“Well, I think she must be ready,” says Père Bernard, consulting a shiny wrist watch. Seems they are booked on the one-thirty flight to Delhi, whence another aeroplane leaves for France at six.
When after twenty minutes she has not emerged, Père Bernard goes to the hole in the wall and twitches the plastic sheet that’s our door. “Mother? Mother Ambrosine?” Receiving no reply, he bends and pokes in his head. “Tiens! There is no one here! Where has she gone? How could she vanish like that?”
“Father,” says I, fully sobbing, “did you hear a trumpet? Ma says when the Apokalis starts, an angel will blow a trumpet, all who love Isa miyañ will be snatched up to heaven right then and there.”
“Nonsense,” says he. “Utter nonsense.”
At this very instant a train rumbling through the Nutcracker gives a loud hoot and he jumps. Eyes, that kind of joy is almost enough to make a person believe in god.
“Father, you must give me your watch.”
“What for?”
“So that if Ma Franci comes back, I can tell her what the time is. After all she has a plane to catch.”
He looks a bit surprised at this, but let’s face it, his head is already well fucked. The watch I’ve cached in the wall. It must stay hidden for I can guess what will happen next. Sure enough, within an hour approaches a cloud of dust which contains two pandus in a jeep.
“Okay, where is she?”
“How should I know? I was here with that foreign father, when we looked inside, she had disappeared.”
“People don’t disappear,” says the senior pandu. Fatlu-in-training is he, all belt and belly, standing there like a fucking Sadda miyã ki tond.
“You’re welcome to look for yourself, watch out for scorpions, don’t forget to go up the ladder…if it will bear your weight.”
“I’ll have less of your lip,” he says, giving me a filthy look, “don’t think we don’t know about you, filthy little chaar sau bees.”
Now, Eyes, around us by is a crowd from the Nutcracker, among it are a few young men, none too happy to see the police. Their presence gives me courage. “Hey fatso, threaten innocent folk round here, such a slippering you’ll get, instead of chaar sau bees you’ll be saying baar sau chees.”
He starts for me, of course, a couple of guys step forward, so he stops.
“We’ll meet in Paradise,” Ma said. When the police have gone I have a good look to check the coast’s clear, then I’ve hopped it to Paradise Alley and soon reached Aliya’s place. Well before entering I hear laughter, a familiar voice says, “Tout que je me souviens de mon enfance d’autrefois, c’est un ciel poudré de bleu, la poussière sèche, des olives et des myrtes.”
It’s Ma. She’s saying that all she remembers of her long ago childhood is a sky of chalky blue, dust, plus olives and myrtes, whatever they may be.
“For those birds,” says Huriya, “he’ll go to any trouble, really he would. If he could see, be polishing the bars of that cage he’d.”
I’ve peered inside. There they are, two old ladies, squatting by the hearth, Ma’s still got on the black burqa she escaped in. There too is heaven’s kettle, a curl of steam from its spout tells me that chai has been accomplished.
“J’ai lui dit, mon travail, c’est ici, dans le royaume des pauvres de bon dieu.” I said to him, my work is here in the kingdom of god’s poor. “Besides, I don’t want to leave my friends, how many years have we known each other, Huriya? Goodness, it must be fifty.”
“I tell him, husband, stop fussing over those birds, what’s to become of your granddaughter when we are gone?”
“Plus he wanted me to go on an aeroplane.”
“The child’s at school most days,” says her friend. “I told her, I said, ‘Aliya, go to school as often as you can, learn what you can. Education is precious. Without it you’re like Hanif and me, you’re done for.’”
“Why should I return?” demands Ma. “When I joined the convent as a girl, they called me a bumpkin because I’d grown up on a farm. You see we had a country way of talking. Viech d’ase, we’d say which was rude, ho barro lo porta! Bits and pieces come back to me, like Jacotin’s nose.”
“Have some more chai,” says Huriya and pours.
“Thank you,” says Ma, who knows “chai.” “Animal should be here soon, I told him where to find me.”
“Aliya’s so fond of Animal,” says her granny, who has in turn caught the mention of my name. “He’s sweet to her, I was hoping he’d take her to that new clinic that’s opened in the Claw, but we are not supposed to go there, I don’t know why.”
Old Huriya is not the only one puzzled by the boycott of Elli’s clinic. Around that time, I had to visit an old boy called Shambhu. He was a twice-victim of the Kampani. He had breathed the poisons of that night, plus the wells in his neighbourhood were full of poisons leaked from the factory.
Shambhu’s body was a sack of pain, his breathing was difficult. “Oh my life,” he told his wife, “if I can’t get a breath I’m going to die.”
“Get him oxygen,” the neighbours said.
“I don’t know what is oxygen,” his wife the old woman wailed, the tears of her face making pocks in the dust.
“It is a gas, but a good gas,” they said. “It comes in metal bottles. If you give it to him he will be able to breathe easier.”
“But from where can I get oxygen? No money for food there’s, where will I find money for this?”
“Take him to the government hospital,” one said.
“Sister, what welcome do we people get at the government hospital? They won’t give him this good gas, they’ll send him off with a chit for aspirin. Zafar bhai and Somraj, all those big people, will they give money to buy it?”
“Let me die, wife,” said Shambhu. “It must be god’s will.”
She began caterwauling afresh. Someone said, “What about that clinic in the Chicken Claw, the one nobody is going to? Every day you see the doctor standing outside, looking for people to come. Let Shambhu go there.”
“It is a Kampani clinic,” another person said. “That’s why people won’t go there, even though it’s free.”
“That Kampani is the very devil. They made it free deliberately because they knew that the poor have no money for the other hospitals.”
“If it’s there why shouldn’t we use it?” demanded Shambhu’s wife. “Why should he not go there?”
“It’s the Kampani clinic. That doctress, the American woman, she’s paid by the Kampani. This is what I’ve heard.”
“He is going to die, what difference does it make?” Shambhu’s wife cried. “I don’t care where it gets the money from, so long as it cures him. A cow can eat many different things, grass, leaves, but the milk she gives is always the same. It’s milk. This doctress is not charging. Says all are welcome. If god has sent such a person to us, who are we to refuse?”
“Sister, we all agree, but Zafar bhai says we must not go.”
“If my Shambhu dies,” she said, “his death will be on Zafar bhai.”
The people of the Apokalis ground their teeth against suffering and stayed away from Elli doctress’s clinic. Alone among the Khaufpuris I would visit her. Zafar encouraged me. He thought I was spying on her, it’s what he told people who complained, “How come Animal’s allowed to break the boycott while we all are denied free treatment?” I felt bad about this, not because of Zafar, but because by deceiving him I was also deceiving the rest.
I was there when an old man came and told Zafar, “An ulcer weeps, it makes the skin all around putrid and this goes on day and night the pain it’s unceasing, with such pain you can’t think, you cannot read your prayers or work or sleep, nothing can you do but just endure it, at the end of each day you can say nothing except I’ve survived, and after many days and nights blur into a dream, you say, well I am still here, but so is the pain, in truth it makes you mad.”