Animal's People: A Novel

by Indra Sinha

  After this there is a long silence. No one is saying anything. No one can speak. At last comes Zafar’s voice, sounding weary.

  “Nothing is left.”

  “And then?”

  “What else? We fight. We carry on. We don’t give up.”

  “People do give up,” says Nisha. “They give up when they’ve nothing left to give.” A private battle’s still going on between them, something that must have started long before this day.

  “There is always something left to give,” says Zafar.

  “Zafar, my love, there’s nothing left.”

  Then Zafar says something beautiful. Jahã jaan hai, jahaan hai. While we have life, we have the world. These words send thrills up and down my crooked back, they make me want to weep. “Wah wah,” I say, before I can stop myself.

  “Who’s there? Who’s out there?”

  So I am brought into the room.

  The music room is full of people. Nisha, standing, is staring down at Zafar who is seated beside her father, looking at his own toes.

  “Are you asking people to give their lives?” Nisha demands. “Say it here, openly, in public. Zafar, would you give your life?”

  There’s an eerie silence every bit as long as the earlier one, then the fool says quietly, “You already know the answer. Yes, I would.”

  When Zafar says this, Nisha walks out of the room. Nobody else moves or says a word. I’ll go after her, I tell them. She’s in the kitchen, where she and I usually eat. Nisha has her back to me, she’s got a knife and is chopping down into an onion, slicing it into rings.

  “Nisha?”

  “Oh, it’s you.” She seems disappointed, like she’d been hoping it would be someone else.

  “What’s going on? What was all that about? Nisha, don’t cry.”

  “It’s the onion.”

  It rips my heart to see her in tears. “Some good will come of this.”

  “Like what?” Her mouth’s filled with the dust of their hopes.

  Faced with the bleakness of her despair, I suddenly understand what Zafar meant, back there in the music room. “Nisha, is revenge a reason to ruin your life? What about Ratnagiri, children, that little house by the sea?”

  She’s turned round to me. “Animal, do you think I like being a Khaufpuri? Well, I don’t. I’m not heroic enough to fight other people’s causes. I’m not like Elli, came here from her own free choice. I’m caught in it because I was born here. This struggle, it’s going to go on and on and on. It will outlast all of us. If our children grow up here, it will blight their lives too.”

  “Then let’s leave Khaufpur. All of us. Why must we stay, just because we were born here? Let’s go to Ratnagiri. Let’s go and forget this horrible place.”

  “Now it’s you who’s dreaming.”

  “Why? The Kampani has everything on its side, even our own politicians. We Khaufpuris have fuck all. Why give our whole lives to a lost cause?”

  Again Nisha’s weeping, this time’s no onion to blame.

  “I’m lost,” I say. “Please tell me why you are so unhappy.”

  She lifts her shirt hem to dab her eyes. “For me there’ll be no Ratnagiri, nor children either.”

  “Stop it. Why are you saying such things?”

  “Animal, if I tell you, you must not tell anyone, nobody outside this house knows yet, do you promise?”

  “I swear.”

  “Zafar is going on hunger strike. A fast unto death.”

  “Hunger strike?” Hearing this I’ve started laughing. “Hunger strike! Darling, dry your tears. He’s bluffing, it’s a sham, every corrupt rotten politician fasts unto death at least once during his career, it’s compulsory, somehow the noble bastard is always persuaded to stop in time. Don’t worry, Nisha. Zafar is not mad. He’ll stop after a few days, when he has made his point.”

  “You know Zafar is not like that,” she says. “He has given his word. He is pledged not to stop, not until we win.”

  Now I understand her terror. Zafar doesn’t lie and when did we, le peuple de l’abîme, ever win anything? Worm meat he’ll be, if this is really his plan.

  “You can stop him,” I tell her. “You’re probably the only one who can.”

  “He says I mustn’t try, yet how can I not? He is not even well. All those stomach pains he’s been having. Such bad cramps, and nightmares. He gets no better and the politicians will not give in. The Kampani will offer too much money for them to resist. Animal, I’m afraid I am going to lose him.”

