The crow had struggled at first, but seemed to have realized that each time it moved, the string sliced deeper into its wing. So it stayed still, looking down with a bewildered, bright eye in its tilted head at the people gathered below. With every passing moment the sky grew denser with more and more distressed, hysterical crows.
Saddam, who had hurried away after assessing the situation, returned with a long rope made of several odd pieces of parcel string and clothes line knotted together. He tied a stone to one end and, squinting into the sun through his sunglasses, lobbed the stone into the sky, using instinct to gauge the trajectory of the invisible kite-string, hoping to loop the rope over it and bring it down with the weight of the stone. It took several attempts and several changes of stone (it had to be light enough to spin high into the sky, and heavy enough to arc over the string and pull it through the foliage it was snagged on) before he succeeded. When he finally did, the kite-string fell to the ground. The crow first dipped down with it, and then, magically, flew away. The sky lightened, the cawing receded.
Normalcy was declared.
To those onlookers in the graveyard who were of an irrational and unscientific temper (which means all of them, including Ustaniji), it was clear that an apocalypse had been averted and a benediction earned in its place.
The Man of the Moment was feted, hugged and kissed.
Not one to allow such an opportunity to pass, Saddam decided that his Time was Now.
—
Late that night he went to Anjum’s room. She was lying on her side, propped up on an elbow, looking tenderly down at Miss Jebeen the Second, who was fast asleep. (The unsuitable-bedtime-stories stage was still to come.)
“Imagine,” she said, “but for the grace of God, this little creature would have been in some government orphanage right now.”
Saddam allowed for a well-judged moment of respectful silence and then formally asked her for Zainab’s hand in marriage. Anjum responded a little bitterly, without looking up, suddenly revisited by an old ache.
“Why ask me? Ask Saeeda. She’s her mother.”
“I know the story. That’s why I’m asking you.”
Anjum was pleased, but did not show it. Instead she looked Saddam up and down as though he was a stranger.
“Give me one reason why Zainab should marry a man who is waiting to commit a crime and then be hanged like Saddam Hussein of Iraq?”
“Arre yaar, that’s all over now. It’s gone. My people have risen up.” Saddam took out his mobile phone and pulled up the Saddam Hussein execution video. “Here, see. I’m deleting it now, right in front of you. See, it’s gone. I don’t need it any more. I have a new one now. Look.”
As she cranked herself up on her bed and creaked into a sitting position, Anjum grumbled good-naturedly under her breath, “Ya Allah! What sin have I committed that I have to put up with this lunatic?” She put on her reading glasses.
The new video Saddam showed her began with a shot of several rusty pickup trucks parked in the compound of a genteel old colonial bungalow—the office of a local District Collector in Gujarat. The trucks were piled high with old carcasses and skeletons of cows. Furious young Dalit men unloaded the carcasses and began flinging them into the deep, colonnaded verandah of the bungalow. They left a macabre trail of cow skeletons in the driveway, placed a huge, horned skull on the Collector’s office table and draped serpentine cow vertebrae like antimacassars over the backs of his pretty armchairs.
Anjum watched the video looking shocked, the light from the mobile phone screen bouncing off her perfect white tooth. It was clear the men were shouting, but the volume on the phone was turned down so as not to wake Miss Jebeen.
“What are they shouting? It’s in Gujarati?” she asked Saddam.
“Your Mother! You look after her!” Saddam whispered.
“Ai hai! What will they do to these boys now?”
“What can they do, the poor fuckers? They can’t clean their own shit. They can’t bury their own mothers. I don’t know what they’ll do. But it’s their problem, not ours.”
“So now?” Anjum said. “You’ve deleted the video…that means that you’ve given up the idea of killing that bastard cop?” She sounded disappointed. Disapproving, almost.
“Now I don’t need to kill him. You saw the video—my people have risen up! They are fighting! What is one Sehrawat for us now? Nothing!”
“Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?”
“That’s how it is these days, yaar. The world is only videos now. But see what they’ve done! It’s real. It’s not a movie. They’re not actors. Do you want to see it again?”
“Arre, it’s not that easy, babu. They’ll beat up these boys, buy them off…that’s how they do it these days…and if they leave this work of theirs, how will they earn? What will they eat? Chalo, we’ll think about that later. Do you have a nice photograph of your father? We can hang it up in the TV room.”
Anjum was suggesting that a portrait of Saddam’s father be hung next to the portrait of Zakir Mian garlanded with crisp cash-birds that graced the TV room. It was her way of accepting Saddam as her son-in-law.
—
Saeeda was delighted, Zainab ecstatic. Preparations for the wedding began. Everybody, including Tilo Madam, was measured up for new clothes that Zainab would design. A month before the wedding Saddam announced that he was taking the family out for a special treat. A surprise. Imam Ziauddin was too frail to go and it was Ustad Hameed’s grandson’s birthday. Dr. Azad Bhartiya said the treat-destination Saddam had chosen was against his principles and in any case he couldn’t eat. So the party consisted of Anjum, Saeeda, Nimmo Gorakhpuri, Zainab, Tilo, Miss Jebeen the Second and Saddam himself. None of them could in their wildest dreams have predicted what he had in store for them.
—
Naresh Kumar, a friend of Saddam’s, was one of five chauffeurs employed by a billionaire industrialist who maintained a palatial home and a fleet of expensive cars even though he spent only three or four days a month in Delhi. Naresh Kumar arrived at the graveyard to pick up the pre-wedding party in his master’s leather-seated silver Mercedes-Benz. Zainab sat in front on Saddam’s lap and everybody else squashed in behind. Tilo could never have imagined enjoying a ride through the streets of Delhi in a Mercedes. But that, she discovered very quickly, was only due to her severely limited imagination. The passengers shrieked as the car picked up speed. Saddam would not tell them where he was taking them. As they drove through the vicinity of the old city, they looked out of the windows eagerly, hoping to be seen by friends and acquaintances. As they moved into South Delhi, the mismatch between the passengers and the vehicle they were in drew plenty of curious and sometimes angry looks. A little intimidated, they rolled the window-glasses up. They stopped at a traffic intersection at the end of a long, tree-lined avenue where a group of Hijras dressed up to the nines were begging—they were technically begging, but actually hammering on car windows demanding money. All the cars that had stopped at the lights had their windows rolled up. The people in them were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the Hijras. When they caught sight of the silver Mercedes, all four Hijras converged on it, smelling wealth and, they hoped, a naive foreigner. They were surprised when the windows rolled down before they had even launched their strike, and Anjum, Saeeda and Nimmo Gorakhpuri smiled back at them, returning their wide-fingered Hijra clap. The encounter quickly turned into an exchange of gossip. Which Gharana did the four belong to? Who was their Ustad? And their Ustad’s Ustad? The four leaned through the Merc’s windows, their elbows resting on the ledges, their bottoms protruding provocatively into the traffic. When the light changed, the cars behind them hooted impatiently. They responded with a string of inventive obscenities. Saddam gave them one hundred rupees and his visiting card. He invited them to the wedding.