Down by the road’s waiting Bhoora’s auto, he lifts me in. “Come,” says he. “Now we’ll go home.”
Zafar and Farouq squeeze in either side of me.
“Wait! What about Jara?”
“The dog is okay,” says Farouq with a grin. “Just look behind to see what a popular bugger you are.”
Right behind us is a bhutt-bhutt-pig full of people plus, I guess, Jara too.
“Bhoora brother,” says Zafar. “Let’s go. Back to my place.”
“No, no,” says I. “Just take me back home. Ma must be worrying.”
There’s a silence, then Zafar says, “You need a doctor, and Elli has gone back to Amrika. We’ll go to my place.”
Eyes, someone had mentioned Elli leaving, but not until now do I know that she has gone back home. “She’s not returning then.” Eyes, I’m not even thinking of my back, just sad it’s that things had to end this way. “I would have liked to say goodbye.”
“No need.” It’s Zafar. Something not right about the way he says this.
“Why are you smiling, you bastard?”
“They’re repairing Elli’s clinic. Your mate Dayanand is there, the blue-lungi foreman’s there chain-smoking beedis. It will be ready by the time she returns.”
“She’s coming back?”
“See, we bring good news.”
“Zafar brother, what does this glee mean?”
Says Farouq, “Elli went back to Amrika, but she took Pandit-ji and Nisha with her.”
“But,” says I, “she promised her husband, the lawyer, that she would go back to him. She told me this herself.”
Says Zafar, “She promised to go back to Amrika. She did not promise to go back to him. What it means…”
But I know what it means. It means the music of Elli’s promise will be heard loud and joyful at her wedding. So then I’m clapping.
“Congratulations, Farouq brother. Zafar brother, to you double congrats!”
“Why double?” Grinning like he knows the answer.
“Because there’ll be not one wedding but two. You will marry Nisha and I’ll be there cheering. I love the pair of you. I swear, my brother, may god in whom you don’t believe, be my witness.” With these words, which I had no idea would fly out of my mouth, a great peace enters my heart. “Zafar brother, this gift which you gave me, please wear it at your wedding.”
I’ve given him back the precious embroidered cap.
“So after all, we won. The power of nothing rose up and destroyed our enemies.”
Says Zafar, “When is anything ever as simple as that?”
The auto’s bumping along the road that leads south to Khaufpur, behind us the hills are dwindling. The countryside is green from recent rain.
After some time Farouq asks again why I’d run away. The way he asks this, it’s like there is another question hidden behind the first.
“After the factory went up, poison smoke came. Ma said it would be like that night all over again.”
“It was not,” replies Farouq. “This time people knew what to do, they got out. Even so, three died.”
“Three? I thought it must be thousands. That fire was hell itself. It was burning my back as I ran away from the factory.”
“Three is three too many,” says Zafar. “So you were in the factory. We thought as much.” They share a silence whose meaning I can’t fathom.
As we rattle along, Zafar and Farouq tell the story of what happened in the days following the fire.
Seems that after they had extracted their promise from the CM the city returned to a peaceful state. Right away the politicians got it into their heads that since things were back to normal they should after all quietly proceed with the deal. It would have to be done in secret. They reckoned that if they did the double-cross quietly plus delayed announcing it, it would be too late to stop. Zafar and Farouq were no longer in danger of dying, it would be difficult to make another demo, plus this time police and army were ready. So a meeting was set up, it would take place not in a government building, where all kinds of eyes would see, but right in the place where the Amrikan lawyers were, in other words, Jehannum.
The morning of the meeting came. Up and down the road from the old city to the hill above the lake, police were out in numbers. Jeeps were going back and forth. Unless they were guests, people were being turned away from Jehannum. The police would stop them at the gate. Nobody could get in. If people asked why this was happening, they were told it was because there’d been threats to the Amrikans. “We are taking no chances,” the police said.
Early on that morning, a woman was seen making her way up the hill. A poor woman she was, clad from head to toe in a black burqa. No one could see her face, she must have been young, for she was tall and stepped swiftly. In her hand she carried a jhadoo, a simple broom, used for sweeping floors. When challenged at the gate, she said she was going to her work as a cleaner. Little mind they gave her because soon messages were coming to prepare for the reception of some big shots, who’d be arriving shortly at Jehannum. Sure enough, the cars soon showed up. Not government cars, mark you, the CM, Zahreel Khan and others, they all came in plain white Ambassadors, one by one they disappeared inside.
What all happened next, the world learned from these folk themselves. The shameful meeting began in a room with a big table, the four Amrikans were on one side, the politicians on the other. They had begun their arguing and haggling when without warning their eyes began to sting. An evil burning sensation began in their noses and throats, a little like the smoke of burning chillies, it caught nastily in the throat, it seared the lungs, they were coughing, but coughing made it ten times worse. Something was in the room, something uninvited, an invisible fire, by the time they had realised this it was already too late. These big shot politicians and lawyers, they got up in a panic, they reeled around, retching, everything they did just made the pain and burning worse. Tears streamed from their eyes, hardly could they see. One of the lawyers was trying to vomit, the rest of them ran in panic. They rushed from the room, jostling in the doorway each man for himself, the buffalo it seems being too bulky to rush, was left behind while the others scrambled to save their skins. These Kampani heroes, these politicians, they were shitting themselves, they thought they were dying, they thought they’d been attacked with the same gas that leaked on that night, and every man there knew exactly how horrible were the deaths of those who breathed the Kampani’s poisons.
Says I, “It’s poetic justice of a fully rhyming kind.”
But Zafar says that poetic justice, rhyming or not is not the same as real justice, but being the only kind available to the Khaufpuris was at least better than nothing. So that person must have thought, who had entered the hotel and carefully emptied a bottle of stink bomb juice into the air conditioner.
“Was this your doing?” I ask Zafar.
“It was not,” he says. “We knew nothing of it until afterwards. We were busy searching for you.”
What made the whole thing fully grand was that someone had tipped off the press, they were waiting with their cameras when these goons stumbled out into the lobby. Once the secret was out, the deal was dead. The Kampani was saying that it was the victim of terrorism, the culprit should be prosecuted and locked up for years, but the jarnaliss took a different view. They said that one stink bomb, however disgusting, could not compare to the terror the Kampani had brought on the people of Khaufpur, plus how could the Kampani bosses demand that anyone should be prosecuted while they were themselves refusing to appear before the Khaufpur court?