by Manu Joseph
He is tired of his focus on the girl, tired of his compassion, which has been fierce for the past several hours. His compassion is not a farce but there is an honest question he has asked himself many times in his career: How does he endure such extraordinary miseries of people that he witnesses almost every day in his work life? And that, of course, leads to many unspeakable questions. He does not have a clear view of himself but he has seen the glint of evil many times in other men, very noble men. Activists and doctors and poets, who are in the proximity of human pain because they wish to be that close and watch. Do people really believe that sadists live alone in a dark room? He can take you where sadists are more likely to be found – in the very places where the miserable come for relief.
After about an hour, which is a very long break, he sees the couple walking back to the car. They appear to be having a conversation. When she speaks, only her head moves. Maybe that is the way she speaks, or it is because she is carrying plastic bags in both her hands? Jamal, too, is carrying such packets. It appears that they are carrying water bottles, meals and snacks. When they reach the car, Laila opens the back door and throws the bags on the back seat. Jamal does the same. The luggage that he had flung on the back seat when he left home is still there. If he was going to pick up some dangerous men, he would have put all those bags in the boot. It is possible that the boot is filled with interesting objects, but still, the way things are being dumped in the back suggests that the car is not collecting more humans any time soon. This, of course, is not a clinching argument. But if Boss is waiting to act until he is certain that Jamal is not going to pick up more friends, it is probably a waste of precious time.
Mukundan feels that the next time Laila takes a toilet break, a team of just three officers will be able to abduct Jamal in his own car. The girl will return from the toilet; she will be perplexed by the missing car and, of course, the missing man. She will be confused and angry, but safe.
As the blue hatchback moves down the parking lot, Mukundan loses sight of the car behind the concrete guardroom. A few seconds later he sees it in his rear-view as it merges into the highway traffic. As the Indica goes past him, he catches a glimpse of Laila. She is looking ahead and talking with an amused face as a wind blows her hair. All the windows are open. She takes off her dupatta and throws it on the back seat.
22
Laila
AS A MEMORY, Rashid Complex is always a grey place, which is strange because there are a million shades of colour here; there are colours on a single clothesline that even girls would not be able to name. Only the buildings are gloomy, and their little dark windows. Yet, as a memory of a place, at least in Aisha’s head, it is grey. Like you remember some creative women in cotton saris as women with large bindis, while in reality they wear small dots.
She is walking home, lugging her schoolbag down the broken roads that no one ever repairs. The street is filled with people and vehicles and cows and asses and pigs, the pavements are filthy as always and there is the smell of sorrow in the air; it is probably only rotting vegetables. She is a bit hurt that Laila did not tell her about her trip with Jamal. She likes the idea of Laila confiding in her but the fact is she never does. She could have told Aisha about the trip last night when they lay chatting.
It was a weird chat. The room was dark and everybody seemed to be asleep, even their mother who sometimes only pretends. Laila was, as she usually is when she is chatting into the night, lying with her head resting on her palm. Aisha was right next to her, the precious place. At some point, Laila fell silent, which was not unusual. That’s how all of them go to sleep. They would be talking one moment and the next moment someone drops off. But after a long silence, Aisha heard her say something in English – ‘radicalized’.
‘Are you dreaming?’ Aisha said.
‘Yesterday some very wise men on the TV were debating the very deep question – why are there not so many Indian Muslims who are “radicalized”.’
‘What do they mean?’
‘Why are Indian Muslims not going around planting bombs? That’s what they mean.’
‘What a dumb question.’
‘How many people in a million should become terrorists for a community to be considered radicalized? Nobody knows. But what they want to know is why Indian Muslims are not radicalized. It’s like a sweet surprise.’
Aisha giggled. Laila was being mean to wise men and that is always fun. ‘One white scholar said Indian Muslims are kind of nice because of the culture of India.’ Laila was now mimicking the white man’s English. ‘India is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic…’
‘Multi-grain.’
‘India is this, India is that. That’s why Indian Muslims are not terrorists. One man said, Indian Muslims have remained poor, and they have remained very religious, and their children study in madrasas but still they are not terrorists. How sweet, he seemed to say. How sweet.’
Aisha toyed with Laila’s feet with her own. She wanted to see Laila’s toenails, which are always bright red, but the room was too dark for that.
When Aisha gets home she finds a crowd of sisters, one lanky brother, one large mother who is cooking in the tiny kitchen, and two neighbours. The moment Mother sees her, she says, ‘Your beloved sister has left her mobile phone behind.’
‘Has she called?’
‘Not a single call. Not one call.’
‘You think she has forgotten our landline number?’
‘That girl has the memory of an elephant. But elephant calves, they so love their mothers.’
‘Now don’t say anything mean about Laila.’
It is not like Laila to forget her mobile. Maybe she wanted to be left alone for a day. Too many needy siblings who call all the time. Aisha toys with Laila’s phone. At first she plays some games, then she does the inevitable. She reads all her text messages. But they are very boring – about work, meetings and accounting.
