Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  No, this wasn’t a dream: I touched the ice, it was cold, I used my nails to scrape some off, I saw it fall to the floor. Walking in and out of the rows of the bodies, wending their way through the blocks of ice, were the mourners. Men and women, their heads lowered, sometimes going down on their knees to lift one edge of a sheet. To see a face, to check if it was family or a stranger. The silence was breaking, I could hear it, by first the sound of their shoes and their slippers against the marble floor, the rapid drawing of their breaths, and then later by the crying.

  A mother crying, a sister crying, a brother crying, a wife crying, a father crying, a husband crying, I heard their tears drop, slide down their faces, their clothes, reach the floor, touch the ice.

  I wanted to tell them about Bright Shirt, I wanted to tell them about Miss Glass and how she had built houses of air and water for all of their dead, where they were safe, where they could look up at the sky and see a moon, scrubbed clean, where they could see an ocean knee-deep, even watch a circus complete with a fireproof juggler and half a dozen clowns.

  For a while, I walked with them, too, drawn by the sound of their tears and the shuffle of their feet. I counted the bodies, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, I stopped counting, I lost count.

  I was now at the end of the hallway, near the elevator. I looked for the Ward Guard from that night. He wasn’t there; in his place, someone else, in the same uniform but without a name tag.

  ‘I am checking on my wife, I was here the night before last, in the Maternity Ward.’

  ‘Go check the list,’ he said.

  He pointed to a piece of paper stuck in one corner on the wall, near the elevator.

  I checked the list, I read names and numbers, people and ages.

  I read Ahmed, Muhammad, Ramesh, Imran, Shameena, Nafitullah, Qasimbhai, Ehsan, Omar, Hossain-ur, Siraj, Ibrahim, Andaleeb, Sajjad, Firoze, Dimple, Bakhtiyar, Shakeela, Babu, Bashir, Syed, Javed, Rehman, Bilkis, Ishfaq, Farooq, Jalla, Rizwan, Zahra, Yasmin, Posha. Each name had an age, single digits double digits. 26, 28, 71, 64, 44, 23, 27, 5, 26, 43, 2, 31, 9, 4, 4, 2, 19.

  And so on and so on and so forth and so forth.

  ‘My wife’s name isn’t there,’ I told the guard.

  ‘That’s good news, you should be happy. She must be in one of the wards near the Operating Theatre.’

  ‘Where is Ward Guard who was here the other night?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Can I see Head Nurse? Doctors 1 and 2? They were the ones who know about my wife.’

  ‘Head Nurse was supposed to be here but she’s been missing, along with the doctors and two guards; they went home in a van that evening when the fires began and we don’t know what happened, they haven’t returned.’

  No, it couldn’t be true. I reached into my pockets, I wanted to show him the discharge slip that Head Nurse had filled out, nail his lie, I wanted to tell him that I was there in the hospital and as proof, I wanted to show him the picture I had picked up in Miss Glass’s room that night, the crumpled shred of black and white, but he had turned to walk away.

  ‘This is not visiting hours anyway,’ he called, looking back at me, ‘come in three hours.’

  No, I wasn’t going to wait any more.

  I had to get into the ward next to the Operating Theatre and see my wife; I was alive, I was awake, I could not let any one, living or dead, distract me now. And so when I heard the screaming of two children, both boys, who were being brought up the stairs in one stretcher from the Emergency Ward below, I knew this was my chance.

  There was a commotion ahead.

  A family was tailing the two attendants who carried the boys bound for the Operating Theatre. I joined this crowd, falling into line behind the man I thought was the father. No one asked me any questions, everyone’s eyes were on the two children, one writhing with pain, the other still. Both had burns over their bodies; someone had draped them with a thin cotton sheet – to keep the infection away, I guess – but each touch of the fabric was making one child scream. Through the sheet, I could see their charred flesh, I could see what the fire had done, peeling away their skin, I saw the red and the blue and the white of clotted blood, veins, muscle and fat. The stretcher stopped at the entrance to the Operating Theatre, someone opened the door and before father and the two attendants and the stretcher could enter, I slipped in.

