JOHNNY GONE DOWN (7 page)

I tasted blood. Every part of my body hurt. My eyes refused to open. I drifted out of consciousness.

I awoke again with a throbbing pain in my head. I tried to move but something weighed me down. My throat was parched. I moved my tongue over my lips and tasted more blood. I coughed and it felt as if someone was dropping massive piles of bricks on my ribs.

‘My name is Nikhil Arya. I’m from Delhi. I study at MIT,’ I told myself silently.

I was alive.

But where was I? I tried to wiggle my toes and felt them move. I moved my fingers and they touched a hard surface. I was lying on a cement floor. A sudden thought struck me. Why was everything black? Had I lost my eyesight? Not my eyes, I thought, anything but that, please.

I tried to speak but only a whimper escaped my lips.

‘Are you awake?’ A steady voice pierced the darkness.

The Khmer Rouge. Ishmael. The city centre.

‘Yes,’ I said.

My throat hurt. A rush of blood filled my mouth. I coughed, and again felt the shooting pain in my ribs as if a bus had run over me.

‘Don’t worry. You aren’t going blind. It’s pitch dark,’ said Ishmael.

I felt a sharp relief despite the situation.

‘Where are we?’ I asked through gritted teeth. It hurt to speak, but I resisted the urge to cough up blood again. I tried to use my arms to sit up, but something restrained my wrist. I pushed again, and a heavy mist seemed to surround me. I drifted away again.

‘Eat it,’ said a voice.

I woke up again. My face touched something cold; iron or steel, perhaps. A tumbler of some sort, maybe it contained water. I tried to lift myself up. Again, something dragged me down.

‘Don’t try to get up,’ said Ishmael. ‘We are tied to the wall.’

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Someone hit us on the
head in the city centre. You fell face down. I thought you had died.’

I felt dead. I needed water. My throat felt rough, as if someone was rubbing sandpaper on my tonsils.

‘Water,’ I said hoarsely.

‘They’ve mixed some rice and water in the bowl,’ he said. ‘Lap it up. This is the only thing we’ll get to eat today.’

I tried to sit up again. Every inch of my body throbbed with pain, and I felt cold metal against my wrist.

‘Don’t get up. One of your wrists is tied to the wall with a chain,’ he repeated. ‘Try to lap it up.’

I moved to my side and collapsed from the effort.

Focus.

Slowly, carefully, I managed to move little by little, until my face reached the bowl. My tongue touched a liquid that smelt like rotten fish and I began lapping greedily. Blood mixed with rice and water, the best meal I had ever had in my life. I lapped until my tongue scraped the bottom, and then I licked the sides until every drop was gone. Exhausted, I lay down on my side and drifted out again.

Finally, some light. I looked around. My left wrist was in a manacle tied to a crumbling cement wall. Ishmael was tied to the opposite end of the tiny cell
we were caged in. We faced another cell like ours with a dark, unlit corridor in between. Somewhere behind us there was probably a door from which the tiny rays of sunlight trickled in.

‘Are you okay?’ Ishmael asked.

‘No,’ I said, tasting the mucus and blood in my mouth. But I was alive, my mind was working. They hadn’t killed us. We could still find a way out.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said, looking at him in the faint light. Two angry cuts stretched from his eyes down to his heavily bearded cheeks, and his face was bruised and swollen like a balloon.

‘The chef serves his gourmet meal only once a day.’ He smiled, revealing two missing teeth in the front.

I ran my tongue over my own teeth. I tasted more blood, but my teeth seemed intact. ‘How long has it been?’ I asked. It hurt to speak, and my stomach growled, roared, with hunger.

‘A week; maybe less, maybe more. You’ve settled well into your routine. You sleep the whole day, lap up the food, and sleep again. A good way to pass time.’

‘Why have they…’

A sudden noise. I heard footsteps approaching our cell. A short, nondescript Cambodian man with a scar on his face entered the cell. He was in plain clothes, not the dreaded black dress with red bandana.

He wasn’t a Khmer solider, I thought cautiously. Maybe the old government was back.

The man stood in front of us and screamed out something in Khmer. Then suddenly, without provocation, he slapped me. I held up my free left arm to ward him off. He rolled his fist and hit me, again and again, until the familiar taste of blood filled my mouth. The pain was so excruciating, I was surprised I didn’t pass out. It was Ishmael’s turn next, and he took his beating with a passive, almost cheerful expression, his shaggy blonde mane now caked with dirt and blood.

The man left as suddenly as he had entered. I glanced at Ishmael. He looked like a pale, frayed, worn-out ghost of the guy I had seen at the airport.

I opened my mouth.

Ishmael looked at me and signalled frantically with his eyes.

‘What are you saying?’ I mumbled through broken teeth. ‘What did he want?’

