Captivity (33 page)

After my turn in the bathroom, I’m astonished to find Junior sitting in my chair yakking away. For a moment I wonder if we have somehow exchanged roles. “Jim!” he exclaims, jumping up when he sees me. “Massage, massage!”

This has become an almost daily occurrence. I want to say no, establish a boundary, tell him I am not his personal masseur. Instead I laugh. “Come on, Jim,” he pleads. He sits on the blue folding chair so that he is facing Tom and Norman and Harmeet. He motions for me to stand behind him. I place my hands on his shoulders. How interesting, I think. This is what the captors see when they stand in front of us, over us, above us: four sad, gaunt-looking men wearing black hats, beards and soiled, misshapen clothing. So easy to disdain. We have to be so careful what we say through our faces. They can reveal so much.

I look at my fellow captives and then down at Junior’s neck. It would be so easy. To take my hands and crush his windpipe. I chase these thoughts away and, as I always do before I begin, close my eyes, breathe deeply and surround Junior with God’s light.
Remember, you are giving him a gift
, I tell myself.
It is when you can no longer do this that you must say no, or accept that you have become a slave
.

“Shlonik?”
Junior asks Harmeet as I strip the muscles in his shoulders and neck, tight like piano strings.

“Noos-noos,”
Harmeet says, shrugging his shoulders. Junior asks why. Harmeet imitates Uncle’s plane-taking-off gesture. “New Zealand,” he says. “No mother, no father, no sister.” Junior forms his hands into a machine gun and pretends to fire it at Harmeet. Fear passes through me like a cold wind. Is Junior saying they intend to kill us?

“That’s
qatil
. That’s murder,” Harmeet says.

“This
mujahedeen,”
Junior says, insisting that they only kill
“jaysh Amriki.”
He turns to Norman. “Doctors, shlonik?”

“Oh, well, I should think I’ve been better,” Norman answers.

“Leaish?
This no madame?”

“Sadly, yes, no madame.”

“I am sorry, Doctors,” Junior says. Then, making a sad face, he points to Tom. “What this? This
mozane?”

Tom nods. Junior asks why. Tom says it’s because he can’t sleep. Junior points to himself, “This no sleep last night.
La nam,”
he says.

This is important information. If Junior is awake at night, any escape attempt will be exceedingly perilous. As if reading my mind, Harmeet seeks to clarify this with Junior. “
Mbhara?
Yesterday no sleep?”

The word “yesterday” fills me with a grim melancholy. Yesterday, when our lives were our own. Seized by an impulse, I begin to sing the old Beatles song.

“More,” Junior says when I’m finished, clapping with delight.

I look at Norman, Harmeet and Tom, hoping they can think of something. They can’t. “Amazing Grace” suddenly comes to mind. I begin to sing and they join me.

“Good, good,” Junior says when we’ve finished. “More, more.”

FEBRUARY 6
DAY 73

I take off my shirt in front of the bathroom mirror and run the palm of my hand across my ribs and abdominal muscles. I’m intrigued by the body facing me in the mirror, the bones pushing through a thin veil of skin: clavicle, sternum, ribs, pelvis. I’m turning more and more each day into a skeleton. I wonder how much I weigh, how much more I’m going to lose, if I should be alarmed.

We are hungry, always always hungry. We wake up to it, sit all day in it, sleep in it. The gnawing aching burning empty hollow tingling of it ebbs and flows but never ceases. It is an ugly and detestable sensation that clamours in every molecule of my body. Our minds and bodies are oriented towards the hope of more food the way a compass needle points north.

We’ve become weak, listless, brittle with fatigue. My heart pounds with the smallest exertion. I must husband my energy carefully during morning exercise. Mass-muscular activity, climbing the first stage of the roof stairway for example, something the captors have recently allowed, is immensely tiring. Three ascents of eleven stairs and my knees are buckling. By the end of the half-hour I’m trembling, lightheaded, breathless. It takes most of the morning to recover.

Harmeet asked me if I thought we were being fed a starvation diet. No, I said, horrified at the thought. What they got at Birkenau and Auschwitz, a bowl of watery nettle soup, that’s a starvation diet, I said. But then I considered our daily ration: three
samoons
stuffed with an egg-sized portion of potato or rice or the occasional morsel of hot dog. What’s that, maybe six hundred calories a day? That’s less than a quarter of what an adult male requires. It’s enough to keep us going, but not much more.

It perplexes me, why they continually give us so little to eat. A second
samoon
would make such a difference. It can’t be that there’s not enough food. The captors’ waistlines are expanding. It’s most noticeable on Junior; once quite lean, he’s growing soft and pudgy.

Uncle and Nephew both complain about it.
“Kabir. Mozane,”
Uncle once said, pulling back on his track jacket to show us his growing belly.
“Akeel, nam, akeel, nam. Mozane.”
All they do is eat and sleep.

