Alif the Unseen (19 page)

“I meant to say thank you,” he said. “That was what I meant to say.”

Bewilderment spread over Vikram’s face, quickly replaced by a careless smile.

“Go away, younger brother,” he said, walking a little straighter. “I’ll see you later, God willing.”

Alif hurried back toward the hidden staircase, hearing the noise of the Alley die away behind him. Squaring his shoulders, he climbed to the top and soon enough found himself jogging along the
narrow passageway between the limestone walls of the Old Quarter garden where he had started out.

When an opening failed to materialize, Alif told himself not to panic. He slowed his steps. Reaching out one hand, he ran his fingers along the chalky stones as he walked past, like a blind man
taking his bearings. One block passed, and then another. Finally his fingertips fell away into empty air. Turning, he squinted: the barest shadow informed him that here, too, was a nearly
undetectable gap, where the wall became two overlapping walls. He threaded his way through, and in a few steps found himself on an unpaved street, choking on the smoke of burning garbage.

“Damn it,” he muttered. “Damn it all.” He wheeled in a circle, trying to determine where he was. Behind him loomed a concrete wall—intact and without interruption
when he put his hand to it—against which were built a series of shabby lean-tos. Barefoot men in the uniforms of the City garbage disposal service were throwing sacks of trash onto a smoking
pyre in the middle of the road, heedless of the Datsun mini-trucks that tried to pass. Women, barefoot and up to their ankles in mire, waded through a second, as yet undisposed pile of garbage,
picking up reusable fragments of glass and plastic with their fingers. The stench was terrible.

“Uncle,” he called to the nearest man, an elderly fellow with a stoop and a thatch of yellowing white hair. “What district is this? Where can I get a taxi?”

The man smacked at what remained of his teeth, cackling a little.

“No proper district at all,” he said. “ We just call it the Place of Trash. Where do you need to go?”

“The Old Quarter,” said Alif, looking desperately up and down the street for the black-and-white glimmer of a cab.

“That’s a ways. I’ll take you there myself for thirty dinars.”

Alif glanced at the man’s unshod feet, feeling skeptical.

“In what?” he asked.

“Apricot.” The man pointed to a donkey cart hitched to a disagreeable-looking animal, presumably Apricot herself.

Alif bit his lip in despair. He would be late.

“Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Half an hour later, Alif arrived at the Old Quarter wall, thoroughly polluted by the dueling scents of refuse and donkey. He paid the driver in a rush, hurrying away before the
old man’s gnarled hand had a chance to close completely over Alif’s crumpled bills. Sprinting up the stone-flagged road that led toward the university and the heart of the Old Quarter,
he did not pause for breath, thinking with each footfall of Intisar. The memory of her perfume was so intense that he believed he could smell it over Apricot’s more insistent odor. He ducked
left down a side street toward the university entrance. Students were leaving their afternoon classes in talkative groups, taking out cell phones and cigarettes and stowing notebooks in their
messenger bags. To Alif, they seemed unnaturally relaxed, unaware of the impending disaster he felt hovering all around him, marking him as a doomed, unfortunate, foolish man who had taken on
burdens he had no hope of discharging.

In the distance, Alif could hear the
chaiwallah’s
voice over the babble of students, his song punctuating their academic jargon. Sweet milk tea, joy for the tongue and health for
the body; when you consider that Foucault defined the postmodern discourse, consider also his own experiential bias; sweet milk tea, if it runs out, I can’t be blamed; obviously you believe
social capital will eventually have a market value; sweet milk tea, a heavenly drink for a worldly price; you suffer from the colonized mind, dude. The last was from a boy who looked
desi
but wore cargo pants and a T-shirt advertising some floppy-haired western band. Alif brushed past him, following the
chaiwallah’s
cry.

Intisar was not there when he arrived. He bought a cup of tea and tipped the
chaiwallah
excessively. While drinking it—hot, soupy with ground-up spices—he wondered if she
might not come at all. She did not check her e-mail as frequently as he did. She might be afraid to see him. Perhaps she enjoyed being so capricious, rejecting him one day, sending him dangerous
artifacts the next. It was for her that he had put himself and his friends in danger, for her that he had written the program that could send them all to prison. And she remained maddeningly
aloof.