  I saw several beds lined up against the wall, all full. All the patients were covered, except for two men, both fast asleep, their foreheads swathed in bandages. Adjusting the sheet over them was a nurse, her back towards me. As she heard me approach, she turned around.

  ‘You can’t come in here,’ she said.

  ‘I need your help, please, I have been waiting for a long time. My wife is here, I have to see her.’

  ‘Give me her name and I will check the register,’ she said.

  I gave her my wife’s name, her number, 110742, and she wrote it down on her palm, then left the room through a small door at the back.

  While I stood there waiting, I saw more people being brought in, with burns, with injuries, some covered with cotton gauze drenched red with mercurochrome, some bare. And more and more white bundles, all being lined up in the shrinking space between the blocks of ice.

  ‘The third room from the corner, to your left,’ said the nurse on her return and she smiled: ‘Congratulations, Mr Jay, you are a father.’

  And she pointed out the door to my wife’s room.

  So this was the end of the nightmare.

  My wife had given birth, I was on my way to meet her, I could now walk in, hold her, hold our child. What did Miss Glass say on that stage? She had said I would never forget Ithim but here I was, moments away from meeting my wife, Ithim a memory, a shadow, a ghost, and with each second that passed and with each step I took, he receded farther and farther away.

  Miss Glass was wrong.

  She had said I would carry the burden of Ithim’s story throughout my life, I would never be able to tell it. Wrong again. For one day, when my wife reads to our child, I think I will join in, too, I will tell them how one night a face by the window wrote on glass, how children played under water, how parents swam when the city was on fire.

  There is no burden I carry, whatever the dead may say. Because I am alive, I can choose what to remember, I can choose what to forget.

  I stood at the entrance to my wife’s room, it was a room for two but the bed next to hers was empty. My wife lay on her side, her head facing the wall, her back towards the door, towards me. The white knot of the hospital gown clasped the nape of her neck, the sheet was drawn over her waist.

  I wanted to give her a surprise so I stood still, not entering, not making the slightest noise. I could see her right arm, thin, the gown’s sleeve almost reaching her elbow. I could see it rise and fall with her breaths, I could hear her voice, faint scraps of whispers; she was talking to her child, to our child, who I could not see.

  Perhaps I moved without my knowing, perhaps the curtains made a noise, or my shoes scraped against the marble floor, my wife turned.

  I was about seven steps from the edge of her bed.

  Not even ten feet, it should take me just under a few seconds.

  I saw the dirt on my shoes, the mud and water and ash. Yes, we would go home this evening; no, I wouldn’t keep them in the hospital one extra minute; we would enter the nursery together, my wife and I, I would help her bring the toys down, the kangaroo, the mouse, the duck, the fish, the bear, the green pillow in the shape of a turtle.

  I was walking to the bed, only three steps away from my wife – so close that I could clearly see a speck in the back of her hospital gown, near her left shoulder – when the floor below me gaped open at my feet, like the universe itself.

  Black, cold, and limitless.

  But after all I had been through, this was a mere distraction, I was sure, an apparition that would soon clear. I only had
to walk across and I would walk across. I had jumped off a running train in the night, I had walked through water, I had been through fire, I could certainly do this. This was only three steps, one, two and three.

  So I took the first step.

  And I fell.

  I kept falling, I shouted out my wife’s name but from below came the echo of a voice which was neither hers nor my own. It was more a humming, like a dirge from the distant edge of the darkness, muffled whispers and screams of the dead and the dying, and the only thing I had, in reply, was the hollow beating of my heart. And the only thing I could see was the onrushing blackness from beneath, to my left, to my right, below and above.

