by Amitav Ghosh
Later, after the bustle and the cries in the cabin had ceased, Zindi came smiling up to the deck. She had a baby cradled in her arms. They all crowded around her to look. It was a boy, very small and wrinkled, dark like his mother and still slimy with her blood. His umbilical cord lay curled on his stomach.
Karthamma still hasn’t seen him, Zindi said. She’s fast asleep. Her face creased into a smile as she looked at Professor Samuel: Maybe she’ll beat you up once she knows what you did.
Kulfi-didi brought warm water and they washed the child and laughed at his shrill, resentful screams. Zindi swaddled it in her tarha and hugged the bundle to her breast and kissed it. My eyes, she said, he will be like my own two eyes to me.
Hajji Musa, standing beside her, tickled the child’s chin and said: It’s a fine boy and where could it grow up better than in the house of Zindi the Apple?
Then it was Rakesh’s turn. He raised his hand to tickle it but his courage ebbed away at the last moment and he dropped his hand and stood staring, shaking his head. Boss, he said in wonder, boss …
And so the child was given his name.
That night, while the others were crowding into the bows in their eagerness to get their first glimpse of al-Ghazira, Alu was sitting alone in the stern, trailing his line, savouring the silence, when he saw Zindi weaving her way down the passage towards him. With a long sigh she settled herself beside him. I’m tired, she said. God give me strength. She had changed into a fresh black fustan and tied a new scarf around her head.
She sighed again and patted his hand. Do you know now? she asked. Are you going to come to my house in al-Ghazira?
I can’t tell yet. Alu’s reply was barely audible. I’ll have to wait and see.
Bring the others if you like – Rakesh and Samuel. They’re all right, and it so happens that for once I have room now.
She peered closely at him: Well?
Alu shrugged: I don’t know …
Zindi sat absolutely still for a moment looking at his lumpy, swollen potato face. Then she hammered her fist on the deck. Idon’knowyet Idon’knowyet, she mimicked him. What do you know? Do you know anything at all?
Alu rose quickly to his feet but she shot out a hand and pulled him down again. He jerked his leg back but her fist had closed on it like a clamp. Pulling himself up again he braced himself against the rails and tried to kick his leg free.
Zindi smiled at him, immense and immovable. Why so shy? she said. Where can you run to?
Then in one quick movement she pulled him down and planted a hand in his crotch. She laughed, and he could feel her breath hot on his cheek. Now, she said, let’s see if you know about anything at all.
She tore open the knot in his pajamas and pushed them down to his knees. Good, she whispered in his ear, so there is something you know. With a flick of her wrists she flung her skirts back over her waist, baring a dark, surging pile of a belly and trunk-like thighs. She took hold of the small of his back and with one powerful heave of her shoulders, pulled him astride her.
So that was how Alu first saw the lights of al-Ghazira peering over Zindi’s shoulder, half-smothered by her breasts, her gasps loud in his ears. He gazed at the distant pinpricks of light and his dazzled sight meshed with every other sense in his body till the lights grew and clamoured and burnt like suns, swallowing the voices suddenly risen around him: Professor Samuel in some distant part of the boat, voice high with excitement – You see, Chunni, I only realized too late that it was I who was wrong, not the shopkeepers, not the obstetricians, but I; and then Zindi spent and fighting for her wind – Never again, don’t dare, don’t dare try this again, don’t even dare look at me again; and somewhere else – Do you understand that, Chunni? I was wrong because there aren’t any queues there, it’s near those lights that the queues are, because there aren’t any queues without money; and Zindi’s hot breath again – And don’t ever talk about this in al-Ghazira, not if you want to live, for if Abu Fahl even imagines this, even dreams of it, you’ll be holding bricks together till the Judgement for he’ll cut you into pieces and feed you into a cement-grinder; and still the lights grew, and it did not matter whether they burnt in al-Ghazira or the moon, any more than it matters to an insect whether a fire burns in a lamp or a furnace, for through a century and a half the same lights have shone in one part of the globe or another, wherever money and its attendant arms have chosen to descend on peoples unprepared for its onslaughts, and for all of those hundred and fifty years Mariamma’s avatars have left that coast for those lights carrying with them an immense cargo of wanderers seeking their own destruction in giving flesh to the whims of capital.