‘He wanted us to keep quiet.’ He laughed as the man came back again.

This time the man hit me until I fainted.

There was blood all over the cold floor when I awoke next. A bowl was kept next to me and I lapped up the rice and water hungrily. Ishmael was staring
blankly at the bars. He smiled at me, but this time we didn’t exchange a word. I didn’t know how many hours or days it had been since the beating. I forced myself to think about escape, but the pain made it impossible to concentrate. I don’t know when I passed out again.

Someone kicked me awake. Three short, thin men were standing over me. Ishmael indicated that I needed to get up. The threat of being hit again gave me new life, and I followed Ishmael’s movements as he dragged himself up and kneeled down, pushing his free arm against the ground for support. They hosed us with water, and the cold water hit me like an electric shock. I nearly cried out in pain, but silenced myself in time.

The bath did me good, and with the blood, dirt and excrement washed away from my body, my wounds began to hurt less. I looked around once the men had left. Ishmael had shrunk to half his size. His bones stuck out of his shrivelled frame, and ugly red wounds covered every inch of his torso. His belly had swollen enormously, and I felt mine and saw that the same had happened to me. Perhaps starvation did that to you; perhaps it was some disease which had struck us both. I didn’t know. I wasn’t supposed to know. This wasn’t taught in the mechanical engineering course at MIT; this wasn’t what NASA expected me to know when I was selected to join their graduate engineering trainee programme; this wasn’t written
in the Cambodian
Lonely Planet
guide. I broke into sudden, convulsive sobs.

The door swung open behind us, and the same man who had beaten us to pulp days, maybe weeks ago, entered. I shrunk against the wall but he didn’t spare me a glance. Quietly, he untied Ishmael and pulled him to his feet. Then he dragged Ishmael outside the cell, holding him by his tattered T-shirt.

Alone in the cell, I drifted in and out of consciousness. I worried intermittently about Ishmael, but mostly, I just thought about food. My throat burnt like it was on fire but I felt no thirst, just gnawing, overpowering hunger. When would they bring the rice? I licked the floor; maybe a morsel had fallen there. Nothing. I tried to imagine food. That made it worse. I tried to stop thinking about food. It felt even worse. I tried to shut my swollen eyelids but felt hungrier from the effort.

I couldn’t hold out any longer. I was dying.

Suddenly, there was the welcome sound of footsteps as a faceless man threw two bowls down on the floor. I threw myself at one of the bowls immediately and lapped up the gruel in a second, my tongue scraping against the steel again and again until it bled.

The only effect it had was to make me hungrier than I had been before.

I eyed the second bowl and was about to attack it
- but stopped. Ishmael. Wherever he was, he would come back hungry. But would he come back? For one long apocalyptic moment, I wished he wouldn’t so I could eat his rice in peace. But what was stopping me now? I lunged for the bowl, tugging at the manacle around my wrist - and stopped again. I couldn’t get his face out of my mind. The seconds ticked by. I continued to eye his bowl hungrily. Just a taste, I told myself, or even just the smell. Just once, please. I tried to keep my eyes shut. It was agonizing to sit so close to the bowl, to see its curvature, to feel its texture in my mind, to smell the wafts of wondrous fragrance that seemed to come from it.

Just as I reached for the bowl once again, I heard the sound of the door opening. Two men dragged Ishmael into the cell, threw him on the floor, and left. A tiny puddle of blood began to form around his body as he lay motionless, face down on the floor. I tried to reach him with my untied arm, but he was too far away. I pulled with all my strength at the manacle. It didn’t budge an inch.

‘Ishmael,’ I shouted.

I didn’t care any more if they came and beat me to death.

‘Ishmael. Ishmael. Ishmael.’

He didn’t stir.

He was losing blood. If he wasn’t dead already, he would die soon unless he woke up and tried to close his wounds. I picked up my empty bowl and
hurled it at him with all my strength. The sound of metal grinding against bone resonated through the cell. Ishmael moved a little.

I pushed his rice bowl towards him. ‘Eat,’ I said.

He looked at me. His eyes seemed to have been pushed back against their sockets; his nose, lips, chin had all been reduced to a bloody pulp. He opened his mouth to say something and tried to lift himself from the floor, but collapsed. He mumbled something; his voice was strained, his words unrecognizable.

He opened his mouth again. He stopped. And then, as if mustering up all his energy, ‘Just tell them something,’ he said. And collapsed.

He never rose again. Every day I envied him, and wished my release would come sooner.

They removed his body after a few weeks, maybe months, when the smell must have reached outside the cell and bothered them.

I felt no sadness when he was taken away. No one replaced him. I was alone in the cell but I felt no need for companionship. I felt nothing at all, just silent acceptance.