Indra Sinha - Animal's People

“What? Why?”

“I have to show you something.”

“What?”

“Well, not show, exactly,” says I trying to think of something she might believe. “Zafar wants us to do this errand.”

“What errand?” she demands, twisting her brows.

“He needs socks.”

“Socks? Are you mad?”

“He is worried about his feet swelling, so he needs us to buy some socks.”

She eyes me as if I have gone crazy. “Then we’ll go later.”

I give Zafar a shrug which he’s received with a look of resignation.

“Okay, then I guess it’s time to tell you all.” He waves at the water bottles stored at the back of the tent. “We won’t need these. There’s little time, we must put the maximum pressure, we’ve decided to fast without water.”

“No!” Nisha’s on her knees beside Zafar, she has her arms around him and she’s saying, “No! You will not do this.”

He catches her hands, whispers something in her ear and suddenly she wilts. So strange, to see this. It’s she who’s the tough one, who keeps him strong when he suffers that black despair, but now she’s on her knees, begging, and not one of us knows what to do.

Zafar says, “We have to do it this way because there’s no time.”

Among the friends and well-wishers there’s silence, then Elli voices what all are thinking. “Zafar, in this heat, it’s suicide. Without water you’ll last maybe three days.”

“Five days is all we need,” says Saint Zafar.

“I beg you,” she says, “don’t do this.”

Oh, Betrayess, what hypocrisy! What do you care what happens to him? I should speak up right here and now and tell all these people the truth about you and that Amrikan lawyer. I keep silent. For two days I’ve been struggling with my conscience, can’t decide what to do. If such selfishness you find hard to understand, consider if you were four-foot and had a chance to be human? With Elli gone, so’s my chance, but right now this same two-timing Elli looks like she’s about to start blubbering, mouth’s twisted, too close eyes flutter like moths’ wings. She says, “Zafar, please give me a chance,” which is weird, like she herself can somehow solve his problem.

It’s Nisha who recovers a flash of her old self. “You stupid man,” she says. “Do you want to die?” With that she’s walked out of the tent, leaving us who are to keep the hunger strikers company.

Welcome to the hell hole. The sun on that first day of the fast is like the mouth of a furnace, pouring molten misery onto the city. The heat of the Nautapa is paralysing. By noon it’s 114 degrees. Everywhere there are only two topics of conversation. One is the heat, the second is the hunger strike. At five in the afternoon, Elli returns to check on the hunger strikers. After only a few hours their eyes are like sandpaper, blinking for moisture that has already fled their bodies.

No reasoning there’s with Zafar, sits cross-legged and reads papers brought to him, peers over the tops of his specs when he talks to people, makes calls on a mobile, carrying on his daily work.

“You’re so thirsty now that you don’t notice hunger,” Elli tells the four, “but soon you may lose all feelings of hunger and even thirst. This is not a good thing.” She tells them what she knows about hunger strikes, the slow wasting of the body. “In Ireland prisoners lasted sixty days on water before they died, but blindness plus other irreversible damage occurred long before that point. Fasts by Turkish prisoners confirmed these grim statistics. These were with water. There’s hardly any data on fasting without water, but in this extreme heat, the body will dry out and begin its collapse within two or three days.” Again and again Elli tries to make the four see how suicidal is their decision. “You’re now in the same situation as people who get lost in a desert without food or water, except that you’ve put yourself there, you are making your own desert.”

“What is Khaufpur but a desert?” replies one of the women, someone says “wah wah.” All inside the tent nod. I can see Elli’s expression, I know what’s in her mind, which is that they’ll soon learn how hard it is to survive on rhetoric. Despite living among us and speaking our language, she knows next to nothing about us Khaufpuris.

Everyone in Khaufpur is talking about Zafar. What a hero, bloody. It’s not as if he was unknown before, but now every bugger is his best friend. Zafar bhai, who gives everything for the poor. This old cry now has a new ring because if someone doesn’t stop him the mad bastard is going to give his life. Farouq, Devika and Bluemoon are new saints and their pictures are pasted on walls all over the city alongside Zafar’s. Four martyrs in the making.

Suddenly every fucker’s an expert at fasting. Well, many are of course, though not by choice. “It’s the moon’s full,” says Ramprasad the fruit seller. “It pulls fluid up to the brain and disturbs the thoughts. That’s why people go mad. The best way to deal with the moon is to fast without water. See this lessens the fluid in the whole body and the liquid from the brain flows down into the body, thus the maddening effect of the moon is removed.”

“Poor cretin, you know nothing.”

“What, Animal? Are you an expert in medicine?”

I am not but it’s time to reveal an unexpected and appalling discovery, which is that I seem to be infected with this disease called conscience. Seeing Nisha’s misery I find that I am not keen for Zafar to perish, plus I hate to admit it, there is a part of me that admires the git. He’s always been kind to me and the place would just not be the same without him.

Zafar’s three days into the fast and Elli betrayess keeps on saying that if he doesn’t stop soon he will die. His body has started to devour itself and the blood is thumping in his head. He is having severe attacks of cramp, which Faqri says might be after-effects of datura. Since yesterday these have been fading which means that Faqri is probably right. Farouq is turning out to be a tough one, “Today better than yesterday” he tells me with a grin when I go to see them, his lips are cracked and his breathing is like wind in a thorn tree. He and the other hunger strikers are telling each other jokes and indulging in the old Khaufpuri pastime of abuse. A crowd of Khaufpuris is with them singing Hillélé and suchlike and keeping up their spirits with jokes. It’s Friday, fourth day of Nautapa, 120 degrees. In the afternoon Devika, the one from the Nutcracker, collapses and is rushed to the big hospital. The Blue Moon woman is persuaded by her family to stop. Zafar and Farouq carry on. They are exhausted and by the end of that afternoon both are asleep. Nisha, who is afraid and agitated, takes her chance. While these two are sleeping she brings a wet cloth and wipes their faces, then lets a few drops of water fall on their lips. What Farouq did, I do not know, but Zafar wakes immediately. He’s very angry, he’s opened his mouth to shout at Nisha, but only a kind of croaking comes out. What does she think she is doing? Nisha, near to tears, replies that he and Farouq should end their ordeal.

“You are behaving like a child,” he says. His lips are so cracked, his tongue is swollen up in his mouth. He sounds like he’s been drinking daru, looks that way too, red eyed and hair standing on end. Even his glasses are dusty and he no longer has the will to wipe them on his shirt like he usually does. No longer is he reading papers. “What has happened to you?” he demands of Nisha. “They used to joke that Zafar’s backbone was named Nisha. Now this?”

“I am strong,” says she, “and with all my strength I am begging you, give this up. You can’t fight if you are dead.”