Only a stupid blind man picks a quarrel with his guide
Reza locked the door and turned to the girl curled up in a foetal position on the mat. Before her were an untouched bowl of noodles, a loaf of bread and a mug of tea that had gone cold. He looked at her eyes, which betrayed the gnawing hunger she felt, which she refused to raise to his masked face, and at her lustrous hair.
‘They tell me you haven’t been eating.’
Her eyes moved slowly to the level of his boots.
‘Do you want to kill yourself, Leila?’
She raised her eyes briefly when she heard mention of her name.
‘I know your name. Leila.’ He pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slid down against the door. Sitting on the floor, he lit up and inhaled. ‘I have seen your licence and student ID. I’ve always thought Leila was spelt with an ‘a’, but yours is with an ‘e’. I would have been curious, if I were the curious type, you understand?’
Her eyes, ringed by day-old kohl, flicked up to meet his.
He had spent the night at San Siro listening to Mamman Kolo interspersing his anecdotes, peopled by iniquitous djinns and cheaply-perfumed prostitutes, with his tambourine. He had realised how much he missed San Siro in the few days since their mission began. After he had collected money for the sales made by Sani Scholar, he rewarded him with a handful of dirty weed. It was, in their kind of business, essential to reward loyalty. And Scholar, who had no use for weed since he did not smoke it, would know how to dispense of it and earn himself respect among the boys.
On his way back, in a rather crowded bus heading to Wuse, he had seen the man with a child in a bag. He could not erase the image from his mind. And when he returned to the mansion, he had sat down quietly, away from the others playing cards on the living room floor, contemplating the atrociousness that a hunger for riches induces in men.
He blew a stream of smoke ceiling-wards and sighed. ‘The world is pretty fucked, you understand?’
The girl waved away a mosquito that had been preying on her foot, her kaftan rustling softly.
He took another drag. ‘I guess it has always been that way.’
He relished the cigarette for some time, pausing to consider the stick in his hand as if to determine how much weight it had lost since his last drag. ‘Some people are trying to find new cures, others are creating new weapons. And then there are those who are trying to kill themselves. Pretty fucked, you understand.’
She looked up at his eyes and looked away.
‘I saw this man today. I never wanted to kill someone as much as I wanted to stick this man.’
He watched the ribbons of smoke curling up to the ceiling, remembering the enduring image his mind had grasped from the encounter.
‘He had this bag, a big travelling bag, you understand? Black. And he got onto the bus with it. The conductor wanted to collect the bag and put it in the boot but the man refused. And he was holding onto the bag tightly as he sat right next to me.’ He paused to take a drag. ‘But the conductor, he had felt something in the bag. And he sat down and kept looking at this shifty man, you understand? So when the man wanted to get off, the conductor offered to help him with the bag but he refused again.’
Leila sat up weakly, but Reza paid her no heed. He continued staring at the ceiling.
‘So he hailed a policeman and asked him to look into the man’s bag. There was … a child, in the bag. Three years old. Dead. Suffocated. She was the cutest little girl I’ve ever seen. I can still see her now, her face, the coloured beads at the ends of her braids—’
He measured the weight of his cigarette again as he watched the horror come into Leila’s face. Then he leaned his head back against the door and put the cigarette to his lips. ‘He said she was his brother’s daughter.’
‘But why?’ Her voice, long unused, sounded rusty. She cleared her throat, with a grace that suggested good breeding.
Reza crushed the butt of the cigarette on the floor and lit another one. ‘Rituals, you understand. He wanted to use her head and body parts for charms and stuff, to get rich. Kai! I wanted to kill him wallahi.’
‘He was arrested, wasn’t he?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Unfortunately?’
‘Yes. Never wanted to stick anyone so bad in my life, you understand? Never. I will look for him someday and kill him, I swear.’
For an instant, she glimpsed the hardness in his eyes. But in a moment he blinked it away. When her body, weakened already from hunger, was racked by a mild shiver, she pulled her limbs closer to her and put her arms around her shins.
