Amriika (37 page)

“Come and have a scotch — or something,” Darcy said to them, adding for Rumina’s benefit, “there is tropical punch too, and it’s safe.”

Darcy, out of his suit for once, was wearing a printed shirt over cotton slacks, and sandals. He helped them with their drinks, then came and stood between them, beaming, paternal. And fragile, vulnerable right here in the bosom of his family, Ramji thought, or is that simply how I want to see him? … But I’ve never seen him like this, a party man straight out of Hollywood, out of
Gatsby
!

Leila joined them and put a friendly arm around her grandfather, who stiffened instantly before yielding. She was a good few inches taller than he, and her angular face seemed to owe more to him than to her mother.

“Tell him why you cover your head,” Darcy said to her, lifting her hand from him but holding on to it. “Maybe he’ll drum some sense into you.”

“Will you, Ramji?” she asked, in a voice spoilt and childlike. “Is that your real name?”

“Of course. And don’t pay any attention to what your grandfather says, wear anything you like,” he told her in a friendly, elder-brother way.

“But what
do
you think of women covering their heads in modesty?” she asked.

“Ramji thinks the hijab adds to a woman’s beauty,” Rumina said, teasing him.

“Is that how she snared you?” the girl asked him vampishly.

“Yes, I would say so,” he said, and stopped there, unwilling to be drawn into further discussion on the desirability of the headdress. But he had his opinions, which she divined; and so she gave him a piece of her mind, which she’d obviously been itching to do.

“Nobody tells me to wear hijab — it’s my wish. It’s my Islamic identity. I follow the injunctions of the Quran for modesty — they are quite clear — and I make a political statement as well.”

And she walked away towards her mother.

“Don’t worry, it’s just the current phase,” her brother Hanif said, having come over, making a circular motion with a finger to his head to indicate his take on the status of her mind. He was a big strapping youth, darker-skinned than his sister, with jet-black gelled hair. Easygoing too, but with a certain vacuousness, a rootlessness of spirit perhaps: he was intensely inquisitive, not about what people did, but what they thought, no matter what the subject. It was a relief when he drifted off to corner someone else.

Basu and Zayd had arrived, Basu having come with his wife and daughter; Zayd’s wife, who was American-born, apparently kept away from places where there were men and drinks. They did not have any children of their own but had adopted two kids from Pakistan. Zayd and Ramji had over the months settled into a mutual tolerance, a forced friendliness laced with the occasional sarcastic bite of a casual remark. To Ramji, Zayd was religious in the worst — that is to say, political — way; despite his loud professions of faith, there was not a trace of piety in him. Zayd dismissed Ramji as a romantic and not fully committed to the cause. The fact that he was not far off the mark in the first part of his assessment fuelled Ramji’s ire.

Zayd was currently covering for
Inqalab
the trial of a blind Muslim cleric who was being held on suspicion of instigating the bombing of the World Trade Center building in New York City. He had just returned from Manhattan, excited by news of the cleric’s previous association with the
CIA
. But Zayd’s passion these
days, which he shared with Naaz, was attempting to follow the trail of the Phantom Author, a status report on whom seemed to be the main attraction of the evening.

News about a phenomenon termed the Phantom Author had broken into the print media several months earlier. Also called the Holy Pimpernel, the Blasphemer, and much more by some of the more sensationalistic commentators, the Phantom had been mailing out anonymous public letters pertaining to the Muslim faith and, it seemed, offensive to many Muslims. Copies of each provocative letter were sent from a different city to selected and well-placed people, and to news and other organizations. Ramji had read quoted excerpts from some of these letters, but he had dismissed their author as an academic crank whose day in the sun would inevitably pass. But the Phantom continued to receive attention and to persist in his campaign. For Zayd he had become a cause. “You want a terrorist, here’s a terrorist — bombing people’s hearts and children’s minds. What’s the U.S. government doing?” Apparently nothing. Therefore, Zayd said, the Muslims should take it upon themselves to do something about that perfidious character.

The lights were dimmed for the evening’s pièce de résistance. A slide projector was set up across from a bare wall. A slide was put on. A political map of the United States came up, on which several cities were circled prominently in black, with red lines of diverse lengths radiating from each. Zayd, who was an engineer by training, received from other Phantom watchers in the country regular reports of “sightings” — details about places where a letter had reached — and of simulation studies that were under way to calculate the home base of the mysterious writer. The map, he explained, standing beside it, was the telltale track left by the Phantom.

“With every new missive he tightens the noose around his neck,” Zayd said dramatically, looping his own neck with his forefingers and thumbs.

“Is the man condemned then,” Ramji murmured, thinking what a clever fool the poor mischief-maker had been and wondering what would happen to him if his identity were uncovered. Had he broken any law?

“Yes, he is condemned,” Zayd said, and without further elaboration continued his discourse on the mathematics of Phantom detection.

“The question is, what are the correlations among the mailing points — the cities from where he mails those letters? What airlines service them, for example, and how conveniently? Do the points receiving the letters lead back to an epicentre, which is most likely his base? Remember, that point is real and he is working around it. The Phantom has been clever — he’s mailed his letters only from the major cities; presumably, he’s close to a major city himself. So you see … the noose tightens.”

