Tanya Tania (28 page)

The crowd outside is restive. Someone says there are none left. Someone else says that the motherfuckers have gone to Pakistan. Another man is shouting, rundi, rundi, rundi. You remember the word written in English in the corner of your notebook when you had left it on your desk over Lunch Break. Slut.

‘Chal Azhar ki galli!'

A cheer goes up. Someone abuses Azhar and his mother and grandmother and father and daughter. Someone imagines how he will look without a penis. The men laugh and step loudly, as if the ground is slipping beneath them. The slap slap of sandals and shoes is loud in your ears and then slowly begin to recede.

Silence.

It takes you a long time to get up. You are surprised by how much your left leg has bled where a piece of glass is sticking deep into your calf. You pull it out and the pain makes the world spin. You take your teeth to the bottom of your kameez and tear a hole and then a strip that you tie around the wound. You can't bring yourself to take Nusrat's dupatta off your head.

You stumble through many silent streets. Everywhere the windows are boarded up and everywhere there is stink of garbage that made you want to vomit over and over again but there is nothing left. Your throat is burning and you stop at a house and bang on the door to ask for water. You hear people inside but no one opens the door. The sun is shining brightly and your head hurts. Images are beginning to swim in front of your head and you know you need to get to water fast.

And then you see a building with a shop on the ground floor that is completely burnt. No sign, no counter, nothing except for a naked old man lying across the threshold of the shop, looking, except for the way his legs are bent, as if he is peacefully asleep. You turn your face away from his genitals, like softly spreading wax between his legs.

It's the bakery from Nusrat's chawl. You look up and it doesn't look like the same building with all the windows boarded up. Where are the petticoats hanging outside windows? Where is the underwear with holes?

You stop at the small doorway of the building and wrap your dupatta around your face so only your eyes are visible. You wish for your father again. You wish for a torch. You wish you had eaten carrots so you could see better in the dark. But you climb up the steps and into the dark.

You hear keening.

You want to run away but you grip the wall, palms pushing into cold stone, and you slide inside slowly. The dark is a monster and you, who have never been afraid of the dark, are terrified.

The keening gets louder and it's behind a closed door. You knock on it softly but it can't be heard. You bang on it, the dark is closing in on you.

The keening stops and someone comes to the door. You can hear them and you imagine them scared, you imagine them wrapping their dupatta around and you wonder why it is that women cover themselves with flimsy cloth when they are scared as if cloth ever stopped anyone and you know it doesn't because it never stopped Arjun but you are doing it too and so there you are, you and the woman behind the door who has stopped keening and both of you have dupattas wrapped around your head as if it will save you from each other.

The door opens a crack and a shadow of a face shows. She asks you in Hindi who you are. You say Tania because you can't think of anything else and as soon as you say it you wonder if you should have said a more Hindu name or a more Muslim name and how did they know to kill the guy with the right side of his head chopped off had they asked him his name?

The woman is silent and you whisper that you are looking for Nusrat. The woman shakes her head and shuts the door and won't open it even though you knock loudly, urgently, continuously.

She opens the door again and she looks tired. ‘Please go away,' she says.

‘It's my friend,' you say. ‘Please Aunty.'

‘Friend!' she looks at you. ‘My husband is missing and you're looking for a friend!'

‘Sister!' you shout, holding the door open with your hand. ‘My sister! Please Aunty please! I've been looking for her for so long!'

The exhaustion and the heat and the buzzing in your head all come together and you can't bear it anymore and you sag against the wall. The corridor sways and recedes, sways and recedes.

The woman makes an exclamation of disgust, looks both ways into the dark corridor and pulls you into her house.

Inside it's dark and it smells bad except for two incense sticks that burn in front of a picture of a fair man in a white cap with a gold border that you've seen at your Bohra friends' houses.

She pushes you at a mat on the floor and disappears. You discover the warm, fast breathing bodies of two very small children on the mattress, one a baby.

