Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  Let me print this message out for whatever it’s worth, I thought.

  And just as I was about to do that, I noticed it: there were three attachments, each with a name I had never heard of: Tariq.Doc, Shabnam.Doc, Abba.Doc. And beyond those three paragraphs of silly rhyme, her message went on.

  Dear Mr Jay:

  I tried my hand at rhyme, I thought let’s bring a light tone, that’s what we need after our conversation last night. Anyway, let me make one thing very clear, maybe it didn’t come across last night, I will never, never mislead you. Trust me, I am only doing what I have to do . . . It’s for your own good.

  The station this evening will be crowded . . . I don’t know if you know . . . the fires across the city have taken their toll, they say that almost two hundred have been killed so far, and not all deaths have even been counted. Bodies are showing up in all kinds of places and as the day progresses, in the sunlight we shall see more . . . some people have said they have seen bodies fall from the sky . . . I think that’s an exaggeration but you get the drift . . . those lucky to have survived have decided to leave the city, go to other places . . . where their friends or relatives live, where they feel safer, where there won’t be a knock in the middle of the night, or a flaming rag thrown into the house in the middle of the day . . . some have decided to return once the fires die down, once they know that the killers have got tired . . . which they will, I hope, given how hard they have been working. But then many may never return because there is nothing in this city now for them, their homes are gone, their places of work too . . . you must have seen three of them on your street itself, the tailor, the shoe store and the butcher shop. I doubt if any one of the three will come back. There are countless such cases. I am telling you all this to assure you that I am not stringing you along . . . these are hard times in the city . . . these are fearful times when people do not admit, even to themselves, what they may have seen, what they may have done . . . so please do not panic if you don’t see me at the railway station . . . I have work to do, unfinished business to attend to . . . maybe it will never be finished . . . but I have to keep trying, now that I seem to have all the time in the world . . . Yes, I am concerned about your baby, about Ithim (did I tell you what a nice name that is?) . . . the baby is the most important thing on my mind right now and I want to help and hence this message . . .

  That’s why I have arranged for someone trusted, someone you will like, someone to be there at the station when you arrive . . . he may act a bit funny, strange, but don’t mind, he was always like that, he has a kind heart and he is one of us . . . I will try my best to be there myself but, to be honest, I can’t give you any guarantees . . . given that the city is on fire, I don’t even know what will happen by the time you reach the railway station, how many more will have died by then. As you may have noticed, I have attached three files with this message . . . please read them carefully, they need time and concentration. It will help you and it will help me if you read them before you reach the station . . . they are about three people from last night who were not so lucky . . . I mention their stories hoping that you will get a better sense of what’s happening in the city . . . did I tell you last night that I took some pictures? I have sent them as well. These pages have been written at great risk, with great effort . . . Mr Jay, I know that if there were questions in your mind before you started reading this second message, there must be now many, many more. Rather than providing answers, I think I have added to the questions you must have, I have multiplied and magnified your fears, your doubts . . . But, as I said earlier, all this is for the better, trust me. It’s for you, it’s for the baby and it’s for me as well. By writing on the glass that night, I wanted to help you because by doing that, you would help me. If all this sounds convoluted, don’t worry, everything will be clear in due course but that course is still due, there are questions that cannot be answered before their time has come. I wish you the very best and I look forward to meeting you very very soon. Go ahead with the journey, Mr Jay, there’s nothing to fear, there’s nothing to lose and that you are reading this means that you are well into your mission. In fact, your journey began the moment you saw my letters on the window. A journey, I promise, you will never forget. You will meet some of my friends too, they have been waiting for this. Please take care of yourself, this is a city on fire. And, by the way, my friends love my new name, they say it sounds mysterious. That it suits me. Thank you for it. You have a way with names. Take care of yourself and take care of the child the way I am sure you have been doing . . . I will see you soon.

  I will always remain,

  Yes,

  Yours loving,

  Miss Glass.

  FIRST things first, I needed to download the attachments, which I did, printing them out right away lest there be a power cut or some virus in the system and I lose them. (And while they were printing, I checked on Ithim as it had been quite a while.)

  The printer stopped; all three attachments were there, on warm, crisp, A4 paper. There were some pictures too, in black and white. I checked for any missing or blank pages, found none. Miss Glass had marked the End on each one of the three files. She was meticulous.

  I shall not summarize anything, will not read between the lines, until you have read them, for yourself, all three files and seen the three pictures. (You can come back to them when you have the time, read them again, read them as many times as you need.) All I want to say before I take you to the attachments is only one thing: it was with the receipt of this message and Miss Glass’s note that I realized, as Miss Glass had put it, my journey had already begun.

  That she had kept her word and although I was still clueless as to where I was going, I had inclined myself to believe her when she said there was nothing to fear, nothing to lose. That it was for my own good, for Ithim’s good. That the baby was the most important thing on her mind.

  Trust me, she had said twice.

  I did.

  Once again, how wrong I was.

