The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe

by Romain Puertolas

  During his performances back home in his village, Ajatashatru went weeks without eating, sitting in the lotus position inside the trunk of a banyan fig tree, just as Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, had done two and a half thousand years earlier. He allowed himself the luxury of eating only once a day, at noon, and then he would only eat the rusty bolts and nails brought to him by the people of the village as offerings. In May 2005, a fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Ram Bahadur Bomjam had stolen his thunder, with the teenager’s worshippers claiming that he had meditated for six months without eating or drinking. So, the eyes of the world’s media had turned towards the impostor, abandoning Ajatashatru in his little tree.

  In reality, our fakir loved food and could never have gone more than a single day without eating. As soon as the sun set each evening, his followers came and unrolled the canvas that hung in front of the fig tree, and he ate the food brought to him by his cousin and long-time accomplice Nysatkharee (pronounced Nice-hot-curry). As for the screws and bolts, they were made of coal. So, while they were not exactly delicious or digestible, they were a lot easier to swallow than actual rusty steel nails.

  Ajatashatru had never fasted while locked inside a wardrobe without having food secreted in a false bottom. Perhaps he could manage it if he had to. The doctor in Kishanyogoor had once told him that no human being, even a fakir, could survive more than fifty days without food, or more than seventy-two hours without water. Seventy-two hours: in other words, three days.

  Of course, only five hours had passed since the last time he had eaten and drunk, but the Indian did not know that. In the darkness of the wardrobe, he had lost all sense of time. And, as he felt thirsty right then, his hypochrondriac nature (not especially compatible with his job as a fakir) led him to believe that he had already passed the fatal deadline of seventy-two hours locked inside this wardrobe and that his life was about to be extinguished like a candle flame.

  If the doctor was correct, the Indian had to drink as soon as possible. It no longer mattered if the voices outside were those of friends or enemies: this was a matter of life and death. So, our fakir once again pushed at the door of the wardrobe, attempting to escape. Once again, however, his efforts were in vain. With his puny arms, he could not – unlike his Bollywood heroes – smash open wardrobe doors. Not even Ikea wardrobe doors.

  He must have made some noise, however, because the voices suddenly hushed.

  Once more, Ajatashatru held his breath and waited, eyes wide open in spite of the fact that everything around him was pitch black. But he was not onstage, in a glass box filled with water, with a lid that would be removed as soon as the curtain went down. So he only held his breath for a few seconds before inhaling again with a loud, horse-like snort.

  He heard a few shocked cries from the other side of the wardrobe, and then signs of agitation: a tin of food falling onto a metal floor, people pushing and shoving.

  ‘Don’t go!’ he shouted, putting on his best English accent.

  After a brief silence, a voice asked him, also in English, who he was. He had no doubt about the accent: the speaker was definitely African, and probably black. Then again, when one is trapped in the dark interior of a wardrobe, everyone can appear black.

  The Indian knew he had to be careful. They could be animists, and believe that objects were alive, a bit like in Alice in Wonderland. If he did not tell them the truth, they might imagine they were dealing with a talking wardrobe and would run as fast as their legs would take them from that cursed place, taking with them his only chance of escaping from his Swedish prison. What he did not know was that these men were not animists but Muslims, and that, as they were inside a moving truck, they were not able to run for their lives, no matter how desperately they might want to.

  ‘Very well, then, as you ask me, my name is Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod,’ the Indian began, using his poshest British accent (no wardrobe could possibly have such a refined accent). ‘I am from Rajasthan. You may not believe this, but I became trapped in this wardrobe while I was measuring its dimensions in a large French – or, rather, Swedish – furniture store. I do not have any food or water. Could you please tell me where we are?’

  ‘We’re in a freight truck,’ said one of the voices.

  ‘A freight truck? Well, fancy that! And is it moving?’

  ‘Yes,’ said another voice.

  ‘Strange, I can’t feel anything, but I’ll take your word for it. Not that I have much choice. And would you mind telling me where we are going, if that’s not too indiscreet?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘Well, I hope so anyway,’ said yet another voice.

