Baaz

by Anuja Chauhan

  ‘Later. First tell me, if you didn’t know about the engagement, how come you were wearing the chain with the eagle locket that day?’

  He interlaces his fingers with hers and stares down at them sombrely.

  ‘He said it was a present from him to me,’ he says lightly, trying, but unable to keep the hurt out of his voice. ‘Because he was so proud of me. Because I’m his oldest son.’

  Tinka looks first appalled, then furious. ‘What a pig!’

  What a girl, Shaanu thinks, staring at her besotted. What a woman. What a way she has with words!

  ‘Yeah,’ he says feelingly.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t really like that locket,’ she continues. ‘It was too loud.’

  Ishaan’s tender feelings vanish instantly.

  ‘Arrey, what’s wrong with loud, now?’ he demands. ‘Why would anybody wear a soft locket? It was heavy, solid gold!’

  She kisses him.

  ‘Jat.’

  As he stares at her, wondering whether this a compliment or an insult, she stretches languorously in the slanting moon shadows, her body tan gloriously smooth, and slides a hand to his belly.

  ‘Ishaaan…’ she coos.

  He groans. ‘Don’t Ishaan me! I don’t like what it does to my stomach.’

  ‘Ishaan…’ Tinka murmurs in tones even more dulcet. ‘Who’s your Mercury?’

  He grins.

  ‘Maddy would say you’re the Venus my penis has been waiting for.’

  ‘Never mind Maddy,’ she whispers fiercely.

  He cups her face in his hands and looks down at her, the grey eyes grave and steady.

  ‘You are.’

  • • •

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ Maddy mutters to himself as he approaches the Medicines Without Borders helicopter standing in a darkened parking lot behind the hotel. ‘Don’t screw this up, Subbiah!’

  He saw the chopper’s American crew leave a while ago, yawning and slapping mosquitoes off their arms. Now he approaches it stealthily, just in case there are Pakistani soldiers stationed around it, heart slamming hard against his ribs, his Sten gun in his hands.

  What if I’ve got this all wrong, he wonders as he edges closer to the makeshift cordon around the chopper. Suppose Tinka isn’t the lady journalist they meant? Or what if she’s got a new boyfriend? What if I’m putting two and two together and making two thousand? Fuck, I should’ve stuck to flying my Caribou. Even better, I should’ve stayed in Coorg, growing poinsettias and brewing coffee. Except I know nothing about coffee.

  ‘Halt-hu-khamba-phrend-uffo?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ says Maddy, one eyebrow raised comically, even as he grips his gun harder.

  The hoarse, definitely nervous voice repeats its musical litany, its accent clearly rustic Punjabi.

  ‘Halt-hu-khamba-phrend-uffo?’

  The bugger sounds even more petrified than me, Maddy thinks wryly.

  ‘Halt, who comes by…’ he mutters aloud, and his brow clears. ‘Ah, now I get it – halt, who comes by, friend or foe? Well, the answer to that would have to be foe, I’m afraid.’

  And he fires the Sten right where the voice has been coming from. The gun rattles, splutters, then shudders into silence.

  Maddy stares down at it in disgust.

  ‘Shit!’

  But the noise it has made is enough to alert the nervous guard up ahead. Seconds later something whizzes past Maddy’s head, missing him narrowly. He drops to his knees, cursing. Up in the hotel, a series of lights come on all along what looks like the eleventh floor.

  Maddy rises to his feet. Staying low, he rushes forward and tackles the dark shape, throwing it to the ground. There’s a grunt, some robust swearing in Punjabi, and then comes a blow to the side of his head. Maddy sees stars but manages to raise his useless Sten and slam the soldier across the temple with its butt. He gives a gurgle and goes limp.

  ‘Stun gun!’ Maddy pants, half-surprised, half-satisfied, and staggers to his feet. The chopper is just metres away, and thanks to the helicopter flying course he’s done recently, he’s pretty sure he can get the thing started and up in the air. But what if the tank is empty?

  Abandoning all attempts at stealth now, he flat out runs towards the chopper and reaches it without incident. Placing his palms against its cold, bulbous flank, he draws several steadying breaths, then starts to move around it, feeling for the door.

  As he rounds the tail and emerges onto the lee side, away from the chilling wind, he is faced with a circle of at least twenty chowkidaars, cosily frying kebabs in a saucepan suspended over a little campfire.

