Fireproof Read online

  FIREPROOF

  RAJ KAMAL JHA is the author of The Blue Bedspread (1999), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia), and If You Are Afraid of Heights (2003). Jha lives in New Delhi, where he is executive editor of the Indian Express newspaper. His fiction has been published in over twelve languages. This is his third novel.

  Also by Raj Kamal Jha

  THE BLUE BEDSPREAD

  IF YOU ARE AFRAID OF HEIGHTS

  Raj Kamal Jha

  FIREPROOF

  PICADOR

  First published in India 2006 and in Great Britain 2007 by Picador

  First published in paperback 2008 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47453-5 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-330-47452-8 EPUB

  Copyright © author date

  The right of Raj Khamal Jha to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One – That Night

  1. The Birth and the Delivery

  2. Face By Window, Letters on Glass

  3. The Empty Room, The First Picture

  4. Ithim At Home, Call At Night

  5. Miss Glass Talks, Yes to a Journey

  6. Falling asleep, awake in dreams

  7. News on TV, Man From Ukraine

  Part Two – The Day After

  8. The First Light, Bodies Run

  9. Mr Saxel Meeko, My Only Friend

  10. One Message, Three Names

  11. Tariq

  12. Shabnam

  13. Abba

  14. A Dot and a Streak

  15. On The Road, In The Mall

  16. Father and son, 5 minutes in the Trial Room

  17. At The Movies, Good Girl & Nice Boy

  18. Skipping Holy Angel, Ithim misses the meeting

  Part Three – The Night After

  19. Bright Shirt At Railway Station

  20. Night of the Scorpion, Jump from the Train

  21. Water and Canvas

  22. The Last Act – I

  23. The Last Act – II

  24. Curtains

  Epilogue

  For my parents Munishwar Jha and Ranjana Jha

  In memory of C. R. Irani (1930-2005)

  WHAT’S left about two months after an apartment complex is set on fire? After many of those who live there have been killed? And those who haven’t, have flown away on wings of fear, never to return?

  Not much.

  Just four policemen at the entrance, one fast asleep.

  The shells of houses where parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, friends and strangers, once lived.

  Blackbrown streaks on walls.

  Lines, short and long.

  Stains, big and small.

  Windows, their bars twisted. Their molten metal congealed in bursts of black iron rash.

  The ribs of what was a car. Still parked in a driveway.

  And debris all around. Like a tonne of black flower petals strewn in the yard to welcome ghosts.

  And so it is, on an afternoon in the month of May in the year 2002 in Gulbarga Housing Society in the city of Ahmedabad. It’s touching 40 degrees, there is fire in the sky.

  It was here, on the last day of the February gone by, that a mob had stood and set the buildings on fire, burnt alive 38 residents – 12 are missing to this day. The Gulbarga massacre, as it came to be called in newspapers and on TV, was one of a series across the state of Gujarat that killed over 1,000 men, women and children, 70 per cent of them Muslim, ostensibly as revenge for the death of 59 Hindu passengers in an attack on a train by a Muslim mob the previous morning.

  This afternoon, in the scant puddle of a shadow in the yard, half-covered by shreds of charred cloth, scraps of burnt paper, there lies a child’s book. It’s called Learning to Communicate (published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi).

  A brown patch in the top left-hand corner – possibly the work of fire and water, sun and shine – has seeped into each of its 124 pages. It’s a junior-school English workbook, its leaves marked by what’s clearly a child’s handwriting and sketches. All in pencil. The fly leaf where the child would have been most likely to write his or her name, address, maybe phone number, is gone. Torn off.

  On page 43, there is a poem called ‘The Town Child’ that has been underlined. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph.

  This is how the poem begins:

  I live in the town on the street,

  It is crowded with traffic and feet.

  The houses all wait in a row,

  There is smoke everywhere I go.

  There is only one thing that I love,

  And that is the sky far above.

  There is plenty of room in the blue,

  For castles of clouds and me, too.

  The child’s last entry in the book is on page 84.

  How many children were killed in Gulbarga isn’t known – police say the bodies were too badly burnt to be identified.

  All of the above is fact.

  All of what follows is fiction.

  PROLOGUE

  (THE OPENING STATEMENT)

  We, the undersigned, do solemnly affirm in this, our opening statement to you, the reader, the following:

  1 That we regret to inform you we shall not tell you our names.

  2 That if you insist on at least one piece of identification, you may call us by the roles we play, mentioned at the end of this statement.

  3 That alternatively, you may refer to us, at any time, by one or more of any of the following: bird beast, black blue, Hindu Muslim, Muslim Hindu, fire ice, cock cunt, song dance, sickness health, bridge river, radio TV, cat dog, night day. So on and so on.

