We are so near the fire that my forehead is burning. Only a few paces more to where the steps lead up onto the platform. I’m perched high on Farouq’s shoulders. Swords drank, busy with slaughter. Ahead of us men, and boys too, those with black headbands and some without, are climbing to the burning edge of the fire. Corpses were scattered in the desert. There are men on the sides, keeping well back from the edge of the pit, ready to help those who are going across. Savage birds hovered overhead night and day. A little ahead a man steps on to the coals, which are dancing with a bright heat. In four long strides he walks across. Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein! The second goes, and the third, and the next. Paradise is theirs, they have gone to Paradise. Helping hands pull them to safety on the far side. No one is left ahead of us. They have become burned up in God. I feel Farouq take a deep breath and tighten his grip of my legs. Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein! As he steps out I open my mouth to warn him not to drop me but instead I’m bellowing with the rest
now Shimr Maloon do what you do
the blessed head kissed by Al Mustafa
tormented by thirst as if the desert was in it,
now lies there on the desert sand
Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein!
The strangest thing happens to me. As the heat roars up around us I feel that I am floating above the sand of a baking desert which is shimmering with heat he who was a shining light is murdered my mouth is on fire with a burning thirst and my eyes are burning and the passages of my nose are burning where the fiery heat rushes in murdered in Karbala and lies unburied and all around there are crowds and commotion, people falling dead, and somewhere in the distance are the banners of the enemy, shaking with hatred for all that’s good and I’m helpless and unable to prevent the terrible thing that’s happened which is the murder of goodness and innocence and the victory of evil and in some part of my head there is a roaring noise like a great wind, fanning the flames, a voice in my head is saying l’injustice ramportera la victoire and I realise that we have gone across and that I have been dreaming Ma Franci’s or rather Sanjo’s dream of the end of the world.
Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein! Ya Hussein!
We are turning around. We are going back around. We will go over again. I begin to feel dizzy I, Muhtasham, the beggar at your door. Again it comes, the heat, the crimson wound, the fire is flowing, such colours are shifting in the coals. My head is doing spirals. I feel myself begin to slip from Farouq’s back, sliding I’m standing, empty, empty-handed, at the door of helplessness falling and there is nothing now between me and the fire.
Let me die I’m thinking as I fall, I’ll be happy. Everything in my life is swallowed up in that wish for oblivion. The fire itself as it jumps towards me has lost its ferocity, seems like a mild sunshine. Next thing I know I’m lying on a carpet inside the masjid, Farouq and others are bending over me.
“He’s come to,” says one.
“Little idiot,” Farouq says. “Picked your moment, didn’t you? I’m halfway across and you let go from round my neck.”
“What happened? Did you drop me?”
“You fainted,” says this other Yar-yilaqi guy. “You were lucky, if he hadn’t danced and caught you, you’d have burned.”
“You caught me? You danced?”
“Thank me some other time,” says Farouq.
“Did you burn your feet?”
“No.”
“Fucking shame.”
“I should have let you die,” says he.
TAPE FIFTEEN
A big book of animals from the library Nisha borrowed once and she showed it to me, this book had pictures in of all the animals of India, bears and apes, wolves, deer of all kinds, rhino, tiger, lion, buffalo, you name it. There was cobra, king cobra, python, bloodsucker lizard, hoopoo, fish eagle, kite and crow, there was gharial crocodile, mahseer fish, hyena and jackal and dhole, which is a wild dog with round ears, but in all the book, in all of its hundreds of pages and pictures, there was no animal like me. Nisha said, “That’s because you are unique. Be proud of it.” But I just felt sad.
Why mention this now? Because two nights after the fire walk I’m up in the mango tree, higher than Elli’s roof. Above the Little Bear’s swinging by his tail, a few shapes are flitting that might be bats. No problem now is this tree, which had so fought me the first time I climbed it. By now I know its ways as if they were stairs, this knot that stumpy branch, twist here, pull up there, leaves above me black, the moon tonight’s not yet risen. See, I have found a name for the animal I am, I’m the bat-eared ape that climbs only in the dark of night.
Elli and Somraj are sitting on the terrace, their faces are lit from the glow of an oil lamp. My bat ears are flapped forward to hear what’s being said. She’s telling him about her marriage. It seems she met her husband when she was studying medicine and he was learning law. They met many times before they fell in love, at friends’ houses, at demonstrations against the war in Iraq which the Amrikans called Desert Storm. Much of her talk, which is Hindi-Inglis mixed, I don’t follow. There are some things even a don for language can’t explain. What does it mean “students at pen state came out to support gay rights”? Appears these two were both idealistic idiots who thought that with law and medicine hand in hand they could change the world.
“He seemed so exciting,” says she. “He’d been to Colombia and eaten fried ants and drank stuff which he said was like a cannon blasting the skull into fragments.”
“We have daru like that,” says Somraj, “but I don’t advise you to try it.”
“I was naive,” she says, “I didn’t realise people change easier than worlds.”
The shadows on his face change, so he must be smiling. What? More smiles? And here he is drinking whisky with Elli and not even disapproving. I cannot imagine him behaving like this with any other woman. Maybe it’s because she’s a foreigner. But Somraj really seems to like her. You can see it in the way he leans forward when she talks, you can tell he wants to hear. He wants to know everything about her.
After getting married, she says, she was working long days in a hospital, the husband was struggling to make it as a lawyer. They’d come home tired and flop in front of the tele. Forgotten their lofty schemes, they were becoming the sort of people they once despised. “I mean,” she says, growing more passionate, “the sort of people for whom the world’s nothing more than a box of dancing illusions, whose ideas of what’s important stop at the edges of their own self-interest.” Somraj nods. Well, there are plenty like that in Khaufpur.
“We were drifting to a place I did not want to be. I could foresee golfing weekends and evenings out with company wives, the whole hateful middle-class flapdoodle. I wanted nothing to do with it. I felt I was losing my life. If the marriage had been better in other ways I might have tried harder to save it. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t.”