She comes back with a steel tumbler of water and you can't help but remember everything your mother had ever said about drinking water outside your house but you can't help it, you take the tumbler and drain it at one go.

‘Now go,' says the woman, taking the tumbler. ‘Please leave. I don't want any trouble.'

‘Nusrat Mohammedbhai,' you say. ‘Her father is a carpenter. She is mute.'

‘I don't know.'

But she says it too quickly and you don't believe her. You grab her hand. ‘Please Aunty please, she really is my sister. Please tell me. I know she lives in this building but I don't know which floor.'

She shakes off your hand and begins to cry.

Why is she crying? What does it mean?

‘I hate them!' she says. ‘I hate all of them. It's to protect them that my husband went.'

‘Protect Nusrat?'

‘Protect the women of the building. My husband and two other men took all the women to the mosque in the next neighbourhood. They left six hours ago when the trouble started in the morning and they haven't come back yet.'

Her voice broke on the last words and she started crying, softly, still very softly, muted into her dupatta, as if it was dangerous to be scared, dangerous to be sad.

‘You're sure Nusrat was with him?'

She suddenly looks at you with hatred in her eyes.

‘Bhaarh mein jaaye teri Nusrat! Bhaar mein jaaye!'

You oddly want to comfort her, to put your arm around her. One of the children's sleeping arms falls on your lap and you almost scream.

She picks him up and you see that it is a baby. He is peeing in his sleep.

‘I've drugged him,' she says, her voice quavering. ‘I've drugged him so he won't cry. I wouldn't let them take him. But he hasn't woken up since morning, not once.'

She holds him close and her face disappears in the curve of the sleeping boy, his arms hanging slackly over her shoulder. There is something disturbing about his deep sleep. You wish you could pick him up and take him home so he would wake up among the gay mosaic tile in the kitchen where he would crouch on his baby haunches, picking at the margins.

‘Please tell me where they went.'

She looks at you suspiciously. ‘Why? Who are you? Nusrat has no sister.' She looks at your shoes which shine white in the darkness.

‘I'm her friend from school.'

‘What's your surname?'

‘Sheikh. Tania Sheikh.'

‘Where do you live?'

‘Colaba.'

She is silent, disbelieving.

‘I have come with my father in his car to take her back home with me. She is my second cousin. My father's brother's daughter. Cousin.'

‘Salim Mohammedbhai's brother?'

You nod.

‘Salim Bhai has rich relatives,' she says finally. ‘If only he wasn't so hot-headed he wouldn't be poor and here with us.'

‘Where did they go, Aunty?'

‘To Momin Masjid,' she says finally. ‘Near the big Catholic school.'

You jump up. You know the school. You had passed it on the way. It is cream and green with a fake Christmas tree right inside the gate and a giant sign in popsicle sticks saying MERRY CHRISTMAS although half the T has fallen off.

‘You should not go.'

‘Come with me.'

Her eyes light up which you suddenly notice are beautiful, a soft brown with vivid edges. But then she shakes her head and tightens her arm around the comatose baby.

You get up to leave and she grabs your arm. ‘Find my husband! Please, find my husband! I will do anything for you, just find my husband!'

To your shock, she falls to the floor, the baby still in her arms, and tries to touch your Reebok shoes. You say, ‘No, no, no Aunty please no,' and you feel foolish saying it because she barely looks older than you, even with her two drugged children and missing husband.

‘Islam Hasan Ali!' she says. ‘His name is Islam Hasan Ali! Please find him, please bring him home, please …'

She is crying to herself, no longer looking at you. You leave quietly. The image of the weeping woman on the floor, her head resting on the lax, lolling baby, his head fallen back at a nonhuman angle follows you.

Islam Hasan Ali. Salim Mohammedbhai. Nusrat Mohammedbhai.

Outside you blink in the sunshine but the smell of smoke is immediate and acrid. You begin to run.

Nusrat. You have to find Nusrat.

