‘He’ll cry but there is no other way. We need to inflict some more pain to make the original pain go away.’
‘You sound just like the Americans and they don’t even pay you anymore,’ Momo says to Doctor. I bristle and keep quiet. You can curse your own country but when someone else curses it, you want to stand up and slap them. It’s not patriotism, it’s our damned human nature. But here everyone is accusing everyone else of being American. God save America.
Doctor takes out a piece of cardboard and cuts a strip from it with a US army knife, then produces a roll of gauze bandage as the mutt squirms and his yelps shoot up towards the sky. Momo squeezes his eyes shut as Doctor bandages Mutt’s broken leg, covering it with surplus gauze. He pats Momo on the cheek, Momo squirms and tilts his cap. Momo has got Mutt’s face in his lap, he takes off his cap and fans him.
Doctor comes and stands next to me, goes around my chair, and examines me without touching me and immediately reaches a diagnosis.
‘Give the poor man something to eat,’ says Doctor. ‘It seems he hasn’t eaten in many days. Give him some food before he starts eating your pots and pans.’ I am first pleasantly surprised then scared by the accuracy of Doctor’s diagnosis. My legs begin to shake and I am sweating despite a slight chill in the air. I resist the urge to faint because I don’t want this quack putting his hands on me. Doctor has probably run out of disinfectants too. Father Dear goes inside and after a few moments emerges with a plate of boiled rice floating in milk with brown sugar sprinkled on top. He hands me the plate apologetically and whispers, ‘She thinks the meat takes much longer to cook without salt.’ I don’t answer and start to eat with as much restraint as a man starving for eight days can muster.
Doctor watches me eat and makes satisfactory sounds as if his patient is responding well to treatment. He takes out his cigarette, two more puffs, clips it and puts it back in his pocket.
When I am halfway through my plate, trying hard to keep my food down as my palate rebels against this strange excuse for a meal, Father Dear disappears again and comes back with a big platter of what looks like large chunks of meat and a pile of bread. He starts to eat, sitting right in front of me, tearing off big juicy chunks of meat, dipping them in the oily gravy and stuffing them in his mouth. Doctor watches him but refuses to join him. ‘That poison is going to kill you one day.’ Doctor produces a dried piece of bread from his bag and a large green chilli and starts taking small, slow bites.
I was told they would slaughter their best horse if a hungry stranger arrived at their door. A hungry stranger has arrived at their doorstep, and they have slaughtered an animal and are happily eating it themselves. They have given me sick people’s food, probably Mutt’s leftovers, and are sitting right there in front of me feasting on the finest meat this desert has produced. Doctor has probably gone vegetarian. Even the lush green chilli in his hand seems appetizing. I have a feeling that I am being treated like a refugee. I feel insulted.
I feel homesick.
But I am here, I have not ended up like Colonel Slatter. I have food in front of me, my stomach is able to keep this food down despite the waves of nausea that engulf me. I feel I should be grateful but I can’t bring myself to be grateful to this pair of crazies who live off UN handouts and are now smacking their lips right in front of me.
‘What is it that you are wearing?’ asks Momo, who has joined us, and is now picking out bits of fat from the meat on offer and feeding them to Mutt.
I look at myself. The inside-out flying suit surprises me. I feel as if I have come to this place inappropriately dressed. I must borrow the local civilian dress, if I want to blend in. I have to mingle before I can be rescued. But for now I have to tell the truth, earn their trust, even if they are being mean hosts.
‘Flying suit,’ I say. ‘It’s my flying suit.’
‘You can wear that and fly? Go on, show us,’ Momo says in jest. He is fully convinced that I am a con artist.
‘This is what we wear when we fly an aeroplane, it takes care of the air pressure.’ I am gobbling the rice, which is not doing anything for my hunger. It seems I am gobbling this mush into an endless void. I look at my cutlery which consists of just a spoon. It is made of stainless steel. Probably very hard to bite.
