The Hounds of Hell Howl at Humanity

The Hounds of Hell Howl at Humanity

At the top of the tower of time, a star was sparkling. It had been burning since an eternity; the temperature within rising eternally. But it was not destined to bask in eternity forever and when the time came – it became a mortal star. Overtaken by its mortal senses and fiery desire, it met another star. As they pierced each other’s body; penetrated into each other; pelted out all that they had saved for this occasion; they became one. In sudden spasms, jerky jolts and noiseless explosions they shared their hunger and hunted into each other to find food to satisfy this dominant need. As time slithered by and they gobbled each other; both were consumed and the singular body became a uterus – a womb sheltering countless children. A nebula had been formed.
***
Saif was sitting on a low table, polishing his shoes. A pair of dark Bata shoes it was; had been worn for the last three years and yet looked so new because of the appreciable time Saif spent everyday polishing them. For Saif it was a kind of exercise. Poor Saif, he didn’t have the money to even join a gym and let alone setting up a private exercise area in his apartment with weights, runners, and stationary cycles and so on.
Moreover, to be precise, his wasn’t an apartment either; it can be better described as a rod-cement shack with a rent of three thousand taka per month. However, there was some glory attached to this shack because it was a parasite of a bigger building whose owner was Mohammad Syed Enait Mauluvi Khan. He proclaimed that this was the ground where he and his friends had dug trenches, suffered leaches and fought treacherous Pakistanis during the ’71 war and on the memory of his ghost friends – he erected this building when the Pakistanis, according to him, left the country for a holiday. But the elders of the street whispered another theory behind his bum. They swore and boiled while narrating historically that Mohammad Syed Enait Mauluvi Khan used to drink cha with the Pakistani curs sitting on a cha-stall which was near this building. The building was constructed by somebody else, it wasn’t his. The actual owner was brutally tortured to death along with his family and the murderers gifted Mohammad Syed Enait Mauluvi Khan this blood stained house for his undercover news. The elders would narrate till there and then sip their coffee once and then would add with care, “The ghosts of the actual owner and his family still haunt the house.” As soon as the last word would be uttered, they would rapidly retreat unto their former positions feigning that nothing had been said till now as if the ghosts were spying on them and would strangle them in their sleep if they were talked about.
This was the kind of elders Saif inherited: one group acted smart and the other group acted sly. Fortunately, none of these elders ever made an impression on Saif. He was all by himself, with ideas that matched his fellow friends and views that ordered him to avoid silver haired, paan-stain teethed people. The only saying from the silver generation that appealed to him was: Health is wealth. He tried to keep himself healthy and because he didn’t have the advantage of machines, he turned to keeping himself fit in the natural way. He walked, sprinted sometimes if he was late for class and ate to live unlike Mr. Khan who lived to eat of which his pork-ish belly was a proof. He borrowed yoga books from the library and tried several steps during the weekends. The diet-chart hung on his bedroom wall and he strictly followed it. His peers thought he was smart but not a hunk. He had miles to go before he could be called that.
Whatever it was, Saif was never worried, he had a proper self-esteem and it had won him a very beautiful fairy, ten years older than him. That she was old was never his worry; that she was rich to know was a comfort for him in his unfair life. Nothing had been fair to him; his sisters with the help of their muscular, moustached husbands denied him any property after the car crash that killed his parents. Luckily, his clever mother who always was a foreseer had kept an account in the bank with sufficient amount of money to complete his graduation from the university and also had the rod-cement shack bought under his name. His sisters knew nothing about these preparations and slept peacefully believing that their brother was drinking from the gutter and eating from the dustbin in some street of the god-forsaken country.
Surely Saif enjoyed his life more than that and already had given birth to three aborted children. But none of this was his plan; his mother had planned for his education and house and his lover had those three children created and aborted. Ethically, it was a crime, he told her, but she persisted, complaining had it been his stomach, he would know how bothering it is to carry a baby. Saif was never annoyed because he never had any fondness for babies; all he was concerned about was his lover’s huge inherited estates, bank accounts and restaurants. He knew his money would run out by the end of his last semester. And so he planned to marry her before it, so that he could jump into some kind of busyness right after his graduation with his lover’s help.
