Fire in the Unnameable Country (21 page)

You'll have to see with your hands, now, won't you, oh ho, said the official, laughing.

For the next hour, while my father's stomach grumbled and he sat in place without a complaint, while the official licked the bowl of daal round and round, picked every grain of rice off the table, even stealing one back from an ant, the old fragile man could be heard rummaging through the endless pile of corrugated boxes, opening and shutting filing cabinets, and rifling through papers and folders.

And let not a single item be disturbed, the staff sergeant warned, ringing for Ben Jaloun's counterpart, the two-faced old woman who had served him earlier. She lurched out from behind the door as if she had been waiting there all the while.

Take him to the green room, Sangeeta, he ordered. I'll mark it down on the clipboard when that idiot returns from there over there, but you know the way: it's a day's journey by dolly-car, so make sure to pack enough provisions; tell Omar Omar I sent him.

In fact, the journey stretched on for a day more than expected, and while for a withered old woman a gondola car is the perfect size, Mamun Ben Jaloun feared that this time the contortions would deal his body lasting damage. (In fact, they wouldn't, but in a strange twist of fate, his son, your humble narrator Hedayat, would for the first six years of his life be afflicted by nightmarish rides on a tiny toy train and would awake from them limping.) The lunar terrain was unchanging all the way there, every leaf of grass, stalk of foliage removed for miles to make way for the filming of a science fiction film by Satyajit Ray rejected by Universal Pictures, a lifeless landscape except for the glistening koi moving about in a man-made pond on which the alien first lands.

Once again he would have to be removed from the gondola car and hauled to the appropriate location. This time he found himself in a pitch-black room that sizzled for a moment before being lit up by a single prick of light: someone was smoking. Another pinprick of fire somewhere nearby. Something like a bodiless head bobbing. The shadows on the walls confused my father, for in the dim light they seemed not at all correspondent to possible objects in an enclosed space: there appeared silhouettes of gnarled boughs, or perhaps these were only very long fingers.

Sing, someone commanded. Mamun Ben Jaloun found it absurd that some people had gathered at the exact moment of his arrival in a darkened room to hear him sing, that singing for any reason except to sing from one's heart and for no one's pleasure but one's own held any meaning. He found it equally absurd that he would probably abide by their request, only he could not think of even one song. Meanwhile, all the cigarette smoke was choking him. More and more little pricks
of light gathered in the room, they revealed little nimbus clouds while he was choking and coughing. He unbuttoned his shirt to the middle and this helped to a degree, but he continued to cough; requesting that they did not smoke would probably do nothing, but he asked anyway. As if they had not heard, they demanded to know what he would perform.

So as to ease the tension, perhaps, some lights turned on from above, and by their aid he saw a woman who appeared like Lady Jerusalem but who was probably Sharmilla or another of her shadow dancers, who stood watching while stroking a small grinning animal. There were others, but he could not tell how many. My father recognized he was standing on a raised platform, which was probably a stage but which felt like the gallows.

Sing, shouted the man who must have been the music director, and merrily, he commanded, but nothing emerged from my father's throat.

If I hiccup now, he began wishing against the inevitable, but when he opened his lips a sweet warble emerged instead, the notes wafted up his throat smoothly, uninterrupted by the smoke. He sang as does a picaresque troubadour, of his own story, what else: I vaulted here on a miscreant wind, he sang, I turned into a reed in the fleshy arms of a baker woman whose dogs bit me, he exaggerated, a woman who never sang but turned on her toes so lovely. There were other verses, of course, to fill out the details, including descriptions of the two-throated old lady who brought him here and had disappeared, and at the end of which everything was still. Finally, it was they who began to cough, one after another, and finally in unison, as if the coughing was substitute for applause.

He may be awarded a room in a flat in the songwriters' district, Apartment 1-B on St. Catherine's, said the man who must have been Omar Omar, the double-name giver of apartments in those parts of the studio at that time. Rent is free for the first month but he must produce consistently to stay subsequent months. Next, he cried loudly, as a door
opened and fresh air poured in and Mamun Ben Jaloun could finally breathe. He looked where the light was abundant. From behind the door it was plain to see the beginning of a long winding animal stretching possibly for miles, constituting no doubt others who too wanted to be playback singers.

My father's shyness exceeds his desire to impress or to earn his keep, and producers realize he can only introduce or record his ideas in pitch-blackness; note that in La Maga Studios, auditions are traditionally held in the dark, but recordings require the sound engineer to see the appropriate dials and switches, and as a compromise someone suggests he wear a pair of blinding dark shades, which simulates the total absence of objects and people.

For the rest of Mamun Ben Jaloun's singing career, he would be known as Blind Man Mamun, a cognomen he rejects until realizing years later many women interpreted his handicap as a mysterious and attractive condition. He does not prefer the moniker of Mamun M either, mind you, he simply stumbled hiccupping onto it the first time he was asked and never had the heart to correct the studio heads after the cheques began to arrive correctly under that name.

At first, my father's output is slight, and he manages barely to write one song per month, belaboured forced creations that lyrically and structurally reflect his inexperience, and only several of which are admitted into films. These hardly dragnet enough to pay for the room in the cramped flat in the songwriters' district of the studio, which he shares with six others also attempting the same craft, each with his own failings: one young man is too didactic with his melodies, another so avant-garde he usually loses the thread of his songs, others with limited ranges, and all of them raising a caterwaul to high hell night and day
with the intention of writing the one song whose payback would be the tenure singer's role in which Mamun M found himself so easily.