Home is gloomy without Laila, or the prospect of her appearing at any moment. But that leaves her stuff unguarded. What are Laila’s things, apart from the clothes and the footwear? The question has never occurred to Aisha before. In the corner of the only cupboard in the house are some notebooks that belong to her. Aisha goes through them. There are lots of lists, which are probably things-to-do written over several months. The children feature often. ‘Buy slippers for Jaan; Javed’s trousers are short.’ In a corner of one of the notebooks Aisha finds a line in Hindi, which looks like a line from a poem:
‘Sweetheart, we lurk like thieves in a world better than us.’
She does not understand what the line means. It is, despite its adult abstraction, the saddest line Aisha has ever read.
23
Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous
THE LIGHT ON the highway is faint and it is not easy any more to spot the small car, which is somewhere in the swarm of taillights. Yet, Mukundan has given a big lead to Jamal, about two hundred metres. He expects the Indica to stop any moment. It has been a very hot day and Jamal is a man who respects water; he has been drinking constantly from a bottle. The girl does not drink so much probably because she wishes to hold off a trip to a public toilet. Their consumption of water is of interest to the Bureau. There has been a development.
Boss finally moved. He has sent five Bureau men. They are right behind Mukundan, in a white Sumo. They are armed.
They had broken away from the welcome party that had assembled at the trap, which is now only about eighty kilometres down the highway. Mukundan has less than two hours left to rescue the girl.
The Sumo men were waiting for Mukundan at a petrol pump. It was immediately clear to him that they did not have a concrete plan except that the objective now is not to extract the girl but to extract Jamal. The Sumo men and Mukundan will trail the Indica and if a clear opportunity arises they would pluck him when she is outside the car, and drive him away to the safe house. But if such an opportunity does not arise, they will not force it.
There is bad n
ews for the girl though. For Jamal, too, who was doomed anyway, but the nature of his doom now looks bleaker than before.
Mukundan was under the impression that the abduction of Jamal was entirely a Bureau operation. But in fact it was always a joint operation between the Bureau and the Beard Squad, the gang of psychotics in Ahmedabad’s Crime Branch. Officially they are called the Anti-Terrorism Squad but every cop in the region knows them as the Beards or the Beard Squad. They capture to kill. In the past four months they have eliminated twelve men, all of them Indian citizens, all Muslims and all of whom were apparently plotting to kill Damodarbhai. Across the nation there have been so many plots to kill him. It’s as though killing him is the new Mecca.
Some people think that the Beard Squad is called so because they hunt Muslim men. But the truth is that ‘Beard Squad’ is a tribute to the beards who run it. Their ringleader, Bhim, colours his visible hair, including a full beard, red. ‘Muslims should not exist,’ he once said on television. He later clarified during a press conference, in-between chuckles, that he only meant all Muslims should convert to Hinduism, ‘their true religion before their ancestors were raped by the Mughals’. This man carries a gun. But he, too, is a poet.
Bhim reports to the second most powerful man in Gujarat, whose Intelligence Bureau code is ‘Black Beard’, a bald cylindrical strategist on a high-sugar diet, once a biochemist, and now a minister in Damodarbhai’s cabinet whose days begin early because he needs to get back home early. His mother does not go to sleep until she sees him. Some days he lies on a swing with his head resting on her lap, and he says the most beautiful things a son can tell his mother. On days, when he is this way, he speaks to Bhim on the phone. With his head resting on his mother’s lap he gives clear, clever instructions, at times conveying a black warrant, settling the fate of some miserable scrawny Muslim. He is the only human in the world whom Damodarbhai trusts and perhaps even likes.
If nothing changes in the next two hours, Jamal and the girl will be in the illegal custody of the Beard Squad.
The Sumo men explain the mystery behind why Boss took so long to act. Boss has been trying to convince Bhim that the girl has to be extracted and set free, but Bhim wants the girl along with Jamal. Boss argued that she can be investigated later, but Red Beard would not listen. The two bosses had a big fight. According to Boss, the illegal detention of a young woman, who is probably a teenager, would be problematic. According to Bhim, the illegal detention of any Muslim is never really a problem.
The battle over the girl is in reality yet another squabble in the world between a practical man who has shame and a practical man who is not afraid of shame. The Bureau is like the good who appear to be good because they are terrified of being perceived as bad. The Beard Squad has no such fears. In fact, they are so lousy at covering up their murders that Mukundan suspects they want the world to know they are killers.
Things are going to get very ugly between the Bureau and the Beard Squad because the Beards are unaware of this side-operation that is under way to get the girl out of the mess. The Bureau is going solo. The operation, if it goes well, would have Jamal in the bag and a very confused girl on the highway, and some raging mad Beards.
FINALLY, THE PAIR of taillights shifts to the shoulder of the highway. Jamal’s Indica slows down and stops on the edge of the road. Mukundan’s WagonR swerves and comes to a slow halt. He turns off the headlights. Behind him, the Sumo, too, goes dark. In the lights of the passing cars, the Indica, which is about a hundred metres away, appears and fades.
Nothing happens for several seconds. The parking lights blink but the car is still dark inside. After a minute the driver’s door opens and Jamal gets out. He stretches and yawns. He walks down the rough unpaved wayside in Mukundan’s direction. He walks at least thirty metres.
