Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  So that when you read, hear or listen, no muscle in your face should twitch. No eyebrow arch, no eyes water, no face frown. So, here goes, following is A Brief Description Of Ithim, My Baby Boy:

  ABOVE Ithim’s perfect eyes and perfect eyebrows, his forehead was a narrow strip of flesh, less than a finger wide, wrinkled and dark in several places, as if charred, projecting half an inch or so beyond the level of his face. Like the narrow brim of a tiny hat made of human skin, discoloured and damaged beyond any possible repair. This forehead set off Ithim’s head, a tiny sphere flattened at the top, its surface uneven, dented where the bones of his skull had not, and would, perhaps, never fuse. If you put your hand on it, you could feel, under the jagged edges, a movement inside: a grating, a buzzing, a fluttering. As if insects and worms, creatures with hard shells and scaly wings, had fallen into the spaces between his bones and were trapped inside, thrashing, waiting for a crack through which they could all come wriggling out, piercing my baby’s skin.

  To crawl and fly away.

  For his nose, Ithim had a minute bump in the centre of his face with two holes. A membranous mound pierced twice with a pin but the mound so small you had to strain your eyes to make it out. Where his lips should have been, there was only a slit. Like a knife-cut, a nick. His right ear was missing. Leaving no trace, just the skin there stretched taut, merging with his noseless, mouthless face and the back of his head. His left ear was there but this was nothing like an ear, it was a very small flap of skin resembling a funnel, more in spirit than in flesh. For it was essentially shapeless and almost translucent. Folded upon itself, more than once, like the whorls of some alien pink flower. Diseased, waiting to fall off its fleshy stalk.

  My baby had neither arms nor legs. None of the four, not one, neither left nor right. Not even stumps. Just four dark stains to mark what he should have had, no rough edges, no hollows. Making it seem that there was nothing amiss, that even looking for his arms and his legs was not only stupid but insensitive, too, an act of extreme prejudice. That it was absolutely normal to be born this way, that Ithim either heralded the birth of an entirely new generation, armless and legless. Or that he had countless such siblings, across the world, who had been born exactly like him and were now living happily ever after. Maybe in an apartment in Mumbai facing the Arabian Sea, in a cottage in Tierra del Fuego washed by the Atlantic, in a bedroom in Greenland, the Aurora Borealis dappling his body. Or in a house in Kabul, its windows and doors blown away by the war.

  Like all newborns, Ithim did not have much of a neck but he had no chin either because in the absence of a defined mouth or nose, his face had little shape. Under the overhang, the weight of his forehead, it fell, listless, right down to his chest.

  The chest itself was straight and, like his eyes and his eyebrows, it could have been unblemished had it not been for the way it ended. Imagine a garden path, neatly laid out, soft grass and freshly opened flowers on either side, the path itself smooth and clear, and then all of a sudden it stops and vanishes. Falls into a gorge, the bottom of which you cannot see through the dense foliage on either side. This is what happened at Ithim’s waist.

  There his chest disappeared and instead of a baby abdomen, that soft little swell, there was another strip of wrinkled skin mirroring the one on his forehead. But thicker and darker. It ran right around him, a string tied around his midriff, a belt welded to his waist. Like a skin-rod had been melted under a blowtorch and then allowed to drip onto his frame, congeal and then harden.

  Below it was the penis, no longer than the nail on my little finger, two folds of flesh below it, drooped over the anus, which was, in turn, covered by a stretch of skin – little more than a flap that could be lifted or lowered, by the slightest of touches.

  All this, in this much detail and more, I saw later when I got to hold Ithim for the first time, when we boarded the taxi and when I brought him home. My first view of Ithim, however, was nothing . . .

  . . . but just a white bundle carried by a large woman, also in white.

