Fire in the Unnameable Country (3 page)

Only on one occasion did Hedayat and Niramish doubt Narayan Khandakar. Psst, come here, you two, he invited us one day with a whisper into a corner of his shop we had never visited, where the light fell crooked onto boxes vessels jars of sweets whose brands we didn't recognize. With a stepladder, he climbed to the top of a candy shelf and walked gingerly along its edge. He threw an errant candy bar at us, which Niramish caught. Then he reached into a region of piled confectioneries that ate his hands, and from that dark place, brought out a metal container before declaring aha, descending steps reappearing before his adopted nephews.

Niramish and I, who had seen El Dorado in Narayan Khandakar's candy shop, were underwhelmed by what looked like an oversized tuna can. What's this, Niramish touched its smooth reflective hull. What's that, he pointed. Boys, Confectionarayan Babu beamed, I present to you my most prized possession, my greatest asset in all the world, a thoughtreel.

A thoughtreel, Niramish said, incredulously, as Hedayat moaned softly, alone, wondered what Confectionarayan Babu would do next; our uncle opened the canister and showed us its contents, a magnetic reel like the kind in cassettes and videotapes. A thoughtreel, he repeated, though alas, I have no way to listen to it.

No thoughtplayer, Niramish mocked, no thought stereo.

No, Confectionarayan said crossly, simply, now if you will excuse me, he began shooing us with a nearby broom. Niramish and I were
astonished because Narayan had never behaved that way with us, and eventually, Niramish, at Hedayat's sullen insistence, changed his tone how much did you pay for it, Uncle. Boys, Narayan Khandakar sighed, I'm sorry I can't answer your questions. I merely wanted to show you an heirloom I will order buried with me one day; hopefully by then I will have had a chance to listen to a human mind on magnetic reel.

Thoughts, Niramish touched the metal hull, can you really tape a human mind.

If you can record a voice, an image, Confectionarayan shrugged.

Niramish and I wrestled with the notion of thoughts encased in metal skin, and we remained skeptical, agitated for so long Confectionarayan added that we ourselves could be mere flickers in someone's mind. What do you mean, Niramish pointed around us at the ground, the ceiling and walls, mentioned the warmer than average temperature for this time of year. Confectionarayan caught his drift the material world, and nodded, yes, but isn't your grandfather a thought if he's that much, he asked, your great-grandfather but a moment of consideration if we remember him at all. Niramish and I stared and waited for him to continue, mesmerised: Poof, Confectionarayan Babu snapped, laughed the way grown-ups do when they think children don't understand. Time turns you into space, he said without exaggerating, into two yards of earth, children.

With his words, I leapt from Confectionarayan's candy store backward in time to the Archives, to row upon row of receptacles of magnetic reels storing recorded thoughts where my father's wear and tear unto madness, though I knew nothing of that nightmare until that moment. Without asking us to, our uncle told us we began long before ourselves, and Hedayat moaned his displeasure as he stared at a dot in the farthest corner of the world, as he travelled endlessly toward that point, which he knew was Niramish and Confectionarayan Babu, his mother in her spidersilk dress, which was his grandmother's slouch and
steps, his father's cynicism, and the soft five whispers of his sisters who were yet to be born, everything he had ever known and suddenly far away and ephemeral. He hovered above the floor, vertiginous.

Narayan Khandakar retained his joyous welcoming character despite the incident, and the pair continued seeking refuge from the playground in the air and sights of the sweet cellar in their single-digit years, their mothers never quite at ease with their lingering hours, but Confectionarayan Babu always insistent they remain under his strict supervision and that a code of good behaviour always applied. It would be there that Hedayat would speak for the first time. This monumental change, however, would not have been possible had a stranger not come to town.

The appearance of Mamun M's mother and Hedayat's grandmother Gita would be Hedayat's benediction; her first revelation would be that it was the scent of her cooking he had detected on Niramish's skin as augury.

She arrived not like a survivor of torture or the perpetual contemplator of suicide, but donning a dark orange pair of sunglasses, which framed her cheekbones, and a silk neckerchief, which hid her stillexquisite collarbones, like the mother of a film star or playback singer. She had followed her son's career alongside millions without knowing he was the selfsame Mamun, and had recognized him only many years later, changed by age, deflated by illness, in a surreptitious documentary that had been featured at Cannes but banned at home because its director was supposed to be dead, a recent Badsha Abd production she had watched at an underground film club in Victoria.

It was your face for an instant as the camera panned the mirror streets, she told. I was absolutely certain and I kept the intersection in mind; in fact, it was not too far at all from where you live. I don't know, Mamun shrugged, there are so many godforsaken movie productions in this town. Twice now, the past had shown up unannounced at his
doorstep, undeterred by the viper's nest of imperial occupation, and on this second occasion he acted as if he had been interrupted in the middle of his morning victuals by the paperboy.

Shukriah, for her part, was as enthusiastic as she had been when Nur al-Din arrived with his basketful of crabs and his knapsack of melodies and his wanderlust, though this guest, she was sure, would rend no one's heart. She also realized that, despite the old woman's polished appearance, before her stood someone in search of a home.

Quietly, she suggested the extension of her visit from three days to a week, from two weeks to a month: Why not help me took-taak in the hosiery shop, Amma, and Gita never refused these kind offerings.