‘If you were flying, where is your plane?’ asks Momo, looking into my eyes.
I choke on my mush. ‘I was bringing in aid, humanitarian aid. Food and football kits.’
‘And then what happened?’ Momo is an inquisitor from hell.
‘My plane developed a technical fault and I had to eject.’
‘You jumped out of your plane? Where is the plane?’
‘Probably somewhere in the desert. When I ejected it was still flying.’
‘And you were going to land at the Hangar, right?’
‘Yeah, I guess.’ There’s a grinding pain in my lower stomach. I don’t know if they have proper men’s rooms here.
‘They forgot to tell you that the Hangar is shut. There have been no flights for seven months.’
‘I’ve got stomach cramps,’ I mumble. ‘When you eject sometimes you have short-term memory loss. It’ll come back to me.’
Momo’s eyes mock me as if he can see through my bullshit, as if saying nothing will come back to you, nothing.
‘You are still hungry?’ Doctor turns towards me.
‘Yes. As you know I have been starving for eight days.’ I wipe the last morsel of rice from my plate. ‘A man can have an appetite. Especially in the middle of a war.’
‘But this place is not America. You can’t eat everything here,’ says Doctor. ‘The fugee food is poison. If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you impotent. You want to go home impotent?’
Who are these people to speculate about my intimate life? It’s probably their culture. I need to be sensitive to it.
‘Yes, I know all about halal. I myself prefer halal. Halal is healthier.’ I am glad I took my ‘Eat and Drink With the Enemy’ module of my Cultural Sensitivity course seriously. A wave of nausea travels towards my throat and with it a sudden urge to get up and run, get away from this place as fast as I can.
I must find a way to contact Cath, I must find a way to send her a message. She wouldn’t believe that I’m stuck here in the middle of nowhere, but I must convince her to come and get me out of here, take me with her. I must go to her. I get up in panic and start walking towards the door. My feet barely touch the ground, I feel I can walk through walls and locked gates. As I approach the gate, my head spins and an ancient fatigue takes over, I collapse.
A shout from the kitchen: ‘Can you bring my plates back? This place is full of thieves.’
CHAPTER 16
Momo
When a boy wants to get with a girl, he tells her a joke. And if she laughs, it’s a sign she is gonna be seduced. When a woman wants a man she tells him a story and if he pretends to be absorbed in the story, it means he is seduced. I know many jokes but I am not gonna waste any on Lady Flowerbody. She knows some stories and she is trying them on me. I am all ears.
‘This modern family is not that old. It all started forty thousand years ago,’ she says, catching her breath and picking out an invisible hair from her mouth. I can already tell this is gonna be a story with a moral. I like a good story. I am also very good at ignoring the moral. Also nobody has called my family modern before.
I can smell the faint maple syrup smell coming from her hair. I am not very good at smells. That’s Mutt’s speciality.
‘You know how it came about?’ she says, puffing on a rolled-up organic cigarette, her tobacco from the American Spirit pouch, her tongue licks the paper in a smooth practised move. Smoking is bad for health so I’m never gonna smoke but I’m not gonna lie, she looks nice with that cigarette between her lips. It’s a tough choice to make between looking good and lung cancer. ‘It all started forty thousand years ago.’
I was thinking she was gonna tell me something about the origins of International Aid, an
d if they could outsource some of their work to me for the right price or if she could guide me to any venture capitalists who were interested in investing in my Young Muslim Mind rather than exploring it. But she obviously wants to tell me something more primitive, something that happened a long time ago before the young minds became Muslim and brought us together here, forty thousand years after it had all started. Her cigarette smells like stale incense that has burnt in the kitchen.
