by Jeet Thayil
Lee was the only prisoner but there were so many men escorting him that the van was cramped and humid. His clothes were soaked through with blood and perspiration and without his glasses he felt crippled, though he was able to see the faces of his abductors clearly enough. He wondered what time it was and then he thought about Pang Mei’s complicated virginity and for some reason the song-like words he had heard earlier that day – or had it been yesterday? – repeated in his head like a prayer, Time is a bomb; the world is on fire. He couldn’t remember the rest of the words, though he heard very clearly the voice of the woman who had recited them. The men in the vehicle spoke as if he was not there, or as if he was already dead. They talked about barbecue pork and home-made rice wine, about how long one could swim comfortably in the summer before the silt of the river weighed you down (no more than an hour), about the comparative advantages of cards over mahjong (less wastage of time, more chances of quick money), about the efficacy of deer penis as an aphrodisiac (excellent), and about Lee’s fate, whether he would be executed publicly or disposed of with minimum fanfare (the consensus: publicly, with a shot to the back of the neck). Kaolu, said one of the men, and it was then that Lee recognized the man who had been in General Lo’s office. His abductors were soldiers. They wore armbands that identified them as members of the Workers Troops but in fact they were soldiers; no, they were mutineers. It was they who were already dead, thought Lee.
*
They took him to a building that looked like the garrison headquarters; they took him to a cell and left him alone. Some hours later, two men came in and stripped off his clothes and beat him, very methodically, until he passed out. He was woken by pain. He knew he’d been unconscious for some time, minutes maybe, or hours; it was hard to tell because time had expanded. Every part of his body throbbed or burned. The pain slowed time and a single moment became something impossibly complex that took all his resources to endure. His pulse throbbed in his ears and hours passed between each beat. He slept and woke and slept again and he felt like a visitor to an unknown solar system where time speeded up and slowed down at random intervals. They gave him congee and he slept. And then the men returned and beat him again. This was how he knew a day had passed, two days, three and four days. He was settling into a kind of routine, he was beginning to focus his mind around the pain and he was preparing himself for worse, when, suddenly, a new set of abductors took over from the old. They opened the door of his cell and someone he hadn’t seen before said, Is this him? Yes, said Tung, whose hands were tied. The new abductors put Lee in a jeep and took him on a long drive. It was night-time and the stars were low in the sky. There were more stars than he had ever thought possible, so many stars that it was easy to lose himself among them, all he had to do was let his head loll back on the seat and look up at the infinite. There was a smell of eucalyptus and manure. He heard birds and wondered why they were awake in the middle of the night. Were they as confused as he by the hitherto unseen elasticity of time? The new abductors drove out of Wuhan and stopped on a dirt road that curved upwards into the hills. They didn’t beat him. They fed him and gave him a change of clothes and put a bandage around his ribs. They drove some more and stopped at an airfield, where they put him on a plane to Peking.
*
He made phone calls from the hospital and discovered that Pang Mei was no longer working in the commissariat or registered at the engineering hostel as a resident. He made more calls. He learned that a teacher he knew, one of his father’s old friends, had committed suicide. Others had simply vanished and were thought to be dead. He was still being treated for his injuries when Wei Kuo-ching came to see him.
‘The killers are barely out of their teens, rabid youths, so-called radicals who hunt in gleeful packs,’ said the usually dapper Wei, looking bedraggled, and was he smelling of wine? ‘Anything can happen to anyone at any time. Did you hear what happened to Commissar Hu?
A big-character wall poster appeared one day, said Wei, denouncing Hu as a “son of a landlord,” a “degenerate dog” and a “seller of scars”. Those kinds of names are thrown around a lot these days, so maybe he should have ignored it. But the poster also said Hu was guilty of sexual perversion with degenerate like-minded women. You know Hu or you don’t, but he’s not the kind of man who will take abuse without fighting back. He called a meeting. He said his accusers were reactionaries and rightists. They were a danger to the Party. He said they were cowards, hiding behind the anonymity of wall posters. He challenged them to come out into the open. The same night fresh wall posters went up accusing Hu of counter-revolution. The accusations and counter-accusations were noticed and the Party sent a Work Team to investigate. The Work Team banned the students from putting up any more posters, but it also reproved Hu, saying he should confess to some of his mistakes. Instead of restoring the peace, the team’s actions had the opposite effect. The students defied the ban and plastered posters all over the city. They mobilized student groups in other cities and they sent spokesmen to the highest levels of the party bureaucracy. The response must have been favourable because they stepped up their attacks. The next lot of wall posters gave details of Hu’s alleged perversions. Prostitutes. Group sex. Sodomy. Homosexuality. And it was at this stage that Hu made his terrible mistake. He denied all charges and then he said, so what if it is true? Even the Chairman isn’t a eunuch when it comes to sex. They came for him the next day. They put black paint on his face and paraded him through the streets. They put him in a cage and hung a sign on the bars, ANIMAL EXHIBITION. They didn’t let him sleep or wash or talk. It took two weeks for him to confess that he had impugned the Chairman and that he was guilty of sexual and other crimes. Pang Mei testified that he had taken advantage of her and introduced her to foreign perversions. His own daughters were forced to denounce him. He’s being purged, said Wei. But the only question Lee could think of asking was, What happened to Pang Mei?
