The Scatter Here Is Too Great (4 page)

She seemed surprised. “Why, what happened?” she paused for a reply.

“Well, because it's my car,” I said, suddenly irritated.

“I'm feeling hot,” she retorted and rolled it up by an inch.

I realized I probably sounded patronizing the way I ordered her. That act of hers of running away with me on a sore afternoon and the risk she took could have resulted in her limbs being broken by her parents if they found out. I knew she did this because, as she said, “I want to do what I want to do—not what
they
want me to.” I had offended her sense of freedom. That act of being with a man (she loved) in a strange place was what she wanted to do. And I was happy for her, for my own reasons, of course. But I should've been more careful.

That little disagreement caused silence. I already felt a little annoyed watching everyone gawk at her—the beggars, newspaper boys, flower sellers on traffic signals—and then the horrible traffic. I hated the rickshaws and motorcycles. And I had to get back home too.

At the Cantt Station stop, where the traffic was crawling because the buses clogged the turning and bus drivers took their pissing-breaks, I spotted Comrade Sukhansaz descending from a bus, almost falling out, actually. It scared the life out of me. He would report me to my father, who might report me to my mother, which would destroy my access to this car and everything else. There was nowhere I could have gone—I was parked between the behind of a shiny black Civic and the front of another, and we were all standing there, honking our heads off at each other. He stood in an aggressive posture, his fists clenched, looking at the bus that had dropped him off.

“Damn,” I said, craning my head out of the window to block at least some of our view of each other.

“What happened?”

“I think he's seen me.”

“Who has seen you?”

“That guy in the red cap. Oh damn. Don't look, don't look.”

“So?”

Well, there went my first impressions of being a brave, brave boy from a good, liberal family.

He had seen me, for sure, but I pretended I did not see him. We were moving inches. You fight for inches on this city's roads. You train your eyes to scour them and the rest of yourself to devour them. Drive to survive.

Fortunately, Comrade stood at a point after which the traffic smoothed out, and I raced past him. He had seen me for sure because he had his hand up, not as in stopping me, but waving to me.

We must have gone a couple hundred meters and we were just starting to ascend the bridge on the left as soon as you cross the Cantt signal, when the blast occurred. Almost instantaneously something flew and smacked solidly into the back windscreen. The strength of the explosion was so terrible that for a second it shook the bridge we were on, and the car, which was already whining from its ascent up the bridge, lost power. Sapna's hands trembled, and she turned around to watch the unforgiving spectacle unfolding behind us. “Don't look,” I told her as I pulled the handbrake to keep the car from sliding down the bridge.

The next few moments were vague and my hand fumbled with the key and instead of turning it in the ignition, it seemed to be trying to understand it. I turned the key hard, shoving it inside the ignition. I anticipated the bridge would blow up next. My hands felt too weak and I was seething with anger. Why me? Why us? Why now? Why here? “Duck!” I shouted at her. “Hunh?” Her eyes were stunned and glued behind us. The car came to life finally, but after what felt a long time. I dropped the handbrake and pumped the gas pedal so brutally the car squealed as it raced up the bridge.

Cars raced toward me from the other end of the bridge, wrong way. No one seemed to have any idea about the location of the blast and those idiots were just madly tearing toward the site itself. A Land Cruiser almost rammed into the car from the side. Bastard. One thing was clear: no one was going to stop. From there on drivers drove with their hands on their horns, cutting through the traffic lights, and the traffic—everyone wanted to rush out from that center of fire and hell behind them. Or toward it. They didn't care. Everyone wanted to be out of there.

I don't know how and at what speed I drove, but I drove faster than I ever did and it was not fast enough. Nothing felt safe or far enough. And when we emerged onto the sea, it was sudden, almost out of nowhere. I had been driving without registering anything at all.

The sea was deserted at that hour. It was on my right, but I was looking to my left, suspiciously at the apartments that stood stolidly, their dirty-yellow paint dependably crumbling as always.

I parked the car, there was no one around. We kept sitting in there. I pulled down my window, and the breeze rushed in as if from another world, our hearts pounded like kicks in our chests, and the whole stretch of the sea seemed something new. It was not the desert it always seemed, not the deserted last bit of earth where I made out with other girls in the backseat of the car.

“Who was that man? The one in the red cap?” she asked.

“Comrade Sukhansaz.”

“What? Sukhan what? Is that even a name?”

“Well, he made it up.
Sukhansaz
is an Urdu word for
poet
. Comrade is what Communists call each other—like, brother. This guy gave up his name for the cause, apparently. Spent years underground, in hiding. He was one of those few who didn't relent—didn't start an NGO or something like it.” I paused. “I remember a few lines from one of his poems,” I said.

My lopped head will shout

My ripped tongue will roar

Kill me, O bandits,

My death will be my beginning.

I couldn't tell her the more obvious, more difficult thing: that the man was my grandfather. My father had a troubled relationship with him and had broken contact with him—much like I did with my father when he and my mother separated. My mother says it was a blunder on her part to have married my father. A man who wasn't faithful to his own flesh-and-blood father could never be faithful to others.

“You think he died there?” she asked.

I did not reply. I was still quite deaf from the sound of the blast, and my hands were still trembling. I was thinking if I should tell her what flew to hit onto the back windscreen.

“Shall we get out?” I asked her.

We got out and leaned against the hot bonnet to face the sea. We did not make eye contact. Our hearts still pulsated with fear and our eyes were fiercely set on the sea. The sea breeze haggled in our ears. I felt her come close; the length of her arm touched the back of mine. Absurdly, there was a pink moon over the sky, looking like a faint dabble in broad sunlight. The migratory birds crisscrossed and flapped like a film reel in the air. We stood like that for a long time, breathing, and then, suddenly, she slid her cold hand into mine and held it tightly.

