The Scatter Here Is Too Great (17 page)

I waved my press card at the security warden and he let me pass. Inside the hospital building, I was pointed to a man behind the counter who was chewing betel leaf and had a calm look on his face. He had a register of all the patients who had been identified so far.

He traced his finger down to Sadeq's name and turned the register around, pointing at a scribbled name, next to #09. I read the name and for a moment felt the ground move physically. He asked me if I was the patient's brother. I shook my head.

Then on the register I saw another name I knew. I pointed to #54: “Is he also dead?”

“Hmm . . . yes.” He saw my face and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “No use going inside right now. You won't find them. Wait outside.”

I ignored him and went inside the emergency ward. End to end, the room was packed with stretchers and beds that were heaped up with patients. There was hardly any room to move between the beds and stretchers. Doctors surrounded with assistants, nurses, paramedics were busy firefighting—yelling out instructions and instrument names. Right in front of me, a naked man was held by three medics in a sitting position; his skin had been shaved off his body for the most part. His mouth was open and he was droning a constant guttural rasp.

“How do we get him to quiet down?” asked one of the assistants from the senior doctor, an old man in a kurta
shalwar
, who was working with his sleeves rolled up and with a silver wristwatch jangling on his arm. “Let him be. The vibration of his voice relaxes his nerves and numbs his pain,” he replied. “Natural painkiller.”

I felt nauseated. I went outside in the parking area for air.

The parking area too was in a state of panic. The family, friends, and relatives of the injured were clamoring outside the hospital gates. I was among the earliest to arrive. Then something bizarre caught my eye. In front of the ambulances, a boy was slapping his forehead with his palm. His shirt was torn and his face looked bruised, as if he had been in a fight. At first I thought he was one of the mourning relatives, but then I noticed his ID slung around his neck and realized he was an ambulance driver.

“Akbar! Oye Akbar! Give a hand here.” Behind him, another paramedic was hollering out to him as he tried to pull out a woman from the ambulance. The woman being pulled out was already dead but I could sense a movement in her body—she was alive the same way flesh is warm after death, alive to pain and sensation. Akbar did not hear his friend; instead, he started walking like he was in a trance: his head penduluming side to side, his eyes fixed to the ground. He walked headfirst into the iron gate of the hospital and banged it hard. The collision woke him up. The security warden standing nearby shook him by his shoulder, “Oye you, boy, you OK? You need water or something? Don't stand here.”

A hot cloud of dust and exhaust was billowing around my face. The air was filled with the refracted heat of the late sun. I was walking on the Clifton bridge.

My eyes were following the blue plastic bag that floated in between the onrushing cars. It curved sideways, rose and cruised and hung in the air, and finally ran into the path of a pedestrian who slapped it with the back of his hand and pushed it over the edge of the bridge. It limped over it and spiraled like a tiny tornado.

I was feeling a disconnect in my body, which was beating to a much slower rhythm than my mind. Somebody at the hospital said that the bomb went off just outside the station, at the intersection. In my mind I was seeing that triangular intersection where at this time of the day the traffic locked into each other because one lane was blocked by buses that treated it as a five-minute stop. The buildings around the intersection were marked with permanent cracks that showed how this city had aged over the decades having withstood incessant assault of noise, smoke, and dust.

In my memory, I looked hard at them, but I couldn't understand what they meant. Along the street level, I was reading signs outside old establishments offering cheap and dirty stays to travelers and residents—I paused to look at one that offered haircuts, steam baths, and massage. A few meters up, a crowd was gathered around the intracity bus terminal; people were piling on top of the roofs of the buses because all seats were taken. In the apartment building just above the bus terminal, a man's thick arms hung out of the railings of his third-floor balcony. He wore a vest and
shalwar
and he was yelling to a man below who was waving something in his hand. Beside the man in the vest, a woman was hanging clothes on the clothesline.

The other name I had read on the register of the dead at the hospital was Comrade Sukhansaz. He was one of my father's dearest friends and a man I had known since I was a child. It occurred to me that his family also lived in one of the apartments adjacent to Cantt Station. Was he on his way to meet his family when the blast happened? Was he leaving? Did he come and decide it was not a good idea to meet them? He used to say to my father that marriage was his biggest comfort and his biggest mistake. After his son was born, he said, he had started feeling alienated from his work that he had dedicated his life to. He cared only about his son. Nothing else was important to him anymore. “That scared me,” he said. “I realized it had to be one thing: family or revolution. But a man is allowed only one irreparable mistake in his life—then at least he can work his life out so as to justify the mistake. But I made two. Having a child was a mistake because of my work. And when my son was born I realized committing to my work was a mistake. You know what Gautama said?
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to Truth: not going all the way, and not starting.
I think I made both. Two mistakes make a man blind. You lose your ability to see and understand things. You go mad. Mad.”

