One minute later the cooker gave off its first steam whistle — a long, throaty blast. There was probably still plenty of steam bottled up inside. The strong burst of vapor carried spicy, delicious smells throughout the kitchen, smells that made Shobha’s mouth water. But still five more whistles to go.
Just as the second whistle was about to blow, she heard a loud commotion outside. Women and children, screaming and shrieking, the sounds of people running downstairs.
Shobha froze. Something terrible had happened. She first thought of Amar and was seized by fear.
She turned off the burner and started fast for the roof. She thought about what Suri said just after she called after the hawker, Mummy, I want a cap gun, too. My own, in that cold, hard, machine-like voice, eyes red, head trembling, that look of wildness on his face, just like when he took Amar’s tiffin box to eat in the park, and got in a fight with Amar, and if she hadn’t broken it up Suri would have strangled his little brother.
And now if Suri had pushed Amar off the roof?
‘Amar! Amar!’ she shouted, arriving on the roof in bad shape.
Amar clung to the railing as if he were made of stone, sobbing quietly, holding the Chinese cap gun in one hand.
The women still on the roof leaned over the railing and stared down.
Shobha looked. There was a crowd of people gathered around the spot where just moments earlier the hawker had stood with his bike. More people came running from adjacent apartment buildings.
Bimla Sahu, the one who everyone called ‘toughie’ or ‘the wrestler’ since she was big and strong and always picking fights came up behind Shobha, put her hand on her shoulder, and she was in tears.
‘He went up to the railing himself and just jumped. It happened so quickly.’
Her face was covered in tears and she was choking on her sobs. ‘Your eldest committed suicide! You and I said one little thing, and look how he took it to heart.’
***
The women said Amar came back to the roof with his cap gun, and as soon as he fired the first shot, Suri began to have trouble breathing. He grabbed his head with his hands, and tottered over to the edge.
And from there he jumped quietly.
***
On Nigambodh ghat, Chandrakant set fire to his son Suri’s body. After the flames rose and began engulfing the body, I turned away.
An old fakir was sitting a little distance behind us, wrapped up tight under a dirty, old, torn, bed sheet. It had been a cold December, and all of North India was under a cold snap that had already killed a handful of poor people. The old fakir was shivering.
It was the same old fakir Chandrakant and I had met years earlier in the Hazarat Nizammuddin dargah near the shrine to the first Hindi poet, Amir Khusrau, a fakir whose eyes were red like an ant’s, whom the almighty did not bless with the ability to sleep, who carried thirty times its own weight its whole life.
He noticed me staring at him and got up to leave. I saw that his head was proportionally much larger than his body — something he was always trying to hide with that torn old bedsheet. FINALLY AN ASSESSMENT BY THE WHO; A PAGE FROM SURYAKANT’S DIARY; THE PENTAGON
Suri — Suryakant — was born sometime in September, 1995, and died on 25 December, 2004, at 12:04. He was born in a private hospital called Kalpana Health Centre between Model Town and Adarsh Nagar, but determining the exact date is no easy task, because a restaurant, day spa, and massage parlour now stand where the hospital used to be. Nobody has any idea what happened to Kalpana Health Centre. People had of course heard of the big scandal and police raid a couple years ago that had made the TV news after the kidney of an indigent man had been removed and sold.
I couldn’t be sure whether nine months before his birth in that hospital when Suryakant came into his mother’s womb was the time of the magic carpet, the one Chandrakant and Shobha had brought with them to the half flat of house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri, Delhi, after fleeing Sarini, and had put on the floor, and played the game they played for years to put out the fire; or whether it was true that one night he crawled like a turtle out of the dirty drainage sewer and silently entered his mother’s womb that way. And the disease that made his head grow and grow, day by day, the disease the doctors said would give him a life span of two years max, the disease that had no trace in any of the medical literature, the disease Chandrakant and Shobha called ‘Mangosil’ but it was really only Suri who knew about the virus that caused it — it wasn’t the disease that caused his death.
He himself chose when to end his life.
***
Suri’s notebook lies open in front me at page fifty-six. He had copied down some lines of a poem in his beautiful handwriting:
You are still alive, you are not alone yet —
She is still beside you, with her empty hands,
And joy reaches you both across immense places,
Through mists and hunger and flying snow,
Miserable is the man who runs from a dog in his darkness…
And pitiful is the one who holds out his rag of life
To beg mercy of the darkness.
I did the translation in a rush because in front of me are this year’s findings from a World Health Organization report. It contains alarming statistics about millions of children in the developing countries who will fall victim to deadly diseases because of malnutrition, poverty, and squalor.
The report also included startling information about children who have been falling victim to an illness for the past several years that causes the head to grow significantly faster than the rest of the body, causing unnatural behavior. According to doctors, the virus or causes of the disease have yet to be identified, but children who suffer from this disease usually only live to two. According to the WHO, this disease, like AIDS, is spreading rapidly.
But the strangest part of the report came from the Pentagon. A total of sixty seven countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Palestine, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Nicaragua, and Brazil were home to children who had been born with heads that so quickly got bigger.
And they were even being born in wealthy, developed countries like the US, France, and the UK.
The brains of these children knew everything. They weren’t innocent and wide-eyed like most kids.
The brains of these children were several times bigger than normal for their biological age. And several centuries of living memories were present inside these brains — you could call it a mini flash drive with all history up to the present day. Their DNA was eerily alike.
The Pentagon urged all governments of all countries to keep a close eye on these big-headed kids.
This is how they can be identified:
‘They are in squalor to poor families. Their eyes are red like the eyes of ants. They more or less never sleep. And it is possible they know everything.’
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Life was getting better for Uday Prakash when I first met him face-to-face in August, 2005. His ‘Mohandas’ had just been published by the leading Hindi literary magazine Hans, and it was clear that the novella, to steal a phrase from Bollywood, was a superhit. The mobile numbers and postal addresses of Hindi writers are a standard part of back-flap bios in India, just in case readers would like to call and compliment the author on a job well done. And so in the car on the way back from New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport to his home in nearby Ghaziabad, Prakash received call after call and SMS after SMS from happy fans who wanted to tell him how much they’d enjoyed reading the story. He continually pulled the car over to receive felicitations from a local colleague, or a stranger from elsewhere. Things were changing quickly in India, as Prakash often points out in his stories — and one advantage of mass mobile-phone ownership, if nothing else, has been that lonely poets and writers are able to receive at least a little boost now and again from their readers.