As the Ambassador’s car made the long trek to Wari, Indelbed sat in the back with Rais and listened politely to Aunty Juny’s stony silence. Rais squeezed his arm once in quiet sympathy, and it made Indelbed feel a little bit better about the whole evening.
Finally, when she couldn’t hold it in any longer, Aunty Juny started venting: “Why are we in charge of him? Kaikobad is such a weird drunk. I hate going to that house, it smells funny. Oh god, the car won’t even fit in that road. Why do we have to drop him off?”
The Ambassador, himself in a foul mood, said, “It’s your precious son’s fault. He brought up the whole thing.”
Whereupon Aunty Juny clamped her pale lipsticked mouth shut and glared at Indelbed through the side-view mirror. He was terrified of Aunty Juny. She was younger than the Ambassador by almost ten years, haughty and fashionable. Her perfectly coiffed skull protected a brain like a rabid German U-boat loose in the Atlantic. No nuance of character or action escaped her, and everything was turned to advantage with the rapidity and precision of an active field marshal. It was said in hushed corners of the clan that if she had been the Ambassador instead of, well, the Ambassador, then the Khan Rahmans would once again have had one of their number sitting as the foreign minister.
As it were, Aunty Juny’s genius was parked firmly in the corner of the Ambassador, propelling him from posting to lucrative posting, deftly sidestepping the wiles of lecherous junior wives, guiding him inexorably into the favor of powerful men while stamping down on the pretensions of lesser aspirants. Most intimidating to Indelbed, however, was that she was one of the few members of that generation of aunties who wasn’t fat, frumpy, or maternal. Oh no. With her glossy leather purses and polished nails, her dangerously high heels, her thin, rangy body, and her razor-sharp tongue—she was like a very pretty raptor. She filled his mind with excitement and dread at the same time. He was normally unflappable with adults, but she always reduced him into a stammering, uncouth wreck.
Rais, with the easy confidence of a university student, glanced at his parents contemptuously and ruffled Indelbed’s head in support.
“I think I’ll stay over for the night,” he said, leaning toward the front seat.
“What?” Aunty Juny’s voice, normally a kind of low growl, always jumped an octave whenever her son provoked her with some foolhardy plan. “Whatever for? You’ve only been back a few days. I’ve hardly seen you…”
“It’s been a week, beloved Mummy dearest,” Rais said. He delighted in calling his mother outlandish, mocking names. People said Rais was smart, but Indelbed could see in him only an insane kind of bravado that was the fair opposite of smart.
“What are you up to, boy?” the Ambassador asked.
“Just want to help out my cousin,” Rais said. “Indelbed could use some company, right? I can talk to him about schools.”
“Are you some kind of communist?” the Ambassador asked suspiciously. He could not keep track of all the youthful fads. In the past year he had seen the various scions of the extended family imitating Goth rock stars, Mohawked red Indians, and, incredibly, some kind of wimpy floppy-haired vampire. Rais didn’t have earrings or tattoos or dyed purple hair. It figured that his son’s debaucheries must be mental in nature. Rais had a distressing habit of reading everything except for what he was supposed to study. It was very likely he was infected by some aberrant philosophy.
“No, sir.”
“Are you experimenting with boys?” the Ambassador asked.
“Vulu!” Aunty Juny glared in shock and anger.
“No, guys, I’m not gay,” Rais said, laughing. “I have a girlfriend in school.”
“What?” Aunty Juny screamed, apparently finding this worse.
“Hehe, good for you,” the Ambassador said. “I remember when I was in—”
“I don’t think the boy needs to hear about your conquests, Vulu,” Aunty Juny said. Her tone made it quite clear that there were no such conquests to speak of, and had she not deigned to take him on, he would be withering away to a lonely death.
“Quite right, quite right.” The Ambassador gave Indelbed a glance through his mirror. “Still, let Rais stay with the boy. I’ll have to come here in the morning anyway to talk to Kaiko.”
Aunty Juny declined to argue further. When the car could go no more, they let the boys out and drove off. The alleyway was still crowded even this late at night. On either side of the lane were hole-in-the-wall shops hosting food vendors grilling kebabs, tailors sitting on mattresses, ISD phone operators, rice wholesalers, and even an enterprising gentleman who sold stolen signboards. The smell of cigarettes and food was undercut by the rich, bubbling broth from the open drains. This was a far cry from what Rais was no doubt used to in his posh Baridhara apartment, but he wasn’t complaining, so Indelbed shrugged off his nascent embarrassment.
