Fire in the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam Read Free Book Online Page A

condemnation, lifetime commitment.

    The only individual who had not dreamed a thing and who passed the entire plague year as if it were a single night’s dead stone rest was Mamun M. With a yawn, he returned to his idle life in Xasan Sierra’s shop, which congregated with the motley neighbourhood jobless crowd, who recounted how they had passed that long time, and some wondered whether such a plague was so bad after all if it had allowed them to see so many splendorous things and if the bad things all vanished like mist at the end. Not unlike life, Mamun M shrugged, drawing heavily on an unfiltered.
    He smoked almost as much as Xasan these days and had acquired a deep phlegmatic cough typical of men who gambol from one to another topic of the political, who make nada, talk on talk all day, justdoing adda, he would employ the Indian term if asked, before resuming talking late into night after pulling down the steel grating over the shopfront and wandering over to one of the illegal garage bars all known and being shut down onebyone daily.
    One day, while sleeping into the mid-afternoon, Hedayat, blind owl from birth because he was born from having swum clairaudient in mother waters for years while listening to her stories, learning to understand the world without seeing, who was blind enough to get his hands fruitexploded become talons from dangling cluster bombs on boughs near the schoolyard, bursts into his chamber hooting squawking chitti chitti chitti chitti chitti chitti, flapping arms and holding a black envelope that would forever break Mamun M’s life of leisure.
    You are hereby ordered to report at once to the Archives Department of the Ministry of Records and Sources, sincerely, Supervisor, reads the letter.
    For years, Mamun Ben Jaloun has been on extended leave from the Department on grounds of medical invalidity after going mad following the discovery of his father’s recorded thoughts, horrified by the implications of wandering dark hallways and corridors of the Archives, of shelving and reshelving metal receptacles of human minds, and he considers claiming sickness as continuing reason for which to forgo the injunction. After the whipping incident, neither Shukriah nor Gita complains about his idle existence, and it would be perfect for saving his life if he is capable of sensing what lies ahead; but as he watches Shukriah waddle up the stairs from the clothing store to the apartment, back down again, weighted more each day with their second child, and he feels nostalgia for his desires in those early years when, while apart, each would cross halfacity’s distance to know the other’s thoughts. He recalls trying, one day recently, to imagine her mind, shocked to find a haze like telephone static and a labyrinth of endless identical empty rooms guarding the vast arena that separated them, and his stepsgrowing heavier, his breathing more laborious with the sadness of that discovery.
    Mamun M realizes his time at Xasan Sierra’s cigarette shop and the concomitant daily routine he has repeated for several years now is nothing but a way to avoid expiating for nearly fifteen years of joblessness. He tries helping Shukriah and Gita in the shop, as he had attempted years ago right after he left the ministry, and they don’t protest his presence, in fact welcome it with warm smiles, but when he realizes he’s only tripping over feet, his own and theirs, and when a second, more strongly worded letter arrives from the Ministry of Records and Sources, he begins to worry about knocks on the door in the middle of the night.
    Nevertheless, I will always claim that when my father returned to the Archives, it was more as self-administered punishment than any other reason. Recall from all reports on the government at that time, Xamid Sultan’s hold on the government was tenuous, and while the fate of many interim leaders of our continent is to graduate to an interminable persistent rule,