Jamal is a decent man, at least while urinating. He has ensured that he is at a reasonable distance from the girl, about ten seconds away from his car, ten seconds of brisk walk. In daylight he would have been clearly in her line of vision, but not in this darkness. The highway is noisy and even if he screams she may not hear. Also, he has probably consumed so much water he would be peeing for at least a minute.
‘This is it,’ Mukundan says into the phone. ‘Move.’
‘I’m not so sure this is our chance,’ a man in the Sumo says.
‘This is,’ Mukundan says and drives ahead with his lights off. He goes past Jamal and stops behind the blinking Indica. That gets Jamal’s attention. Even as he urinates, he keeps an eye on the mysterious vehicle that has stopped behind his car.
‘She can see him,’ the man in the Sumo says. ‘If we take him, she would know it was an abduction.’
‘No, she can’t see him,’ Mukundan says. ‘It’s too dark. From where I am I can’t see him at all.’
‘She can see in the headlights of the passing vehicles.’
‘She is not looking. She will not look at a pissing man. She is a young Muslim girl from Mumbra.’
‘But if she wants to she can see.’
‘She won’t look. And she can’t see him, trust me. And she won’t look at a man who has his dick in his hand. She definitely can’t now.’
Mukundan turns on his headlights. There is no way the girl can see anything behind her except the harsh lights. The lights may worry her but she is not going to step out of the car on a highway. As he expected, she rolls up her window.
Jamal wonders what is going on but he is not finished yet.
‘Go for him,’ Mukundan says as he gets out of the car. He walks to the roadside, phone in one hand and pretends to pee. That should comfort Jamal, who finally looks away.
‘Move now,’ Mukundan says. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Boss said, smooth. Smooth or nothing. This is not smooth. We’re not sure this is going to be smooth.’
All that the men in the Sumo have to do is get behind Jamal, put a gun to his ass, gag his mouth and pull him inside. And leave. It would be over in five seconds.
‘No,’ the Sumo says. They won’t budge.
Jamal zips up and begins to walk back to his car.
Mukundan gets back into his car and drives away. He gets a passing glimpse of the girl’s dark figure. She is sitting tense, her arms folded, her large eyes follow the mysterious WagonR.
24
Damodarbhai
THE VILLAGE CHILDREN roar when the fifty-metre-long cracker begins to explode. A disoriented camel shits. The local Gau Rakshak Sena has sponsored the cracker in tribute to the victory of Damodarbhai. The cow protection force has only five official members. The chief is a thirty-year-old man with smashed ears, his cartilages destroyed by years of wrestling. When the fireworks end, he feels incomplete, as he feared. He is happy, even emotional, but he wishes there were more to the day. It has been eight years since he sold his land to the builders. He does not have to work any more, work ever.
He has the habit of asking himself very clear questions. ‘And what would satisfy you?’ He always finds clear answers. ‘If someone does something wrong, if someone goes out of line, and if I can punish him.’
He begins to call his friends in other villages asking if there have been any movements of trucks. Over the past two years, as the patriots ascended, Muslims have been careful not to transport cows to slaughter during the day. They do it in great secrecy in the night. The locations of the slaughterhouses are widely known but the cops, those whores, they don’t allow any trouble at the slaughterhouses any more. But they don’t mind it if there is trouble in other places, far from the slaughterhouses. In fact, sometimes they help with useful tips.
About an hour later, he gets information about a truck passing through a dirt track about thirty kilometres from his village. Some bastards are taking the goddesses to slaughter on a day the patriots have shown to whom the nation belongs.
He collects a dozen friends in his Fortuner. It is not long before they intercept the truck. There are four Muslim boys in the truck and a dozen old cows.
Gau Rakshak Sena liberates the cows, who amble away. The four Muslim boys stand with folded palms, begging to be spared. The men take the boys to a cowshed and tie them up to pillars. They bring hockey sticks from the Fortuner and thrash the buttocks of the boys, who wail. One of the men records the punishment on his phone. This is going to be a hit on YouTube. It may even get Damodarbhai’s attention.
25
A Telephone Conversation
‘PROFESSOR.’
‘AK.’
‘Have you reached the airport?’
‘Not yet. But I’ve entered Mumbai, but I don’t know what that means. It’s been all concrete for hours.’
‘I have news.’
‘Go on.’
‘The Bureau is still clueless about Jamal.’
‘Alright.’
‘They tell me they have no operation under way. They are not chasing any Jamal.’
‘Do you believe them?’
‘They won’t lie to me, Professor. I’ll screw them later, they know that.’
‘So what’s going on then?’
‘There is something we are missing. Our man has been saying some interesting things. The cops who are lying in wait for Jamal and the girl, they are the Beard Squad.’
‘He said “Beard Squad” specifically?’
‘Yes.’
‘So Jamal and the girl are going to Gujarat?’
‘They are probably already there. He says the Beard Squad is going to execute the girl.’
‘And Jamal?’
‘He doesn’t say much about him. But he says the girl is going to make a telephone call from a telephone booth.’
‘How does he know that?’
‘Exactly. I don’t know.’
‘At what time will she make the call?’