  Her blue plastic name tag read HEAD N RSE, the U rubbed away leaving just a little white dot. Although I had been waiting in the Maternity Ward’s lobby the entire evening and I knew my wife was the only one scheduled to deliver that night – her name written in chalk on the blackboard outside, her patient number 110742 – although I knew the next baby brought out of the Operating Theatre would be mine, I didn’t see Head Nurse when she emerged with the bundle. I lost her in the shuffle of the crowd, in the cautious hurry of patients, their relatives and the hospital staff, in the scramble of those running to take the lift or walking up and down the stairs that led to the main entrance below. I lost her in the shapes of those on the floor, lying down, curled up, those still waiting for beds with their names and their numbers.

  And it was only when I looked hard, when the crowd dissolved under my stare, that I saw Head Nurse walking, almost running, carrying my baby, wrapped from invisible head to invisible toe. As if he had been delivered stillborn and she was rushing him to the Morgue downstairs. Before other dead babies and dead adults took up the place that the hospital had assigned to him.

  The end of the white sheet that covered him was tucked firmly between Head Nurse’s left arm and left breast, she trying hard to ensure it didn’t slip off, show even a bit of the baby’s face. Afraid it would frighten those she passed along her way.

  Like the solitary security guard. His plastic name tag, red in colour, read WARD GUARD, all the letters this time in place. Beyond Ward Guard, in the staircase landing, near the lift, there was a child fast asleep on a sheet spread out on the floor, his leg in a cast. There was a couple who sat on a wooden bench in one corner, the wife sleeping, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder, a white plastic bag by his side, crumpled, supported between his feet. The wife’s eyes, half-closed, were fixed on the ceiling where there was nothing to see. Except the hooks and the fans and the paint, hard, hospital blue-white. If I try hard, I can recall others, I can remember what exactly they were doing the precise moment Head Nurse walked past them holding the bundle. But suffice to say, they couldn’t care less, they had their own bundles to worry about.

  Surely Head Nurse had no reason to walk so fast.

  ‘You don’t have to see him right away,’ Head Nurse said, her back turned towards me as she pressed the button to call the lift.

  I had ploughed, rather rudely, through the crowd, so fast she was moving and I didn’t want to lose her. My feet had brushed against many sleeping on the floor, their sleep so deep there wasn’t the faintest stir. Without even knowing, I had elbowed people, including patients, pushed them aside, charted my own way. And was now standing barely three feet behind Head Nurse, near the lift.

  ‘Is he dead?’ I asked, not courageous enough to walk up to her, claim the baby, pull the sheet off his face.

  I didn’t know what else to say, I didn’t know what to ask.

  There was a long pause as if she needed to think of the answer to this question, as if there were several ways to answer it, several options between yes and no.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘mister, how can you talk like this? Yes, it’s an abnormal delivery, there’s a problem with the way he looks but that’s because of the way he has been born, the way he came out into this world. It doesn’t sound nice, such words from your mouth.’

  And she said this without once looking me in the eye, her eyes fixed on the display panel above the lift on the wall that showed the numbers rising; the lift was moving up.

  ‘What’s the problem with the way he looks?’ I asked.

  ‘Just wait for a while, I need to clean him up.’

  It doesn’t sound nice, she said. Such words from your mouth.

  There’s a problem with the way he looks, she said, just wait for a while. And I took all of this with not a word of protest.

  For, obviously, this woman called Head Nurse thought that because she held the baby, my baby, in her arms, she wielded at that moment mo
re power over me than anyone in this world. A power that had made it possible for her to climb from the hospital’s Dettol-swiped marble floor to some astronomical moral high ground and stand there, a ground so high I should be struck speechless. That I should go down on my knees and gaze at her, not only at her huge feet trapped in tight black leather shoes, men’s shoes with laces, but at her thick calves that draped over the rims of her white socks, up past her starched white skirt as well. Past the yellow half-moons under its buttons caused by an overheated iron. Up her legs, into the darkness of her thighs, across the planets and the stars that lay inside and, in between, the whole of space. Head Nurse was God. And I, less than a mere mortal.

  Hold it, why do I sound so bitter?

  Head Nurse had nothing to do with the baby.