But shhhh listen carefully, as my father eventually learns to do: realize that since the walls are thin, the compositions of all seven musicians are in fact tethered inseparable, fragments and rehearsals of one and the same song, and it is possible, by choosing the rhythmical shift from one attempt and the major-minor change from another, to sew together a track that stands up much better than any single attempt. Thusly, he manages by bricoleur's feat to write his first winning tracks and to gather the confidence to shut out the cacophony of his peers and housemates, to move into a small flat of his own and finally to open up his own vault of melodies.

His matured style impresses Soni Aadam, the chief of security we met earlier, who is also the producer of a dozen films simultaneously, and who therefore requires a perpetual supply of songs to develop their scores. He prefers my father over other songsters and gives him ample opportunity to develop his craft, and the pictures prove it. A photograph of my father in front of a large ribbon microphone, large shades preventing us from seeing the expression in his eyes when he hits a G over middle C, a photograph in front of a piano with three fingers poised over white keys black keys, a photograph where he shakes hands with Mohammed Rafi, another one while recording with a hundred-man Wall of Sound string and woodwind orchestra. A song about the clinking of chains in a nameless ministry of arid corridors and dusty offices, or of working in the potash mines or labouring in the citrus groves: the nature of my father's songs changes drastically over his career. Like his father, he tries to avoid politics and would desperately edit his lyrics, but the melodies would always return the words to their original course.

Sometime around his third year in the trade as a songwriter, he discovered the hidden strength of raisins and things began to fall apart.
It is arguable what part the Black Organs had to play, whether they introduced the drug slowly and habituated him to its daily use; such machinations were not uncommon in La Maga Studios. (Understand that all the vital fluids of his memory of Qismis had by then been dried and sucked out by Lady Jerusalem's embraces and her vacuumincinerating kisses, so the memory of raisin wrinkled fingertips and palms, the past, cannot be blamed.) The change, in any case, was immediate and absolute. Observe: it was always a fistful in the morning and then another at mid-morning before recording, some more alongside the afternoon coffee; nobody suspected a thing, you see, who cares how many raisins a man eats on a given day, who has ever become sick or overdosed on raisins, how many friends would insist on rehabilitation or therapy if one is a raisin addict.

Still more and more raisins, in the cakes and the rice, the salads and meat dishes, with the food, but more often as a standalone drug. People differ in their capacity to handle chemical substances. And raisins for Mamun M proved to be highly addictive. Past their initial impact on the nervous system as an upper, they dragged him into a two-kilogram-a-day habit of dried gutrot and grape, paroxysm high epileptic flashes, come synesthesia ochre rotted flutes, come rot ejaculate fainting slumber, and raisins raisins your pockets full, sell your mother for a sack of raisins. And with the raisins came the accompanying symptoms of decay: mix it with the butter: a too-tall pair of naked legs moves past, like this, a female voice asks amidst the sound of mortar and pestle, the rustle of hands on cloth, her skirt slips and our camera-eye moves to reveal another naked body in the room, two more behind her on top. His lyrics at that time grew so junkydrenched and his voice so shaky, aged so far beyond his twenty-six years, that Soni Aadam gave him an ultimatum: replace your life or we will replace you. Secretly, he began employing Mimic Mamuns, trying to pass these off as the original himself in screenplays, but the
audience would not have it. My father's populist observations in song were inimitable.

There were riots, believe it or not: we will not tolerate, shouted the placards and the crowd. Can't fool won't fool all the people, they chorused. Soni Aadam was forced to apologize publicly and even compensated the real Mamun for the songs he did not sing in efforts to cajole him into resuming his ordinary rate of production, but Mamun Ben Jaloun would not budge from his sandlot. He had the finest silica brought to him in bags and became a connoisseur of the stuff. He loved letting it trickle through his fingers, perhaps as much as he loved women or that wrinkled saccharine familiar.

Eventually, Soni Aadam brought the mountain to Muhammad: a full studio outfit arrived in several trucks along with a top-notch roundtheclock producer, just in case Mamun awoke from a succour binge with an idea. For several years, it worked. Lying on his back, with a microphone suspended from the ceiling, my father would sing, somehow capable in the horizontal of accomplishing what he could no longer manage vertically, the notes rising, pausing, before resuming their climb up the scales; never had his voice been sweeter, more melancholic. Audiences were satisfied once again though the famous playback singer never appeared in public, and the only stories of his personal life were so rancid they must have been concocted by enemy publicists.

Mamun M never agreed to interviews, remained barricaded in the large flaking plaster-walled mansion he purchased in his second year as a songwriter, whose servants roamed the halls busy with unassigned tasks, and which once filled in the nighttime with the youthful rebels of that generation but now remained silent as Mamun M, who was altogether silent except in song, where his observations of the lives of ordinary people remained accurate enough that the public wondered whether, like certain sultans in the Arabian Nights, he would visit the orchards, graveyards, factories, herders' plains, mines, and oil refineries
of his lyrics, disguised as a plebe. Regard: a crowd gathers around a niqabi woman, they tear her veil at the black cloth because, secretly, Mamun M is hidden underneath. Denuded horrified, the woman cries and throws dust onto her forehead. The crowd is ashamed and several of the perpetrators are severely beaten. Such scenes were not uncommon at that time.

What else did the sultan survey that Hedayat's owl eyes summon, that his automatic tongue can hoot and chitter about: nothing at all. Mamun Ben Jaloun didn't for a moment see the hard-callused hands of the oil worker or natural-gas plant labourer making all the stuff the unnameable country was known to the world for. Rather, my father wandered set to film set, laying a track here another song there, his feet always following some distant melody, and, as others around him noticed, always trying to dig out some actual story swimming under the skin: why the endless movie studio, he always wondered. Mamun Ben Jaloun, restless, young, inquisitive, always inquiring, why do they burn every movie set after they're done filming. But no one told him. No one seemed to know.