Tatiana Moskalev was right, and she’d given him good information. He spent two months investigating in the hills of northern Moldova – or the country that used to be Moldova and is currently at war with the southern part of itself – carefully questioning and bribing the people he met there. Reuters footed his bill on this occasion; he told an editor he trusted about the tip he’d got, and she signed off his costs. If he found it, it would be the biggest kind of news. If he didn’t find it, he’d be able to do a portrait of this war-torn country, and that’d give them something, at least.
But he found it. One afternoon, a man in a village near the border agreed to drive Tunde in his jeep to a place on the River Dniester with a view down into the valley. There, they saw a compound, hastily thrown up, with low-slung buildings and a central training yard. The man would not let Tunde leave the jeep, and he wouldn’t drive any closer. But they had a good enough view for Tunde to take six photographs. They showed brown-skinned men with beards in battle fatigues and black berets training with a new weapon, new armour. Their body suits were made of rubber, on their backs they wore battery-packs and in their hands they carried electric cattle-prods.
It was only six photographs, but it was enough. Tunde had made world news. ‘AWADI-ATIF TRAINS SECRET ARMY’ was the Reuters headline. Others shouted: ‘THE BOYS ARE BACK’. And ‘LOOK WHO’S SHOCKING’. There were anxious debates in newsrooms and on morning shows about the implications of these new weapons: Could they work? Would they win? Tunde hadn’t managed to photograph King Awadi-Atif himself, but the conclusion that he was working with the Moldovan Defence Forces was unavoidable. The situation had begun to stabilize in many countries, but this news kicked it off again. Perhaps the men were coming back, with their weapons and armour.
In Delhi, the riot went on for weeks.
It began in the places under the motorway bridges, where the poor people live in blanket tents or houses constructed from cardboard and tape. This is the place men come when they want a woman they can use without law or licence, discard without censure. The power has been passed from palm to palm here for three years now. And the many death-bearing hands of women have a name here: Kali, the eternal. Kali, who destroys to bring fresh growth. Kali, intoxicated by the blood of the slain. Kali, who puts out the stars with her thumb and forefinger. Terror is her name and death is her breathing in and out. Her arrival in this world has been long expected. Any adjustment in understanding had come easily to the women under the motorway bridges of the megacity.
The government sent in the army. The women of Delhi discovered a new trick. A jet of water, directed at the attacking forces, could be electrified. The women put their hands into the spouts and sent death from their fingers, like the Goddess walking the earth. The government cut off the water supply to the slum neighbourhoods, in the highest heat of the summer, when the streets stink of rot and the pregnant dogs wander, panting, in search of shelter from the sun. The world’s media filmed the poor begging for water, praying for a single drop. And on the third day, the heavens opened and sent an unseasonal rainstorm, hectic and thorough as a scouring brush, washing the smell from the streets and collecting in puddles and pools. When the soldiers return, they are standing in the wet or touching wet rails, or their vehicles are trailing some loose wire into the wet, and when the women light up the roadways, people die quite suddenly, falling to the ground frothing, as though Kali herself had struck them down.
The temples to Kali are full of worshippers. There are soldiers who join with the rioters. And Tunde is there, too, with his cameras and his CNN pass.
In the hotel filled with foreign journalists, people know him. He’s seen some of these reporters before, in other places where justice is at last being meted out – although it’s not considered good form to say so. Officially, in the West, the thing is still a ‘crisis’, with all the word implies: exceptional, deplorable, temporary. The team from Allgemeine Zeitung greet him by name, congratulate him – with a slightly envious tone – on the scoop of the six photographs of Awadi-Atif’s forces. He’s met the more senior editors and producers from CNN, even a team from the Daily Times of Nigeria, who ask him where he’s been hiding and how they could have missed him. Tunde has his own YouTube channel now, broadcasting footage from around the world. His face begins each broadcast. He is the one who goes to the most dangerous places to bring the images no one else will show. He celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday on a plane. One of the air stewards recognized his face and brought him champagne.
In Delhi, he follows behind a pack of women rampaging through Janpath market. There was a time that a woman could not walk alone here, not if she were under seventy, and not with certainty even then. There had been protests for many years, and placards, and shouted slogans. These things rise up and afterwards it is as if it had never been. Now the women are making what they call ‘a show of force’, in solidarity with those who were killed under the bridges and starved of water.
Tunde interviews a woman in the crowd. She had been here for the protests three years earlier; yes, she had held up her banner and shouted and signed her petitions. ‘It was like being part of a wave of water,’ she says. ‘A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.’
He knows exactly where this part will fit in his book. The history of political movements. The struggle that moved so slowly until this great change happened. He’s putting together an argument.
There is little violence against people; mostly they are turning over stalls.
‘Now they will know,’ shouts one woman into Tunde’s camera, ‘that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid.’
There is a brief scuffle when four men with knives appear in the crowd, but this is quickly dealt with, leaving the men with twitching arms but no permanent injuries. He has started to suspect there will be nothing new here today, nothing that hasn’t been seen before, when the word comes through the crowd that the army have formed a barricade up ahead, across Windsor Place. They are trying to protect the foreign hotels. They’re advancing slowly, armed with rubber bullets, and shoes with thick, insulating soles. They want to make a demonstration here. A show of force to let the world see how a properly trained army deals with a rabble like this.