Hasan moved through the darkness with eyes shut and arms parallel to his torso. His big toe stubbed against a potted plant which should have been at least five feet away from him. There was a time when Hasan could have walked blindfolded through the drawing room with all its breakables and sharp-cornered tables, but now he couldn’t even negotiate his way through the hallway successfully. Four steps from the door should not have taken him to the plant, unless . . . I guess I last tried this a shoe size ago, Hasan thought. Back then, this had been just an amusing exercise to carry out in the serenity of a two a.m. house heavy with sleep while Hasan was wide awake with the excitement of being wide awake at a forbidden hour. He was tempted to extend his arms and feel his way around, but that would be giving up. He stood still for a moment and listened. The tremble of blinds in the hallway and the rustle of dining room curtains oriented him again. He remained motionless until he could feel the air currents crossing each other beneath his fingertips, remained motionless until he was so confident in his sightless seeing that he could have taken a felt-tip pen and circled the places where moonlight from the blinds’ slits dappled his body. The musky scent of Raat-ki-rani wafted in from the garden, making the breeze seem heavier than it really was. In silk pouches of air, here and there, the smell of Gul Mumani’s unsmoked cigarettes wreathed and swirled.
Hasan walked in a diagonal into the dining room, eyes still shut, and made his way around the dining table without so much as brushing against a chair. He walked around the room five times, in ever widening circles, and successfully avoided walls, paintings, furniture, curtains. At last he stopped, paused a moment, stepped forward, and felt his fingers close around a candelabra. He smiled and kissed the cold silver of the candelabra. A hardened trickle of wax tickled his lower lip. If word got out about his plan to depose the President, and soldiers broke into the house to arrest him under cover of darkness, Hasan would know how to find his way around the house in stealth and seek out objects that could serve as defence weapons.
Hasan opened his eyes and placed the candelabra back on the cabinet. Only problem, of course, was that he really didn’t have a plan to depose the President. That moment at the beach when the word ‘depose’ came to his mind now seemed like a moment of incredible clarity. Not that it had felt that way at the time, of course. The moment between recognizing what needed to be done and realizing the weight of that recognition had been so brief that it was only in the freeze-frame of memory that he could bow his head before the splendour of the moment and hear, in the background, a sitar string shiver.
Hasan had intended, of course, to tell Ami and Aba about his revelation, even though Zehra had told him that a coup was obvious but impossible and he should just stop thinking about it. Every night Hasan went to sleep assuring himself, tomorrow, at the right moment, I’ll tell Ami and Aba. But ten days had passed since the beach and the right moment still showed no signs of appearing. Instead, Hasan’s declaration of resolve to topple the government became part of the Unsayable which adhered to every surface around the house like gummy motes of dust. Always before, conversation had cleared the air. When Hasan missed Sports Day because of chicken pox, when Waji who couldn’t tie his own shoelaces accused Hasan of stealing his frog-shaped eraser, when the Widow received her first death-threat, even when Salman Mamoo was placed under house arrest, Ami and Aba had had the words to unclench Hasan’s stomach.
But now his stomach was growling. Hasan wandered into the kitchen to see if there was any ice-cream left in the freezer. He pulled the freezer door open and it was like opening an alien vault which beamed out an eerie glow and froze intruders with a glacial blast. Aliens, it appeared, did not store ice-cream in their vaults.
Ice, Hasan thought. Unmanageable topics were like huge blocks of ice, so cold they burned you when you tried to handle them. But Ami and Aba knew how to lift the block with words, and with words toss it back and forth between each other, until Hasan forgot the block and clapped his hands at the twist of wrist with which Aba sent the block flying and at the backward arc of Ami’s arm as she caught the overthrow. Now, however, everyone was walking around the ice, hoping it would melt of its own accord. Twenty-six days to the trial. Hasan looked at his dual digital-analogue watch. Twenty-five days.
Salman Mamoo’s tea. Hasan slapped a hand against his skull. How could he have forgotten about it? He reached into the freezer and began to push aside the plastic-wrapped hunks of meat on the top shelf. There it was! Hasan pulled out a plastic container and held it up triumphantly. Salman Mamoo’s tea. He would heat it and drink it, and it would infuse him with ideas and inspiration. Hasan peered closer at the container. He opened the lid and looked inside. Frozen chicken broth. He placed the container back in the freezer and began to search again. Maybe Atif-Asif-Arif had moved it to another shelf. Hasan moved down to the second shelf, shifting bags of meat and containers of precooked food first to one side, then to the other. He squatted down and rummaged through the third shelf, his fingers crossing from numb to burning and still nothing. Nothing in the ice drawer at the bottom either. He must have missed it. He started back at the first shelf, taking each object out of the freezer and setting it down on the kitchen cabinet, his fingers red and raw now, pull out and place down, pull out and place down, pull out and place down, little drops of water dripping down the sides of the chicken-broth container, pull out and place down, pull out and place down, Hasan’s fingers brushed against the water droplets as he set down a piece of steak and his fingers froze on to the next packet of meat he tried to remove. He pulled his fingers off and a tiny piece of skin stayed on the plastic. Hasan grabbed two dishcloths from a cabinet drawer, wrapped them around his hands, and went back to his job. Pull out and place down, pull out and place down. Finally, after squatting down to clear out the ice drawer, he rocked back on his heels and swore out loud. He kicked the ice drawer back in its place and leaned against the kitchen cabinet, elbows on his knees, head buried in his hands. He shook the dishcloths off his hands and sucked the bleeding finger on his hand, holding his other hand under his armpit for warmth.
