Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Isma’il smiled happily and his blue-grey eyes shone as he went around the room shaking hands. I was with Abu Fahl and Rakesh, he said. We went to the Star.

Then Rakesh and Abu Fahl came into the room, their clothes ragged and dishevelled, their faces ghostly, pale with dust. They sank into a corner, and Abu Fahl ran his glazed eyes over the room. Everyone was leaning forward, staring intently at the two men.

What happened? Hajj Fahmy asked.

Abu Fahl mumbled: Wait. Some tea first. His head dropped and he ran his hands over his face. Suddenly he hugged himself and shuddered. As though in response, an involuntary shiver rippled around the room. Abu Fahl smiled.

Soon after we left the house, Abu Fahl said, we met Isma’il. He followed us, asking question after question — What’s happened to Alu? Where are you going? We answered him, but at the embankment I waved him away and told him to go home or his mother would worry. Yet when we were halfway down the Corniche he was still behind us. I shouted and showed him my fist. He stopped then, and we went on.

We must have been walking faster than we knew, for we turned a bend and there was the Star, before us. It was only an outline, black against the purple sky. I stopped Rakesh and went ahead alone, trying to keep to the shadows of the rocks beside the road. There were no policemen, not one.

When Rakesh came up beside me he stopped and stared, as I was staring. It looks bigger than it did, he said to me, and I saw him shiver a little. So I said loudly: Things change when you see them from different places. And sometimes the light plays tricks.

It was twilight, the last red light before darkness, and even your own face looks different then. But still it was a strange thing, for the Star did look bigger, much bigger. Those concrete pillars and steel girders reached above us like eucalyptus trees; we could hardly see where they ended. There seemed to be no end to the rubble and the wreckage. It towered above us. It was like the pyramids at Giza; small mountains with jagged edges and dust blowing into spirals off the sides. We heard the muezzins calling, somewhere far away in the city, but then the crashing of the waves killed the cry and we were as alone as two men on a rock in the sea.

I said to myself as we walked closer: Why, we were working here only yesterday, and when we’re closer it’ll seem all right. But even when we were standing at the foot of the first slope of rubble it seemed no smaller. And then we heard it whining, eerily, in a strange whistle. It rose and died away and rose again, blowing straight out of the centre of the ruins.

I caught Rakesh by the hand, for I know what he is. And if I’d left it a moment later, for all that it was he who took me there, I know he’d have turned and bolted like a rabbit, for the hairs were standing all along his arm. So to give him strength I shouted: It’s only the wind whistling. Come on, be a man. At that he took heart, and even tried to smile.

But that smile never stretched very far, for the very next moment there was a flash of white beside him as someone pushed past him and sprang on to the rubble. Rakesh had turned to stone, his mouth open, as he gazed at that figure, waving at us. I shook him hard and shouted into his ear until he heard: It’s only Isma’il. He must have followed us. Nothing to worry about.

So we went on again, following Isma’il. Right before us was a gentle slope of rubble, about ten feet high. We climbed it, but very slowly, for there was broken glass and bits of torn steel, like razor blades, lying everywhere.

At the top it was I who lost heart, for everywhere, all around us, as far as we could see, there were hills of shattered concrete. The slopes and tips were just visible in the last light, and the black darkness was climbing fast. Isma’il had disappeared.

I could see no sign of him, so I gave up looking and hit my head with my hands. There was a lavatory bowl behind me, protruding through the rubble; a very beautiful thing, gleaming new, painted all over with flowers. I sat down on it, for I saw no hope in going on. Rakesh sat down, too, leaning against a slab of wall. I said to him: Let’s go back. We’ll never find him. There could be a fleet of trucks in here and we wouldn’t see it for days.

Then it was Rakesh who gave me courage. A little before the Star collapsed Rakesh and some of the others were working with Alu in the basement, directly in the centre of the building. That part of the building was, in a way, hollow, for above it there was only an empty space topped by a glass dome. That space was a five-storey greenhouse, for inside it thousands of plants grew in pots hanging on chains. The contractor said that people would flock to the Star simply to marvel at the hanging plants. Because that part was hollow, when the Star fell and its five pointed arms became towering mounds of rubble, its centre settled into a low valley. Rakesh had been there soon after the collapse. So at that moment, when I had lost hope and wanted to turn back, he pointed to a distant dip in the rubble and said: That’s where we have to go, I think, though it’s difficult to tell in the darkness.

Like the eager boy that he is, he jumped to his feet and, clear as the light of day, he saw and I saw a dark shape springing up with him, inches from his face. Rakesh would have screamed or shouted if he could, but all he could do was fall sideways, gasping for breath, his eyes starting from his head.

Even before he was down, a chunk of rubble was in my hand, and I threw it with all my strength.

It was just a mirror, but Rakesh was still holding his throat, sobbing and gasping, when it shattered and the glass fell at his feet.

Maybe when the Star still stood that place was a great gilded bathroom, hanging high in the sky, looking out to sea.

When Rakesh had stopped trembling I took my torch from my pocket and we went on. What a journey it was; Sitt Zeynab grant that I never have to do anything like that again. Every yard seemed to take hours. We had to slide our feet forward, picking our way through the glass and steel. Sometimes the rubble would slide away from under our feet. Our legs and feet were cut open so often there must be a trail of blood across those ruins. And again at times the wind would whine within the ruins and rise to a howl, and we would have to stand and wait for it to die away again. All around us shadows leapt behind the light of my torch, flickering this way and that. But of Isma’il there was not the slightest trace.

At last we reached the edges of the mound and the valley was before us. It was like the handiwork of a madman — immense steel girders leaning crazily, whole sections of the glass dome scattered about like eggshells, and all over, everywhere, thousands of decaying plants.

Still, we sighed with relief when we saw that valley at last.

I turned sideways and began edging down the slope, towards the valley. Rakesh was close behind me. Halfway down, my foot caught on something in the rubble. I heard glass cracking, and a moment before it rolled away I saw a television set. As it fell, the rubble began to slide with it, more and more of it, until it was a landslide. We would have been at the bottom of it if Rakesh had not managed to hold on to a girder that was still upright. I caught his leg and somehow we managed to keep ourselves safe as the rubble fell past us.

When the dust and the wreckage settled we heard a noise. It was a voice of some kind — of that there could be no doubt — muffled but steady, somewhere under the rubble. He’s there, Rakesh shouted. He slithered and stumbled down the slope to the spot and began to dig with his hands. Wait, we’re coming! he shouted, but the voice underneath carried on without a break.

We cleared away the rubble until we reached an opening. At once I reached down, for I knew what it was. I found it, groping about, and gave it to Rakesh. It was a transistor. The falling rubble must have switched it on somehow.