Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  ‘I am tired, you are calling very late, it’s not even morning.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? This is the time when everyone’s sleeping across the city, when blankets are drawn tight, when the windows and doors are all closed so the wind doesn’t enter. Not that there is a wind blowing tonight, in fact, it’s very calm. I wish there were a wind; some of the fog would have cleared, along with the smoke from the fire, and I would have been able to see through the window. Anyway, because it’s so late, it’s quiet and we can hear each other clearly. But the main reason I’m calling, Mr Jay, and as I told you earlier, is that I need to meet you, I have to tell you something. Let’s meet, I will tell you in detail, I will tell you everything, there isn’t much time to waste.’

  ‘You can email me.’

  ‘I know that, Mr Jay, I know your email address, I plan to send you a message in the morning, a follow-up to this conversation. But I wouldn’t have called you so late in the night, I wouldn’t have disturbed you, if that message would serve the purpose.’

  ‘I am sorry, I am hanging up now. I see no point in this conversation.’

  ‘No you won’t, Mr Jay. I know you won’t. You won’t admit this, even to yourself, but you like this, don’t you? A woman calling you, asking you to meet her? A woman you have vaguely seen, at a hospital window, from a distance. Tell me, what did you see, did you see my face?’

  I heard the sound of laughing from her end, I heard the sound of quite a few people laughing.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked. ‘Is there anyone else there with you?’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ she said, ‘just the sound of laughing. Could be a late-night show on television. Or people talking in the upstairs flat; it could be something on the radio, static on the phone, disturbance, it could even be a sound in your head, or from the street where they have set the house on fire. Now answer my question, please. Did you see my face?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Describe it, I want to know how well you recall, how well you see.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t so clear, nothing was clear, I just remember your hair, it was short, up to your shoulders.’

  ‘That’s pretty good. What was I wearing?’

  ‘Something in white.’

  ‘That’s better. Where is your baby? They say you should never leave a newborn out of sight, even for a second, because children at birth are as vulnerable, as defenceless, as puppies or kittens, they can choke on anything, even their own breath.’

  ‘Yes, I see him, he’s right there, he’s all right. He’s in front of me, on the bed. Now will you tell me your name, please?’

  What good that would have done, I had no idea. How would knowing her name help? Perhaps it was just my half-hearted attempt to fill in the blanks, to hold my end up in what was clearly a losing battle of words and nerves and will, that made me ask this question. Whatever, it didn’t work since, in answer, she turned the question around.

  ‘My name? Why don’t you give me one?’

  ‘Is this some sort of a crank call?’

  ‘Give me a name, an unusual name, I know you can come up with interesting names, like the one you did for the baby. Ithim, I like that name.’

  ‘How do you know he’s Ithim?’

  ‘I know the Head Nurse, I know the doctors, we all know each other. They told me, they showed me the form you filled in, the discharge slip. So give me a name.’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t think of anything,’ I said, ‘I just saw your face through the glass.’

  ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘that’s it, you just gave me a name, Glass. How about Glass? Yes, call me Glass, you saw me through glass the first time and I like the sound, glass. It’s an unusual name, it makes me stand out in the crowd.’

  ‘OK, Miss Glass.’

  ‘See, we have progressed. Already you are on first-name terms with me.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Mr Jay, you keep asking the same question over and over again. I have told you I can’t give answers on the phone. Do I have to say it again, Mr Jay? I can say it ten thousand times if that helps you but why are you being so stubborn? Why haven’t you asked the most obvious question yet?’

  ‘What’s the most obvious question?’

  ‘It’s staring at you, it stared at you earlier today, think of the evening, you should get it.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Think. What made you look at me?’

  ‘It was an accident, I was standing in the hallway, looking out and then my eyes travelled across the lawn, to the building where you were, rose above all those floors and stopped at your window. I saw you there. It was pure accident.’

