Fire in the Unnameable Country (9 page)

I shuddered though the night was warm, I felt it then and I should have/ we strode through one and the next deserted street and passed through known mirrors and appeared at the other end of the city. There was Niramish, translucent, paler than ever and seated on a bed, separated from Grandfather by the mere distance of a chess set. They were just beginning a game, but Grandfather rose at once with a nod, he departed and left the two of us to talk, but we did not talk for a long time.

In time, the air grew foul and I complained to Niramish, There are no, but where are the windows in this room, friend.

That is because they are suffocating us, yaar.

Niramish was moving pieces around the Queen's Gambit and replacing the pawns to Staunton Harold/ he was doing this and replacing them. He said, they're suffocating us, yaar, a phrase he repeated many times, They're suffocating us, he said while moving pawns to the start. But since he became angry while speaking and returned to fully visible flesh and blood, not at all diaphanous anymore, I was contented. Then he began to sob and became confused about his size. He shrank to my knee's height and began clutching at my trousers, sobbing.

I said to him, Niramish, this too shall pass, rise up, Niramish, and when he began to fade again and to flicker dangerously, I scooped him up onto my shoulder like a toddler and coddled him. It's all right, Niramish, there are others in the world and surely this misery is not the world.

He did not believe me then, and in strode Uncleboy, Telephone for Niramish, at which time my glasses fell off my face on their own accord.

Niramish descended from my shoulders because he was shy for his sobbing and his shrinking act and reached down to lift my glasses since he was closer, and as he leaned them up to me he began sobbing again because they had fallen down and broken.

I knew then, I could have said it, I felt everything but others knew absolutely.

This one is important, Uncleboy tugged on my shirt, and we left Niramish.

In the other room they came and went, and the voices jostled me between the apparitions, which spoke. They were hard drinking and a hand extended toward me, and the decanter was there. I smelled it but I had no wish for that. The smell was of whiskey and I worried for Niramish, but the air was not foul in this room and I was glad for that. I could not call the silence by name and it was not silence, for they were talking, and the voices that. A hidden organ heralded its bloody existence inside me and I doubled over in pain. The source of the pain was elusive and I began to run somewhere and to gasp because my throat or my. I waited for the pain but mostly the anxiety to pass and for Niramish's conversation to be over. When we heard the noise and smelled the smoke I felt the other. Then I ran and I realized in fact I was clutching the decanter.

I splashed the whiskey onto Niramish's face. Rise, Niramish, I pleaded, but the hole was too large and around his head there was that, and when he was lying like that. I discovered I was sobbing. I thought it was I who with my sobs was making the whole house shake, but probably it was the air outside that was moving like a furious dustbowl that had gathered for a purpose. When all the confusion was over, it was simple to understand: they had inserted a miniature explosive inside the mobile, and when we felt the house shake it was the shudder of a hidden organ, a Black Hawk helicopter that was rising now and from which the bomb had been triggered.

News of the Electrician's death rippled across the continent, and the whole world knew very soon. It was reported in the newspapers and jumped media into radios and television screens, and there was jubilation like we had never known. They tried to bury him that very
day due to public health concerns. His body would not stop issuing blood and we couldn't understand, though he had been a fat adolescent, why there issued from his body blood equal to that of thirty people or more, and why the bleeding had no end, though they had bandaged his mortal head wound with wound-tight layers of cotton cloth. We would have drowned in the house where Niramish died had they not located a large tumbrel soon after to carry him to the nearest cemetery. On the way there, as respectful silent as a murder of funereal crows, they gathered behind in fours and fives at first before the dozens began streaming and then whole hundreds shorn from their lives in that horsebeaten noonlight, in the flythickened air that clotted in all lungs, drawn by the look of that sad spilling blood, which was overflowing from the tumbrel and spilling brown already for putrefaction, but which continued to drip drip drip drip. Some estimates quoted a number of nearly two hundred thousand, though I was alone that day and cannot verify.

