by Paul Theroux
“Go, go, come on,” Nigel whispered from below.
“I can’t. It’s not working.” I thrust again at the bar to show him my predicament. He looked distraught, his forehead slick with sweat. I said, “Can you take out another bar?”
“Not now,” he said, almost hissing. “It makes too much noise.”
Nigel waved a hand, telling me to climb down. “Get back to your room,” he said. “Quickly. I’ll try to fix this up.”
I walked to my room as casually as I could and closed the door noisily, to let Abdullah know I had returned. I lay on my mattress in the dark, trying to muster one calm thought. I knew it was only a matter of time before our plan was discovered—before one of our captors spotted the jury-rigged pile of bricks and bent bars that comprised the bathroom window or just read the whole stupid plotline in my eyes.
After dawn broke and the boy named Hassam came to open our window shutters before prayer, Nigel and I stood at our sills, deciding that we had to leave immediately. Quickly, we redrew the outline of our plan. We knew from the calls of the muezzin that there was a mosque somewhere close by. It seemed like the one good option, a place to find a crowd. We waited for the midday prayer, for the heat to arrive and the boys to start nodding off. I knocked for the bathroom, and Nigel met me there, holding my backpack. Early that morning, he pulled out a third window bar. I waited while he quickly unstacked the bricks again. This time, I didn’t hesitate. I got one leg out the window and then the second. I slid a few inches on my stomach to lessen the distance to the ground, holding on to one of the remaining window bars for support, and then I let myself drop.
We hit the ground one right after the other, me and then Nigel, two soft thumps in the sand. My heart lifted and crashed with the impact.
Things were bad. I knew it the instant I touched the soil. Nothing appeared the way I had imagined it. To the left was a sideways-leaning fence made of patchwork pieces of colored tin and old, flattened oil cans. To the right was a row of shanties, built from more tin and pieces of loose burlap. There wasn’t a bit of vegetation in sight, beyond a few brambly thornbushes, low and leafless in the sand. More alarming was the emaciated child, a boy of maybe seven, standing only a few feet away from me, naked but for a pair of shorts, swaybacked and wide-eyed and looking like he might scream.
The boy took off at a sprint—heading, I was sure, toward the first adult he could find.
It was as if a starting gun had been shot, as if a seismic disturbance had unsettled the air, rippling over the rooftops to the patio where our captors lay in repose. Everything became instinctual then. Nigel and I didn’t even look at each other. We just started, madly, to run.
Every strategy we plotted at our windowsills flew out of our heads. Every bit of reason lifted away as we dashed down the alleyway.
At the end of the alley was a rutted sand road, and on the road there were shacks and some market stalls, and the land beyond was a flat brown. Nigel was yelling at nobody and everyone, screaming “I caawi, I caawi,” the Somali words for “Help me.”
I saw it all in a high-speed panic, which is to say I barely saw it, or caught it only in flashes—a half-collapsed wall, a few nervous goats, a donkey lashed to a cart by two thin poles. We ran through it and past it, this landscape we had spent hours imagining, this place to which we were colossally mismatched, me behind Nigel, Nigel shouting, the heat warping the air around us, all of it with the unreality of a bad dream. People on the street spotted us and fled. Later, I would look back on it and realize that if you are running in a place like Somalia, everyone understands that you are running from danger. Which means that they, too, should run.
The mosque was tall and wide, painted green and white with a crescent moon on top and a short set of wooden steps leading to a wooden platform and an entrance. The platform was heaped with shoes, signaling that the place was full of people. Moving up the stairs behind Nigel, I felt the first trickle of relief, a feeling so unfamiliar that I almost couldn’t identify it.
Just then, a lone person came skidding around the street corner. It was Hassam, one of the younger guards. His expression was one of disbelief and selfish terror. I saw Abdullah run up, just behind him.