  I am Body 2, I have nothing to say

  11. Tariq

  (The First Attachment)

  OUR first eyewitness is a boy. Name is Tariq, he is ten, or, at the most, eleven years old. He wears shorts and a T-shirt although this is February and it is cold, and if you look close enough, you will see his elbows and his knees are bare. The skin covering them is cracked and dry. A boy with not enough clothes in this city – he shouldn’t stand out in any crowd. Still, they got to him.

  That’s his house in the picture.

  A simple frame. Simpler than the house a child would draw when told to draw a house. Just a long rectangular box, the windows cut out as an afterthought. The house built, as if, not to defy the elements (the rain, the sun, the dank or the chill), but instead to surrender itself to them, its plaster to be streaked, its corners to be shadowed, its walls to be eroded. Unprepared, totally, for fire, for men intending to kill and burn. That’s why the door’s gone, the windows and the ceiling, all shattered into countless pieces scattered inside and out. There are some clouds in the sky but no evidence of smoke, it’s bright, it’s clear.

  We will come back to this house later. Now let’s return to last night.

  Through the drift of the fog and the smoke from fires far away, through the yellow haze of the neons in front, through the black-white exhaust of vehicles that streak past his house, through his tears that bend, refract everything he sees, Tariq witnesses the woman lying on the street. She is his mother.

  Tariq’s eyes also witness four men.

  A, B, C and D.

  They look like educated men, not like the men he sees in his neighbourhood in frayed clothes, stained and unwashed, dust in their hair, dirt in their fingernails. They are not men who shout and who scream when talking will do, they are not the hangers-on who sit for hours at the iron gate of the former Member of Parliament’s house down the street, they are not men Tariq sees in the crowd during election time, men who go from door to door with coloured fl
ags and handbills. They are men he sees only one at a time. In a car, talking on a phone, taking out a pen from their pocket to take down something. Men his mother points out saying he has to be like them. Confident and educated. All in their late twenties, maybe early thirties, young but not so young, old but not so old.

  Tariq hears them say things to his mother, he sees them do things to his mother, he hears words and he sees action.

  And behind all this, there must be some rhyme and there must be some reason. But forget reason for a second. Let’s get the rhyme over with first. Even though it’s silly, even though it’s stupid. But that’s the way it is. Rhyme, different schemes. This one is abcb, defe.

  A wears glasses,

  B, a striped shirt.

  C ties his shoes

  And D means to hurt.

  A pulls her hair,

  C gives a shout,

  B just watches

  As D lashes out.

  Tariq watches her falter, stumble, he watches her hand reach out to C, more by instinct, desperate and blind, than any deliberate thought.

  C takes several steps back as if Tariq’s mother is the predator and he is the prey. She slips again, her ankle twists, one of her slippers comes off.

  C brushes her hand away, kicks the slipper across the street.

  B watches as D does the same to the other.

  A laughs, the frame of his glasses glinting in the street light and he begins to unbuckle his belt.

  B keeps watching.

  His mother’s blue-and-white rubber slipper, the Hawaii chappal, white sole, blue straps, one of them loose. (Straps you fix by greasing the hole with a lubricant and sliding the rubber in.) If the men are observant, they will see white flecks on the straps. This is because she always keeps her slippers inside the bathroom, near the bucket, near the tap, when she goes in for a bath. Tariq knows. He knows that soapsuds fall on the straps and dry. That his mother has had these slippers for more than four, five years, which works out to over eighteen hundred soapsuds. That’s the number if you assume that only one, at least one sud falls from her hands or her hair, while she is bathing, to land on the strap. The result: the blue gets paler by the day.

  That’s why this night the blue slipper is almost white, like the sky is in the morning. In the picture.

  Kicked, her first slipper comes to rest against the cement divider on the street at the foot of the lamp, below a billboard advertising cellphones. (The poster has the picture of a little boy and a dog, a pug, which follows him wherever he goes, across the park, up the hills, down the slope, up the stairs, into the house. It’s an ad for a cellphone service, national roaming, Rs 99 a month, good deal.

  You and I, we go wherever you do.

  The boy and the dog are looking straight ahead into the hills, across the river and the meadow, the flowers and the grass; they are not looking at what’s happening below them, on the street.)

  The second slipper doesn’t travel far although it is kicked as hard as the first. It lands right in the centre of the street, waiting for the night’s traffic to run it over.

  Sit Tariq, this eyewitness, this kid, down, give him time, a day, a week, a month, a year, and maybe he can describe everything but right now there are only a few things he can remember:

  1 The end of his mother’s sari tearing. Sound like paper being ripped, shredded, in the middle of the night.

  2 Laughter and talk, talk and laughter. From all four: A, B, C and D. Mixed up, jumbled, so that he can’t make out whose laugh is whose, whose voice is whose.

  3 Their teeth. White. They take care of their teeth.

  4 Their shoulders. Rising and falling with their laughs.

  5 Mother saying something, words in a language he has never heard before. Or maybe the words are not her own, are being pushed from somewhere inside her, without her even knowing.

