Fire in the Unnameable Country (45 page)

A
VISIT HOME

Time passes, stories lead us; when they feel fit, they call us back. To your knowledge, my grandparents met in a building where they listen inside people's skulls, a palace of ears that call eyes and limbs, truncheons, bullets, nightly kidnappings out into the world, a building of machines that make and multiply fear. Which wild eyes could spot love or a chance caress in such a place of ordered misery, of daily vortexes that suck you inside its walls because it's your time, for no other reason than because your number is called and time to die.

My grandparents lived. My grandfather died an ownbulleted death many years later (because he lost Gita, lost everything many years earlier). He was made into pieces, shipped eventually by Department 6119 to my grandmother, who emerged from her solitude at the sight of his eternal face in a duffle bag, carved into such thin slices the incisions were initially difficult to spot; only when Gita tried to raise him out of the bag did she realize what he had become, because Zachariah Ben Jaloun slipped as meat through her hands.

Years later, after watching her grandson Hedayat grow old enough
to dance gangster-steps with his friend Niramish, Grandmother Song would, with her daughter-in-law, my Mother Thankyou, warn us against our football-bag excesses, our solitary conversations behind closed doors, though neither we nor anyone in the unnameable country knew then what even Hedayat only suspected, what he would gather in a spontaneous gaze of total understanding exactly a moment too late: his friend was about to get his brains blown out. When Hedayat found a partner in grime and underworld after Niramish's death, he kept Masoud Rana and the Datsun out of his family's knowledge as much as possible for all the badnaam they might heap upon the unsuspecting.

Eventually, Hedayat did pay a visit home, hoping all was well and expecting to see it overrun like a seabed with the scuttling papers of his father's contract work. Recall my grandmother's home was an abandoned movie set, rented to immigrants at a time when cameras were large, clunky, expensive. By the time Hedayat became a man running guns and pepper through the Warren tunnels, cameras and microphones had miniaturized and multiplied ubiquitous.

All I heard when I entered my parents' home was a low ominous hum and could see no papers anywhere, nor any workmen. Changes: coloured markings on the floor, curious glass partitions, and a man seated at a chair before the first of these and right near the steps, holding a flat elongated grey instrument. He called me to halt and passed it around my body; it twittered like an electrical bird, all agitated, frenetic around my pockets. He had me show him my keys and all the coins and safety pins and whatever other metal objects before it became safe to pass. I recall he wore a nametag on his blue uniform with no name.

The small apartment had grown cavernous in my absence, seemingly much larger because much of the furniture had been removed since I last visited. There was no one, and the floor was covered in the grey shit clouds of perfumed mountain swallow chicks that were
cheeping and pecking at flaxen seeds scattered everywhere. My father appeared like an apparition out of a corner of the house that was unfamiliar to me, with an unrecognizable expression on his face. There were rooms and they were difficult to know.

Did you come back for long.

I am here now, I said. The house is a prison now, why are there perfumed chicks feeding everywhere on seeds, cheeping and befouling the floors. Where are the others, I asked when he didn't reply to the first question.

My father pointed to some forgotten corner of the universe, and it was a good thing the Quintuplets entered the room at that moment, because I could have sworn I was in the wrong house and with the opposite truth in mind I might have left with the intention never to return. They were the same, the four of them taller, though no less quiet, and the fifth, who was higher like the rest and still as silent, still swimming in an irrepressible inner world of which one caught glimpses. Without a salutation the Yeas threw down their schoolbags and bugled in unison some song they had learned in physical education or extracurricular that was about sweeping, what fun time is sweeping time, that was the refrain while the rest of the lyrics also had to do with cleaning, there was a line about the centipedes and the rats, which they sang with sweet diligence and these had to be swept, as well as notice the streets should be clean and one's house clean, the country and the heart unwell if not lathered up from time to time, a line about the mutinous grass also and why it should be cropped.

I might not have minded if the tune weren't so predictably repetitive, and it seemed odd to me that they would want to sing it instead of other possible songs; it was a good thing, anyway, Nehi was there to break the annoying number, which also featured a horse-galloping dance. She placed the quizzical have you seen. I hadn't and looked to the odd corner, where she pointed, where there was now a large
elevator at the far end of the space that had once housed their cribs, their playthings, and later their desks.

So what do you do now, I asked.

Nothing until after six o'clock, when they've brought back all the furniture. She informed that the prison's budget had been mismanaged and the new penitentiary was leasing all the family's belongings until the Ministry of Profits could decide how to allocate the necessary funds; Nehi bore through the intimate procedural details, listed names of bureaucrats as well as dates and times and reasons provided, and they haven't paid us once, she concluded, looking at our father.

True but moreorless true, Mamun M was chewing the cud of his frustrations, rolling his tongue left and right cheek, hard to argue with the child when she's in her, one of those, though consider they leave us these perfumed mountain swallow chicks as collateral every morning, and I doubt it's a swindle since we also get it back.

True as his word, the largemetal doors opened promptly sometime around six o'clock and brawny musclebound warders, untalkative and greyclothed, shuffling and dragged out a whole apartment from within what looked less like an elevator and more like a submarine's interior. They had even set things up so there was a rug in place and lamps and the couch was pushed back against the wall of the dining area, and they gathered up all the cheeping swallows into the folds of their clothes and pushed them into their pockets, which left only their grey clouds and the beads of sunlight seeds across the floor.