  My darling covers her face with her hands, she really believes the bugger is crazy enough to do it, and as for the stomach pains, I’ve cloaked myself in guilty silence. What can I say? Never before have I realised how many secrets I have from her. She wipes her eyes. “Thank god Elli will be with him.”

  “Yes, thank god.” In my head a vicious voice whispers, speak out now and you will deprive Zafar of his doctor. Zafar himself would want you to speak, says another voice, if he wants to kill himself why should you worry? Says a third, if you don’t tell, you are doing Zafar a good turn, plus it may benefit your back. Shut it, I tell myself, for I can’t in truth blame these thoughts on my voices, as soon as I’ve figured out what’s best for me I’ll do what I will do.

  “I am so sorry,” I say aloud. “I am such a bad bastard.”

  “What are you sorry about, Animal dear?” asks Nisha, smiling at me through her tears, “you have done nothing wrong.”

  TAPE NINETEEN

  The fast begins in a small gaggle of jarnaliss and photographass on the pavement opposite the Khaufpur court where in a few days’ time the hearing’s to happen. Zafar makes a speech for the cameras. Blah justice blah. He’ll be joined on this fast unto death by two women from the slums near the factory. One of them I know, Devika, used to give me sweets when I was younger. The other’s from a place called Blue Moon Colony, her kid is sick from drinking the poison water. To my amazement a fourth hunger striker steps forward. It’s Farouq. For once my archenemy is looking serious, even respectable. He’s all in white kurta pyjamas, around his head is a strip of black cloth like the one he wore for the fire walk. Zafar’s dressed the same except his turban cloth is red.

  The courthouse is in the old city behind the Chowk, near the lake. It’s a big building of yellow stone, on its black iron railings they’ve hung a banner which says fast unto death for justice. Opposite’s a small dusty square. Under the shifting shade of four tamarind trees a tent has been pitched, it’s where Zafar and his crew will do their starving. Camped around the tent in a mass of bright saris and black burqas are hundreds of women, always it’s women who support, from places like the Nutcracker and Jyotinagar, same women were at the CM demo. NO DEAL, their placards say.

  When the jarnaliss get bored and fuck off, the four hunger strikers dodge across the road through the don’t-give-a-shit trucks and crazy speeding autos, and take their seats like four sages inside the tent. Elli the Betrayess is waiting there with Nisha, whose face is a cupboard full of woes.

  “I urge you not to do this,” Elli is telling the four, who listen politely but without expression. “If you insist on going ahead then you must drink plenty of water, at least two litres each day, plus electrolytes. You’re going to need it in this heat.”

  “Electro-whats?” asks Devika.

  “Uh, just a fancy name for a little sugar and a pinch of salt. Plus a squeeze of lime juice won’t hurt. I’ll be coming here regularly and every few hours I will take urine samples and check your blood pressure.”

  Nisha chips in, “If the doctress sahiba finds danger signs she will tell you to stop and you have to listen to her.” Normally she’d say Elli, now it’s doctress sahiba. Who is Nisha trying to convince, so desperate must she be?

  “Okay, let me explain what will happen to you,” says Elli betrayess. “In the first few days your body will raid your muscles and liver for their stores of easy energy. It’s called glycogen. You’ll lose weight fast. With the glycogen gone the body
starts feeding on muscle. That includes heart muscle. When the muscles are exhausted, the body burns ketones produced by cracking fats. This also makes a lot of toxins. When the fat is used up the body goes into meltdown. It has nothing left to feed on but vital organs, but serious damage begins well before that. In this heat I reckon you can do at most twenty days before things start getting really dangerous.”

  “We have five days until the hearing.” This is Zafar, he’s saying this because our enemies will have to sign their deal before the hearing, which falls on the morning of the sixth day.

  “Five days you’ll manage,” says Elli, everyone can hear the relief in her voice. “It will be uncomfortable, but drink plenty of water and you’ll be fine.”

