by Keya Ghosh
I see the hope come back into this face as my words sink in. ‘The army! Those dudes know what they are doing. They’ll send in specially trained commandos, right? They’ll get us out of here. We are going to get out of here!’
‘You have to help me with her,’ I say, indicating Diya. He looks over to where Diya sits. She’s slumped in her own grief, uncaring of what happens next.
‘What’s wrong with her? What the hell happened between the two of you? I had such high hopes for you.’
‘Just help me get her out of here with us. I won’t go without her. And she won’t go with me.’
He looks at me sympathetically. ‘You’ve got it bad, man.’
Salim sends one of his men to fetch sweets from the food section. The others hustle all the remaining hostages into the room where we are. They all crowd in fearfully, convinced that one of them is going to be chosen to go through the door next. We are the only ones who have been watching television and know what’s going on.
Salim addresses them. ‘I thank you for having been with us through this test of our belief and faith. It is now over. The government has agreed to all of our demands.’
The terrorists begin to move through the hostages, handing out sweets. A slow buzz of conversation has started. The idea that it’s over is sinking in very slowly.
‘We are working out the logistics with the government,’ says Salim. ‘But you’ll be out of here soon.’ The buzz gets louder. People are praying, thanking God, exclaiming.
Salim speaks, cutting through the buzz and silencing it. ‘Of course, a chosen few will go with us and stay till the end. Just as insurance, so that your government doesn’t try anything.’ There is a stunned silence. You can see dread seep back into the room as faces fall.
‘Shall we begin?’ says Salim. And, right on cue, the lights go off. In the darkness, we hear a tortured shriek. It is the sound of metal buckling. They are taking down the front shutters.
There are screams, curses. Above them all, I yell, ‘Get on the floor. Down! Now!’
We are all crowded together, and it’s chaos. Time seems to slow and stretch, and everything is happening in the same moment.
We can hear smashing. Booted feet. Then, deafening claps of sound and white light blind us. Stun bombs.
There is the sound of shots. Someone is screaming. I crawl over to Diya in the dark. I have to shove people out of my way, climb over tangles of limbs. Harish follows me, grunting. People are running. Tripping over us. There are sudden blinding flashes as the guns fire. It is a nightmare that unfolds around us.
I just keep going until I get the scent of lemons. I am beside her.
‘Come on,’ I whisper to her. ‘We are getting out of here. Come with us.’
But she won’t agree to come with us. ‘Just leave me here,’ she says fiercely. ‘DON’T COME NEAR ME.’
‘You have to come with us,’ I say.
‘Come on,’ says Harish. ‘We’re going to get out of here’.
‘Leave me alone,’ she says. ‘Leave me here.’
There is random gunfire, flashes of light. Deafening thuds and smoke. It’s disorienting. No one knows what the hell is happening. Flashlights are flickering in the corridor outside. A terrorist screams, ‘Stay where you are! Don’t move!’ He grabs the nearest hostage in the dark. It is Malini. Then we hear him yell. Manu has attacked him, biting and kicking.
‘Grab her!’ I yell at Harish. He does. We are both trying to drag Diya with us. She fights us, kicking and thrashing.
‘Shit! Have you gone mad?’ Harish yells at her. ‘STOP IT!’
Then, there is an explosion and a blinding flash of light. Glass goes flying everywhere. The terrorists have triggered some of the explosives they have laid.
We are knocked to our knees. Harish falls down and doesn’t get up. I let her go and crawl to him. I am almost blind and my ears are ringing.
‘Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.’ I am praying.
He’s not dead. But a flying chunk has hit him hard and he’s passed out. I try to lift him and can’t. I have to choose. Him or her. I leave him lying and run back to her.
She is trying to get back on her feet, dazed. I grab her arm. She fights me.
‘Let me be! I want to die!’
My ears are buzzing loudly and I can hear nothing. Then I swallow and the sound comes back. ‘So do I!’ I shout back. ‘I want to die! But I can’t. Not until you are safe. Aman won’t let me.’
She stops struggling at his name.
I say, ‘Don’t you understand? I have to save you. I couldn’t save him. I have to save you.’
I hold out my hand. ‘Please come with me. This is what he wants. Please.’
‘He’s gone,’ she whispers.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I would have given my life in his place if I could have.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I would have too.’ We look at each other, both mourning for the man we love.
‘Let me save you. Please,’ I beg.
She looks at my hand. But she won’t take it. She shrugs it away and gets to her feet. She nods at me. We run to the door and into the rest of the store.
I have planned the run already. I have been scoping the place out from the moment we were herded in and have worked out a rough plan of the mall in my head. Our best bet is to get as far away from the fighting as we can and then just lie low until the army begins cleaning up. Except, from the sound of it, the operation has gone seriously wrong. There is a series of deafening explosions and flares of light and then a stunned silence. The terrorists have set off the explosives they had laid. I don’t think the army was expecting it.
I can hear booted feet but they sound like they are retreating. The gunfire starts up again. But now it is the terrorists’ guns that speak again and again. The rescue operation has unravelled in a few seconds.