In my grief I tore the budding feathers from my arms and the sunlight burned my skin raw. Know this, however: there were other birds, of the flighted variety unlike your narrator, crows mostly, but magpies and curlews also, as I could tell, which hovered above us like a ragged canopy, or just another convoy of Niramish's close associates and admirers. At the cemetery, they were burying an uncle who had died of lung disease or an infarction of the pulmonary valve, and some of the mastans and nameless rebels, whose faces were shielded from the cameras by scarves, asked them please, will you not give us this spot, for as you can: they pointed to the still bleeding Niramish in the barrow and then to the crowd. But they would not. The whole crowd was ready to give him, to tear up the very earth on which it stood, but still there was no ground that would accept Niramish.

The birds disappeared for lost hope and then not a wisp of cirrus overhead, no shade from even one palmate branch: the crowd swayed
like a single unit, vast millipede which this side that sided out of thirst and various other discomforts. For sixteen days it wandered from cemetery to cemetery looking for a place to bury the Electrician, for that was how he had died, not as my friend who took refuge with me from the teasing afterschool crowd, not Niramish and me eating capsicum candies in Confectionarayan Babu's sweet shop or who had suffered through the bitter alienation due to his indelible odour of curried vegetables as I had for my talons or for my slow metamorphosis into an owl, not as One Arm, Quiet Talker, but the Electrician who had designed explosives that warranted conversations across borders and who now could not stop bleeding even after death.

Some thousand or more people relayed their condolences for my loss. Among them was a man weaved toward me through crowd and criers, stood gregarious with a smile and a sun-gleaming pate. He addressed me by name. In the funeral crowd, I had met Niramish's relatives, of course, but none so determined to know me and about my gangster-steps with him. Though I avoided the man, no doubt a Black Organ, I was convinced, he persisted, and finally found me pressed against the farthest cemetery wall from the entrance. Hedayat, he called, snapped a pocket mirror to light between thumb and index, showed my face in sunlight before declaring the mirror was magic, a magic gift for my dead nephew's friend, he snapped fingers. Take it, he handed me the mirror, which reflects the future, he instructed, before facing it in view of a toddler withered suck at his mother's teat.

Charlatan's tricks, I waved him away, leave me to my misery, old man, I yelled.

I am Niramish's uncle Dhikr, he insisted, followed me around, I'm his father's brother, he said before snapping again, this time bringing a small velveteen packet to appear. He showed me shoelaces, explained the contents of the package once upon a time a fabled Zachariah, your grandfather, boot-hopped across the Mediterranean into European
Plains lit by thousand-watt bulbs of the Director's choice, across papier-mâché Ural Mountains into Asia until the Chukchi Sea: you must believe in my gift of flight your grandfather's bootlaces, he instructed, in their ability to lift you out of the darkest place. May you never need them, but if you were my nephew's friend, I suggest you keep them near.

Still slighted by this stranger interrupted my sadness, amused because it was my father, the playback singer Mamun BenJaloun, who had boot-hopped the world, not my grandfather, suspicious whether the stranger had known Niramish, knew his relatives, let alone mine, and before I could say thank you, I saw his bald pate weave dense funeral crowd under the midday sun. What sorcery had he given me, this Niramish's uncle, I wondered as I pocketed the velveteen package in my shirt's secret compartment. I wouldn't recall the existence of the bootlaces or find use for them until months later, when I would find myself in the darkest place, in an Archives abyss among animals.

A thousand people extended their condolences the day they buried Niramish, yet I didn't know them. In the heat and discomfort, the teeming mass lost sense of whose memories, whose emotions belonged to whom. I caught the name of Niramish's first cigarette and echo of his coughing as recalled by a young man to the right of me who didn't speak a word the whole funeral march, his first easy sums in primary class remembered in full by his gradeschool teacher walked in the crowd silently. I drank a homemade lemonade image from a motherfriend he neglected to mention to me, saw moving picture of a curious Niramish asking about petals and petioles in her garden as soft touches of her apron to lemon-dribble cheeks. I saw her years older, hunched, sad, whipped whisper-thin to her neighbour how many more times this back and forth between the military and our boys in secret barracks, she was saying.