As Saif polished his shoes, he was rethinking the plan and checking for any loopholes in it.

***
In the vacuum of space and time, the nebula gushed forth all those uncountable babies silently, not making the slightest noise to represent the birth-pain it was going through. A divine delivery! As the babies were hurled out into the bottomless pit, the quiet void, some of them were picked up by the existing orbs and planets and they were named as satellites, some formed a planet on their own ambitiously and the rest moved on and on like illegitimate children haunting the streets of Dhaka. Some homeless, desperate meteors had been born!
***
Saif looked at the pair of shoes from this angle and then from that angle – yes, it was perfectly done. Outside, the city basked, baked, burned under the scorching sun. The marshmallow clouds had become a rare sight and the air of the city hung still without any flow. The only things that stirred this uninvited calmness was the news of a new restaurant opening somewhere, the newbie singer making his debut, a dance club advertising by playing loud music, the hullaballoo about which politician would go behind bars, the latest fashion which was more fashionable than the last, the critics criticizing whatever came across them whether a movie, a book or a happening, the well known hypocrite do-gooder of the society yelling at the government’s new policy, politicians who enjoyed politics like a Cadbury were realizing what a bitter gourd it was as they sat yelling in agony on the electric chair, the controversy about somebody’s cap and nasal voice, the argument about who was sexier: Mallika, Malaika or Molita, the girls who had come down to the streets asking for women’s rights, most importantly the right to bare themselves, logically reasoning that the average weather was hotter than Arabia, the bearded set of men protesting against banning their system of education, the porn-cd-wallahs pulling at young boys’ shirts and trying to propagate their business, the whore standing by the roadside and advertising how long she could satisfy a man, the TV screaming and the radio booming with thunderous dance music, and so on and so forth. These days the sight of a badam-wallah, chanachur-wallah, and all the other good-poor-wallahs were rare. They seemed to have disappeared from this part of the world. Saif wondered if they were not present at this part of the planet, which part would shelter them. He walked out of his rod-cement shanty and hailed a taxi. A face emerged out of the window and asked, “Where?”
People talked so less; were a word enough to convey a message the dictionary would have been thinner. Couldn’t the taxi-pilot ask in a proper full sentence, where he would like to go? Had it been only this, it wouldn’t have struck Saif so much but the fact was otherwise. This strange inertia of using fewer words had penetrated the depths of society. Society should be all about communicating and conveying your message to the other individuals where the major method is talking and minor ones include writing, advertising, etc etc. Sadly, there were so many barriers – caste, religion, sex to stop one person from talking with another. Even in case of love-talks, which are supposed to be sweeter in tone and longer in length, his lover held him dissatisfied. If she wanted to say she missed him, she would just say, ‘miss you honey’; with an untrue smile hovering on his lips Saif would think: where was all the Khalil Gibran–ish poetry in this love, where was the drama of Shakespeare in this love; surely love has evolved; it has evolved to nothing – a mere word nowadays that inspired only movies and painful songs with bombshell dances. Thinking thus, he climbed the taxi.
***
The unearthly meteor was spiraling down the whirling staircase of time. The distant stars were winking at it and the closer ones stared with suspicion. The planets saw it with sarcasm and the wiser ones with dread. It crossed one floor, two floor and then a third. It was nearing the green planet where a few moments ago dark hills had erupted out of nowhere and had made their way to terrible heights. Blue water had risen from the soil and covered two-third of it. There were aliens walking the face of this planet, soon they developed from spears to guns; from guns to missiles and then from missiles to nuclear. Just the way it was created it was now falling apart. The hills were coming down and oceans were dying, the green planet was losing its greenery. The meteor saw it was an easy target, loitering around the sun.
***
The muddy-yellow taxi with a broken rear-view mirror was galloping at a neck-breaking speed through a countryside tunnel. Saif sat uncomfortably, humming a tune to himself and dreaming that he was dancing with Ayesha, his lover. The sudden break wrenched him out of his paradise, the safety cushion appeared from under the seat and terminated his fall. “What the hell… ! What happened?” he shouted.