  ‘Fuck!’

  They stare at him for a moment, as taken aback as he is, their kebabs sizzling on their forks, and then, spotting the gun in his hand, they get to their feet with a collective roar.

  Maddy takes to his heels. Racing around the chopper, with the chowkidaars hard on his heels, he comes around at the back, yanks at the pilot’s door and is flooded with sweet relief as it yields to the pressure of his hand.

  Diving into the cockpit, he slams the door shut behind him and feels around for the ignition wires, even as the chowkidaars start to whack the perspex of the chopper with their iron-tipped lathis. He connects the wires, the engine fires, and the rotors whir to life. Maddy stares down at the instrument panel, blinded momentarily by the sudden light in the cabin, then jabs tentatively at various buttons. The chopper lurches, pitches randomly towards the right and remains stubbornly grounded.

  Maddy stares down at the controls dementedly. What is he doing wrong?

  Outside, the chowkidaars, pushed backwards by the whirring rotors, have managed to get their hands on some kind of weaponry. Shots slam into the chopper’s perspex, starring it in seven places. Illuminated by the light in the cabin, Maddy is as exposed as the ladies on the first-floor balconies on English Road.

  And still the chopper refuses to lift off the ground.

  • • •

  Upstairs, the West Pakistani commandoes, lean mean killing machines in their OG camouflage uniforms make their way through the corridor of the eleventh floor, towards room 1152. There are ten of them, an unnecessarily large number to take down just one IAF man and a woman journalist, but General Khan’s instructions had been very specific. As they file down the corridor, their boots thudding hard against the soft pile carpet, an elderly Swiss gentleman in a white towel bathrobe, who happens to be putting out his room service tray at that very moment, hails them in an outraged voice.

  ‘Hey hey, this is a neutral zone, if you please! By whose authority are you here?’

  The officer at the lead of the line of soldiers turns away his crew-cut head and keeps walking.

  But the old man sticks out one frail arm and grabs him by the shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me? I asked you a question!’

  ‘Sir, please let us do our work!’ the officer replies curtly.

  ‘You have no work here, sir!’ bellows the old man, now very red-faced. He sucks in a big breath, then, chest fully inflated with air and authority, he says, ‘I work for the International Red Cross, and I tell you now that you need to turn around and leave this building immediately.’

  There is a moment’s pause. The soldiers look at their leader. The officer, his face impassive, looks at a point behind the old man’s perspiring head.

  ‘Immediately!’ the old man repeats.

  The officer raises the butt of his Lee-Enfield rifle and knocks the Swiss out with it. He collapses, right next to the shells of the boiled egg he has just eaten, an expression of intense surprise on his face.

  • • •

  ‘Tinka?’

  There is no answer. Shaanu sits up drowsily, feeling around the bed for her.

  ‘Where d’you go?’

  It is the darkest hour, the one before dawn, and she is sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the bed, wrapped in a bedsheet, her tousled hair glowing in the pool of golden light thrown by the bedside lamp. In her hands she clutches the o
veralls Ishaan had been wearing.

  ‘Look.’ There is a strange edge to her voice. ‘This must be his family. They look so happy.’

  Shaanu rolls over the cool white sheets to look at the little photograph she’s holding.

  ‘Where did you find that?’ he blinks in surprise.

  ‘Half falling out of the inner breast pocket. Didn’t you see it?’

  He shakes his head and leans over to kiss her shoulder. Then he leans even further and studies the picture.

  A smiling woman in a floral hijab, a tall, dark bearded man and, sitting on his shoulders, two solemn-faced little girls in party frocks.

  Ishaan chuckles. ‘No wonder Nikka Khan looked so confused last night! I look nothing like this guy.’

  Tinka doesn’t smile. Her fingers are stroking the little girls’ faces. ‘They’re so young,’ she says softly.

  Shaanu’s grey eyes register pain, then harden.

  Wordlessly, he reaches for the overalls in her hands and puts them on. Then he strides to the window. The now-familiar wail of the air-raid siren rises to their ears.

  ‘The ceasefire’s over,’ he says roughly. ‘I should go.’