  I kept falling and as my eyes began to adjust to the dark, slowly, like night clouds get scattered by the lightest of winds to show the moon and the stars, the darkness began to fade and I saw Tariq’s mother, the blood on her forehead now dried, a thin broken line, her sari torn, ash caught in her long black hair, its grey making her look older than she was. I kept falling, I passed Shabnam’s parents, both silent, their lips crusted red, both naked, pressed against something that looked like a wall with neither a beginning nor an end, the mother behind the father. I saw Abba’s daughter-in-law, Ithim now cradled in her arms, a gaping hole where her stomach should have been, the charred strip around Ithim’s forehead as big as a ring around a planet. All of them were silent, unmoving, and although there was not the faintest gleam of reproach in any of their eyes, their gaze was so burningly fierce that I had to look away.

  Just when I had passed Ithim, I found myself inexplicably slowing down until I came to a sudden stop as if an invisible floor had surfaced to stop my fall. And hardly had I caught my breath when I found I was now being dragged up, carried as if being pulled by strings out of a bottomless well.

  On my way up, I passed them again and this time, instead of the hum of the dead, all I could hear was a voice, it was my voice, I was sure of that, although it was not I who was doing the talking. My lips moved on their own, the words formed by themselves. One after the other, three words, words that until then I hadn’t once spoken, not once even thought, words that came not in a steady rush but spread out, stretched, gaps of silence between each: I am guilty. I heard this as I passed Abba’s daughter-in-law and Ithim, I heard this again as I passed Shabnam’s parents, I heard this a third time as I passed Tariq’s mother, the voice growing louder and louder as I continued to be lifted up through the darkness, higher and higher, towards the edge over which I had just fallen and where, I knew, the hospital bed was. Where my wife and my child lay.

  I was now back in the hospital room, I stood at the foot of the bed, they were fast asleep. My child, a bundle wrapped in a white towel, its eyes closed; my wife, on her side. I bent down to look at our child; everything was there, everything was normal: eyes, nose, mouth, lips, ears, tiny eyelashes, its forehead wrinkled into a tight knot.

  A Baby Sentence making perfect sense.

  But I was trembling hard, as if the earth had indeed begun to move; I shivered, frozen with fear that the chasm I had just fallen into and been lifted out of would abruptly open up again and, this time, I would fall into its blackness never to return. That the people I saw in there would hold on to my feet, Abba’s daughter-in-law and Ithim, Shabnam’s parents, Tariq’s mother, would not let me rise back to the edge. My knees buckled, I tried to steady myself by sitting on the marble floor using both my hands to clasp the iron frame of the bed, ice cold, just below the warm white sheets that covered my family. I could smell the hospital’s antiseptic between the cracks in the floor, the folds in their sheets.

  And as my wife and my child, fast asleep, travelled through the world of their dreams, linked together, hand in hand, my wife’s finger held firmly in my baby’s tiny curled-up fist, I sat there, on the floor, inches away from both, afraid to make the slightest movement.

  My chest hurt from the screaming of the voice inside, even my breath seemed to have lost its way, my eyes were wide open but instead of the daylight that was now streaming through the window from the city outside, making my wife’s hair gleam, drawing a yellow bar of sunlight over my baby’s face, I could see little more than a blur. Over each of my eyes had spread a thin, gauzy film, my unwept tears.

  I closed my eyes, hoping that this wasn’t anything more than a nightmare, that when I opened my eyes, the film would be gone but the moment I had done that, the voice was back, this time as a whisper, soft and gentle, I am guilty, as if it had deliberately lowered its pitch, not to disturb my wife and child. From outside, through the half-closed door, I could hear the rustle of winding sheets being pulled over the dead, the squeak of hospital trolley wheels rolling up and down, the footsteps of patients and visitors as more and more bodies from last night were brought in, someone shouting out to clear the way. But even over these sounds and these noises, even if no one was there to hear what my voice had just said, I knew the dead had heard.

