Birds, Chariot, Sea, Flower, Nothingness

“The striped birds are pulling up the black chariot with all their might. They know if they can throw the chariot in the sea, they will get that magical pink flower they have been looking for so long. There is a narrowest of tunnels inside that flower that goes to the origin of the world, to that nothingness from which we all have sprung,” the stout man, with a chequered muffler wrapped around his head, whispered into the red receiver. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was eavesdropping on him. The street on the other side of the transparent glass of the phone booth was still desolate. He let out a big breath.

But little did he know that there were people listening in on the other end of the line.

There were three people who were listening to the message.

The first one, Badrinath, was the man who was waiting to listen. The tall Indian informer had been waiting since last month. It was how he earned his food. The cold, unrelenting mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where he otherwise lived as a shepherd, listened along.

The second was the man who was hoping to listen. An old Pakistani spy, Badr Niazi, had been ordered to go to the mountains and gather details of all the informers, and this call was his chance to win back his promotion, which had been held for over five years now. The seniors didn’t like the way he ogled at things; especially at the bodies of men and women alike. 

The third was a girl, Bela Naik, who happened to listen in because she had ended up hacking the wrong grid. She was a coder by occupation and a hacker by obsession.

She had been led to this message by an ache which remained buried inside her most of the times, but stumbled out of her fingers at the most unforgiving of times and took her down to the blind alleys of dark web.

There, she searched for her brother, who went to play on the street one June but never came back. It had happened 17 years ago. But she still missed him and still floundered from one clue to another, all the while caressing the worn-out gaming console he had left behind.

“It is mine,” he would screech every time she tried to touch it. Now the console waited for the hurried touch of his fingers. 

He had been playing with his friends in the street that day and she was mopping the rooms when a huge commotion rose in the street. ‘Kidnappers, kidnappers!’ People were heard yelling in the street, but before anybody could do anything, the kidnappers had taken him away. The scene still loomed in her consciousness over and over again.

All of them decoded the message in their own ways.

Badrinath understood it to be another try by the Pakistani spies to find the Indian nuclear code. The striped birds were little known Pakistani spies. The black chariot was the talkative, amorous nuclear scientist. The sea was the hotel where the scientist was to be taken and the pink flower was the nuclear code. The nothingness they yearned for was the absolute annihilation of India, its oblivion from the maps and minds of the world — the solemn oath of the partition.  

Badr Niazi interpreted it to be a renewed try by India to create a new country on the map of the world, Baluchistan. The striped birds were little assassins they had hired. The black chariot was the man who was the last hope between Baluchistan and Pakistan. The sea was the country where this man was to be given asylum, and the pink flower was the subsequent independence of Baluchistan. The nothingness they desired for was the undoing of the partition and of Pakistan bit by bit, to un-name the places and undo the histories. 

For Bela, it all was a mystery. 

For a moment, she thought all this was happening in a parallel world, and she wished to leave her laptop and her earpiece behind and fly off to this word of birds and chariots. But soon she understood that it was a puzzle to be solved.

She slammed her laptop shut, put the earpiece in her pocket, and took out a cigarette from her laptop bag. She went to the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and sat down for a smoke. 

“Birds? Huh?” The words came out of her mouth along with the first ring of the smoke, but nothing made sense. How can I even start interpreting it when I don’t even have a clue — she wondered. She was thinking of calling her friend when her phone rang. 

“Hello Janab, who are you?” The voice on the other felt as if the man had climbed down a deep well and had taken the phone along. There was a hollow echo in it.

“You tell me. You are the one who called.” She thought it was nothing but one of those boring sales calls.

“Madam, tell me now. Don’t play any games. Otherwise, I will be there in five minutes.” 

The voice scared her. She could guess it was about the bird conversation, but still played dumb.

“I don’t know what are you talking about.” She threw the cigarette butt into the flush, pressed the phone against her ear by raising her shoulder, and started washing her hands. The voice on the other end became even sterner. 