  4 That we could keep providing you with more such options. Endlessly and tirelessly. Until the hours go by, until night uncoils into day. Weeks slide, months fold, seasons shift. Until the city swells, the streets crumble, the earth moves.

  5 That one reason we can do this is because we have all the time in the world.

  6 That this is because we are all dead.

  7 That beginning the morning of February 28, 2002, we were killed in ones and twos, sometimes in groups of three, four. Sometimes thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. At one time, even ninety.

  8 That some of us had our throats slit, some were stabbed in the back, some in the front. Most of us, however, were set on fire.

  9 That we were killed in our homes and on our streets. At work and at play. In our sleep and in our waking, in the darkness and in the shining. And in the dim, half-lit spaces that lie in between.

  10 That there are, as of one count, a thousand of us. Not that many, not that few. If each of us
were even just over a foot tall, stacked one on top of the other, we would reach almost as high in the sky as either of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Perhaps, then, we could restore the skyline of a damaged city three oceans, three continents away. A tower of flesh and blood. (By the way, that’s just a thought meant to illustrate. It should by no means be construed as an intention. For we do not want controversy.)

  11 That once dead, we have discovered gifts we never knew we had. We have found a home in the sky far above, where, as the poet says in the child’s book, there is plenty of room in the blue. We can ride across the city curled around wisps of smoke. We can climb up drops of rain to reach the castles of clouds, paint them red, yellow, any colour we choose. And while we are up there, we can even scrub the moon clean, stoke the sun if it begins to cool. Our children can dance underwater on the tips of leaves, our fish can fly, our birds can swim. In short, we can do anything. Except coming back to life, of course.

  12 That during the hours we were killed, the world was a busy place. Girls in bikinis were barred from a Commonwealth summit in Australia to respect ‘religious and cultural sensibilities’. An institute in Chicago revealed, in a medical first, that a thirty-three-year-old American woman had conceived a baby girl ‘scientifically selected’ to ensure she was free of Alzheimer’s.

  13 That closer to home, the nation celebrated Pandit Ravi Shankar’s third Grammy and the first-ever nomination of a Hindi film for the 74th Academy Awards. Government officials seized fourteen tonnes of fresh, endangered marine wildlife, illegally removed from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Work continued on the four-lane highways of our Prime Minister’s dream, on sealing the glass atrium of the new mall. The point we are trying to make is this: our killing was certainly not the end of the world. Because elsewhere there was fun, there was frolic, there was the promise of a better future.

  14 That considering all of the above, we decided death should not be an excuse for inaction, grief should not become a substitute for sloth. That instead of trying to fight the fire with our tears, perhaps the time had come for us to give ourselves the promise of a better future, maybe some justice as well.

  15 That this is the story of how we went about it.

  16 That its narrator, though, is not one of us but one of the living. He is a man waiting for news of the birth of his first child, his wife in the operating theatre. In a hospital that night where we lay dead and dying in the city on fire.

  Signed (in rough order of our appearance in the pages that follow)

  Head Nurse

  Doctor 1

  Doctor 2

  Ward Guard

  Miss Glass

  Lobby Guard

  Ambulance Driver

  Old Bird

  The Book

  The Watch

  The Towel

  Taxidriver

  TV Body

  Fruitseller

  Manhole Man . . .

  17 We won’t list everyone. Doesn’t really matter because you will anyways meet us in the pages that follow. Some of us will walk in, walk out of the margins, lose our way between the lines, reappear to speak in footnotes. Where we will whisper in small type, dispense with full stops, not even pause for breath. For there’s no time to waste.

  So let’s get started right away, let’s get started with that night.

  PART ONE

  THAT NIGHT

  1. The Birth and the Delivery

  DON’T listen to the dead, please do not listen to the dead – whatever they tell you, whatever fancy name or un-name they wish to go by, howsoever lyrical they may wax, because once you lend them your ears, they will nibble at your guilt, feed on your pity, swallow you whole, from head to toe, make no mistake. That’s why I need to tell you, right in the beginning, there’s only one thing in this story about which there’s not much doubt, in fact, there’s no doubt, none at all. And it’s this: it was, as they say in their opening statement, that night when it all started.

  That night it was that night.

  All the rest of it, everything else that follows, ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of it, doubt dispute distort deny.

  Bury.

  Cover with gravel, dead leaves, shrivelled, dry and rotting. Pat the earth flat, slap your palms against the hips of your trousers, let the dirt fly, then walk away not to look back. Never ever.

  Or if you aren’t the physical type, round up the little boys who at traffic lights knock on your car windows between red and green, get them to pile it all up, then fetch some kerosene, the poor man’s fuel – only nine rupees per litre – sprinkle it all over from a jerry can. Light a match, set the whole thing on fire. And blow.

  Blow, blow, blow.

  Like the North Wind blows in the children’s tale.

