No God in Sight Read online

  Morning must be approaching. When I open my eyes again, the room seems brighter than before. Why doesn’t Shazia turn off the bulb? She knows we can’t afford to burn power without reason.

  Suleiman is sitting next to me, on my bed, watching over me like a vulture. He sees me stirring and jumps at the opportunity. ‘Tell me, please! Why? Why did you convert? Why did you become a Muslim?’

  I do everything it takes to smile, but my lips don’t obey. I close my eyes again, to shut out the glare of Suleiman’s stare.

  He seems old enough to have questioned—if youngsters still do it—life. To have contemplated his own existence and the existence of an Almighty. Or maybe not. Men like my great-grandson, born into a pervasive monolith of a faith, have little reason to be inquisitive or anxious. When a holy book provides answers before you have questioned, and your day is neatly partitioned into five prayer sessions before you are born, you would have to be a fool, or an innately disruptive person, to nurse doubt. Oh, but the nobility of questioning customs, suspecting idols and searching for years! And the thrill of finding your answers in a holy book! And the comfort in having your previously formless days neatly partitioned into five sections! Suleiman will never know such delight and I pity him for it.

  It is Shazia’s delicate touch on my shoulder. ‘Abbu. Abbu, wake up. Time for dinner,’ she whispers.

  It is daylight now. A mellow, velvety morning.

  ‘Turn off the light, damn hell!’ I say.

  Suleiman, with foodtray in hand, turns to look at the glowing bulb. ‘Come on, Abbu,’ Shazia says, ‘if I switch off the bulb, how will I see you, hmm? See what’s for dinner, you’ll love what I made.’ She tries to prop me up.

  I start to tell my loving but foolish daughter that it’s morning, time to turn off the bulb and feed me breakfast, not dinner. But I don’t say it.

  The truth…the truth of the moment…the truth of the moment whisks my words away.

  Hey Ram. Ram-Ram.

  As I breathe my last, I hope Suleiman doesn’t think his question was the death of me.

  Shazia-dadi, the Genius

  Suleiman thought his question was the death of Abbu.

  He rested his head on Abbu’s arm and wept. I stroked his head and pacified him with kissing sounds.

  I am cursed. At the most delicate of moments my thoughts are invariably profane. Abbu is dead. No point describing how cleaning and changing him twice a day—my own father!—would spark thoughts that embarrass me. Stroking Suleiman’s head, I imagined how pleasurable it would be to… oh, sick. Even at seventy-one every man seems a potential. Reason must intervene on every occasion and prompt my virginal subconscious in a hushed murmur: he is father, he is brother, he is milkman, he is postman… Suleiman is my brother’s son’s son. My grandson. My grandson! I repeated it several times till the feel of his coarse hair turned indistinguishable from that of any other object.

  ‘Son,’ I said at last with complete conviction, ‘we must arrange his funeral.’

  Suleiman raised his wet, grieving face, ‘My question distressed him, Shazia-dadi. I killed him. I killed him!’

  At Abbu’s age, so much as a gentle breeze could have polished him off. But I didn’t tell Suleiman that. His guilt was precious to me.

  At birth, marriage, and death, a man’s life isn’t his own. Abbu’s funeral was a circus. While washing Abbu’s corpse, the maulvi dropped it in alarm. ‘Oh, the profanity, the deceased is uncut!’

  Uncut? Uncut. Uncut? Yes, yes, uncut!

  The question and answer crept through the acquaintances who had gathered at the graveyard. What was uncut? No one would tell me. I sat alone on the special spot for females near the entrance. ‘He’s a convert, maybe that’s why?’ Suleiman suggested to the maulvi.

  A convert? A convert. A convert? Yes, yes, a convert!

  Another round of whispered gossip. Another maulvi stepped in and finished what the earlier one had abandoned in horror.

  The following week blurred by.

  Then the day came: the day of Suleiman’s departure.

  I began by saying, ‘Been just nine days since Abbu. Stay some more, Suleiman.’

  Didn’t work.

  So I asked, ‘Why be a refugee in an unknown city? This house is yours only.’

  No effect.

  So I cried, ‘Stay! Have pity on a seventy-plus woman!’

