THE TEA SUCCEEDED IN FLUSHING out the bitterness from my mouth. From which fantastical world had Chacha Khidr procured this peculiar tea at such a tender hour? I was now totally psyched about the big data recall, the one Pir had called a high-speed connection for my brain.
How would it feel to remember the long-forgotten text whose every word had once been a jealously guarded treasure in the innermost recesses of my mind?
Pir leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table, holding a cigarette between his fingers. His dark eyes probed mine, searching for what I could not guess.
‘Chacha Khidr is the real master of Pul Siraat,’ Pir said, blowing smoke in the air. ‘He’s been travelling back and forth across the abyss his entire life—that’s all he does.’
‘Then who are you?’
‘I’m his deputy,’ he replied without further elaboration.
I felt like he was pulling my leg.
‘Is Chacha a jinn?’ I asked.
‘No one knows what he is, except that he’s skillful and the best guide there is.’
‘Is he the real Khidr?’
‘Maybe you should ask him that question,’ Pir said, shaking his head and smiling.
‘And Tarzan?’
‘Oh, he’s all too human of course. He was just a baby when a jinn found him lying on Mall Road in front of the Governor’s House. For one so small, he was crying and throwing his legs in the air, raising one hell of a fuss. He’s human all right, but he was raised by jinns. He’s got their fingerprints all over him,’ he said, grinning.
‘Ah, like the Tarzan raised by a family of baboons?’ I asked.
‘Exactly.’
‘Are you a jinn too?’ I asked pointedly.
‘I’m a hybrid,’ Pir laughed, looking at me with an amused expression.
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked, trying to remember if I had ever heard of jinns impregnating humans, or vice versa.
‘You won’t understand even if I explained it—not until you’ve got the necessary experience under your belt,’ Pir said.
‘Necessary experience?’ I asked, feeling strangely relaxed, lucid even. I had to admit that I hadn’t felt this good in a long time. All I knew was that, whatever this ‘necessary experience’ was, I wanted in.
‘Necessary experience is only attained through what we call Direct Perception,’ he explained.
‘And Direct Perception is?’ I prodded.
‘If you take a ride across the abyss yourself, your experience of Pul Siraat will be direct, immediate and unmistakable. And it’ll save us both from a lot of the basic questions.’
‘Ride? I always imagined Pul Siraat to be some kind of wire that a believer walked on with his bare feet,’ I said. ‘How do you ride it?’
‘On a bicycle. How else?’
‘That’s insane!’
‘It was Chacha’s idea. For my part, I was perfectly happy teaching traditional tightrope to the select few,’ Pir said.
‘How wide is the abyss?’ I asked eagerly. My curiosity was racing and I could barely keep up with my own thoughts. ‘I mean, how long is Pul Siraat? It’s a physical thing and not just your imagination?’
‘Now listen,’ Pir said, impatiently. ‘The Abyss, and the way over it, changes according to the intention and capacity of the believer.’
I realized he hadn’t blinked in several minutes. His eyes looked like two bright mirrors suspended in the dark in front of my face. Was Pir trying to hypnotize me? If so, should I resist or surrender to the power of his gaze?
‘What if you’re not a believer?’ I asked, finding it hard to break eye contact.
‘Belief is the crutch for the blind,’ he said. ‘I think you should avail yourself of the opportunity and go see with your own eyes. Go for the ride.’ He looked dead serious which made me very uneasy.
‘Maybe another time. Wali, my driver, is waiting for me in the car. He must be wondering where the hell I am.’
‘That’s what drivers are for, Ismael. They wait.’
I felt lightheaded thinking about crossing over some mythical abyss, traversing the fabled wire stretched over a pit of fire, on a bicycle!
‘But don’t you have to be dead to experience everything we’re talking about?’ I asked.
‘Yes, typically. But there are shortcuts for everything, my dear Ismael,’ he said, straightening his back. ‘And certain people know all of them.’
‘Certain people like Chacha?’ I ventured, sensing some understanding of things in the belly of my mind.