*
She was disgraced, said Wei. The students took turns to work on her in groups. They humiliated her, taunted her, called her names on the street, talked to her family and colleagues, raided her quarters at all hours of day and night. After a few weeks, when they knew she was nearing her breaking point, they put up a poster that said she would not be allowed to commit suicide. I heard she was sent away for re-education through labour. Isn’t it a good thing you decided not to marry her? What a mistake you would have committed. Then Wei said, I’m here to warn you. There have been posters attacking our department, and me personally. If I am under attack, you are next. There are few things you can be certain of at this time: blood lust; group attacks against those who are alone or isolated; packs of dogs running wild through the streets; the end. This is our reality. Anything can happen to anyone at any time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
To Bombay
He put an official requisition through for a jeep. The requisition was a lie from beginning to end. He expected to be found out and arrested and punished, but nothing happened and the jeep came through. He found a map of old Asia. Names change but geography stays the same, he told himself, and he put his trunks into the jeep and drove south and never once looked back. He drove long stretches, drove as long as he could before the necessity of food or sleep made him stop. He travelled at night and slept in his uniform. When necessary, he said he was on special assignment for his division. He stopped in Sian and Chengtu and Kunming. He found that his map was so out of date it was inaccurate. He burned it and bought a new one. Once he left China travel became easier. He didn’t have to worry about being caught: Burma was primitive and India was chaos, nobody asked for papers or explanations. He lived in Dacca, Calcutta, Cuttack, Amritsar. He lived in Delhi. In many places he found people who looked like him, Indians from the country’s north-east provinces. He lived in cities and towns that he never learned the names of. He lived in hostels and guest houses and ramshackle lodgings. He learned to drive like an Indian. He abandoned his jeep and bought an Ambassador and he thought h
e would keep driving until he got tired of it, but he never tired of it. Then why had he chosen to stop in Bombay instead of Delhi or Calcutta? The truth was, he had not chosen. He came to the city with no intention of staying: it was the last of a series of random events set off by his flight from his own country. He got into the habit of taking long walks in his first months, a time of aftermath and distrust, his perils behind him but vivid in his head. It was only when he left his small room and walked by the waterfront that he felt at ease. He discovered the sea by accident, in his first week, on an exploratory walk that began around the neighbourhood of Grant Road and ended at Nariman Point. He walked for three hours and during most of that time the water was either in his sight or just beyond. He began to see it as a gift, the sea, because it was always nearby, wherever you were. It was the only thing about Bombay that did not disgust him.
*
‘My father was an important man and I.’
‘I know, you told me before. You were in the army, you were important too.’
‘I was, in the old days.’
She said, ‘You should rest, don’t agitate yourself about these things.’
He shook his head. He wanted her to understand. He pointed at the trunk that held his uniform, his identification documents and photos, paid and unpaid electricity and water bills. He said, You. He pointed to the pipes, pointed twice, his hand travelling slowly from cot to cot. He said, Now I not important. I just old man with sickness, not much to give you except pipe. I want you take them. They only valuable thing I own: they your dowry. He nodded at her.
‘Ah Lee, I want you to live for a long time,’ she said.
And Mr Lee made a small sound. She would remember it whenever she thought about him in the years after his death, the involuntary vowel that ascended from deep inside his lungs. It communicated more clearly than words the thing he was trying to say, that it was a humiliation to die and a double humiliation to die in a foreign country. And she remembered the lie she told him. Twenty-two years later, in 1998, when she was diagnosed with the same ailment, she remembered her lie. A man who does not return to his native place is like a man who dresses in finery and sits in the dark, he told her. He had always planned to return to China in his old age, to die there and be buried beside his ancestors. He said, You promise to rebury me in China. However long it take, you rebury me. She wanted to calm him. She said: Ah Lee, don’t worry, I promise. Later, long after he was gone, she would recall all this with terrible clarity; most of all she remembered his last days and the instructions he left. She was to place his ashes in a vase she would find in his trunk. Cremation was quicker than burial, he said, and ashes were easy to transport and easy to store. Beyond these points of business, he hardly spoke or ate; all he wanted was opium. He was willing himself to die.
*
On a dry morning in April, she took his ashes by taxi to the Chinese graveyard in Sewri. The front seat of the Ambassador was filled with flowers and Dimple sat in the back with Ah Fong, Mr Lee’s old friend and customer, who had to be helped into the car.
‘He always said he is first to die,’ said Ah Fong, ‘I always say, wait, you see, I die first.’
