by Manu Joseph
The Sangh is grey. It is not constricted by unnatural moralities, hence has exceptional freedoms to get things done.
7
Around 1:30 p.m.
THIS IS A RARE reversal of social roles in the republic. Normally, in circumstances like this, people like her would employ people like the man in the debris to do all the crawling.
A few feet into the tunnel her shoulders begin to ache, but it is not an unfamiliar pain. She was worried that the attack on her may have left her with injuries that she may have underestimated, but she seems a lot like her usual self. She is strong, she knows that, and she has a genius core.
There is a powerful stink in the tunnel, a damp revolting smell. The air is particulate. There are electric wires hanging from the roof and she hopes the first thing the firemen did was cut off the power supply. Her chest moves over something stiff, something hard and rubbery in a very human way. She feels as though she is being groped. She looks down to train the headlamp on the object.
It is the hand of a buried human.
In her panic she bangs her helmet against the roof and thrashes her body about trying to turn around, which she realizes she cannot. She begins to feel giddy. She stops moving, and calms her breath. It has been only seconds since she entered the tunnel and if she passes out now it would be a while before the soldiers realize something has gone wrong.
She begins a slow backward crawl. When she emerges from the tunnel the soldiers help her out and make her lie on her back. They don’t say anything, which is a relief. They probably did not expect this to work in the first place. She glares at the soldier who had drawn her the map of the tunnel. ‘There is a human hand jutting out, you know,’ she says.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘I forgot to tell you.’
‘Tell me everything.’
‘That’s the only thing I forgot.’
The soldiers laugh.
They are surprised when she prepares to crawl again. This time she is a bit faster. She shuts her eyes to endure the moment when her body will slither over the hand. The moment passes, she crawls on. She hopes the roof will not cave in. Everything above her is an accidental arrangement of loose slabs of concrete. Her walkie-talkie crackles.
‘Okay?’ the Major asks.
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘As you get deeper, we may not be able to communicate,’ he says.
When she spots the far end of the tunnel she realizes that it is narrower than she had imagined. A few feet from the crevice she sees the man in the light of her headlamp. He is exactly as the soldier had mentioned. Lying with his legs straight, a concrete beam over his knees. Squashed between him and the beam is the naked leg of a woman. The rest of the woman, if it exists, is buried. The man’s head is covered in dust and blood. He has a moustache. His head is raised, which is lucky for him. His aimless eyes stare at a spot that has no special meaning. He looks calm and lost. There is not much room above him. This has to be the worst that can happen to a person.
The lean soldier was almost certain that she would be able to squeeze herself between the beam and the roof. When she looks at the gap, she wonders if she is really that small. But if she manages to get past the gap, there is enough room inside for her to take care of him.
When she reaches his naked feet, she shouts, ‘Can you hear me?’ She says it first in Marathi, then in Hindi. No real Indian would use English to break ice with a man buried in debris; it is as though such calamities can happen only to the vernacular. His lips move but she cannot hear him.
His feet are cold and the pulse is slow, but not as slow as she had feared. She has a clear view of only inches of his lower limbs. The rest is under the beam. She tries not to look at the leg of the woman, but then she stares at it to get used to the corpse. She wonders if the woman was his wife or his child.
She feels a portion of the man’s tibia, sprays antiseptic and stabs the bone marrow needle into the bone. And she twists the syringe’s grip until she feels the needle has reached the marrow. There is no reaction from him. He continues to mumble as she slowly injects the saline. She repeats the procedure on the other leg.
She takes out a packet of glucose water from her pouch and throws it over the beam, to his side. She discards the pouch, and crawls over the beam one leg first. She clears the gap just about, slithers on to the other side of the beam, and crawls over the man. There is space just for two tightly squeezed bodies. She has never crawled over a man without a sexual mission.
His body does not appear to register the weight, but his lips stop moving. She does not know the extent of his internal injuries, she might be killing him by bearing down on him. Her face is now just an inch over his. His eyes are wide open but they are not focused on her. It is as though they are observing something deep within himself. Despite the layers of dust and dried blood, she can tell he is not very old. He is probably in his late thirties or early forties, and in good shape.
‘Can you hear me,’ she says in Hindi. ‘What’s your name?’
Maybe he is from the south? She speaks to him in Tamil, and in such bad Malayalam that it would be a torture to a dying Malayalee.
‘Blink if you hear me,’ she says.
He does not respond. His breath is shallow. She cannot be on top of him for too long. She is also blocking his air supply. She squeezes the glucose from the Tetra Pak into his mouth. He drinks, which is a relief. His body figures that sugar has arrived and it shudders in desperation. He gulps it down, and begins to mumble. He is certainly saying something. His voice has no strength, he speaks from his lips, there is no movement in his throat. He is probably saying, ‘Get off my chest, bitch.’ She puts her ear to his mouth.
‘What time is it? What time is it? What time is it?’ That’s what he says. He mumbles in lousy Mumbaiya Hindi with a heavy slur, but he says ‘time’ in English.
