Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

by Manu Joseph

  From the crowd a little girl of about six or seven, wearing a blue skirt and a T-shirt that says, in gold, ‘Grand’, walks up to a soldier and demands that she be allowed to listen to the headphones.

  ‘It might be my mother,’ she says. Then she adds diplomatically, ‘Or it might be my father.’

  ‘You won’t be able to figure out anything, child,’ the soldier says but still he puts the headphones on her.

  She listens intently. ‘Mama, are you there?’ Then she says, ‘Papa, are you there? This is me. Abha.’

  ‘They can’t hear you,’ the soldier says. ‘This is not a phone.’

  Abha ignores him and keeps talking.

  In the murmurs of the crowd, Akhila gathers that no one has seen the girl’s parents today. The girl was up early for some reason and playing in the compound when the building collapsed. Some neighbours have tried calling the mobile phones of her parents but their phones are not responsive. Both her parents are deep in the rubble.

  Abha finally says ‘bye’ and hands over the headphones to the soldier. The girl ambles around the rubble and begins to collect things – trousers, buckets, a pressure-cooker, various utensils. She picks one object at a time, goes down to the foot of the mound and places it on the ground. She lines up the objects. She is particular about what she takes but there is no clear pattern to what she chooses except that she does not collect any dolls or other such objects that would belong to a child of her age.

  She seems happy in her freedom, running, hopping and dancing in the compound. She joins a group of children who are playing a game Akhila does not fully understand. Are their parents, too, buried?

  Akhila, finally, decides to walk over the rubble even though she is certain that her every step would squeeze a breath out of someone deep inside. There is a huddle of soldiers on the concrete slab where they had received the signal.

  The leader of the squad from the Air Defence Unit is a large jovial man whom everybody calls Major. He has the habit of drawing a soldier to his chest and speaking softly to him as though he was about to say something dirty. He does that to male residents too.

  The Major’s plan is to drill a narrow tunnel through the debris, about thirty feet long in his rough calculation, to the location of the survivor, who is probably below ground level. A lanky soldier would crawl into the tunnel and pull the person out.

  SHE CAN SEE four stray dogs lurking around, sniffing things, preparing for the inevitability of crawling into crevices and seeking the sources of the odours that are yet to reach the humans. The soldiers have been driving away the dogs all day but they keep returning. In the morning they had remembered to be diffident, but they are now changing character. It must be the smell. Do they sense that a master species has fallen? When a soldier tries to drive one away, the mongrel stands his ground and growls, but he eventually relents. This is going to change in a few hours as the bodies embedded in the debris continue to decay. In the night, the dogs will crawl in.

  The soldiers have taken hours to make the tunnel. They are not searching for any more survivors. They have accepted that there is only one. All activity is concentrated around the small dark hole on the slope of the debris hill. The mouth of the hole is about two-and-a-half feet across. Three soldiers have been taking turns crawling in and out of the tunnel with heavy equipment.

  The soldiers have cordoned off a small area around the hole by arranging pieces of furniture they found in the debris and tying them together – among them sofas and beds made to stand, and several cupboards. Within the ring are the Major and most of his team. When the soldiers had set up the barricades, there was a mob of reporters but their numbers have since thinned. Any other day, such a rescue would be news but not today. Damodarbhai has won. There were fireworks outside, and lots of chanting and screaming.

  A soldier who had crawled into the tunnel about thirty minutes ago is yet to emerge. It is the longest a soldier has been in the hole.

  When he finally appears he is covered in white dust. He is lean and long and it appears that he was designed to crawl into narrow tunnels. He almost runs to the Major.