We turn and run away from it, into the heart of the store. I point and we run up the stalled escalators. We find ourselves in a giant signature shop and just keep going. We run down long, dark aisles loaded with things, shoving aside shopping carts. We stop, winded, somewhere in the clothing section. I gesture and we both slide into a long row of hanging garments and crouch there, listening.
We hear a confused babble. Men’s voices shouting. A scream. A single shot. And then the voice of the person I was hoping had been shot to hell. Salim Mukhtar. He is yelling. He’s screaming. ‘Find the hostages who have run away. Find them now!’ So, others have run as well.
I grab her arm, and without a word we move farther, deeper, creeping along as carefully as we can. ‘He’s alive,’ she says. ‘He won’t let us live.’
‘He won’t find us.’
‘He’ll just blow the place apart,’ she says.
And like an echo we hear Salim’s voice. ‘Lay the rest of the explosives. If we go, we will take this whole place with us,’ he is yelling. ‘We will take them all with us! This will be our kabar! Our martyr’s monument!’
We stand there listening, frozen in place. ‘Run!’ I say. ‘Let’s get as far away as we can.’
I plunge into the darkness, then stop. She has not moved. She is just standing there. ‘It’s no use,’ she says. ‘They are going to blow the place up. We are going to die.’
I try to slow my breathing down. To stop my heart from hammering. This is it. We both stand there, just waiting.
Then, I don’t know from where, a thought comes into my head. I am not going to die like this. Terrified. Like a rat in a trap. I’m not.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Dying is the last thing we’re going to do. Let’s do it our way.’ I look around. The army has cut off the electricity, but a few backup emergency lights have kicked in. But they are few and scattered and leave great areas of darkness between them. I can make out we’re in the signature store of a clothing brand.
I begin to grab clothes off the rack. ‘I’ve never worn a suit. What do you want to wear?’
She stares at me for a moment like I’m crazy.
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‘I am going to die,’ I say. ‘In a few minutes. I’m cramming in whatever experiences I can.’ I hurriedly put on the jacket.
Diya just looks at me.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘This is all the time we have.’
Diya nods. Then she jumps up and begins to pull things off the racks as well. ‘I need shoes,’ she says. ‘Stilettoes.’
We find shoes. We pull jewellery and clothes off the mannequins. We race each other to the changing rooms.
The changing rooms are side by side. I pull my clothes off frantically. I can hear Salim ranting. All other sounds have stopped. His voice carries over to us clearly. Someone screams.
I don’t care. I’m crazy. I’m high. I’m laughing at the sadness and the madness of it. In the other changing room, I can hear her laughing too. We’re both breathless with excitement. There is only this moment. Only us. And we are alive right now.
We come out of the rooms and look at each other. She is wearing a long dress. One shoulder is bare. She looks beautiful.
‘You look like a heroine.’
‘You look pretty good yourself.’
We stare at each other, suddenly self-conscious, but still on a high.
‘And now what?’ she asks. Her lip trembles. The elation leaves her.
I don’t want to lose her in these last few minutes. I improvise desperately to hold on to the moment. ‘Now we’re shooting a movie. You’re the heroine. I’m the hero. This is the bit where they meet for the first time.’
She says, ‘They’re at a party. He asks her to dance.’
I hold out my hand. ‘She says “yes”.’
She takes my hand.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Let’s get to where there’s more place.’ We walk to where there is empty floor space and a display of mannequins. I spin her around, and her dress flares around her.
She spins back towards me and looks me straight in my eyes. She locks her eyes with mine and doesn’t look away. ‘He puts his arms around her.’
I do that. Her dress is sort of silky. Her body is warm through it. The smell of lemons is still in her hair. ‘The music begins to play,’ I whisper.
She begins to sing softly. It is the first time I hear her sing. Her voice is a sunbeam in the dark. It is sunlight at dawn. It is the stars coming out at night.
The stars you named,
Became ours forever,
They watch in a still dark sky.
The love you named,
Can leave me never,
It can never die.
I will count the stars as I wait for you,
And make the whole sky ours.
This world is not enough to hold
Our love, so we reach for stars.
The automatic sprinklers suddenly come on, spattering us with water. More explosions must have gone off in this part of the mall. I start to laugh. This is the ultimate movie moment. We are dancing in the rain. We sway together.
She puts her head against my chest. Where she can hear my heart beating. I whisper a happy ending in her ear.
‘Boy meets girl. They fall in love and run away together. Far away. They build a house they can live in together. The floor is made of moon silver. The walls are woven of branches. And the roof is made of the sky. It is a house of stars. They lie in each other’s arms in the dark, and they name the stars one by one because they are making a new world. A world where the stars have not yet been named. Where there is no religion. People don’t do terrible things to each other. A world that has place for love.’
She sways in my arms, both of us dreaming of the house of stars where we would be safe from the world.
Then she whispers, ‘I love him. There is a part of my heart that will always be his. I will never love anyone like I love him.’
‘I know,’ I say.
She closes her eyes. Then she puts her lips against mine.
