No Country: A Novel (44 page)

Some people had managed to escape to the roof, and my heart leapt with hope. They were standing at the parapet. They seemed to be swaying, but they were certainly safe. I searched frantically for Bibi.

Then I saw my daughter.

The pounding in my heart made me choke. I sank to my knees and put the child on the ground, for all strength was draining out of me. A lowering blackness troubled my sight. My daughter, my headstrong Bibi, stood at the high open window, swathed in a luminous shawl.

She stepped out into the wide air and flew down to meet the earth.

We lay together in a strange country now, a few feet apart. My hands moved blindly over the gritty earth, reaching for her. “Bibi,” I called, “oh my Bibi,” groping for her in the sudden darkness. There seemed to be pebbles all around, pebbles that were wet and familiar.

“Where is my child?” I thought, wondering what dreadful
weight on my chest made it impossible for me to breathe or cry out. A cracked voice rang in my ears, keening above me, a voice I recognized:
Moo-maa-gy,
it cried,
Moo
-
maa-gy,
again and again. And I knew these pebbles now. They were from the sea-edge at Sligo, where I had played by myself one last time in Ireland, before Papa Brendan carried me carefully in his arms over a swaying gangplank onto a ship, about to enter an ocean.

But this time I had fallen through, into an impenetrable darkness.

•  •  •

A
CHILD WAILED,
his palms soiled, cheek smudged by dirt, his nose runny.

An ambulance driver careened his wagon on to the sidewalk, honking furiously. It ran over a limb or two and parked under the cascade of bodies, so that its roof would break the falls. Firemen had arrived in a swarm. They spread out a tarpaulin and stretched it out, but the next body fell with such force that the fabric was ripped from their grasp. They hurriedly rigged a ladder, but it reached only halfway up the tall building. The last of the bodies fell past it.

The child watched a car at the curb across the street; its gleaming wheels caught his eye. Bibi’s son clutched his grandmother’s lifeless body, stood up, then lost his balance, and sat abruptly on the grimy sidewalk.

Carefully picking himself up, without aid, he toddled unsteadily, taking his first steps on earth, away from all his relatives, into the swarming and deadly city.

“Will you take me to that great house?” I asked my father on the morning of my seventh birthday.

“That old house is n-no more,” Baba told me sadly.

“Do houses die?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said sadly, “Everything d-dies.” I thought about that carefully.

“But we should know where we belong,” he continued, “and who we are,” as if he was speaking to himself.

Baba was born by a roaring river near Barisal in a great house with pillars. He lived with his old grandfather, whose name was Ramkumar Mitra.
His
father’s name was Doorgadass, and he was a famous merchant. He traded with the English and the Dutch. He even had a timber business in Burma.

“We must remember the names of our ancestors,” Baba told me as he took me on the horse-drawn gharry to show me his office, where I read what was written on a wooden board outside:

Monimoy Mitra, MA

Civil Court, Jessore District

Bengal Province, India

It told you where he was and who, but I told him there was a big mistake here. I don’t understand how Baba had MA after his name. He is my
Baba
, not Ma.

Ma was different, in a way I did not understand. I do not remember my mother ever caressing me. She could not bear to be touched.

So I asked Baba how I was related to Ma. He took a minute to understand what I meant and mulled it over, blinking, then blurted out, “Good God, Kush, b-because you grew inside her. She is your
mother
!” He made a vague gesture with his spread hands, as if that explained everything. It did not.

“Who decided that I would go into her?” I persisted. “Why
her
?” He began to stammer a long answer, as if he had been involved in some kind of mistake, but was honestly trying not to blame anyone. “Besides,” he said, finally, “I have to start work now. Qadir will drive you home.”

When I returned home, my mother’s maid Sushma had told me that I had been born that day. I laughed at her. “No,
nonono
, I don’t remember being born this morning.”

Sushma set my breakfast down with a clatter, chapatis, and a soft runny egg. Then she told me it was exactly seven years ago and there had been another brother who had tried to be born,
the same day
. The firstborn, the one who did not breathe.

“Ask your ma,” she glared, daring me, “ask her. She wanted 
him
.”

