IT WAS A DONE DEAL. AS SOON AS THEY RETURNED home from the bank, Sanjit felt the presence of a heavy cloud in his body. The exuberance of having three hundred thousand Afterlife Dollars had quickly given way to the reality of what he’d agreed to do for it. Suddenly he felt like someone who’d lied at the interview to get the job. And now that he’d got it, he was out of his depth.
I’m no killer.
He caught Ali looking at him and ducked behind a half smile. He didn’t want his employer thinking he wasn’t up to it.
He lowered himself onto the sofa. Ali scraped a steel chair across the floor. Farid stood near the window, blocking the light. His arms were folded as he watched Sanjit closely.
“We’re going to train you. Prepare you mentally and psychologically. Understand?” Ali said.
Sanjit nodded, relieved that they weren’t expecting him to do it straight away.
“Normally, this takes months. But in your case, we haven’t got months and you’re not a Muslim. So we’re going to improvise. The good news is you’re ready to die. So you’re halfway there.”
Sanjit swallowed. There was something in the way Ali had said it. A sense of finality. Dying was no longer an abstract idea in the future. It had entered the room and was sitting right next to him on the sofa.
Next, Ali explained the rules: No leaving the house. No phone calls. No movies, television or watching cricket. The outside world was closed off until further notice.
Sanjit nodded quietly, accepting that he’d signed away his freedom along with his body when he signed on that dotted line an hour earlier. “So when do we start?”
“Look at him. Raring to go.” Ali slapped Sanjit’s back, proud of his protégé. “Let’s eat.”
Yes, food before everything. Even murder and carnage.
After lunch, Sanjit was told to sit on the sofa. Farid closed the curtains, reducing the sun to thin lines around the window. Ali knelt down and inserted a disc into the DVD player.
The screen flickered and turned black. An Arabic title spun like a revolving door before settling in the middle of the picture. The English translation appeared below it: Srebrenica, Bosnia.
A lineup of bodies kneeling in the grass: men, women, children, barrels of Kalashnikovs hovering above their heads like angels of death. The barrels smoked. The bodies slumped to the ground at the same time as if they had been tied together, the weight of one dragging down another.
Sanjit flinched. The undigested biryani in his stomach moved.
The video cut away to a shot of a freshly excavated mass grave, a heap of coffee-colored mummies entangled like pretzels. Men and women in jumpsuits, dusting off skulls and bones as if they were rare archaeological finds. A woman in a white headscarf, resting her head on a domed coffin lid. As the camera closed in on her tears, an angry voice railed in Arabic. Sanjit couldn’t understand the words, but he felt the hate seeping into his skin.
Next, an adobe house somewhere in a desert. A little girl with tattered clothes and frizzy hair, crying. Lying at her feet in a growing crimson pool, the body of an older woman. The girl walked aimless loops around the room, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the dusty floor.
Then a helicopter view of a thick urban grid. An explosion, possibly a missile strike, sending up clouds of smoke. The camera swooped to the ground. The building was now a small mountain of bricks, smoldering like naan fresh out of a tandoor oven. A woman, disconsolate beside the rubble, the wail from her throat merging seamlessly with the scream of the ambulance that had arrived to collect the blood-splattered bodies.
The montage switched to the next gear, images flashing quicker, the voice-over more impassioned as the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Then an aircraft carrier with a gaping hole in its side. The twisted exoskeleton of a red London bus. A ball of fire swallowing a Humvee on a desert road. A man kneeling on the ground, head bowed, hands tied behind his back. A sword came down on the neck before Sanjit could look away. He ran to the bathroom and emptied his stomach. A few moments later, he returned to the darkness of the living room. The video had been paused. Farid was looking at him and shaking his head. Sanjit glared and snatched the remote from Ali’s grasp.
He pressed play and gritted his teeth, determined to watch the beheadings without flinching. Because he wanted to show them that he wasn’t a pussy.
OVER THE NEXT few days, he had to sit through more of these videos: blood and gore wrapped in the same narrative of persecution and revenge, tailored to a Muslim audience.
But as a non-Muslim, he was processing the images differently. Once he got past the initial revulsion, it was like porn. His body tingled from the thrill of violence and death one moment. Next moment, he felt a shame akin to that experienced after masturbation.
But what was there to feel ashamed about? How was this any different to the buzz from watching an action movie? Granted, in movies, the actors didn’t die for real, blood was food coloring, and muzzle flashes were added in post-production. But wasn’t the basic principle the same? Celebrate violence. Put it on a pedestal. And why not? It was as much a part of human nature as love, anger or greed. Man discovered it long before he discovered the wheel or fire. It was in the fabric of our existence. The world came to being in the violence of a big bang and was going to end the same way.
The more he watched the videos, the more he noticed the changes within him. His eyes were turning flesh to paper, blood to water, and smoke to air. The hardness from his face spread slowly to his chest and then his entire being. Soon, he was like an actor watching his favorite movies with a view to being in them.