  ‘You hope so? And could I possibly ask you what you are doing in a freight truck whose destination is not entirely certain to you?’

  The voices conferred for a moment in their native language. After a few seconds, a deeper, more powerful voice – probably the voice of their leader – took over the conversation and replied.

  THE MAN SAID that his name was Assefa (pronounced I-suffer), and that there were six of them in the truck, all from Sudan. The others were called Kougri, Basel, Mohammed, Nijam and Amsalu (pronounce all that however you like). Hassan, having been arrested by the Italian police, was missing. The seven men had left their country – or, more precisely, the town of Juba in South Sudan – almost a year ago. Since then, they had been on a journey worthy of Jules Verne’s greatest novels.

  From the Sudanese town of Selima, the seven friends had crossed the border shared by Sudan, Libya and Egypt. There, Egyptian traffickers led them into Libya, first to Kufra, in the south-east, and then to Benghazi, in the north of the country. Next, they were taken to Tripoli, where they lived and worked for eight months. One night, they boarded a cramped boat with sixty other people, bound for the small Italian island of Lampedusa. Arrested by the carabinieri, they were placed in the Caltanissetta refugee centre, but were helped to escape by other human traffickers, who held them elsewhere and demanded a ransom from their families. A thousand euros – an astronomical sum. The community clubbed together, and the ransom was paid. Except for Hassan, who never escaped the refugee centre.

  The hostages had been liberated and put on a train that went from Italy to Spain. They ended up in Barcelona, thinking that they were in the north of France, and spent a few days there before they were able to set right their mistake by taking another train towards France, and more particularly towards Paris. So, these illegal aliens had taken almost a year to make the same journey that a passenger with the correct papers could have made in barely eleven hours. One year of suffering and uncertainty versus eleven hours comfortably seated in an aeroplane.

  Assefa and his acolytes had hung around in Paris for three days before taking the train to Calais, the final stop before the United Kingdom. They spent ten days there, helped to a great extent by Red Cross volunteers who gave them food to eat and a place to sleep. This was how the police knew the approximate number of illegal aliens waiting in the zone. The Red Cross served 250 meals? Then there must be at least 250 illegals in the area.

  To the police, they were illegal aliens; to the Red Cross, they were people in need. It was unsettling to live with such a duality and with constant fear in the gut.

  Last night, at about 2 a.m., they had sneaked aboard a freight truck while it moved slowly in the line of vehicles waiting to enter the Channel Tunnel.

  ‘You mean you jumped onto a moving truck?’ exclaimed Ajatashatru, as if that were the only really important part of the story.

  ‘Yes,’ Assefa replied in his deep voice. ‘The trafficker opened the door with a crowbar and we jumped inside. The driver must never even have realised.’

  ‘But that’s very dangerous!’

  ‘It would have been more dangerous to stay in France. We had nothing to lose. I guess it’s the same thing for you.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re completely wrong! I’m not an illegal alien, and I had no intention of going to England,’ said the Indian. ‘
I told you: I am a very honourable fakir, and I became trapped in this wardrobe while I was measuring its dimensions in a large furniture store. I had come to France to buy a new bed of nails, and –’

  ‘Oh, give me a break,’ the African interrupted, not believing the Indian’s preposterous story for a moment. ‘We’re in the same boat.’

  ‘In the same truck,’ the Indian corrected him under his breath.

  AN EDIFYING CONVERSATION then took place between these two men, who seemed to be divided by everything, beginning with a wardrobe door, but whom fate had finally brought together. Perhaps it was easier for the illegal alien to open up to a door – a little confessional booth improvised amid the lurches of the truck – rather than having to look into the face of another man who might judge him with a frown or a blink. Whatever the reason, he began to tell the Indian everything he had felt in his heart since the day he had decided to undertake this long, uncertain journey. People like to confide in strangers.

