Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

She knew then that this was no young Ghaziri on a joyride, but a part of the machine that she had known to be lying in wait.

It was all sand now, everywhere, like the desert in a Khamsin, wrapping her in layers, sifting into her mouth and into her eyes. She was caught in a sandy fog, hardly able to see the road beneath her feet. She could hear screams in the distance, and odd muffled popping sounds. Then she heard the helicopter again, and in terror she ran blindly along the edge of the road. She heard it swooping low over her and she threw herself over the side and rolled to the bottom of the embankment. As she rose unsteadily to her feet again, she felt an odd stickiness on her eyelids. She drew a hand across her face and it came away covered in blood. She screamed, but the sound was lost, for there were shouts and screams everywhere now, shrilling eerily out of the gritty, golden cloud. Faintly she caught a whiff of tear gas.

Sobbing with fear, she pulled the scarf off her head and wrapped it over her face, covering her nose and leaving only a slit for her eyes. She tried to run but fell and struck her head against the embankment. She struggled up and tried to run again, in the other direction, but she could see no more than a few feet ahead; and suddenly, horror-struck, she realized that she was running towards the screams. She stopped in utter, terrified confusion, and then somewhere close by she heard a shout. She looked up and saw two figures tumble off the road and come rolling down towards her, screaming. A moment later another figure came crashing down after them.

When he was almost upon her, she recognized Abu Fahl. He collapsed in a heap hardly a foot away from her and lay there whimpering in shock, blood pouring from a gash in his head. A little way behind him lay Alu and Zaghloul, clinging to the sand in blank terror.

Suddenly Zindi’s head was clear again. She pulled Abu Fahl’s arm and shouted — Get up, get up — but he lay as he was, inert on the sand. She shook him and then drew her hand back and slapped him hard across his face. His head snapped back, and then slowly recognition filtered into his eyes. She pulled him to his feet and screamed into his ear: What about the others, all the rest, Samuel, Karthamma, Chunni, Hajj Fahmy?

He could only shake his head stupidly. She turned him round and pushed him towards Zaghloul and Alu. Take them with you, she shouted, pointing towards the inlet, and run in that direction. Hurry, we can still get away; they haven’t seen us yet and there aren’t any of them on this side of the embankment. They were all on the other side so that we wouldn’t see the ambush.

She pushed him again — Run — but he clung helplessly to her arm: And you?

I’m coming, she said. But, first, I’ve got to see if there are any others. She gave him a shove, and this time he stumbled away; and, pulling up her skirts, she scrambled up the side of the embankment.

The tear gas clawed at her nose and eyes as soon as her head was level with the road. For a moment she was blinded. Then, very hazily, through a golden-grey glow, she saw a line of helmeted black-uniforms with riot-shields and batons, charging the milling crowd on the road. She saw Hajj Fahmy prone, screaming under a baton; she saw Professor Samuel and Rakesh being dragged off the road by their feet, and then she couldn’t see any more for her eyes were smarting like a salted wound. Blindly she pushed herself back towards the edge of the embankment, and just as she was about to slip down again she heard a familiar shriek across the road.

She fought her eyes open, scraping at them with her nails, and darted across. It was Chunni, kneeling on the ground, tearing at her hair and screaming hysterically, as though she wanted to rip her lungs apart. Zindi crouched low and clutched at Chunni’s hand. She caught a bleary glimpse of Karthamma lying beside Chunni and she snatched at her hand, too, and pulled, crying: Come on, quick. But Chunni slapped her hand away, and before Zindi could stop her she had struggled to her feet and wandered off, screaming, straight towards the black-uniforms. Then Karthamma’s head rolled limply to one side and Zindi screamed, too, for she saw that Karthamma was dead; that she had fallen on a pickaxe, and that the end of the axe had passed through her back and emerged bloodily from her navel.

Heaving the body away, Zindi turned and threw herself across the road and down the embankment. She rolled to the bottom, her skirts ripped to shreds and splashed with blood. When she managed to push herself up again, she saw three figures, nothing more than shadows, vanishing into the haze. She ran after them and caught up; and together, shielded by the darkness, they hurried towards the inlet and the waiting motor-launch.

And, though she was weeping herself, she comforted them and helped them and she put her arms around their shoulders and held them up, for they stumbled often on that torn beach: it was not long since that the black-uniforms had driven their jeeps across the same sand, leaving it furrowed and sown with salt.

And so it happened one day that Dr Uma Verma came upon an odd little group in a roadside café while she was walking down the sand-blown, dusty length of the Avenue Mohamed Khemisti in the little town of El Oued on the north-eastern edge of the Algerian Sahara.

She was on her way to visit a Berber patient of hers, an elderly Acheche woman who had promised her half a dozen eggs from her own chickens. She was walking very briskly; not because she was in a hurry — her patient had assured her, smiling till the tattoos on her face disappeared into her wrinkles, that there would always be eggs in her house for the ‘Indian doctor’ — but partly because that was how she always did everything. That was one of the first lessons her father had taught her. Often, before he set off for school in the morning, the old man would say to her: If you’re going to do anything, do it as though you meant to finish it, and finish it well besides. That’s what went wrong with this country — nobody ever thought anything worth finishing. Look at those Rajput kings and all those Mughals who sat around in Delhi and began things — just began … She could see him now, old Hem Narain Mathur, masterji , his bespectacled eyes bright in the gaunt hollow of his face, smiling, sucking his teeth, standing as though for a photograph beside the most treasured of his few possessions, his first bookcase — a few old nailed-together planks of wood which he had clung to somehow through all his years of wandering — three shelves which held all the most beloved books of his college years, the very bookcase which now haunted a corner of her drawing-room in El Oued like some patient, dusty ghost waiting for who knew what? And she could see herself watching him, stiff and starched in her school uniform and oiled braid, hurrying him out of the house — It’s time to go now, Ba — out into the almost-Himalayan cool of the Dehra Dun morning; walking hand-in-hand through their gullie, past the Clock Tower, listening to his frayed old cotton shirt and white trousers swishing briskly beside her, trying to keep up with him and wondering why it was that he who walked so briskly and talked so often of finishing — not just beginning — had never finished anything himself.

But there he was, in front of his bookcase again, smiling. She could see his smile clearer than ever now; and today, with the smell of failure already bitter in her nostrils, it stung, for she could see that it was at her that he was smiling, even though his smile was not mocking but melancholy.