He can hear boys shouting ‘Allah is great!’ out there.
Jeo remains where he is, staring at him from the door. There is a paper in his left hand, half crumpled up in the fist.
Mikal walks towards him with the SMG held out. ‘You must try to shoot a gunman under the nose. The bullet will go through and sever the brainstem so the hand will be paralysed and won’t pull the trigger, not even in reflex.’ Working together they had built a computer when they were twelve years old. He closes Jeo’s fingers around the gun. ‘Keep your right hand here …’
A drop of water falls onto his wrist and he looks up, puzzled, seeing Jeo’s eyes full of strange light.
‘My father …’ Jeo says.
‘What?’
Jeo raises the hand with the paper and Mikal sees that it is one of Naheed’s letters.
‘My father …’ Jeo says again, pulling out the others from his pocket.
‘The letters are old, Jeo. From before you two were married. You can check the dates.’
But Jeo’s mind is on something else. ‘My father …’ He is trembling, breathing fast as he looks at Mikal with terror in his face. ‘My father caused my mother’s death?’ Rapidly he goes through the letters. ‘It says here …’ He can’t find the one he is looking for and then releases his hold on all of them, letting them fall as he looks at him and asks pleadingly, ‘My father killed my mother?’
Mikal shakes his head. ‘That’s not what happened.’
On his knees among the scattered papers, Jeo pushes some aside to uncover others, reading disjointed phrases from them, searching both sides of the sheets.
‘She was dying and he didn’t want her to be damned eternally. He withheld her medicines till she let go of her doubts, forcing her to embrace Allah once again before it was too late. Some people say she had a heart attack during those moments … The sudden lack of drugs …’ He raises his hands to his forehead. ‘Oh God. Why did you read them?’
He moves towards him but Jeo lets out a strangled bark. ‘Get away from me.’
Mikal stops.
‘Naheed.’ Jeo drops the letters, one of which has seven coloured flowers glued to it like stains on the page. She had gone to collect them from Rohan’s garden, without knowing she would marry Jeo within months.
‘She loves you,’ Mikal says.
Jeo gets up and pushes him hard into the wall. ‘How do you know?’ The shock emptying the breath out of Mikal, his head slamming against the deep blue paint and Jeo has now picked up the gun and is trying to work it, keeping it pointed at Mikal. The gun is capable of firing four hundred bullets every minute and it goes off eventually, Jeo’s finger pressing the trigger for two or three seconds, a duration long enough to release thirty bullets, gouging a curved line of chips from the wall behind Mikal.
For a while Mikal’s wildly beating heart is the only point of reference in the formless darkness that has filled his eyes. The empty cartridges fall to the ground like a chain rattling. You told the mendicant to add a link to one of the chains hanging on his body for your sake, a link representing a need of yours, a wish. And as he wandered through the land he prayed for the need to be alleviated. When and if it was, the link disappeared miraculously from about the fakir’s person, the chain shortening. To him it was proof that Allah had taken pity on him and somewhat lightened his burden, that he was forgiven a little for his transgression.
And now they hear, both Mikal and Jeo, what they hadn’t before — the rocket-propelled grenades being fired into the fort’s main gate. They hear the splinters exploding from the wood as the gate begins to cave inwards.
*
There are a few seconds of utter silence and then more than a thousand attackers penetrate the smoke and dust, firing and being fired on, kissing their guns before pulling the triggers, both sides shouting Allah’s name. A panic spreading like a flicker in a shoal of fish whenever there is a sound from an unexpected direction. Noises from the mouths of humans and the mouths of guns. In the form of screams, in the form of bullets, as if the men are shouting at the weapons and the weapons are shouting back. Mikal knows they will be in this room in less than five minutes. ‘Remember,’ he tells himself. ‘Short controlled bursts.’ He turns around to where he last saw Jeo, a second or a lifetime ago.
Jeo is motionless and then begins to collect Naheed’s letters. Calmly walking across the room to place them in an alcove.
Six Taliban men enter and bolt the door from the inside. Eight humans and their fate. ‘Not one of you is allowed to die until he has killed twenty of the enemy,’ one of them says; he was the driver who brought them here, the owner of the leather lash reinforced with Saudi coins.
Mikal crouches by the window and raises his head to look out. Rooms, trucks and trees are on fire, as is the golden dome of the mosque, and he cannot believe the intensity of the fight, hundreds of guns firing at the same time. The attackers are advancing and are being brutal with each person they find. They had expected more Taliban in the fort, and — disappointed at the small number — they are pouring the rage and violence and metal meant for several men into just one. Each man is dying ten, twenty or thirty deaths.
*
Someone is trying to break down the door, the wood receiving forceful blows. And all the while someone injured out there is screaming with pain, ‘Help me, somebody help me, somebody please help me!’
A rocket-propelled grenade — fired from the other side of the courtyard — lodges itself in the room’s wall, emerging halfway into the interior without going off. It remains there and begins to vibrate. Grit and plaster falling to the floor and onto the man standing directly below it. He — and Mikal and Jeo, and everyone else — watch the grenade with rapt fascination for a few seconds, everything reduced to fear and marvel. It should’ve exploded but it can’t because the wall is constraining it. It begins to burn instead, sending a stream of brilliant liquid flame and metal directly onto the chest of the man below with a piercing whistle. The man’s torso melts, is consumed, and the rest of him falls backwards and the blinding red and white lava continues to shower onto him, the high-pitched sound echoing off the walls.
*
The second RPG comes and gets stuck in the wall directly above Jeo and Mikal, vibrating again but without any loudness. Nothing except a hum, the sound of a finality beyond all illusion. Mikal breaks out of his paralysis and moves Jeo and himself from under it. Because there hasn’t been a blow on the door for a while Jeo opens it and looks out while Mikal reaches for Naheed’s letters. The base of Mikal’s neck erupts in blood, Jeo looking back and seeing him fall. The corridor outside is filled with dense smoke and the young woman who comes rushing out of it towards Jeo wears a look of wildness on her face, her eyes crazed with a radiant power. When was the last time he saw a woman? The tip of the foot-long dagger enters Jeo’s face through the left cheek — going through the gap between the lower and upper jaw. The sharp metal cuts through the roof of the mouth and reaches under the brain. The blade grates against the bone of the skull that it splinters, and it grates again immediately afterwards when she pulls it out. He hears both sounds — from the inside, between the ears. The pain is something he could not have imagined. ‘This is for what your people did to my man,’ she says, armed with love’s vengeance. Part of his mind remarks on the woman’s beauty, notices the blossoms on her dress. He has fallen with his face to one side and he sees Mikal lying prone on the other side of the room, the red coming out of his mouth as though it is something he is saying, his last words.
How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn’t necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.