HATE. ANOTHER WORD that got bad press. Pity, because when you paused and thought about it, there was a certain beauty to it. Not beauty in the way you’d describe, say, a woman or some scenery, but perhaps a more profound definition based on its ability to generate transcendence.
Man made fire because he hated darkness, cars because he hated walking, appliances because he hated chores. And now Sanjit needed to summon this transformative power, admittedly not for such a lofty cause as advancing civilization. But a cause that was important to him nonetheless.
So how did you hate someone enough to want to kill them? Infidel Westerners slaughtering Muslims blah blah blah blah … That might work for Ali, but not Sanjit, for the simple fact that foreigners weren’t responsible for his disease. Life was. Worse, it didn’t even bother leaving a note explaining why, although God knew how many times he’d begged for it.
Why me?
And then one day, it struck him. He needed to rephrase his question slightly. Not why him. But why not someone else? He tried applying this simple tweak.
He stood at the window, elbows on the sill, gazing at the rivulet of heads below, asking, “Why me; why not him? Or him? Her? Him? Him …”
He followed the stream of humanity meandering between the low, discolored buildings, squinting as the bodies got smaller with distance.
“Her? Him? Him? Him?”
And then when he’d gone as far as his eyes could see, he closed them and imagined faces on the other side of the ocean: black, white, yellow, brown. Golden hair, red hair, brown hair, black hair. His lips pinching out the same words over and over, like a mantra:
“Why not him? Her? Him? Him? Him?”
With each chant, his jaw became harder. Before long, he was standing upright, arms by his sides, rage balling up in his fists, his chin and neck and stomach. It traveled down to the heart, filling all its empty chambers.
Ali had been brainwashed to hate all Westerners, but Sanjit had gone one up.
He was learning to hate the whole world.
THERE WAS A third aspect to the training: preparing to meet God, or in Sanjit’s instance, Indraloka. This was where improvisation was called for. Luckily, Sanjit remembered the visualization exercise from his cricket-training days.
He asked Ali to buy a Vedic chants CD and a portable disc player. When Ali arrived with the goods, Sanjit retired to his room. He lay in bed, eyes closed, music from the CD player oozing into his ears, the strings of the sarangi flickering like a candle flame. The chanting began. Three deep “oms” followed by a recital of ancient hymns, flat in the beginning, rising in the middle, a gentle slope at the end. Sanjit didn’t understand the words but its monotony was calming, like warm oil on skin. The mind stopped wandering. Thoughts manifested and disappeared like bubbles before they ceased altogether. He was in the sunless depths of a deep, deep sea, voices and the sarangi melding into one body before disintegrating into flecks. Then a burst of white light, crystallizing in a vision of Indraloka.
He imagined a bellboy giving him a tour of his suite in the celestial resort: plush leather sofa, granite floor, a welcome hamper with dried fruits and wine on the chic coffee table. The big-screen TV on the wall was tuned to a cricket match, the minibar stocked generously with beer, liquor and soft drinks. “Free replenishment,” said the note on top of the fridge. He crossed the room and opened the sliding doors that led to the balcony.
Beyond the railing, the ocean, bright as a gem, still as a lake. A soft breeze caressed his face, gently unhooking the curls from his ears.
He gazed at this view, allowing its serenity to percolate his body, then went to the bedroom. The king-size bed was covered in a grey satin sheet, soft on the skin. Ditto for the pillows. The mattress was springy. The bellboy gave a knowing smile when Sanjit bounced on it.
The bellboy directed him to another balcony, this one with a view of the pool. A girl lying on a deck chair lowered her Ray-Bans and looked at Sanjit. She was clad in a red bikini, her slim, tanned legs glistening with sun cream.
“Come on,” she mouthed.
One moment, he gestured, smiling.
He held this vision in his mind. The suite, sun, sea, girl. Happiness, uninterrupted by anything: work, age, disease, time itself.
The music in his ears tapered and he opened his eyes slowly, returning to the darkness of the room. He removed the headphones and sat up, body suffused with calm. Nothing escaped the attention of his finely tuned awareness: the drop of sweat prickling his earlobe, the ceaseless twitching of the nostrils pumping breath, the coarseness of the sheet under his palm. At once, he became aware of the pain, discomfort and suffering that underpinned earthly existence. Suffering he was going to say goodbye to.
His eyes sliced through the darkness, seeking shapes, feeling corners. Then something tickled the insides of his nose. He rose and followed the scent to the living room. Ali and Farid were sitting on the floor, shoveling biryani into their mouths. Pretty much the only thing on the menu these days.
Not that Sanjit cared. He’d lost interest in food, just like he’d lost interest in everything in the world. But he sat down and scooped a small mound of yellow rice and meat onto his plate.
He was a soldier and needed to eat.