It is odd that he must ask her a question. Of all the things he can say, a question, and that too ‘what time is it?’ There is no doubt in her mind that he is delirious and non-responsive to instructions. He is in no position to follow commands, let alone ask a question because a question seeks an answer and his mind cannot be at that level of communication. Yet he asks, again, ‘What time is it?’
‘One in the afternoon,’ she says.
As she had expected he repeats the question. She yells the answer. That makes him go silent. But then he repeats the question one more time. Then his lips deliver a different set of words. She puts her ear to his mouth. At first she feels he is not making any sense but slowly his words gather force and meaning.
8
A Telephone Conversation
PROFESSOR VAID’S PHONE has been ringing all day. He has ignored all the calls but the man whose name now flashes on the screen is too important. And, he always has good reasons to call.
‘Professor.’
‘AK.’
‘Can we talk?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Delhi. I can’t be anywhere else today. Have you been watching the news?’
‘Should we call it news? It’s the most predictable day of our lives.’
‘Women still hate us, Professor.’
‘You must be referring to the election results.’
AK has a nasal laugh. And he laughs often. By his laughter alone one would not guess he is a national treasure.
‘Do you have the time to talk, Professor?’
‘Go on.’
‘This morning a building collapsed in Mumbai.’
‘Strange you should say that.’
‘Why is it strange?’
‘A boy in the shakha said the same thing a few hours ago. A building has fallen in Mumbai. It seems to be the most insignificant news today but looks like everyone is going to tell me about it.’
‘Why did the boy tell you about the building?’
‘It’s nothing important.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It really is not worth your time, AK. A building fell, so
?’
‘There were mild tremors in Mumbai. It’s possible that several old buildings have fallen. Actually that can’t be true. That would be big news.’
‘It doesn’t matter how many buildings fell.’
‘It doesn’t matter. What’s interesting, Professor, is that the guys in the Intelligence Bureau are very excited.’
‘What happened?’
‘There is a man trapped in the debris of the fallen building. He is probably dying. But he has been mumbling. He drifts in and out of consciousness, but when he is awake he mumbles.’
‘What does he mumble?’
‘That’s the thing. At first, he was saying, “What’s the time?”, “What’s the time?” The same thing over and over again. Then he said that a man is about to leave his home. He would be carrying explosives on him. He is going to blow up things today.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is that man going?’
‘I don’t know much right now, Professor. I just got off the phone. I have an informant who is with the Crime Branch but he is not on the site. He is on his way to the location. He is on the phone with some people who are on the site. So, what I have is not first-hand information. I am still trying to grow eyes and ears on the site. The details are very, very sketchy.’
‘This man in the debris, AK. He is not saying someone is on his way to plant a bomb. He is saying a man is about to set out. He is saying a man is about to leave his home.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s very specific.’
‘Yes. He is vague about some things, specific about some things. But that’s how people are even when they are not buried in debris.’
‘How does this guy, this guy who is in the debris, know about the terrorist?’
‘You may have guessed, Professor.’
‘He is involved?’
‘It looks that way. This is how I see it: a terror coordinator or an accomplice was at his home this morning. He was supposed to join another man and blow up stuff. But his building collapsed. Now he is in the debris, in some sort of a final delirium, so he is blurting out real-time information about the movements of a terrorist.’
‘I think he is just blabbering. Maybe in his final moments he has remembered a film he saw with a beautiful woman.’
‘No, Professor, I think he is giving away the details of a terror plot.’
‘You see terror in everything, AK. That’s your job.’
‘I am just a retired cop.’
‘You’re the next National Security Advisor.’
‘That’s confidential information.’
‘So you’re taking the dying man in the debris seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘The building, is it in a Muslim ghetto?’
‘No. It’s Prabhadevi. As Hindu as it gets, but you know Mumbai. There are all kinds of people in places that nobody would guess are places.’
‘AK, there is a man in the debris and he is saying something. That much I can understand. But who is listening?’
‘I don’t know, yet. But what I imagine is that the man is stuck under a huge concrete slab and a group of rescuers, maybe firemen and soldiers, are able to hear him rambling.’
‘And he’s saying that there is going to be some fireworks today. That’s a tribute to this day, isn’t it?’
‘I’m getting a call, Professor. I am going to call you back.’
A few minutes later, AK calls again.
‘Professor, can we talk?’
‘Go on.’
‘My guy is yet to reach the site but he called with some information. We don’t know the name of our man in the debris, yet. He is not responding to questions. I think he is slipping away. But he has been mentioning a name. We presume that’s the name of the man who is about to blow up something somewhere. Jamal.’
‘They’re all called Jamal.’
AK lets out his nasal laugh.
‘Jamal lives in Mumbra,’ he says.
‘According to the man in the debris?’
‘Yes.’
‘How far is Mumbra from Mumbai?’
‘It’s a distant suburb. Two hours from the building that collapsed.’
