House of Stars Read online

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

  I say, ‘Kabir.’

  ‘Ah. And you are Hindu or Muslim?’

  My tongue keeps going without any instructions from my brain. ‘My name is Kabir. I was born in an orphanage. I have no idea what I am.’

  That catches the attention of the leader in the black headband. He walks over. ‘Really? We have ourselves a smart-ass. I could pull your pants down and check.’

  I say nothing. He walks around me, inspecting me. I keep my head down. Don’t look. Do not catch his eye.

  ‘I think I should just shoot him. Let God sort him out.’

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  He gestures with the gun he is holding. ‘Get on your knees,’ he says.

  I do as he says, knowing that I’ve been really stupid. I should have just given them my name. But I left that name behind some time ago. I don’t want to be that person any more. I’ve run away from that person. I’ve travelled more than a thousand kilometres to get away.

  He puts the gun to my head, but his tone is all nice and friendly. ‘Kabir, give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot you. Mother waiting at home? Little sister who loves you?’

  I can’t think of a thing. ‘I’m an orphan,’ I mutter.

  The grey-haired man speaks up. ‘No one is an orphan. We are all God’s children. The question is: which God?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I never cared enough to make a choice.’

  ‘All right then.’ The gun is cold against my temple. ‘This would be a good time to make a choice.’

  I whisper frantically so only he can hear, ‘I haven’t even lived!’

  He leans forward to ask softly, ‘Never had a girl?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never been kissed?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to die before being kissed.’

  The gun stays steady on my temple. Then it begins to shake. Black Headband is laughing. ‘I doubt you’re going to get lucky in our current situation,’ he says.

  I sense the glance that goes between him and the grey-haired man. Then Black Headband shrugs and lowers the gun. The grey-haired man speaks up. ‘Go. Any group. Make the choice you have not made so far.’

  I get off my knees to walk back, and stumble and nearly fall. Relief has turned my knees to jelly. I try to walk calmly. I know they are all watching to see which group I will choose.

  I have a promise to keep. There is no real choice for me. I walk over to the group that holds her. I sit down with the non-Muslims.

  All those with Muslim names head in a group for the exit, their hands on their heads. The shutters are opened 2 feet high. They have to crawl out.

  If I had given the right name, I would be on my hands and knees right now heading for freedom. But promises chain you with a bond that even a bullet can’t break. The letter rustles against my heart. I lean back and look for her.

  She is sitting on the ground, her face hidden by her long hair. She does not look up.

  Diya

  My name? I can’t tell them my name. I just make up another surname. The first thing that comes into my head. Diya Shourie. I realize I have my college ID in my bag. I take it out and shove it up the leg of my churidar. That’s all I can think of on the spur of the moment.

  They take our mobiles and our bags next. Make us empty our pockets. One well-dressed lady says, ‘I simply cannot let you have my handbag. It’s brand new and very expensive.’

  A man snatches it from her, flings it on the ground, and stamps on it twice. ‘Now it isn’t,’ he says. After that, everyone hurries to hand over whatever they’re asked for.

  We sit quietly on the floor, wondering what comes next. We are a mixed lot of odds and ends. There are several salespeople from the shops. A few cleaners. Several security guards. The early-morning shoppers who have ended up among the prisoners seem to be mostly women. There’s one old and cranky-looking man. Everyone is keeping their heads down.

  Except this old lady. She stands up and says, ‘Excuse me!’ all crisp and clear. The leader doesn’t look around. ‘I want to know what is going on. Who are you people?’

  The leader continues to ignore her. But the old lady isn’t the kind to take that lying down. ‘I’m talking to you, young man,’ she says.

  The leader turns around and kicks her in the stomach. It’s so unexpected and so brutal that several people scream. The old lady doubles over without saying a word. She grabs her stomach and stuff starts leaking through the buttons of her kurta. I can’t see what it is, but it isn’t blood. She lies on the ground, the breath knocked out of her, white in the face.