  ‘There is a man, sir,’ he says. ‘About thirty feet into the tunnel, there is a man lodged in the debris. He is conscious but he is in a very bad way. Fortunately he is not inverted. He is in a lying position, sir, his back resting on a fridge, legs straight. His head is slightly raised as though he is on a thick pillow. That’s good. A bit of him is buried in debris. Across his legs is a heavy concrete beam. Between the beam and his legs is the leg of another person. A smashed leg. It looks like the leg of a woman, it is wearing an anklet. Must be his wife. The rest of her is buried in the debris. She is surely dead, sir. I think he knows. His eyes are open, sir, he is half-conscious and speaks a few words. I could not get close to him, sir, because there was no space for me to go past the concrete beam on top of his legs. I can see his face but I cannot reach him. But, sir, I know he is mumbling something. I can’t hear him but he is saying something.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ the Major asks.

  ‘We should feed him glucose and fruit juice immediately and begin scraping the beam to extricate him. Then we tie a rope around his feet and pull him out.’

  ‘Let’s get down to it then.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We can also chop his legs off, sir.’

  The Major considers this.

  The soldier says, ‘We have to chop off the beam or his legs, sir. If we cut his legs off, we can bring him up.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It would be easier to chop his legs than the concrete beam, sir. It would be faster.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ the soldier says. ‘But we have to decide right now or it will be too late. The problem is, the way he is positioned, I would have to put my hand through the space between the beam and the roof and run the saw. There is no space to do it well. And it’s too risky, sir. None of us have the training in that sort of a thing. And we will not be able to give him anaesthesia. He has been in there for nearly six hours without food or water. So if we are chopping his legs off we do it clumsily and without giving him anaesthesia.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘I couldn’t figure that out. He is covered in dust. He could be forty, fifty. I don’t know, sir. But the anaesthesia may kill him. And we don’t know yet if he is diabetic and all that.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There is a problem, sir. Whatever we decide to do, we need to first feed him glucose. I will not be able to reach his mouth. I can only throw the packets on him, but I don’t know if he can move his hands or if he can even follow instructions. I think he has to be fed, sir, I don’t think he has much time.’

  ‘You’re saying a soldier would not be able to crawl over the beam and reach his mouth.’

  ‘There is not much space between the beam and the roof of the tunnel, sir. But a little boy would be able to crawl in.’

  ‘We can’t send a minor in, the whole world will fuck us in our ass.’

  ‘We can send a little man in, sir, a civilian midget or something? A civilian midget who is very fit. Or…’ The soldier’s face brightens as though it has only occurred to him. ‘Or a woman, sir. A strong, small woman might be able to crawl over to him, sir, but if she is not very flexible she can get stuck inside.’

  The Major makes some calls. Forget a small fit woman; there are no women in the first place in the reserve force of the Indian army in the entire state of Maharashtra. There are no women in the city’s fire department. They now try to trace a female cop, small, strong and flexible, who would not ask them to fuck off.

  Akhila takes another look at the dark hole. It is terrifying. There is a good chance that the rescuer, too, would be buried in. It would take just another mild tremor. But there is a man deep inside, he is dying slowly, fully aware of that
perhaps and of the fact that his wife’s lifeless limb is over him, and he has no space even to thrash about in fear and desperation. He is probably the father of one of the little children milling about. She can give him a long shot at survival. All she needs is courage. Or she can just walk away, which would be a reasonable decision, even a smart decision.

  She goes to the Major and says, ‘I can try.’

  The Major takes a good look at her. She had thought she would have to be persuasive but the man does not dismiss any idea thrown at him.

  ‘She might be able to crawl over the beam, sir,’ the soldier says. ‘She is small.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ the Major asks her.

  ‘I’m an athlete, a trained rock climber, a doctor.’

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘I’ve never practised but I am as good as a doctor.’

  ‘Going into a tunnel is a bit risky, you know that.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s just twenty feet. I can do it.’

  ‘Thirty feet,’ the soldier says. ‘It’s not a steep tunnel, most of it is flat but it gets narrow in places.’

  ‘I’ll be able to do it,’ she says.

  ‘Crawling into a tunnel is not as easy as it seems,’ the Major says, but he is hoping she would still do it.