  The four of them look at each other, then Zafar beckons to me. I shuffle over and he whispers to me, “Animal, take Nisha away somewhere.”

  “Where?” I whisper back, bemused by the secrecy.

  “Anywhere,” he says. “Just get her out of here for a few moments.”

  So I four-foot over to where Nisha is watching us, suspicion settling like a swarm of flies on her face.

  “Nish, come with me for a moment.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I have to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Well, not show, exactly,” says I trying to think of something she might believe. “Zafar wants us to do this errand.”

  “What errand?” she demands, twisting her brows.

  “He needs socks.”

  “Socks? Are you mad?”

  “He is worried about his feet swelling, so he needs us to buy some socks.”

  She eyes me as if I have gone crazy. “Then we’ll go later.”

  I give Zafar a shrug which he’s received with a look of resignation.

  “Okay, then I guess it’s time to tell you all.” He waves at the water bottles stored at the back of the tent. “We won’t need these. There’s little time, we must put the maximum pressure, we’ve decided to fast without water.”

  “No!” Nisha’s on her knees beside Zafar, she has her arms around him and she’s saying, “No! You will not do this.”

  He catches her hands, whispers something in her ear and suddenly she wilts. So strange, to see this. It’s she who’s the tough one, who keeps him strong when he suffers that black despair, but now she’s on her knees, begging, and not one of us knows what to do.

  Zafar says, “We have to do it this way because there’s no time.”

  Among the friends and well-wishers there’s silence, then Elli voices what all are thinking. “Zafar, in this heat, it’s suicide. Without water you’ll last maybe three days.”

  “Five days is all we need,” says Saint Zafar.

  “I beg you,” she says, “don’t do this.”

  Oh, Betrayess, what hypocrisy! What do you care what happens to him? I should speak up right here and now and tell all these people the truth about you and that Amrikan lawyer. I keep silent. For two days I’ve been struggling with my conscience, can’t decide what to do. If such selfishness you find hard to understand, consider if you were four-foot and had a chance to be human? With Elli gone, so’s my chance, but right now this same two-timing Elli looks like she’s about to start blubbering, mouth’s twisted, too close eyes flutter like moths’ wings. She says, “Zafar, please give me a chance,” which is weird, like she herself can somehow solve his problem.

  It’s Nisha who recovers a flash of her old self. “You stupid man,” she says. “Do you want to die?” With that she’s walked out of the tent, leaving us who are to keep the hunger strikers company.

  Welcome to the hell hole. The sun on that first day of the fast is like the mouth of a furnace, pouring molten misery onto the city. The heat of the Nautapa is paralysing. By noon it’s 114 degrees. Everywhere there are only two topics of conversation. One is the heat, the second is the hunger strike. At five in the afternoon, Elli returns to check on the hunger strikers. After only a few hours their eyes are like sandpaper, blinking for moisture that has already fled their bodies.

  No reasoning there’s with Zafar, sits cross-legged and reads papers brought to him, peers over the tops of his specs when he talks to people, makes calls on a mobile, carrying on his daily work.

  “You’re so thirsty now that you don’t notice hunger,” Elli tells the four, “but soon you may lose all feelings of hunger and even thirst. This is not a good thing.” She tells them what she knows about hunger strikes, the slow wasting of the body. “In Ireland prisoners lasted sixty days on water before they died, but blindness plus other irreversible damage occurred long before that point. Fasts by Turkish prisoners confirmed these grim statistics. These were with water. There’s hardly any data on fasting without water, but in this extreme heat, the body will dry out and begin its collapse within two or three days.” Again and again Elli tries to make the four see how suicidal is their decision. “You’re now in the same situation as people who get lost in a desert without food or water, except that you’ve put yourself there, you are making your own desert.”

  “What is Khaufpur but a desert?” replies one of the women, someone says “wah wah.” All inside the tent nod. I can see Elli’s expression, I know what’s in her mind, which is that they’ll soon learn how hard it is to survive on rhetoric. Despite living among us and speaking our language, she knows next to nothing about us Khaufpuris.