  Suleiman continued to pack with a chilling apathy. This was the world Abbu said he would always shield me from: a world uncaring of a woman who had never married or bred. But to be treated like this by one of your own? ‘Oh, Abbu!’ I gasped, lamenting his absence and the profound loneliness that lay ahead.

  ‘What’s that?’ Suleiman looked up from a bag he was bending over.

  ‘You killed my Abbu,’ I whispered. This was my desperation talking. Suleiman froze. ‘Your anger, your question, it crushed my frail old father.’ Suleiman hid his face in his hands. I concluded with a curse, like a haggard second-rate witch: ‘Wherever you go, whatever you do, never forget that you stripped a lonely old woman of her one and last protector.’

  Suleiman looked up with the same wet grieving face he had at Abbu’s death. ‘But I can’t stay here, dadi! I can’t! The woman I love is waiting for me in Mumbai!’

  ‘Then take me along!’ I joined my hands and begged. ‘As your mother, as your responsibility, you must take me with you to Mumbai!’

  Abbu would have been happy to know: for the first time I left a man speechless and unable to say ‘no’.

  Nilofer, the Martyr

  Trust Suleiman to set off alone and return with a bent old woman in tow. I was in our tin shack, resigned to sleeping alone for the ninth night in this alien city, when Suleiman appeared at our joke of a door. ‘Nilofer, I’m back!’

  ‘You took so long coming!’ I whined. From Barauli station I had come to Mumbai with my uncle, while Suleiman had gone to Namnagar. I leaned forward to embrace him. Suleiman raised his eyebrows in warning. I reached for his mouth. He averted his face. No, no, he mimed. ‘Why not, dear?’ I peered over his shoulder and literally leapt off Suleiman for decency’s sake.

  ‘Who’s she?’ I inquired softly.

  So.

  Shazia-dadi didn’t like our ten-by-ten tin shack; too tinny and suffocating, she said. She hated the curtain we drew across the room for privacy. She loathed the two loos shared by nine other slum-dwelling families. And she refused to digest the food I made, and the fact that Suleiman and I lived in sin. We are orphans. Except for my uncle who couldn’t care less and Shazia-dadi who was too new to matter, Suleiman and I had no one else to convince of our love.

  ‘But you two must marry. Must, must, must,’ Shazia-dadi grumbled every night as we disappeared behind the curtain into our windowless half of the shack.

  ‘Why, dadi? We’re not doing anything indecent,’ Suleiman would titter, as he lowered my shalwar and his pajamas. In the ensuing silence, all three of us would fake coughs and sneezes to drown out any chance sounds.

  Every hot afternoon, or whenever lines for the two toilets were too long for comfort, Shazia-dadi begged us to leave Mumbai for Namnagar. But Suleiman wanted to be a city tailor for fashionable madams. Besides, where we lived wasn’t bad. Ours was the best slum refined refugees could find.

  ‘Imagine,’ Suleiman had told me when we were still in Barauli, planning our exit before the Mahant returned to rob and maim us, ‘imagine you and me in the heart of Mumbai on the seventeenth floor. What a view! Oh, the breeze! Ah, the silence!’

  ‘What rot!’ I’d said. ‘You went to Mumbai to look for shelter or take drugs?’

  ‘No, no, Nilofer, really! I saw it today! A slum on the top of a building. It has nine shacks and two toilets with running water.’

  Suleiman and my embroiderer uncle rented two adjacent hovels; over a few days they shifted our things from Barauli before bringing us women to this Muslim slum on the terrace of a Muslim skyscraper in a Muslim area. ‘The best of the best of the best.’ It rea
lly is. Although the view still makes me dizzy. And the breeze threatens to take you with it. And climbing seventeen floors (since us slum-dwellers may not use the lifts) can make you utter words you didn’t even know you knew.

  But did Shazia-dadi have a single good word for the constant breeze or for our company? Hunh! All day she moped or studied the skyline, cursing herself for having begged to come to this hellhole in the sky.

  My baby gave her a reason to leave. I vomited every morning for three weeks, taking this syrup and that pill, not realizing all along that I was pregnant.

  ‘But you’re not married even!’ Shazia-dadi exclaimed on hearing the good news. She pounced on her bags and started packing.

  ‘Don’t go, dadi, you’ll be all alone in Namnagar,’ I said, genuinely concerned.

