Chapter Sixty-Seven
I rode back to the Amritsar and climbed the stairs, one at a time, my body heavier than will.
‘You were right, Jaswant,’ I said, as I passed his desk on my way to my room. ‘I need a shower.’
‘I told you so! And there’s no hot water, now, and the whole city is going crazy, so serves you right, baba, and goodnight, sleep tight.’
I sat at my desk, opened my journal, and wrote what I felt and what I’d seen that night. Ash from my hand and arm smudged the pages. My left hand, pressing the journal flat, made fingerprints, perfectly arranged and deeply defined, while my right hand described the scene of the crime.
Black ink flames ran across the pages. Flames reflected in a policeman’s eye, flame reflecting chrome-blue off a wall of bicycles, neon flames from motorcycle exhausts and steel boots, scraping rebel sparks from the righteous roundabout of revenge.
When I couldn’t write any more I took a bottle and hit the shower prison style, with all my clothes on.
I drank some, and washed my dirty clothes, peeling them away one textured leaf at a time, and drank some more, and washed my dirtier body, my skin sour with the scents of fear, and her non-identical twin, violent fear.
They were shot. Killed. Burned. They’re dead.
Clean and dried and naked, I closed the curtains, banning the day to come, locked all my locks, put weapons around the room wherever I thought I might need them, played music on my bad sound system, said a prayer of thanks for my bad sound system, and I paced.
When you do enough time in a cell, you learn to walk, because walking stills the voice inside, calling you to run.
Don’t you dare give up on me.
I walked. I drank some more. The music got louder, or maybe it just sounded louder. I was riding a Bob Marley wave to a brighter shore, and I wanted to look at Karla’s smile, and I realised that I didn’t have a photograph of Karla.
I searched everything I had without success, and decided that a joint might help. The joint found lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know I had, including a friendly cricket that didn’t sing, which I relocated to the balcony, but there was no picture of Karla.
I was getting a little high, and the first thing I wrote in my journal, after the fruitless search, was a question.
Is Karla real?
I wrote a lot of other things. I recited poetry. When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I began, and I got to like him with friends possessed, when someone seemingly possessed started banging on the door.
I went on with my war dance for the dead, and the banging stopped, and the drumming in the music thumped me around the room, and I could write again.
I wrote pages of notes on Nazeer. Departed loved ones never leave the heart, but the living picture of them fades, paled in memory’s river. I wanted to write Nazeer, before I couldn’t. I wanted to write those eyes, so often like the eyes of an animal, a hunting animal, unknowable and capable of anything: those mountain eyes, born in sight of the planet’s peak, that were so seldom lamps inside the cave of his tenderness.
I wrote the humour, hidden in ravines of his grimacing. I wrote the shadow that covered his face in any light, as if the ashen end was stamped on his face from the beginning.
I wrote his hands, those Komodo claws, the dark earth of early labour years branding them for life: Martian canals of lines and wrinkles on his knuckled fingers, some of them as deep as cuts from a knife.
I wrote Tariq. I wrote about the little beads of sweat that broke out on his lip whenever he was pretending to be someone else. I wrote the precision in his movements, as if his life was a tea ceremony that never ended.
And I wrote how handsome he was. There was a handsome man already growing in the awkward boy: a face that would make girls think about him at least twice, and a brave eye that would challenge every man he met.
I tried to write him, to keep him, to save him, and Nazeer, in words that might live.
I wrote until something ran out, or everything ran out, and I reached that place where words stop and thinking stops and there’s only emotion, feeling, a lonely heartbeat sounding through colder depths of the ocean inside, and I slept, dreaming of Karla, pulling me from a house on fire, her kisses burning love on my skin.