The Scatter Here Is Too Great (15 page)

We kept exchanging worried glances. After a while I told her to go into her room and let me speak to him myself. “Please make him come out,” she pleaded as she left, adding, “I will offer some
nafl
prayers to ward off this evil.” I kept knocking at the door, hoping he would open it. I was afraid he might end up doing something to himself.

You see, he was about to get married in three days, and all the preparations were complete. That was his last day of job duty.

After a while, the pauses between his sniffles grew longer and I wasn't sure if I heard anything. I was seriously worried. I finally declared, “Okay, Akbar, I am going to break in if you don't open.” I had been threatening this for some time to no avail but now I felt I had no choice. “Get out of the door's way, Akbar.”

I rammed my shoulder into the door and it banged open. The steel latch holding the door fell out with its screws and jangled on the floor, the door slammed against the wall. He sat shriveled under the washbasin.

He was cold blue when I lifted him with his hands, and it seemed he was shivering as if he's caught a chill in his bones. (It was sweltering hot outside.) He refused to move out. I called my mother and we forced him to the table where, morsel by morsel and gulp by gulp we made him eat and drink. He wept constantly.

My mother sat beside him, loudly reciting prayers, telling him, “Acha acha, now, Akbar, my son . . . that's enough, my child. Recite Alhamdulillah. Recite the
kalima, durood
. . . come, my dear, come. Stop, my dear. Stop now.”

I was sitting beside him, holding a glass of water, watching my mother constantly rubbing her hand over his cheeks, and his welled-up eyes dripping water. He was in a strange state. His shirt buttons broken as if he had been mourning. Suddenly he said, “Maa, I held the dead body of a boy today. He was an angel I tell you. An angel.” And started weeping again. We sat there, unsure at what was happening and unable to find a way to handle a grown man weeping incessantly. He then began slapping his forehead with his palm. My mother threw herself at him and I held him from doing so. We let him go when he calmed down. He stretched his hands and stared into them. “You know his clothes smelled of hashish, but when I touched his body I felt a light inside me. His body was crushed inside a car and he was dead but his wounds were dry, and he was smiling. I touched his forehead and it was cold with sweat. But then, but then . . .” And he started weeping again. He pulled out a bunch of business cards from his pocket and spread them out on the table besides his plate of food. I picked one up. It smelled of intense black smoke and read:
Chief Security Services. Sadeq Khayyam. Ph #: 0300-xxx-xxxx

Akbar did not sleep that night. At the call for prayers at dawn, he got up and left for the mosque. My mother saw him leaving and told him not to stay long and come home soon. She thought he would calm down when he prays. But when he did not return for some time, she woke me up. “He's gone for more than an hour now. Go see where he is . . . my heart is troubled. God knows, what evil is eating up my child. He was so happy until yesterday . . . wedding in three days . . . May God protect us.”

I found him standing at the edge of our lane, staring out onto the main road, the few running buses in the morning, people like shadows ascending them, filling in to go to factories. He got scared when I approached him. Then he recognized me and embraced me. He clung to my body for a long time. He was still shivering from cold. He broke into sobs and said, “They are here,
bhai
! They are here! I have seen them walking over the corpses. . . . They are here!” His voice trembled and he shook uncontrollably. Watching him, for a moment I felt scared.

Obviously, when I told this to my mother, we thought he had seen—probably even handled—ripped, mangled bodies, and was traumatized. She gave him a spoonful of honey from the neighbors to go with some warm milk. We then sat with him until he went to sleep. My mother said she wouldn't go to work today. “I will take care of him and will also get a talisman to ward off his evil.”

That evening when I came home, I was shocked to find the house in utter silence.

For the past week and a half, each evening was spent in festivities of dholki—family folks gathered, girls from the neighborhood came in, and there was lots of singing and dancing, and the closer we got to the wedding day, the louder each evening became. I discovered that when everyone was playing the dhol and singing, Akbar entered the room enraged, and shouted at everyone, “Enough! Shut out this singing and dancing! You don't know—doomsday is here. I have seen them with my eyes . . . they are here! Rectify your end! There is no time left now!”

