Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous

by Manu Joseph

  The world is filled with people who wish to impress when they speak. It is not a bad idea at all but there are advantages in being underestimated. That, too, is the art of conversation.

  No one seems to have any clue about the girl. Mukundan has no doubt that Jamal and the girl are very familiar with each other. The only thing he is not sure about is whether they have met without clothes. Jamal does not have a sister. Maybe she is a cousin, a niece, or an employee.

  If they are lovers, what is it that she sees in a man like Jamal, a married thirty-five-year-old man with kids who is stupid enough to be shadowed by the Bureau? What do women see in most men anyway? You look at girls laughing in the company of their men and you would think humour is a very common male talent, which it is not. Shouldn’t love be the reward for the clever alone? The rest must receive only loyalty, which is a very different thing. But the world does not work that way. But then, to imagine love as high tribute is to fall for the historical lie of lovers. Love is probably a lower emotion than its reputation. That thought always comforts him.

  He is the sort of man who, if he ever gets entrapped in love, would turn out to be a good eternal husband. He knows that, and he fears his own captivity. At a level of living it is smart to be a good husband because it is smart to be good. He understands morals as a system of logic. In most situations there is usually only one right path and millions of wrong turns. And everyone, in a given era, in a given place, knows what is right. If you forget your time, if you forget your place, there will be trouble.

  Maybe he is a bit naïve when it comes to women and sex. When his niece was born, after he saw her in the cradle, he could not masturbate for a whole week. Sex seemed like such a depraved act of violence. With the angelic face of his infant niece in his head, he even started having dreams about the general welfare of women. And in his waking hours attempted another poem. About a reporter with the Malayala Manorama, who has got the greatest journalistic scoop of the century. He has stumbled upon a stunning secret that is eventually headlined, ‘All Lost and Stolen Girls in the History of Humanity Revealed to Have Been Forced into Stenography’. The story has an extraordinary impact on society, especially fathers, who lose their fears. They release their girls from their hawkish vigil. Girls suddenly find the freedom to roam their towns, like boys, and they begin to thrive.

  Mukundan has worked hard many nights on the poem, but the words just won’t come.

  AS USUALLY HAPPENS to a discreetly pursued car, the blue hatchback begins to assume bleak human qualities. It looks stupid, debased and tragic, its haste comical because it is only racing towards a carefully laid-out trap. A little blue car duped by the republic, a young intelligence officer on its tail. How did these fools get into this situation when life is actually somewhat beautiful, and easy too, no matter what writers say?

  He has always found the shared tragedy of a couple heartbreaking. Something particularly sorrowful about the togetherness of man and woman in misfortune, even if they are not lovers. He would not want to look at their faces when their destruction begins, in a few hours.

  He wonders why the Bureau has planned to capture Jamal this way. Why not just pluck him at home, or when he goes to the market? There would be too many witnesses? And, maybe they want to take him with his supplies, whatever it is that he is carrying in that bag or in the boot of the car. Also, Boss wants to know if he is going to pick up any interesting characters along the way. Apart from a young woman, that is. Men, dangerous men, that is what the Bureau is looking for.

  Mukundan hopes a miracle will occur, that the Indica will stop on the highway and the girl will get away. She is probably only getting a ride to the home of a relative, who lives in one of those gloomy grey buildings by the highway.

  The phone rings in his shirt pocket. It is Boss. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Is the girl still there?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We have to extract her before we take the car.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘We have about five hours to do that, if they don’t stop anywhere. But we can’t have a situation where Jamal changes his plan.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘We just want the girl out of the car, that’s all. Nothing else should change. We want him to be on course, we want him to come to us. We’re waiting.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘But we don’t want the girl.’

  ‘Got it, sir.’

  ‘We extract the girl without Jamal changing his plan.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘If you have a plan let me know. Don’t intervene until then. If things change, call.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘The thing is, Jamal might collect more people along the way. We are interested in those people.’

  ‘Jamal threw his luggage in the back seat, sir.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He is not expecting anyone in the back seat, sir. Or maybe there are a lot of things in the boot, sir.’

  ‘Let’s wait for a while, let’s see if any men board. And then take a call.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘We have to extract that girl.’

  Mukundan can see why the presence of the girl is a problem. The Bureau wishes to take Jamal to a safe house, get all the juice out of him, or flip him into an informer. What use are terrorists in prison? The Bureau can abduct shady men and keep them in illegal detention for months until they are of no use. Then they are handed over to formal custody. Sometimes they die. The Bureau is allowed to get away with that because there are things a nation must do. But it would be messy to abduct a young woman who is probably just another girl in the company of the wrong man in the wrong place. If she were to be left in the car, she would be a witness to the abduction. If she were to be abducted, she would have to be seriously implicated in terror or eliminated because illegal confinement of a woman is not the same as that of a man. There would be hell to pay. And if the abduction does not go smoothly and there is a gun battle, a dead young Muslim girl would draw too much attention.