  6 A’s hand. On her head.

  7 Her head snapping back, A pulling her hair so hard it leaves her forehead bare, washed by the yellow light.

  8 Her eyes opening, closing, then opening again.

  Two more things he needs to make it ten. Three for eleven.

  (For a list of eleven appears more complete, more valuable. Can be presented as evidence, as details that add up to something bigger. Otherwise who knows, they will say he’s making everything up, that nothing happened, that he wants our tears because his own don’t quench his thirst for pity.)

  So, here goes:

  9 There’s a noise his mother makes when she is dragged along the street. It’s the sound of her skin scraping, being peeled off. It’s the sound of her legs against the tar, of her sari against the tar, of one hand, which flops to one side, against the tar.

  10 Bare legs, theirs and hers. Naked.

  And, how can he forget

  11 The cars.

  Two cars pass by.

  A 3rd, then a 4th. Then a 5th, 6th, 7th. It’s the 7th car that runs over the second slipper.

  Tariq watches the street light, the insects at this time of the year fluttering against the halogen to keep themselves warm, undeterred by the sight of their friends dying, falling down onto the street below. Black, like the sky, like her hair.

  Tariq hears their words, their laughter, the cars.

  And her crying.

  Drowned out by the radio from one car, the 8th (or is it the 9th?), which slows but doesn’t stop. Its windows are rolled down, both in the front and in the rear, despite the cold, so he hears the radio loud and clear. A woman’s voice, singing a song.

  The car’s engine keeps running, fogging where the exhaust fumes meet the cold air. The driver gets out and runs into the shadows, they get in, all four of them, B and C in the rear, A and D in front.

  Then they all drive away.

  They don’t see the boy.

  Other cars come, Numbers 10, 11, 12, 13, all pass her by (one even swerves to avoid her as she lies, half across the divider, half on the street). Tariq sees her mouth open, the lips part, the flash of red on her forehead, it’s blood. White, her teeth. He sees her mouth move, as if she were gulping the night down, chewing it, drinking it, as if she had been emptied and needs the darkness to fill her up once again.

  She must have heard him walking, his footsteps, over the noise of distant traffic. Lying on the street, she must have seen him coming because when Tariq is near, just a few feet away, without her eyes meeting his, she stretches out an arm, her right hand, to hold his, this time not a desperate lunge but more confident and measured. And she gets up and, together, they walk to where her slippers lie. The son picks them up one, two, and then, hand in hand, they walk home. Son and mother, mother and son.

  He can make out, distinctly, the tread marks of the car on one slipper, the hard black bands on the soft white platform, the tyres stamping their imprint on what is meant for her feet.

  She limps. Tariq helps her cross the street, the second time in his life he has done this, the second time in his life that he has led his mother home. (The first was when his father died, two years ago, and when the neighbourhood women, after their crying, left the house, he had helped his mother get up from the floor and walk to her room.)

  The blood, by now, has trickled down from her forehead. In a thin red line that jumps over her left eyebrow, skirts her eye, ends in a pale smudge on her cheek, near her lips. She wipes it with one hand and then she wipes it again with the corner of her torn sari.

  ‘I wish I had some warm water,’ she says when they enter the house. It’s cold in the kitchen, the gas has almost run out. (The man from the gas company had promised to come in the morning with a refill but he couldn’t. The city was already on fire, roads were blocked and all the shops had been forced to close.)

  Because the cylinder is almost empty, it’s easier for Tariq to move it. Otherwise, he can barely make it budge: twenty-five kilograms of the gas plus the weight of the cylinder. More than Tariq’s own body weight.

  Tariq clicks the automatic lighter in the burner, as he has seen h
is mother do. The flame flickers, more yellow than blue, a sign the gas is running out, she has taught him. It sputters for a couple of minutes, long enough to warm the water in the steel bowl, then it dies down.

  And while he watches the water heat, the tiny air bubbles forming at the bottom, rising up to the surface to break into the winter air, he hears, over their gentle pop and hiss, he hears her in the bathroom, hears the water fall. He hears her remove the slippers.

  Minutes later, she walks into the living room where Tariq stands with the warm bowl of water. Her hair is wet, sticking to her head, one strand across her forehead, the water dripping onto her neck, down her blue blouse and the blue sari that she has changed into. There is some cotton wool sticking to her forehead with a Band-Aid and the red line is gone. She has washed the blood away.

  She sits down in a wrought-iron chair, he puts the bowl on the glass table in front (the glass table that had come with the chair had the same wrought-iron carving, its legs matching those of the chair, its frame that held the glass in place arranged in the same pattern as the chair’s backrest, the iron strips hammered into leaves and flowers and petals and stems).

  The son turns to leave but his mother stops him, pulls him towards her.

  Then she dips both her hands in the water and keeps them there. He puts one finger in the water and runs it over her knuckles, cold in the warm.

  Her eyes are closed, he can see and feel her shiver, her hands tremble, as if underneath the water, what he can see is not her hand or her fingers but only their reflections and ripples. He can smell the soap in her hair when he rests his head on her shoulder, his cheeks feel the dampness of the fabric on her arm.