  ‘I’ve done it before. I’ve crawled.’

  ‘In a tunnel like this?’

  ‘No, but I know I can crawl into a tunnel. My muscles know.’

  ‘Things can collapse, things can fall on your head. There is probably a gas leak.’

  ‘I’ll do this, Major.’

  ‘How many push-ups can you do?’ the Major asks. She laughs. He is serious.

  ‘Twenty in one go,’ she says, which is a fact.

  ‘Man push-ups or woman push-ups?’

  ‘Man push-ups.’

  The soldiers laugh, but that is because they believe her.

  The lean soldier draws a diagram for her. The tunnel is a gentle gradient of varying width, but towards the end it gets a bit steep and at the very end it gets so narrow that she will be able to pass only sideways. Then there is the pod where the man is stuck under the beam. Once she clears the beam, there will be just enough space for her to crawl over him and feed him.

  The good news is that the soldiers are carrying impressive Israeli medical kits. She has been rummaging through their stuff. They even have bone marrow syringes. This means she does not have to find the man’s veins to give him intravenous injections. She will be able to infuse saline into him by stabbing the needle into his bone.

  The word spreads that the young woman who was beaten up a few hours ago by the patriots is setting out to crawl into a tunnel to feed a dying resident in a final stand of the rescuers. The families of the missing hope it is their man who has been found. They begin to gather around the ring of furniture that guards the mouth of the tunnel. They are not allowed inside the ring.

  The soldiers fit Akhila with a helmet, a headlamp, a walkie-talkie and they attach a small bag to her stomach that contains fluids and medication. There is a discussion among the soldiers about tying a rope around her waist, but they eventually decide against it. The rope would tether her to the outside world and help the soldiers pull her out if she faints or is incapacitated in other ways, but it would also increase her circumference and she may not be able to squeeze through the final crevice. She is warned several times that she cannot be in the tunnel for more than a few minutes because the oxygen levels are very low. As she kneels outside the hole, the Major says, ‘Forgot to ask you. Do you know how to crawl backwards?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you feel giddy, you have to crawl in reverse immediately and head back. You can’t turn around, you know that, there is no space to turn around. You have to crawl backwards.’

  It had not occurred to her. ‘And,’ the Major says, ‘if you feel giddy, don’t wait for it to pass. It may not pass.’

  She crawls into the hole, scraping her arms on the rough debris.

  6

  A Patriarch’s Review

  PROFESSOR VAID, IN a light half-sleeve shirt and loose trousers, and smelling of herbs, is ready to leave. But he is very early, like old men. It will be a while before the vehicle arrives to take him to the airport.

  The chatter of television experts fills his small ascetic home that does not have sounds of its own. The Sangh has won, the Hindu rule is coming. What more can they say? Impoverished women, Muslims and the low castes have voted against Damodarbhai because he terrifies them. They are wise. The patriarchs will have to work harder to confuse them.

  He sits in the coir armchair directly under the ceiling fan and hopes that the apparition of the unhappy cook, with his enormous paunch and slow wounded walk, does not pass through the living room. Vaid imagines a more aesthetic presence in his home. It is a woman but not an old woman. Someone more tiring. A young formidable daughter? She has an athletic frame and an incapacity for endearing meekness, and despite being his daughter her world is framed in English. They are foes, they have to be foes. What must they fight over? About her decadence, perhaps? But are young women as decadent as they claim these days, are they as sexual as men? Can they ever be? The woman who is a lot like a man has to be the thought-experiment of men, like communism, free trade, the Big Bang, black holes and equality, which the world has taken too seriously.

  But why does he wish to believe in the impossibility of sex-crazed women? He does not have a daughter.