Nephew too pulled up his shirt to reveal a giant expanse of stomach. “This
kabir. Kabir mooshkilla,”
he said. Harmeet smoothed his sweater against his abdomen to demonstrate how thin he’d got.
“Shwaya,”
he said. “Shwaya mooshkilla.” Nephew shook his head and sucked in his stomach. “No,” he said,
“shwaya zane.”
I could hardly contain my rage. Don’t they know how hungry we are? If they do, they must not care, or else this is what they want; they’ve figured out that famished hostages are more compliant, easier to control, less likely to fight back or escape. Tom thinks it’s because they get a food allowance from Medicine Man and they’re spending it on themselves instead of us.

Maybe, if we tell them, they might give us a little more, I say. We debate and scheme endlessly, when and how and who. Each of us resolves to do it, but none of us can. It’s impossible to actually say the words:
We are hungry
. It is inexplicably humiliating.

Yesterday, when we were lying in bed, Nephew presented Harmeet with a yellow plastic bag.
“Akeel,”
he said benevolently. I couldn’t believe it. They never do this, give us extra food.

“Oh,” Harmeet said, his voice strangely flat, “it’s some bread.”

“Can I see?” I asked, wildly hopeful, visualizing a fresh-baked
samoon
for each of us. I immediately understood Harmeet’s disappointment when I saw what was in the bag—a handful of scraps, all different sizes, some splashed with tomato sauce, some with teeth marks, the remains of what they’d eaten for supper, probably to the point of discomfort.

We said thank you and waited for the captors to leave. We didn’t want them to see how hungry we were. We watched, eyes riveted to each piece of bread as Harmeet divided the bread into four strictly equal portions. No one ate until Harmeet gave us the sign: “Bon appétit, gentlemen.”

I chewed ravenously, eyes staring hard into the distance. I forced myself not to think about how much I needed and wanted this bread, how it had passed through our captors’ hands, how they’d torn it from their lips and left it on their plates for garbage. The humiliation of it was unbearable.

–

The day is long. I make lists.

And I write.

I close up my notebook. I’m feeling sorry for myself again. It’s time to do my inventory. It’s the only thing that helps when things get unbearable. Always it starts,
I am alive
. It changes, now and then, depending on the day, how I am feeling, what I can be grateful for. Today it goes like this:
I am not in pain, I am not alone, I am not wet. I have my faith, I am sleeping okay, I am in good health. I am not depressed and I am not afraid. I can see, hear, taste, smell, feel, think. I have a home. I have people who love me and are waiting for me. I am from a country where there is peace
.

I feel better when I am done. It always reminds me: things could be worse.

FEBRUARY 7
DAY 74

We’re lying in bed. Nephew is getting ready to turn off the light and go downstairs.
“Aku akhbar, Haji?”
we ask. It’s our perpetual question.

“News good,” Nephew says. “Friday go to Canada.” He points to Harmeet and me. “Canada okay. Canada
hubis
okay.
La mooshkilla
. Tom
zane, Amriki
good. Britannia, Doctor
zane/mozane.”
He waves his hand back and forth to show things are up in the air.

“Harmeet and Jim go Friday?” Harmeet asks.

“No,” Nephew says. “All four together.” He holds up four fingers. “Canada
hubis
in
Ordoon. Amriki
okay. Norman
zane/mozane
. English
haji la Baghdad
. English
haji Ordoon.”

“What did he mean?” Norman asks when Nephew is gone. It is unclear and contradictory, impossible to make sense of. It sounds as
if they’ve got the money from Canada, Tom’s release has been secured through the prisoner exchange, and now they’re just waiting for Britain to come through with a ransom so they can release the four of us together.

“I have a new mantra,” Norman says. “It’s ‘When I get back to Pinner.’ It just occurred to me during the Bible study. It was like I snapped awake. This is what I have to do, where I have to keep my focus: when I get back to Pinner! Pinner, it’s my new name for God.”

“I don’t understand,” Harmeet says. “What’s Pinner?”

“Well, that’s the part of London I live in!” Norman exclaims.

“Shall we unlock?” Tom says. “Norman, do you have the Instrument of Grace?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Norman says.

In fact we have several now. We’ve recently discovered a gold mine supply right at our fingertips: the dozens of curtain hooks in the pleats of the grey curtains we use to cushion our legs at night. We keep them carefully hidden. The original Instrument of Grace, the nail from Harmeet’s shoe, is pinned inside the hem of the red blanket. Harmeet keeps a piece of curtain hook in the waistband of his track pants, Norman in a pocket inside his tweed jacket, and we’ve hidden a forth in the bathroom. Norman is just about to unlock when Uncle flicks on the light. I almost leap out of my skin. Where the hell did he come from! Uncle goes straight to the barricade and grabs a videocassette. He draws a small rectangular box in the air. “Mooshkilla, mooshkilla,” he says. Their VCR is broken. He wants one of us to come and fix it. Harmeet, you’re the engineer, we say, you better go. Uncle unlocks him and takes him into the mysterious, forbidden world we know simply as Downstairs.