Part II
Rajas: Passion
Chapter Ten
Falling Star
Six months after Mariamma arrived in al-Ghazira, Alu was buried in the collapse of an immense new building. The building was at one end of the Corniche which swept around al-Ghazira’s little bay in a blaze of tarmac. Though it was not quite finished, it had a name: it was called an-Najma, the Star, because of the five pointed arms that angled out from its domed centre. People said later that the fall shook the whole of al-Ghazira, like an emptying wave shakes a boat. A tornado of dust swirled out of the debris while the rubble was still shuddering and heaving like a labouring beast, and for a few moments the whole city was wrapped in darkness, despite the full mid-afternoon brilliance of the desert sun. It was, after all, the Star, one of the largest buildings ever built in al-Ghazira; not as long as the concrete tents of the airport, nor half as high as the tallest bulb on the desalination towers, but larger than both of them put together. When it fell it was in an avalanche of thousands and thousands of tons of bricks and concrete and cement, and Alu was almost exactly in its centre.
When the first rumbles of the collapse started Zindi was standing transfixed in the murky twilight of one of the Souq ash-Sharji’s tunnel-like lanes, her eyes flickering between a shop and the flaking signboard above it. ‘Durban Tailoring House,’ the sign read, in Hindi, Arabic and English, and Zindi spelt the letters to herself over and over again as though she had never seen them before.
The momentary darkening of al-Ghazira’s skies after the collapse passed unnoticed in the Souq ash-Sharji, for even during the day the gloom in the old bazaar’s honeycomb of passageways was a live thing, coiling through the tunnels, obscuring every trace of the world outside. The bright lights of the rows of shops in the passageways merely chipped at its flanks. Inside the Souq the passing of the day was marked only by the innumerable clocks and watches in shop windows, and the computerized system of loudspeakers that ran through the whole complex of passages and corridors and punctually relayed the call to prayer five times a day (even at dawn, when the only people in the Souq were a few soundly sleeping vagrants).
Nor did any but the most alert in the Souq feel the soil of al-Ghazira tremble when the Star fell, for its thick mud walls reached deep into the earth, and they reduced the shock to a barely perceptible tremor. In any case the Souq was a long way from the Star. Its squat main gateway, the Bab al-Asli, with its two horn-like towers, looked out into a crowded, dusty square known as the Maidan al-Jami‘i, cuckolded of pre-eminence by the newly painted façade of the Old Mosque opposite. The square was the heart of the old town. The Star was almost another country. It stood at the farthest end of the bay, where the Corniche turned inland towards the straight roads of the new city. It was minutes away from the border, within shouting distance of the rival airport in the neighbouring kingdom.
Zindi noticed nothing, not even when the news of the collapse was broadcast over the radio after the midday prayers, for the Durban Tailoring House still absorbed her wholly. The muted swell of celebration which rose soon afterwards in the shops around her welled out and trickled down the corridors, leaving her untouched.
In the many years she had spent in al-Ghazira Zindi had passed that shop at least twice a week, often more, but that afternoon she stood in the passage forgetful of time and everyt
hing around her, as though she were seeing it for the first time. She stared at the dusty panes of the display window, at the long-collared shirts on their hangers, folded blouses, pajamas; and shimmering satin petticoats; she gazed at the few grimy lengths of cloth on the tottering shelves, at flapping calendars on the walls and pictures of men in suits, cut out of Italian magazines and pasted on the window. When at last Forid Mian, the old tailor, whom she had known since her first days in al-Ghazira, saw her standing outside and came out of the shop squinting, she looked blandly into his shrivelled, pock-marked face with its sinister trails of moustache and beard, and let herself be led in as though she were in a trance. Inside, she stood marooned among the snippets of cloth that carpeted the shop and swivelled about, sniffing the pungent sharpness of terylenes and rayons and the mustiness of cottons with their blue factory marks still fresh on them. She fingered through the piles of clothes Forid Mian had finished. He had always drawn his custom mainly from the women in the old Indian merchants’ quarter of the city so there were petticoats, and blouses, and frocks for girls not old enough for saris. She nodded and grunted as Forid Mian told her stories about his customers. But she heard very little. She had to hold on to the counter to steady herself, for the shop was dancing around her as he spoke, spinning, dissolving, transfiguring itself.