  If he had been in the care of women, he might not have ended up in such a house. With its narrow doorways and foolish arches, it is hideous; its exteriors are worse. The Sangh had conceived it as a guesthouse. The patriots who were given the task decided that it had to be modern but Indian, which is an expectation on a par with the virgin prostitute. The result was a two-storeyed irregular thing whose ground floor has large rectangular glass windows, and the floor above has contiguous saffron arches like the gums of a toothpaste model. There are slim pillars here and there. As it is not colonial nor Hindu nor Islamic nor beautiful in other ways, it is familiar to most patriots as a place that is contemporary. Much thought goes into the ugliness of the great republic. But he can endure it.

  Perhaps he should search for something to read instead of dreaming of formidable daughters. He only re-reads these days, but not literature any more, which is a flea market of frailties. People love literature without realizing that such a love is a surrender to the tastes of alpha cultures, patriarchs and leftists. But millions choose to surrender, unflagging in their search for a mention of themselves in the works of others; something, anything that reminds them that the world, despite everything, is about them. Most of reading is probably a mere selfie. But he accepts that people look for their modest biographies in far uglier places than literature – in astrology, blood reports, lipid profiles.

  He wonders what Miss Iyer thinks of literature. She has not posted a prank on a novelist yet, but there is one that comes close.

  In the film The Most Expensive House in the World, Miss Iyer stands on the Kemp’s Corner Flyover in Mumbai. She is in tights and an oversized shirt, its sleeves folded, and she is wearing a wig of wiry grey-and-black hair resembling the coiffure of Arundhati Roy.

  It is early morning, the traffic is thin, the air is clear and there is sea breeze on the young glowing face of Miss Iyer. In the background looms Antilia, the gigantic home of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. It is probably the most expensive home a human has ever built, Miss Iyer tells us. ‘And I am about to read a portion from an essay by Arundhati Roy, a writer of Indian origin who actually lives in India, how strange is that.’

  The camera shifts to a view of Antilia. The voice of Miss Iyer says, ‘This is what Arundhati Roy wrote about the skyscraper home you see in the frame.’ She begins to read a piece of prose by Roy, her voice and intonation remarkably close to Roy’s English delivery. She tells us how Roy stared back at Antilia, and how funny Roy found the idea of a home that was twenty-seven floors hig
h, with its own gardens and helipads, and its own weather, and six hundred servants. Roy wonders why Ambani was proud and not embarrassed or terrified to own a home like this in a poor nation.

  The film cuts to Delhi, to a lush lane in the prime real estate of Jor Bagh. The viewer is transported to the forbidding gates of an enormous modern mansion, which contains the luxurious flat of Arundhati Roy. Miss Iyer is standing on the road with a malnourished woman in a sari and her feral half-naked little daughter whose hair is the colour of cow dung. The security guard, who is seated in a chair outside the gates, looks on with immense interest. Miss Iyer asks the woman, in atrocious Hindi, for her views on the elegant mansion.

  ‘It’s so big, so big, such a big house,’ the woman says. ‘What more can I say? And such big windows. So much wood, so much stone. I think the weather inside must be very cool. That’s what people tell me – that the weather inside such homes is very cool. And look at the pretty trees, the plants. So many plants. What more can I say? What can I say about the homes of big people?’

  What Mukesh Ambani’s home is to Arundhati Roy, Roy’s home is to a malnourished woman. So? The accusation of hypocrisy in an Indian socialist and Marxist is not exactly a high intellectual grouse. Miss Iyer is surely not taking all this trouble to laugh at a minor human flaw that should ideally be declared a fundamental human right.

  He has been trying to understand Miss Iyer’s complexity. The victims of her pranks are not merely liberals, but heroes of the left, heroes who are light as feather. In the battle between presumed good and presumed evil, good is hiring poorly. Does Miss Iyer see the plain fact? Evil is an equal-opportunity society where the darkest rise. Liberal heroes, on the other hand, are made in a very different sort of place, a place where the gentry suffocate honest competition. Here the midgets rise. What chance do they have against naturally selected arch-villains?