“Speak now or regret forever.” The voice kept threatening.

Not only did she cut the phone but also switched it off. Only after dinner, she found some courage to switch it back. The moment the network appeared, many threatening messages started arriving and started piling themselves on top of each other.

The messages were arriving from two unknown numbers and were distinct. While one sender seemed someone who knew Marathi as well as Hindi as his abuses reeked of the choicest words of both the languages, the second was from an Urdu speaker and perhaps the same man who had called her in the morning. His every message was either a pleading starting with Janab or a threat to life. 

Her approximations became certainties when two men called back-to-back and asked for the same question in their respective dictions. 

“Who are you and why did you eavesdrop on the conversation today?” they asked. One man even sounded oddly familiar, as if she knew him from some earlier birth.

She again switched off the phone but didn’t stop at that and instead broke the sim card into many pieces and threw it down the window of her apartment. As the voices of two disparaging men rambled about in her head, she started to fear for her life. In that moment, she swore neither to hack nor to find her brother again.

But it wasn’t meant to be. 

The unbearable ache, along with curiosity, came chasing like two well-bred dogs yearning to be caressed. Soon, she ended up switching on her laptop and jotting down her keywords from that conversation. 

1. Striped Birds

2. Black Chariot

3. Sea

4. Pink Flower

5. Nothingness

The secret was impossible to know, but to her, it felt only 5 clues away. She felt drawn towards it, and in no time, even started obsessing about it. She started ignoring everything, including her work.

She spent all her time in incognito mode and going in and out of those hacker nodes until she stumbled upon a blog by xxbn2836 who promised to reveal a thing or two on the dark messenger number 15 of the dark web on Tuesday night. 

“All the clues lead from and to Bachabazi,” xxbn2836 typed almost reluctantly and then logged out. Bela’s heart stopped. Somehow, to her, the whole thing felt personal. She couldn’t sleep that night and kept getting in and out of the dark web and kept reading an article here and kept watching a video there and tried wrapping her head about the only clue she had. The whole thing unraveled itself only when xxbn2836 logged into the dark messenger number 15 two days later and agreed to reveal everything.

“Understand this, the striped birds were the kidnappers spread to all parts of Asia, and the black chariot was the young boys,” he typed in such a hurry that Bela’s reading speed couldn’t match with his typing speed. “The sea was Afghanistan, where all these children were to be brought for Bachabazi. The pink flower was their virginity. The nothingness was the nothingness on the other side of the orgasm.”

She read it a line at a time by moving her finger on the screen of her laptop as if feeling the words with her skin and giving additional proof to her mind so that it could believe what was in front of it.

“But isn’t knowing so dangerous? Should I be worried” she typed in hurry. In her ears rang the voice threatening to find her.

“I don’t know what you should do. But for me, once I lost my son to it, I stopped thinking what was dangerous and what was not,” he said, and logged out. The green circle next to his username turned grey.

On one hand, something warmed in her. On the other, she felt she was breaking up. She had solved one mystery holding up her life, but she also felt entangled in another one, in an older one. 

“Is my brother somewhere in Afghanistan, too? Or is he dead?” The thoughts typed themselves inside her forehead. “Was he tortured like this too? What does he look like now?” 

She crawled to the living room, plopped down on the heap of the pillows spread over the sofa, put her legs on the table, and took out the Marlboro. She couldn’t care less about soiling the table. She picked up the gaming console from the table and held it near her heart. Even the console felt warm and cold at the same time.

Sitting thousands and thousands of kilometres away, with his back propped against the wall of the house and his feet stretched out on a maroon rug, Badrinath stared out of the window. The snowflakes were falling slowly as if the universe had been put on freeze. The telephone line had already gone dead, and there was nothing else he could do but wait for the weather to break.