It was a long time before she heard Forid Mian asking her whether she was feeling quite well, and when she did she laughed and wandered out of the shop leaving her glass of tea untouched. Forid Mian followed her out and stood staring after her as she swayed slowly down the passageway and disappeared into the brilliant pool of sunlight at the foot of the Bab al-Asli.
Zindi crossed the road into the dusty square and found a bench. She sat prodding at a struggling tuft of grass with her toes, absently gazing at the digital figures on the tiled clock-tower in the centre of the square. A boy in buttonless trousers, with key-rings and nail-clippers on chains draped over his arms, came up to her. He laid his chains out on the bench and tugged at her elbow: Libnak, for your son, and this one for your daughter, or another for your daughter-in-law …
He turned around and shouted across the square. Another boy came running up, shaking yellow packets of dehydrated soup: Just try one; see how you’ll like it … Zindi sat unmoved, staring ahead of her. One of the boys leant over and tweaked her plastic bag open. Zindi, suddenly alert, snatched her bag away. She rose with a howl and sent the boy staggering with a blow of her open hand: Get away from me, you son of a bitch, ibn kelb.
She walked across the square flailing her bag and rolling her eyes: Yalla, yalla , out of my way, sons of bitches, can’t sit a minute anywhere any longer, crowd around your feet like shit on a beach.
Crossing the road, she stood on the pavement, panting and wiping her forehead. Then something in one of the cavernous shops that ringed the square caught her eye and she went inside. She pointed it out to the shopkeeper, nestling between piles of aluminium pots and plastic buckets. It was a baby’s comforter. Holding it like a talisman before her, she went across the square to her bus-stop, deaf to the suppressed excitement that was now rippling through the whole square.
She had a long way to walk after she got off her bus. By the time she was struggling up the side of a long, high embankment, every layer of her black dress was soaked in sweat. Once she had scrambled up to the road which ran along the embankment she stopped to catch her breath, shielding her face from the sun with her bag. On the far side, a finger of land, invisible from the other side of the embankment, jutted out into the sea, bordered on one flank by a narrow inlet. Far away, at the end of the inlet, was the old harbour, crowded with sambuqs and motor-boats. That narrow spit was known as the Ras al-Maqtu‘, the Severed Head, a sandbar garotted by the road on the embankment.
The Ras shimmered and blurred in the heat of the afternoon as Zindi looked confusedly about – at a group of neat whitewashed houses in a corner by the sea, at the jostling, crowded walls of wooden planks and broken crates which covered the rest of the spit, all but a narrow strip of beach. She looked over the roofs of corrugated iron and halved oil-drums, with their crazily angled wooden platforms and tracery of pumpkin vines, and at last, led by a strip where the dense patchwork was cut through by charred, blackened frames of shacks, her eyes found her own house, solid and thick-walled, its brick-and-cement permanence setting it apart from the others, a reef in a shifting tide.
She stopped when she reached the house, for she sensed something amiss. She looked down the narrow lane, at the blackened stubs of wooden planks and collapsed, soot-covered sheets of corrugated iron which lay all around the house. Then she pushed against the heavy wooden door of her house and almost fell in, for, to her surprise, the door was open. The door opened into a short, dark corridor, which ended in an open courtyard. There was a room on either side of the corridor and more around the courtyard.
Zindi stood in the corridor and shouted: Karthamma … Abu Fahl … The only sound that answered her was the cooing of pigeons in the courtyard. Frowning, she went into the room to her right and hung her plastic bag on a nail in the wall. The room’s complement of mats stood rolled in a corner as she had left them. A kerosene-stove lay beside them. She picked it up, held it to her ear and shook it. She knew by the sound that it had not been used since she left. She looked into a biscuit-tin and saw that none of the tea inside it had been used, either.
