Ashton is about to launch into a rejoinder, a scarlet blotch stands out on his cheeks and his mouth gapes, but at that moment there is a clatter at the door. It opens and in comes Mahmoud and Rashida and an older woman, carrying trays of steaming naan bread and cans of tea.
Amin claps his hands, beaming. “Thank God! It is breakfast at last. I tell you, my doctor has told me these many years, ‘Amin, you must drop ten kilos,’ although I am almost sure he did not mean decapitation. If we survive this he will be most pleased.”
Everyone except Manjit Nara and Sonia gathers around the trays, sits, and starts eating and drinking, as at a school picnic. Nara sits carefully on the edge of Sonia’s charpoy and says, “I will bring you your breakfast and we will chat, yes?”
He does so. The naan is soaked in clarified butter and is warm, greasy, and delicious. The tea is thick, sweet, milky.
“You have a different look,” he says. “At first I thought it was mere shock after what has been done to you, but now I don’t believe so.”
“No. They shut me in a dark stable and I thought I was going to die. Then I had a certain experience. It’s hard to explain. I did spiritual exercises that I had been taught long ago, in despair, you understand, and it was as if I dissolved, and what was left didn’t care about the pain and the fear. It was almost amusing. And now, sitting here, eating bread, talking about professional subjects, I feel I’m being drawn back into the world, and something in me doesn’t want to return. Does that make any sense?”
“Indeed it does. Some people are broken by suffering and others transcend it and become more than they were before. The Christian martyrs are examples, but we also see it in daily life, especially in places like India, where we are among the world leaders in suffering. If there were an Olympics in suffering, India would take all the gold.” He laughs nervously. “I must say, although it shames me, that I am glad we are to be chosen for death at random.”
“Are you? Why is that?”
“Because otherwise I would have been the first, idolator that I am, and representative of the most hated nation.”
“After the United States.”
He smiled at that and coughed politely. “Yes, but al-Faran is a Kashmiri insurgent organization. Rest assured, they would have picked me. And I have been trying to prepare myself for death, to meet it with dignity, but I find I cannot. My insides turn to water when I think of the moment, having my head cut off. When they hold up the severed head, will there still be thoughts in it, even for a few seconds? What horror to imagine it!”
Sonia says, “The self slays not, neither is it slain.”
“Yes, but I find the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita is of little comfort to me now, knowing it is all a dream of Vishnu and I will be reborn, and so on. I have been poisoned by my education as a modern physician. The Brahmins are perhaps wise to avoid contact with the dead. Corpses are so undeniably real, it is hard to have lofty thoughts around corpses.”
He shuddered and drank the rest of his tea greedily, as if it were an elixir of amnesia.
“But I didn’t seek a private conversation with you only to expose my pathetic cowardice. I ask you to observe Mr. Ashton, over my right shoulder.”
Sonia looks. Ashton has brought breakfast loaves and cups to where the Cosgroves are sitting. Annette seems to be urging her husband to eat but he has turned his face away from her. His shoulders are shaking. Ashton is sitting next to her, his hand lightly on her shoulder.
“See? A comforting gesture, perhaps, or something more? Mr. A is a bit of a ladies’ man, yes? And the beautiful Mrs. Cosgrove may require a strong man to lean on in this time of trouble, with her husband having completely collapsed. I tell you, it was a surprise to me, this collapse, one would have thought that Cosgrove, with all of his oft-told adventures and dangers escaped, would have been the last to do so, but see, again, one can never tell.”
“Perhaps he exaggerated,” she suggests. “Perhaps the angel has never come quite this close.”
“The angel! That is good. Or maybe it is being a prisoner, having no control of one’s fate. It is the case that people who do all sorts of dangerous things on their own are terrified to fly in airplanes, and this may be an allied syndrome. And neither is Mr. A what he seems.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, just persistent rumors among the community of subcontinental scholars. That Mr. Ashton has, let us say, official connections. That he is not unknown to MI-6.”
“You think he’s a spook?”
“Is that what you call them? Yes, a spook.”
“Well, they said that about me too, you know,” says Sonia. “After my trip through Soviet Central Asia. Perhaps we’re all spooks, including Father Shea.”
“Yes, but not the Cosgroves. Annette is as clear as water and Porter is a wreck.”
“True, but perhaps that’s part of their act. And whatever the actual case is, I suggest it would be better not to descend into that sort of paranoia. But now, Manjit, I believe Rashida would like to talk to me privately, or at least as privately as these conditions allow. Thank you for breakfast.”
With a shrug and a smile Nara goes off, and Rashida, who has been hovering for some minutes, swoops in to sit at the edge of the pallet.
“So, Rashida, any more dreams?”
“No, but my father has had one and he will come to you tonight.”
“How will he do that?”
“Tonight, Mahmoud will take you to an empty room. He has had a dream too, as you foretold him, and wants to know its meaning. Soon you will die and there are many who wish to have their dreams told before you are dead. They have given money to Mahmoud and so it will be done.”
It is done. In the night Mahmoud slips into the prison room, light-footed for such a large man, awakens Sonia, and leads her to an empty room of the hujra. It is dark except for starlight coming through a window and silent except for the sound of the diesel generator and a fainter high-pitched grinding noise, like the squeal of a rusty gate that never closes.
Sonia feels the faint breeze of an opening door on her cheek and then the loom of another person in the room. In a low voice he announces himself as Baryal Rostai, the father of Rashida.
“I have had a dream,” he says and tells it, with many halts. Sonia considers it for a while, then speaks. “The well you fell into is the entrance to Hell; the rope you held on to is the Holy Qu’ran, that frees men from everlasting torment. As we read in the sura al-Imran, Hold firmly to the rope of God and do not become divided. This much is easy. But then you reached the top of the well and there was an angel there who handed you a string of pearls and pointed to the right side. The pearl indicates a young man, for it is written in the sura al-Insaan, There will be young men of perpetual youth serving them; if you saw the youths you would think they were scattered pearls. The right side indicates an escape from harm, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, interpreted it in a dream of his disciple, Ibn Umar. This is what it means. As you walk from this village there is a path that leads to the right and to another village. In this village there is a young man. To him you must marry your daughter.”
“But I have already promised my daughter to Khaliq Sumro.”
“I cannot help that. You have dreamed what you have dreamed. God in His mercy has given you this warning, and you are free to disregard it.”
Baryal waits but she says nothing more and will not answer his questions. He leaves and before long there is another man in the room. Sonia interprets his dream according to the book of Muhammed ibn Sirin, who compiled an account by the Companion Abu Huraira of the dream interpretations of the Apostle of God. And then there is another and another, and this one is Idris Ghulam.