  The leader reaches down and rips her kurta open. Packets begin to fall out. There is dal and rice and even a box of tea leaves. It is dal that is bleeding out of her. She is a shoplifter.

  I think the terrorist will kill her. Instead, he starts laughing. ‘So sorry to interrupt your shopping,’ he says. ‘Anyone else have any questions?’

  Nobody says a word. The only sound is that of the old lady wheezing as she struggles to get her breath back.

  Sitting right next to me is this little kid, about six years old. He’s terrifically excited. ‘Who are they, Ma? Why do they have guns? Are they the bad guys? Who are they going to shoot?’

  His mother is struggling with the small toddler she holds in her arms. The toddler is shrieking and crying, and she can’t get him to shut up. She keeps trying to get the older boy to be quiet and sit still, but he jumps up for a better look.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask. ‘Don’t let him cry. They won’t like it.’

  ‘My baby is hungry,’ she says desperately.

  The leader yells without even looking in our direction. ‘Shut that child up or I will do it with a bullet.’

  The mother tries to put her hand over the kid’s mouth. He only screams louder and starts kicking. I take my dupatta and begin fanning him. The little boy whines and whimpers and slowly winds down into silence. We can all breathe again.

  ‘Are the police going to come?’ asks her older son. ‘Are they all going to shoot each other? What’s going to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ snaps the harassed mother. ‘Nobody knows.’

  Surely the police know what’s going on by now. Surely somebody is doing something.

  Kabir

  I find myself sitting next to this fat boy. He’s in the process of having a complete meltdown. He keeps muttering to himself. Then he turns to me and says, ‘I can’t die! If I die, my mother will clean my cupboard and find all the porn magazines I’ve hidden. I can’t die.’

  This is so unexpected that I start laughing. I just can’t help it.

  He is seriously upset, ‘This is such a waste, dude! I’ve been on a diet for a month. If I knew I was going to die, I would have eaten everything. I would have really lived, you know what I mean?’

  He doesn’t need any encouragement from me to go on talking. ‘I can’t die, man! I’ve never had a girl. I don’t even know if I’m gay or straight.’

  I’m not ready to die either. And I’m just as badly off in the girl department. But I’m sure I’m straight. The only thing is, I don’t have any major regrets. At least I didn’t until this morning. Until I saw her.

  Then, this little old lady stands up and begins asking questions. The leader wearing the black headband suddenly turns around and kicks her. All kinds of things start falling out of the old lady’s clothes. Turns out she’s a shoplifter. She picked a bad day to be stealing, I guess. We all sit there listening to her struggling to breathe. No one tries to help.

  ‘That guy is really badass,’ says the fat boy, terror in his voice.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘The really badass guy is that one.’ I indicate the grey-haired man who had spoken quietly and politely to all of us. He radiates such authority that I have no doubt who the real power and the real badass in the group is. He is handling the whole operation without raising his voice once. Leaving the violence to the guy with the headband. As if he’s above and be
yond fighting, and belongs in a whole other zone of scary.

  ‘That guy?’ says the fat boy. ‘What I can’t understand is why he looks familiar.’ I’m wondering the same thing.

  The old man who had given his name as Mahendra Shyam Bhonsle gives a sudden snort. ‘Young people. Ignorant! Don’t you read? Don’t you know anything? He was in the headlines yesterday.’

  I haven’t seen a newspaper in a month, but the fat boy has. ‘It’s that guy!’ he exclaims. ‘The one who planted the bombs in the trains. When so many people died.’

  ‘Yesterday the court sentenced him to death,’ says Mr Bhonsle. ‘Today they were shifting him out to Yerawada jail. His name is Salim Mukhtar.’

  Salim Mukhtar. Shit. If I had really managed to choose a God, I would have prayed. The bombs in the trains are only one of the long litany of things he’s done, in a career marked with death and violence. He’s evaded the police and stayed at the top of the Most Wanted list for over a decade. They had caught him by sheer accident. A regular raid that ended with the trapping of a very big fish. And they wasted no time delivering a death sentence via a fast-track court.