  Tinka looks up from the photograph, her eyes still far away. ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Yes.’ He bends down to put on his shoes.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks, confused.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says evenly. ‘You’re clearly all set to mourn the tragic demise of Squadron Leader Bilawal Hussain. And I’d rather not. Honestly, I don’t feel he would even want your sympathy. I fought him in the skies, and I know the bugger was having fun when he died. It was a good death. We should all be so lucky.’

  Tinka, sitting in the pool of light, shakes her head, bewildered. ‘Why are you so angry?’

  Is he angry? He stares down at her helplessly, clenching and unclenching his fists, and realizes he is.

  ‘Tinka – I shot him down, I cut down his body and yanked the clothes off his charred corpse. I do not want to look at pictures of his little daughters!’

  ‘Shaanu…’ She rises to her feet in one swift move, clutching the bedsheet around her. ‘Listen…’

  If Ishaan sounded good on her lips, Shaanu sounds knee-bucklingly devastating, but he manages to ignore it. Raising a hand to ward her off, he says, ‘Why the hell should I feel guilty, anyway? Sure, I chewed up Bilawal Hussain – the others ejected, I saw their chutes, so I know it was just the one guy. But what about Raka? They shot him up so badly, he’d be better off dead, the poor chap.’

  She raises her chin, her face mutinous.

  ‘Raka will get better,’ she says firmly. ‘Also, that’s bullshit logic and you know it.’

  They stare at each other for a while, then he turns away to look out of the big glass windows where the Dacca landscape is slowly glimmering into sight. ‘Before I met you and you put all these ideas into my head, I loved my career. It was my childhood dream, all I ever wanted to do or be. My father was a freedom fighter. He hid from the British in my mother’s village because he was wounded, and she nursed him – but he died before they could get married. Chimman says that story isn’t true. But Chimman ka kya bharosa?’

  Wordlessly, Tinka hugs him from the back, resting her chin against his shoulder.

  Staring out of the window, Shaanu continues, ‘But then you started talking about Jimmy and writing about Napalm, and about the kids in the orphanage … and I got more and more confused … and now you’re nosing about in my overalls while I’m asleep, and you’ve dug out this bloody photograph which I hadn’t even noticed all these days!’

  ‘I didn’t nose about,’ she protests, stung. ‘It fell out.’

  ‘I didn’t see certain things before,’ he continues, not listening to her. ‘But you made me see them – and now I can’t unsee them!’

  He whirls to look at her, and his eyes are so hurt and confused that her heart turns over.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says brokenly. ‘Look, I don’t want to fight – you’re hurt and weak…’

  Shaanu retreats towards the door.

  ‘You’ve made everything complicated when it’s actually so simple! They’re our enemy and we’re their enemy and we fight each other till somebody wins!’

  But this is too much for Tinka. She scrambles to her feet, clutching her bedsheet around her.

  ‘Nobody wins,’ she says passionately. ‘That’s the point. Everybody loses!’

  They’re standing only a few feet apart, but to Shaanu, at that moment, the distance between them seems unbridgeable. He backs away from her, towards the door, the Kota-grey eyes storming.

  ‘You’re going to hate me now,’ he says hopelessly. ‘I know it. You’re that sort of person. Every time you look at me, you’ll be thinking…’ He pauses, then spits out the word with mocking, melodramatic venom. ‘Murderer!’

  ‘I can never hate you.’

  Something in the tone of her voice makes him flinch. He throws up his hands. ‘You’d dislike me then! Or pity me. Which is worse!’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  But her voice is unconvincing.

  ‘I’m going,’ he says. But he doesn’t move an inch.

  Standing by the bed, she holds out a hand to him, then slowly lets it drop. They stand without speaking, silhouettes in the moonlight.

  And then a hail of bullets shatters the silence, unnaturally loud in the still of the night. The heavy teak door of the hotel room lunges forward, blown off its hinges, and a posse of armed soldiers stands framed where it stood.

  ‘Down, down, down!’

  ‘Surrender or we shoot!’

  ‘Abhi! Turannt!’

  Ishaan whirls around, his face contorted in a snarl of rage, and stands in front of Tinka…

  The soldiers step over the fallen door and thunder into the room.

  Ignoring her protests, Shaanu pushes her further back and faces them, fists clenched, eyes blazing…

  And then, with the impact of a killer shark breaking through the ocean’s surface, the tail of a helicopter shatters through the glass window, drowning the sound of gunfire with the khata-khata-khata roar of rotor blades.

