“What is your command, my lord?” the tall, fiery-haired creature—a jinn, the boy realized—said gravely before bursting into laughter.
The boy said, uneasy, “Do I get three wishes?”
The jinn shook his head, still laughing. “No, lordling.”
He explained how he’d been trapped in the hourglass and thrown in the sea by a clever sorcerer, destined to trickle forever and forever, and for the first hundred years he vowed to give all the riches in the world to his rescuer.
None came.
Two hundred years passed and he grew cold in his trickling and afraid. He vowed to grant immortality and everlasting beauty to his would-be rescuer, yet luck did not favor him.
Another hundred years passed—
“And by now I’d curved a part of me into a meem shape. I went inside myself. I dreamed of looming towers and lush gardens, the taste of first love and the smell of Paristan and Mount Kaf, how I once chased a young pari down to her fae hole by the river; and I told myself this time I would not be released. This time I would take the man who upends me, removes me, pours me out—and cut him into a hundred pieces. I would dissolve the pieces in acid, then pour it all out into the Ravi River.
“And right on cue, you came along. Only thing is, lordling,” the jinn said, looking troubled, “you’re not a man.”
The boy faced the creature bravely. “Don’t mock me, jinn. I am, too.”
“Besides,” said the jinn, “you don’t look like you have enough meat for a hundred pieces.”
“Well, you don’t look like you could fit in an hourglass, either, but appearances can be deceiving, can’t they.” The boy had a sly look in his eyes. “In fact, I don’t believe you were ever in yonder tiny thing to begin with.”
“No?’
“I bet you’re all smoke and screen and no real jinn-magic. Prove me wrong if you wish.”
“And how do you propose,” said the jinn, “I should prove myself?”
“Why,” cried the boy, “show me how a grown body could fit into that hourglass!”
The jinn nodded, thoughtful. “As you wish.”
He reached forward and grabbed the boy.
The fisher boy screamed.
The jinn snapped his fingers together.
A vat of boiling liquid appeared on the shore. The jinn hoed and hummed and clamped his hands around the boy’s torso. He wrung him like a washcloth and rinsed him out, and all the while he held him above the vat to catch the seepage, then crumpled him. Into the vat he dropped the soft tail of blood clot that was the fisher boy, lifted the mixture, and chugged it.
Done, he placed the hourglass on the sand, swirled back in, went to sleep.
And dreamed.
* * *
Amina is joyful. She cannot breathe for delight.
The nightmare, she tells me on the phone, is over.
It takes me a moment to get the specifics out of her: Pressured by human rights organizations, the Supreme Court has taken suo moto notice of the “inhumane sentencing.” There would be no public hanging, dismemberment, or acidic dissolution; just a plain, good old-fashioned hanging till death.
And there would be no filming.
It really isn’t surprising, we tell each other. The local magistrate had become too senti, too dramatic when he passed that verdict. Of course, it was going to be stopped.
He has much to do with it, of course. Relentless visits by human rights workers and activists painting ghastly pictures of his final moments; our killer got scared, caved in, let his lawyer make phone calls, use the egregiousness of the sentence to whip up public anger.
I walk around with the phone receiver cradled between my head and shoulder. Amina jokes that she can hear the grin in my voice. We talk for a bit. It is something of an anticlimax, she admits, but she is tremendously relieved, nevertheless. No streaming of the execution, no viral videos, no duplicity on her conscience. “I don’t know how I would have faced my own children had I gone through with it,” she says.
She finally hangs up. I press the phone once into its cradle, lift it, and make a call. I walk outside, breathe in the night air. I think of Amina and smile at her wonderful innocence, look at the moon and sigh at its beauty. What a blessing it is to have time, I think, and such beautiful sights to spend it on.
The package is to be delivered after midnight.
* * *
Khan Bhai’s father had a film shop on Hall Road. Even as a kid I suspected that was why my parents disapproved of my hanging out with Khan Bhai (that and probably the motorbike incident), why Uncle Faris and Father didn’t quite get along. Films are haram, photography is haram, we were told. Pictures render living objects into eternal idols and idolatry is haram. Throw in lurid buxom Bollywood and Lollywood heroines humping the air in mango groves and grassy fields and you were talking an all-expenses-paid trip straight to the fires of Jahannam.
One Friday, after school was out, Salman and I hitched a ride to Hall Road with his brother. We got dropped off at Habeeb’s Milk Shop, where we bought two bowls of doodh khoya filled with ice cubes swirling in caramelized milk, a layer of tukhm balanga and dry fruit on top. We lapped it all up, then walked to the film shop, where we watched the shop tech clean the video drum of an old VCR. Uncle Faris was out, the shop was mostly empty, and it was a soft spring day. Salman yawned, shook himself, and declared he was going to go explore other shops in the building. The doodh khoya was heavy in my belly. In the back of the shop on a dusty old couch secreted behind half a dozen TV and VCR sets I lay my head down on my schoolbag and went to sleep.