‘The world is pretty fucked, you see.’ Reza rose and slapped the dust from his jeans. ‘Anyway, eat your food. That’s all I came to tell you. Eat your food.’
He turned and hurried out, but she had caught a glimpse of the tears forming in his eyes.
Reza set down the LED lamp in the middle of the room, away from the girl on the mat who watched him from the half-shadow as he turned to leave. But he hesitated, looking at the lamp casting its white light on the wall.
‘Wait.’
He watched her mouth trying to form words she seemed unsure about.
She stopped and tried to compose herself. She drew her legs close to her body. ‘I’ve been sad about the little girl, you know.’
He sighed.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What are you sorry about?’
The words now tumbled out of her. ‘I’m sorry she died, I’m sorry he killed her. I’m sorry you didn’t get to kill him.’
When she started crying, he remembered what the man in that Bollywood flick had done, how he had drawn the girl to his chest and rocked her shoulders and patted her thick, lustrous hair. He looked at Leila’s bowed head, at her hair that was beginning to lose its gloss and its scent. He wanted to sweep away the rebellious strands that had fallen out of line. But she was not his girl. She was the girl he would have to, if the need arose, put down and dispatch. Probably in the gully – where she would rot before she was discovered. He imagined what she would look like as she decayed: how her eyes would putrefy and her hair would fall off her shrinking cranium, how worms would crawl between her fine, little lips and eat her tongue. He shook his head and then felt a certain provocation because he could not find a kinder euphemism for kill (murder, exterminate, terminate, slay, execute). Something more … humane, perhaps. Even ‘put down’, if considered carefully, had a quality one could only associate with brutality. Like something the Americans, with their crazy infatuation with animals, would do to a tired, broken pet. As that murderer had done to that little girl in a bag.
‘I know you’re going to kill me, you are just going to kill me, and I don’t want to die. Please, please.’
He listened to her crying, a strange sound that made him restless. ‘I will not kill you.’ And he meant it. He sat down on the floor, on the blind side of the lamp so his masked face was shadowed, and from his pocket pulled out a joint Gattuso had rolled earlier. But realising that the pungent smoke would choke the room, he put it away and waited for her to calm down.
‘Why are you holding me?’ she sniffled.
He sighed and reached again for the joint, which he lit before he changed his mind again. He took a drag. ‘It is necessary. That’s all you need to know, you understand?’
‘Is it money you want? Have you called my uncle? What did he say?’
The pungent smoke filled the already clammy room. When she pulled her scarf and held it to her nose, he put the joint out and unlocked the door. With his foot, he kept it from opening all the way.
‘Can I go out, for a while? For some air, I mean?’
He cleared his throat. ‘What course are you studying?’
‘What?’
‘Your ID card. It says you are a student at some university in London. What course?’
‘Oh. Palaeontology.’
He had never heard of it. And when she explained that she studied fossils in relation to the history of life, he laughed so loud that Gattuso called out from downstairs. Reza said he was fine.
‘You are as stupid as all the rich people I know.’
‘What?’
‘Rich people. They are all stupid, you understand.’
‘How so?’
‘See, we here, people go to school, they study medicine and things so they can cure sick people from useless diseases caused by poverty, you understand. You rich brats, you go to schools in London and America. UCLA – you must have heard of it – you go there and study stupid courses no one gives a shit about, playing around with bones of long dead animals when people are dying and there are no doctors to treat them—’
‘Well—’
‘Well what?’
She was silent and he could see the hurt in her eyes. But he imagined she would, someday, if she survived this, dig up his bones and put them in an exhibition in a British museum. Or his father’s, who was at that time, no more than a fossil clothed in weary tissues. A relic of times gone by, of an unrequited love for a woman of malevolent temperament. And when he looked at Leila’s hurt eyes, it reminded him of the expression on his mother’s face when she saw him turning away from her in disgust.