The person at the other end cuts the call. I look at the small gleaming screen of my phone silently.....
STORY
The person at the other end cuts the call. I look at the small gleaming screen of my phone silently. The sound of Nazri’s ringtone did not come from my phone.
It came from inside the shop.
It is as if the scene is orchestrated by a divine playwright. As soon as the call is cut, I stand up and turn my face slowly to look at Maryam’s tiny blue slipper, lying upside down near the store behind Nazri’s shop, where he keeps all the extra products he intends to sell the next day.
I feel my heart sinking into my belly and then ride a fast, very fast, escalator straight into the dusty ground beneath my feet.
I walk to the shop door I have seen only in passing. It is locked from the outside.
I sit down on my knees, praying her father doesn’t come here yet, and her mother doesn’t stop searching for her in the building. I want no one to be there to see if I am right or wrong.
Taking the pin that holds my buttonhole together from my collar, I straighten it with my teeth and tug at the lock. A common store bought one - six pins. I slide in the pin, praying the idle lessons at lock picking in jail work now.
They do. I feel the sixth click over the pin I have inserted into the object and, sliding the lock out of the bolt silently, I open the door. I step in and close the door. I stand in the darkness of the room for one second before turning on the torch in my phone. I deliberately look around at the walls first, that are stacked high with crates of cola and chips. On the opposite wall is the door that leads from the store into the tuck-shop itself; it is closed.
I turn the torch to the floor. I see the yellow shirt she wore today. Beside it lies the white shalwar, folded meticulously, unlike the shirt, which is thrown on the ground carelessly. Then the torch light illuminates shards of Coca Cola bottles and the drink spilled onto the ground. I move my hand in a slow arc until the light finds her, lying on the floor, with her curly hair stuck to the sweaty face, the blue-green eyes closed. Blood covers her head where he hit her with the glass bottle; it looks oddly faux, like ketchup, in the silvery light emanating from my phone. Every breath escaping her is ragged, as if it has to fight through a thicket of thorns in her chest to come out.
I realize I had stopped breathing.
I do not know how long I stand there, looking at the hurt body of the little girl next door.
I freeze and melt and freeze again under the onslaught of a thousand memories and comparisons and regrets before I walk, almost in a trance, to the door that leads into the tuck-shop. It opens at a slight push and I stand in the doorway, framed in darkness, the smell of blood and cornhusk and free candy and shame swirling up to the steel roof in gusts and waves around me.
I find Nazri, his back to me, in a chair. I am only half aware of what I am about to do when I walk up behind him noiselessly, grab his neck and smash him, headfirst, into the glass counter.
His unresisting body goes limp in a second, the hand thudding to the floor. I drag him off the stool he’s sitting on and push him into the counter.
“Give bibi ji some coffee, Saleem,” the cook had said to me, and I had jumped at the opportunity to see her, perhaps hear her say “thank you, Saleem” to me in that beautiful silver voice. I had walked into her bedroom, glanced swiftly at her resting on the couch wearing a diaphanous dressing gown. Does she always wear this when Sahib isn’t home? I had wondered as I set the coffee before her. Is she always this beautiful? “Saleem,” she had said, and I had realized she hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I entered the room. “Saleem, come sit here beside me.” She had patted the couch.
I trample Nazri’s hands under my heel, my mouth frothing as I spit profanities at him. I feel disembodied, as I watch myself beat the 55 year old tuck-shop owner who gives free candy to children, and I watch myself, white with fear, drawing away from the woman in the black dress who is the wife of my employer, the judge sahib.
“Bibi ji,” I had croaked when she told me what she wanted. “If you don’t, Saleem, I will tell your parents you don’t work well and you don’t want to be jobless again, do you?” “Bibi ji...” I had pleaded as I watched from somewhere near the roof of Nazri’s tuck-shop as the woman slaps the boy and tries to take advantage of his innocence.
The boy’s face is pale with fear and disgust as he looks at me and at the little girl breathing through the thicket of thorns in her chest.
“I’m sorry... I’m sorry!” My legs give way beneath me and I sink down to the dusty floor of Nazri’s shop, sobs racking my body. Tears flow from my eyes after four years. The nails on my face hurt today, and the humiliation and the disgust and the sadness of the fallen idol of my first love becomes a gnawing monster, curling up in my ribcage and biting at my heart with its long, sharp teeth. “Please, please, please!” I realize I’m saying the words out loud and I cannot stop. I remember grabbing the vase, hitting her with it. I remember pulling up my pants and running to the door to find the cook standing there, looking at me with odd satisfaction. “You tried to rape and kill bibi ji and sahib will hear about it.”
I ran straight home that day. My father slapped me when I told him everything. “Why lose another job, you idiot?” His spit landed on my cheek. “What harm could one beautiful woman have done to you, eh?”
To be continued ...
