Beyond the flyover the city grew less sure of itself.
The slow chase threaded past two hospitals so full of sickness that patients and their families had spilled out and were camped on the roads. Some were on makeshift beds and in wheelchairs. Some wore hospital gowns and had bandages and IV drips. Children, bald from chemotherapy, wore hospital masks and clung to their empty-eyed parents. People crowded the counters of the all-night chemists, playing Indian Roulette. (There was a 60:40 chance that the drugs they bought were genuine and not spurious.) Families cooked on the street, cutting onions, boiling potatoes gone gritty with dust on small kerosene stoves. They hung their washing on tree guards and railings. (Saddam Hussain took note of all this—for professional reasons.) A bunch of emaciated twig-thighed villagers in dhotis squatted on their haunches in a circle. In the center, perched like a wounded bird, was a wizened old lady in a printed sari and enormous dark glasses that were sealed along the edges with cotton wool. A thermometer angled out of her mouth like a cigarette. They paid no attention to the white horse and her riders as they cantered past.
Another flyover.
This time the goose-chase party went under it. It was packed tight with sleeping people. A bare-bodied bald man with a purple crust of congealed talcum powder on his head and a long, gray, bushy beard beat out a rhythm on an imaginary drum, flinging his head around like Ustad Zakir Hussain.
“Dha Dha Dhim Ti-ra-ki-ta Dhim!” Ishrat called out to him as they went past. He smiled and rewarded her with a complicated flourish of percussion.
A shuttered market, a midnight egg-paratha stall. A Sikh Gurdwara. Another market. A row of car-repair shops. The men and dogs asleep outside were covered in car grease.
The rickshaw turned into a residential colony. And then leftrightleftrightleft. A lane. Construction material stacked along it. The houses were all three and four storeys high.
The rickshaw stopped outside a barred iron gate painted a dull shade of lavender. Payal stopped in the shadows, many gates away. A snuffling specter. A pale mare-ghost. The gold thread on her saddle glinting in the night.
A woman got out, paid and went into the house. After the rickshaw left, Saddam Hussain and Ishrat-the-Beautiful approached the lavender gate. Two black bulls with wobbling humps lolled outside.
A light came on in the second-floor window.
Ishrat said, “Write down the house number.” Saddam said he didn’t need to because he never forgot places he’d been to. He’d be able to find it in his sleep.
She wriggled against him. “Wah! What a man!”
He squished her breast. She slapped his hand away. “Don’t. They cost a lot. I’m still paying my installments.”
The woman silhouetted against the rectangle of light on the second floor looked down and saw two people on a white horse. They looked up and saw her.
As though to acknowledge the glance that passed between them, the woman (who was beautiful, who was not, who was tall, who was short) inclined her head and kissed the stolen goods she held in her arms. She waved to them and they waved back. Of course she recognized them as the team from the scrum at Jantar Mantar. Saddam dismounted and held up a small white rectangle—his visiting card with the address of Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. He dropped it into the tin letter box that said S. Tilottama. Second Floor.
The baby had fretted most of the way, but had finally fallen asleep. Tiny heartbeats and a black velvet cheek against a bony shoulder. The woman rocked her as she watched the horse and its riders exit the lane.
She could not remember when last she had been this happy. Not because the baby was hers, but because it wasn’t.
6
SOME QUESTIONS FOR LATER
When the Baby Seal grew older, when she was (say) crowded around an ice-cream cart on a burning afternoon, one among a press of schoolgirls clamoring for an orange bar, might she get a sudden whiff of the heady scent of ripe Mahua that had infused the forest the day she was born? Would her body remember the feel of dry leaves on the forest floor, or the hot-metal touch of the barrel of her mother’s gun that had been held to her forehead with the safety catch off?
Or had her past been erased forever?
Death flies in, thin bureaucrat, from the plains—
—AGHA SHAHID ALI
7
THE LANDLORD
It’s cold. One of those dim, dirty winter days. The city is still stunned by the simultaneous explosions that tore through a bus stop, a café and the basement parking lot of a small shopping plaza two days ago, leaving five dead and very many more severely injured. It will take our television news anchors a little longer than ordinary folks to recover from the shock. As for myself, blasts evoke a range of emotions in me, but sadly, shock is no longer one of them.
I’m upstairs in this barsati, this small, second-floor apartment-on-the-roof. The Neem trees have shed their leaves; the rose-ringed parakeets seem to have moved to a warmer (safer?) place. The fog is hunched up against the windowpanes. A clot of blue rock pigeons huddles on the shit-crusted chhajja. Though it’s the middle of the day, nearly lunchtime, I’ve had to switch the lights on. I notice that my experiment with the red cement floor has failed. I wanted a floor with a deep, soft shine, like those graceful old houses down South. But here, over the years, the summer heat has leached the color from the cement and the winter cold has caused the surface to contract and shatter into a pattern of hairline cracks. The apartment is dusty and run-down. Something about the stillness of this hastily abandoned space makes it look like a frozen frame in a moving picture. It seems to contain the geometry of motion, the shape of all that has happened and everything that is still to come. The absence of the person who lived here is so real, so palpable, that it’s almost a presence.
The noise from the street is muted. The blades of the still ceiling fans are edged with grime, a paean to Delhi’s famously filthy air. Fortunately for my lungs, I’m only visiting. Or at least that’s what I hope. I have been sent home on leave. Though I don’t feel unwell, when I look at myself in the mirror I can see that my skin is dull and my hair has thinned noticeably. My scalp shines through it (yes, shines). Almost nothing remains of my eyebrows. I’m told this is a sign of anxiety. The drinking, I admit, is worrying. I have tested the patience of both my wife and my boss in unacceptable ways and am determined to redeem myself. I am booked into a rehabilitation center where I will be for six weeks with no phone, no internet and no contact whatsoever with the world. I was supposed to check in today, but I’ll do it on Monday.
I long to return to Kabul, the city where I will probably die, in some hackneyed, unheroic manner, perhaps while handing my Ambassador a file. BOOM. No more me. Twice they nearly got us; both times luck was on our side. After the second attack we received an anonymous letter in Pashtu (which I read as well as speak): Nun zamong bad qismati wa. Kho yaad lara che mong sirf yaw waar pa qismat gatta kawo. Ta ba da hamesha dapara khush qismata ve. That translates (more or less) as: Today we were unlucky. But remember we only have to be lucky once. You will need good luck all the time.
Something about those words rang a bell. I googled them. (That’s a verb now, isn’t it?) It was a close-to-verbatim translation of what the IRA said after Margaret Thatcher escaped their bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. It’s another kind of globalization, I suppose, this universal terrorspeak.
Every day in Kabul is a battle of wits and I’m addicted.