  Or if you want the exact opposite, if you want to preserve it so you may come back to it later, forget fire, use ice.

  Freeze it. Cold, hard, solid, white.

  Find a spot like they showed on TV that night. Under a glacier north of Himachal Pradesh. Which for twenty-three years preserved the bodies of a woman called Marin Bjornhaden, resident of the Swedish city of Göteborg, and of Lars, her fiancé. Both were tourists, trekkers, who had lost their way, but neither was damaged nor defaced. (Their golden hair was streaked with ice, like sunlight caught in the snow. Even their clothes were untouched, the fabric turned hard and brittle but perfectly in place, the white and blue checks on Marin’s blouse not one bit discoloured. Ditto the fringes on her red scarf. The lapels of the fur-lined jacket that Lars wore.)

  In short, do whatever you want.

  Because it doesn’t matter, the dead are going to get me in the end. Come what may, any which way.

  And that’s why it’s the beginning there should be no getting away from. The beginning of the night, when they told me my wife had given birth to our first child.

  A baby, severely deformed.

  The only part of the baby’s ten-point-two-inch frame left absolutely untouched by Strange, Mysterious Forces, seen or unseen, that cause such things to happen, were his eyes. (In a while, even the doctors at the hospital will stumble as they pull out Gray’s Anatomy, 36th edition, turn to chapter title Embryology, page 178, run down the paragraphs they highlighted in medical college, first year, try to refresh their memory on which foetal organ is formed when . . . but let’s leave that for later.) Each eye of the baby was perfectly shaped, fully functional. His eyebrows were perfect, too. As if drawn by an artist, talented and tender, who had all the time in the world and only two things to pour his life’s purpose into: these two lines.

  The rest of the baby was a mess.

  So much so that if all the parts of all the world’s babies, black, brown, yellow, white – choose your colour, mix a little bit of this a little bit of that – if all the babies conceived, imagined, all those about-to-be born or born, the half-made, the half-unmade, the aborted, the dead, through the present, the past and the future, down the ages of Baby History, were letters of an alphabet of a Baby Language and each normal baby a sentence making perfect sense, ours would have read:

  Zd^hjd srty!lks. op*fhT)

  Maybe shorter, maybe fewer words. But unreadable, nevertheless.

  Twisted full stops, varying types, incomplete parentheses, dotted commas, fused colons, lost asterisks. The letters, of varying sizes, welded and split in the wrong places, the words mangled and missing.

  So had it not been for those eyes and those eyebrows, the staff at the Maternity Ward of the Holy Angel Nursing & Graduate Hospital at 1607 Mahatma Gandhi Road, would have put him down as a ‘growth’. Or they would have called it a mass. A lump. Or whatever the medical term is for a Mess. They would have then dropped him into a container, cold and glinting, so that his parents, my wife and I, could see for ourselves, if we so wished. Confirm the news that, sorry, there was no baby, only a growth. There was an it, there was no him. And after we had left the hospital for home, they would have incinerated ithim in the hospital furnace. Or if ther
e was a power cut and the generator wasn’t working, they would have left ithim on the floor. In the corridor of the ward, a bundle leaning against the wall. Wrapped in cotton gauze and bandages so thick you would have mistaken ithim for soiled linen waiting to be picked up for laundry. Or to be sniffed, nuzzled, by a stray dog that might walk in from the street outside. Drawn in by the smell of a newborn, a newdead.

  But ithim had eyes and they were alive.

  Ithim had eyelashes. Ithim had eyebrows and they moved.

  Ithim (let’s do away with the two types, roman and itals) was my baby. And my baby could see.

  No, that won’t do, that’s evading, that’s fudging with words.

  For there’s no running away from the sum, no hiding from the substance.

  Indeed, the harder I try to avoid mentioning the baby’s details, the harder I try to pass them off in a couple of paragraphs or slip them in between phrases deceptively roundabout, the more these details push at the walls of my reticence. And before they break through, come tumbling out in a headlong footlong rush – along with countless other details that are not relevant now, that will only clutter things up – I need to describe the baby. In terms as specific as I can. As the cliché goes: Cold & Clinical.

  Just like the hospital that night.

  To do this, I will need the unrelenting light of reason. Which means I should switch off all the adjectival neons, the Soft Yellows and the Harsh Whites, the Cold Blues and the Warm Reds.

  Switch them off. Click, click. Click, click.

  Mere switching off won’t do, let me yank the wires out, wear heavy shoes, ankle-length, thick rubber soles to insulate my feet, let me smash these lamps, stomp hard on the shards until there is glass dust on the floor, dust so fine it reflects nothing. There, I have killed the lights, banished the shadows they cast. Of grief or pity. Tragedy or terror. Leaving behind only reason. No emotion, none at all.