I was afraid of being associated with my friend and with his uncle and his uncle's gift, which bulged in my shirt's secret compartment. I denied to everyone no, I did not know him. I tore from the ridges of
the crowd's belly to one moving leg and another of the crowd, to one part and the next of that singular insect made of so many tired grieving people, but they could all identify me as Niramish's friend. The people moved as one suffering animal gave up its legs and portions of its body as its constituents began to disperse, leaving Niramish still lying above the earth and still bleeding. The people were replaced by the avian convoy, which fluttered back and descended silently and remained with us until Niramish was buried.

Years later, I became aware that the Library of Congress had preserved a recording of the sixteen days it took us to find a resting place for Niramish, one that bears the title
The Annunciation of a Terrorist
. It is possible to review the verity of the events as I have described them. Truth be told, certain mysteries remain, and I am not sure I have related the correct quantity of blood that spilled from Niramish's head wound, for instance, or whether it continued spilling for as many days as I indicated or drew as many people by the sight of its unending drip-drip. But everyone knows the legend of Niramish flowed through so many hidden arteries afterward and in such gushing volume there erupted out of the many whispers-wounds certain copycat electricians who tried but failed to repeat Niramish; they were all arrested or died before.

The world spoke ill of him or well of him, they spoke of him all over the world, but no speech, nothing at all, could return Niramish to the sainthood of his simple presence. For months afterward in La Maga, the Black Organs arrested anyone cooking curried vegetables, since they identified the odour of frying mustard seeds and cauliflower as incense-symbols of the vigil act, while the mastans moved me from safehouse to safehouse to ensure I was not arrested. However, now that I no longer wore the blind glasses Niramish had fashioned for me, I could see the shadows of the mastans falling differently. The categories of friend and foe were reluctant to demarcate themselves clearly just yet, but I could tell Black Organs was not ready for Hedayat.

THE
BANQUET

Ten days later, Grandfather and associates, higherups and henchmen, visited me at the trogloscene little saferoom where they were hiding me, dusting sweet hands falling jilapi crumbs before spilling bloody talk over Niramish's death. They frowned who would play my replacement business partner. Despite my grief, I bit my tongue: silence is necessary for mastanism/mastani, language to language the same cutthroat ideology. The black economy also has its slavers and supplicants and an owl learns grip and talons over street mice gang little furballs and when to give a hoot.

But for all the braggadocio and machismo promise of the Underground Unnameable Country, the point, friends and enemies, is that Hedayat would be expected to play pawn or at most run the bishop's moves in a long game in our gang's piratical accumulations. Recall, as the story goes: in the beginning Niramish and I paid tithes regularly and easily since we had secured one of the best divisions in the city for dealing black pepper, but we stopped altogether when Niramish began lip-dribbling stones of incomprehensible, when the Electrician started
talking alonethoughts of combustion and exchange belonging to his new associates.

And now Niramish was dead and Grandfather was opening a coffin little box, offering me a cigarillo: a lungful of sweet, second breath harder, and then the room pankha, spin-spin. My temples bloodhardened. Words mounted words in the smoke. Someone dragged a very large covered wagon into the room. The meaning of it all escaped me until they flung back cloth and there sat an elephantine subject, much fatter than Niramish and unlike Niramish because he possessed two well-functioning upper limbs. He sat there twiddling thumbs, awaiting his turn.

Then merdre and kingpsshit, drumroll circus introduction in the midst of mourning: Grandfather bade me shake hands with my new business partner, and I shook hands because what could I/ Grandfather offered me the devilish handshake deal of nothing at all to start with but two marijuana bricks. And my bambacino new psshitgrinning partner merely emitted a contented whine while twiddling thumbs under cloth until they rolled him away. Then, because they respected that I had been Niramish's shadow and knew I was tired of the world, they left me alone to think things over.

At first I didn't like Masoud Rana. No serious-minded goonda I knew carried a flask of Canadian rye wherever he went, while his '66 Datsun, destined to become my street career's ashes to phoenix, emitted the odour of leaded gasoline left me head-throb pull over the car, man, nauseous on green grass side of the road. We started with near-nothing.