by Bajaj, Karan
‘Eat it,’ said a voice.
I woke up again. My face touched something cold; iron or steel, perhaps. A tumbler of some sort, maybe it contained water. I tried to lift myself up. Again, something dragged me down.
‘Don’t try to get up,’ said Ishmael. ‘We are tied to the wall.’
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Someone hit us on the head in the city centre. You fell face down. I thought you had died.’
I felt dead. I needed water. My throat felt rough, as if someone was rubbing sandpaper on my tonsils.
‘Water,’ I said hoarsely.
‘They’ve mixed some rice and water in the bowl,’ he said. ‘Lap it up. This is the only thing we’ll get to eat today.’
I tried to sit up again. Every inch of my body throbbed with pain, and I felt cold metal against my wrist.
‘Don’t get up. One of your wrists is tied to the wall with a chain,’ he repeated. ‘Try to lap it up.’
I moved to my side and collapsed from the effort.
Focus.
Slowly, carefully, I managed to move little by little, until my face reached the bowl. My tongue touched a liquid that smelt like rotten fish and I began lapping greedily. Blood mixed with rice and water, the best meal I had ever had in my life. I lapped until my tongue scraped the bottom, and then I licked the sides until every drop was gone. Exhausted, I lay down on my side and drifted out again.
Finally, some light. I looked around. My left wrist was in a manacle tied to a crumbling cement wall. Ishmael was tied to the opposite end of the tiny cell we were caged in. We faced another cell like ours with a dark, unlit corridor in between. Somewhere behind us there was probably a door from which the tiny rays of sunlight trickled in.
‘Are you okay?’ Ishmael asked.
‘No,’ I said, tasting the mucus and blood in my mouth. But I was alive, my mind was working. They hadn’t killed us. We could still find a way out.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said, looking at him in the faint light. Two angry cuts stretched from his eyes down to his heavily bearded cheeks, and his face was bruised and swollen like a balloon.
‘The chef serves his gourmet meal only once a day.’ He smiled, revealing two missing teeth in the front.
I ran my tongue over my own teeth. I tasted more blood, but my teeth seemed intact. ‘How long has it been?’ I asked. It hurt to speak, and my stomach growled, roared, with hunger.
‘A week; maybe less, maybe more. You’ve settled well into your routine. You sleep the whole day, lap up the food, and sleep again. A good way to pass time.’
‘Why have they…’
A sudden noise. I heard footsteps approaching our cell. A short, nondescript Cambodian man with a scar on his face entered the cell. He was in plain clothes, not the dreaded black dress with red bandana.
He wasn’t a Khmer solider, I thought cautiously. Maybe the old government was back.
The man stood in front of us and screamed out something in Khmer. Then suddenly, without provocation, he slapped me. I held up my free left arm to ward him off. He rolled his fist and hit me, again and again, until the familiar taste of blood filled my mouth. The pain was so excruciating, I was surprised I didn’t pass out. It was Ishmael’s turn next, and he took his beating with a passive, almost cheerful expression, his shaggy blonde mane now caked with dirt and blood.
The man left as suddenly as he had entered. I glanced at Ishmael. He looked like a pale, frayed, worn-out ghost of the guy I had seen at the airport.
I opened my mouth.
Ishmael looked at me and signalled frantically with his eyes.
‘What are you saying?’ I mumbled through broken teeth. ‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted us to keep quiet.’ He laughed as the man came back again.
This time the man hit me until I fainted.
There was blood all over the cold floor when I awoke next. A bowl was kept next to me and I lapped up the rice and water hungrily. Ishmael was staring blankly at the bars. He smiled at me, but this time we didn’t exchange a word. I didn’t know how many hours or days it had been since the beating. I forced myself to think about escape, but the pain made it impossible to concentrate. I don’t know when I passed out again.
Someone kicked me awake. Three short, thin men were standing over me. Ishmael indicated that I needed to get up. The threat of being hit again gave me new life, and I followed Ishmael’s movements as he dragged himself up and kneeled down, pushing his free arm against the ground for support. They hosed us with water, and the cold water hit me like an electric shock. I nearly cried out in pain, but silenced myself in time.
