The Parapet

He saw the woman from a distance, leaning against the parapet at the point where the wall of the fort joined the cliff and fell away in a vertical swoop to the valley far below. She didn’t look out of place among the slow flow of tourists, and if she hadn’t been standing so still and looking down over the edge he would probably not have noticed her at all.

For a moment he stood where he was, studying her, trying to decide whether he was right. Perhaps she was just another tourist, among all the others who had come up this long way from the city. But she was too still, for too long, and standing just at that point, where the wall and the cliff were one.

Slowly, casually, he walked along the parapet until he was standing near her – not too close, not close enough to touch, but near. She didn’t look at him at all, didn’t even seem to know he was there. She was younger than he’d first thought, and taller, in her flat sandals almost as tall as he was. Her hair fell over her face and screened her features from view.

He leaned against the parapet, watching her from the corner of his eye. Her blue dress – not fashionable among the usual tourist attire of jeans and Bermudas, T shirts and halter tops – fell like shimmering water over her thin shoulders, catching the sun. Her long fingers played over the rough stone of the parapet, blind things fumbling for something. Perhaps it was hope, or happiness.

“Nice view,” he said at last, because it seemed that she’d stand there forever, hunched over the parapet wall.

Slowly, she turned her head to look at him. She wasn’t beautiful. With her thin, triangular face and wide mouth, she wasn’t even pretty. But her big eyes might have been lovely, if only they’d had any expression in them but dumb misery.

“Yes,” she said without any inflection. “Nice view.”

He moved slightly closer to her, and stood looking down at the valley. Down there, he could just see the sheds where the tourist buses disgorged their occupants, who then hired donkeys or camels for the ride up to the fort. A line of donkeys made a crawling row of dots moving slowly up the trail. He pointed to them.

“Uncomfortable beasts, aren’t they?”

She glanced at them without interest. “Yes.”

“You’d think they’d be more like horses, or ponies, but they aren’t. I never got the hang of riding one. Do you like horses?”

“No, not particularly. Why, do you think all women like horses?”

He grinned. “No, but so many do. You come across all the girls and horses stories.”

She smiled slightly, a slight twitch of her lips. “There are all kinds of pop psychologists claiming it’s a sexual thing. The horse is, you know, between the girl’s legs, so it’s obviously a symbol of...” She gestured in the air. “You know.”

 “Really. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” He gestured at the smudge of haze on the dun horizon. “So, did you come up from the city?”

“Yes, we...” she caught herself. “I, I mean. I’m putting up at a hotel there.”

“Which hotel?”

“Ave Caesar, over on –“ she paused. “That’s not right, is it? It’s Ave Maria, of course, not Ave Caesar. Hotel Ave Maria.”

“Staying long?”

“No.” The monosyllabic word sounded as though it were cut off with a knife. She stirred restlessly, her long fingers crawling across the stone. “If you don’t mind –“

“Yes?”

“Nothing.” She leaned down over the parapet again, her hair screening her face. “Forget it.”

He leaned over, beside her. “Steep drop, isn’t it? It’s a lovely defensive position here. No enemy could get up to this part of the fort. So they didn’t really need any cannon emplacements and firing ports here. Pity forts have gone the way of the dodo.”

“You like military architecture?”

“Of course,” he replied. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t like anything military.”

“Fair enough. It’s a great fort though. But I wonder how they managed to build it like that, right flush with the cliff edge. I couldn’t have done it, I’m telling you. I get scared of heights.”

“They probably used workers who are accustomed to that kind of thing. Like the ones who, you know, build skyscrapers and things.” The woman turned to look at him again, and tucked her hair behind one ear with an unconscious gesture. “Have you been here before?”

“No,” he lied. “First time. I read a guide book though.”

“Ah.” She fished in her shoulder bag and brought out a book. “Like this one?”

He took it from her and flipped through it. Her name was on the inside of the front cover. “Mirabelle? I had a cousin named Mirabelle. Once.”

“What happened to her?”

He shrugged and gave the book back. “She died...killed herself, as a matter of fact.”