You can't find the school and you run through the streets again forever. Everything is spinning around you, the sun beating down hard on your head, the headache back and the pounding of your heart so loud between your eyes that you could barely see. Things flash by: a turned over vegetable cart with tomatoes split under sharp beaks of crows, a Hanuman temple with a headless Hanuman and a priest lying next to it, a mound of garbage, a dropped bag of bread, pamphlets in Marathi with pictures of swords and a smiling blue god sitting on a rock, a dog (Was it the dog from the store?) sitting solemnly on top of an empty cart, watching you run by for the second time as you try frantically to find a way to the school.

You run into the green and cream wall of the school. You climb over the gate and fall on the other side, hurting something in your left leg badly. You purse your lips and ignore it. You have a bad feeling you're running out of time.

Nusrat. You have to find Nusrat.

You run through the school and the red floors make you think of my house with its red-floor balcony and even as you're running, across the playground, through the corridor, with classrooms on the sides, you think about me and you wonder why I haven't written, if I'm alright. Because Nusrat was right, Tania Ghosh, you have a kind heart. A stupid, kind heart.

The shouting hits you like a wall of sound. You run out into the front courtyard of the school and you can see through the tall black posts of the front gate of the school that there are two big mobs facing each other, both with flags and swords and machetes and bricks and broken bottles still dripping with orange soda. One mob has men, women and children. The other mob has men.

You run to the gate. You grab the posts and look for Nusrat.

When you see her, your heart leaps in relief. She's right in the middle of the crowd, holding an older woman who must be her mother. Her mother is crying but Nusrat is dry-eyed and solemn, holding her mother tightly as if to prevent her from falling to the ground. She is jostled continually by the crowd and she ducks and flows with the crowd stoically. For a moment you just look at her, thinking how beautiful she is and how you can't wait to hold her hand and drag her away to safety. Your heart begins to slow down. It looks like a big shouting match but no one has hurt anyone. Maybe they will all go away. They won't hurt each other in front of a school.

It all happens quickly. One minute the men are just screaming at each other, a mix of slogans and abuse and indecipherable noise. The next minute, there are stones flying through the air and people falling to the ground. The women start screaming. The children start crying. You just keep your eye on Nusrat. She is being pushed and shoved. She puts her arm around her mother. She is trying to drag her to the side.

Suddenly a man breaks out from the mob with Nusrat in it. He runs across the empty space between the two crowds and enters the other mob. He has a large iron rod with him. He starts to hit men around him, waving his rod around. Blood blooms. The men in the other crowd close around the man and you can see the bodies pump up and down as they beat the man.

Suddenly police vans appear on the edges and scores of policemen pour out of them with revolvers in their hands. They jump into the crowds and disappear in the dust.

And then Nusrat runs after the man and disappears where the men are beating him.

You scream her name over and over again. NUSRAT! NUSRAT! NUSRAT!

But you can't see her anymore. She has disappeared. You begin to climb the gate to get to her.

And then the gunshots.

Once, twice, thrice.

Many times together. Many gun shots.

Everyone is screaming now and everyone is running in the same direction—away from the square of confrontation, into lanes, into streets, into shops, into the dust growing opaque.

The dust is immense and through it you scream. NUSRAT! NUSRAT!

Your voice disappears into the mayhem and then quickly, as if it is a movie script, the square is silent and a moment ago where people had stood screaming at others, moments ago where there had been so many people beating Nusrat's father, moments ago where people were pushing and shoving and screaming, there is nothing but silence, nothing but dust.

You stop shouting and stand still, peering through the dust, hoping to see which direction Nusrat had run in. You are tired of running after her. You want to find her and you want to go home. You are beginning to feel angry.

NUSRAT! Let's go home now! NUSRAT! It's Tania!

NUSRAT, you scream through a now total silence, your voice ringing out into all corners. NUSRAT!

When the dust clears you see Nusrat. She is lying on the ground, on her side, looking straight at you.

For a moment you smile. She has seen you! Nusrat!

And then something is very wrong because how can her head be at that angle and who is that woman coming running towards her also calling her name and why isn't Nusrat getting up?