I had meant to visit only for two nights at most, but when I tried to leave, the first gatekeeper, the one with the grey beeping instrument and his left twisted ear like a demented cauliflower, which was not like before, told me that, in fact, he was another man and didn't recognize me, I had no identification and he couldn't let me pass until the return of his superior, who was the first of the guards I had encountered.

When is that.

Unsure, could be tomorrow but no since the Friday is after and then the closesttime Monday following, but possibly not.

At first Hedayat busied himself with the mountain swallows, but there were so many of them, and though flightless, they had a way of evading touch with such ease that after a while he had to satisfy himself only with scattering their flaxen seeds and clearing their shit, which dissolved into dust putrefaction if left too long, because then we would be breathing it.

Restlessness clasped around his ankles and he dragged the whole musical heavy weight of it from one glass enclosure to another. In the mornings they came to take away the furniture, his father went off to the storage room of the local police division, where they had created a small workspace for him to gather and arrange the data of the city's latest gangs and kleptocrats, his mother and grandmother went downstairs to open the hosiery shop, and the Quintuplets went to school. By the hum and banging of the ever-expanding prison deep below, which had never been completed and which they would be building forever, he leafed through the explorers' magazines Mamun had bought for their precise high-resolution satellite images; eventually, he learned to identify every island of the Philippine archipelago, every urban centre town hamlet and road of the new world, before discovering a magnifying glass so powerful, it allowed him to explore the whole earth down to the details of the very hairs on the heads of the people as they walked frozen in their native streets or the smells of their meals at the time the pictures were taken. He inhaled with his boredom an agitation that found release only by singing the lowest registers of his range, and this way he rattled all the glass and brought the workmen deep below to curious pauses.

One day, two warders arrived, and a third. Not unlike the daily movers, but with crueller faces, they brought with them the music of loud jangle keys as they pushed in front of them a hooded man, whose
legs were bound by real, not invisible, shackles; they paused before Hedayat to ask for directions to the elevator. All the mountain swallow chicks gathered cheeping around the three men, two of whom kicked nasty, while Hedayat pointed beyond several glass partitions. The birds followed the zigzag coloured markings on the floor, and when the hooded man faltered over a rough area on the floor, they beat him on his back and the back of his neck to disabuse him of failure until he was vomiting into his hood of stale socks and rotten colons, which was easy to smell all throughout the house. They halted for some time before the elevator without removing the hood, trampling on errant mountain swallow chicks, talking loudly about various things, whistling non-melodies, and never allowing the hooded man a moment's respite. Then they disappeared into the mineshaft of hell without turning a look around.

Each evening, at the changing of the guards, I would look for signs of differences in the twisted cauliflower ear, the moustache and gesticulations of the returning guard, but found none; he grew tired of asking are you the one and being told no, the other one, so that on the day things changed, Hedayat didn't notice until the differences in the pieces on the chessboard, which was also there before, though I did not mention; recall now: located on a low table in dramatic contrast with the very high chair of teetering daddy-long-legs for the guards.

Remember, I had passed a glance at the game, which had seemed in its advanced stages; now I saw that white had moved queen-side bishop to fianchetto in an angular defence against the black knight's advances on his castle-piece.

But your rook is still, I told him, and he bemoaned he knew of the danger. I watched as he thought about the move he had made,
though it was clear he wouldn't make alterations, for that was what had been decided between he and his colleague, that they would not; and besides how could he while separated by such a distance from the low table while sitting on his very high metal chair with its teetering skinny legs.

After collecting my thoughts through our brief conversation about the game, I began to describe being marooned in my own home, including my inability to move freely between all the glass panes, the coloured markings that were transparent in meaning even to birds, daily disappearance of all the furniture, the odd appearance of two warders and a hooded man, as well as the ubiquitous presence of the cheeping mountain swifts and their habit of shitting on the floor of the house. While I related these absurd things, the guard would move chess pieces back and forth by bending over and extending a hand several feet beyond its actual length with surprising skill, and flatulate loudly at precise instances in my story. His wind had no odour but I grew concerned that the sounds were produced to censor critical moments of my narrative, a way for him to erase them from future possible recollection.

Are you listening, I shouted.

I am not only, in fact I was once a court stenographer and possess a ninety-five percent rate of recollection, he said, as if to counter my fears.

So what have I been telling.

A tale of eternal childish longing.

But I grew flustered that it was not, and in fact. The underlying message you cannot argue, old man, is one redolent of the theme. I was unprepared for his forked line of reasoning and told him I simply wanted to make the necessary arrangements to be able to leave and enter my own house at will.

That would be impossible without identification.

Which I have but which is elsewhere.

Where.

I cannot describe, would not tell you all the details of my life at once, but suffice it to say if I could leave I would return the next time with all my documents intact.

Impossible, he cut loose a furious fart not at all free of liquid or solid masses by the sound of it. He shifted in the very high chair on which he sat, which teetered on its thin insectmetal legs as if assailed by a formless draught.

So how do I then.

The guard yawned, he leaned back and nearly fell over as the chair teetered dangerously, he put his hands up to touch the ceiling because he was very close, and he looked at his watch. By that time, I realized many hours had passed, night had fallen, and in fact the whole family was bustling about the apartment now absent of the sound of its diurnal cheeping guests. The centuries had tarried on my behalf and now it was too late.