The bath did me good, and with the blood, dirt and excrement washed away from my body, my wounds began to hurt less. I looked around once the men had left. Ishmael had shrunk to half his size. His bones stuck out of his shrivelled frame, and ugly red wounds covered every inch of his torso. His belly had swollen enormously, and I felt mine and saw that the same had happened to me. Perhaps starvation did that to you; perhaps it was some disease which had struck us both. I didn’t know. I wasn’t supposed to know. This wasn’t taught in the mechanical engineering course at MIT; this wasn’t what NASA expected me to know when I was selected to join their graduate engineering trainee programme; this wasn’t written in the Cambodian Lonely Planet guide. I broke into sudden, convulsive sobs.
The door swung open behind us, and the same man who had beaten us to pulp days, maybe weeks ago, entered. I shrunk against the wall but he didn’t spare me a glance. Quietly, he untied Ishmael and pulled him to his feet. Then he dragged Ishmael outside the cell, holding him by his tattered T-shirt.
Alone in the cell, I drifted in and out of consciousness. I worried intermittently about Ishmael, but mostly, I just thought about food. My throat burnt like it was on fire but I felt no thirst, just gnawing, overpowering hunger. When would they bring the rice? I licked the floor; maybe a morsel had fallen there. Nothing. I tried to imagine food. That made it worse. I tried to stop thinking about food. It felt even worse. I tried to shut my swollen eyelids but felt hungrier from the effort.
I couldn’t hold out any longer. I was dying.
Suddenly, there was the welcome sound of footsteps as a faceless man threw two bowls down on the floor. I threw myself at one of the bowls immediately and lapped up the gruel in a second, my tongue scraping against the steel again and again until it bled.
The only effect it had was to make me hungrier than I had been before.
I eyed the second bowl and was about to attack it - but stopped. Ishmael. Wherever he was, he would come back hungry. But would he come back? For one long apocalyptic moment, I wished he wouldn’t so I could eat his rice in peace. But what was stopping me now? I lunged for the bowl, tugging at the manacle around my wrist - and stopped again. I couldn’t get his face out of my mind. The seconds ticked by. I continued to eye his bowl hungrily. Just a taste, I told myself, or even just the smell. Just once, please. I tried to keep my eyes shut. It was agonizing to sit so close to the bowl, to see its curvature, to feel its texture in my mind, to smell the wafts of wondrous fragrance that seemed to come from it.
Just as I reached for the bowl once again, I heard the sound of the door opening. Two men dragged Ishmael into the cell, threw him on the floor, and left. A tiny puddle of blood began to form around his body as he lay motionless, face down on the floor. I tried to reach him with my untied arm, but he was too far away. I pulled with all my strength at the manacle. It didn’t budge an inch.
‘Ishmael,’ I shouted.
I didn’t care any more if they came and beat me to death.
‘Ishmael. Ishmael. Ishmael.’
He didn’t stir.
He was losing blood. If he wasn’t dead already, he would die soon unless he woke up and tried to close his wounds. I picked up my empty bowl and hurled it at him with all my strength. The sound of metal grinding against bone resonated through the cell. Ishmael moved a little.
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br /> I pushed his rice bowl towards him. ‘Eat,’ I said.
He looked at me. His eyes seemed to have been pushed back against their sockets; his nose, lips, chin had all been reduced to a bloody pulp. He opened his mouth to say something and tried to lift himself from the floor, but collapsed. He mumbled something; his voice was strained, his words unrecognizable.
He opened his mouth again. He stopped. And then, as if mustering up all his energy, ‘Just tell them something,’ he said. And collapsed.
He never rose again. Every day I envied him, and wished my release would come sooner.
They removed his body after a few weeks, maybe months, when the smell must have reached outside the cell and bothered them.
I felt no sadness when he was taken away. No one replaced him. I was alone in the cell but I felt no need for companionship. I felt nothing at all, just silent acceptance.
