by Omair Ahmad
Jamaal should have run then. He was young, and fast. It is possible that he would have got away. This had all been a mistake. He was not one to start trouble, he could do something, he could escape. But the Fates rode him at that moment, and the knife that he always carried stirred next to his skin.
He moved so fast that Kumar and Chaudhri would swear later that Jamaal must have already been carrying the knife in his hand.
‘Maadarchod!’ Jimmy shouted as the cheap work of wood and steel found a home. As the blade sank into the inspector’s khaki-covered belly, he yelled, ‘My name is Jimmy the terrorist.’
The policemen gaped, and then Chaudhri struck. He brought his lathi down hard on Jamaal’s wrist, fracturing the brittle bones in his fury and fear. Kumar moved soon after, recovering from his shock, and brought up his own lathi.
They beat him down until he could not stand, and then they kicked him, shattering teeth, tearing skin and rupturing organs with their boots. At some point Jamaal flopped into unconsciousness, and a sharp kick broke his neck. They went on kicking him long after he was dead, and Jimmy the terrorist with him.
It was only the whimper of the inspector that brought them back to their senses, after close to half an hour, after a lifetime of retribution. Rawat was sitting on the pavement with the knife protruding out of his belly. When Jamaal was struck down, the force had wrenched the knife out a little way and now the blood was spreading. The inspector had been in shock for those long minutes of Jamaal’s death, but when the blood drenched his pants and invaded his underwear the sensation brought a mewl of fear out of him.
Three weeks later Inspector Rawat received an award for valour from the chief minister as he sat up painfully in the hospital bed.
No one asked who Jamaal had been, where he was born, or what he did, but Jimmy the terrorist was listed, his death reported, and maybe that is the important thing.
EPILOGUE
That is the official story.
There is, though, another version, the whore’s version.
She says that after Jamaal stabbed the inspector, Kumar and Chaudhri fled. Jamaal looked at the inspector sitting shocked on the pavement, and putting one foot on Rawat’s belly, he wrenched the blade out. Wiping it on the inspector’s shirt, he tucked it back into his sleeve, the metal warm and sated.
She says that by the time Chaudhri and Kumar came back, Jimmy the terrorist was long gone, swallowed by the alleys of the Moazzamabad that bore him.
Author’s Note
Every story has a story behind it. I first wrote ‘Jimmy the Terrorist’ as a short story in 2002/3 when I was living in Washington DC, finishing a Master’s thesis, and both missing and dreading India. Missing it because I had not been back since 2001, dreading it because a few years out of the country had made me rethink the challenges we face. It was at this time that I started writing little vignettes and character sketches to put a human face to those challenges. ‘Jimmy …’ as a short story was my attempt to understand how our recent history of riots and curfews might affect an anonymous young man growing up in North India.
During those days I used to play chess (very badly) with an old school friend, Vamsee Kanchi, and talking about my writing during a game I said to him, ‘Maybe that’s just the fate of people.’ To this Vamsee said, ‘Why are we so fixated on one fate, maybe there are many?’ Presumably he was just trying to distract me, since his chess skills were only marginally better than mine. But the idea stuck, and is possibly one of the keys to my later writing: that many fates are possible, and that people who report on stories, and tragedies, as if they were predestined somehow deprive us of the whole truth.
A couple of years ago I put all those vignettes together and tried to get it marketed as a collection of short stories called Unbelonging. Ravi Singh at Penguin India came back to me and said of ‘Jimmy …’, ‘There’s a lot happening in this story, would you want to make it into a novella or a novel?’ In a collection, he said, it would be lost. Sabah Hamid, who is always the last court of appeals for me when it comes to things like this, said, ‘No.’ She really liked the short story, and thought I would only ruin it. Nandini Mehta, again somebody whose literary judgement I respect, also thought that the short story should not be stretched.
But I really wanted to write a longer story on similar issues, so I realized I would have to write a completely new one. Jimmy and the setting could not be anonymous; everything had to be detailed. Jimmy had to be a person in the real world, and this needed a family, a neighbourhood, a history.
There is a line in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune that has stayed with me—‘Still, but one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?’ So for me the book also became at least as much, if not more, about Jimmy’s father. And for this, I turned to my own father for his memories of the 1960s, '70s and '80s. My father enjoyed his life thoroughly, and it is maybe his zest, his love of poetry that is captured in the early chapters of the book, although I have, as a darker person, drawn a darker picture of the times. (Perhaps there are other intimates and friends who have inspired parts of the book. I remember that my sister, reading the first draft, wondered which characters I had drawn from our extended family, because some of the words and actions seemed slightly familiar.)
A whole host of friends helped me, and commented on the manuscript. I am most indebted to two of them: Neha Kumar and Mandavi Mehta, who argued in detail about pretty much every single sentence of the book. In no particular order of preference, others whose comments, reading and advice shaped the novel are: Mushir Ahmad, Ateeq bhaijaan, Atika, Amitabha Bagchi, Ratika Kapur, Anuya Upadhyay, Vatsala Kaul Bannerjee, Mitali Saran, Kalyani Prasher, Hartosh Singh Bal, Rajeev Srivastava, Elena Bratanova, Basharat Peer and Rachna Kalra.
I have been exceedingly lucky in my friends.
I have been exceedingly lucky in my publishers as well. Mike Bryan, as CEO of Penguin India, was a wonderful source of support and enthusiasm, and Heather Adams made a particular remark after reading the first draft that made me realize I was still stuck in the short story and had some major changes to do before it became the novel I wanted it to be. Of course the most important editor of the whole thing was Ravi Singh, who long-sufferingly went through iteration after iteration of the manuscript before it was finally ready. The whole team at Penguin India has been a pleasure to work with, supportive, cheerful and very ready to help.
In the end I showed the manuscript to Sabah. And although she still loves the original story, she didn’t disapprove. I guess I’ll have to live with that.