  Salim is kneeling in a quiet corner, saying a quick prayer. When he finishes, he is handed a mobile phone. Every eye is on him. All the hostages seem to have figured out who he is. A little ripple of relief runs through the room as he goes into the next corridor. A private phone call. I wonder who he is calling.

  The terrorists take up spots around the room. There seems to be nothing to do except wait.

  I turn to the fat boy, who is now praying.

  ‘So do you think we’ll get a discount if we shop now?’ I say.

  He looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘Did you just make a joke?!’

  I nod. He is not amused. ‘Seriously, man, some death-row crazy is going to shoot us in the head and you’re making jokes.’

  ‘I think I’d like to die laughing,’ I say. He doesn’t find that funny either. He edges away from me. That takes him closer to the old man muttering angrily to himself. Mr Bhonsle is a very angry old man.

  Five minutes later, the boy leans towards me and whispers, ‘I don’t know what the old man’s problem is, but he’s seriously pissed off.’

  ‘We’re being held hostage by terrorists,’ I say. ‘I can understand him being pissed off.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ he says. ‘I mean, I didn’t even come in here to buy anything. I just wanted to look at some jeans. A few sizes smaller, you know, for when I came off my diet. Just looking. What were you doing?’

  ‘Just looking,’ I say. Looking at the most beautiful girl that I have ever seen. Who just happens to be my best friend’s girl.

  Mr Bhonsle joins the conversation in a burst of indignation. ‘This is all wrong,’ he says. ‘I only came in here to buy a few envelopes. Today’s the day I retire. I knew all the staff had got together to organize a lunch. They were going to give me a clock. They give everybody a clock.’ He looks really upset. ‘All I came in here for was some envelopes to put thank-you notes in. This is really irregular.’

  I try to hide a grin. Irregular. I would call it a bloody disaster. The fat boy rolls his eyes. He looks at me and tries to smile. ‘Hey, man, my name is Harish,’ he says.

  ‘My name is Kabir.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says. ‘We all heard. Is it really Kabir?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘You were pretty brave.’ Harish shrugs. ‘I’m not brave. And I don’t want to die.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘Those porn magazines.’

  This time he really smiles. It’s a small, scared smile, but it’s a smile.

  Salim comes back into the room. He looks at the group of frightened people huddled on the floor. Some are praying. Some are crying. He laughs. ‘Do not be afraid. We will not harm you. You are our passports to get out of here.’

  He seems exuberant. ‘Everybody up,’ he says. ‘We are going to see ourselves on TV.’

  Diya

  We sit there on the floor for a long time, trying our best to be invisible. Some people are crying. There is a continuous soft murmur of people praying to their gods, pleading for help. The old lady has got her breath back and is sitting quietly in a corner. We are all waiting to know what’s going to happen to us.

  Then the leader comes back in and tells us to move.

  We are all herded into the electronics department. Dozens of television screens are mounted from floor to ceiling. They are all tuned to the same thing: breaking news. Every channel is covering the terrorist attack on the police convoy that had been taking Salim Mukhtar to Yerawada. That’s the name of the grey-haired man. I realize I know who he is. I listen with a sinking heart.

  ‘An accident was engineered to block traffic while the rescue was carried out. Terrorists then ambushed the van that carried Mukhtar and managed to free him. However, they were unable to get away as a roadroller engaged in road work had been left parked, so that it blocked a side road.’

  There is blurry footage from a mobile phone that shows a traffic jam and men with guns running between cars. There is the sound of gunfire. Then shots of a police van with the door gaping open. A roadroller sits squat in the middle of the road.

  The presenter has a sombre expression as she says, ‘The terrorists are now inside Luxore Mall. Police have cordoned off the area. It is currently unclear how many hostages are being held. There are unconfirmed reports of more casualties inside the mall.’ The reportage switches to shots of the outside of the mall. Crowds are milling around. Police are struggling to control them. A policeman tries to make a statement while the press mobs and jostles him.

