by Indra Sinha
“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!”
“Then you must go,” says the hero, but I swear if there had been a drop of moisture left in his body it would have been rolling from his eye. “Please do not come here again until it is over.”
“Until it is over? What does that mean?” says Nisha, shaken by this.
“It means that you are my life,” says Zafar, which, being the dismal sod he is, is the nearest he will ever come to saying I love you. Women sitting near go ooh and ah, but many are weeping.
“If I am your life,” says she, “then you are killing both of us.”
“You shake my resolve,” says Zafar. “Please go now.” On his face is a look like he is being tortured. Nisha gets up and walks away, like her heart and guts are trailing on the ground behind her.
Saturday, fifth day of Nautapa, 118F. No more singing around the tent. Zafar and Farouq are lying on their mattresses, for long periods now they do not speak. Their fourth day without food or water. People are whispering that they are sinking. The crisis can’t be far away. When the doctress sahiba orders them to quit what will they do? The wisdom is that they are going to carry on to the dreadful end. People really believe this, a sure sign is that many folk, Hindu and Muslim alike, come hesitantly to the tent to ask for their blessings. To be in the presence of saints, this is something. A delegation of elders from the Nutcracker arrives and pleads with them to stop. Through their destroyed lips, they refuse. Fire of thirst, burning of hunger, these two are cremating themselves on the pyre of their dead cause.
At lunchtime I am at Somraj’s house eating my lunch, and packing some chappatis and pickle to take home for Ma. Since this drama began I have not been spending time with Ma, which I should because every day she is getting madder. Two, three times now the neighbours have found her shouting in the lanes and brought her home. They do not know what she’s yelling, but I do, because she tells me at night. “Animal, I am trying to warn people, but they don’t listen. Hell is coming, it will open underneath our feet, you can feel the heat already. Le camp des saints et la ville bien-aimée. Un feu descendera du ciel, et les dévorera.” The camp of the saints and the well-loved city, a fire will come from the sky and devour them. Then she’s confirmed that angels have moved in all around, they’re taking over the city, preparing some big showdown. Soon there will be no people left.
Nisha comes to me with eyes red from crying, she kneels in front of me so she can look me in the eye. “Animal, you have to take a message to Zafar from me. Will you?”
“Of course.” Nothing I’d like less, but how to say this?
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should say. But in the end what else is there? I love you. With all my heart and soul.”
Oh wicked to say so but the fire that burns Zafar is nothing to the flames which now engulf me. “Yes, yes,” I say. “Of course I will tell him.”
“Say that I respect him and admire him and support him and wish to be his strongest ally,” she babbles. “How can I stay here alone? Look.” She shows me a cap, carefully embroidered in blue and scarlet silks. “I have made this for him, for our wedding.”
“It is beautiful.” God, how this hurts.
“Tell him that if he goes, he’s taking me with him.”
“I will tell him,” I mumble.
“The thought of him gone,” she says, now talking more to herself than to me, “it makes me desperate. The Kampani is not worth spitting on, it’s not worth dying for. If there was one good person in that Kampani, even on
e who might be moved by such a sacrifice, then it might be worth it. But they’ll be cheering when the news comes.”
“Stop this talk Nish,” I tell her. “No one’s fucking going. No one’s going.” This talk of her going with him is spooking me. “Not in a million years will he do this. Think about it, not even Zafar could be such a dork as to suppose that dying would be a better option.” But I am not sure of this, not at all, because Zafar is a hero, a saint, and his death would cause such mayhem that no politician could ignore it. The way Nisha is talking, I want him alive now, very much so. A rival who’s alive can make mistakes, who knows, she might grow tired of saintliness, but one who’s dead and eternal, no way.
“Animal, next to Zafar, you are my best friend. Give him my message.”
Zafar says the hunger has stopped and he has been feeling a kind of peace, but he doesn’t seem very peaceful because when I have said the message he starts flapping his swollen tongue at me.
