Heads turned back and forth, eyes focused now on Jeebleh, now on the epileptic. Two possible scenarios came to Jeebleh’s mind, in instantaneous reconfiguration. In one, the crowd turned into a mob. In the other, he was taking part in a TV game show in which the contestants pressed buzzers when they were ready to answer.
GapTooth asked, “If you’re not a doctor and you’re not sarong-wearing, and you do not suffer from epilepsy, then who are you?”
Trusting his instinct, he replied, “I am a guest.”
“Of the epileptic?” asked GapTooth.
“No, I am Bile’s guest!”
“Bile, the doctor?”
“That’s right.”
“Have Raasta and Makka been found, then?” GapTooth said.
“Who are they talking about?” someone called out from the fringes of the crowd. “What manner of name is Raasta? It is not Muslim, not even Somali.”
“Have you not heard of the Protected One?” someone next to him said.
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” the man said.
Before Jeebleh could speak, another man stepped forward. “The trouser-wearing stranger in our midst is new to the city, as you can obviously see. But at least he is no enemy and no threat to us, if he is Bile’s guest. And I am sure most of you have heard of the Protected One, Bile’s niece, and the Simple One, both missing for a while now. Unless you do not listen to the BBC Somali Service?”
Another man admitted to not having heard of Raasta.
“A pity you haven’t had the luck to meet either the Protected One or the Simple One,” GapTooth said rather theatrically. Jeebleh couldn’t tell whether some of them were teasing one another, as friends do. They could’ve been actors manqué, for all he knew, performing an impromptu play, staged for the benefit of anyone who happened to be passing.
With his hand extended to Jeebleh, GapTooth said, “Please remember me to the kind doctor when you see him next. And I hope, for our sake, that we find Raasta healthy and unharmed.”
“What’s your name, so I can give it to Bile?”
“Alas, I have no name by which I wish to be known in these terrible times,” GapTooth said, “nor do I answer to my old name, because of the associations it has for me nowadays. Possibly, the good doctor would know who I was if I resorted to my former name, but I would rather wait until peace has come to stay.”
“I understand,” Jeebleh said, even if he didn’t.
At the mention of Bile’s name, the crowd had begun to relax, and so had Jeebleh. But he reminded himself that it was when you dropped your guard that someone could hurt you. He imagined panic descending on him in the unlikely form of a faint heart, his own. Then he felt ill at ease, and began perspiring, until the sweat soaked through his shirt, and his back became too wet for comfort. He kept his panic under check, even though he was short of breath and nervous. Finally he plucked up enough courage and then knelt to check on the epileptic. A man with a front-row view of the spectacle asked if there was nothing he could do for the poor man.
BaldMan asserted, “If I haven’t said it before: We do not bother with people we do not know!”
“But he’s a human being just like you and me!” Jeebleh shouted, whirling to his feet. “He needs to be taken to a hospital. Why do you need to know his clan family before you help him? What’s wrong with you? You make me sick, all of you! Out of my way, please.”
The crowd stepped back fast, clearing a large circle around Jeebleh and the unconscious man, only to close in shortly, gawking. The hungry dog, which no one had bothered to shoo away, stood nearby, waiting and watching. As Jeebleh glared at them, he assumed that many in the crowd thought he had suddenly gone mad, and might harm them. In the quiet that followed, as they gathered around him in the attitude of spectators assembling for the timeless pleasure of it, he knelt down again.
It seemed that the epileptic had started to undress before losing his consciousness and falling. His hands a little unsteady, Jeebleh rearranged the man’s sarong as well as the circumstances would permit, and straightened his legs. But he had no idea what to do next. So he took the man’s head in his hands, believing that this would help release the pressure of his teeth on his tongue.
The crowd came closer, their expressions changing from barefaced indifference to total concern. When the epileptic stirred in an agitated way, the spectators, thrown into a mix of fear, shock, and relief, fell back, some invoking several of Allah’s designations, others remaining silent with the panic overwhelming their hearts. Jeebleh, oblivious of their doings, tugged at the epileptic’s limbs one at a time, until the sick man responded with a tremor, like the fury of a madman unchaining himself. The epileptic shook so violently that Jeebleh had difficulty holding him on the ground.
It was in this moment of despondency that Jeebleh heard first the voice of a woman and then a car door being opened and closed. Was he conjuring things, imagining the words “Let go, let go”? When he looked up and found his eyes boring into Bile’s, he relaxed his grip. Finally he let go, happy to leave the epileptic in the capably professional hands of Bile, who would know what to do.
Now he sensed Shanta’s discreet, caring presence. She was saying to him, in the voice of a parent to a frightened child, “Come with me, then.”
Taking a moment to look at her, he was surprised by her unimposing beauty, diminished as it was by her overall expression, which was suggestive of mourning. She was tactful despite the awkwardness of their encounter. It wasn’t lost on him that someone always came to his assistance whenever he committed himself to a clumsy act. Now it was Bile and Shanta’s turn to help deal with the problem. He felt like a mischievous child who kept getting into trouble. Perhaps the time would come when he would run out of people to offer him a lifeline.
“Tell me everything!” Shanta said. But she didn’t even listen. Instead, she led him by the hand, away from where the epileptic had collapsed.
That the hungry dog was gone was a relief to him.
THEY HAD WALKED SCARCELY TWENTY METERS WHEN HIS SENSES AWOKE TO the pervasive smell of excrement and the rotten odor of waste. Shanta’s questions helped take his mind off the overwhelming smell. “Tell me about the dog!” she said.
“Which dog?”
She linked her arm to his and kept pace with his slow gait. “Tell me about the dog and the cruel boy in fancy clothes.”
He told it to her in a short form.
She said, “Has it occurred to you that you cannot be good in a conscientious way in a city in which people are wicked and murderous through and through?”
He let that pass without comment.
“Now tell me about the elders!”
Again, he gave her an abbreviated version.
She said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“What have I done?”
She wondered aloud whether he realized that he was rubbing pepper and salt on the communal wound, reminding them of their human failures. She pointed out that the source of his problem was fundamentally this: He always occupied the moral high ground. She added, “Because of this, you had to be humbled.”
He was having difficulty breathing, not because the smells were new to him — they weren’t — but because they had become even more overpowering. People living in such vile conditions were bound to lose touch with their own humanity, he thought; you couldn’t expect an iota of human kindness from a community coexisting daily with so much putrefaction. Maybe this was why people were so cruel to one another, why they showed little or no kindness to one another, and why they were blind to the needs of a bitch in labor or an epileptic in a convulsive seizure.