Her wide mouth opened, closed again. “Oh,” she said at last.

“She jumped from a building,” he said. “I still wish I’d known...what she was going through. I feel guilty that I didn’t know. I’d have tried to save her.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” She touched him, then, her long fingers on his arm. “She chose her own path. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yeah, but...” He shook his head. “It was a while ago, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

She leaned slightly towards him, her eyes steady on his face. “All right,” she said. “I’m not going to do it. Not today, anyway.”

 “Do what?”

“You know what. That’s what you’ve been trying to stop me from doing, isn’t that so? Is that a regular thing you do, absolve your guilt by stopping women from repeating what your cousin did?”

“Perhaps. No. I don’t think so. I haven’t done this with any other woman but you.”

She peered at him doubtfully, but decided he was speaking the truth. “All right,” she nodded. “I won’t do it. Not today, at least. Some other day, yes, perhaps, but not today, and not here.” She hesitated. “Should I thank you?”

He frowned. “Do you think you should, Mirabelle? I don’t think you should.”

“All right then, I won’t thank you.” She smiled again, for the second time, and this was a wider smile than the last one, and it even touched her eyes. “I’ll go down to the city and be lonely as hell, instead of out of it for good – but I won’t thank you. I mean, why the hell should I?”

“You’ll be fine,” he said to her. “I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, maybe, Maybe not. We’ll have to see, right?” She hesitated, and touched him again, on the cheek. “Was it true about your cousin?”

“True enough. Her name wasn’t Mirabelle, though.”

“No, I thought not. Well, I’ll be going.”

He nodded. She turned away, walked a few steps, looked back over her shoulder at him, and then turned down towards the steps leading to the lower levels of the fort. He was alone.

Sighing, he turned back to the parapet and put his hands on the wall, leaning over. At last, he thought, he could do what he’d come up here to do. All it would take would be a little boost from his arms, and then it would be all over. But, suddenly, he didn’t want to.

He stood there for what seemed like a long, long time, and then abruptly turned and hurried down the steps. If he was fast enough, he could find her again before she left the fort.

Two sad and lonely people, he thought. There was probably no point to it. Probably he was being stupid, and nothing would come of it, nothing at all.

All the same, by the time he glimpsed her shimmering blue dress in the distance, he was running.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2015

Thanks to Benni Jones for the illustration

The Great Big ISIS Movie Extravaganza Part IX

Copyright B Purkayastha 2015 

Inviting ISIS In

If the current government of India wants to invite ISIS to set up an affiliate in the country, it’s emphatically going about it the right way.

I haven’t been talking about the effects of the Hindunazis on the country in the one year that they’ve been in power, but rest assured that they haven’t been idle.

The Hindufication project in India grows apace. Although it’s not yet possible for the Hindunazis to declare this the official Hindu nation of their dreams, they are working hard at the state level, where the laws permit, to make Hindu “values” the law as far as possible. Thus, for example, even the possession, let alone consumption, of beef is now a crime punished by stiff prison sentences in several states, all ruled by Hindunazi governments. Hindunazi politicians have openly called for Muslims to be disenfranchised, and referred to Christians and Muslims as “bastards” while Hindus are “sons of Rama”. In the state of Rajasthan, Muslim kings like the (extremely liberal) Mughal emperor Akbar have been erased from school history books (along with other “foreigners” like Pythagoras and Newton) in favour of Hindu “heroes”.

Hindu “science”, which last raised its ugly head under the previous – and far more moderate – Hindunazi government in the early 2000s, is back with a vengeance. Even back then, ultra-right rags like the magazine India Today (whose editor was rewarded with a civilian medal) relentlessly plugged the Hindunazi agenda and distinguished between “indigenous religions” and Islam and Christianity. Today, the Prime Minister of the nation can claim at a scientific conference that ancient Hindus knew about plastic surgery and in vitro fertilisation, and not one of the assembled scientists can summon up the gumption to contradict him. And even as I write this, I came across a report that cow urine is now going to be used as a hospital disinfectant in the Hindunazi state of Rajasthan.

