“Do you love her?” Inspector Malangi asks in a neutral tone, as if asking Teddy what he had for breakfast.
Teddy thinks it’s a trick question and shuts his eyes. “This is something that I have been asking myself.”
“I think the very fact that you have been asking yourself this question — that’s your answer. And if you love her, you’ll never forget her. That’s the nature of love. If you love somebody you’ll remember them no matter what, even after you have screwed every whore of every nationality that washes up on these shores.”
Teddy nods in agreement. The smell of hashish is making him dizzy and he remembers Alice’s smooth chin nuzzling his neck.
“And don’t you want her to remember you? Let’s say you put a bullet through her, will she remember you after that? She won’t remember anything. She definitely won’t remember you. You are a young man, you have a lot of life ahead of you. Do you want to spend that life in oblivion, forgotten by the only person you loved and the only one you are guaranteed never to forget?”
“You are right, I was angry. I was very angry.” Teddy points to the cast on his arm. “But now I am not angry. I don’t want revenge, I only want justice. Fair is fair. I just want to make sure that if I can’t have her, then nobody should be able to have her. Is that not fair?”
“She has already been had,” Malangi interrupts him. “It’s better not to think about these things. It’ll only drive you crazy. Even saints don’t make babies without having a bit of fun first. Forget about that. Stop pitying yourself. Stop pitying her. Remember it’s about love. You need to give her something she’ll never forget. Never.” He points towards a glass cupboard with a double lock. The label above the cupboard reads Hazardous Material. Inspector Malangi goes to the cupboard, unlocks it and stands next to it like a chemist showing off his life’s work.
He takes out a glass bottle, then puts it back and looks around for a piece of cloth. He wraps it around his hand and unscrews the bottle carefully. He pours a drop on to the wooden shelf in the cupboard. A hissing sound, smoke rises from the spot where the liquid drop fell and in an instant it burns a hole through an inch and a half of solid wood.
“Try this and she’ll always remember you. This is the only thing that’ll hurt as much as love hurts.”
Carefully they put the bottle in a small gunnysack and Inspector Malangi walks Teddy to the outer gate. “You also need work, because this place is going to the dogs. There is this old family, nice people, they need a driver cum bodyguard type person. Work is a bit boring but the money is good. They also have some business pending with your wife. They’ll protect you. You’ll get to see the world.” He leads him to a gleaming Surf surrounded by four guards in black uniform. There is no number on the registration plate, just some words in bold red. “Try it out. I hope you people get along,” says Inspector Malangi, introducing Teddy to the guards. “And keep that stuff away from your body, make sure it doesn’t spill. It’s as precious as gold.”
♦
The boy goes through Inspector Malangi’s wallet carefully, as if he is interested in something besides the couple of thousand-rupee notes in it. Then it seems he has found what he was looking for. He turns his head towards the boy on the motorbike and nods. The boy pulls back his baseball cap and revs his bike in response. Inspector Malangi has seen this little exchange a million times before. It means, our job here is done, let’s get the hell out of here.
It’s only when the bullet pierces his neck that Inspector Malangi realises what that job was. He grips his neck with one hand and before pressing down on the accelerator looks out at the boy on the motorbike. In an instant he realises that the boy is not-Abu Zar. He has already put his gun back in his jacket and is not even looking towards him. The car lurches forward, Inspector Malangi slumps down on the steering wheel, the car swerves and hits the traffic signal at the precise moment it turns green, and blocks two traffic lanes behind it. An impatient horn sounds behind him. Another one honks. Soon it becomes a chorus of angry, protesting car horns. An ambulance is stuck in the traffic and its siren begins to wail. As he bleeds to a quick death, Inspector Malangi has the same thing on his mind as that on the lips of all the impatient drivers stuck behind his car: when will our nation learn some road manners?
Twenty-Nine
Alice Bhatti waits till two a.m. for Teddy to return home, then calmly walks into the kitchen, picks up the plate of food that she had prepared for him and covered with a white paper napkin and chucks it in the garbage bin. She immediately regrets it. She feels guilty, like she always does when good food, any food for that matter, goes to waste. Yassoo’s flesh, she remembers Joseph Bhatti admonishing her. You are throwing away His flesh in the garbage bin, and although her father mostly used this line to force her to eat whatever concoction he had rustled up, whenever she sees food being thrown away, she feels Yassoo’s body is being soiled. And although she has drifted far away from Yassoo, the idea of throwing food away still repels her. She can often be seen taking leftover plates of hospital food outside in the compound and handing it over to those camped out under the Old Doctor. Now she is angry with herself because she has done something she strongly disapproves of. She is angry with Hina Alvi. Who takes marital advice from someone who was divorced thrice? She is angry at Teddy. She doesn’t mind him being away. Men should go away so that they can come back and then go away again. Their comings and goings make a home a home. She would like to know where he is, though, and when he is coming back. So that she doesn’t have to make food for him that goes to waste and then sit here and wonder whether spinach and potato curry really equals Yassoo’s flesh.
There is nothing unusual about his absence, but it galls her because for once she actually has things to tell him. She knows that when he does come back from work, he comes back in the early hours of the morning, sometimes with hair covered in sand and sometimes boots caked in mud. He is usually so exhausted it seems he has been wrestling with desert monsters. Or wading through marshes. On these days he usually returns on a big motorbike, the kind that traffic police sergeants drive, complete with a siren, but he has never talked about any work with traffic police. Or sometimes he returns in a fancy car with Emirates registration plates. One day he came home in a Bedford truck, full of refrigerator cartons. Someone usually comes and takes the vehicle away the next day. Alice always hoped that some day he’d offer to drop her to work, but he was always asleep when she left for work and the vehicle would be gone by the time she came back.
She goes to bed and sleeps fitfully, dreaming of a lone horse galloping on a motorway as a sixteen-wheeler trailer with a bright orange container on top speeds towards it. A fat mosquito trying to enter her ear startles her out of her dream. She feels nauseous with anxiety and goes to the bathroom and retches into the sink. She comes back to bed and a fluffed-up second pillow mocks her. She drags herself to the window and peers down at the spot where he parks his return vehicles. As she expected, the spot is empty, and two dogs are trying to eat each other’s faces. She can’t tell if they are fighting or trying to get to know each other better.
In a fit of resentment she decides to change and go to the Sacred. If he comes home now he’ll find her all dressed up to go to work. Ah, you are back. I was leaving for work. Or he’ll find her already gone. She puts in extra effort with her uniform, applies some mascara, and as the sky turns muddy, half promising a sunrise, she leaves Al-Aman. She leaves her bag open and clothes strewn around the room. She is not sure what this is meant to convey: that she has come back but may leave again, at short notice if she needs to. She also leaves her side of the bed unmade as some kind of protest against his absence.