Over time, Shukriah was able to learn the reason for her visitation and the story of her life. It turned out that while Zachariah Ben Jaloun and his wife had not seen each other in almost twenty years, his records at the Ministry of Radio and Communications still stated Gita as his primary contact, since recall, as you may have heard, he had neither remarried nor found any stable friendships since coming back to that labyrinth of names. Two days after he put a bullet in the back of his head, my grandmother found thin meat slices in a duffle bag that had arrived without address of origin or deliveryman, in the shape of her estranged husband, with a knock on her front door one Thursday at lunchtime just as she was sipping her first spoonful of turkey broth. As his sallow chainsmoker's face disintegrated in her hands, she realized she had been smelling onions since the moment she woke up that morning, and had found him in her sheets, in the clothing hamper, in the smell of every man's sweat or cologne while shopping for the day's eats. Gita realized she hadn't distrusted the premonition for a moment, and rightfully so, so well had she and Zachariah known each other in life.

Gita was so shocked by his return that she could not help but ask him the questions she had been muttering to herself for years.

And our boy is lost now, she told him, perhaps dead, all grown
up if he is alive, but probably a dacoit or a motorcycle pirate. Oh we failed, Zachariah, we utterly failed at love.

After a simple burial attended only by two or three people who still remembered him, she began to feel a lightness on her feet, as if she had regained lost years by sending some furtive mass, which had weighed unseen on her Atlas shoulders, to the grave. She quit her freelance needlework and took a job as an operator for the national telephone company.

And after many years there I thought it was high time for a living reunion with my only remaining family. How glad I am to know my son is alive and sharing a home with such a joyous woman and that he has a delightful son of his own.

Shukriah did not press her mother-in-law to fill in the gaps of her narrative right away, presuming that time would complete that task, and told her only the best parts of her own life's recent history, such as their early days in the small flat above the hosiery shop, the funny stories she would tell fetal Hedayat during her very long pregnancy.

Eight years, my God, Gita exclaimed, you would expect him to be as large as a whale.

This is around the time our head of state Anwar the Great reunites with Dulcinea, his love mare. My father insists on attending the magisterial funeral.

Hurry up, he ushers the family into a waiting downstairs van. Labial flashes smiles energetic words pour, so hard with a whole family to travel, I hear him say, as the rise and fall of the driver's hum of understanding, acceptance.

The hum of the motor opiates me, summons sleep, and in between that time and the following scene, they encounter a rupture, an argument
that would not heal for a long time. What I hear when I woke up: in front of his own mother, Shukriah shouts, and from that day onward, she refers to Mamun only by the self-reflexive pronoun himself: son, tell Himself to come now, that the table is set/ Himself is not the only eating member of the household what will Himself do about this outrageous gas bill, the old days money is not going to last forever/ is Himself ever considering another job, and so forth. When, out of habit, the more personal marker, you, falls, Shukriah's lips replace the mistake immediately with Himself. Mamun M's contrition is evenly matched by his stubbornness and his inability to utter the truth: he cannot stand the presence of his mother, as if her quiet footsteps throughout the house shake the cobwebs of older memories and return him to previous lives wrapped in spiderthread.

What was Mamun M's fantasy illness. His self-diagnosis of colon cancer had been proven otherwise by every sound individual of the medical profession except those keen on fleecing him for pharmaceutical expenses. Did he still believe he was mortally ill. Was he of the opinion that his mother would set back whatever recovery he had made. If so, why. The longer Gita stayed in their apartment, meanwhile, the more she began to feel as if her son had betrayed his spine. What was he doing all day while his wife ordered women's linen from catalogues and managed a complex credit system that kept in mind all the customers who could not pay and others who paid partially and continued to haggle or to barter for even the smallest items, while she expanded the store's inventory to include women's and children's clothing because times were so bad that one could not sustain oneself on the business of selling only hosiery.

One day, while whipping cockroaches out of their hiding spots with a long black leather strap she had brought with her, Gita tried disabusing her son of his laziness. At first the lashes only reached the corner of the bed, and Mamun felt safe by the thought that a woman
who had regained a son after missing him for nearly two decades would not could not. Nevertheless, he moved his body from out of the way of the attacks just to be sure. When the following lash discovered his neck, he leapt out of bed, shrieking with indignation.

Attack me, then, strike your dear mother who bore you, she said as he shook with rage. And who wishes only the best, she lashed out again, this time catching him on a concha, the outer shell of his right ear bursting with red; note that the whip was bona fide cowhide and fashioned to injure work animals.

Shukriah found her spouse curled into a hermit crab's shell, his head shielded with his hands, weeping like a child. She felt only pity at that moment and placed her own body between him and the instrument of torture, encircling him with her arms and drawing to his level on the floor.

Enough, Amma.

I was trying to, Gita lowered the whip, ashamed.

I know, Shukriah forgave, and returned to calling Mamun by you. From that day forth, no one demanded that Mamun M work, but fate would have in store for him to return to the Archives one final time. For the moment, he busied himself at Xasan Sierra's shop, where he idly filled cigarette papers with loose tobacco for smokes and adda; the enterprising youth who had forged a career as an aleatory songsmith had grown into a bloodless middle age, drained of all his vital energies. Not even his mother's whip could salvage his former zeal.

All this occurred around the same time the great Grenadier Lhereux abandoned his lifelong desire to return to Mother France and decided to remain in the unnameable country to nurse the President back to health so the latter could summon his previous cruel strength and push all the new rats and parvenus of the judiciary and governing council into the ocean. True to his style, the grenadier said nothing to anyone about his plans and instead sought out the most beautiful and willing
horses in New Jerusalem to replace Dulcinea, the love mare. But he discovered that rather than improving the President's condition, Anwar sank deeper into the swamp of melancholia, weeping and singing in a private language into the manes of the beautiful thoroughbreds he would send away after exhausting his equine desires for each animal, and more strangely, that he began to assume certain pathologies of the criminal minds he had grown acquainted with over the years due to his long association with the National Security Service, such as the covering of his face with a mask made of spidersilk gossamer a suspected terrorist reportedly wore, designed to vibrate at the exact frequency of Black Organs telecommunication.