Anagrams and Barbed Wire Jesus
Zui Kumar-Reddy
Sit here,
the nurse said, pointing to the granite bench in front of a desert backdrop;
the painting was like something out of the foxes mind from the Little Prince, I
thought. This was a mandated appointment, there were thousands of us who moved
in and out like conveyer belt kings. The painting was blank, I thought, as I
was placed in the foreground of nothingness. ‘Android’s ran ‘em. Android’s ran ‘em,’
the nurse laughed in a shrill witchy way as she strapped me into place. I was
held there by the weight of my bones that stuck hard to the granite below me.
And all I could see were queues of bones and sagging skin and all I could think
was Android’s ran ‘em.
She had a
light pointed at me, must have been a zillion watts, I smelled the burning of
my skin and I saw it bubble and blister but I felt an early morning breeze, a
rainy day coolness, and it came as if I had summoned it. A tray with eight
identical glasses of electric blue liquid was placed on a table beside me. I
was made to drink it all before the army of identical men dressed in white tore
the clothes of my back and placed my burning body horizontal on the granite.
This is an exorcism, the nurse screamed as she prodded at my pus filled blisters.
And as they had us all like this, our naked skin melting into our insides, that
is when they began. It wasn’t slow like we were warned it would be, the crucial
moment, it was fast, like an industrial scale mass purging. I was made to sit
upright again, and found myself and a thousand other pathetic excuses for
humans lined up before a multitude of enormous turbines aimed and ready to blow
away all that was left clinging to our now loose skin.
See, you
can purge the devil out of someone quite easily, I hear that can be done with a
bottle of beer and some sorpottel, but memories, that’s a whole other story and
it took a while for these guys to figure out just what the fuck they were going
to do. Three years they wasted cutting heads open and waterboarding people’s
brains with acetone, but everyone just ended up dead and so that was deemed
unsuccessful. This new thing they had come up with, this industrial scale mass
purging, it was cost effective and it worked. But a few of us had been reading
about it, months before the appointment, and we trained ourselves like nobody’s
business, to remember. They had fried our brains already, last year and the
year before that, but memories they stick to your skin.
So as they
turned on the turbines. I felt what seemed like a frantic plastic bag inside of
me, looking for the nearest exit. This was number one, I said to myself and I
had to hold on tight because after the first one they speed up like
motherfuckers.
There were
three ways one could find Mrs D'Cunha’s house. The most roundabout and my
favourite by far, was the ‘Mail Route’; this required one to be small in size
and fairly malleable. Your starting point was the big post office just off
Museum road. Across the street you would see a house with a gabled roof and a
bright blue door. This was the residence of Mr Ranatunga that was later gifted
to the family of his prostitute. If you were to knock on this bright blue door
you would be greeted by Shanti, a twenty something year old girl with chocolate
skin and jasmine hair. She would take you by the hand, very firmly and with no
real interest in coddling or baby talk, and walk you to the compound wall. It
was here that the exchange took place. A grey haired Daniel would be waiting on
the other side of the wall, for a laddoo shaped human package who an old lady
was expecting for tea. And it would now be time for you to dutifully curl up so
you could be passed through the two lines of barbed wire that were strung above
the granite wall.
I lost it.
The frantic plastic bag. My bones felt lighter. ‘Android’s ran ‘em,’ the nurse
shrieked like a maniac from behind the turbines. The next few went fast, and I
was relieved. I didn’t know what they were, just that they were leaving the
innermost fibres of my body and taking with them whatever it was that made me
feel so heavy. The men in white stood along the periphery of the oval room that
we were in. Each of us, positioned on a bench in front of a backdrop, looking
like we were set up for mini photo shoots. The bag of bones on my right, he sat
in front of a beach as he writhed in pain like a worm under a magnified sun.
They filmed it all, each of us, the cleansing, so that it could be screened at
the tenth year anniversary of the new republic of whatever we were heading
towards. I didn't know what I was losing until number three thousand and fifty
four.
On Sunday
mornings, as my mother would paint blue pin stripes down the walls of the
courtyard, Mrs D'Cunha would have the Ave Maria on repeat as she sat in her front
room and swayed back and forth to the sweetness of the song.
The blue
pin stripes, the Sunday mornings, they were political, the men in white made it
that way as they leaned into us from the corners of the oval room. I couldn’t
see their eyes through the darkness that shadowed their faces and I wondered if
their memories were monitored like ours. There was some sort of a clause for
sure, some memories were alright, some people didn’t need to go through this,
but we were picked out, in the thousands, and burned till we bled out all that
we had known.
