He drifted into sleep and saw a rain-soaked street, its drains bubbling, and a man who looked like Jesus Christ riding a bike through the knee-deep water, trailing a twenty-foot-long bamboo pole on the carrier. The man got off his bicycle, took his bamboo pole, bent over a manhole and pushed the pole back and forth in an attempt to unclog it. A few children ran past, splashing water on him and taunting him by shouting Yassoo Choohra, Yassoo Choohra. The man looked up at the children and smiled.
Teddy didn’t know how long he had slept for, but when he woke up, he saw his face resting on the poster that had slipped out from under the pillow. He found himself cheek to cheek with Yassoo, his mournful eyes staring at Teddy. He felt a wave of panic and rushed to the Sacred.
♦
“You are a snake in my sleeve, you son of a bitch.” Teddy rattles off insults with passion but without any sense of timing, mixing them up as they come along. He is doing something that he has seen other people do. Shut up. Noor wants to tell him to shut up, because not only does he have no idea what Teddy is talking about, but he is worried that Zainab will wake up. He gets up, pulling on his shalwar and thinking that he should somehow convince Teddy to step outside and then talk. He doesn’t get the chance to make any suggestions about a change of venue for their conversation. Teddy puts the gun to his head, presses it against his temple and asks: “Where is she?”
“Who?” Stifling a yawn, Noor says it in a voice that sounds like, I don’t like you barging in here like this, the visiting hours are long over, arms are not allowed on hospital premises without the written permission of the Chief Medical Officer. And why have you brought four guns anyway? Is there a loot sale on somewhere?
Teddy takes Noor’s right hand, puts the barrel of his pistol between his two fingers and twists them like those demented schoolteachers who think that by inserting and twisting a pencil between the fingers of a sleepy student they can make him recall the exact date of an obscure historical event. Noor’s face twists in a suppressed scream; he points to Zainab and waves his free hand, frantically trying to say Don’t wake her up. He brings his mouth closer to Teddy’s ear and whispers, “Alice is not on duty. I haven’t seen her all day.” Teddy looks satisfied with the answer. Noor is about to turn away when he gets an unexpected Junior-Mr-Faisalabad-powered punch in his stomach and doubles over. He sees Zainab smile in her sleep. He is in pain but can’t scream. He doesn’t want her to wake up and find her only son surrounded by so many guns and being thrashed by his old friend.
Zainab sits up in her bed, her eyes still closed, and starts to hum a song. In any other situation this would have amused Noor, he might have hummed along, and in the morning they both might have laughed at this, made jokes about an old woman who sings in her sleep. But Noor knows that Zainab is delirious. Her fever has probably shot up. He needs to take her temperature to find out. But Teddy is standing between him and Zainab, loading and unloading his other guns as if demonstrating them to a potential customer. A cat with one of its ears covered in a smudge of blood, which in turn is covered by a swarm of houseflies, shoots from under the bed, dashes into the corridor and looks back at them as if saying, Couldn’t you have found another place to play your little game?
“I know you are related to her, you know where she is. Where are you people hiding her?” Teddy puts his pistol on the food trolley, picks up a stainless-steel automatic that looks like a high-end surgical instrument, moves the safety catch on it and puts it to Noor’s neck. Noor can’t figure out the logic of this. Is there a different gun for every question? What will Teddy ask when he picks up that thing that looks like a Kalashnikov’s nasty old uncle? And why am I being associated with the Bhatti clan?
“But I am not related to her,” he says in a startled voice, a slightly aggressive statement of what he thinks is a well-known fact. If a few months of sharing a cell, which you shared with twenty other people as well, makes you family, then he is probably related to a few hundred women who had ended up in the Borstal after stealing a Rado watch or fornicating with their neighbour or attempting to kill their husband.
“She herself told me,” says Teddy, shaking his head like someone who is sick of living in a world where people lie needlessly, where people just make up stuff to confuse other people.
“She tells many things to many people, it doesn’t mean — ” A sharp jab from the stainless-steel muzzle cuts his explanation short. His lower lip feels soggy and on fire at the same time, and a loose tooth almost pierces his philosophising tongue.
Zainab stirs in her sleep and Noor looks around and again counts three guns on the food trolley.
He has often thought of asking Zainab what people see in their dreams if they can’t see. Do you just hear voices? He can’t believe that he has never asked her. He decides that he must ask her tomorrow, then realises that people with guns to their head must make these kinds of pledges all the time.
“But you know I am a Musalman, masha’Allah,” says Noor and is surprised at what he has just said. He has never used this expression before. He has heard Dr Pereira say it quite frequently. It started as an attempt to make his older patients feel at home, but now it has become an integral part of his inventory of good manners. The Sacred has a severe shortage of doctors, there is no way of telling whether the medicines we use are real or fake, we can’t even get the janitors to turn up for work, but masha’Allah people still have confidence in us, seven thousand patients walk in through that gate every week.
Teddy looks puzzled. His gun-wielding hand goes limp, and for a few moments he looks like the same Teddy Noor has spent many afternoons with, trading tips about bodybuilding and debating why, if girls like bodybuilders in the movies, how come they don’t like them in real life? For a moment Noor feels that his denial backed up by his pride in being a Musalman has made Teddy reconsider his assumptions. But Teddy is not about to give up. He has spent enough time in the investigation centres to know that telling a Musalman from a not-Musalman is easy enough; it only involves pulling someone’s shalwar down, parting their dhoti or unzipping their pants.
Teddy Butt waves his gun towards Noor’s shalwar. “Show me. Prove it.”
Noor wants to shout out his defiance. No. No. It seems it doesn’t matter whether you are in that hellhole called Borstal or this hellhole called the Sacred. They like to play the same games. In the Borstal, every crime, real or imaginary, every mistake, accidental or deliberate, ended in a punishment that involved Noor taking off his shalwar.
Noor wants to tell Teddy that he doesn’t do it any more. Not in front of his mother. So what if she can’t see him naked. He is seventeen years old and she is his mother and he can see her. He was twelve and Zainab still insisted on changing his clothes with her own hands as it gave her a measure of his growing body, but the day he got his first erection he refused to let her change his clothes again. Now she reaches out sometimes and feels the fuzz on his face with the tips of her fingers and sighs.
He looks at Zainab, who has slipped back into deep sleep now, her mouth slightly open, a fly hovering over her nose. He wants to go and shoo it away.
He shakes his head in an emphatic no.
The jab that brings his left eyeball out of its socket is a gun slap, the side of the gun hits his temple, something pops and there is an intense pressure in his forehead as if his eyeball is straining to leave the socket behind. As he drops his shalwar, he has an intense desire to look in a mirror. His right eye is shedding tears, his left eyeball has popped out of its proper place. But he doesn’t feel pain any more. He just doesn’t want a shot fired here. That would not only wake Zainab but also really scare her. Loud bangs give her headaches that last for days.