  Mukundan knows what the Boss is thinking – if the girl is in the car when Jamal is abducted, she is going down with him. The Bosses would have no choice. That, or call off the operation. But the Bosses are not the sort of men who would call off an operation just to be fair to a girl.

  What is required is that Laila just vanishes from the car. Actually, that is not a good summary of his assignment. If she disappears into thin air, Jamal would be baffled by the magic and he might cry ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ and abort his journey. What is required is that Laila leaves the car according to the laws of physics, and Jamal still carries on. What must Mukundan do?

  His mind grows quieter. Outside, the world is ugly and prosperous. Giant factories stand where there used to be green fields. The air is grey and people are in the spells of purpose. He has entered Gujarat. Damodarbhai country. A land of merchants where artistes are rare, at least among men.

  14

  Laila

  EVERYONE IN THE class probably saw the blue car. It is good for Aisha’s reputation if people know her sister travels by car some days. She wishes they also got to know that the man in the car was once a Hindu Brahmin who converted to Islam. That is even better than white people converting to Islam because white people are like Brahmins to black and yellow and brown people, but white people who convert to Islam are usually just crazy. But the Brahmins, they are never crazy. As in a doctor would never say they are crazy. They always know what they are doing and they are very clever. But that is all Aisha wishes the class to know about Jamal. The rest of him is not so nice. At least what her mother says about him is not.

  A week ago, after dinner, when she and Laila went for a walk on the terrace, Aisha had asked what exactly Jamal did. They went in small circles, watching the ocean of lights that surrounded them. On a clear day, they can see the lights of Mumbai. They love the city, the crush of people and the shine of the rich.

 
; ‘He does many things,’ Laila said. ‘Like me.’ And she chuckled fondly at some faraway memory as though he was a shop window in Mumbai.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘He lays cable. And he is working on starting a perfume business. And many other things. Do you know what satphones are?’

  ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘They really do.’

  ‘Satphones are satellite phones.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t need a sim card for them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But they are banned because cops won’t be able to trace calls made on satphones. So he has been trying to get the government to let him bring some satphones here.’

  ‘Legally?’

  ‘Yes, legally.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He says some fat businessmen want satphones. He is helping them with permission and stuff like that.’

  ‘I hope it’s not something shady.’

  ‘Everything is a bit shady in our country. You can’t do anything straight.’

  ‘You don’t go with him when he is about to do something shady.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Does he really beat up people?’

  Laila laughed, but she nodded.

  Mother Taliban has discouraged Laila from being seen in public with him (‘People have mouths’), but Laila does what she feels like. Jamal has dropped her home a few times and when something like that happens in Rashid Complex at least a thousand people get to know. At all times there are people in balconies, behind windows, on terraces and on the ground too. Once, when Laila was walking Aisha back home from school, as she does sometimes, a funny thought occurred to her and she made Aisha take out her protractor. They held the protractor at arm’s length and found people in every angle, except angles 80 to 110.

  There is much talk in Rashid Complex about Jamal and Laila even though there is an official story about the two. It is a sort of story that begins with the deathbed scene.

  Aisha is suspicious of deathbed stories because it is all very convenient that the main character is dead. The story is that two years ago, when their father was dying slowly in the general ward after the accident, he called Jamal to his side. He was apparently his business partner. And appointed him Laila’s father, and asked him to pay for her college education. So Jamal is Laila’s guardian. Aisha wants to believe that because it is sweet, and safe. But it is not a very convincing story. She had never seen Jamal until a few months ago. And nobody remembers the deathbed scene except for Mother. Also, the story appears to have become public knowledge only a few months ago.

  Laila refuses to talk about Jamal and she pretends to get angry when her sisters try to dig.

  Aisha wonders why a devout bearded Muslim man, however wonderful and kind, would ask a much younger man to be the father of a pretty teenager. That’s creepy and there are things that even men know are creepy.

  Mother probably invented the story so that people don’t sneer at Laila. This guardian business is exactly the kind of half-baked story that she would tell.

  15

  Damodarbhai

  THE MAN IN the saffron loincloth carries a large vat up the stairs. It is heavy, filled with copies of the Koran in Urdu, Arabic and English, whatever he could lay his hands on. He places the vat on the terrace and surveys the low skyline of Faridabad. In all those homes people know that a new emperor has come to rule, a beautiful glowing man with a silver beard and a fifty-six-inch chest; a man who closely resembles the most famous of Mohanjo Daro relics – the sculpture known to informed people as ‘Bearded Man’. The emperor is a prophecy of the great ancient Hindus. He is half-history-half-biology, that is what Damodarbhai is.

  Among the copies of the Koran in the vat is a small bottle of kerosene, which he empties over the books. He throws a light and watches the books burn. An intense joy fills him as the books, tortured and helpless, are deformed. He begins to chant the name of the emperor as he has done every week in the past five years. ‘DaMo, DaMo, DaMo.’