Suddenly he wanted, wanted so badly his heart grew to twice its size just thinking of it, wanted to turn the doorknob to Ami and Aba’s room and crawl into their bed as he had always done when fever or nerves about the next day’s cricket match fought off sleep. Wanted Ami and Aba’s intersecting breaths to cradle him into dreams of clear night skies and just-ripe mangoes.
It wouldn’t happen. Sleep had, of late, become the great divider in the house. At any moment of the day someone was asleep, falling asleep or just waking up, and this more than anything else made these days even stranger than the first days after Salman Mamoo’s arrest. Personally, Hasan had no trouble falling asleep at eleven p.m., or even earlier if the cricket match down the street ended before the allocated time. Staying asleep though was another matter. He glanced down at his watch again. Two-thirty. Usually he managed to sleep until at least four, but the nightmares tonight had been worse than ever before. Ami’s light had been on in her studio when Hasan had climbed down from the roof, but when he peered in through her window and saw her staring at a blank canvas, her fingers curled into her palms, he backed away before she could see him. She would stay there until about four a.m., he knew, and if he was back up on the roof at that time and the wind direction was right he would hear the drag of her feet as she closed the door leading outside and retreated to her bedroom through the other door.
Aba, of course, saw his ability to sleep as per routine as a blow against the government, a refusal to be tyrannized within the confines of his home. So at eleven-thirty every night he would get into bed, set his alarm for seven-thirty and count words until he fell asleep. ‘A, aardvark, aasvogel.’ Aba claimed ‘ad–’ words were unfailing soporifics, but most mornings his eyes were bruised with exhaustion and when he returned from the office he slept, without words, until dinner. As for Gul Mumani, it was impossible to tell if she slept at all. Sometimes Hasan would find her in the television room, sitting upright, with eyes closed. She might stay that way for up to two hours, and just when Hasan was convinced she was asleep, a tear would slide out of her eye.
Somehow, though, guests who dropped by after dinner always commented on how well the family seemed to be dealing with things. ‘It’s good you remember there’s still hope,’ some friendly soul would say, and last night Aba replied, ‘It’s the hope that’s killing me.’
Water dripped down Hasan’s back. He shifted to the left and twisted his neck to look up at the cabinet top. Bags of meat were sweating. The thought of moving all those packages back into the freezer was too exhausting to contemplate. He leaned back against the cabinet and thought of dolphins.
There was a gentle tapping on the door leading outside. ‘Hello fellow,’ Uncle Latif’s voice whispered from the other side of the door. ‘Open sesame seed.’
Hasan pushed himself off the ground and unlocked the door. Uncle Latif stepped inside, dressed in a bathrobe and a blue and yellow polkadotted tie. ‘I peered down from my balcony, but you were not on the roof. And then I saw this glow from the kitchen and said, oh my, either the Widow’s husband has come to visit, and got the wrong address, or my friend Hasan is cooling himself on this warm night by using the freezer as an air-conditioner.’
‘I was looking for ice-cream,’ Hasan said.
‘If I ever write my memoirs that will be a wonderful title,’ Uncle Latif said. He began to refill the freezer.
Hasan picked up the chicken broth from the cabinet and passed it to Uncle Latif. ‘So, if someone, you know, what’s the word? hyper-ethically speaking, wanted to depose the President, how would he do it?’ Hasan said.
‘Hyper-ethically?’ Uncle Latif said. ‘Oh, I see. Fine word choice.’ He broke a frozen water-drip off the roof of the freezer, dipped it in Vimto concentrate, and gave it to Hasan. ‘Well, how to de-pose such a poser? Remove all cameras from his line of vision. Boot out all frogs and toadies, and leave him in a room without mirrors. Or perhaps, leave him in a room filled with mirrors.’
Hasan frowned, and sucked Vimto off the tapering icicle. The ice was smooth along the sides but its tip was sharp against his tongue and the Vimto was so sweet it warmed his mouth. He smiled at Uncle Latif. ‘This is what the smallest stars taste like,’ he said.
Uncle Latif closed the freezer door and sat on a stool beside Hasan. ‘Yesterday, when I was in your drawing room, scraping the ice-cream carton – raspberry flavour, couldn’t resist – that friend of Gul’s whose hair looks as though bombs have exploded in it phatak! said, “Maybe the President will be assassinated.” And Shehryar – I swear, sometimes I want to break the law just to have him represent me – said, “I hope not. I refuse to feel grateful to an assassin.” And when H-bomb hair left he said to Saira, and okay, I was dropping eaves, he said, “Tyranny is killing our imaginations.”‘
Assassination? Hasan stared at Uncle Latif. Assassination? He walked over to the sink and threw in the remaining shard of icicle. But, of course. How else? How else? A trickle of Vimto formed a ring around his finger. If only I had a ring of invisibility, Hasan thought, I would follow the President everywhere and whisper ‘murderer’ in his ear until his conscience couldn’t take it any more and he restored democracy just so that he could get a peaceful night’s sleep.
Hasan rubbed the Vimto off his finger. But I don’t have a ring of invisibility. I don’t know how to get a ring of invisibility. Let’s face it, there probably is no such thing as a ring of invisibility. He stared at his reflection in the window. If I could, would I do it? Would I kill the President?