Qasiir used a mix of voices — imitation Italian; Arabic, presumably learned from Egyptian films; and Xamari dialect — to answer. A muscular dude, he said, had been wearing the shades; he had acted Hercules-strong and macho. Just to prove the dude wrong, Qasiir had provoked him into a fight, then peeled the shades off his face, threatening to kill him for them if necessary. Jeebleh asked who “the dude” was.
“He had plenty of muscles, but he wasn’t strong.”
Jeebleh recalled being injected with the liquid solution by a man who met this description. At Jeebleh’s prompting, Qasiir explained that it was no use carrying a fancy gun if you were going to chicken out at the last minute, was there? “The dude’s gun was for show, and he didn’t deserve to keep it, so I took it away from him, to help him, you see. Now I have his fancy gun and his shades too.”
Jeebleh felt he was being taken to a territory outside his experience. Not only was Qasiir running rings around him, he, Jeebleh, was becoming more dependent on the young man. Yet he was no more out of kilter than a man walking with his shoelace untied. How much of a change had been wrought on him by living through these experiences? Did it mean — and this was very worrying to him — that Caloosha had won him over to his way of doing things, crudely and cruelly? Jeebleh asked Qasiir how many mourners were at the graveside, and if he could tell him who they were.
“Five or six, maximum.”
“Including the guy with the shades?”
“And two military types.”
“Who else?”
“Two women.”
“One of them his wife?”
“Go see for yourself,” Qasiir said.
He knew then he would want to see for himself!
After a pause, Qasiir said, “It was no big deal.”
“How do you mean?”
“Cool Caloosha no longer cool!”
“Was Af-Laawe there?”
Qasiir was probably being cheeky, or perhaps knew more than he was prepared to let on, because he said, “They’ll be burying him, all right!”
You could’ve beaten Jeebleh down with a single feather from a vulture, when he noticed several perched in the mango tree, restlessly surveying the extent of the cemetery. “Let’s go and see what’s what!” he told Qasiir.
Jeebleh took pride of place in the battlewagon, next to the driver, and acted as though he were the commander of a fighting unit. With the heavy gun mounted on the vehicle, they were mobile, fast, and deadly; he feared no one. It took the battlewagon a few minutes to cover the distance between his mother’s grave and where Caloosha’s was now being dug. It was a sad affair: two miserable-looking military types in dirty fatigues, their bodies unwashed, eyes sore from sleeplessness, their cheeks bulging from the qaat they kept chewing; two women, looking rather like whores paid to mourn; and the muscular man who had injected the solution into his thigh. Jeebleh didn’t give in to the temptation of letting Qasiir and his friends turn “the dude” into inedible mince, something they would gladly have done if he had asked them. Nor would he inquire what had become of Af-Laawe, the muscleman’s paymaster; he assumed that they had fallen out with each other, as all thieves do sooner or later. For all he cared, Af-Laawe might have died at the man’s hands.
From the way the gravediggers took their time, you would’ve thought they were performing a thankless task — as if they knew they wouldn’t be remunerated for their labor. And where was Caloosha’s corpse? Wrapped in a white sheet, it lay close by, still, the freshly dug earth accentuating its sorrowful state. Unburied, his corpse struck Jeebleh as being sequestered in the aloneness of a man whom even hell wouldn’t deign to receive.
Good breeding made Jeebleh say a few words for the martyred dead anyway. And before long, he got back into the battlewagon, ready to return to Seamus and the other labors. He planned ahead to the moment when the sepulcher would be finished, and he would call on Shanta, to prepare for the alla-bari party. He wanted to arrange the purchase of the cow to be slaughtered at the next day’s feast.
ONCE THE TOMB HAD BEEN COMPLETED TO HIS AND SEAMUS’S SATISFACTION, Jeebleh said he wanted to be alone there, to commune with his mother’s troubled spirit. He was not a religious man, nor given to saying his prayers or fasting. But he wished to appease her spirit in the best way he could, by consecrating the tomb with a prayer. He knelt down, and saying a brief prayer, imagined two dark angels with blue eyes ceremoniously arriving to interrogate his mother, newly reburied. Sadly, the old woman was unable to provide the right answers to the angels. They were about to order the ground to close in upon her, when she recovered in time to recite the appropriate responses. Whereupon her grave expanded to seventy times seventy paces in length and seventy times seventy in breadth, and the light in the tomb came on. Approving of her, the angels spoke in unison: “Sleep in peace, then, with Allah’s blessing!”
Jeebleh joined the others, and the battlewagon took them back to Bile’s apartment. He was more pleased with himself and more relaxed than he had felt for a long time. But there was no Shanta in the apartment. Instead, he was pleasantly startled to find Faahiye in the living room. Where were Raasta and Makka? They were in Bile’s room, asleep, where Bile was awake, staring at the ceiling.
MEANWHILE, FAAHIYE WAS PERFORMING A RELIGIOUS RITUAL. HE TUCKED HIS sleeves up past his elbows, washed his hands several times, flung the water with his right hand into his mouth, and rinsed his mouth three times. Then he snuffed the water into his nostrils, only to blow it out soon after by closing his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and snorting. He washed his face three times, then his right hand and arm, and rubbed his wet right hand over the top of his head. He inserted the tips of his forefingers into his ears and turned them around and around, then passed his thumbs upward, behind his ears. He washed his neck with the back of his fingers, and finally, washed his feet up to his ankles, pressing his fingers into the spaces between his toes, one space at a time.
Jeebleh and Seamus watched as Faahiye repeated the ritual of ablution again and again, never failing to recite the appropriate traditions.
“It’s as though he has fed his mind on an insane root, which has taken his reason prisoner,” Seamus whispered.
“As if a little water will clear him of the deed!”
Jeebleh left, intending to call at Shanta’s to make certain that everything was in order for the next day’s alla-bari feast.
EPILOGUE
“But let us go; Cain with his thorns already
is at the border of both hemispheres….
Last night the moon was at its full.”
. . Meanwhile we journeyed.
(CANTO XX)
THAT NIGHT EVERYONE APPEARED TROUBLED AND ANXIOUS, FOR OBVIOUS and not so obvious reasons.
Jeebleh cast his mind back on everything that had happened, perhaps to sort out what memories to take with him to New York. Could this be why he had stashed away the letter the clan elders had left for him? His intention was to frame it, and put it on his office wall. His hand kept going to his thigh, where the muscleman had injected him. He continued to wonder if his contagion of worry would kill him before he had even had his blood tested at home; he was worried less about the barber’s cut, now that it was healing.