‘When folks lived in caves, they didn’t have partners. I mean they didn’t think very hard about who they went to bed with and consequently when women gave birth to babies nobody knew who the father was. So maybe they did take care of them, like the community does, out of the goodness of its heart or for the larger common good, or maybe they just found the little babies cute like we do now, but the net result was that the world had lots of mums and no dads. And lots of kiddies died, lots of them. Sometimes they died because of all sorts of nasty diseases, or wild animals mauled them, or sometimes older kids killed them for fun, anyway they died in huge numbers and there were no dads to mourn them, only sad women digging holes in the frozen earth and later no partner to hold them, no one to promise them they would make another baby. Maybe they didn’t even know how the babies were made. I am sure they had some idea but it was not as if they could google it and look at the illustrations or something.’
I know all about how babies are made. Father Dear forced sex education on us. He had even designed a module keeping in mind local culture and customs, he always reminded us, as if there were different ways of making babies in different cultures. I nod as if she isn’t telling me the story of human evolution but narrating a tale of personal loss, something that has happened to her. When women are telling you stories about history, they are telling you about the present, something that started a long time ago but is not likely to end any time soon.
‘So the kiddies kept dying, and men kept denying that they had any role in their birth or death and women kept digging holes and starving themselves to feed their children. Then there was this smart girl who one day gave a man her baby to hold. As the men prepared to go out to work – I mean go out to hunt or forage for food or whatever it was that they called work back then – this woman comes up to the man who she had slept off and on with, they haven’t really done anything, not the things that she has done with other men, it was sort of like sure we live in the same cave, sure we know each other, you were on top of me last week, or last month – don’t know how and if they measured time – weren’t you? So she just asks him to hold the baby for a minute while she goes out to relieve herself. And she said it at the exact moment as she was plonking the baby in his lap, so the man didn’t have the time to grunt or hit her or throw the baby away, or say wait a minute I am a man, or make whatever gesture was in vogue to say a clear NO, I am not holding this baby. Before he could get up, swing the baby at her or yell at her, she was out of the cave and gone and this guy was left holding the baby. And she didn’t come back all day. A number of times the man left the baby on the ground and walked up to the cave’s entrance determined to join the others in their daily toils, but as soon as he reached the cave’s entrance the baby gurgled and laughed. Not cried, mind you, because that would have been normal, that’s what children did, they cried.
‘So the man spent practically the entire day walking up and down the cave, picking up the baby, plonking him down, holding him upside down and swinging him; he did everything he could remember having seen women do with a baby, he just did it in a more manly way. There was not much you could do with a baby back then, I mean there was no baby gym, or prams or soft toys, so he ran out of things to do with the baby very soon. They both sucked a yam, he sucked it and put it in the baby’s mouth and the baby threw up and he felt obliged to clean it up with a banana leaf or whatever it was that they used for wipes in those days. They probably took a nap together because that’s how the men and women returning after their day’s toil found them, the man reclined against the wall of the cave, the baby with his arms tightly around his neck, smiling in his sleep.’
‘You’re making this stuff up,’ I say, propping myself up on an elbow and trying not to look below her neck. She digs into American Spirit, another lick on the paper and she holds an unlit cigarette between her fingers.
‘So he became the first man to not leave the cave, to stay with the baby. And when the people came back they were divided in their response. Women were scared, they didn’t know what had happened. They wondered if the man had given birth and that was considered a monstrous thing even back then. Men were in awe, they had been out all day chasing dangerous animals and weeding out poisonous roots for food and here was a man, one of them, fast asleep with a smiling baby hanging around his neck.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I ask, getting up.
It is getting late. Mutt is yelping in the distance. Mutt has the impatience of a juvenile who thinks his lazy owner is standing between him and his destiny. A potted history of the nuclear family is standing between me and the door. She holds my hand tightly as if she has read my thoughts and my escape plan and is determined to foil it.
She is gonna make one determined storyteller.
‘They started to emulate him after that. Some of them at least. Others were repulsed. How can a man, a hunter-gatherer, a lurker in the jungle, stay all day in the cave hugging a slobbering little baby? But there were many who took to it enthusiastically and let the women wander the jungle, go out and hunt and find food. And these women who otherwise might have gone to bed with whosoever might be lying next to them always went back to the man with their baby. And that’s how the word “baby-man” came about.