At first, I had been consumed with regret for giving Sam my passport. He belonged here, I thought, not me - it had been his idea to come to this wretched place. I held an irrational grievance against the hippies, whom Ishmael and I had helped escape from the airport - they should have been here with me, I thought, instead of sharing their story at cocktail parties as they must be doing now. I had raged against the madness of the Khmer Rouge, who had locked us up for no reason at all - we weren’t enemies of the revolution, we didn’t care whether it was good or bad, we didn’t even know anything about it. Most of all, I blamed myself for the wrong choices that had led me here - abandoning India to study at MIT, agreeing to Sam’s Cambodian vacation, and holding on to life when it was so much easier to slip away.
Now, I thought nothing, I felt nothing. If Ishmael had learned to accept, so would I.
Months passed, maybe years. Time meant nothing in that small, dark cell where I lay, tied by my hand to a wall. I slipped in and out of consciousness, my thoughts coherent for only brief periods of time after I drank my bowl of rice gruel. When awake, I would try to imbue my day with some meaning by remembering equations from fluid mechanics or reciting passages from Milton’s poems. I tried to make myself indifferent to the pain, although sometimes when a sudden movement made the manacle press harder against the gash on my wrist or my decaying teeth began to slowly break away from my gums, I would give in to the impulse of screaming silently until I collapsed. For the most part though, I waited, either for death or for a chance to escape, both options equally appealing - and unattainable.
After an eternity, they came for me. Two men, perhaps the same ones who had taken Ishmael - though I wasn’t conscious enough either then or now to be sure - untied the manacle that had bound me for months. They lifted me to my feet and dragged me out of my cell. I was escorted through the darkness, past a row of small box-like cells similar to mine, and out of a door which I had often heard opening and closing. It brought in flickers of light into my cell in the mornings and shadows in the evenings.
The sharp glare of daylight hit me like a lightning bolt, and I stumbled. They caught me, not unkindly, and I glanced gratefully at their blank faces. I took in a breath of fresh air and felt suddenly, irrationally elated. Down a flight of stairs we went, into a small but well-lit room with crumbling walls.
A thin man sat on a chair in the centre of the room with a desk full of files, papers and journals in front of him. He looked up on seeing me enter, and squinted.
He said something to me in Khmer.
I tried to decipher if it was a greeting, a command or a question but his tone was flat and expressionless. I bowed my head to indicate my respect. He walked over to me, and I tried not to look down at him -which wasn’t difficult as I seemed to have shrunk to half my size.
He said something again.
‘English?’ I said tentatively.
‘Confession,’ he said in a sharp, high-pitched tone, and rattled off a string of Khmer.
‘What confession?’ I said, confused.
He raised his eyebrows and one of the men stepped in front of me. Before I could react, he hit me in the face - not hard, a mere tap - but I was so weak that I crashed to the floor. I heard bone crushing against bone but felt no pain.
‘Confession,’ he screamed again, followed by another string of Khmer.
I tried to sit up. For the first time in months, I saw my body in daylight. I had been reduced to a skeleton, the skin hanging from my bones like a loose coat on a hanger. Scabs, bruises and cuts covered every inch.
‘What should I confess to?’ I cried out.
He raised his eyebrows again, and the second man kicked me in the ribs. This time I felt a hollow pain spread through my body, magnifying as it went up, and almost exploding in my chest. I took a second to catch my breath. I knew I wouldn’t last much longer if this continued.
I was about to plead with them to stop when Ishmael’s words flashed through my mind. ‘Just tell them something.’
This was what he had meant.
Like me, he must have been asked to confess and had been beaten to death because he didn’t know what to confess to.
‘I’m a spy,’ I said suddenly. ‘American spy,’ I added.
If I was a foreigner, I was probably expected to have plotted against the Khmer Rouge, I reasoned quite astutely for someone as fucked up as I was. Ishmael had said they hated Americans, so being an American spy was probably the most shocking confession I could make.
I looked tentatively at my interrogator, wondering if I had overstepped my boundaries.
He went back to his chair and the men came towards me.
I cowered in fear, but they picked me up and placed me on the chair opposite him.
‘Confession,’ he said again with a new gleam in his eyes.
‘I work for the CIA,’ I said with renewed confidence. ‘CIA,’ I emphasized.