‘Fear has remained your greatest enemy, Ismael—a trip to Hell will be really helpful in your case,’ he said, slipping a hand into his pocket and drawing out three glass vials the length of my little finger.
He raised them to the light and I could see each vial was filled with a transparent liquid—one red, one yellow and the third one green. He laid them on the table.
‘What are those for?’ I asked, eyeing the delicate little receptacles.
‘This is the shortcut,’ he said.
‘The shortcut?’
‘Crossing the abyss is an extremely dangerous affair,’ he explained. ‘It requires years of discipline and training before you can even think of putting the first foot on the wire. The elixir in these vials contains a formula designed to reduce that time to a matter of minutes.’
Pir seemed almost ruthless in pushing his concoctions on me so quickly. After all, he had only met me less than an hour ago. In comparison to the shamans running sacred ceremonies in the yoga centres of New York City, Pir seemed to be operating on a whole new dimension. The man was clearly a master, but of what though I wasn’t quite sure.
I touched the vials with my fingertips, rolling them on the table in front of me. After all the marvels I had already witnessed and consumed in this place, I could only wonder about the secret chemistry contained in these three vials.
‘You must choose one,’ Pir said.
I picked them up and held them to the light of the candle, shaking them gently. They reminded me of a traffic light. Was I standing at the crossroads of life and death? Or on some threshold far more crucial to my existence than even that?
‘What are the chances that I won’t make it back?’ I asked, searching Pir’s large fiery eyes for reassurance but finding none.
‘There’s no guarantee of anything in life.’
‘I meant probability. High? Medium?’ I said trying to steady my voice. Pir just sat there.
‘Low?’ I whispered. He just shrugged.
‘Low to medium, maybe,’ he admitted, stroking his beard, his large bright eyes staring at me like those of a sphinx.
The vials were of pharmaceutical grade with tapered necks for easy snapping. I stared at them, massaging my lip with my finger. Red could be too hot to handle while green could be too weak for someone like me. I smiled inwardly, like some psychedelic Alice in Wonderland.
‘Since I’ve got to choose one, I’ll take yellow.’
‘Good choice,’ Pir said.
Keeping the yellow vial in my hand, I put the other two back on the table. As I rolled the vial around between my fingers, stalling as much as possible, I heard a faint drumbeat in the distance. It grew louder as if some spectral drummer marched through the unseen toward us.
‘In life, Ismael, timing is everything,’ Pir said, standing up and walking over to the entrance of the room. He stood there for a moment and motioned for someone to enter. The drummer picked up his tempo as he entered the room. His drum was the size of an oil barrel and hung from his neck by an old leather belt, its weight resting against his thighs. Pir came and sat back down at the table.
‘For the elixir to work, the crusted matter that’s deposited on one’s soul must first be polished until clean.’
Before I could open my mouth to ask another question, the cadenced drumming rose to a deafening volume that reverberated deep in my chest. For a moment I thought I had heard this drumming before. But where?
The drummer had long black and henna-stained dreadlocks which hung to his waist. He reminded me of a chunkier Bob Marley. Trailing behind him were the jinn boys holding their torches. The room swam with dancing red and gold light and the walls came alive with shadows moving in time with the drum’s rhythms.
The drummer marched over to us, beating his dhol with such ferocity that his drumsticks blurred and all but disappeared. I grabbed the edge of the table to steady myself against the cacophonous vibrations which shook my eardrums. Pir raised his hand in the air and the man stopped immediately. In the absolute silence that descended upon us, I could actually hear the crackling of the boys’ torches.
‘Ismael, it’s time to break the vial,’ Pir said, sliding back into his chair. ‘And give me your watch.’
‘Why do you want my watch?’ I asked, reluctantly sliding it off my wrist and handing it over. I noticed it was half past one. We had started from Shadmaan around one. It had taken about twenty to twenty-five minutes to get to Shah Jamal. Was it possible that I had spent only a few minutes in Pir’s company?