I bolted forward into the mosque, forgetting to remove my shoes. What I saw first was a field of men—kneeling, sitting, milling about in small groups. There were prayer mats spread in lines across the floor. Heads turned. A few people stood up. The interior of the mosque was vast, a single room with a vaulted ceiling. I heard myself calling out Somali words and English words and also some Arabic, my brain blurry with distress. I shouted, “Help!” and “May the blessings of Allah be upon you!” and “I am Muslim!” Nigel, too, was yelling.
A crowd magnetized around us, men with puzzled faces, some showing alarm. And then Abdullah was upon me, having blasted through the door with Jamal right behind, both of them holding guns.
Abdullah lunged and I dodged, feeling his grasp slip off my shoulder. I ran to a far corner of the room, where another group of men sat on the floor. I said every Arabic word I could think of as they lifted their bearded faces toward me, dumbstruck. Off to the side, Jamal had corralled Nigel against a wall and was hitting him repeatedly in the head, pounding on him with a closed fist, beating him with every ounce of strength he had. Nigel, I could see, was trying to hit him back, all the while shouting, “Jamal! Jamal!” as if to remind him that, in a weird way, they were once friends.
My fear organized itself into speed. I ducked through a doorway leading out into the air. With Abdullah two paces behind me, I leapt over the three stairs that descended from the side door of the mosque, landing in heavy sand, shedding my flip-flops as I ran. A gunshot ripped overhead, hollowing out the air. I looked back to see Abdullah, who had stopped running long enough to fire at me. My mind circled back toward the mosque. Nigel was inside. Inside was safer than outside. Keeping my shoulders low, I did a high-speed 20-yard end run around Abdullah, throwing myself back up the stairs and into the mosque.
The scene inside was oddly calm. Nigel had managed to shed Jamal and was sitting, not quite placidly but pretend placidly, at the front of the mosque, in the semicircular area that served as the imam’s pulpit, surrounded by a loose cluster of maybe 15 bearded men, most of them standing. I dropped to my knees next to Nigel, who was speaking English with some of the men, sounding like he was answering to some skepticism that he was Muslim.
Through a large, low window to one side of the pulpit, I could see a woman, sheathed entirely in black, peeking in at us, until one of the men strode to the window and slammed its metal shutters closed.
Abdullah had reentered the mosque. He was creeping his way into the group of bystanders, his gun canted loosely in my direction, sweat dripping through his hair and shining his cheeks. Nigel, meanwhile, was loudly reciting verses of the Koran like a schoolboy.
One of the men explained to us that someone was phoning the local imam, who was in the next village but would come to hear our story and give his judgment. “Inshallah, everything will be fine,” he said, indicating that we should remain seated on the floor. “Inshallah, maybe fifteen minutes.”
I felt relieved by this. An imam, I figured, would want to help us. I could hear Abdullah and Jamal arguing—politely—with some of the men.
Abruptly, a woman parted the quarreling crowd, elbowing her way past the men with the guns. I recognized her as the woman who had been looking through the window. She wore a black abaya and full hijab, including a niqab draped over her nose and mouth, covering everything but her eyes. Every man in the place was staring at her. The woman noticed no one. She came right over to me, kneeling down at my side without a word. Automatically, I reached for her hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine. I felt, for a second, safer than I’d felt in ages.
Her eyes were brown and somehow so familiar that it was as if I knew them from somewhere. The tops of her hands were painted with delicate, tendril patterns of rust-colored henna, the sort of ornament that on
e woman draws painstakingly on another. She was speaking in Somali to the men around us. I watched her, my nerves firing. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I knew she was helping me somehow. I heard distress in her voice. When she looked at me, her eyes swam with emotion.
Without thinking, I reached out and brushed my fingers over her face, feeling the warmth of her cheek beneath the fabric.
I said, “Do you speak English?”
“A little,” she said, moving closer. “You are a Muslim?”
“Yes, from Canada.”
“You are my sister,” she said. “From Canada.”