His eyes widened. With luck, I thought, I could convince him I was the biggest traitor Cambodia had ever seen. And then what? He would probably execute me swiftly, without torture. I cheered silently at the prospect. He probably knew only a few words of English, so I decided to choose the ones with the maximum impact.
‘Kill Cambodian farmers,’ I said. ‘End communism. Kill them all.’
His face lit up. Perhaps this was the first confession he had heard; the other hapless prisoners must have denied their involvement vehemently, as I too, would have done if I hadn’t been warned by Ishmael.
‘Fuck Pol Pot,’ I said.
His eyes widened.
‘Fuck Pol Pot,’ I repeated, feeling faint from the exertion of speaking after so long. ‘Kill that bastard.’
I had run out of things to say, given my limited knowledge of Cambodian history and the dizziness that had overcome me.
‘Down with the Khmer Rouge. Motherfucking dog fuckers,’ I said with all my remnant energy.
I seemed to have done my job. He barked out an order to his men.
Finally, I thought, escape to a hopefully kinder afterworld.
I prayed for it to be swift. A shot in the back of the head, perhaps, or a sudden twist of the neck.
Instead, they grabbed me by my arms and dragged me outside.
I blinked in the harsh daylight as they took me through an open courtyard and into a jeep with logs of wood piled high in the back.
They gestured for me to get in.
I knew better than to ask, and slowly clambered into the back. My swollen belly hit against the edge of a log, and I sprawled face down on the pile. They tied my wounded left wrist to the partition between the driver’s side and the back of the jeep. The steel scraped against my wound, still raw from the manacle, and I moaned. As the jeep began to move, I forced myself to stay conscious to take in the first view of the place where I had spent the last several months - or years. It looked like a… a school. Yes, it was a school, I realized. The garden was actually a playground with the remnants of a soccer goalpost. The classrooms in the yellow brick building had been converted into holding cells, one of which had been my home, and the man who had just in
terrogated me sat in what was probably the principal’s office. They had converted a school into a torture chamber for the educated bourgeoisie - did they even see the irony of this wonderfully symbolic gesture? I chuckled, and realized that I was slowly going insane. Ravaged by starvation, a wrist that had been all but sawed off, crippled by pain as the wood struck against my brittle bones, and on my way to certain execution - yet, I was tickled by the unintended irony.
We began crawling through the city of Phnom Penh. Abandoned cafés on the roadside, factories that had closed down, deserted buildings, damaged vehicles, rubble, tires and skeletons; no living being in sight, not even a dog, except a few vultures that hovered around the decaying bodies strewn along the sides of the road. The jeep continued its bumpy ride through the debris-strewn dirt tracks, and soon the city gave way to the vast, empty countryside. I remembered Ishmael talking about the forced movement of people to the villages. Perhaps I was being taken there, I thought, and felt a little cheerful. I would prefer to die in the open than in that airless cell, wallowing in my own shit. The steady rumble of the jeep lulled me out of consciousness.
I woke with a sharp pain in my side. Daylight had given way to dusk and the jeep had entered a forested area with deep valleys on both sides of the road. The road became less bumpy but the turns became sharper. We swerved dangerously with every turn; again and again, I was thrown about on the wooden logs.
The jeep took a sudden, sharp turn as we entered an even thicker forest. I was thrown to the other end and banged my head against the opaque front partition. Painfully, I tried to adjust my body and realized that the manacle which tied my wrist to the partition had come loose. I didn’t plan what I did next, I didn’t even actively think about it; I just did it.
Scrambling to the edge of the logs, I jumped out of the speeding jeep as it navigated its next sharp turn. Down I fell, maybe twenty feet, and landed with a deafening splash in a shallow stream. For a second, I just lay face down in the cold water in disbelief. The water rose up my mouth and nose, and sputtering, I raised my head and looked around. I couldn’t see anyone in the stream, or in the forests on either side. I looked up at the road. The jeep didn’t seem to have stopped. If they hadn’t heard me, it would take a while for them to notice my absence. The logs were piled high and they could neither see nor hear me, nor had they shown any inclination to stop during the journey.