“You … you seem to have followed him pretty closely,” Amir said admiringly, from the chair where he was sitting beside the projector.

There was the barest trace of a flinch on his wife’s face at this brief stutter, which melted quickly into a look of affection. Amir, tall, fleshy, and bald halfway back, was well liked, a people person; a generous, uncontroversial man, the big breadwinner of his family.

“Yes, I have my own file on him,” Zayd told him, “and there are definite patterns to his activities … like fingerprints.”

“What will you do if you find him?” Ramji asked the question he had been toying with.

“Why, he should be exposed … to the people,” Basu said. He turned to Ramji and added, “Let him face the consequences.”

“Such as? …”

Naaz said, “When I was young, when a thief was caught in our neighbourhood the crowd beat him up. That was people’s justice. That’s consequences for you.”

“But surely,” Ramji said, this time to needle Zayd-the-hunter, “if we believe in political dissent, then there is room also for religious and cultural and all sorts of dissent. The point is, the Phantom should also be allowed to speak. No?”

Howls of protest and ridicule exploded around him: But he’s gone too far! This is not dissent, it’s violence, it’s personal attack! He
should
be stopped! Punished! If that other satanic author had received his due —

Darcy was standing at the back of the group, near the doorway, a sardonic gleam in his eye, unwilling to come to Ramji’s rescue; Rumina was beside Darcy and looking anxious. There was an embarrassed silence, then an eruption of good humour and fellow-feeling as dessert was announced.

“It’s always nice to withdraw from a crowd and be alone, isn’t it?” Ramji said to Rumina, echoing a thought he’d often had after a raucous party such as the one they’d returned from.

“Yes …,” she said, beside him, and he turned towards her, wondering what she was thinking.

They had gone to sit on the beach. It was a cool night and for a while they sat together in silence, wrapped in a shawl, watching
the black form of the sea straight ahead; the tide was low, the murmuring waves far away. At moments like these, he thought, you can’t help but become aware of your ultimate loneliness.…He gave her hand a squeeze. She had told him recently that she sometimes missed all the girls she had been brought up with; but then she added that that was a long time ago, they all had lives of their own, with families, and she had him. He had suggested once that they try and search for her mother, start by writing letters, but she had shaken her head. She did receive letters from Tanzania, but there was no one there really close to her now.

“Do you believe that life exists in the stars?” she asked at length.

“Yes, in some of them.”

Following her eye he looked up at Orion overhead in the sky; a constellation, he told her, known to Indians as Trisanku, the remains of a mortal abandoned both by man and the gods.

There came the sound of voices; low, but fairly close to their right, from a man and a woman, and they both turned to look. The couple was some twenty yards away. Perhaps they had been there all the time. The man was stark naked and crouched on his knees, visibly hard and primed for the woman who lay under him on the sand.

“It won’t do to disturb them now, will it,” Ramji murmured, turning away.

Rumina looked at him and nodded. He held her close, and they kept their eyes averted from their neighbours.

D
arcy was telling his life’s story; but in the manner of the preacher he had once been, he began with an anecdote that at first seemed to have nothing to do with the subject.

A long time ago, in the 1920s, there was an old white house on a beach in Zanzibar that was for many years known to be haunted; the ghost was that of a German diplomat. This ghost of a white man would appear in European-style white attire, complete with a sun helmet, called the topee, and shoes. He was tall, and seemed nimble and athletic. At nights he liked to stroll about in the compound, sometimes pausing for a drink from the well there; during the day he could be seen through the windows walking inside the house. Finally, a local exorcist claimed to have got rid of the ghost in the house, and a wealthy family rented it for the use of a young couple who were getting married. The wedding festivities were held in the house, and it seemed even then that something was not quite right. A cauldron of wedding biryani was first found to be missing, and then after much hullabaloo, during which the servants
swore their innocence, the food was discovered in a room on the second floor. More surprisingly, the door had to be broken open — it had been locked from inside. How did the food get in there? It would have taken six strong men to carry the steaming cauldron up the flight of stairs; but without being noticed? and the locked door from inside? But the festive spirit had peaked, there was no inclination at this jolly hour to probe further into the strange occurrence. Food was served and the celebrations proceeded well past midnight. Not long after they were over, and the guests and families had departed, leaving the couple to their house, at four in the morning, just when the muezzin was beginning his call to prayer, a long and chilling cry tore into the quiet hour. People came running from all directions towards the source of the sound, the house on the beach. The sight that met them was horrific. The bride had been thrown clear through the couple’s window and landed close to the well, the length of her trajectory suggesting superhuman strength on the part of the assailant. The groom was a nervous wreck, muttering incomprehensibly. He never recovered, and he never told exactly what had happened. But the fact came out that the German had been a homosexual; and after that terrible night the groom was rumoured to have become a homosexual too. In fact, years later, as a tramp in Dar es Salaam, he attained notoriety by trying to waylay boys outside a local school, and the boys in their turn teased him mercilessly. Aside from this proclivity he was supposed to be simply crazy.