Normally he would have cringed a bit, walking his cousin through this maze, but right now he was too worried about his father’s temper. By the time they had reached the front door and negotiated entrance, he was in fact quite relieved that Rais had so magnanimously offered to help him. They were met in the hallway by Butloo, who informed him that the master was in a rare rage. Indelbed turned to Rais to confer, just in time to see the back of his traitorous cousin as he slinked off toward the stairwell, cell phone in his left hand and a rolled-up joint clamped between the long fingers of his right. Rais winked back at him.
“I really needed to get away from them, man. I’m going to your room for a smoke. Same place, right?”
Indelbed nodded.
“I’ll see you later then.”
“Thanks,” Indelbed replied, trying to inject as much awful sarcasm as possible into his voice. It came out sounding sulky and immature instead.
Indelbed went to the study, bracing himself for a torrent of abuse. Automatically he checked for the saber and saw that it was hanging from its usual hook on the wall. While his father had never actually stabbed him with it, he had felt the flat of the blade more than once. (The Khan Rahman family was very much in favor of corporal punishment for young children, and the Doctor was one of the preeminent champions of this philosophy. The saber was the worst, but the belt wasn’t too nice either, and the Doctor’s hands, long and bony, were also deadly weapons of retribution.) The Doctor was sprawled in his armchair, muttering incoherently. He was for once dressed decently, in a white kurta. It even looked fairly clean. He must have unearthed it in some remote closet. His whiskey bottle was rolling on the floor, his glass cradled protectively against his bony chest. The man’s head lolled sideways, and a thin line of drool connected his chin to his shoulder.
Indelbed tidied his father up a little bit, taking care not to wake him and trying not to let his relief get the best of him. The armchair and footstool, joined together, could form a sort of couch-bed, which was not an unusual place for the Doctor to sleep on drunken nights. Tomorrow the hangover would be terrible, and the punishments might be further enhanced by this. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but like any little boy, Indelbed was an optimist at heart, and on the whole preferred a delayed punishment to an immediate one.
He reflected on the hints made by the Ambassador and GU Sikkim, and tried to imagine this wretched creature—this whiskey-pickled flop—harboring some dangerous secret. It made no sense to him. He tried to dismiss this as hearsay, but could not conceive why such lofty members of the clan would bother playing a prank on him.
He stood in front of the mirror and pulled up his T-shirt. It wasn’t a tattoo so much as a brand, a rough circle of raised flesh between his shoulder blades, with hardly any details. He didn’t remember getting it. He had always thought the Doctor had injured him by accident somehow. Why were they asking about it? How did they know?
Fired up somewhat by curiosity—imagining for a moment that he was the secret prince to some underground kingdom—he poked around his father’s books. They were a sorry lot, most of them water damaged. The drawers held plenty of notebooks, handwritten both in English and Bangla, and even some in Arabic script, which was probably Urdu. He knew that some of the older members of the family spoke Urdu, but only behind closed doors, because after the war it had become unfashionable to do so.
He tried to read a few of them, but he didn’t know most of the words, and the slanted handwriting confused him. There were diagrams of the human body and various medical notations, including pages and pages of recurring letters: ATCG. Then there were solid pages of math, numbers and letters jumbled together in bewildering formulas. Indelbed couldn’t be sure if this was genuine work the Doctor had been doing or simply the gibberish of a deranged mind. These notebooks covered a number of fairly recent years, the cheap paper undamaged yet by age, the handwriting steadily deteriorating as the drink wrecked the Doctor’s nerves. He resolved to ask Butloo about it tomorrow. The man didn’t know how to read, but he knew the mind of the Doctor, and if there was some horrible secret, he was sure to have a clue. Feeling slightly let down, he left his sleeping father and went upstairs to his room, only to find that Rais had appropriated his bed and was now lounging on it—with his shoes on, no less—smoking cigarettes and yapping away on his cell.
“I’m going to be a while, buddy,” Rais said, looking up. “You better grab the guest room.”
“That’s just great.”
“Sorry, dude.” Rais at least had the grace to look remorseful. “Girl I’ve been seeing here. Trying to dump her gently. I hate this part. This might be a long night. Don’t want to keep you up.”