“Nothing, just ran over a dog,” said the driver. The taxi started again. Am I going crazy? Then why am I lamenting the death of a street urchin – a dog? Saif thought to himself. He was feeling sorry for the dead dog whose body would rot with the intestines oozing out, in this tunnel for a few days before it would be cleared away. But feeling sorry for a dog wasn’t the character trait of the people anymore. Many fellow human died the same way, but who cared? Nobody. Life was not cared for and death went by unheeded. The burial grounds would be refurnished after every three months and more dead bodies would pour in. That was the case for a human being and feeling sorry for a dog? – pooh, pooh, a silly sissy’s job. As the taxi burst out of the tunnel, light blinded Saif’s sight. And when he recovered his vision, he wished he had never gotten it back.
He had come to this place in distant, almost forgotten past when he was young and bullied by his sisters. He would sit in between the two sisters on the back seat of the car and his parents would sit in the front. Bearing the pinches, punches and poking he would try to enjoy the view in vain. Some soothing country music would be seeping out of the speakers and the car would roll on until it reached the green-yellow rice and soya fields where his father had bought a vacation home. For a week they used to live a village life and it was fun. No digital games, no tiled-floors, no designed bathrooms – yet it was awesome. As the humid air made him uncomfortable, his eyes glistened with the joys of his past. The driver pulled up the window-glasses and switched on the air-conditioner. From behind the spotless glass Saif looked at the desolate country side and lamented the deterioration.
The paddy fields were no longer as huge as they were. Small patches of them were scattered here and there; tall, proud factories stood beside them. The machines inside these factories made growling noises. It was a black and white picture when seen from far away; the colours that inspired nakshi-katha were gone. Soon enough, the taxi reached it destination.
Saif popped out of the taxi and handed the driver some notes from his leather wallet. Then started walking towards Ayesha’s apartment which was just a few minutes walk from where he dropped. Why did everything look so gloomy, he questioned himself. The beggars flitted like dragonflies from a Ford to a Ferrari without receiving any sympathy. The passengers were too busy to look at them, their cell-phones kept them occupied. Around the corner, a beautiful girl sat on a bench under the shadow of a building, working hastily in her laptop. Just beside her, a tattered clothed girl stood, with tears dried on her cheeks and face buried in despair, looking at the trendy creature sitting a few inches away. Plastic flowers and trees decorated some of the houses because the owners thought it was a waste of time to water real plants. And some didn’t even bother to keep the plastic ones because they felt it was a waste of time too, to clean it once a month.
Reaching the apartment Saif saw a plastic rose bush near the gate. He looked around and then plucked a flower. Putting it into his pocket he, walked up the stairs. Ayesha opened the door; she was wearing deep green lingerie with no extra-makeup. When Saif planted the blood rose in her hair she looked like a red-green parrot. Saif said, “You look just like the parrot I had when I was a kid.”
“Whatever; let me be a bitch today.” With that she pulled him in, closing the door to the world outside; the world in which red-green parrots were extinct and the only parrots were in human forms just like Ayesha and sadly, these parrots didn’t want to be parrots, they willed to be bitches as Ayesha wished. So much for the beautiful parrots!
***
The meteor reached the gravitational field of the green planet but snapped out of it, moving on independently towards it. The protective layers were thinner than they were supposed to be. Man had destroyed this very effective protection all by themselves, in order to create tinier weapons for protection from their brethren and for tinier comforts than the comfort of living safely. The meteors which were supposed to burn to ashes before reaching the surface could now reach the ground; the meteors’ power hadn’t increased, man’s wisdom had decreased. These meteors which were supposed to appear as shooting stars to lovers gazing at the blank sky at night and look like fairy tale – shooting stars seeing which the lovers could make a wish were now going to become meteorites, bombing the face of earth, marring it with scars and scratches, and someday blasting it to tiny bits.
***
Saif and Ayesha were now on the roof of their apartment enjoying a blissful dinner. A soft music was playing in the background – a very usual scene for the city dwellers. The modern cave-men needed music to eat, air-conditioners to sleep and wine to drink. But the night held something different and special for this pair of love doves not just sexy music, sumptuous dinner and humid air. The modern shooting-star came spearing down from the depths of hell like a gift fit for the dying humanity, and it struck the roof you have just been introduced to. The building collapsed, the neighbouring buildings caught fire too; people ran helter-skelter as if judgment day had arrived.