‘They didn’t all live happily ever after, men got bored, sometimes in their anger they smashed the baby against the cave walls and moved on to the next cave and the next woman and sometimes the next child. But many of them stayed, many of them kept the baby alive and then many of them left the baby with the woman and ventured out and came back to the same woman and picked up the baby. And when they were out hunting wild animals sometimes they thought of that baby and smiled. Now that’s parenthood for you, that’s family for you. You might want to call it love or evolution or survival or the desire to sleep with the same woman every night of your life.’
‘And then what happened?’ I ask, now half standing, ready to bolt but oddly fixated with this history of love in the caves.
‘Boom,’ she says, exploding an imaginary bomb with the palms of her hands. ‘Fewer and fewer kids died. But the more people lived together, the further they drifted apart. You have six billion people now and we all still feel lonely.’
Then she looks at me with those sad eyes of hers. ‘Your Mother Dear, she refuses to leave that cave.’
‘What has she got to do with it?’
‘She needs to be strong. I think in the end she’ll find a solution to this problem of yours. She also needs to lower her expectations. She needs to get out more often.’
‘She has no expectations. She used to be strong. She could carry three pitchers of water on her head, but with age of course. . . ’
Lady Flowerbody has no idea how Mother Dear is raring to go out. She has no idea how I have managed to keep Mother Dear in.
‘She needs to let you go. She still lives in the caves and you are her baby-man. But you are too young to carry the whole family’s burden. And history’s burden.’
‘I am old enough.’
Look at the do-gooder’s trickery. One moment she is teaching me how babies are made, the next moment she is trying to snatch that same baby from his mother.
She is definitely gonna be on my team. Now if only Mutt would shut up. I am right here, I am not gonna leave you and go somewhere, you should know that by now, Mr Fried Brains.
CHAPTER 17
Mutt
Today is the third worst day of my life. How do I know? Because one is wise enough to know that the worst day is already in the past. Maybe other bad thing
s will happen, in fact today came close to being like the day my brains got fried, but I have lived an eventful life and I can safely say that the worst is in the distant past.
I keep running after the Jeep Cherokee; Momo can see me in the rear-view mirror but he keeps pushing the pedal down. He pushes that pedal hard when he is on a mission. Today I need to be on this mission with him but he doesn’t want me to see him cry. I can smell his unhappiness at having to leave me behind. It is stronger than ever before, the smell of withering jasmine flowers. It’s a smell very common amongst your masters when they are abandoning you for your own good.
I do not wish to write a treatise about the terms of abandonment between humans and their canine comrades, but may I just venture to ask what he knows about my own good? What’s worse than somebody unilaterally defining your own good for you? Yes, there is something worse than that; when they actually, sincerely, from the bottom of their lovelorn heart, believe they know what’s good for you. The stench of certainty, the rot of unshakable faith. It always reminds me of the smell of dead members of the domestic canine fraternity, freed from the daily humiliations that I have to suffer. I have smelled it too often. It’s not pretty, that’s why one suffers. If the ultimate freedom comes with that stench one will choose to stay an abject slave for a few more years.
This morning I could smell it already. Momo was feeling bad for himself because he had to do that thing that he thinks, nay he knows, is treacherous but he is certain it’s for my own good. He was scheming and plotting and walking about as if he was just distracted by the new arrivals in the house. He doesn’t realize that the white man has no smell and she is a bouquet of wild flowers.
I was lying under the jeep and Momo knew it. Our relationship is such that he doesn’t need to see me to know where I am. He is aware of my presence. And I am not only aware of his presence but what’s going through his genius head as well. I can chase his anxieties and hunt them down for him even before he has been able to give them a name. I can tell his enemies from his friends. I can’t divine a future for him but I can tell you that his future is my future.
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