Indelbed grabbed his stuff from the bathroom and stalked out, glaring at his cousin. He wasn’t sure what “this part” or “dump” meant, but he was sure the girl was better off. The guest rooms were not habitable, of course, having neither bedding nor, for that matter, working beds. Plus they were full of mosquitoes, since the windows did not close properly, and if anyone thought mosquitoes were not a big deal, they’d never spent all night fending off bloodsuckers the size of sparrows.
He sat at the foot of his bed and waited, arms crossed.
“Sorry,” Rais said, finally hanging up after twenty minutes. He didn’t look the least bit sorry. “You talk to your father?”
“He was asleep,” Indelbed said. Fat good you were, though.
“Find out anything mysterious? I had my ear to the door, back at the party. Heard pretty much everything GU Sikkim said. His voice really carries.”
“I’ll be sure to warn him next time,” Indelbed said.
“So you actually got a tattoo or what?” Rais asked. “Why’d they keep hassling you about it?”
Indelbed shrugged.
“I’ve always wanted one,” Rais said. “My mom would kill me, though. Plus they hurt a lot I bet.”
Indelbed wordlessly lifted his shirt and showed the mark on his back.
“Whoa! You do have one! It looks a bit like a snake swallowing its tail,” Rais said. “If you squint. Pretty cool.”
That made him feel better. He hadn’t really ever felt cool before. Rais had a way of making everything seem easy.
“I was going to ask Father about it, but he hasn’t even woken up yet,” Indelbed said.
“It’s the drink,” Rais said knowledgeably.
“Rais bhai,” Indelbed ventured, “what is a mongoloid?”
“It’s like a baby with an extra chromosome,” Rais said. He looked at Indelbed. “I don’t think you’re one; they always have stretched-out heads.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Their brains don’t work properly. Yours is fine. I’m pretty sure.”
“Thanks. And what’s ‘sterile’?”
“You know how kids are made, right?” Rais made a halfhearted poking gesture with his hands.
Indelbed shrugged. He didn’t really, but it didn’t seem like particularly secret knowledge. After all, the world was full of kids.
“Why do you ask?”
“GU Sikkim called me mongoloid and sterile.”
“I’m sure that can’t be right,” Rais said. He frowned. “You look perfectly normal to me.”
“Well, you’re not studying to be a doctor anymore, are you?”
“History major for now. I did the premed stuff, but I definitely don’t want to be a doctor.”
“You probably wouldn’t know anything about it then,” Indelbed said. He sniffed.
“No point sitting around,” Rais said, giving him a pat on the head. “Let’s look for clues to this awful secret.”
His enthusiasm was genuine and infectious, shaking Indelbed out of despondency, and soon they were rifling through the Doctor’s private notebooks, expounding outlandish theories. Rais seemed to have no compunction about going through the Doctor’s private stuff.
“It’s about DNA, I think,” he said finally, after poring through the pages. “See the squiggly lines? Looks like chromosomes to me.”
“Looks boring to me,” Indelbed said.
“Maybe he was charting the family tree or something,” Rais said. “Hey, how come there’s none of your mother’s stuff around? I don’t even know what she looked like.”
“I don’t either,” Indelbed said, surprised. He hardly ever thought of her, and his father never spoke of her, other than reassuring him that she was dead. He realized that there was not a single picture or reference to his mother in the house. No favored artifact. No portrait. No sepia photograph of the happy couple. Not even an article of clothing. Had she been some kind of hideous monster?
“I bet that’s it, she’s a monster,” Rais said, showing colossal insensitivity, Indelbed thought. He had always hoped that his mother was secretly alive and would one day come to reclaim him. He wasn’t quite ready to let go of that yet.
They asked Butloo about it, but that worthy creature clamped his lips shut and said that Dr. Sahib had forbidden him to ever speak of her. The other staff had all joined after her demise and knew nothing except farfetched rumors. They claimed she had been a memsahib, a witch, a rare beauty possessed by djinn.
“It’s got to be something weird about your mother,” Rais said.
“Maybe she was mad?” The village of the insane always weighed on Indelbed’s mind. “That’s it, and I’m probably going to go mad too, which is why he never bothered sending me to school.” He tried to take his fate philosophically, but the little quaver in the end gave him away.
“It’s like Jane Eyre; maybe your mother went mad, and she’s locked up somewhere in the house!” Rais said.