Everybody dies, thought Dimple. Losing your family is like dying, which means I’ve died twice. At the Chinese shop they had shown her a black button she could pin to her sari, the salesman telling her it was the latest thing on the mainland. Instead of an armband you wore a button, silk, very stylish. She wanted the armband, she told him, and she wore it over her sari blouse, an old-fashioned one that Mr Lee had liked, elbow-length red cotton. She found a framed picture of Mr Lee in uniform, which she placed on the shrine, and she poured a splash of red wine on the ground. There was a plate with sliced meat from a rooster. There was fish and sweet egg cakes. She burned bundles of lucky money in red packets embossed with the symbol for double happiness. His clothes were still in good shape and she couldn’t bring herself to burn them, his uniform, the silk padded jackets, the white tunics and black pyjamas, his black canvas walking shoes, the stick with the jade dog’s head. She put them on a shelf and forgot about them. A week after the funeral she found Ah Fong waiting at the khana early one morning. He was agitated, talking before she’d even opened the door, and it was strange to see him on the street in the daylight, and to hear the things he was saying.
‘I had dream. Ah Lee, standing in front of me, shivering in the cold, naked as day he’s born. He said: I have no clothes. Give me your shirt. I wake up, I shout, I was so frighten. Why you don’t burn his clothes? This is message, he is sending you message from grave.’
It spooked her. She gathered Mr Lee’s things and took a taxi to the cemetery. The cotton garments burned quickly, but the shoes sputtered and black smoke poured from the soles. She asked the attendants for help. They piled everything together in a pit and lit a bonfire. It took an hour for the fire to smoulder down to ash and she waited, alone on a bench, and then she felt it, felt his spirit lighten, or was it her own spirit, lifting like a balloon into the sky? She had done as he wanted in every detail except one: she didn’t take his ashes home with her and find a way to return them to China. She left him in Sewri. Years later she would be given the opportunity to correct her mistake, but by then it would be beyond her. And by then she would understand that when she felt his spirit leave the cemetery and ascend into the sky, she had been partially right; what she had gotten wrong was the direction in which Mr Lee moved and the element in which he settled. He went downward, where he waited in water for the chance to speak to her again.
CHAPTER NINE
The Pipe Comes to Rashid’s
She wrapped the pipes in muslin and took them to Rashid’s. It was early in the day. The screen doors were open to the light and the radio played a song from Pyaasa, Geeta Dutt singing of heartache. It made her think of the movies she’d watched growing up, secret excursions to Tardeo Talkies for Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, all that sepia longing and Government of India footage of war and industry. The room was from the same black-and-white era. She came in with the pipes and Rashid was reading an Urdu newspaper. He was islanded, barricaded by a bottle and glasses, cigarettes, pipes, dirty dishes, discarded clothing. He didn’t seem surprised to see her. The first thing he did, he asked if she wanted tea. I can call for it from the balcony, he said. I’ll put on a shirt and call for tea.
She said, ‘I don’t want tea, Mr Rashid, thank you.’
‘Okay, no problem, no problem. What can I do for you?’
‘Actually, I’ve brought something for you.’
She unwrapped the pipes and placed them on the floor and picked up the longer one, three feet something from tip to tip.
‘At least five hundred years old. Made by a Chinese pipe master, much superior to our local pipes because of the quality of the wood and the seasoning.’
‘Is it too long?’
‘No, sir; it’s constructed on the same principle as a hookah. The length is very important, it cools the smoke as it travels from the bowl to the mouthpiece.’
‘You’ve been practising this speech.’
‘Yes, sir, a little.’
He liked her manner, her conservative clothes, the way she spoke Hindi mixed with English. He watched her as she assembled the lamp and oil and chandu and he liked that too, the sight of a woman calmly making a pipe, because an Indian woman in a chandu khana was a rare sighting. She tapped the stem when the pipe was ready and it took him a moment, an awkward moment of grapple, to adjust to the big mouthpiece. But she was right: the pipe was a work of art. The wood was stained reddish brown and there was old brasswork at the mouthpiece and bowl. Maybe he was imagining it, but the smoke tasted better and you could take deeper drags and a single pyali went a long way.
‘How much do you want for it? Maybe I’ll take both.’
‘I don’t want to sell the pipes, Mr Rashid.’
‘You call me Rashidbhai or Bhai, not Mr Rashid, this is not America.’
‘Bhai, let me work for you. I
can make pyalis and take care of the pipes.’
He said he would not be able to pay her. She would get three pyalis a day and tips. She could eat in the khana but she couldn’t sleep there.
‘I have a place to sleep, but I smoke four pyalis a day – of good opium.’
‘Mine is the best on the street. Where do you smoke?’
He was surprised to learn that Mr Lee was real. Like everyone else, he’d heard the story about a Chinese khana somewhere on Shuklaji Street and he’d dismissed it as fiction. But he knew the value of old stories and he incorporated Mr Lee’s into his own. Rashid told everyone he bought the pipes from the old Chini himself. He told the story so many times that eventually he came to believe it and with each telling he added new details. Mr Lee was on his deathbed when he sent for Rashid; it was the second last thing he did before he died, he handed over the pipes; the last thing he did was to smoke; he didn’t want anyone else to have the pipes, only Rashid, because he wanted them to go where they would be best used; the pipes had originally belonged to the emperor of China and had fallen into the hands of the Nationalist army; and so on.