And with every day that passes, minorities in India grow more and more insecure.

Normally, this would not – from the Hindunazi point of view – be of much importance. Christians make up something like 2% of the population and are virtually powerless. Muslims are far less defenceless, but they’ve been systematically marginalised and disempowered, pushed into ghettoes, and indigenous Islamic terrorist groups like the Indian Mujahideen and Student’s Islamic Movement of India are remarkably ineffectual. But there’s a new force in the world, one that’s actually catching the eye of a lot of people, and that force is ISIS.

This isn’t the place to discuss whether ISIS is an independent formation or is partly or wholly controlled by the west as a de facto ally and tool, or a combination thereof. Whichever it is, the fact is that for a lot of young Muslim people, the Islamic State is a glamorous, vibrant entity, which has the power and courage to face off against multiple countries and fight them to a standstill, while expanding elsewhere at a blistering rate.

And that the Islamic State has made recruits among Indians – something al Qaeda, with its Arab-centric philosophy, signally failed to do – can’t be denied. The exact number of Indians who have gone to Syria or Iraq to join the takfiri headhunters isn’t that large – the figures vary according to whom you ask, from a couple of dozen to up to three hundred – but they did go. And far more than those who did go must be those who stayed back, but still bought into the jihadist philosophy. There was also a guy in Bangalore who was arrested for running ISIS’ twitter campaign in this country. I suppose he’s been replaced by now.

Here are some of them far in the south of the country:

And some more, in Kashmir in the north:

And after all, why wouldn’t they? If you feel hemmed in by the day, targeted by creeping religious fascism, and someone tells you that the country you live in is a Dar ul Harb, where Muslims are persecuted, wouldn’t you agree that they have a point? And if they then say that ISIS is the answer, that it can defend you, wouldn’t you at least think about it?

I’m betting you would.

Even some Hindunazis, like the anti-Christian polemicist Arun Shourie (Harvesting Our Souls) have noted that all it would take would be a hundred or so disaffected Muslims to get together and decide that ISIS has a point for the organisation to get a toe hold in this country. And with bomb-making instructions available online, even if they couldn’t find automatic rifles, or those spiffy balaclavas and Toyotas, they can do one hell of a lot of damage, both directly and indirectly.

Indirectly? Why, yes, because Hindunazi stormtroopers like the Bajrang Dal are eager and willing to find excuses to launch anti-Muslim pogroms, and an ISIS module in the country would be the perfect excuse to launch said pogroms.

And that brings me back to the starting point. I can’t believe that the government is so stupid that it can’t put together the elementary reasoning ability to conclude the same thing that I did. In fact, the only rational conclusion is that the government wants an ISIS module to start work so that it can use that to distract attention from its failures and advance its agenda.

The past year, you see, hasn’t done anything to enhance the reputation of the Hindunazis or to endear them to new voters. The economy, which was supposed to be in a Golden Age, is faltering. The Great Indian Muddle Class hasn’t suddenly become hyper-rich overnight. Prices are still rising, the crime rate isn’t falling, and there’s only so much you can blame on leftists, Maoists, environmentalists, secularists, and Pakistani spies and sabotage.

Prime Minister Narendrabhai Modi’s big gamble was to amend the law to make it easy for his corporate backers and allies to acquire private land for their projects. This ran into a brick wall in Parliament, where the moribund Opposition was suddenly given a golden opportunity to get its act together. Even the Congress party, which had been in apparently irreversible terminal decline, was resurrected virtually from the dead. Things are stalled all down the line.

At this juncture an ISIS threat would be a positive godsend. Like all fascist groups, the Hindunazis need an enemy, and ISIS is a quite genuinely nasty enemy. The Hindunazis would immediately project themselves as the defenders of the nation, and, obviously, all dissenters could be called the enemies of freedom and allies of the Muslim invaders from abroad.

This isn’t, of course, a sustainable long term strategy, but when did politicians, Hindunazi or otherwise, look at the long term anyway?

I’m waiting for the first suicide bomb blasts, and the immediate taking of credit by the Islamic State.

It shouldn’t be long now.