  ‘No, it was no accident, but forget that for a moment, you didn’t see me. You saw something else first that drew your attention, that kept it fixed, fixed so hard that later in the night you had to get into that building, visit my room.’

  ‘Yes, you had written two words on the windowpane. You wrote help me.’

  ‘Use my name, please.’

  ‘Miss Glass, you wrote help me.’

  ‘There, it wasn’t difficult at all, see?’

  ‘Why did you write that?’

  ‘You forgot my name again.’

  ‘Why did you write that, Miss Glass?’

  ‘I like that, I like being addressed as Miss Glass. I stood there, looking out, my gaze travelled too, just like yours. And I saw you standing there across the lawn, in front, at that window. I was with someone who knew you, who had seen you earlier in the day.’

  ‘Where, who? Who was this someone?’

  ‘Again, you are asking questions that we should be discussing face to face, not on the phone. So let’s meet, Mr Jay.’

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  Trust me, I wanted to take that word right back. Right then and there, I wanted to squeeze myself into the phone if that was the only way out, swim down the telephone line, go underneath the road or fly through the sky to wherever these telephone signals go, catch up with that word, Where, grab it, do anything, not allow it to reach her. But, of course, I couldn’t. The word was out. She had heard it.

  With that one word Where and the sense of the question mark at the end of it ( Where? spoken in a manner that begged an answer, an answer I knew would inexorably push me towards something I had no idea of) I had crossed the line. The line that divides what-is-safe-and-tested-and-trusted from what is not. I shivered.

  Why had I said it? Where had that word Where come from? All along, I had been holding myself, refusing to bite this bait that had been thrown at me from somewhere in the city somewhere in the night. I had switched subjects, had settled for the inane and the trite, even the stupid, and then suddenly, even without my knowing it, I had said what I had been trying all the while to avoid.

  And given Miss Glass what she wanted.

  ‘I knew you would say yes,’ she said. ‘It’s far away but not that far, we have to take the train, it will take a few hours.’

  ‘Train? I am not taking any train. I can’t leave the city.’

  ‘Yes, you can, I have checked. Your wife will remain in the hospital for at least one more day. You will return before that. In time to see her wake up. It also gives us time to be away until the fires die down, until the city is safe.’

  ‘What makes you think I will do something as stupid as go on a train journey with you?’

  ‘I know you will go.’

  ‘And where do you plan to go?’

  ‘Why do you want to know everything?’

  ‘I have a baby, I will have to bring him along, I need to know where we are going. I don’t want any harm coming to the child. Forget it.’

  ‘You know what? My mouth hurts talking to you, my ears hurt listening to you say the same thing over and over again. I may very well forget it and never call you back, never ever. Anyone listening in on our conversation, anyone with even the slightest, most basic intelligence, can make out how horribly unbalanced this whole thi
ng is, as if I am involved in a dialogue of the deaf. As if I am the one who’s desperate, who’s throwing herself at your feet. When the fact is that it’s you who are. You have a baby who frightens you. So far, I have not raised this subject but now you have left me with no choice. I know all about the baby, I have even seen it. You have a wife, a caring wife who loves you, who perhaps is the only one who loves you, not because she has no choice but because she has decided to love you and her decision has been made, it’s irreversible. You are lucky, Mr Jay. And yet when she’s lying there, still not having held her baby as new mothers usually do, you don’t realize what difference you can make. You can bring the baby with you, come with me to a place where I know they will help you and your baby, maybe even set him right. I can’t guarantee anything but it’s worth trying. And what are you doing instead? You are trying to be this man who is not moved, who is seeing all of this as a mere distraction, who doesn’t remember anything. Who is listening to me, and perhaps thinking, here’s this strange woman who has nothing better to do at this time of the night than make calls to men. Are you there? Hello, are you there? Say something, breathe, shout at me but don’t just stand there holding the phone. Silent and mute.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘What do you want to say?’

  ‘I want to say just leave me alone.’