  The man in the loincloth is an insignificant lawyer, he does not deny that. He is one of the defeated men who stand in black costume outside a court to solicit work. Every evening, on his way back home, he buys copies of the Koran. He steals them when he can. Never in his life has he stolen anything else.

  It is not easy for him to hold that book. He has to quickly put it in a bag. What an object to touch. He has always hated Muslims, those untrustworthy reptilian men; those meek women in burkhas; those boys who go to madrasas, the way they look at women who are not inside a shroud; and that sick green of their culture; the diabolic medieval mosques of the psychotic conquerors from Arabia; and the Saudi-sponsored mosques and the nasal whine that comes from within. Wherever those wretched people are, in whichever corner of the world, there is trouble. That’s their nature, their training. For centuries, they butchered Hindus. In every riot, they butchered Hindus. It stopped twelve years ago, in 2002, when Damodarbhai showed them, finally, to whom the nation belongs. He has now come to rule all of Bharat.

  The lawyer got the idea of burning the Koran when a librarian in Jaipur was arrested for doing that. The librarian argued in court that the Koran was a regressive and dangerous book. If Indians are allowed to burn copies of the Indian Constitution, why must they not have the right to burn the Koran? The man was sentenced to a year in prison for hurting the feelings of Muslims.

  The enraged lawyer filed a petition demanding the right of Hindus to burn the Koran. The court threw his petition out. That evening he bought a copy of the Koran, went home, tore a page and burnt it in the kitchen, ignoring the questions of his wife, who had long acquired the habit of looking puzzled every time she saw him. He kept tearing pages and burning them. He felt an immense joy, a cosmic joy. In the days that followed, he began burning whole copies. But one evening he almost gutted the kitchen. After that incident he started going to the terrace. One day, as he was burning the copies, he was impelled by a higher force to remove all his clothes. When the neighbours, from other roofs, objected, he went back home and wore a langot. The neighbours never wondered what he was burning. The morons only see the dick of a man, not what he is about, what he wants, how he thinks, what he does.

  He has invented a ritual, that is what he has done. The fire in the vat grows, the books are now almost ashes. Matter that was trapped in medieval madness has been liberated.

  16

  A Telephone Conversation

  IN THE FRONT, beside the driver, there is a bodyguard with an automatic gun. It is not clear to Professor Vaid how one boy with a gun would be of any use when Islamic terrorists come to kill him, as they have promised several times. A pilot van of unarmed police is ahead. The farcical dwarf cavalcade of two vehicles moves at a brisk speed.

  The roads even in Nashik are good these days, at least half of them are. There are straight white median markings too. How swanky all this is. The nation was once a village and order, any kind of order, was considered a form of arrogance. Many years ago, he saw three half-naked workers painting a series of white lines on a highway. They had all the right tools but the lines were crooked. For miles. He asked them why they were drawing crooked lines. ‘We are not ruled by white bastards any more,’ one man said. ‘Why should the lines be straight?’

  Are Indians innately a crooked-line settlement that has been infected by a straight-line civilization?

  Vaid is on his way to the Mumbai airport, which is five hours away. In Delhi, he has a string of events including a lecture on ‘How the Left Steals Compassion, Fiction and the Wound’. Before his lecture, a woman in her thirties or forties, she would know the difference, will walk to the podium in a spectacular sari and say several flattering things about him, all of them true. He will begin his lecture with his usual words. ‘I’m too old to lie’, which is a lie in the first place. Then he will say the same things he has been saying for decades but in different words:

  ‘Activi
sm is always a feudal system in which nobodies are in the care of somebodies. It begins in a special moment when the elite of a system become the underclass in another system.

  ‘Intelligent women, for instance, in a system controlled by men. Affluent or talented blacks in a system of whites. High-caste Indians in America, rich Third-World Muslims in the West. Writers in Indian languages in a nation where English-language writers are culturally dominant. They are all elites of one system who become the underclass in another system. There are more. The progeny of old money, in an age where crass new money has overtaken them and made real estate too expensive for them. Mere millionaires in a system of multi-millionaires. Mere multimillionaires in a system of billionaires. Billionaires, too, in a system of highly intelligent machines whom they defame because they have no one else to fear. Gandhi, the affluent upper-class racist, in a system of whites who once denied him entry into a first-class train compartment. Ambedkar, who too was denied entry into a firstclass compartment, an elite low caste, in a system of Brahmins. It appears that if only passenger trains were equitable systems, many revolutions would not have occurred.

  ‘When the elite of a system become the underclass in another system, they search for a moral cause to restore balance of power. This is popularly known as activism. Upon finding the moral cause, the elite co-opt, enlist and employ naïve simpletons to fight the battle. Activism is always a retaliation of the elite, always couched in morals and always a feudal system where the strong employ the weak, the poor, the demented, the suicidal, the semi-literate and other losers of the society.’