Diya
I close my eyes and I kiss him. I know it is the last thing I am going to do. I am going to die, and it is the right thing to do. We both go very still. We wait. Lips just touching, hearts hammering. Waiting.
And then I hear Salim’s voice. He’s calling my name. My real name. He sounds like he is right beside us. I go rigid in shock.
I break apart from Kabir. How is he here? How does he know? How does he know?
‘Come on, Surabhi. I know who you really are. I found an ID lying on the floor. And I know who you are.’
The identity card I had shoved into my churidar. He’s very close. He’s found our discarded clothes. He’s found it. It has my father’s name on the back. He knows who I am.
‘GOD IS GREAT,’ his voice sounds as if he is standing right beside us. ‘I asked God to give me something to get my people out of here,’ he shouts. ‘And he gave me you.’
‘Run,’ I whisper. ‘We have to run!’
But we don’t run. We back away from the voice as carefully as we can, making no noise. Breathlessly we move away, then faster and faster. Away from that voice that is shouting my real name.
We duck down different aisles. Then we spot the toilets ahead of us. Kabir pulls open the closet that holds the brooms. We both squeeze in and shut the door. Through the slits in the door, we can see the bathroom. Nothing moves.
We can hear Salim, but he is heading in another direction. He is shouting my name. ‘Come out,’ he says. ‘I won’t harm you. I swear it. You’re too valuable to hurt. You and I are going to walk out of here together. Come on.’
Kabir puts his lips against my ears. ‘Who are you?’ he asks.
I can’t lie any more. I have to tell him. ‘My name is Surabhi Thakur. My father is Bhai Thakur.’
Kabir
It all makes sense now. Aman always refused to tell me who her father was. I thought he was a rich businessman. Instead, it turns out he deals in the business of hate.
‘My father leads a party that thinks India should be only for the Hindus. My father thinks the only good Muslim is a dead one. My father has led riots. He’s been indicted by a court three times. He’s never gone to jail.’
Her voice is the smallest whisper in my ear. ‘Do you hate me now?’
‘No,’ I whisper back. ‘You didn’t choose your father. You don’t choose the hatred you inherit. You can only choose not to be a part of it.’
‘I would rather die than be a part of it,’ she says. ‘I hate my father and everything he stands for.’
We sit there listening to Salim bellow her name. He is heading away from us.
She shivers. ‘If he finds us—’
‘We can’t let him get you. He’ll kill you.’ I hold out my hand. She takes it. She is not just giving me her hand. She is giving me her trust. ‘Come on. We have to get to the windows. We can smash a window and jump out.’
She is scared to leave the closet. In the darkness, there is a sense of safety. But I know we can’t hide for long. He will find us. We have to get to a window.
Diya
It’s a nightmare. A game of hide-and-seek that ends in death. We sneak along, trying not to make any noise. We slide along the wall. The first window we find has an iron grill on it. We keep going. It’s a long way to the next window. He holds my hand. I cling to it.
We reach the next window and realize our fate is sealed. It too has a grill. Every window has a grill. We are not going to be able to get out. Only the show windows on the ground floor are glass. And Salim Mukhtar is between us and those windows.
Kabir just hangs on to my hand. ‘There has to be a way. There has to be a way!’ he keeps saying as he searches desperately. He knows as well as I do that once Salim gets his hands on me, there is no hope.
We search and search. So many sections. So many doors. Corridors. And no windows that can let us out.
We find ourselves back at the bathroom, doubling back on our tracks. Kabir looks at the door to the closet. We climb back in, and Kabir shuts the door. It’s an admission that there is nowhere for us to go. We can’t get away.
Then the bathroom door slams open. Salim comes in with a gun in his hand. We can hear him kicking open the bathroom cubicles. He slams them one by one, and each one sounds like a gunshot. It sounds like he is about to leave when everything goes silent. Kabir turns so that he is shielding me with his body.
The door flies open.
One.
Two.
Two bullets thud into Kabir. He falls. And I am standing there, screaming. Salim reaches out and grabs me by the hair. I stumble over Kabir, and then I am being dragged away from him. I try to go to Kabir but he won’t let me.
I am screaming as he drags me away. Kabir is lying on the floor, so still, blood pooling underneath him. I am screaming his name.
Kabir
I am lying on the floor. There is just so much blood. It’s all over the place. It takes me some time to understand that it is my blood. I try to get up, but I feel so heavy. I can’t. I just can’t.
‘Get up. You need to get up.’ Aman’s voice is loud in my ear. ‘You need to get up now and go find her.’
He is back. Aman is back. I open my eyes with such effort and see him looking down at me. He is kneeling beside me. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Get up.’
Bloody Hindi films. All full of shit. The hero takes dozens of bullets and keeps going. In real life, a couple of bullets and you’re on the floor with feet that won’t listen to you. I roll over and it is so painful I almost pass out. I can’t get up. I begin to crawl.
I crawl in the direction that I last heard her scream. I am trying not to scream in pain myself.
There is a man lying on the floor. He is dead. He is still holding his gun. One of the terrorists. God. There is so much blood. I don’t want to crawl through it but there is no way around it.