A loud bang startled me awake. I sat up, rubbing the soreness from my neck. The room was lit from a large TV switched on and tuned to a dead channel, the hissing powdery gray squirming on the screen. It had been off when I went to sleep. I got up and walked over. A VCR sat atop the TV with a VHS in its maw. I peered at it, but the title space was blank.
I nudged the VHS in, stepped back, settled on the couch.
Bright rainbow lines fluttered and crackled on the screen. The light and pixels contracted into a tiny fist, then bloomed into Technicolor:
The scene is set at night. Two boys crouch in front of a closed door, their backs to the camera. One tumbles forward as the door swings open, the other quickly glances back—his eyes roll large and white—and follows his friend, slamming the door behind them.
The voice of the narrator comes at the audience: “You watch them enter and at once you are filled with terror. It is as if a boiling vat of vitriol has overturned inside you, the contents frothing their way past the coils in you into your deepest recesses, brightening the edges, jolting your fulcrums.”
The boys stand sweating in a halo of light from an overhead chandelier, a jagged beast of a thing hanging above them—one snap and they might be driven from their vessels. Their hearts thump loudly. They’re in a wood-floored hall. Odors of incense, jasmine, and coconut oil haunt the air.
The taller of the two hesitates, then steps forward.
“And thus the brave boys go within and not without,” proclaims the voice of the narrator.
The camera follows.
They tread softly down the hall lined with frames on either side. The camera pans across some of them: Mughal miniature art replicas, Arabic verses in calligraphy, numbered magic squares, frowning men and children. A portrait of an erect brooding woman seated in a gold-armed chair, shoulders gripped by a pale man with a black beard and kohl-drawn eyes standing behind her.
His is the darkest presence in the house, the boys think, and so thinking hurry on.
Strange the front door was unlocked. Surreal no one has accosted them yet. Where are the residents of the house? A door on their left is wide open. They peer in to see a dim-lit drawing room with plush sofas, a large dinner table, side tables with lovely vases, and sconces on the walls—excep
t the sofas have been moved, the large mahogany dinner table and side tables pushed against the walls.
On a large bedsheet spread on the marble floor in the middle of the room a silent congregation sits kneeling, straight as if in tashahhud. Perhaps a dozen, clad in pristine white.
The boys hang on to the doorframe. Their mouths are open.
Flowers are arranged before the kneelers in bunches and vases that smoke with incense. Clover sticks, half-drained bowls of milk, and jars of honey sit next to the flowers. Faces pallid and perfectly symmetrical, they may as well have been chiseled from ancient stone, loom over them. The congregation is so quiet and still the boys imagine they can hear their pulse resound through the drawing room.
“The house unfolds at night,” says the narrator.
A scratching in the walls, in the ceiling. The room shivers once.
The congregation jolts forward. They slam their foreheads into the floor, one by one, staccato collisions that sound like birds hitting a windowpane. Milk bowls are upended, the vases topple. The lines of heads now lie limp, prostate, bleeding.
The floor gurgles.
The taller of the two boys breaks. He turns and dashes blindly back through the hall, his feet clattering on the wooden floor.
The other boy stands riveted. He is looking at the wall the congregation had been facing.
The camera does not swivel in that direction.
Slow the hands of the congregants as they rise and float in the air in a gesture of obeisance. The torsos remain prone, the bodies curled in comma. Gentle the forward motion of the boy as he steps inside the room and begins walking to the head of the congregation.
“Dusk belongs to the jinns,” says the narrator, “and the ones filled with dusk, too.”
Darkness falls and the door of the drawing room slams shut.
* * *
The hissing electric gray returned on the TV screen. I got up and turned the TV off, returned to the couch, and went to sleep.
I remember waking in the dark later, screaming my mother’s name. Uncle Faris rushed into the back room and, finding no immediate threat, yelled at me. I remember nausea and lethargy and feeling feverish. I remember the rickshaw he hailed for us (day wasn’t over yet for him) and Salman and me lurching home through the traffic on Mall Road, Jail Road, and Main Boulevard past Firdous Market with its jalebi and paan khokas and barbecue vendors, me dozing with my head against the green plastic swing door, which had a bright parrot with flamingo plumage painted on it.
I dreamed on the ride home; of this I am certain. I don’t remember the dreams.
But even in waking hours, for years and years and years, the vapor and essence of them would hang to the edges of our house, our street, our muhallah. Even Salman noticed there was something wrong with our world; it made him vertiginous, look around him askance, he said, but I could be equally brave and strong sometimes and would wipe the fog away, as if with the edge of my sleeve.
What else was a friend good for, Salman would say, wink and smile; and his eyes would glow bright, dark, and old.
* * *
In Shahdara is a spacious, pretty villa with tall brick walls and a brass gate. I meet my new friends in the street outside.
“Done?”
They nod.
“Trouble?”
“Not much.”
I pause for effect. “And the two accomplices?”
“Cared for. A guard will find them tomorrow morning.”
I smile broadly to make sure they see it in my eyes through the mask. “Wonderful.”
“May Allah bless you,” one says. He is beginning to tear up, but his lips are pressed tight together when he doesn’t speak. Red rages in his cheeks. “Make sure you—”
“I will take care of it, I assure you, in the most auspicious way inshallah.”