‘A Muslim hole?’
‘Yes.’
‘So our Jamal is going someplace.’
‘He has not yet left home, according to our man.’
‘If our friend is under a concrete slab, as you guess, a whole lot of people, not just the firemen and soldiers, must be hearing him. Isn’t the information a bit too sensitive for too many people, too many bystanders.’
‘That’s my concern, too, but something is totally bizarre about the whole thing.’
‘What?’
‘Not many people seem to know about this. A lot of very senior cops in Mumbai don’t know. The media is definitely clueless. There appears to be some kind of control in place.’
AK says he will call again, and he does. This time he is calmer.
‘Professor.’
‘I was waiting for your call.’
‘I have six men on the site now. Cops, Bureau guys, one Major. They’re all feeding me. Their information is now consistent.’
‘So what is going on?’
‘After the building fell, the firemen poked around a bit, but then the soldiers flew in from Pune in a chopper. They were carrying acoustic life-detectors. And they detected the vibrations of a man deep in the debris. They dug a tunnel and they found their man.’
‘So that’s why very few people know about this.’
‘Yes, but there is a complication. The man is stuck under a heavy beam. He is in such a position that a soldier cannot reach his upper body because the gap between the beam and the roof of the tunnel is very narrow. So, they sent a girl in.’
‘A civilian?’
‘Yes, a civilian but the athletic type. She is a doctor, too. Perfect.’
‘She is a doctor?’
‘A student but postgraduate type.’
‘Alright.’
‘The man is very weak, he is very, very faint. The girl has to put her ear to his mouth.’
‘So everything we know, AK, is what the girl has been telling the soldiers?’
‘Yes.’
‘There is nothing that anyone else has heard. It’s all just the girl telling us?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’m trying to understand. That’s all.’
‘You asked the same question twice, Professor.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘What’s on your mind, Professor?’
‘Nothing important. Go on.’
‘That’s it for now.’
‘He has not said more?’
‘Nothing more. One Jamal is about to leave his house. He is going to blow up something somewhere. We don’t know the place yet.’
‘Jamal who lives in Mumbra. That’s all we know?’
‘Jamal. Mumbra. Yes.’
‘Jamal. Mumbra. Is that enough for the cops to be on to him?’
‘Depends on the intel they already have and the men they are stringing upside down right now. They might be on to him already.’
9
Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous
THERE ARE FACES only an Indian can make. In his short life of twenty-eight years, Mukundan has never breathed the air of any other nation but he knows there are faces only an Indian can make. Like that baffled face when he is shocked by the most rational outcome of his own actions. He crosses the road like a cow, and he is startled by a truck. A vehicle on the road? How? He walks across the railway track, and he finds a train hurtling towards him. A train on a railway track? He is stunned. Cops who do not wear bulletproof vests break into a house to fight militants, and they are shot in their paunches. They stagger out looking bewildered. That baffled face, when boys fall off trains because they were dangling from the doorways, when illegal homes built on infirm soil co
llapse, when pilgrims are squashed in annual stampedes inside narrow temples.
But then the foes of the republic, too, are delivered the face. Sooner or later they all find it. Enemies of humanity, criminals, psychotics. The republic is a giant prank. It lures all into believing that they can do anything and get away with it. And they do get away with a lot. But then one day, inevitably, surprise.
Mukundan is waiting on the street for a man. If he is waiting like this, in a small private car hired by the Intelligence Bureau, six licence plates stashed in the boot, it means someone has run out of luck. You can say Mukundan is a bearer of surprise.
He combs his hair, studying the rear-view mirror. He enjoys the act of combing. It is meaningless and relaxing.
He is about a hundred metres away from the building where Jamal lives. Somewhere on the fourth floor, the top floor, Jamal is probably chatting with his wife. There is much love in that house. That is the information. Jamal has three little sons. It would be so simple if men like Jamal were bachelor psychopaths. But they usually are not.
Mukundan is at the wheel of the WagonR, which is parked on the edge of the narrow bustling street. He has lived in Mumbai almost all his life, for twenty-five years, but he has never been to this hellhole before; he has never even uttered the word ‘Mumbra’ ever. Mumbra, it turns out, is an enchanted place where fragrant streams flow, divine food lines the alleys and wild lovers romp on fruits. But this is from a pig’s point of view.
Hindus would say it is a filthy colony. When Hindus say that, it has a clear meaning.
‘Why are Muslims so filthy?’ Damodarbhai said a few weeks ago, standing on a stage. Fifty thousand people burst out laughing. The crowds cheered him on to say more and he gave them a long analysis of why they are filthy. He said, ‘The Hindu man and wife abide by our family planning slogan: We Two, Ours Two.’ The crowds clapped as though they were all joint inventors of contraception, but they were so excited because they knew what was coming. ‘A Muslim man takes four wives, and what do they all say in the bedroom, “We two, ours twenty-five.” One day, my friends, there will be more Muslims in our country than us.’