My mother, poor woman, stared at him with disbelief. She wanted to have the first marriage in the house with great fanfare. She had even refused to quit her job until Akbar got married. She worked in a garments factory, where she cleaned the fluff that was generated in the knitting machines. Her work had rapidly destroyed her lungs and now she regularly spat blood. Her refrain was, “I'll quit once my Akbar is happily married. I am saving up for him. I want to have at least a television in the house when he gets married. What else will I do with my daughter-in-law all day? If we have a television, we would be able to watch good dramas at least.”

It was even worse when the bride-to-be heard about this. She was the daughter of my aunt, my mother's sister. We had all grown up together. She was a lovely girl, very shy, kept to herself, never spoke an unnecessary word. She was a good match for Akbar, much better than she was for me. For a long time everyone said that she was going to be married to me . . . but I had refused to marry because I wanted to start my own business. I mean, I had a clerical job at the bank but had decided I wanted to make a successful business before anything else. So I had promised to marry this girl who was the daughter of an owner of a big bakery in our area. She was not good-looking or anything (in fact, quite the opposite) and I felt nothing for her, but she was happy with me and ready to convince her family to help me. The deal was done, more or less. I was waiting for my father-in-law to put my business on solid foundations before I married his daughter. I think he saw it too, but like me, he was a practical man. He understood that long-term relationships can only be built on trade and commerce. I felt a little bad about it, but to be honest, that's how life works.

Once my business was up and running, I planned to start a little general store for Akbar. He has that kind of a temperament. I knew he would've been happy with it.

Anyway, my mother was worried when Akbar yelled at everyone like that. She said, “I don't know what he has seen and what has come over him. . . . I feel he has some jinn's shadow on him. . . .” Somebody suggested to my mother that it could be a jinn and that we should go see the Maulvi Sahib.

Maulvi Sahib lived with his wife and four kids in a single room inside the mosque. He was a very pious man and people from far and wide came to seek prayers for their ailments. We explained to him what had happened and he looked deeply concerned. He asked us to wait outside his room while he spoke to Akbar himself in private. We could hear Akbar telling him something in a low voice. After a while they grew quiet. Maulvi Sahib came out and spoke to us, and he told us the strangest story.

Akbar told him that on the afternoon of the bomb blast, he and his paramedic were lifting the wounded into the ambulance when he saw two men in long pink robes walking among the dead bodies. They had dirty faces, as if rubbed with charcoal; bald heads; and their tongues were sharp and elongated and hung down to their chins. They were walking over the corpses, touching them, looking joyous and thrilled. Most strangely, no one—not the police, press, or anyone else present was paying attention to them. They roamed freely, and they seemed happy and celebrating. Akbar was convinced that these were Gog and Magog; that they had finally broken free of their thousands of years of being imprisoned behind the wall and were here now; and that they were in this city, the harbingers of the Day of Judgment.

My mother and I looked at each other incredulously. A strange fear cut through both of us.

(If you don't already know about Gog and Magog, their arrival was supposed to mark the coming of the end of the world. Gog and Magog were two leaders of a giant warrior race that had been separated from humans by a wall of iron and lead. With their hands and legs tied, Gog and Magog were condemned to licking the wall all night in order to break it down. Every night they licked the wall down to the thinness of paper; but come morning, the wall replenished itself to its original thickness. They fell asleep with exhaustion and the next night set out to work down the wall again. One of the signs of the Day of Judgment is that the wall will cease to replenish itself and they would manage to bring it down and flee from the prison. They will bring strife and disharmony and, ultimately, the apocalypse to the world.)