Indelbed shot him a dirty look, but then another thought took hold: “You don’t think she got sent to the village, in secret?”
Rais leaned back, wondering for a moment, and then shook it off as impossible. “Let’s just go to sleep. We can look some more in the morning, and my dad’ll be here.”
When the Ambassador finally arrived the next afternoon, it was past four o’clock and Indelbed was quite sick with worry. The problem was that the Doctor wasn’t actually showing any signs of distress. His temperature was okay: he wasn’t sweating or shivering, and he hadn’t even vomited once. Indelbed, the veteran of two separate cases of alcohol poisoning, and numerous cases of very bad binge-drinking hangovers, just could not see how this was drink related.
“What’s more,” Rais said, after they had told the whole affair to the Ambassador, “the bottle is only half empty. Surely Uncle wasn’t a half-bottle man…”
“No, it would definitely take more than half a bottle to put him down,” the Ambassador said ruefully. “Still, let’s call a doctor, eh?”
The neighborhood doctor, by dint of Butloo’s penchant for gossip, had already heard about the peculiar ailment of his colleague and had been sitting with his medical bag on his lap for the past three hours, waiting for the summons. Everything that happened in the big house was a source of constant entertainment to the neighborhood, and he expected to live off this incident for many weeks.
To his chagrin, he could reach no diagnosis. After checking all the vital signs, the best he could offer was a saline drip and plenty of rest.
“There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Kaikobad,” the physician said. “He just seems to be asleep. Probably he’ll wake up. Perhaps he was very tired?”
The Ambassador, not the least bit impressed, ushered him out with great haughtiness. They ate a take-out dinner in silence, and then Indelbed was quite relieved when the Ambassador announced that he and Rais would be staying over.
“If he doesn’t get up by morning, boy, we’ll have to have a rethink,” the Ambassador said.
Indelbed desperately wanted to ask what this was about, but he didn’t dare.
“It’s probably the madness coming on,” Rais said. For an adult, even a young one, he had a peculiarly ineffective method of cheering people up.
Indelbed spent the night next to his father, trying desperately to stay awake. In the dark his father’s still form seemed monstrous. When he finally succumbed, he dreamed of ghosts with doglike faces hounding him. Several times in the dark he imagined his father reaching for him. At dawn, the sound of the muezzin woke him, and he wandered outside, bleary-eyed. He felt a miasma of unknown dread pressing down on him. The familiar objects in the house failed to comfort him. Everywhere he saw evidence of insanity and loss, years of neglect. For the first time he contemplated the awful certainty that he might soon become an orphan. He would have to leave the house. They’d probably send him to the village (where perhaps he’d be reunited with his supposedly dead mother).
In the morning, the Ambassador and Rais rejoined him, only to learn that nothing had changed with respect to his father. The Doctor remained asleep and undisturbed. If anything he seemed even more restful than before; yet there was no movement of any sort, no response to shakes, or slaps, or pinches, or any other minor physical torture.
The Ambassador was a methodical, sound thinking man and, in the absence of his wife, well able to handle most situations. He made some phone calls, and within the hour two more doctors came, one a relative by marriage to the Khan Rahmans and the other a promising youngster cousin of thirty years. Both of them were highly placed in the Apollo Hospital, which was the medical facility endorsed by the clan elders. Neither of them looked pleased to be out here, but they had answered the summons, and extremely promptly. Not for the first time, Indelbed marveled at the push and pull of the extended family. He had seen it in action before, but never for his benefit.
“Well?” the Ambassador asked, after they had consulted.
“I can’t say, Vulu,” Dr. Pappo, the uncle by marriage, said. He was a heart specialist at Apollo, a recognized expert in cardiac distress. “There is nothing wrong with him. I’ve told him many times about the drinking, but that would lead to stroke or liver failure. Nothing like this. He seems to be asleep. I can admit him if you’d like, but then what? He doesn’t even need a respirator or anything.”
The junior doctor had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.
“A man doesn’t sleep for two days if there’s nothing wrong with him,” the Ambassador pointed out.
“For god’s sake, he doesn’t even have a fever,” Dr. Pappo said. “It’s probably the other thing…”
“Ahem, what?”
“You know,” Dr. Pappo said. He shrugged apologetically. “We’ve all heard the rumors, eh?”
