Unable to swallow her grief, Champa sat with her grandfather in the antechamber, watching as he groomed his falcon. Dada had been in a foul mood since he returned from an errand. Champa wondered when he would regain his calm. She needed to ask him for help.
‘Why are we such an unkind species?’ she began.
She had spent the morning cleaning the madrasa. The girls had been temporarily shifted to a house provided by the Subedar while the premise was repaired. Only a few books were left unburnt, one was a book of verses by Hafez. The poet had been her father’s favourite. Champa wondered if it was he who had saved the book. Perhaps there was still a trace of goodness in him.
‘Humanity is lost,’ said the pir. ‘We will die of greed.’
‘There must be a solution, Dada?’
‘Beggars and kings, the wise and the foolish, they are all the same. God gives us resources in abundance but we spit in His eye. We pollute, we deplete, we destroy. But there is hope.’
‘What hope?’
‘Kalinoor can absorb solar energy and focus it into a single point of clarity hot enough to burn a porthole through the fabric of illusion. Through this gateway, I shall summon the most powerful djinn in the universe.’
‘And what will you command it to do, Dada?’
‘Eliminate mankind through floods. The time has come for forty days of torrential rain to cleanse the world once again. The land will belong to flora and fauna! Tigers, cobras, cheetahs, chimps. Mother Nature shall flourish as God intended.’
‘Dada, that sounds a bit destructive. Surely there must be some other way?’
‘There is no other way.’
Champa mulled over her grandfather’s words. He and the Subedar were not so different. Both were delusional and violent and neither would stop at anything. Men! What would become of Bengal?