It wasn't until that moment I realized that I needed comforting.

For the first time, in all my years of running here, I felt the sea in a new way. It did not seem like the end of the city.

Before setting off for home again, I went to examine the rear windscreen and found it as I feared: splattered with tiny bits of blood. I had clearly seen what it was that hit us. I wished I hadn't. I fought with my memory and tried to imagine it to be something else, but there was no time for that.

I cleaned the blood with a rag dipped in the car's radiator water. I found more splatters on the backlights, on the roof, the bumper. Sapna identified a couple of them on the door. I disposed of the bloodied cloth by flinging it on the road.

We couldn't afford to have anyone find out.

T
he front door slams open and a new air kicks into the room.

You see one window rip-rooted from its welded joints and its steel edges poking through the net, which is meant to bar mosquitoes. Slightest movement could slit the netting and send the panes crashing on the floor.

You should stand up and put the windows straight.

Your head hurts.

You'd fallen face-first on the floor.

Are you okay?

Your mother is moaning, “Ya Allah, Ya Allah”—her hand firmly pressed to her chest, as if trying to push her heart back into its original groove—“Ya Allah, mercy”—her pain thronging in the final “ah” of Allah. The other woman lying on the sofa is as mute as before. She had fallen unconscious a few minutes before the sound of the explosion tore through the room. You don't know what state she is in now.

You were wondering if you should take her to the hospital.

Yes.

Is she alive?

You must take her to the hospital.

But what if there is shooting outside? Yes, after a bomb blast there is shooting. Or another bomb blast. What about stray bullets?

You follow the slant of light cutting in from the broken window and stare at the ceiling to see where stray bullets would bore holes. Oh but wait—bullets smash through glass panes—“Get down! There could be stray—” you have an impulse to yell but you immediately realize that both women are too old to make abrupt moves. You feel a fizz in your spine. What must you do? Should you become their human shield?

You think of plugging the windows—you think sofas, pillows. You've heard that bullets do not pierce soft, woolly stuff but rip through hard surfaces like metal and wood and bones. But you immediately reject this idea as ridiculous because you don't have enough sofas in the house—in fact, just one, on which the two women behind you are seated right now. And besides even if you did have them, that would still entail going near the window.

You know it's not over—that you are in the middle of something; that something worse is sure to follow. You don't know what, but you can already taste its fear.

It tastes like a cold blunt knife in your mouth. It doesn't cut.

Worse is yet to come.

Lie low.

It was not a soft bald sound. It rammed through the window, kicked open the door, and stabbed you between your shoulders. You went down face-first, as if by instinct.

Now your face is resting on the cold floor and you taste the dust you're breathing in through your mouth. Your mind flashes back to the other brush with death you had many years ago. Those last choking moments of consciousness flickering in your head before the gray/white water killed all lights.

You were five steps ahead of your friends, up to your shoulders in water and thinking of turning back, when your left foot skidded and the ground suddenly gave out beneath you and you tumbled forth, face-first into cold, salt-hard water. You kicked—water-in-your-nostrils, water-in-your-eyes, flailing, why-did-I-why-what-happened, your clothes waterlogged, clawing you down, your friends shouting, pulling away from you against the gray/white saline water gouging into your eyes—to stay afloat but a few minutes of tossing and turning, water choked through your nostrils into your brain. You felt bloodlines beneath your shoulders, in your thighs, that hold you up, swell stiff. You couldn't move your arms anymore. Your final effort was a powerful two-legged kick that threw you up an inch and then, down. A swipe of cool sudden gray/white darkness fell around your eyes.

You came to life with your head bouncing against a dirty red watercooler, your body ached, bruised all over. The waves had pulled you far into the sea and it was only luck/fate/God (you haven't decided yet) that had you saved. The two fishermen in vests on the farther end of a broken boat were making tea in a blackened pot on a kerosene-powered stove. They smiled when they saw you, asked you in their dialect, Are you OK, brother? Will you have some tea? Sit, brother. Your head must be hurting. Here, have some hot tea. It's okay. You will be fine. We are cooking some food. Where do you live? We'll be in Keemari by evening. Where do you live, brother? Oh you need to go to bathroom? No special room here for that. Piss on the sea that tried to kill you. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. You want some more tea, brother?

You sat at the edge of the boat and gawked at the great gray sea surrounding you. The air reeked ghastly of fish and kerosene. It was the most alive smell you'd ever smelled—the smell of survival. You threw up.

Your brain short-circuits into that fish-kerosene-smell. You feel the same burning sensation in your neck, the sudden opening of sweaty pores. Yes, you feel that now. The same body-anger at being chosen to die. Once again something inside is protesting: Why you? Why? Why now? You have done nothing to deserve this. You shouldn't have to deal with this.

There is something different though. Now you're sensing death not as a blank mortifying fear of you choking out of breath or your heart seizing up but now it feels more like a fear
for
something outside of yourself. The terror you feel now is of being cut out of something. You desperately wish to see your son and tell him you are fine. You want to hold his hand like the time when he was a ceaselessly crying newborn and you were alone in the hospital room sitting next to his cot feeling a kind of raging joy, an awe, as if you were looking at Life itself, a presence of something divinely
new
, as if you had just begun a life outside yourself, and nothing, not even death, could damage all your dying rotting parts that you felt each day. You listened to your son's crying for a while, waiting for his mother to return, but you couldn't take it after a while. You dipped the edge of a little white plastic spoon in honey and rubbed it against his lips. Sucking on it, he tightened his tiny grip around your little finger.