What rumors? What rumors? Indelbed wanted to shout. Does everyone know except for me?
“Thanks very much,” the Ambassador said, ushering the doctors out. “And let’s keep this quiet, eh, Pappo?”
They went through the study again with the Ambassador, looking for clues. But of course there was nothing to be found, Rais and Indelbed having already ransacked the place. The Ambassador examined the floor and discovered something, however, bending down and tasting it with one finger.
“Salt,” he said. “Circles of salt everywhere.”
Gathering up some courage, Indelbed confronted his uncle. “Can you please tell me what’s going on? So what if there’s salt on the floor? He’s a drunkard. He does weird things all the time.”
“You see, Indelbed, your father was a bit of an important man in some ways,” the Ambassador said, clearly uncomfortable. “I mean, you don’t want to know, we’ve always discouraged him—well, there was no talking to him, even before the drink. Look, let’s just focus on waking him up, and then we can let him explain everything.”
“Didn’t Father tell you anything else when you called him?” Indelbed asked. “I know he said something. Your face changed.”
“Hmm, he was agitated, said you were under some kind of threat,” the Ambassador said. “Difficult to tell with Kaiko, how coherently he was thinking. He said he was taking some steps to protect you.”
Threat? Me? Indelbed was flabbergasted. He pictured the police coming after him, or perhaps the black-sunglass’d RAB guys—the rapid action battalion, a sort of SWAT team known for killing criminals in cross fires—with their big guns. He couldn’t imagine what he had done. Did they come after you for not going to school?
“Er, neither of you geniuses checked his cell phone,” Rais said, holding up the phone in question.
“What?”
“Cell phone,” Rais said. “Uncle Kaiko made like ten calls to this one guy, before he croaked.”
Rais was already hitting the redial. After some rings, a man answered. Indelbed heard his voice come across the line quite clearly: “Hello, Kaikobad?”
“It’s his nephew,” Rais said.
“Give it here, son.”
“Where is Kaikobad?”
“Hello, this is the Ambassador speaking.”
“Who?”
“Sorry, I mean this is Vulubir Khan Rahman,” the Ambassador said. “I’m Kaikobad’s cousin. You might have seen me on television; I’m on all the talk shows…”
“Er, no.”
“Sorry, hmm, this is a bit awkward. Are you a bootlegger of some sort?”
“Bootlegger?”
“Well, Kaikobad called you a number of times two nights ago, and then he went to sleep.”
“Sounds perfectly normal.”
“Well, he hasn’t woken up since.”
“Oh dear.”
“So the thing is, do you know anything about this? Might I ask your name?” Not for nothing was the Ambassador considered the politest man in the Foreign Service.
“Certainly,” the man said with a flourish that somehow carried through the phone. “I am Siyer Dargo Dargoman, emissary, consultant of the occult, and barrister of contract law in the Celestial Court. You must have heard of me—I argued the case for the inheritance of Harun al-Rashid’s fifth concubine’s enchanted bedsheet.”
“Sorry, haven’t, must have missed it…”
“Oh.”
“Are you human, then?”
“Human? I am Afghani!”
Indelbed looked at his cousin, stricken. What else could the man be but human? The Ambassador pressed on: “Well, could you help us?”
“Yes, of course, Kaikobad has already employed me in this matter,” Siyer said. “I am more than three-quarters of the way to Dhaka. You say he’s in some sort of coma?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“That could be a problem.” Siyer sounded pissed off. “I normally take an advance, see, but as it was Kaikobad, I agreed to fly out at my own cost and everything…”
“Well, don’t worry, man, I’m sure we can scrape together your lawyer’s fees,” the Ambassador said in his haughty way.
“Really?” Siyer said. “If Kaikobad is asleep, then you can’t use his dignatas. Have you got emeralds? Or some of Solomon’s artifacts?”
“What? What the hell is dignatas?”
“Look, never mind, I’ve already left. I’ll reach out tomorrow,” Siyer said. “You bunch of jokers better figure out how to pay me.”
The Ambassador put the phone down, highly discomfited.
“Well?” Rais asked.
“It’s an Afghan lawyer whom Kaikobad hired,” the Ambassador said. “He’s coming here tomorrow. He wants to be paid. Not in money. In some dignatas and jewels and Solomons.”
“What?”
“I think, Rais, that we better call your mother.”