“Animal you are always saying you don’t have to think, you are fucking lucky mate, because thinking is doing my head in I think my head will bust with all the fucking thoughts bulging in it.” It’s not usual for him to swear so I am a bit amazed. “What a place is this Khaufpur,” he says, “where even the sky is broken and when rain comes it’s just a loan against long overdue debts.”
He rambles on in this way, well you know what they say, the tongue has no bone so it can twist and turn to all kinds of things.
“Is Khaufpur the only poisoned city? It is not. There are others and each one of has its own Zafar. There’ll be a Zafar in Mexico City and others in Hanoi and Manila and Halabja and there are the Zafars of Minamata and Seveso, of São Paulo and Toulouse and I wonder if all those weary bastards are as fucked as I am.”
“What should I tell Nisha?”
“Nisha?” he croaks, as if he’s having trouble remembering who she is.
“Your girlfriend.”
“So where is she?” He starts looking around. His eyes are sunk in his head. So dry and inflamed are they that as they swivel I’m expecting them to creak.
“She is at home crying because you told her not to come here.”
“Why would I do that?” he demands, glaring at me as if I am lying. No, worse, as if I am to blame for all this.
“She tried to put some water on your mouth.”
“Water? Please…” His voice dries up, for a moment I think he’s asking for water, but probably he was begging me not to mention it because in a moment he starts again, following some thoughtway of his own. “I never walked in fire because I refuse to bow to god. Refusing to bow is not the same thing as not believing. Look at the world’s misery and you have to believe that something very malevolent is at work here. I can’t honour this vile thing.”
He looks at Farouq who is lying asleep nearby with a sheet draped over him, pretty much like a corpse in its shroud. “Farouq can walk through fire because his mind is calm,” Zafar whispers. “But right now the fire is inside me and I tell you Animal it’s fucking burning me up.”
I think Zafar doesn’t hear these words that are crawling out of his mouth. It’s like he is this parched old corpse, uttering thoughts which have chewed him up from the inside starting with his muscles and bones and ending with his soul. Now they are like beetles, dropping from his mouth onto the ground. Never would I have expected it, but it pains me to see my old rival in this state. It fucking hurts, for a moment I even feel proud of the man. He’s talking like a weakling, but he’s not weak. If he was weak, he’d take a drink and he’d live. It’s his strength that’s killing him. Once inside the factory I found a parcel of furry skin stretched over bones, it was a dead dog, so old it no longer stank. I prodded it with a stick and a lizard ran out of a gap in its ribs. Its insides were full of white peas, which must have been lizard eggs, and it was crawling with black beetles. This will be Zafar in another day or two.
I am just thinking what news I can carry to Nisha when, of a sudden, there comes cheering outside the tent. People are applauding. Then Elli’s here, she’s telling Zafar and Farouq that they can stop their hunger strike, they can drink water, they can eat an orange, they can chew a date, they can rejoice, get up and dance because the deal has been delayed. She’s just had a call from someone she knows. The deal is not going to happen. There’s no way it can be signed before Monday, which is the day of the hearing. We have won.
Khaufpuri-style celebration is a no-holds-barred affair, every festival it’s, all rolled into one. Folk have so little good news in their lives, when they get some they go apeshit. Someone has brought gulal, coloured powder, the stuff that’s thrown at Holi, others are lighting firecrackers, little bundles of red fatakas, they’re flipping about in the dust like exploding fish. Happy people are jigging round the square, everyone’s saying, “We have won, we’ve done it, the Kampani’s on its knees.” All around us Khaufpuris are dancing and yelling. Some are hugging each other. The tent is full of people grinning and giving victory signs and there’s a long queue to shake Zafar’s and Farouq’s hands. In the midst of all this rejoicing I am wondering, who has really won? How come Elli, who is in cahoots with the lawyers, has brought such news at such a time?