  Slivers of glass shower Shaanu, Tinka and the soldiers alike.

  As they cough and blink and cower, the tail lashes and reverses out, and a massive, bulbous chopper fills the shattered window, hovering like a gigantic, illuminated bee in the moonlight.

  A hoarse, triumphant voice roars over the rotors and the sound of still shattering glass.

  ‘Dogggfightttt!’

  Ishaan, holding Tinka’s hand fast in his own, responds to this greeting with a yell of unbridled glee.

  ‘Wooooohoooo! Ekdum Baaz-ke-maaphik, Maddy!’

  Maddy, hunkered down in the pilot’s seat, peers out at them through the wildly sliding door, sweaty and dishevelled.

  ‘What would your grandfather say now, bastard?’ he crows. ‘Big guy, big cock! Now get into the goddamn chopper!’

  FIFTEEN

  The muezzin’s cry rings out with its usual vim and vigour on English Road the next morning, causing the pigeons roosting on the dome of the mosque to flutter away and resettle in a disgruntled mob on the peepal tree beyond. The sky behind them is milky blue, with an edge as red as ox’s blood.

  The street itself lies uneasily calm after last night’s excesses, the only movement the slow sweep of the safai karamchari’s broom along the road, gathering up the usual sordid pile of debris – leaf plates, glass bottles, wilted flowers and used condoms.

  In the tiny room on the terrace of Harry Rose’s narrow white house, Maddy yawns luxuriously, then rolls over to look at Shaanu who is lying with eyes tight shut, mouth slightly open, trying to hold onto sleep.

  ‘Baaz,’ he whispers. ‘Hey, Baaz.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Gimme the juice.’

  Shaanu groans and covers his head with his pillow.

  ‘What the fuck, man?’

  Maddy scrambles closer.

  ‘Did anything happ
en last night?’

  ‘Matlab?’ Shaanu voice is muffled, the pillow is still covering his head. ‘You were there, you know what happened. We were trapped and you saved us, and then we ran out of fuel and almost crashed, and all the villagers freaked out, and we had to find our way home in a bullock cart.’

  Maddy waves away these irrelevancies. ‘No, no, what happened before. When you were in the bedroom with Tinka.’

  Shaanu whips away the pillow and meets his friend’s sheepishly eager gaze. ‘You tharki bastard. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘You owe me,’ Maddy insists. ‘I saved your goddamn life. Make me a detailed report.’

  Shaanu’s eyes grow dreamy. He hugs his pillow, looking sleepy and happy and heart-breakingly handsome. ‘Fuck off.’

  The muezzin hits a high note. They both wince.

  Maddy edges closer.

  ‘So, what, you love her now?’

  Ishaan flops back in the bed.

  ‘Yes,’ he says to the unplastered ceiling. ‘I love her.’

  Maddy’s face appears above his.

  ‘And something happened or not? In that fancy hotel bedroom, I mean. Dishoom?’

  There is a long silence. Then Shaanu grins.

  ‘Dishoom. Dishoom. And dishoooooooom.’

  ‘Yessssss!’ Electrified with delight, Maddy slaps his hands upon his thighs and capers wildly about the room. ‘Wah, mere sher, mere tiger! I’m proud of you!’

  ‘Yeaahhhhh.’ Shaanu’s reply is a deeply felt, deeply drawn-out sigh. ‘I’m not giving you any more details, you horny bastard.’

  ‘Okay, man, okay.’ Maddy backs away. ‘But like, what’s the plan, going forward? Love, marriage, babies?’

  This makes Shaanu sit up. His smiling face grows sober.

  ‘Yes,’ he says strongly. ‘Yes, all of that! That’s what I want – that’s what I want to spend my life doing! Whatever she wants, whatever it takes.’

  ‘Who?’

  They look around to see Tinka standing in the doorway. Bundled into the chopper in nothing but a white bedsheet yesterday, she is now dressed in one of Harry Rose’s kaftans. It’s too long and too loose, so she has had to yank it up and belt it around her waist. She looks vaguely like a samurai dressed for battle.

  ‘Nobody,’ Ishaan says quickly, his ears bright red. ‘Uh, good morning.’