He placed the cigarette between his lips, lighted it with a wet matchstick, and drew a big puff, and then let out a big sigh. The past came gushing out of the recesses of his heart to fulfil the emptiness of the moment. Tiny unwept tears started filling up his eyes.

That hot June afternoon and that street from which was picked up became as vivid as the falling snowflakes.

“Aai! Aai!” He had screamed then, and in some ways, he was still screaming. 

Once the kidnapper had put him in that giant caravan, his face and body had been blackened along with those of many other children. He couldn’t recognise himself, for they all looked similar. Then the caravan drove off, and they were all dumped from one dark hole to another and then to another until they had arrived here. 

Once in the mountains, his life became all about pleasing men. From middle aged to old, from Irani to Baloch to Pashtun, they passed him to every man willing to pay for his naked skin.

“Marhaba, Marhaba,” they said, and pounced on his little flesh.

It went on for ten to twelve years till his warm pink flesh started hardening and men stopped desiring for him. 

“Too old, too roughed up.” The verdict was frequent and instant. “We want someone more tender.”

Once rejections piled up, they declared him useless and let him go as if he could just go back to his earlier life and consider this all as nothing but a strange interlude.

“Go back? What would I even say? That I spent my years being a boy-whore?” he said to them and never went back. Instead, he started doing odd jobs — cleaning trucks, making naan, pulling carts — until a mysterious man offered him to pay a decent amount for doing something simple. 

“That is it? Just keep my ears and eyes open?” The disbelief at what he was hearing made his eyes small and his face long. “And answer your telephone call once a month?”

“Yes, that’s it.” The man was sure like all men with authority are.

“And for that, you will pay me what I earn in a year?” He shook his head from ear to ear.

“Yes, that is my promise.” The man extended his hand and he extended his hand in return and became an informer.

Now, in this moment of great catharsis, he recalled all those details. He thought of his sister. He wondered what she looked like now and what she was doing in this very moment. 

His thoughts were interrupted by a simultaneous knock and kick on the door. It was as if the visitor couldn’t decide whether to be courteous or to be curt. By the time he unfolded his legs and stood up, the rough looking man had already swung open the door with his kicks and was already standing in his courtyard, taking a clear aim at his head.

It was Badr Niazi. 

He had intercepted the call and had been trying to find the informer for many days and now was standing in front of him, ready to shoot him.

“Hands up, you bastard,” he said, touching his upper lip with his tongue. With the crook of his finger pressed hard against the cold trigger, he stared at the tall informer like a lion staring at its prey.

But the moment Badrinath’s eyes recognised the face in front of him, the strength started deserting him. His stare grew weak, his hands trembled a little, and his heart pounded.

“It is him. Without a doubt, it is him.” The voice in his head couldn’t be clearer.

Badr Niazi was indeed him. 

It was long before he became a spy in the Pakistani army. In those days, he used to work with a kidnapping cartel and he was one of the first boys he had kidnapped from India to Afghanistan. It was a hot June afternoon, and the boy was playing marbles when he had bent down and placed one hand on the mouth of the boy and one around his legs. The boy flapped his legs hard, but he kept his hands firm and his legs nimble. By the time he reached the caravan, the boy pissed on his shirt.

“Harami pilla,” he said and threw him onto the back of the caravan where many frightened boys sat waiting on their haunches. Once they reached Afghanistan with a truck full of boys, the leader praised him in front of everyone.

“He is your first abduction, and let him be your first gift as well.” The leader gave the boy’s little hand in his hands. “Enjoy him.”

Badr deflowered the little boy, but for years to come, the innocence of his face kept haunting him and his hollow-scared eyes kept waking him up in the middle of nights. Now that little boy had turned into a grown man. Now the little boy was full of rage. Now the little boy wanted to swallow him — dead or alive, and there was no way his old body or revolver could outrun or outgun the little boy. 

Badr had to die. Badri killed him swiftly and then made the phone call. 

“The kidnapper and the spy both are dead,” he told the hot line.