Through the excited crowd I catch sight of Elli’s pale face, she is the only person other than me who isn’t smiling.
The scorpions have gone barmy, or perhaps it’s Ma. I’m woken by the madwoman chuckling to herself and’ve gone down the ladder to find Ma with a pissed-off looking scorpion crouched on the palm of her hand. Seems to be giving it instructions. I freeze so’s not to alarm the creature. These red ones, they’re the dangerous kind. One bite from one of these you are history. This is not what’s needed right now. I’ve hardly slept. All night I have been fighting with my newly discovered conscience, I have decided that I must warn Zafar, brother don’t be fooled by Elli’s news, Elli is a fake.
“Can you feel the heat?” Ma asks, giving me a sweet smile. “Hell is opening under this city. The stones in the wall are burning, it’s driving the scorpions out, poor little things, their time has come, soon the earth will burn, plus trees and all green things, the abyss is opening, smoke will hide the sun and moon, like a scorpion it’ll sting, with such pain that men will beg to die.”
“Yes yes,” I tell her, “please put that creature down.”
“Honestly Animal, don’t you hear a word I say? The night is coming when this city will be full of angels and dead people, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She holds out her hand to me, the scorpion still crouched there flexing its tail. “Here, mind you don’t hurt him, isn’t he lovely? His name is François.”
Carefully, carefully, I take François and lower him to the earth. A score of heartbeats shake my body before his little legs start moving and he grants me the gift of my life. It’s only seven in the morning, already the heat’s climbing a spiral to the unbearable.
Sunday, sixth day of the Nautapa. 124F. I call at Somraj’s place expecting to find Zafar there, now there’s no more reason for his hunger strike. Somraj looks ill. There are dark marks under his eyes as if he has not slept. Zafar and Farouq are still in the tent, he informs me, the fast goes on.
“But what about Elli’s news? Last night, people were dancing.”
Somraj says there’s been no confirmation of her news. The politicians are terrified that Zafar or Farouq will die, the story might have been a trick to get them to stop their fast. Tomorrow morning is the hearing, Somraj says. One way or another, by then we’ll know.
The crowd outside the tent has grown, it fills the small park and it is quiet. Word has got about, our heroes must endure one more day. Everyone knows that if tomorrow comes and if Zafar and Farouq do not call a halt, by day’s end they will surely die. Eerie is the silence of so many people, almost, you can hear them breathe. Farouq and Zafar are lying on rugs with their eyes closed, a few people are sitting silently by. One of those in the tent is a man called Ramlal who knows me, he’s the husband of Devika, one of the
original hunger strikers, so I ask if anything’s been heard.
“What? You don’t know? It’s all over Khaufpur.”
“I’ve just come from home.”
Ramlal is about to speak when Zafar stirs and mumbles, “Who has come?”
“Zafar? Zafar bhai, it’s me, Animal. I’ve something to tell you.”
“Animal? Good you’ve come,” he says out of lips so puffed, blackish they are, falling apart, they hardly can speak. “I also have something to tell you.”
“What is it, mate?”
“Come near, I can’t talk so well.”
Yesterday he was bad, today he’s worse. His eyes are red storms. His breath rattles like dice.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ve stopped sweating. Can’t take a piss. I’m burning up.”
“It’s Nautapa.”
“No. I’m burning from inside. Like a furnace.” Poor fellow’s trying to lick his lips but they don’t get moist. “Let that be. Come nearer, I don’t want anyone to hear.”
So I crouch down right by him and he takes my hand. Almost I jump back, his skin is so hot. It’s like when I was carrying Aliya.
He says, “You are fond of Nisha, I know.”
“Of course. We all are.”
“Yes, but with you…for you it’s special, na?”
“What do you mean?”
“No time to argue,” he says. “Can hardly talk, so just listen.” I nod, and he says, “What we are doing, it could go wrong. If anything happens, look after her. Make sure she’s okay.”