‘Time will only complicate things for you,’ Pir said, dropping my watch into his pocket, reading my mind once again.
I took a deep breath and tried to empty my mind of the doubts that had plagued me since Pir showed me the vials. I hoped I had made the right choice.
But one thing was certain: there was no point in trying to figure out where this whole thing was headed. I just had to trust him. So I held the little vial in my fingers, feeling the cool smooth surface. Then I snapped the neck and poured the yellow liquid onto my tongue. I had expected an unpleasant taste—like that of Ayahuasca—but the elixir was completely tasteless. It evaporated from my tongue, leaving a peculiar but not unpleasant dryness.
And that was it. The shamans had a long way to go in improving the taste of their jungle concoction. The contents of Pir’s vial were smooth and delicate.
Then I glanced up and saw the drummer beginning to move his body, whirling slowly at first and then gaining speed. His dreadlocks whipped back and forth like a dense black cloud as he began to pound the drum again. My body rocked involuntarily as the rhythm of the drummer washed over us. I resisted the urge to get up and whirl around with the drummer like he was my dance partner from Hell. The man was a gaping vortex of pure, raw energy. I closed my eyes and allowed the wave of sound to sweep me over the edge.
Just twenty-four hours ago I was in Manhattan, a place that might as well have existed in another time, another dimension, for all I cared. I almost couldn’t remember the man named Ismael who had lived there once.
A long time passed. I couldn’t even say how long, but it was enough for me to have forgotten all about time and to become utterly absorbed in the moment. The man ceased his drumming. He stood motionless, his sticks resting on the drum. Sweat poured down his face and he was heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. Pir raised his hand again and the man bowed and slowly walked out of the room, followed by the jinn boys and their bobbing torches.
I heard someone moving around behind me and turned to see Chacha Khidr again, standing next to his bicycle, his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were as bright as ever and like before, they were locked onto mine with a disquieting twinkle. He seemed to have materialized out of thin air. I had no idea how he had even entered the room.
‘Ah!’ Pir said, waving at the old man like he had been gone for centuries instead of just a few minutes. ‘It looks like your ride’s here, Ismael. You may now request Chacha to escort you across the abyss.’
Before I could reply, Chacha said, ‘I hope Babu Ismael won’t mind holding my sack as we cross over.’
Clutching a burlap sack stuffed with human body parts and sitting on the back of a cycle behind this crazy old man who probably wasn’t even a man was not my idea of the best way to cross any abyss. Fortunately, my unbridled passion for adventure wiped out all trace of disgust, misgivings and bewilderment still lurking in me. ‘Not a problem!’ I said with unbridled enthusiasm.
‘Excellent!’ Chacha said. ‘There’s no turning back now anyway, Babu.’
‘Chacha, don’t worry about me. I’m not turning back; not now, not ever,’ I assured him.
I got up from my chair feeling a delicious tingling vibration coursing through my body. It felt like somebody had struck me like a tuning fork. I was as light as a balloon, filled with helium and ready to float away had there not been some unseen hand holding me back by a string. Chacha picked up the burlap sack and without a warning, lobbed it at me from a good ten feet away. I threw my arms out and caught the sack. It was so light it could have been filled with feathers. I fought the urge to think of what the sack really contained.
‘Let’s go, Babu Ismael,’ Chacha said, wheeling his bike toward the entrance.
Pir stood up from his chair and we all left the room together. The jinn boys were outside waiting for us, their torches illuminating the darkness. We returned to the ledge overlooking the courtyard, still illuminated by the many lamps.
The boys on the wires were still practicing and I spotted Tarzan riding a bicycle across the middle wire. I wondered if he had ever ventured to the other side or if he was still a novice learning the high art handed down by Chacha Khidr.
Chacha straddled his bicycle, his feet barely reaching the ground. ‘Ready when you are!’ he shouted.
I looked at Pir. His earphones were back in his ears and his lips moved without making any sound. He gripped my shoulder and gave it a shake.