  Shazia-dadi thought I was taunting her and left anyway.

  At least Suleiman was ecstatic on hearing about the baby. He had started getting stitching jobs from a local tailor.

  One rainy night, while our tin roof was shuddering in the wind and the rain was seeping in upward from under the door, Suleiman and I began making plans for our coming child. After discussing names and deciding on what kind of sweets to distribute after the birth, the talk got down to money. He put up a brave front, telling me not to worry, he would handle all the expenses. But as every woman knows, or should know, that any time a man acts like a man, it’s when he feels least like one.

  My man needed me to step in. And I had to do it without offending him.

  ‘What? What do you mean you are bored?’

  ‘I’m going out of my mind, Suleiman!’ I said, the next evening. ‘In the village I used to be busy all day: milking the cows, sweeping the house, roaming the fields. Up here… I’m dying up here!’

  ‘So, what do you want to do? You want to roam the city? You want to go out? How are you going to climb seventeen floors up and down every day in your state?’

  ‘I won’t. I’ll just climb two-three floors.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘Please, Sallu?’ I said. ‘Please, don’t say no, let me work in someone’s house below. Please?’

  What tantrums men throw! Suleiman’s lasted for two days. Two days of shouting and yelling. Are we servants? Am I so poor? Am I not feeding you? This. That.

  As every woman knows—one ear in, another ear out.

  Besides, I wasn’t going to be some dirty, ill-mannered servant. I just wanted to be a self-respecting woman doing her job! How could anyone living below refuse to assist a pregnant refugee from their own umaah?

  So, the following Sunday morning, while Suleiman was still sleeping, I bathed, put on my finest shalwar-kurta and smudged my eyes with kajal more liberally than usual.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Suleiman looked up groggily from his pillow.

  I smiled. I bent down to kiss his cheek, and whispered, ‘One more word from you and I’ll move out this very second.’

  Suleiman kissed me back and wished me best of luck.

  Numerous are the advantages of living in.

  Then I climbed down three stories to the fourteenth floor and stood in its lobby, wondering which of the four doorbells to ring and ask for work. 1404 or 1401? 1402 or 1403?

  Why think so much, I thought. Must be a reason why the first is always the first. Best to start from the first only.

  Bismillah.

  Flat 1401

  ‘A servant? Mad or what! We have nine daughters. The last thing we need is a servant.’

  Flat 1402

  (Still in bed, will not rise for another hour no matter who’s at the door, it being Sunday morning, a day for waking late, although neither has slept all night, anxious as both are over unpaid credit card bills for the garments, gizmos, gifts, and gourmet meals recklessly consumed in conformity with current social aesthetics, and that’s how everything happens here, in flat 1402, slaves to the bandwagon decree, who will not, will not rise for another hour no matter who’s at the door, it being Sunday morning—a day, for waking, late.)

  Flat 1403

  An hour. Or maybe longer. Doesn’t matter. When one is trying to shit, time is unimportant.

  So I have been straining on the commode for what seems like an hour, when I notice a drop of blood on my shirt, just below the left pocket. I squint. I wonder if I am seeing things. Could I have strained too hard and burst a vein? I rub my eyes.

  When my vision clears, the bloodstain is still there.

  I stand up and pull up my trousers. (There is nothing to wash away or flush down. Just like every other ‘morning after’. After a successful hit, I need to strain for at least a week before my insides agree to release their waste. By then, the glands on the side of my neck harden and I start smelling of feces.)

  I look into the mirror above the basin. No other stains. My grey shirt is spotless except for this single drop of blood that seems to have traveled almost thirty feet and landed on me so neatly. Strange, right? It was so dark last night; I must have struck that hotelier’s artery.

  I lick my fingertip and press it to the stain on my shirt.

  The blood liquefies and it seems, all at once, as if I have touched a fresh wound. Wow. It has been years since I’ve had blood on my hands. I use a gun now. Earlier, when I used knives or choppers, it used to be a bloodbath in the true sense. I would carry a change of clothes and slip into them in the getaway car. The bloodstained garments were not to be tossed away; they were to be given to Maamu, our gang-guru; he would cremate the clothes on the balcony of our headquarters.