She hurried out into the courtyard and shouted again: Professor … Kulfi … Alu … Once again there was no answer. Turning, she threw open the door of the room opposite her own. It was the door to the room in which the men of the house lived. Mattresses were spread neatly on the floor. Trousers, lungis and jallabeyyas hung from pegs on the wall and wet clothes dripped on a line which ran from one barred window to another. The windows were shut as they always were during the day: that was one of Zindi’s rules.
Suddenly uneasy, she dug into her petticoats, pulled out a bunch of keys and hurriedly opened a steel cupboard which stood in one corner of the room. The cupboard was tidy, as it always was; Rakesh’s pile of shirts and printed T-shirts lay stacked in a neat pile, beside Professor Samuel’s bulging wallet; cassette recorders and transistors stood in a row on the bottom shelf, undisturbed. Sighing with relief, Zindi locked the cupboard.
Back in her own room Zindi unlocked her wooden provisions chest and went through it carefully. The sacks of wheat, rice and sugar and the packets of tea lay untouched. Breathing hard, she went down the corridor, into the courtyard, shading her eyes from the sudden brightness of the sun.
A storm of cackles greeted her. Several plump chickens flapped out of her way, and in a wired pen in a corner a long-necked gander hissed and spread its wings protectively across its flock of geese. The sides of the roof above were lined with grey pigeons looking down into the courtyard, their heads cocked. Zindi saw that the birds had not been fed and she fetched corn and wheat and half a cabbage for two rabbits in a wire-covered wooden crate.
Then she crossed the courtyard and unlocked the door to the women’s room. The room was divided into cubicles by lengths of cloth nailed into the walls and ceiling. She went around the room, pulling the makeshift curtains apart. The room was undisturbed and empty. Experimentally, she tried the heavy brass lock on the door of the next room. It was firmly locked, and that was the one lock in the house to which she had no key.
Zindi went back to her room, the heavy folds of her face knotted into a scowl, her jowls dripping sweat. She spread a mat on the floor and sat down to wait.
It was sundown when she heard the knocks she had been waiting for. She switched on the naked bulb in the corridor and stood there for a moment, her hands on her hips, shaking with anger. The rapping grew louder, and she flung the door open. Karthamma, Professor Samuel and Rakesh stood outside. Rakesh held Boss, the baby, cradled in his arms. Behind them, dimly outlined in the darkness was a man in a jallabeyya, stocky, dark and powerfully built, the texture of his face that of supple leather. He had only one eye; th
e other was an even grey, glowing dully beneath a half-closed lid.
Zindi’s eyes fastened on him. When the first wave of her roar broke it sent them all staggering backwards into the shadows: So it’s you, Abu Fahl, you bastard, you son of a bitch. It’s you who’s been behind everything all along? So this is your plan, is it? Lure the others out of the house like cattle, in the middle of the day, and leave it open for half the world to come in and take what it likes? You know what we’ve been through and now you plan this? This is the way you’re setting about it? Wallahi, wallahi, you don’t have to wait any longer. As God is my witness, you can have all your things and wander off for ever to eat out of a ditch. That’s where you were born, that’s where you’ll end. Wait.
Zindi ran into her room. An instant later a tin case flew out of the door and crashed on the wall opposite with such force that its hinges fell apart, spilling clothes, money, cassettes. Then she heaved one of the two mattresses in her room to the door and threw it out. There, she shouted, that comes to an end now, and I’m happy at last.
Abu Fahl pushed Professor Samuel aside, jumped over the mattress and leapt at Zindi. Wrenching her arms behind her, he pushed her down on to the mattress. He knelt beside her and put a hand, as large and horny as a goat’s head, on her heaving shoulder. Zindi, he said softly. Zindi, calm yourself. Calm yourself. Haven’t you heard?
Zindi rolled her eyes at Karthamma and Rakesh. I’ve heard enough, she growled deep in her throat. I’ll give you something to hear about.
Abu Fahl looked up at the others and rubbed his wrist on his blind eye. She doesn’t know, he said. God the Living, she doesn’t know.
Zindi was suddenly still. She looked at Karthamma and saw the tear-clotted smudges of dirt on her face. She saw the rents in Rakesh’s clothes and the gash of dried blood on his shirt. Ya satir! she whispered, looking from one to the other. What? Tell me.