She reached out both arms, and I let myself fall. I sank my face into the pillows of her body. Her arms fit snugly around me. I felt the edges of my vigilance soften, the domino fall of my defenses. I began to cry. As men jabbered around us, the woman tightened her hold on me. She was the first woman I’d interacted with in five months. Lifting my head to find her eyes again, I told her I had been a prisoner, that I wanted to go home. My voice rose and fell unevenly. Uttering the word home caused me to sob. I pointed toward Abdullah, who was scowling at us, probably 10 feet away. “He is abusing me,” I said, suddenly desperate. To be sure she understood, I used my fingers to mimic the mechanics of sex.
I watched the woman’s eyes get wide. “Oh, haram,” she said. “Haram, haram.” She looked up to the crowd, her expression ferocious, and shouted a few agitated Somali words.
But before anyone could respond, the dynamic in the room changed suddenly. Two of the leaders of the kidnappers had marched into the mosque, looking disheveled and furious, with the captain next to them, waving a pistol.
One of them—a man called Ahmed—located me and pointed a finger. “You!” he shouted. “You have made a big problem!” The air in the mosque had grown stuffy and uncertain, filled with noise. Then came a loud, concussive crack, a gun going off somewhere inside the room.
The sound of it broke the spell, the holding pattern. I saw Abdullah pushing through the crowd in my direction, his head lowered like a bull’s. I screamed as he dove at me. He caught my feet with his hands and began dragging me in the direction of the side door. I clawed at the ground as he pulled. I don’t remember any of the onlookers trying to stop him.
It was only the woman who tried.
She clamped on to my arms and pulled me back, using her weight for leverage, letting loose a torrent of Somali. For a few minutes, my body was strung between them, with Abdullah yanking my legs while the Somali woman proved herself a stubborn anchor. We were being towed along—the two of us, linked like train cars—inch by inch across the floor of the mosque. My shoulder sockets ached to the point where I thought they would pop.
Finally, she could hang on no longer. I managed to lift my head and look back to see her sprawled on the floor and weeping openly. Her headscarf and niqab had been torn off in the struggle, leaving her exposed. I could see that she was my mother’s age, in her early 50s, with a gentle plump face and high forehead. Her hair had been braided in tiny cornrows over her head. She still had one arm outstretched in my direction. Three men with guns now surrounded her.
Someone lifted my shoulders, maneuvering me roughly over the stairs outside the mosque and into a courtyard. My abaya had ridden up over my waist. My jeans, which were already baggy because I had lost so much weight, were slipping toward my ankles as Abdullah jerked me forward, holding my legs on either side of his chest as if pulling a cart. As we moved over the courtyard, my body skimming the dirt, I felt my frayed underwear sliding off as well. I was naked, basically, stomach to knees.
I felt something wet hit my stomach and realized I had been spit on. We were moving through a crowd, past a metal gatepost marking the edge of the courtyard and the entry to the road. I reached out and caught the post, latching on to it with both hands.
Abdullah turned to see what had stopped his progress. Beyond him and through the gate, I could see a blue truck waiting with its engine running. Another gunshot echoed from inside the mosque. Nigel, I thought. They’ve killed Nigel. The thought was like a suck hole, a thing that could kill me. I spotted a woman’s narrow face looking down at me from the crowd, her expression unreadable. I screamed at her in English: “Why won’t you help me?”
She looked stricken. “I don’t speak English,” she said in perfect English.
Suddenly, the knuckles on one of my hands exploded in pain. Someone had kicked it to loosen my grip on the pole. I howled and let go. Then I was being pushed to my feet and toward the truck. I saw two other men hauling Nigel through the door of the mosque and in our direction. The sight of him brought a wash of solace and a hammer blow of anxiety. It had been all of 45 minutes since we’d slipped through the window. We’d made it out but not truly out. We’d crossed the river only halfway. Things would get worse from here. Everything that followed would be aftermath, punishment.
Nigel and I would remain hostages for another 10 months. We were freed, finally, on November 25, 2009, 460 days after we were taken, and only after our families managed to raise just over $1 million for a ransom and the services of a private security company. They held fundraisers, accepted other donations, and borrowed where they could. (Later, we learned, to our relief, that the three Somali men who were kidnapped with us had not been killed, but rather released unharmed.)
