There’s no Musa, so who has been filling her head with this trash?
Why is she still wallowing in this old story?
Everyone’s moved on.
I thought she had too.
I’m lying on her bed.
My head is killing me.
And the room is full of balloons.
Why do I always end up like this around her?
I open the notebook I’ve torn a page out of. On the first page it says:
Dear Doctor,
Angels hover over me as I write. How can I tell them that their wings smell like the bottom of a chicken coop?
Honestly, it’s so much simpler in Kabul.
Then, as she had already died four or five times, the apartment had remained available for a drama more serious than her own death.
—JEAN GENET
8
THE TENANT
The spotted owlet on the street light ducked and bobbed with the delicacy and immaculate manners of a Japanese businessman. He had an unobstructed view through the window of the small, bare room and the odd, bare woman on the bed. She had an unobstructed view of him too. Some nights she bobbed back and said, Moshi Moshi, which was all the Japanese she knew.
Even indoors the walls radiated a bullying, unyielding heat. The slow ceiling fan stirred the scorched air, layering it with fine, cindery dust.
The room showed signs of celebration. The balloons tied to the window grille bumped into each other desultorily, softened and shriveled by the heat. In the center, on a low, painted stool, was a cake with bright strawberry icing and sugar flowers, a candle with a charred wick, a matchbox and a few used matchsticks. On the cake it said Happy Birthday Miss Jebeen. The cake had been cut, a small piece eaten. The icing had melted and dribbled on to the silver-foil-covered cardboard cake-base. Ants were making off with crumbs larger than themselves. Black ants, pink crumbs.
The baby, whose birthday and baptism ceremonies had been simultaneously celebrated and successfully concluded, was fast asleep.
Her kidnapper, who went by the name of S. Tilottama, was awake and concentrating. She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.
A weevil-philosopher with a grave manner and a sharp mustache was teaching a class, reading aloud from a book. Admiring young weevils strained to catch each word that spilled from his wise weevil lips. “Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion.” The youngsters scratched away on their little notepads. “Schopenhauer on the other hand believed that Pity is and ought to be the supreme weevil virtue. But long before them, Socrates asked the key question: Why should we be moral?”
He had lost a leg in Weevil World War IV, this professor, and carried a cane. His remaining five (legs) were in excellent condition. Airbrush graffiti sprayed on the back wall of his classroom said:
Evil Weevils Always Make the Cut.
Other creatures crowded into the already-crowded classroom.
An alligator with a humanskin purse
A grasshopper with good intentions
A fish on a fast
A fox with a flag
A maggot with a manifesto
A neocon newt
An icon iguana
A communist cow
An owl with an alternative
A lizard on TV. Hello and welcome, you’re watching Lizard News at Nine. There’s been a blizzard on lizard island.
The baby was the beginning of something. This much the kidnapper knew. Her bones had whispered this to her that night (the said night, the concerned night, the aforementioned night, the night hereinafter referred to as “the night”) when she made her move on the pavement. And her bones were nothing if not reliable informants. The baby was Miss Jebeen returned. Returned, that is, not to her (Miss Jebeen the First was never hers), but to the world. Miss Jebeen the Second, when she was grown to be a lady, would settle accounts and square the books. Miss Jebeen would turn the tide.
There was hope yet, for the Evil Weevil World.
True, the Happy Meadow had fallen. But Miss Jebeen was come.
NAGA ASKED TILO for one good reason why she was leaving him. Did he not love her? Had he not been caring? Considerate? Generous? Understanding? Why now? After all these years? He said fourteen years was enough time for anyone to get over anything. Provided they wanted to get over it. People had been through much worse.
“Oh that,” she said. “I got over all that long ago. I’m happy and well adjusted now. Like the people of Kashmir. I’ve learned to love my country. I may even vote in the next election.”
He let that pass. He said she should think about seeing a psychiatrist.
Thinking made her throat ache. That was a good reason not to think about seeing a psychiatrist.
Naga had started wearing tweed coats and smoking cigars. Like his father did. And talking to servants in the imperious way that his mother did. Termites on toast, khadi loincloths and the Rolling Stones were a forgotten fever dream from a past life.
Naga’s mother, who lived alone on the ground floor of the big house (his father, Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan, had died), advised him to let Tilo go. “She won’t be able to manage on her own, she’ll beg you to take her back.” Naga knew otherwise. Tilo would manage. And even if she didn’t, there would be no begging. He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn’t tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?
The only thing he could attribute her newfound restiveness to was her mother’s bizarre passing, which he thought odd, given that it was a relationship that had barely existed. True, Tilo had been at her bedside during the last two weeks in hospital. But other than that, she had seen her mother only a few times in the past several years.