Anjum finished her tea and then lay on her back with her forearms crossed over her eyes. She seemed to have dozed off, but she hadn’t. She was worried.
“And in case you didn’t know,” she said after a while, as though she was continuing a conversation—actually she was, except that it was one she had been having with herself in her head. “Let me tell you that we Muslims are motherfuckers too, just like everyone else. But I suppose one additional murderer won’t harm the reputation of our badnaam qoam, our name is mud already. Anyway, take your time, don’t do anything in a hurry.”
“I won’t. But Sehrawat must die.”
Saddam took off his glasses and closed his eyes, screwing them up against the light. He played an old Hindi film song on his phone and began to sing along tunelessly but confidently. Biroo slurped up the cold tea remaining in the saucepan and trotted off with boiled tea leaves on his nose.
When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors.
It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans.
Anjum waited to die.
Saddam waited to kill.
And miles away, in a troubled forest, a baby waited to be born…
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
—PABLO NERUDA
3
THE NATIVITY
It was peacetime. Or so they said.
All morning a hot wind had whipped through the city streets, driving sheets of grit, soda-bottle caps and beedi stubs before it, smacking them into car windscreens and cyclists’ eyes. When the wind died, the sun, already high in the sky, burned through the haze and once again the heat rose and shimmered on the streets like a belly dancer. People waited for the thundershower that always followed a dust storm, but it never came. Fire raged through a swathe of huts huddled together on the riverbank, gutting more than two thousand in an instant.
Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.
She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next—there she was on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s. She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in those first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile.
A thin white horse tethered to the railing, a small dog with mange, a concrete-colored garden lizard, two palm-striped squirrels who should have been asleep and, from her hidden perch, a she-spider with a swollen egg sac watched over her. Other than that, she seemed to be utterly alone.
Around her the city sprawled for miles. Thousand-year-old sorceress, dozing, but not asleep, even at this hour. Gray flyovers snaked out of her Medusa skull, tangling and untangling under the yellow sodium haze. Sleeping bodies of homeless people lined their high, narrow pavements, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe, looping into the distance. Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheater where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty had been played out for centuries. But this was to be the dawn of her resurrection. Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heeled shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore.
She was to become supercapital of the world’s favorite new superpower. India! India! The chant had gone up—on TV shows, on music videos, in foreign newspapers and magazines, at business conferences and weapons fairs, at economic conclaves and environmental summits, at book festivals and beauty contests. India! India! India!
Across the city, huge billboards jointly sponsored by an English newspaper and the newest brand of skin-whitening cream (selling by the ton) said: Our Time Is Now. Kmart was coming. Walmart and Starbucks were coming, and in the British Airways advertisement on TV, the People of the World (white, brown, black, yellow) all chanted the Gayatri Mantra:
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasya dhimahi
Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat
O God, thou art the giver of life,
Remover of pain and sorrow,
Bestower of happiness,
O Creator of the Universe,
May we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light,
May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.
(And may everyone fly BA.)
When they finished chanting, the People of the World bowed low and joined their palms in greeting. Namaste, they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with maharaja mustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels. And with that, in the advertisement at least, history was turned upside down. (Who was bowing now? And who was smiling? Who was the petitioner? And who the petitioned?) In their sleep India’s favorite citizens smiled back. India! India! they chanted in their dreams, like the crowds at cricket matches. The drum major beat out a rhythm…India! India! The world rose to its feet, roaring its appreciation. Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.
Away from the lights and advertisements, villages were being emptied. Cities too. Millions of people were being moved, but nobody knew where to.
“People who can’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t come here,” a Supreme Court judge said, and ordered the immediate eviction of the city’s poor. “Paris was a slimy area before 1870, when all the slums were removed,” the Lieutenant Governor of the city said, rearranging his last-remaining swatch of hair across his scalp, right to left. (In the evenings when he went for a swim it swam beside him in the chlorine in the Chelmsford Club pool.) “And look at Paris now.”
So surplus people were banned.
In addition to the regular police, several battalions of the Rapid Action Force in strange, sky-blue camouflage uniforms (to flummox the birds perhaps) were deployed in the poorer quarters.
In slums and squatter settlements, in resettlement colonies and “unauthorized” colonies, people fought back. They dug up the roads leading to their homes and blocked them with rocks and broken things. Young men, old men, children, mothers and grandmothers armed with sticks and rocks patrolled the entrances to their settlements. Across one road, where the police and bulldozers had lined up for the final assault, a slogan scrawled in chalk said, Sarkar ki Maa ki Choot. The Government’s Mother’s Cunt.
“Where shall we go?” the surplus people asked. “You can kill us, but we won’t move,” they said.
There were too many of them to be killed outright.
Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s work, the expression in their eyes, were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch, they were called, the ’dozers.) They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.