  Ajatashatru thus learned that when Assefa left his country it was not for a reason as trivial as buying a bed in a famous furniture store. The Sudanese had said goodbye to his loved ones in order to try his luck in the ‘good countries’, as he liked to call them. His only mistake was to have been born on the wrong side of the Mediterranean, where poverty and hunger had taken seed one day like twin diseases, corrupting and destroying everything in their paths.

  The political situation in Sudan had plunged the country into an economic stagnation that had led many men – the strongest – to risk the dangers of emigration. But away from home, even the sturdiest men become vulnerable: beaten animals with lifeless expressions, their eyes full of extinguished stars. Far from their houses, they all became frightened children, and the only thing that could console them was the success of their venture.

  ‘To have your heart pounding in your chest,’ Assefa said, hitting his thorax. And a powerful sound echoed even within Ajatashatru’s wardrobe. ‘To have your heart pounding in your chest each time the truck slows down, each time it stops. The fear of being found by the police, huddled behind a cardboard box, sitting in the dust surrounded by crates full of vegetables. The humiliation. Because even illegal aliens have a sense of honour. In fact, stripped of our belongings, our passports, our identities, it is perhaps the only thing we have left. Honour. That is why we leave on our own, without women or children. So that we are never seen this way. So that we can be remembered as big and strong. Always.

  ‘And it is not the fear of being beaten that twists our guts. No, because on this side of the Mediterranean we do not suffer beatings. It is the fear of being sent back to the country from which we have come, or, worse, being sent to a country we don’t know, because the white people don’t care where they send you – what matters for them is getting you out of their country. A black man brings chaos, you see. And this rejection is more painful than being beaten, because that only destroys the body, not the soul. It is an invisible scar that never vanishes, a scar with which you must learn to live, to survive, day after day.’

  Because their will was unshakeable.

  One day they would live in one of the ‘good countries’, no matter what it took. Even if the Europeans had no desire to share the cake with them. Assefa, Kougri, Basel, Mohammed, Nijam, Amsalu: six among the thousands who had tried their luck before them, or who would try it after them. Always the same men, the same hearts pounding inside those starving chests, and yet, in these lands where there was so much of everything – houses, cars, vegetables, meat and water – some considered them as people in need, and others as criminals. On one side the charities, and on the other the police. On one side those who accepted them unconditionally, and on the other those who sent them home unceremoniously. There was something to suit all tastes in this world. As Assefa repeated, it was impossible to live with this duality and the fear in the gut of never knowing what was going to happen next.

  But it was worth it.

  They had abandoned everything to go to a country where they believed they would be able to work and earn money. That was all they asked: to find some honest work so they could send money to their families, to their people, so that their children no longer had those big, heavy bellies like basketballs that were at the same time utterly empty, so that they could all survive under the sun without those flies that sat on their lips after first sitting on cows’ arses.

  Why are some people born here and others there? Why do some have everything and others nothing? Why do some live while others – always the same ones – have the right only to shut up and die?

  ‘We have come too far now,’ continued the cavernous voice. ‘Our families have put their trust in us, they have helped us to pay for this journey, and now they are waiting for us to help them in return. There is no shame in travelling inside a wardrobe, Ajatashatru. Because you, you understand the helplessness of a father when he cannot even put bread in his children’s mouths. That is why we are all here, in this truck.’

  There was silence.

  This was the second electric shock that the fakir received to his heart during this adventure. He did not say anything. Because there was nothing to say. Ashamed by his own base motives, he thanked Buddha that he was on this side of the wardrobe door so he did not have to look the man in his eyes.

  ‘I understand,’ the Indian, deeply moved, managed to stammer.

  ‘Now it is your turn, Aja. But first, we are going to take you out of there so you can drink some water and eat some food. Judging by your muffled voice, it must be a thick crate.’

  ‘It’s not because of the crate,’ the Indian whispered to himself, swallowing a sob.