  ‘No, I can’t leave you alone, I will not leave you alone. This is very important for me, too. It’s taken a lot of work to track you down. Listen – and I am saying this for the last time – listen carefully. I am going to say this very slowly so that you don’t miss a word. Come and see me, I have booked two tickets on the train at five thirty this evening; that’s rush hour, too, the station will be very crowded at that time. And given what’s happening in this city, everyone will be trying to get away. So the earlier you are there, the better.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the station. In a few hours, I will send you an email with the details. It should be with you in the morning. So there, it’s all set now. We are ready to meet.’

  ‘What did you mean when you said we will go to a place where they can set him right, the baby? Set him right.’

  ‘I meant what I said, they can set him right.’

  ‘How can you say that when you don’t know what’s wrong with him?’

  ‘I know, Mr Jay, I know what’s wrong with the baby. Everything, almost everything, isn’t it? There’s nothing right about him other than his eyes and his eyelashes and his eyebrows?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But look at it this way, he is alive. You can’t say that for quite a few children in this city tonight.’

  ‘When you say he can be set right, does this mean he will become normal? That he will grow arms and legs, ears?’

  ‘I told you I can’t give you any guarantees, the one assurance I can give you is that he can’t get any worse. And let’s talk, you need to know a few things, too.’

  ‘What do I need to know?’

  ‘We are meeting tomorrow, Mr Jay, when everything will be clear. Just one more day. Don’t forget to check your mail. See you, Mr Jay, have a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘OK,’ that’s all I could say.

  ‘And one last thing, start early. You never know which roads will be blocked, the city is on fire.’

  Miss Glass hung up.

  I heard the phone click.

  Click and bring to an end, abrupt and sudden, this conversation in the course of which the colour of the sky had changed, from the black of the night to the pale blue of its dying, during which the silence from the street outside had begun to break, like glass, into shards of noise, jagged and grating. Someone coughing, someone waking up on the street below, the sound of the water tap on the street, someone washing his or her face, someone who had woken up before the sun. My ear hurt from pressing the phone to it. The handset itself was warm, almost hot to the touch, where I had gripped it for so long; when I put it back on the cradle, I could see my fingerprints, marked in sweat on the dust. Ithim lay still, the tears on his face had dried. He hadn’t cried again. Not once. Through this conversation between me and Miss Glass, between his father and this woman who seemed to know much more about him than his mother.

  This woman who until a few hours ago was The Face in the window, a scrawl on the glass, an empty room, and who of course was only in my imagination, tired and fevered and whatever was there of it. But with that call, an entire world had gaped open; now she had not only a voice but a certain character as well, a hard-edged confidence, almost arrogance, and a sense of proprietorship over me and my baby.

  She had talked to me in the disquieting manner of one who makes you feel she knows you better than you do yourself, who will always be several steps ahead of wherever you are. Who was this woman, where had she come from? She had called me stubborn, she had said that talking to me was like a dialogue of the deaf, but she was the one who had built a wall around herself and every time I had tried to chip away at it she kept adding another layer, word by word, sentence by sentence, so by the time the conversation had ended, all I knew about her was that she was hidden behind a fortress of her own making. And from that safe perch, she had not only disarmed me, she had forced me to surrender, lose the battle.

  But before I could think through what she had said and what I had heard, before I could try to look beyond those walls around her, I knew I was fighting another battle, this one more immediate: a battle with sleep that came like water rising, rushing upwards, in a wave. Beginning with my feet, rippling in and out between my toes, rising to my ankles, then to my chest, lapping against my shoulders, climbing over my jacket, gurgling as I breathed through my nose, reaching my eyes, filling them both.

  I slept.