For a while, I kept track of my freedom, counting the days and the weeks and eventually the months that separated me from my captivity, sliding them like beads on an abacus, hoping that at some point one thing would feel stronger, more significant, than the other. But it doesn’t work that way, exactly. What I’ve learned is that freedom can’t fully overtake its absence. Once lost, a part stays lost forever.
I live with what happened. Memories leap the border between then and now. One sensation abruptly rivets itself to another—hot sand, the smell of an overripe banana, the rattling of a diesel truck—and tosses me, with a pounding heart, into the past. But that day, in particular, stays with me. The sweaty paranoia of slipping through the window, the frenzied dash into the mosque, the confusion that followed. All of it sits locked in my mind, surreal and forever vivid. I don’t know what happened to the woman in the mosque, the stranger whose name I never knew, who fought until I was dragged out of her arms. But I recall the elemental comfort of her embrace and all the terror and sadness she seemed to be beating back with it.
During the rest of my captivity, the memory of the escape became a sustaining one. It held an electrical charge, a force. We had been hopeful for how long? Ten minutes? Twelve? Whatever it was, in the context of the dark months to come, the feeling turned out to be vital. I craved it, just one hit of lung-clearing, odds-stacked-against-us, nearly impossible possibility. And when I most needed it, I found I could summon it—that mad, dim hope. It was like bending a spoon with my mind.
ANDREW McCARTHY
Clear-Eyed in Calcutta
FROM World Hum
I BLINKED. I MISSED IT. Instinctively, I had closed my eyes. The black goat’s head had been pressed down between two small stone pillars, then held in place by a thin metal bar. Swiftly the machete was drawn up into the air—and with no pomp in an otherwise elaborate ceremony, came whooshing down toward the taut, thin neck of the bleating goat. When I opened my eyes after no more than an instant, the two men holding the four legs of the now decapitated animal were flinging the carcass back, away from the altar. The body bounced up against the wall behind them, then slid back a few feet into a pool of water and blood that was gushing from the angry artery of the goat’s neck. The legs were still twitching. People, mostly women in colorful dress, rushed in and dipped their fingers into the blood, dabbing their foreheads, and then the foreheads of their children. The small horned head of the sacrificed goat was tossed beside its recently separated torso. All the while, the tongue was protruding, then retracting, as if the animal were gasping for breath it would no longer need. The eyes still appeared to contain life. My recollection is that the goat was still b
leating, but that can’t be correct.
I had been up in the hill country of West Bengal, in the soft climate of Darjeeling in the Lesser Himalayas, sipping delicate teas and hiking through crisp air over steep trails, before descending into the plains and humid chaos of Kolkata—although everyone I met who lived in the city of 14 million still called it Calcutta.
Little about Darjeeling’s charming provincial decay prepared me for Calcutta’s assault. Yet in truth, the cacophony and filth and poverty I found on the streets did not approach the squalor I’d always conjured in my imagination whenever I’d heard the word Calcutta before I ever saw the place. Only occasionally during my visit, when I would come upon a horribly disfigured small child, or a family of four living in a doorway, did the profundity of human degradation take me so wholly off-guard as to stop me in my tracks or make me gasp.
Like any place that exists with death hovering in such open proximity, Calcutta throbbed with life. The City of Joy’s natural condition struck me as one of openhearted generosity.
At the Victoria Memorial, the monumental shrine to the queen left behind by the British, I wondered why the Indians hadn’t ripped it down. Sipping tepid, watered-down coffee through a straw, I engaged in a passionate discussion on nuclear weapons and pop music with a few of the local intelligentsia, one flight above the street in the smoky College Street Coffee House. I woke early and got lost among the millions of carnations being strung together for wedding celebrations at the flower market, then walked across Howrah Bridge, one of 6 million people a day who do the same. I attended a raucous and joyful cricket match. I also visited Mother Teresa’s Mission of Hope, as well as her Kalighat Home for the Sick and Dying, then her orphanage—I came away with a decidedly mixed feeling about the diminutive nun who was so invested in suffering, and who seemed to me all too human in her love of the spotlight.