I was standing somewhere near where the curve of the bridge peaked. The sky from the bridge looked a white metal sheet. This bridge was one of the few places I visited often. On this bridge, the world made sense, even if momentarily. I had spent many hot afternoons standing here, feeling the feral breeze of this city, and staring at the railway tracks forking below—abandoned and alone for miles, and watching the kites scout the skies overhead, and pigeons, crows, and sparrows beneath them, all pursuing their always scramble. On the bridge you could stand aside, and simply observe the enormous angry mad busy world rushing past you.

I began dreaming of Sadeq with whom I had spent most evenings during the last three years, listening to his daily digest of car recovery stories, his musings on love, his weird descriptions of people and places in his angry, funny, doped-up voice. We were friends in school who lost each other afterward but then we rediscovered our friendship again after college.

Back in the school, we hunted as a pair. I had a sharp tongue and he was a bully, full of untamed flair. But during the years of his absence he had turned into a hard, angry, vengeful spirit who reveled in the fear and intimidation he caused. He said he cared very little for the world. But the truth was different. He was running away from things he loved. (In that sense we were alike.) In his crooked messy way he did love people. And in his ways, he found that love reciprocated too. But he carried guilt for not being able to give himself up to what he loved; he hated himself for being a criminal. He once told me about an old man he helped outside a hospital and how holding his frail body sickened him. How he tried not to think of that man because it made him sick of what he was doing every day of his life and how he lived. Those were rare moments though when he lowered his guard. I remember once while playing hooky from school, we ran into some policemen who harassed him and he broke down. We never spoke about that incident, but I believed that was the moment we had become friends.

My mind drifts. I was dreaming of that café at Cantt Station where I went looking for an old man we had met on the bus on that trip—the old writer, the truant, who roved the city and wrote stories about all the truants of this city. The café he told me about was adjacent to the intersection. It was a Persian café that served cheap delicious food and tea and fruitcakes; its dark hall was packed with booths that had wooden furniture and tables with marble tops. The incubated air inside smelled fuzzy—frying things mixing with car fumes wafting in from the street; its darkness diffused with white tube lights. For a while, in my mind, I was there again, listening to the din and tumble of life inside the café.

Out at the street, I saw a boy in a car with a girl stuck in the traffic jam. It reminded me of a story a friend once told me of a botched date where he got stuck in the Cantt Station traffic, and by the time he managed to extricate from it, it was time for the girl to return home.

All these stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city as anything but a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That's how we lose the city—that's how our knowledge of what the world is and how it functions is taken away from us—when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, that we ought to have known. Suddenly, it struck me that that's how my father experienced this city. How, when he walked this city, he was tracing paths from his memory to the present—from what this place had been to what it had become.

My mind now was a hard knotted skein of voices of the two men I had lost. I could hear their voices in my head: both of them raucous, loud, foul-mouthed. But gleaning beneath their cacophony of noises I could sense the menacing silence of their deaths. I felt as if my heart had been violently torn out of its cage and all its pieces flung into the world. My forehead was cold with sweat.

As I walked down the bridge, I saw a car windscreen lying on the footpath. It was battered with bullet holes. I stopped and examined it. It was an absurd thing to be lying on a footpath. I stood looking at the sharp, clean webs around the bullet holes. A stunningly violent, shockingly beautiful object—a crass memento of this city to mark this moment.

I walked down the bridge to climb the first bus I could get—to be somewhere else.

Things go on.

I do not remember when was the last time I strayed from the path I had followed from my apartment to work and back. But I do remember very well how and why it was established.

There came a point in my life when I started looking for a job with a hard, inflexible routine. I started searching for work that would help me get away from writing; work that would not leave me with a craving to reach for words because here's the thing: writing was an inescapable torture for me. I could not do it, yet it was the only thing I desperately wanted to do.

I had tried many things to effect my escape—worked as a salesperson for car tires; a receptionist; a signboard painter; plumber; cotton-filler in pillows and quilt covers; an overseer in a garment factory—but when I came home at the end of each day, I reached for pen and paper—and wrote down the little fragments that filled my head. I wandered the city for hours—I hung about the old markets, sat at the rickshaw and taxi stands, observed alleged criminals around the city courts, ogled at customers buying condoms and electronic gadgets and spices and haggling over meat and used books and parrots—and each day, I came home brimming with the manic psychic energy of the city, with countless nameless voices in my head, and tried to write it all. But nothing I wrote was up to the task of capturing this ruinously mad city. Each day was another exercise in despair.

But that wandering the streets, to be honest, was also just another search for how to look away. I wanted to forget—because like everyone, I had a lot to forget: I wanted to forget my father and his stories that were of no use to me but that nonetheless haunted me and interrupted my life and imagination and my writing. I wanted to purge myself of his imagination. I wanted to write against his idea of stories. I wanted to write stories that were completely unlike his stories—ones that had
no
element of fabrication. I wanted voices on the page to be as true as the ones I heard. Because I had realized that there was nothing called true stories. Only fragments were true.