  I am a member of the Audience, I am going to appear right at the end, I will be sitting in a gallery, the lights switched off, I was nineteen years old, they stopped me on the street, they said you killed the people on the train yesterday morning and I said no, wasn’t there, but that didn’t matter, they said, tell us where you were between six and eight in the morning yesterday, that’s the time when the train was attacked, tell us in detail so I told them I was sleeping at six, I told them I slept until seven, seven thirty, and then I got up, washed and I prayed, then my mother said we don’t have flour in the house so I went out to buy some, when I returned I was still feeling sleepy so I lay down on the bed for about half an hour or an hour, I watched the smoke from the oven, I could smell the cooking, my mother got angry because I don’t have a job, she said I just sit at home and eat, I sleep too much, when I finally got off the bed it was about ten in the morning so there you are, I said, I was nowhere near the train between six and eight but that didn’t matter, they said, why don’t you cry, why don’t you feel sad, as sad as we feel, at the fact that fifty-nine people have been burnt alive, I said I don’t know how sad I should feel, they said, don’t try to be funny, and then they stabbed me, once in the back, then in the front, they said you may have been asleep but why were your people near the train and before I could tell them that I don’t know anybody who was near the train I had already begun to bleed, I felt the air rushing out of me, my eyes swim, I didn’t feel the pain at all, I saw the blood draining out, they had turned, they had begun to walk away and the last thing I remember is hating myself for making such a mistake, I think I should have told them yes, yes, yes, I burnt the train, I was so happy when I heard the news that I told mother, I will get not only flour but milk and honey as well, I should have told them that my family attacked the train, my mother was there, my father, my two sisters, my uncle, my cousin, my aunt, my grandmother, all of them were there, even my future wife and my future children, and all of them lit the fire, one by one, and that we would do it again if we got the chance, I should have told them that, if only to see what would they have done different, would they have killed me still?

  6. Falling asleep, awake in dreams

  HOW long I slept I am not sure but what
I remember distinctly is that no sooner had my eyes closed than my mind began to give Miss Glass flesh and blood, size and shape. And the Miss Glass I saw, with my closed eyes, was tall. She wore a red sweater, long-sleeved, that hugged her thin frame and outlined her small, high breasts and her arms, the sleeves of the sweater falling a few inches short of her wrists and her palms, showing long, slender fingers.

  She was sitting in a chair, just a few feet away from me and Ithim. Her back was turned to us, her hands rested on a table, a study table of sorts, as if she was reading something, her red sweater riding above the waistband of her trousers, showing a strip of skin, a soft pale pink, almost translucent, offset by the hard red. Her trousers were black, close-fitting, so they sharply defined her legs, her knees. The ends of her trousers, because she was sitting, rode a few inches above her ankles, showing off two red socks and a bit of each calf, each sock had a white line skirting its edge. She had shoes with laces. There was a headband tied in her short hair, also red, like her sweater, but speckled with white and blue dots, one end falling over the nape of her neck.

  Because her back was turned, I couldn’t see her face. I could have leaned forward, craned my neck to look, but that neither occurred to me nor seemed possible given the state I was in – it was as if I was rooted where I sat and I could alter neither my angle of vision nor my field of view – so all I could see was just one side of her face, in profile. Her sharp nose was pierced; I saw the glint of a ring, white and dull, rusted steel or blackened silver. Her lips were pale red, parted, as if a word had escaped, or just formed, unsaid, in the space in between. She was tapping one foot, measured and in step with perhaps a song or a tune she could hear that I couldn’t.

  How old was she?

  Her face only about a quarter visible, I couldn’t be sure, but her frame, tall and thin, the almost flawless strip of skin above the waistband of her trousers, her ankles, whatever of her face I could see, the way she had tied her hair, the way she was moving her foot, the socks she wore, all suggested she was young, both in spirit and flesh. Yes, I did see the grey line of her underwear near the waistband, running above her trousers, I did see the arrangement of fabric and skin, of colour and texture, the black trousers, their half-swell over her bottom, the strip of pink flesh and the red of her sweater. Yes (why should I hide it) I did imagine what was beneath, I did imagine her breasts, my chin in the hollows behind her knees, her lips, my lips, her tongue, my tongue, the roof of her mouth, the ears, their lobes between my teeth, the taste of her toes.