‘No matter what happens, don’t panic.’
Was he kidding? Then he slapped me on the back and headed back toward his room without another word, the jinn boys close on his heels.
Without a word or warning, somebody killed the lights in the courtyard, plunging the place in complete darkness. I saw a pair of eyes in the dark about five feet from me. It was Chacha. Under any other occasion the sight of him would have scared the hell out of me, but tonight it was strangely comforting.
I hopped sidesaddle on the back of Chacha’s bike and his pedalling was immediately fast and furious. Sitting like this was the only position that allowed me to maintain my grip on the bag that teetered precariously in my lap.
There was nothing to see or hear besides the rustling of Chacha’s robe as he pedalled deeper into the sightless void. The sheer audacity, style and scope of this adventure had punctured a gaping hole through my logical self. My right foot found the footrest just in time as Chacha bore down on the handlebars of his cycle and we picked up even more speed.
‘Hold on!’ Chacha shouted, glancing back at me.
In the next moment, we were rocketing down a steep slope in a free fall. I let out a scream—the kind you hear from people strapped to a rickety seat on an evil roller coaster ride, half terror, half ecstasy. The bike plunged several hundred feet before finally levelling off. We must have been barrelling along at a good hundred miles an hour.
The air had become stifling hot and dry as we hovered weightlessly. The darkness was less intense here and the skies shimmered with a warm glow of that mystical hour just before dawn. Soon we were enveloped in a gray mist which morphed into a shimmering glow of crimson rather quickly. I looked down and the scene below jolted every nerve in my body. My first thought was that only a miracle would get us out of here alive.
Like a bird in a nosedive, we plunged into a vast chasm that opened up beneath us. I was numb with shock when I noticed the steel cable, as thick as my wrist, on which our bicycle sped through open space. The bottom loomed a good mile below and swelled with a scintillating river of boiling blood-red magma. It was a monster of a canyon with its distant rims shrouded in darkness. My cheeks burnt and my throat contracted as a sulfurous heat washed over us from the floor of the abyss.
‘Are you enjoying the view, Babu Ismael?’ Chacha asked.
‘Was—was this the route you took to bring us the tea?’ I stammered.
‘I cross over every day, Babu. Often several times a day,’ he said.
‘So this is what Pul Siraat looks like,’ I said, still numb with fright.
Instead of answering my question, Chacha began singing a song—an old pre-Partition Indian one about princesses and unrequited love. Black smoke rose from the bubbling river of liquid fire and the air smelled of sulfur. My fear began to fade with the retreating darkness and I resigned myself to whatever was to assail my senses next.
Steep canyon walls emerged through the mist revealing tall spires of twisted black rock rising toward the sky like minarets. Some of them reached as high as the cable, while others disappeared above our heads.
‘Chacha, was this the route you took to bring us the tea?’ I repeated my question.
‘No Babu, that is the long way. There are many other routes, in fact. The cable chosen for your journey is shorter than that,’ Chacha explained as I struggled to hear him over the noise. ‘I thought Babu Ismael could use a little adventure! You’re not in any big hurry, are you?’ he asked, as another mighty gust of blistering wind shot up from below and almost swept us off the bike and into the chasm. I began to shiver uncontrollably.
Looking into the distance I saw a black bird the size of a small plane rip through the air and plunge downwards. Chacha leaned closer into the handlebars and I hugged him from behind.
‘We better stop—the winds are getting worse and we could get blown off the wire.’
‘Stop? Where? Is that even possible?’ I screamed, watching in amazement as the gigantic bird surged back up from the bottom of the abyss, its enormous red-tipped black wings kept flapping despite the brutal blasts of heated air.
‘There’s a rest area just up ahead,’ Chacha said, pedalling faster. ‘Don’t panic.’
Don’t panic? DON’T PANIC?!
‘How far?’ I asked, still watching the massive bird ride the currents up the canyon. ‘Do they serve tea there?’