  THE FAKIR DID not cry his eyes out, but he still felt a heavy weight descend upon his frail shoulders. It was as if he no longer lay inside the wardrobe but underneath it, crushed by the weight of revelations and remorse, of the hardness and injustice of life. In the time it took for him to be freed from his metal prison, Ajatashatru came to realise that he had been blind up to this point in his life, and that there existed a much darker and more deceitful world than the one he had seen for himself.

  Life had not been a walk in the park for him. Strictly speaking, he had not had what most Westerners would call a very happy childhood or a model upbringing. First of all, his mother had died and his father had abandoned him, and then he had suffered the abuse and violence that a somewhat boisterous child can unwittingly attract in environments where only the fittest survive. He had been propelled into the ugliest and hardest kind of adult life without enjoying a real childhood. But when it came down to it, he had had a place to live and people who loved him: his cousins, and the woman next door who had raised him like her own son. He didn’t know if he should include his followers in this category. In reality, perhaps, those people feared him more than they loved him. It was because of all this that he had never before felt the desire to leave his native country. He had sometimes been hungry, it was true, and he had paid dearly for that – in his case, with his moustache, because he had always managed to save his hands from amputation. But, after all, a fakir’s life was supposed to be painful, wasn’t it? So what was he complaining about?

  As the wooden crate cracked under blows from the crowbar, Ajatashatru imagined the Africans leaping, cat-like, out of the night, and landing in the moving lorries that had brought them here. Assefa had admitted that they would slip inside the trailer of a truck while it was stopped in a lay-by at night, preferably when it was raining so that the sound of the rain would cover the sound of their movements. Ajatashatru imagined them hiding behind containers, chilled to the bone, out of breath, desperately hungry. But all journeys have an end, even the hardest and most gruelling, and they were about to arrive at a safe harbour. They had succeeded in their mission. They were going to be able to find work and send money to their families. And he was glad to be with them as they reached the finishing line, to witness the happy ending to their courageous adventure.

  ‘You’ve got to the h
eart of the matter, Assefa. When they don’t give you what you deserve, you have to take it yourself. That is a principle which has always governed my life,’ he added, without making it clear that this noble principle included theft.

  The Indian had just come to the realisation that he was surrounded by the true adventurers of the twenty-first century. Not those white yachtsmen in their €100,000 boats, taking part in races and solo round-the-world trips that no one but their sponsors gave a toss about. Those people had nothing left to discover.

  Ajatashatru smiled in the darkness. He, too, wanted, for once in his life, to do something for someone else.

  MOHAMMED, THE SMALLEST of the Africans, had found, on the floor, the crowbar that the trafficker had used to open the truck’s doors. In the rush, the man must have dropped it and forgotten it there, before he had jumped out of the truck.

  So Nijam and Basel, the two strongest, used it to smash the hinges of the big wooden crate in which the Indian – an illegal alien, whether he liked it or not – was enclosed. Fifteen minutes later, they had dispensed with the crate and were down to the blue metal wardrobe, which looked similar to a locker in an airport or a football team’s changing rooms.

  ‘I don’t know how you can still be breathing,’ said Assefa, quickly stripping away the layer of bubble wrap that covered the wardrobe.

  Finally the wardrobe door opened and Ajatashatru appeared, magnificent amid the fragrance of his urine.

  ‘You look just the way I imagined you!’ exclaimed the Indian, seeing his travelling companions for the first time.

  ‘You don’t,’ the leader replied bluntly, perhaps expecting to see the Rajasthani in a sari with a large knife on his belt, riding a small-eared elephant.

  For a moment, Assefa contemplated the fakir who stood in front of him: a tall man, thin and gnarled like a tree. He was wearing a slightly soiled white turban on his head, a crumpled white shirt, and shiny grey trousers. On his feet were a pair of white sports socks. He looked like a government minister who’d been stapled repeatedly in the face and then shoved, fully clothed, in the washing machine. Basically, nothing like Assefa might have imagined an illegal Rajasthani migrant would look, had he ever taken the time to imagine what an illegal Rajasthani migrant might look like.