Ustad Kulsoom Bi was still the major decision-maker in the Khwabgah, but she was not actively involved in its day-to-day affairs. On the mornings her arthritis troubled her she was laid out on her charpai in the courtyard, to be sunned along with the jars of lime and mango pickle, and wheat flour spread out on newspaper to rid it of weevils. When the sun got too hot she would be returned indoors to have her feet pressed and her wrinkles mustard-oiled. She dressed like a man now, in a long yellow kurta—yellow because she was a disciple of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya—and a checked sarong. She wound her thin white hair that barely covered her scalp into a tiny bun pinned to the back of her head. On some days her old friend Haji Mian, who sold cigarettes and paan down the street, would arrive with the audio cassette of their all-time favorite film, Mughal-e-Azam. They both knew every song and every line of dialogue by heart. So they sang and spoke along with the tape. They believed nobody would ever write Urdu like that again and that no actor would ever be able to match the diction and delivery of Dilip Kumar. Sometimes Ustad Kulsoom Bi would play Emperor Akbar as well as his son Prince Salim, the hero of the film, and Haji Mian would be Anarkali (Madhubala), the slave-girl Prince Salim had loved. Sometimes they would exchange roles. Their joint performance was really, more than anything else, a wake for lost glory and a dying language.
One evening Anjum was upstairs in her room putting a cold compress on the Bandicoot’s hot forehead when she heard a commotion in the courtyard—raised voices, running feet, people shouting. Her first instinct was to assume that a fire had broken out. This happened often—the huge, tangled mess of exposed electric cables that hung over the streets had a habit of spontaneously bursting into flames. She picked Zainab up and ran down the stairs. Everybody was gathered in front of the TV in Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s room, their faces lit by flickering TV light. A commercial airliner had crashed into a tall building. Half of it still protruded out, hanging in mid-air like a precarious, broken toy. In moments a second plane crashed into a second building and turned into a ball of fire. The usually garrulous residents of the Khwabgah watched in dead silence as the tall buildings buckled like pillars of sand. There was smoke and white dust everywhere. Even the dust looked different—clean and foreign. Tiny people jumped out of the tall buildings and floated down like flecks of ash.
It wasn’t a film, the Television People said. It was really happening. In America. In a city called New York.
The longest silence in the history of the Khwabgah was finally broken by a profound inquiry.
“Do they speak Urdu there?” Bismillah wanted to know.
Nobody replied.
The shock in the room seeped into Zainab and she stirred out of her fever dream only to tumble straight into another. She wasn’t familiar with television replays, so she counted ten planes crashing into ten buildings.
“Altogether ten,” she announced soberly, in her new, Tender Buds English, and then refitted her fat, fevered cheek back into its parking slot in Anjum’s neck.
The hex that had been put on Zainab had made the whole world sick. This was powerful sifli jaadu. Anjum stole a sly, sidelong glance at Saeeda to see whether she was brazenly celebrating her success or affecting innocence. The crafty bitch was pretending to be as shocked as everybody else.
—
By December Old Delhi was flooded with Afghan families fleeing warplanes that sang in their skies like unseasonal mosquitoes, and bombs that fell like steel rain. Of course the great politicos (which, in the old city, included every shopkeeper and Maulana) had their theories. For the rest, nobody really understood exactly what those poor people had to do with the tall buildings in America. But how could they? Who but Anjum knew that the Master Planner of this holocaust was neither Osama bin Laden, Terrorist, nor George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, but a far more powerful, far stealthier, force: Saeeda (née Gul Mohammed), r/o Khwabgah, Gali Dakotan, Delhi—110006, India.
In order to better understand the politics of the Duniya that the Bandicoot was growing up in, as well as to neutralize or at least pre-empt the educated Saeeda’s sifli jaadu, Mummy began to read the papers carefully and to follow the news on TV (whenever the others would let her switch away from the soaps).
—
The planes that flew into the tall buildings in America came as a boon to many in India too. The Poet–Prime Minister of the country and several of his senior ministers were members of an old organization that believed India was essentially a Hindu nation and that, just as Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic Republic, India should declare itself a Hindu one. Some of its supporters and ideologues openly admired Hitler and compared the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. Now, suddenly, as hostility towards Muslims grew, it began to seem to the Organization that the whole world was on its side. The Poet–Prime Minister made a lisping speech, eloquent, except for long, exasperating pauses when he lost the thread of his argument, which was quite often. He was an old man, but had a young man’s way of tossing his head when he spoke, like the Bombay film stars of the 1960s. “The Mussalman, he doesn’t like the Other,” he said poetically in Hindi, and paused for a long time, even by his own standards. “His Faith he wants to spread through Terror.” He had made this couplet up on the spot, and was exceedingly pleased with himself. Each time he said Muslim or Mussalman his lisp sounded as endearing as a young child’s. In the new dispensation he was considered to be a moderate. He warned that what had happened in America could easily happen in India and that it was time for the government to pass a new anti-terrorism law as a safety precaution.
Every day Anjum, new to the news, watched TV reports about bomb blasts and terrorist attacks that suddenly proliferated like malaria. The Urdu papers carried stories of young Muslim boys being killed in what the police called “encounters,” or being caught red-handed in the act of planning terrorist strikes and arrested. A new law was passed which allowed suspects to be detained without trial for months. In no time at all the prisons were full of young Muslim men. Anjum thanked the Almighty that Zainab was a girl. It was so much safer.