Akbar said he had no doubt it was them. He also made repeated mentions of a boy, whose body he had pulled out from the rubble. He said that boy was an angel, destined for heaven. He also told Maulvi Sahib that he could not get married—he felt no desire; he felt physically empty; he was just eyesight looking out from his head. He could feel no desire for anything. He said nobody could see what he saw, and there was no way he could say it. He pleaded to him to save him from getting married.

After reporting this, Maulvi Sahib turned to my mother and said, “It is a difficult time, but God is merciful. You keep reciting the prayers I told you last time. Besides that, give some alms. Inshallah things will get better. And yes, don't get him married. You will destroy the girl's life most of all.”

He was a good man; he consoled us; said the worst was over.

We did not know what to do. The wedding was in two days.

It was then that my mother told me about the dream she had a few days earlier. In her dream she was sleeping when she was awakened by a strong stench of birds. She saw that the house had been invaded by hungry ravens and kites that were tearing apart everything that she had prepared for Akbar's wedding. They were at work quietly at first, but when she woke up (as in, woke up in her dream) all the birds began squealing. She saw the floor covered in bird shit and tattered clothes hung from the ceiling fan, and while some birds hovered around the room, a few of them sat in a neat line along the edge of the steel cupboard in the bedroom where most of the wedding stuff was stocked. “You know the terrifying bit? All of them were looking at me menacingly, as if angry at me for having done something wrong,” she told me breathlessly. “That image haunts me. I have been reciting
ayat-al kursi
continuously. When I saw Akbar yelling and kicking around today, that's the first thing I thought.”

I cannot tell you what I felt as she told me all this. Up until now, I felt as if we had met an unfortunate accident, but now, suddenly I began feeling something entirely different. As if we were trapped in the middle of a story we did not know, and had no control over.

I felt afraid in a way that I had not been before. On the one hand was my poor brother, who had been cold and silent since that night, and on the other there were omens for us. I also felt that it was possibly because of my sins that this had been brought upon my family.

But really what could we have done? The preparations for the wedding were already made. We had little means, and it had taken us everything to put this wedding together. It was impossible for my mother to postpone or change the wedding date. She was sick with worry. My brother on the other hand was in no condition to get married. Then something even stranger happened.

My mother got a call from my aunt saying that the previous night the girl had consumed an overdose of sleeping pills because she wanted to marry somebody else. My aunt was crying and begging apologies, but then my mother told her that Akbar had not been feeling well since the bomb blast either and wanted to put off the marriage himself. It was according to God's will. Everything would be fine, they agreed.

Much to our relief, the wedding was called off, but it left our home in disarray. My mother's pain was all too visible as she packed or handed away things that she had prepared for Akbar's wedding. Akbar, on the other hand, was a walking mute. He had given up ambulance driving, taken up other jobs, and quickly lost each one of them. He now sat at home and did nothing all day. My mother spoke to him, and he replied in his cold, staid manner. She cried and prayed for him.

As far as I was concerned, the shock of those couple of days gradually faded, but more and more I was filled with an intense curiosity to find out about those two men that my brother saw. I wanted to see if they were still around in the city. And if what he said was true. It was strange, I realized: I didn't really believe it, but I did not have the courage to disbelieve what my brother saw either.

I went to a friend who had a barbershop in that area. His shop was located in one of the lanes away from the main road where the blast had occurred, but the force of the explosion was such that all the windows and glass in his shop had shattered. “Yes, we all rushed out to see what had happened, but there was such madness. The ambulances, fire engines all came later. Before that I saw ripped smoking body parts scattered everywhere.” He covered his face with his hand. “One glance at the scene made me sick. I couldn't take it anymore.” He did not remember seeing two men in pink cloaks.

I spoke to a few more people in the area and most people—to my surprise—actually did see them, but nobody had taken any special notice and everybody seemed to be confirming the view that they were garbage collectors, “or something like it.”

I finally met a young man whose account was close to my brother's. His PCO (Public Call Office) shop was located right across the site of the blast. He was warm and welcoming. He offered me tea and the only chair in his shop.