The other hesitates. The first nudges him, and they climb into the van and speed away. What they return to remains uncertain. Some will say the loss of a child is a permanent sundering of the heart, and the way theirs went at the hands of a monster…a sorrow greater than mountains could bear, or so I read in the Quran as a boy.
Or was it another book?
So little I remember of that boy.
I walk to the entrance of the villa, caress the broken padlock on the gate, and quicken my steps toward the house.
The pond in the basement is black with algae, fetid with the smell of dead fish. Light from a cluster of sixty-watt bulbs set into the ceiling cuts golden swathes into the water. Next to the bulbs is a ceiling hook from which dangles a metal chain, one end of it clamped in the teeth of a cranking mechanism placed next to a tripod and a large vat. A gleaming butcher knife hangs from a hook on the mechanism.
I make for the tripod. Once the angle and camera settings satisfy me I go to him.
He is curled up naked on the marble floor in the center of the basement, hands and feet bound with thick jute rope that loops up and through a metal square pressed against his back. Blood darkens his nostril and the corner of his lips. Tape marks glisten around his mouth. His glasses are cracked and streaked with red. When he parts his lips to sneer, a wheeze escapes them. I’m quite sure the word it carries is “sisterfucker.”
A dusty cupboard stands at the far end of the basement. I smile at him brightly before walking over to it and returning.
“Your wish is my command. Here,” I say, squatting, and place the hourglass before him.
The sneer disappears. His eyes flash to the hourglass and stay there. We sit in respectful silence for a while.
He whispers, “Who are you?”
I shake my head.
“You can see it?”
I smile and rise to my feet.
He tries to wriggle toward the hourglass. “You can hear it?”
I pause to block his sight line, look him in the eye. “Can you?”
Uncertainty, surprise, fear sit coiled in him. “No, not anymore.”
I nod. I reach forward, grab his trussed feet, and begin dragging him toward the hanging chain.
He squirms and tries to roll. “What the fuck are you doing?”
I hook the chain to the clip on his back and begin cranking. Thrashing, he jerks up into the air, twisting higher with every seesaw of the crank. When he’s high enough, I stop and fetch the hourglass.
What a thing of beauty it is with its brass bases and the glass bulbs that have not stopped twinkling. Passed down dozens of generations, it has glowed like a beacon, calling some, disappointing others. The dark sands have not stopped falling since the last time I upended it when I visited the villa alone; the trickle ticks. To others the paradox between the seen and the heard might be fatal. The countdown it measures, a period accrued by grains of sand so ancient the desert it was collected from disappeared millennia ago, is exactly one hundred.
One hundred what? That depends on the listener.
I turn it over, noting the tremor that susurrates through its body as the sand begins to fall the other way. On the bottom base whirls the wolf etched in dervish wool, its left index pointed to the heavens, right toward the earth. The wrong configuration. Or the right. Who defines either?
He is spasming on the metal chain, spit and blood flying from his mouth. “Put me down, madarchod.”
“You were correct about one thing at least. It was biding its time for the perfect master to claim its mystery.” I put the hourglass on the ground, this hereditary beast of his. I carefully feel across the edges of the mask to ensure my features are perfectly obscured. I return to the tripod and fiddle so the angles are just right. “What does an hourglass do, you think?”
That stops him. He hangs, swaying in a circle, his eyes bulging and red with gravity.
“What purpose does it serve?”
Sweat pours down his forehead. He twitches. “My…my mo
ther’s hourglass is special. It has spoken to—”
“It bears witness to the passage of everything. You did so well with ninety-nine but you failed with the hundredth. The last sacrifice should have been you. Had you consummated the process and procured the righteous testimony of millions as they watched your elevation, your dislocation from the mundane, you would have been His holiest and all of us, including me, your subject. But now that completion falls to me.”
“Whose holiest?” He stammers, then louder he screams. “Please let me down. Please.”
“He is a hidden treasure. He remade you, reshaped you, to find Himself.” I drag the vat below him, position it perfectly. “Now, for the greatest film the world will ever see. A record of His reverence, His emergence.”
“What are you talking about? My God, I didn’t mean anyone harm. I just wanted to protect my boys. The hourglass told me, it promised—”
“You really never knew.” I laugh and click the red Record button.
Begins the final cut.
“There is no greater being but He, and I am his messenger.” I recite the holy declaration of faith as I bend and upend the hourglass for the final time.
The sand begins to trickle and tick.
I go to him with the knife in hand and start skinning.
The hourglass ticks. And ticks and ticks.
His screams fill the basement as I cut and peel him. Carefully I slice and turn my instrument, run it up and down until I’ve freed him of his burdensome covering. I scratch my head, I judge the best angles. I take pains not to block the camera’s vision.
There once was a boy who was a walking wound, I think. Filled with bleeding holes and needed patching.
This is the easy part. Once it’s done, I will have to redesign the movements of his blood. I will nick and sew and ligate till all his human highways come together into one perfectly synchronized dripping blood clock, which will tick down our insignificance, tick up to what is greater than the sum of all our parts.
Final Cuts Page 29