  It was my sperm, it was my wife’s egg, it was my wife’s womb, it was our nine months and Head Nurse was just a hard-working woman trying to do her job and maybe she wasn’t standing there in judgement, she was only being considerate and her words and gestures were innocent and well-meaning. Which my eyes had seen and my ears had heard, but which I had persuaded myself to turn and twist to sound harsh and brutal. Maybe because it was I who was the bitter one. The half-crazed father, frightened and insecure.

  I didn’t hear the lift reach the floor, I didn’t hear it open, I didn’t hear it as it began to swallow Head Nurse. With my baby. With at least ten more people. As she walked into it, she turned to look at me and smiled her first smile of that night: ‘You don’t need to get us any sweets to celebrate. I will clean the baby, then you can fill out the registration form, get the discharge slip.’

  I heard the lift close with a creak, I heard it shudder in its shaft.

  Up ahead, at the end of the corridor that led to the Operating Theatre where my wife was, beyond the glass door where someone had carefully painted a sign without caring about either spelling or grammar, NO ENTRY EXPECT FOR AUTHORISED PERSONAL, I saw two doctors in surgical scrubs, their masks still on, come out, look in my direction, say something to each other and then hurriedly walk in. They did this twice, thrice. As if someone had both of them on invisible strings and was playing with them. Like they were life-sized puppets, in doctor costumes. Gowns, caps, stethoscopes, androgynous. And someone was pushing them out and then pulling them back in. Pushing them out, pulling them back in. Maybe as part of a game called Doctors Come Out to Watch the Waiting Father of the Deformed Baby And Go Back In Without Breaking the Bad News.

  ‘That’s the first time I have heard her say that,’ said Ward Guard, who, sitting in a red plastic chair, had seen it all, had seen Head Nurse, had seen the bundle go down the elevator, had even seen the Doctor Game, seen them come out, go back in, come out, go back in.

  ‘Say what? Heard her say what?’ I asked.

  ‘That you don’t have to get her any sweets. She never says that, never. Even when the baby’s dead, she doesn’t say that. She must be in one of her moods, don’t take her seriously. She’s had a very busy day, she has been here since morning. In the evening, she left for a while saying she was going to check on her children to see if they were safe, she had heard about some fire in her neighbourhood. Then she must have come back later in the night. Ask me, I have been watching her for five years. She has a good heart.’

  ‘So why did she say that?’

  My fifth sentence that evening, my fifth question.

  The guard didn’t want to answer, maybe he thought I wasn’t ready to hear. Hear what? Perhaps this?

  ‘You know why Head Nurse said that, you know why Head Nurse smiled at you and said you needn’t bring sweets for her or for the hospital staff because and listen carefully she knows that your baby isn’t dead in fact he’s worse than dead Mister he’s grotesque he’s frightening he is ugly he scared the hell out of the doctors and the attendants and the nurses when they pulled him out they first thought it was a tumour that there was no baby and it was only when they saw the head and that’s when they all said as in a chorus cover the monster is this human or is this an animal and Mister if I were you I wouldn’t even take him home I would pray he dies that his internal organs twist and turn and fold upon themselves so that they choke him to death I would pray and wish that his perfect eyes close and never open again that his perfect eyebrows lie still and you don’t ever have to answer your wife when she asks you what happened what’s the fruit of my nine months of labour where is the pleasure of all my pain you can just tell her that he is dead let’s go home rather than show her that fucking freak.’

  No, Ward Guard didn’t say anything like this.

  Instead, he said: ‘The baby must be sick, very sick.

  ‘But don’t worry,’ he continued, ‘there are very good doctors here. This may not be among the city’s top hospitals but there are some very good doctors. And there’s a temple near the parking lot. It’s open until midnight after which the priest locks the main door to the room where the idols are kept but he keeps the courtyard open. It’s very clean and quiet, it has a white marble floor where you can sit and pray. I do that, once in a while, just like that. Who knows – prayer may work.’

  Sensing that I wasn’t listening, Ward Guard fidgeted in his chair and I waited, my back now turned to him, my eyes fixed on the hallway that led to my wife, the row of windows on my left.

