Fire in the Unnameable Country (2 page)

Afterward, we are home and an experienced neighbour serves as midwife. My head is appearing and the tension is everywhere along Shukriah's uterine walls her thighs abdomen vulva as the pale green walls breathe in and out in time to her hard labour breaths in-exhalations.

My father: I understand, Shukriah, it hurts, darling, but please just breathe. And my mother's roar: Just tell me how you understand fifty-three hours seventeen minutes of constrict relax constrict relax/ a scream interruption/ my mother resets her huffing-puffing, swiftly regains rhythm/ broken water, muscles seizing, tissues distending, she continues yelling, surely torn now, and then maybe push out a miscarriage, because like you can empathize, you man. Recall, as if you have overheard, their loving words to each other just several hours prior, but can we judge, are we in any position to judge.

Meanwhile, I am caught in the midst, who is paying attention to me, where is the doctor/man, lowly cretin man whose hot breaths populated microscopic insects inside, my mother continues cursing, as another big push and something greymucus and pink is emerges emerging from inside her until finally my owl's screech ear-rending howl.

Out of the womb and into the sky: our neighbours still report to Shukriah that first wail of Hedayat Awwal Ben Jaloun, or Owl as they would call him in his life, that cry they had waited years of slow gestation in wombwater to hear, the sound that entered their homes bustled furniture rushed window into the streets to rustle branches and tremble birds, thump hearts in chests for one what the hell moment.

Everything is monochrome. There are some nearshapes. Wet light splashes everywhere onto objects in the room. Some items are near, others farther away. Correction: this is uncertain. A pungent odour. Is it from the elongated masses waving near me. (Myself. Limbs, I would later learn, and digits. Fragments of and little control over these. But myself nevertheless.) Or is the smell over there. Other smells, but these are more nuanced, indescribable. The smells go away when the elongated masses near me disappear and then a warm shape, bright, soft, singular, a clothshape, I would learn to feel.

Hark unto the sounds. Little sounds and the bigger sounds; the bigger sounds come closer and their shapes and movements become ordered: a wholething, a face, I will come to know, of either the one or the other, mother or father. I am frightened but no one is crying. Cover him more with the blanket, my mother says as my father carries me around the room, and his smell is heavy, weighs hasha hasha from the nose, and then a yellow tinkle.

Ooh, he has soiled himself.

At least we know that works, Shukriah is laughing, gleaming. Bring him to me, please. Her smell means something like before, long ago. I am lifted closer, and then the smell is closer.

Then the dark but not so much. Like a wholething though not quite. A shadow. The universe disappears; to say it another way, sleep divides time, though I know neither word. In the beginning, the world seems dislocated from my mother's stories while I waited in the red-lit darkness of her womb, in its lub-lub comfort mother heart, its swimming sense of
already and always. (Later, I would conclude that even in these earliest times, I had realized the continuity with some distant past, but knew no origin could be deduced by this feeling, and that one could not conflate it with any notion of eternity; rather, tick-tocking on and on: only a vague sensation of existing, having existed, and persisting in time.)

What others observed in Hedayat was that he didn't speak a word after his introductory howl, went dumb, and scared his parents who thought he was deaf. He waited until his second year to take his first steps, then climbed out of his perambulator without warning one day and broke into a trot in a crowded marketplace covered with glass shards and husks of rifle shots, eggplant vendors and sweet sellers until Shukriah caught up with him, surprised by the deftness and surety of his steps.

When my mother's sister Reshma returned for holidays from her studies in Berlin, he was already four years old and she swore she could hear all the answers to her questions, and later verified that the quality of his voice was the same on these earlier occasions, though at that time he did not move his lips and was still in the habit of pointing to indicate this or that thing. He showed no prodigious insight in these early years, exactly dumb, but projected endless curiosity with his eyes and the hidden desire to match the world with what he had imagined it to be before he was born.

Recall, as if I have told you, in those days Mamun M had not worked for a long time, and it was only through Shukriah's indefatigable and successful efforts to unfreeze his savings account from his playback singing days that the family managed to survive, even to pay Reshma's tuition and living expenses abroad. No one could locate his sickness anymore because he did not shit florid, was no longer wasting thin away, displayed a healthy appetite, and had re-formed talkative friendships with Xasan Sierra, the cigarette vendor, as well as Confectionarayan Babu, the candy seller, among other neighbourhood staples. Mrs. Henry,
meanwhile, my parents' downstairs neighbour who owned a hosiery shop where my mother began working soon after my parents moved to La Maga, had grown arthritic and suffered from chronic diarrhea, which she blamed on the equatorial climate and infested drinking water that grew no better if boiled, she claimed, and returned to England. Before she left, Shukriah convinced her to mortgage the shop to her, allowing the old woman to add to her pension and for the family to acquire a means of supporting itself for the foreseeable future.

After numerous trips to the local doctor, who was not an oncologist but who managed through conversation to prove (without actually proving) that Mamun M's illness was imaginary, my father decided he had let years of his life slip away into fabulism as he lay in bed regurgitating the past, and began to impose upon the house strict notions of reality, cutting strings of remembrance and loosening events that seemed no longer plausible, including his discovery of his father's thoughtreel rubbish, he would say, that they can read thoughts with the shortwave, another way of controlling the public imagination with fear, and that jazz orchestra blowing about a windy hallway and the pressing of the body against the wall like a carpet beetle: true to an extent, but remembering the nightmare, my father would say before casting a gaze elsewhere in time.

Hedayat remains curious of his father's thoughts those days on the magician Alauddin's sudden rise to prominence, his opinions of his wife and wife's sisters' flight on the magic rug, but at that time infant Hedayat's vow of silence was absolute, and he would not have revealed his clairaudience and grown-up thoughts for all the curiosity in the world.