When he tried to rehearse what he would say, two separate scenes played themselves out in his mind: in one, he shouted accusations; in the other, he took her in his arms. Both ended with Intisar
trembling against his shoulder, apologizing and professing her unbroken love. He drank the rest of his tea too fast and felt his stomach protest. He must not hope; the hope alone would kill
him.

Alif shook his head to clear it and willed his innards to settle. The afternoon was getting hotter, the sun approaching its most unforgiving angle. A man had wandered up to the
chaiwallah
from around a corner. He ordered tea and paid with a small bill, waving his hand when the
chaiwallah
offered him change. Turning away, he discreetly dumped the hot
liquid on the ground. Alif tensed. Two more men, trying too hard to look nonchalant, approached from the cobbled street that ran up to the campus entrance. One of them reached for something buckled
into his belt.

Alif did not wait to see what they would do. Throwing his empty cup on the ground, he bolted past the
chaiwallah’s
cart. Voices followed him, ordering him to stop and put up his
hands. He did neither. Gulping air into his lungs, he sprinted toward an alley that led between the edge of campus and the closest private house. It was narrow—didn’t Amitabh Bachchan
escape into a narrow alley in
Sholay
?—and they would have to follow single file. He clattered past a splintered pile of boards, the detritus of a construction project, and prayed a
loose nail would find its way into one of his pursuers’ feet. Alif’s own feet smarted—he was not used to exercise. Gasping, he emerged out the other end of the alley.

The street on which he found himself was broad and genteel, its stone-flagged surface recently washed. It sloped upward toward the heart of the Old Quarter. Squinting along its length, Alif saw
the outline of the great mosque of Al Basheera against a white sky, fronting the original, medieval campus of the university. Alif scrambled up the street, legs aching, with a wild idea of seeking
sanctuary. Surely they could not drag him out of Al Basheera in handcuffs. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it, continuing up the punishing incline toward the top of the hill. Footsteps
rang against the stone behind him, and shouts: a man’s voice called for backup. Alif blinked back tears of frustration.

“You! Boy! Why are you running?” At the gate of an ornate villa, the rotund, officious belly of a doorman blocked his path. By way of a uniform, the man wore a pseudo-Ottoman robe
and a feathered turban that gave him the air of a circus performer or a waiter at some touristy restaurant. The simulacrum was unbearable. Alif was seized by a desire to strike the man, or trip
him, or plunge a foot into the soft underside of his enormous belly, anything to get him out of the way. But courtesy stopped him, and the doorman grabbed his arm.

“Damn you to hell!” Alif shrieked, feeling betrayed. The doorman puffed out his cheeks. Alif struggled, but his abductor’s meaty hand tightened around his arm until Alif could
feel his own pulse. State agents were closing in behind them, sweat stains visible beneath the arms of their sport jackets.

“Is this your life, dressing up like a monkey for a bunch of rich fucks?” Alif bellowed at the doorman, baring his teeth. “Is this your life? Is this your life? Do you think
they’re going to stop treating you like shit if you turn me in?”

The doorman looked stunned. His cheeks fluttered. The grip on Alif’s arm slackened, and he twisted free. Bolting up the street, he paused long enough to look over his shoulder, guilt and
contempt warring in his chest as he saw the doorman staring after him, shoulders slumped, the feather in his absurd turban drooping in the heat.

Near the top of the hill, the street branched into two. Alif swerved left and stumbled over a traffic bump, then again on a loose flagstone, cursing all the while. Something buzzed past his ear.
He yelped and flinched, convinced it was a bullet. Women’s voices floated out the open door of a shop on his right. Without thinking, Alif changed course, rushing inside to shrieks of dismay.
A profusion of ladies’ gear greeted him: shoes on stands, purses on racks, gloves on tables. He knocked over a jewelry display as he stumbled on, seeking the back exit; a fresh volley of
shrieks followed him and he felt a stinging blow on the back of his head.

“I just need the back door, damn it!” he screamed, fending off more blows with his arm.