  Wherever they were: in the chasm below me, outside the window in the city on fire, in the flames and in the smoke, in the Hideout far away, under the water that lapped against the railway tracks or on the stage, brightly lit, in the dark shells of their houses where ghosts flitted from door to window, window to door. I knew the dead had heard, I was sure of that, because when I opened my eyes, the sunlight in the room was bright and clear, the floor below me was as hard as it could be, my wife and my child were waking, the film over my eyes had lifted and my tears had begun to flow.

  EPILOGUE

  (THE CLOSING STATEMENT)

  We, the undersigned, do solemnly affirm in this, our closing statement to you, the reader, the following:

  1 That this is Mr Jay’s story. We made no changes in his narrative, not one word. Except for his name. For if we remain unnamed, it’s only fair that he should, too. But then, Miss Glass said, he is our central character, anonymity could be seen as dissembling, even disrespect. So we called him Mr Jay.

  2 That in all, they burnt down 12,000 houses where we lived, 14,000 shops where we made our living. That’s a lot of empty shells, rectangles and squares. In some places, the ash has been cleared, some buildings have been painted a fresh white (with a little bit of blue put in the paint to make the white look whiter). But many are untouched.

  Left, maybe, for us to flit around, to walk through the rooms where we once lived. To look out of the windows on to the streets where we once walked. And after the rain and shine and heat and cold of so many seasons, these gaps, many now say, look as if they were caused by time and neglect, not by fire and hate.

  How easy it is for the living to deceive themselves.

  3 That there are times we get tired, impatient. Let us move on, we say, let us accept that the city, the country has to forget. And that, in the end, we are and we will always remain the meek, we will inherit nothing.

  4 That, at these times, Miss Glass comes running in, says, snap out of it, stop whining. It’s the living who need to move on, she says, because they don’t have much time – we, the dead, have forever. There’s no arguing with Miss Glass.

  5 That Miss Glass says she has unfinished business. That just as we helped Ithim’s mother by getting Mr Jay to admit his guilt, we have to help Tariq’s, then Shabnam’s. Go after the others, she says. I will have to start with each one of you, she says, all those who could only whisper in this story, as a footnote. I will begin with Ward Guard, then go down the list. One by one, I will do all one thousand.

  12 But that will take a long time, we tell Miss Glass. Even if you keep one day and one night for each, as you did for Ithim, and a day in between to rest, it will take nine, ten years.

  ‘So what?’ she says. ‘What’s the hurry, we are all dead.’

  On this note, she laughs, as she climbs down the steps of the castle of clouds and, with Bright Shirt by her side, begins to fly down to the charred city below.

  Like an angel, from the sky far above, from the room in the blue, fireproof.

  . . . like a man who
seeks to return to a beloved place

  and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses,

  so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place.

  in the same way we leave things here.

  in the same way the dead leave us.

  YEHUDA AMICHAI

  (Translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier)

  THE END

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  The events in Gujarat, in brief:

  Violence began on February 27, 2002, when a train, the Sabarmati Express, was stopped and attacked near Godhra, a town about 150 km from Gujarat’s capital city of Gandhinagar. The exact nature and sequence of events surrounding the attack is still not clear, with conflicting reports from conflicting inquiry commissions. While the Justices Nanavati-Shah Commission (named after two retired judges), appointed by the state government, has said there is evidence to suggest a conspiracy, another, one-judge committee, appointed by a rival government, called it an ‘accident’. According to the case filed by the Gujarat police, several Muslims conspired to attack the train and set it on fire.

  What is clear, however, is that fifty-nine passengers, all Hindu, were killed when fire broke out in one coach of the train, S-6. Among those killed were several ‘activists’ on their way back from Ayodhya (in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh), where they had been campaigning to build a temple in place of a mosque, the five-hundred-year-old Babri Masjid, that was illegally demolished in 1992. (That demolition had itself sparked off Hindu-Muslim violence across the country in which hundreds were killed.)

  The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council, a forty-year-old ‘religious-cultural group’) called a strike to protest against the Godhra train attack the next day across the state. Endorsing the strike was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ran the government in Gujarat and, then, the Centre as well.