  Salim watches it all, smiling. There he is, blown up in colour on every screen. The TV shows a gaunt, intense-looking man scowling at the camera. The image has little resemblance to the man who stands calmly beside us. The years have not been kind to Salim. He has spent the last three in a prison, waiting for a death sentence.

  He turns the sound off. The presenter continues to mouth silently on the screens behind him as he turns to face us.

  ‘As the lady told you—you are hostages. A good hostage is one who stays alive. I have more than enough to spare. So here are the rules.’ He looked around at the numb people in front of him. ‘There is only one rule. You will not be a hero. In real life, heroes die.’

  No one can take their eyes off him. ‘You will not try to escape. You will not try to do anything foolish. You will not move at all until you are told to. You will shut up. You will stay in one place. You will do what you are told.’ He smiles. ‘Only then you might stay alive.’

  Nobody moves. Nobody says anything. Nobody tries to be a hero. ‘We are going to make this easy for everyone,’ Salim says. ‘We have some demands. If the government meets them, you go free.’

  A little murmur runs through the hostages. He makes it sound so simple. ‘I know what you have been told. That we are dangerous, violent people. We are not. We are people with a wound. It pains us deeply, and no one will hear our pain. All we want is for them to listen to us.’

  I guess it’s simple irony that, at exactly that moment, the dozens of screens flash gory images of mangled bodies scattered among the wreckage of a train.

  ‘We are not terrorists. We seek healing. We seek justice.’

  Kabir

  Freedom fighter. Seeker of justice. Men with guns in their hands seem to find an awful lot of fancy phrases to justify what they are going to do. Take away all the talk, and ‘man with gun’ equals ‘killer’. But he obviously doesn’t see it that way.

  ‘Justice,’ says Salim Mukhtar. ‘That is all we ever demanded. Justice for the great injustices done to my people. Our place of worship was desecrated. It was destroyed.’

  I can hear the sound of someone weeping quietly, trying hard to stifle their sobs. Salim’s tone changes. He slips into the ranting voice that comes easily to those who whip up crowds or convince people to die for a cause. ‘We asked for justice. Was it given to us?’
r />   He walks up and down in front of the screens, searching for faces in the crowd in front of him. The facade of the quiet, polite man peels away. There is an intense glint in his eyes. Fervour in his voice.

  ‘Every day, my brothers are harassed. Jailed. Accused. Killed in encounters. What do you do when you get no justice? You make your own. I decided to stand up. I made my own justice.’

  Sure. What he really makes is bombs. What he did was stick a couple of bombs in a local train in Mumbai. Killed more than fifty people.

  ‘They caught me, and I said to them—an eye for an eye. Is that not justice? IS THAT NOT JUSTICE?’ He yells the last sentence, and the sound echoes in the large empty spaces of the mall.

  As if anyone in our sorry bunch is going to stand up and argue with him. But no, it isn’t justice. What had those people in the train ever done to him? They were just going home. Thinking about paying their rent. Worrying that their kid wasn’t studying hard enough. Wondering if there was going to be water in their houses when they got back. Just ordinary people. Even his Muslim brothers were among the people killed in the train blasts. The same brothers he claimed to be standing up for. Terrorists are random killers. Period.

  ‘They gave me a noose around my neck. To be hanged by the neck until dead.’ He looks around at his captive audience. ‘Well, I’m not dead yet. And I have my own idea of justice. All of you will learn what it is.’

  I don’t know if he is expecting applause. He gets a terrified silence.

  He leans forward to look intensely at us. ‘You be good hostages. I will pass a good sentence.’

  Speech over, they count us. ‘Thirty-six,’ says one of the men. There are four of them, not counting Mr Death Sentence. Two more men come in, dragging a man in a security uniform. All that stands between us and the outside world are six terrorists and the man they have freed. Salim Mukhtar, the great Seeker of Justice, Bomb-maker, Killer of Random People.

  The security man has been shot in the stomach and is covered in blood. They put him on the floor. He keeps moaning and moaning.