Unseen hands shoved him toward a door marked employee propped open with a rock. He rushed through it, half-leaping over the lintel, and found himself in another alley. The backs of buildings
obscured his view of the mosque. He spun in a frantic circle, hoping for some landmark to guide him, and found none. Weeping openly now, he sprinted onward in the first direction that presented
itself, past a row of cats watching coolly from a garbage heap.

He turned one corner, then another, rushing through clusters of men in tailored white
thobes
. He had neither changed nor shaved in two days, and knew full well he looked like
someone’s thieving garden boy on the run. These men, these women, would have no qualms pointing the security police in the direction he had gone, would complain to each other about how
dishonest maids and drivers had become these days. He could not stop now. In Baqara District it might be different; in Baqara District people knew about injustice. Here he was alone.

“Stop him, stop him!”

Alif turned to see his three pursuers panting up the street. He surged on, given fresh momentum by fear, and nearly toppled an old man fondling a string of prayer beads.

“Sorry,” he gasped. The man made a private remark to God. Alif took a wrong step and fell. As his knee came down hard on the flagstones, he wondered if the man had evil-eyed him.

“Damn it,” said Alif, uncertain if he was addressing the old man or the Almighty. “It’s not my fault!” Bursts of pain flared in his right knee, keeping time with his
heartbeat. He lurched to his feet and ignored them. The men from State would surely catch him now. He staggered around another corner, under an old carved arch, and sent up his own prayer in
half-formed desperate thoughts.

The mosque appeared in front of him at the end of a narrow street, reaching toward the sun stone by stone, as if summoned. Alif cried out in relief. He jogged toward it and winced, limping the
last few feet to its massive copper doors. Age had turned them a flat shade of green, such that the old songs about Basheera’s shining gates no longer made sense, but Alif greeted them like
lost friends. He pushed his way inside.

The interior of the mosque was dim. The only illumination came from five circular skylights built into the dome, letting geometric columns of sun and air into the prayer space. All the electric
lights were switched off—the midday prayer had been over for an hour, and no worshippers remained. Alif quieted his breathing and slipped along one wall. There was noise coming from somewhere
in the murk—the incongruous sound of an old violin recording. It was an Egyptian folk song in a wry, diffident key, and for an instant Alif was reminded of the way Dina shrugged when
confronted with a question for which she had no answer.

“God forgive us, man! Your shoes!”

Alif spun around in terror. A leathery sheikh wearing a turban and a brown cloak was coming toward him from the opposite end of the room.

“What do you mean by this disrespect? Are you mad?” The sheikh halted in front of Alif and squinted at him indignantly. His eyes were a rheumy, unfocused blue. “Are you a
Muslim, sir?” he asked, switching to Urdu.

“I’m sorry,” Alif stuttered in Arabic. “Yes, I am, but I’m in terrible trouble and shoes are the last thing on my mind.”

“Trouble?”

Someone pounded on the outside of the main doors. Alif froze. The sheikh considered him for a fraction of a second.

“Keep moving,” he muttered. “My office is through the arch on the far side of the
musala
. When you get there, ask our Lord’s forgiveness for your dirty
feet.”

Alif hurried to obey him. As he slipped through the arch he heard the great doors open and a terse voice ask whether the sheikh had seen a young man in a black T-shirt come into the mosque.
Flattening himself against the rounded edge of the archway, Alif listened.

“My eyes are not the best anymore,” said the sheikh, “and I’m afraid I have just closed up the
musala
. You’ll have to come back for the midafternoon
prayer.”

“Nonsense. We have the authority to search the whole mosque anytime we please.” The voice was fat and guttural.

“Whose authority?” the sheikh asked.

“State’s, you impudent old man—what other kind is there?”

“God’s,” he answered serenely. There was a pause.

“Maybe we should clear this with Religious Oversight first,” said a second voice in a quieter tone.

“Search the place now if you like,” the sheikh’s voice continued, “but I must insist you take off your shoes and make ablution first. This is a place of worship. I
won’t have it polluted with unclean feet or unclean thoughts.”

“He didn’t mean to insult you, Uncle,” said the second voice apologetically.

“Really? Well, he must have a natural talent.”