“And me?” I began angrily, but I knew the answer.

“Your poor ma refused to nurse you, and can you blame her! And you, bawling and screeching from that first hour, such a bother in a sad house! Your father had to go off and buy a milch goat. What with its bleating and your yowling, she needed to rest from that day,” concluded Sushma with satisfaction. I knew the rest well enough.

Ma went into perpetual mourning for my brother and lived alone on her great bed. Baba slept in his study.

I decided to talk to my mother about my birth when she woke up and explain that I had not meant any mischief and none of what happened was my fault. Under her bed, thinking it a good playspace, I smuggled my favorite picture book. Lying on my stomach, I turned a page. The leaf fluttered. My mother called out, “Laub, oh Laub, is that you, Laub?” Sushma hurried in. I could see her shadow growing larger on the wall behind her.

“No, no,
bahu,
” she said, “it is only Kush under the bed.”

I heard my mother’s voice choking, stiffening, “Take him away.” Sushma dragged me out before I could say anything. Before shutting the door on me, she whispered, “He did not live because you had taken up all his blood inside your mother. Stay away from here.”

I went out into the backyard, walking on until I reached the dense trees where I was not supposed to go. “Snakes and scorpions and
petni
-witches live there,” Sushma had warned me once. Today I wanted to see for myself if anything she said was true. And before I knew it, I was lost. The tendrils of the banyan trailed around me, creating an early evening. A part of the bark moved, and suddenly I was aware of speckled wings and the round eyes of an owl, a perfect match with the branch it sat on. We regarded each other carefully until its gaze shifted, and I became aware of
someone else beside me. And I knew immediately who it was—I just knew without having to look!

From that moment I began to sense him around me, my twin—pale Laub—because I had taken away his birthright blood: pale in the darkness of corners, under the broadleaf trees, in all the hidden places of my life.

It’s not your fault
, he whispered that same night when I drifted into sleep. He was lying next to me in the darkness where no one else could see him.
Is that you, Laub?
I would think—and he always let me know where he was.

I knew I could not share him with anyone else at home.

•  •  •

N
O MATTER WHERE
I explored in the afternoons, I had to be home by sunset, because Baba had appointed his retired clerk, Binodbabu, to come and tutor me. I would watch him in the twilight as he ambled past hedges of
hetaal
and
akondo
, carefully picking his way lit under the oscillations of his handheld lantern.

As I intoned the scales of the multiplication tables, swinging my legs in rhythm, the night outside would be nudged awake by the hum of insects. Some of the winged ones flew and whirred into the study, the carapace of their moth wings touching the smeared heat of the kerosene lamp. As I sang out the numbers, I could feel my mind sharpen in wonder—how they stayed the same in meaning, while everything else—like leaves, or the sky, or day and night—changed so much and so soon.

Baba took up the task to teach me English, a small teaspoon at a time. At first I thought he was teaching me a secret language that nobody else spoke, in which I could think my secret thoughts.
As I learnt, my brother Laub learnt too, in twin measure. Some words tasted heavy and metallic, like
lead
and
iron
, and some phrases made small pictures behind our closed eyes. We repeated “a school of fish,” “a gaggle of geese” to ourselves. Numberless fish, gliding and flickering under the waters. The silly waddle of geese headed for the ponds edged with waterweeds. We decided to make up new phrases:
a slink of foxes
—for we had seen them in the bamboo groves behind our bungalow, in the direction of the wide river where I was forbidden to explore;
a jamboree of bees
, when the hive became a swarm. Together we would think up phrases:
a melody of cuckoos, a rattle of woodpeckers, a squirm of earthworms
—and then, I would whisper,
“Laub?”
And my brother would be there, just out of sight, invisible to everyone else.

I never told Baba, or Qadir his servant, and certainly not sour Sushma, about my brother Laub. I was afraid that if I told them, my brother would be made to go away. Then I would surely lose him, and he would be unhoused, again through my fault—and then if I called out,
Laub, is that you?
—there would be no answer.