  Everyone in Khaufpur is talking about Zafar. What a hero, bloody. It’s not as if he was unknown before, but now every bugger is his best friend. Zafar bhai, who gives everything for the poor. This old cry now has a new ring because if someone doesn’t stop him the mad bastard is going to give his life. Farouq, Devika and Bluemoon are new saints and their pictures are pasted on walls all over the city alongside Zafar’s. Four martyrs in the making.

  Suddenly every fucker’s an expert at fasting. Well, many are of course, though not by choice. “It’s the moon’s full,” says Ramprasad the fruit seller. “It pulls fluid up to the brain and disturbs the thoughts. That’s why people go mad. The best way to deal with the moon is to fast without water. See this lessens the fluid in the whole body and the liquid from the brain flows down into the body, thus the maddening effect of the moon is removed.”

  “Poor cretin, you know nothing.”

  “What, Animal? Are you an expert in medicine?”

  I am not but it’s time to reveal an unexpected and appalling discovery, which is that I seem to be infected with this disease called conscience. Seeing Nisha’s misery I find that I am not keen for Zafar to perish, plus I hate to admit it, there is a part of me that admires the git. He’s always been kind to me and the place would just not be the same without him.

  Zafar’s three days into the fast and Elli betrayess keeps on saying that if he doesn’t stop soon he will die. His body has started to devour itself and the blood is thumping in his head. He is having severe attacks of cramp, which Faqri says might be after-effects of datura. Since yesterday these have been fading which means that Faqri is probably right. Farouq is turning out to be a tough one, “Today better than yesterday” he tells me with a grin when I go to see them, his lips are cracked and his breathing is like wind in a thorn tree. He and the other hunger strikers are telling each other jokes and indulging in the old Khaufpuri pastime of abuse. A crowd of Khaufpuris is with them singing Hillélé and suchlike and keeping up their spirits with jokes. It’s Friday, fourth day of Nautapa, 120 degrees. In the afternoon Devika, the one from the Nutcracker, collapses and is rushed to the big hospital. The Blue Moon woman is persuaded by her family to stop. Zafar and Farouq carry on. They are exhausted and by the end of that afternoon both are asleep. Nisha, who is afraid and agitated, takes her chance. While these two are sleeping she brings a wet cloth and wipes their faces, then lets a few drops of water fall on their lips. What Farouq did, I do not know, but Zafar wakes immediately. He’s very angry, he’s opened his mouth to shout at Nisha, but only a kind of croaking comes out. What does she think
she is doing? Nisha, near to tears, replies that he and Farouq should end their ordeal.

  “You are behaving like a child,” he says. His lips are so cracked, his tongue is swollen up in his mouth. He sounds like he’s been drinking daru, looks that way too, red eyed and hair standing on end. Even his glasses are dusty and he no longer has the will to wipe them on his shirt like he usually does. No longer is he reading papers. “What has happened to you?” he demands of Nisha. “They used to joke that Zafar’s backbone was named Nisha. Now this?”

  “I am strong,” says she, “and with all my strength I am begging you, give this up. You can’t fight if you are dead.”

  “Why talk of death?” asks Zafar. “Talk of winning.”

  “You think you are being strong,” she says, “but you are not. Giving up your life is just that, giving up. It’s surrendering. These Kampani-wallahs, they’re not impressed. They’re laughing at you. You are making them a gift of your life.”

  When she says this, I am watching Zafar’s face and it seems to me that a great weariness appears in it. He knows she is right. It comes to me then that he is doing this because he is tired of fighting and that this is the only way he can stop with honour. We have not supported him well, we’ve not appreciated his years of struggle for our sakes, now he is tired, wants it all to end, ending this way will not be without honour. But I’ve underestimated Zafar. The man is, after all, a saint, already he’s apologising for losing his temper with Nisha, but now it’s her turn to go mad. She shouts at him, “Don’t expect me to stay here and watch you die! I won’t! I refuse!”