“You are behaving like a child,” he says. His lips are so cracked, his tongue is swollen up in his mouth. He sounds like he’s been drinking daru, looks that way too, red eyed and hair standing on end. Even his glasses are dusty and he no longer has the will to wipe them on his shirt like he usually does. No longer is he reading papers. “What has happened to you?” he demands of Nisha. “They used to joke that Zafar’s backbone was named Nisha. Now this?”
“I am strong,” says she, “and with all my strength I am begging you, give this up. You can’t fight if you are dead.”
“Why talk of death?” asks Zafar. “Talk of winning.”
“You think you are being strong,” she says, “but you are not. Giving up your life is just that, giving up. It’s surrendering. These Kampani-wallahs, they’re not impressed. They’re laughing at you. You are making them a gift of your life.”
When she says this, I am watching Zafar’s face and it seems to me that a great weariness appears in it. He knows she is right. It comes to me then that he is doing this because he is tired of fighting and that this is the only way he can stop with honour. We have not supported him well, we’ve not appreciated his years of struggle for our sakes, now he is tired, wants it all to end, ending this way will not be without honour. But I’ve underestimated Zafar. The man is, after all, a saint, already he’s apologising for losing his temper with Nisha, but now it’s her turn to go mad. She shouts at him, “Don’t expect me to stay here and watch you die! I won’t! I refuse!”
“Then you must go,” says the hero, but I swear if there had been a drop of moisture left in his body it would have been rolling from his eye. “Please do not come here again until it is over.”
“Until it is over? What does that mean?” says Nisha, shaken by this.
“It means that you are my life,” says Zafar, which, being the dismal sod he is, is the nearest he will ever come to saying I love you. Women sitting near go ooh and ah, but many are weeping.
“If I am your life,” says she, “then you are killing both of us.”
“You shake my resolve,” says Zafar. “Please go now.” On his face is a look like he is being tortured. Nisha gets up and walks away, like her heart and guts are trailing on the ground behind her.
Saturday, fifth day of Nautapa, 118F. No more singing around the tent. Zafar and Farouq are lying on their mattresses, for long periods now they do not speak. Their fourth day without food or water. People are whispering that they are sinking. The crisis can’t be far away. When the doctress sahiba orders them to quit what will they do? The wisdom is that they are going to carry on to the dreadful end. People really believe this, a sure sign is that many folk, Hindu and Muslim alike, come hesitantly to the tent to ask for their blessings. To be in the presence of saints, this is something. A delegation of elders from the Nutcracker arrives and pleads with them to stop. Through their destroyed lips, they refuse. Fire of thirst, burning of hunger, these two are cremating themselves on the pyre of their dead cause.
At lunchtime I am at Somraj’s house eating my lunch, and packing some chappatis and pickle to take home for Ma. Since this drama began I have not been spending time with Ma, which I should because every day she is getting madder. Two, three times now the neighbours have found her shouting in the lanes and brought her home. They do not know what she’s yelling, but I do, because she tells me at night. “Animal, I am trying to warn people, but they don’t listen. Hell is coming, it will open underneath our feet, you can feel the heat already. Le camp des saints et la ville bien-aimée. Un feu descendera du ciel, et les dévorera.” The camp of the saints and the well-loved city, a fire will come from the sky and devour them. Then she’s confirmed that angels have moved in all around, they’re taking over the city, preparing some big showdown. Soon there will be no people left.
Nisha comes to me with eyes red from crying, she kneels in front of me so she can look me in the eye. “Animal, you have to take a message to Zafar from me. Will you?”
“Of course.” Nothing I’d like less, but how to say this?
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should say. But in the end what else is there? I love you. With all my heart and soul.”
Oh wicked to say so but the fire that burns Zafar is nothing to the flames which now engulf me. “Yes, yes,” I say. “Of course I will tell him.”
“Say that I respect him and admire him and support him and wish to be his strongest ally,” she babbles. “How can I stay here alone? Look.” She shows me a cap, carefully embroidered in blue and scarlet silks. “I have made this for him, for our wedding.”
“It is beautiful.” God, how this hurts.
“Tell him that if he goes, he’s taking me with him.”
“I will tell him,” I mumble.
“The thought of him gone,” she says, now talking more to herself than to me, “it makes me desperate. The Kampani is not worth spitting on, it’s not worth dying for. If there was one good person in that Kampani, even one who might be moved by such a sacrifice, then it might be worth it. But they’ll be cheering when the news comes.”
“Stop this talk Nish,” I tell her. “No one’s fucking going. No one’s going.” This talk of her going with him is spooking me. “Not in a million years will he do this. Think about it, not even Zafar could be such a dork as to suppose that dying would be a better option.” But I am not sure of this, not at all, because Zafar is a hero, a saint, and his death would cause such mayhem that no politician could ignore it. The way Nisha is talking, I want him alive now, very much so. A rival who’s alive can make mistakes, who knows, she might grow tired of saintliness, but one who’s dead and eternal, no way.
“Animal, next to Zafar, you are my best friend. Give him my message.”
Zafar says the hunger has stopped and he has been feeling a kind of peace, but he doesn’t seem very peaceful because when I have said the message he starts flapping his swollen tongue at me.
“Animal you are always saying you don’t have to think, you are fucking lucky mate, because thinking is doing my head in I think my head will bust with all the fucking thoughts bulging in it.” It’s not usual for him to swear so I am a bit amazed. “What a place is this Khaufpur,” he says, “where even the sky is broken and when rain comes it’s just a loan against long overdue debts.”
He rambles on in this way, well you know what they say, the tongue has no bone so it can twist and turn to all kinds of things.
“Is Khaufpur the only poisoned city? It is not. There are others and each one of has its own Zafar. There’ll be a Zafar in Mexico City and others in Hanoi and Manila and Halabja and there are the Zafars of Minamata and Seveso, of São Paulo and Toulouse and I wonder if all those weary bastards are as fucked as I am.”
“What should I tell Nisha?”
“Nisha?” he croaks, as if he’s having trouble remembering who she is.
“Your girlfriend.”
“So where is she?” He starts looking around. His eyes are sunk in his head. So dry and inflamed are they that as they swivel I’m expecting them to creak.