The sun is rising rapidly. Is it rushing me to tomorrow?
I’m passing through Shalimar, the garden suburb gilded with the cumulus of privilege.
Inflated Indian bureaucrats, carrying golf bags like trophies, are piling into chauffeur-driven cars. Their wives, stylish in haute-couture, are waving goodbye to fancy-dressed children as maids take them to History Unbound parties. On patios girls skip rope, play hopscotch and boys kick balls. Scents of freshly cut grass, chlorinated swimming pools and barbecues suffuse the air.
I could be inside a glossy brochure. The mansions are pseudo-Arcadian. But they look like off-the-peg strongholds which, even with heavy electronic gates, seem pregnable.
Ranged around kitschy shopping centres, they have been specially built for Numen’s long train of yes-people who massage his megalomania in pecking order. The enclave has an undertone of impermanence. The voices are either mollusc-flat or affected falsettos. Hearty laughter sounds emphysemic. The residents know that their tenancy depends on Numen’s idiosyncratic computations of their servility and that, therefore, the luxurious air they breathe is transitory.
Hrant often said this retinue, too, must yearn for a country where moral virtue displaces oppression. But if they do, then they must also wonder whether such a change, assuming it’s possible, would be too Spartan. So they straitjacket their tongues, sew up their ears, blindfold their eyes and barter their souls in Faustian deals for a speculative existence of milk and honey.
I pity this menagerie of lackeys. I can detect Fear’s yellow-green cloud hanging over their straw bastions.
I know Fear only too well.
He’s a trickster that spreads disbelief. He has a favourite magician’s hat: the word ‘might’. A word which connotes ‘power’, ‘impunity’, ‘persecution’, ‘weapons’, ‘violence’. From this hat he pulls out sharks that munch one’s innards. For ‘might’ also disseminates the probability that a world cocooned by love was not necessarily tableted by the Creator, that all our aspirations to uphold Good and defeat Evil might just be vanity of vanities.
I know Belkis and Childe Asher are nearby. I murmur. ‘You think I might run away again?’
No reply. I understand. It’s a question only I can answer.
Which I will tomorrow.
Although I have Belkis’s sprit implanted in me, I’m still afflicted with primal forebodings. When I’m haunted, I blame her for forcing me to become a Dolphinero. I know that’s unjust. She didn’t force me. I agreed – rashly – as those slow in mind do. I didn’t want to expose my weakness. I deluded myself that I had the requisite qualities, that I could follow her example.
She worked hard to nurture me into a Dolphinero. Held me to her bosom unreservedly. Never revealed her qualms. She saw, very early on, I had phantoms; that Fear, in particular, stalked me. ‘Touch your heart,’ she said; ‘Life needs Dolphineros. We are Dolphineros – that’s the truth. All we need is fortitude. We have that. Because we know death is a lie,’ she said …
As history has reminded us, ‘fear of Fear’ is the threat. We must confront it. Eyeball to eyeball. Know thine enemy etcetera. But that’s bravado. Fear never stops attacking. How many souls can withstand that? I become catatonic. Conscientious thoughts fall comatose. My breath turns yellow-green with halitosis.
I should admit I portray my phantoms, too. Not as behemoths with blood-shot eyes and thousand-and-one tentacles flashing daggers. I don’t have that sort of imagination. Whenever I try to conjure their physiognomies I come up with a blank mass. How can one face the faceless?
So, I cheat. I humanise my phantoms. Give them ordinary features like people I’ve come across and with whom I sometimes shared bread. In fact, I see them as victims, too, and try to befriend them. But they harangue me. ‘Death is real,’ they say, ‘it’s not a lie!’
Of course, I try to ignore them. But are those demons telling me something crucial about Death, something only they know?
I often see my mother. The mother I so briefly knew. I watch her beatific face as a midwife places me on her lap. I watch her suckling me. I watch her holding my frightened father’s hand as soldiers approach. I see her triumphant as she hands me to a woman who hides with me in the woods and later hands me over to the Red Cross. I watch the soldiers chain my mother and my father to a rock in the badlands – fodder for wild animals like Prometheus. I watch her strangle my father with her chains to stop him suffering. And I watch her grapple with vultures until she and they tear each other apart.
My mother appeared again in a dream last night.
She held me and sighed. ‘Poor Oric – bereft without his Belkis.’
I tried to comfort her. ‘Not for long, Mother …’
She wailed. ‘What do you know about Death? What can you know?’ Then she drifted into a vast pit of twisted human remains.
What do I know about Death? I certainly don’t know if it’s real or a lie. But I know that if it’s real it’s brutal and humiliating. And I know if I don’t share Belkis’s fate I would become an unquiet spirit. Her name would be carved on my tomb, but my bones would never lie next to hers.
I go into a park, sit under a willow and pick up where I left in my journal.