•  •  •

B
ABA WENT TO
his office every day on his horse-drawn gharry, which Qadir Chacha drove. Often in the mornings, I rode beside him on the gharry to drop Baba at his office in the red courthouse building with its red-blue-black British flag. To me it looked as if they had decided to firmly cross out the crucifix at the centre.

Qadir Chacha lived in a small hut off to one side of our bungalow, under a guava tree, next to his nag Burak’s stable. Old Burak liked to have his bony ribs scratched, whinnying and snorting with pleasure.

Qadir also ran errands for Baba. He would come in to clean our front verandah, but he would never come any farther inside, nor was he allowed to touch our food—not because Baba himself cared at all, but because Sushma was fierce about it: Qadir was Muslim. Baba told me to call him Chacha—uncle—because it was the custom with older servants. Qadir Chacha said his prayer on a tiny roll-up rug in front of his house, facing west. He would wash his hands and feet, sit with his ankles tucked under him, and raise both palms, looking up as if someone invisible was standing in front of him.

He told me about a pir who used to live near the river. Qadir Chacha whispered that djinns had built a tiny mosque overnight for that holy man, Ali Suleiman al-Badr Khurasani, a mosque as lovely as a pearl. Many years ago, when the old pir died, he was buried there. About the pir’s mazhar, the cloth-covered mound of his tomb, Chacha told me many stories: Young men given up for dead after snakebite and left there after prayers would rise and wander around, alive but listless; women, barren after years of marriage, would eat a mango from the trees that grew wild around the mosque, go home, and find themselves pregnant, although the children were usually mischievous. When the girls grew up, they sang beautifully, said Qadir Chacha, nodding his head. Some years after the old pir’s death, there was a terrible scourge of cholera. Most people in the nearby villages died. Now, no one lived in that great bend of the river. Cane vines, wild jarul, and hetal trees took over, along with dreadful sheora trees, where
shaakchunni
-witches were known to set up their nasal caterwauling, demanding fish, unnerving travellers at night.

Qadir Chacha said it was only a half hour’s walk from my father’s bungalow, by the wide river. Desperate people went looking
for it when grief or despair drove them to thoughts of drowning or poison. Poor farmers or simple fisherfolk would speak to the walls of the small mosque and come back comforted.

The pir never made any distinction between Muslims and Hindus, for God the Merciful, he said, distributes His store of grief equally among his creatures, whether they were followers of the Book or no. That is why the old pir was hated by the full-bearded mullahs in their town mosques and the angry madrassah maulvis in skullcaps. Pir-baba was invoked by the poor—of both religions—for whom hardship had no separate names. Qadir Chacha insisted that the holy pir had known the ninety-nine names of God, and was blessed with the knowledge of His secret hundredth name.

The dead pir was loved by all, even those who had merely heard of him. Some even whispered—here Qadir Chacha dropped his voice to a whisper, for it was a grave matter—the holy pir’s tomb, the mazhar, moved about, from one new moon to another, even as a river shifts its course in the great alluvial valley which we all shared, the living and the dead.

Qadir Chacha muttered mysteriously that some poor villagers had recently seen unknown beings flit around the riverbend, that djinns had been known to hover about and congregate, talking to someone there. Their voices, Qadir Chacha whispered, were unearthly and metallic, and their wings like moths’ were adamantine black, folded one over the other.

When I felt Laub growing afraid, I asked Qadir Chacha defiantly, “How do you know? Have you ever seen any djinn, white or black?” And he tilted his eyes, sputtering, “
Tauba, tauba!
Oh, how can you say that, little Baba? I just heard tell, that is all.”

Sushma screamed for me from the verandah:
Time for dinner,
Time for lessons, Time to take a bath, Time to just come inside
. Sushma did not like Qadir. She did not like him telling me anything. But Laub loved to go and listen to him.

What thrilled us most in the nighttime was to wonder if the djinns were beginning to arrive secretly at the courtyard of the pir’s lost mosque to sing. Those evenings when the old private tutor was racked by cough, or his gouty frame not equal to the walk from his cottage a furlong away, I would skitter out quietly so Sushma would not know that I had gone to Qadir Chacha’s mud hut for more stories.