Grip, Mamun M would declare, placing his thumbs and forefingers on his son's cheeks and pinching paining invoking evolution, is what
distinguishes our ability, our opposable digits, God bless, to manipulate the world and to make it human.

Shukriah, he would instruct with wagging finger: Tell this boy no funny stories beyond the grip of normality, and you too, Chaya, samesame, I am warning.

As an act of protest against the strict conditions of reality and human behaviour set down by his father's newly stentorian, masculinist voice, Hedayat briefly returned to a non-ambulatory state and acted as if he had forgotten how to walk, and when his mother yelled, see what you have done, Mamun, he showed preference for scuttling sideways, his back arched, on his hands and feet like a crab, or for crawling about like a barbaric example of the canine tribe, until his mother cajoled him to return to his original silent, ambulatory state. Recall from press reports how at that time there lay strange fruit scattered everywhere in La Maga, which would explode out your raspberry insides and reveal the true colour of your hidden organs, you know what I mean: clusters of little fruits on the treebranches and lying fallen on the dusty streets, which they told you in school to avoid at all cost.

Come along, Niramish tells one lunch hour, his mixed vegetal odour a constant warning to others to stay away, but a friend to Hedayat since at school he is the only one who will tolerate his silence. Niramish's own two problems: first the smell of mixed curry vegetables stuck to yellow turmeric fingertips, effusing from clothing, detectable from a hundred feet away. Niramish Khaja, loyal companion, smelly child: it never bothered little Hedayat the slightest, and, in fact, he interpreted the constant smell as an augury of the future, as if it were an odour destined to grow thicker in time. Niramish's second problem: narcolepsy. In a stumbling sentence, halfway through his response to the teacher's question, sitting or standing up, even poised in his characteristic loping gait, in the schoolyard or in the cracked-mirror streets, anywhere without warning, he would fall into a stertorous nod,
his head would slip and his double chin would quadruple, before the snoring sound came out and came out and out until someone pinched his nostrils, wake up, Niramish, wake up, smelly child.

Hai, did it happen again, he would re-emerge with a loud snort.

Niramish, good-natured Niramish, a nutritious and well-meaning friend, would one day provide Hedayat with the perfect excuse. See him: running running toward the prize. Look, he shakes the tree, they fall to the ground, and he lifts them up out of the dust mound to see. And then the fire and the howling at these strange clusters of nectarines. A mere ten steps away, Hedayat is thrown back by an unnameable force and aside from a minor bruise on his forehead appears uninjured at first. You might say it was in consolation for his friend Niramish, who loses his right eye as well as three fingers of his right hand, pointer middle ring, and/or for the added reason of rebellion against father and father-prescribed humanity; whatever the case, Hedayat finds his hands curled up into hardened talons, unable to bend his thumbs and besotted by the added difficulty of fully working the digits of both right and left hands.

Doctors who probe observe take samples of the tendons bones nerves interstitial tissues conclude, nothing wrong, Shukriah Ma'am, seems altogether like a psychological matter.

The psychos, meanwhile, suggest all manner of cures, from hypno to shock therapy to antidepressant medication, all of which my mother refuses what we need is gently to pry open his mouth, she insists, this and nothing more, doctors sirs. Whether the loss is a rational decision or an effect of the blast no one can decide until Hedayat, too, forgets, content to take multiple-choice examinations since his writing appears to teachers like a private hieroglyphics, and not altogether worried about the future.

Eyeless-fingerless-eyepatched and the other finger-gnarled, Niramish and Hedayat form quite the pair. During trips to Confectionarayan Babu's
candy shop, they stand in the shadows of the crowding children, the fat smelly pirate and his friend with talons and twisted hands, crackling laughter, whoops and hollering: they are the butt of all the mobile playground's jokes. Narayan Khandakar, meanwhile, or Confectionarayan Babu, as he is known to everyone, is a gentle creature, and when the cete of badgering children leave after making purchases or get caught up in lights and buttons of arcade games, he invites, psst come on, you two, not out of pity or even to favour the son of one of his closest friends, Mamun M, but out of a spontaneous fatherly love, and pulls the string of the incandescent bulb in the cellar stairwell, and from dark corners the light spreads into bright shapes, the yellow fruits that break apart spilling candied seeds, the blue sugar packets that make you froth rabid at the mouth, the sweet toothpaste meant for eating, Confectionarayan Babu's many succoured potables, his bars and candies of all shapes.

That box over there, he never bestows a favour without first requesting they lend a nominal hand: please push it to this here.

Though Hedayat is more or less crippled at such tasks, he leans with his weight against his elbows against the box.

Here, let me do it, his friend remains better equipped despite the damage of the exploded nectarines.

Never are they allowed more than one bowl or handful of candied almonds, but none of the other children are allowed to drink from the gushing fountain that feeds the vending receptacle for iced drinks or to try the newest American chocolate bars; just being in that wonderworld is tantalizing enough.

Most important for Hedayat, he provided foil to his father/ there couldn't be two individuals more dissimilar; Mamun M was perennially preceded by a sorrowful tune while Confectionarayan, with his round ball body and insatiable sweet tooth, was every chocolatier's test subject and never had a sad word to say about anything. Confectionarayan
added questions to the son's mind: Don't be so hard on your old man, he would say, he's not a bad man, and if you only knew, boy, what subterranean hallways he's seen, what a thoughtreel looks like.

Narayan Khandakar and my father would chatterbox in Xasan Sierra's cigarette shop, talking talk and playing cards in enclosed urban tin hut eat Saturday night meets Sunday morning, and Hedayat knew he knew the man and trusted the sweet seller's judgment.