The bird shifted its angle of flight and turned right into our path. It came up alongside us and hovered about twenty feet to our left. Up close I would say it had the face of an owl, but its long pointed beak was that of an egret. Fresh blood dripped down its beak and talons. I thought at its prey and shivered again. The bird regarded us closely with black, jewel-like glittering eyes.
‘Chacha, are you seeing this?’
‘Here we are!’ He announced as if he hadn’t heard me. The bike stopped moving. Seeing the ground beneath my feet, I jumped off the bike and so did Chacha.
The ground was solid volcanic rock, black and as jagged as broken glass. We were on the flat top of a rocky column no more than a hundred feet in diameter. The bird was now circling us. Chacha started walking toward the edge of what looked like a broad mesa, keeping an eye on this winged thing from hell; I followed, my legs wobbly.
The bird emitted a shrill cry, folded its wings against its body and plunged back into the abyss. I laid the sack down and walked over to the edge where Chacha stood staring after it. Together we watched the bird’s descent. It sped down in a spiral arc, crossed the burning river of fire and landed on a rocky ledge a couple of hundred feet above the floor of the canyon. Black smoke continued to rise from the pit and obscured both the ledge and the monstrous raptor that perched there.
‘Babu, this is called the Lookout Point,’ Chacha said.
I realized we were standing next to a rusted pipe fixed to a pole. Touching the pipe. I noticed it was quite warm, but not infernally hot like everything else in this place.
‘Chacha, what the hell is this thing?’
‘A telescope!’ he said, pulling it toward himself and bringing it up to his eye. ‘What’s the point of touring Hell if you can’t have a Lookout Point complete with a telescope?’
‘Hell!? I’d always thought—’
‘Yes, that’s right. At this very moment you’re looking at one of the tributaries of Hell.’
The Lookout Point was the tallest rocky spur that rose from the floor of the grand canyon of Hell. It was no more than a needle in that boundless space but it afforded a staggering panoramic view of the pit of horrors and despair below us.
‘God Almighty!’ I gasped. ‘Who built a telescope in a place like this?’ Was Chacha going to point out the roasting bodies of the sinners with the help of this metal tube engraved with the word ‘Galileo’ next to the viewfinder?
‘It’s been here ever since Hell came into being,’ Chacha said, peering into the canyon.
‘Chacha, telescopes were invented only a few centuries ago,’ I said. ‘And Hell is supposed to be older than humanity.’
‘Time is important only because things need to happen one after the other, Babu Ismael,’ Chacha replied. ‘Or at least, it has to look like they do,’ he added with another of those infuriating winks of his.
Focusing on the bottom of the canyon, I looked through the lens of the telescope and adjusted the glass until everything came into sharp focus. I gasped and jumped back, bumping into Chacha. The old man just cackled and held his sides.
‘Looks close enough to reach out and grab it!’ he cried.
That was actually an understatement. The surface of the river of fire was so clear that I could see bubbles and geysers forming on the surface and then exploding to emit puffs of gas and plumes of debris.
If Hell was real, Paradise had to be real too. At that moment I knew with certainty that I was done with my doctoral thesis trying to prove otherwise. I wondered if I would be given a glimpse of the latter at some point.
I slowly moved the telescope over the distant wall of the canyon, searching for the basalt ledge where the raptor had perched.
Finding the spot, I scanned the area looking for the creature but what I saw instead stunned me. Where the bird had been, there was now a man just standing there. He was tall and muscular, his body chiseled like a statue. His copper-coloured skin glistened with sweat and his face was as red as the flames that licked the earth at his feet.
I shuddered with alarm when I saw the guy wasn’t standing there at all; he was bound to a pole. His hands were chained high over his head and his ankles were crossed one over the other by a heavy manacle. A dark liquid oozed from a deep gash at his side.
Some movement on the other side of the ledge caught my attention. The bird waddled out from a cave in the wall of rock. The man’s head slumped on his chest at a sickening angle. Making its way over to his captive, the bird thrust its enormous beak into the gaping wound on the man’s ribcage. The raptor shook and twisted its beak with such terrible ferocity it would only be a matter of minutes before it ripped the poor fellow apart.