One
Christmas, many years after I stopped being able to fit through the barbed
wire, Mrs D'Cunha called me and my family to her house, it was a matter of
urgency she said. She brought us to a corner of the garden, right by the
compound wall and pointed a little into the distance. ‘Do you see that?’ she
asked us. She meant the barbed wire Jesus whose shadow was plastered onto a
neighbouring white wall. I barely saw it but thought it was the most exciting
thing that had happened all year.
And then
HE stepped out, from behind the men in white. They called him the Android. He
was dressed like a ringmaster with a whip in hand and a detached smile that was
both born from and held on to nothing. He wore an orange suit and swayed from
side to side as he walked to each one of us, stroking his chin and cracking his
whip. The men in white fired into the room a grey smoke that cemented itself
onto the parts of us that were left cut open and bare. We had only heard about
him before, and hadn’t really known how to prepare ourselves for whatever it
was he was going to do.
By the
time I finished school, Mrs D'Cunha’s house looked like a different place. It
wasn’t as grand as I remembered. There was nothing on the roof but dried leaves
and plastic sheets to prevent the rain from getting through the leaks. I
dropped in on her once with cake and tea and she was the same, just sad that
the lace curtains on her windows had started to turn grey, because of the
pollution, she said. The avocados had started to fall to the ground as no one
was collecting them and the family of monkeys that used to frequent the tree
hadn’t been seen for nearly three years.
The
Android had me shivering on my side and whipped me till the skin on my fingers
started to peel away. Now you won’t remember shit, he said. I smiled at him,
and the sides of my face stung as I did, but I knew where this was going. If
the body isn’t good for shit, if everything it does essentially means fuck all,
the one thing you can count on till the point where you’re completely cut apart
and then re-assembled is that your mind is capable of seeing the desert fox
from the Little Prince in the midst of a full-on mental massacre.
My father
would say to everyone who ever visited the street that we lived on, that only
Marquez could do it justice in description; the gabled roofs and the dead
geraniums brought all the way from Ooty that sat outside the front doors for
days in the hope that they would somehow find the will to live again. My
childhood, in and out of Mrs D'Cunha’s house was full of grasshopper cakes and
old powder tin kaleidoscopes. The last time I visited her was to express
concern for a dog that was being beaten by one of the servants. It seemed
useless telling her all this, as she lived in a world outside of the big one
that was becoming less and less familiar. Not that she wanted to, and not that
it was even a choice, but it’s like she had been forgotten, sitting in her
front room, listening to the Ave Maria and watching her avocados fall to the
ground. Incidentally, if you had visited the house forty something years ago,
in the morning around seven or eight, you would most likely find Mr D’Cunha
himself. He would probably have been walking up and down the terrace singing
the very same song his wife had listened to until her death. This was the city
I had known in the very beginning of my life; avocado trees and early morning
opera singers, but the changes came faster than many could keep up with; a gush
of grey smoke swept in and picked up whatever it could and all those who couldn’t
keep up were just left behind. So, when years later I found Mrs D’Cunha’s body
rotting in the same position in the same chair that she had sat and swayed in
for most of her life, I wasn’t surprised in the least. She had just slipped all
our minds, I thought, amidst all this grey smoke it was too hard to see through
her lace-curtain windows anyway….
As they
switch off the turbines I peel the remaining skin off of me and all that had
melted into the bench beneath me. I’m a clean slate ready for business.
Grateful to be perfectly moulded into the new world. And made aware of the
dangers of the old one. We step up in unison, all of us who have been stripped
down to cells, preferred building blocks for a new race, we make our way out
into a new world that is also subject to this contrived erosion. In front of us
stands the ringmaster who repeats in an unchanging voice: you’re all mine,
bitches.
Zui Kumar-Reddy is a 21-year-old Biology student who loves to write.
She has had her works published in Out of Print Magazine, The Peal
and Down Dirty Word - The Legendary. This year she was one of the
selected participants for Max Mueller Bhavan and Sandbox Collective’s: Project
Gender Bender, where she screened her music video ‘Goef Josef’ on the subject
of female desire. Currently she is making pots and pots of guava jam, guava
jelly and peanut butter thanks to an abundant harvest!