  Like someone accusing himself, I point my blood-specked fingertip at my face. I had forgotten the luscious gloss of blood. I had forgotten its stench of rust—yes, I can smell it now, holding my fingertip near my nostrils, I can smell that faint but unmissable odor of corrosion. I open my mouth. I lick my lips. Should I do it? I have never done it: never tasted blood. Mine, several times; but never the blood of a person I have killed. If I lick this fingertip what would… did the doorbell just ring? I prick my ears like a jackal. Like a bhediya. That’s what the newspapers call me: Salim Landya, aka Sewri Ka Bhediya.

  Ting-nong.

  The doorbell rings again. Bhengcho! This doorbell is not supposed to ring! My fingertip grazes my nostrils. Breathing copious amounts of sickening, rust-flavored air, I run out of the bathroom. I grab my gun from the floor. What is this? What is this supposed to mean? Maamu said this flat was vacant! Why would anyone call on a vacant flat!

  Holding my loaded gun up, I crouch against the wall, beside the door. ‘Who is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Salaam-aaley-kum, brother. M-my name is Nilofer,’ some woman stammers in a girl-child’s voice.

  ‘What do you want?’ I ask.

  ‘Work!’ she blurts.

  Just what I thought. I release the safety latch. ‘Then don’t waste time,’ I shout. ‘Let’s get this over with!’

  ‘You can open the door, please?’ she says.

  The patronizing saali. ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘I’ll open the door and give you tea-biscuit also. First tell me, madam, how you knew I was here? Who sent you?’

  ‘I-I just rang the bell. I-I did not know who would be there!’ she replies.

  Liar, I want to shout, lying madakcho saali!

  I stand up and place my trembling hand on the latch. ‘Just wait, haanh,’ I say, ‘I am opening.’

  ‘Okay, b-brother,’ she says, ‘I am waiting.’

  1…2…3…4…I start counting.

  At 20 I will throw open the door and shoot that haraamzaadi’s brains out.

  Meanwhile, on the Floor Above

  Kishore Malhotra rings the bell of flat 1503. A man in a nightsuit answers the door.

  ‘Someday you will catch a horrible disease, linger, and die,’ Kishore says and tightens his face. If he was going to be slapped, it would be now. Ten o’ clock on a Sunday morning was no time for dismal truths.

  ‘I would hope so,’ the resident of 1503 chuckles. Kishore opens his eyes warily. ‘Who wants
to live forever? Not me,’ the man adds. He crosses his arms and grins at Kishore with absolute serenity.

  Kishore is stumped. He only expects the brute in people. What kind of person is this? Through his confusion, Kishore mumbles, ‘So how will you pay the high hospital bills? What will happen to your wife and children after you die?’

  The resident of 1503 retorts, ‘I don’t believe in hospitalization, or in children. And I plan to marry money. Anything else?’

  Kishore’s shirt turns wet with sweat. He is ill-equipped for clever debate; he only means to trigger monetary and biological anxiety, the solution to which is right here, in his folder. He asks this freak one last question. ‘But what if your wife also falls ill and both of you are in hospital and all the money runs out?’

  The resident rests against his door and frowns. ‘Cheer up, boss. What are you? Buddhist?’

  No, mister smart aleck, Kishore muses regretfully, and turns to go. I wish I was, though. I would retreat to some ashram in the mountains, where the food is free and the air is cool. I am, in fact, an insurance agent and I haven’t sold a single policy since I began making the rounds weeks ago. I’ve tried the slick talk and the smooth moves. I’ve practiced Seven Steps to Successful Sales and improvised eight of my own. People say what I sell is superfluous. Shoo, they say, don’t corrupt us with this American mania for surety. Most days I feel like a victim. But of what? I’m not smart enough to fathom.

  ‘Hello, brother, you didn’t say what you were selling!’ the man in 1503 jeers. But by then Kishore is on his way down to the fourteenth floor to peddle a policy to flat 1404.

  1602, 1503, 1404… the sum of all he does is a deliberate, auspicious nine.

  Meanwhile, on the Floor Below

  Vinti Kambole puts down her bag of merchandise and rings the bell of flat 1302. A youth in vest and shorts answers the door.

  ‘Is there a lady in the house?’ Vinti inquires.