The man looked up, his face a mask of unspeakable pain. For a moment, our eyes met and I stopped breathing. He opened his mouth and screamed in agony as the bird ripped deeper into his tortured flesh. Sweat poured from my body and I gagged. I tried to tear my eyes from the horrific spectacle below, but it was impossible.
At last the monster pulled its beak out from the man’s side. It swallowed whatever hideous trophies it had extracted from its victim and then lifted its massive body and took flight. Beating its enormous wings against the volcanic currents, the creature disappeared into the smoke rising from below. I turned and looked for Chacha, but he was no longer by my side.
Panicking at the thought of being alone in a place like this, I almost cried out with relief when I saw him standing next to his bike, gripping the ghastly burlap sack. The bird reappeared and soared upward across the canyon toward us.
‘Chacha, what’s going on down there?’ I demanded, trying, with little success, to stifle the terror in my voice.
‘Time to feed the birds,’ Chacha replied, flashing me his toothless grin once again.
I heard a rustling noise and looked up. I held my breath as the raptor from Hell descended above our heads. Chacha rushed to the far end of the mesa and dumped the rotting contents of the sack onto the ground. He then turned and rushed back to where I stood.
We watched in fascination as the bird landed its enormous bulky body next to the carrion, with its wings still held aloft. The sword-like beak contained hundreds of dagger-sharp teeth which still dripped blood from its recent feasting on the captive below. ‘Let’s go!’ Chacha gave my arm a tug.
A gust of wind lifted what looked like a scrap of paper from the remains of the corpse and dropped it next to us. I collected it off the ground and looked at it. It was a certificate of shahadaat or martyrdom. The bottom of the paper was scorched but I could still read most of it. It said: ‘Fida Muhammad, resident of Faridkot, embraced martyrdom for Allah and entered Paradise on…’ The date and place of his death had burnt away. I tossed the paper into the scalding wind.
Chacha was perched on his bike and ready to go. I jumped on behind him as before, my eyes still glued to the bird. The creature clasped the severed head by the beard and swung it back and forth like a pendulum in its enormous beak. It gained momentum with each swing and the skull cracked like a gourd. With ravenous eyes the bird pecked on the emulsified brain, its long black tongue scouring the inside of the skull.
‘The bird loves brain,’ Chacha said solemnly.
Fighting sensory overload and the urge to vomit, I closed my eyes. Soon I wound up suspended between sleep and wakefulness. I had no idea how long we rode or what surrounded us, but I awoke with a start, clutching Chacha’s waist.
‘It’s time for tea,’ his voice chimed within my dreamless reverie.
Opening my eyes, I saw a tent large enough to fit a dozen people set up in a large grassy field. The tent’s faded green cloth was patched in many places and reminded me of a dervish’s robe.
Chacha parked the bike and we made our way over to the tent. The grassy area looked over on a lush beautiful valley on one side and the broad sweeping canyon of Hell on the other. Not far from the tent, a wooden table and a set of benches were set on a patch of grass, so we sat down.
The place smelled of roses and the occasional whiff of sulfur; the air danced with golden beams of light filled with sparkling dust. Rolling green meadows stretched out below us and a grassy slope drenched in mauve was ringed with waterfalls. Birds of all kinds soared over the valley. At the far end, a dark band stretched across the horizon. It took me a moment to realize that I was looking at a massive wall that, given its immeasurable distance from us, must be a hundred times taller than the Himalayas.
‘Wow! Is that really a wall?’ I asked Chacha. ‘What’s behind it?’
‘Paradise,’ Chacha replied, retrieving a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He looked old and weary now, and I wondered again about his true age.
Before I could learn anything more about the place, a man holding a tray emerged from the tent. His face was radiant and his eyes were as bright as two moons.
‘Welcome to the Bihishti Tea Corner, sir. My name is Ibrahim.’