  Another cluster of patients and relatives had collected, once again waiting for the lift that hadn’t returned since it took Head Nurse and my baby downstairs. I passed them by as I walked to the nearest window. And that’s when it happened, that’s when I saw it.

  And like a wind that rises on a still afternoon from a place unknown and keeps rising until it grows to a gale to a storm, making the tops of trees tremble, snapping branches, clapping doors and windows, toppling things in its way, it made me forget, blank out, erase, why I was there at the hospital, it made me forget the doctors, it made me forget Head Nurse, Ward Guard, the ward, the patients, the crowd, the child in a cast, the couple sleeping, the plastic bag between the man’s feet, the display panel above the lift.

  Above all, it even made me forget my baby, my wife, my baby, my wife.

  It was a face by a window.

  AT first, I think I missed it. For, as I stood there, by the window, looking straight ahead into the night, into the first wisps of fog that had started swirling above the ground like smoke from small, invisible fires, my mind had already taken flight, propelled by Head Nurse’s words, by Ward Guard’s words, by questions to which I had no answers. I had begun to wonder how come, of all the babies born at that moment in the world, it was ours that had to go wrong.

  Like most parents-in-the-making, we had followed all the advice prescribed by the gynaecologist, who had returned from Riyadh after the First Gulf War, was herself a mother of two and a grandmother of three, and who kept telling us, as proof of her competence, that all five were among the healthiest men and women in the country, if not the world. Besides the four hundred rupees she charged every visit, she got us to dip into our shallow pool of savings as well and pour whatever we had into nuchal scans to look for genetic defects, intrauterine procedures, amniocentesis, fetal blood sampling to ultrasounds and tests and scans so specialized I can’t even recall their abbreviated forms. None of these tests, the doctor said, revealed anything that warranted concern.

  Still, at a cybercafe, just down the street from where we lived, every evening of my weekly day off from work, my wife and I would Google child disorders + disabilities, congenital + abnormalities, early + warning + signs + deformities + childbirth + India. We would trawl the sites of the world’s best hospitals and nursing homes, look at each list of FAQs trying to find out if there was anything the doctor had missed.

  (The cybercafe owner was a man in his forties, a man called Saxel Meeko, who, maybe because of its oddness, had printed his name out in several fonts on A4 paper and pasted the sheet on a board behind his chair.

  Saxel Meeko

  Saxel Meeko

  Saxel Meeko />
  Saxel Meeko

  He kept the cybercafe open until late in the night, his own computer screen split into frames, each showing a landmark of a different city live from across the world. One day it would be Times Square in New York, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, another day it would be Trafalgar Square in London, Darling Harbour in Sydney, the flower market in Amsterdam. One window that never changed, however, was the one linked to the webcam outside the cybercafe, mounted high up on the wall and trained on the pavement below.

  The rest were fuzzy, sights familiar from magazines and picture postcards, the movement in them barely perceptible except over long periods of time, of the sky changing colours or like once in the case of Darling Harbour a seagull flying into and out of the frame. And in New York, a man running to board a bus. But Mr Meeko’s pavement scene was where the image was clearest, where you could see people walking in and out of his shop. You could even see the occasional street dog sniffing the water in the drain.

  Ordinarily, Mr Meeko kept the screen turned in such a way that no one but he could see this image. I got to see it only after my wife and I had made what would have been our tenth or eleventh visit, and that evening there was no one in the cybercafe except the three of us. ‘I am happy to inform you,’ Mr Meeko said, ‘that now I can share what I keep very private, very confidential, but you are nice people who avoid any unpleasant situations. So I have decided to do this, thank you, please.’ He had never spoken so many words to us at one go but he made the offer seem like a privilege so rare that we were struck more by the warmth of his gesture than the oddity of its manner, the singsong lilt of his voice. I don’t recall what we said in response other than making polite exclamations on his idea of bringing the world to our neighbourhood, but from that day on, Mr Meeko would always smile at us and even began giving us the printouts for free. He became a friend, in fact, the only friend I had in the city, and I am going to meet him later, there is much to tell about him, but now, back to the baby.)