
Excerpt from Blood Towers
Of all the things he said I can recall only two: He said it all begins at the churning He said this world and its inhabitants are the color of half-baked bricks because the brick maker was distracted and left his task unfinished. Someday he will return.
Seeing the open field deserted I emerge into the blinding sun. The external exhausts of the ACs strike a palpable blow. My eye has caught something flapping in the sand. I hurry over to discover that instead of a wounded bird it is yet another shopping bag. Intent on avoiding scorpions, I nearly stumble upon the first of the dun coloured lizards, each hovering on diagonal paws that are flipping in a slow tap-tapping dance. Once you spot one lizard you see another, then dozens of them.
A short distance from the lizards another restless army disperses: black beetles, each a blood-clot against the pale sand. I have spotted fist-sized spiders lurking here. I have disturbed sand grouse, and perhaps the last of the jerboas. Someone once claimed to have seen a cobra at this site, but it could just as well have been a stripped tire. However, today there is no trace of wild desert fowl.
Since learning of my Mishel’s peculiar taste I have spent precious time scouring the construction site for night kill. The last time I presented her with the mangled carcass of a desert piper that had flung itself at the tower, she sang in a low voice:
On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me 3 desert pipers, 2 house sparrows, and a peregrine hawk in a date tree.
Seeing me rummaging so close to the base, the site security guard greets me with a sideways shake of his head.
“Oye, majnoon. You’ll find nothing here today. It’s not windy enough.”
I grin back sheepishly. Having missed the early morning pickings today, I had planned to take advantage of the noon prayer hiatus.
“Like I told you, lover boy, early dawn or late dusk, when the dew is settling and the fog rolls in from the sea. But, mind you, get here before the hawks do.”
He waves a hand and continues on with his perimeter scan, punctual as clockwork. I’ll not see him again until dawn. I will have to turn up empty-handed for my dinner date at the Chenaab Sweat Meat and Paan-wallah Shop, and Mishel will have to make do with spiced lamb kebabs.
Back in the cocoon of my site QC prefab office I feel instantly chilled. Two local proverbs have recently been posted on the Motto of the Day signboard:
Money of the night does not see the light of day and Wealth delivered by the storms is swiftly dispersed by the winds
I am unable to shake off the image of a blinding sun that weaves its dazzling west-to-east ellipses around the tower. How, even at this moment, are we all not equally bound by our various obsessive supplications? The sun, the stars and the two-headed four-legged creatures at rest, the migrating birds, the hopping lizards and restless beetles, the weaving spiders and prancing scorpions, the swooping falcons and scampering grouse—all beholden to the gravitational pull of this creature anchored fifteen floors deep into the sand and soon to soar half a mile above us all.
I, Rafiq Muslim Badshah, a measly brick-maker’s son, was once rescued from a life-time bondage to a brick kiln owner. This insect of a youth eventually escaped Kachi Basti to begin an apprenticeship with a bitch of a rajara, a brick mason, who reluctantly taught me the rudiments of his trade. Back home in Punjab I became famous for perfecting the traverse brick latticework—a wall so elegant to behold that it would trigger every Punjabis’ lust for amplification. I plied the little skill I had into a small fortune, which later flowed straight into the grubby maws of the immigration middle-men, those whores for whom there are confirmed reservations in the Hells of both of my conflicted faiths. I acquired a questionable EngTech diploma from the Upstairs Punjabi School of Engineers before I left. I also read voraciously; the world had bypassed me in a hurry, and I had a lot of catching up to do.
From the moment I first arrived, a glorified bricklayer in Arabistan, I was stiff-necked from craning skyward, my fingers busy texting OMGOMGOMGOMG. Every horizon was a moving mountain range of successively higher peaks—“a cobra over every lair,” as one construction worker framed it.
Every vacant eye is set on the far horizon where the sand is littered with shredded tires that look like a giant’s flayed skin.
Today at noon hour the tinted window of my office reveals about forty construction workers scattered in the middle distance for their break. Since all seating has been removed from the vicinity, the men have nowhere to rest. As I continue to watch, a curious ritual takes place; one that still amazes me after three years. The men wearily align themselves in pairs, and turning their sweat-soaked backs towards each other, settle onto their haunches in the tower's narrow line of shadow. Only their safety boots contact the blistering sand. Every vacant eye is set on the far horizon where the sand is littered with shredded tires that look like a giant’s flayed skin. Here the barbed wire barriers are festooned daily with a fresh crop of stray polythene shopping bags. Occasionally, one of these bags detaches itself from the pile, and spins for hours in the vortex around the tower. Near the base, construction debris tumbles earthwards in slo-mo, having slipped out of clumsy sweaty novice hands—nuts, bolts, and screws, pipe wrenches, steel nails. Statistically speaking, every single day a human will also come tumbling down, but shhhh … hush for now—the men who choose to fly here in the world’s suicide capital are another story.
Over the next hour, as the stain of the tower’s shadow line glides over them, the idling men will scuttle in unison, clinging to their precious sanctuary. Phones will pipe the soft layered cadence of the voices of distant loved ones. Flashed images of the last season of rain birds, the rippling of flooded rice paddies, the roiling of muddy rivers, and the clash of thunderclouds.
A solitary worker, unable to crouch or scuttle, limps closer to my window, settles in against the NO SMOKING sign, and lights up. Facing away from the wind he shields the flame with cupped hands, his cheeks contorting, the anticipated surge pouring the length of his hunched body. Sucking intently, the concavities of his face collapse as his lips relax.
No matter how diligently the men have tracked their tempo of time the shadow passes faster than flood waters during periods of rest but slows to a trickle amidst the drudgery of work. How soon, how soon the alarms sound. The men snuff out their smokes on pitted boot soles and head back to their base. Their boot prints are swiftly obliterated. When they return tomorrow the passage of their shaded oasis will have moved eastwards by several feet.
But these preventable deaths cannot slow the hectic pace of development.
The year is 2022, and the world waits breathlessly for the first flip of a coin for the opening match of the Football World Cup in this tiny corner of the Muddle-East. Slogans abound, like ‘the Greatest Game hosted by the Greatest Nation.’ The local press boasts that by tournament’s end, the kingdom of Arabistan will have spent fifty times more than the previous host nation. It does not mention that for every game played during the World Cup tournament, over a dozen construction workers will have died on its sites. But these preventable deaths cannot slow the hectic pace of development. Feverish proposals for cloud cities are heard everywhere. Multi-storied condominiums will be suspended on giant angled pylons stretching hundreds of feet into the sky. A constant stream of moisture will be pumped from beneath the structures, forming clouds that will envelop and shield the earth from view. Another project promises gardens suspended upside down from the arch of a 70th floor. How about an underground or a subterranean city? It’s as easy as assembling Lego blocks.
Capped by turquoise waters that remain at a constant human temperature, this nascent dagger-shaped kingdom is in single-minded pursuit of becoming the world’s favoured escape from reality. Fuelled by its frenetic investment growth and a constant supply of cheap labour, Arabistan further claims it is to be home to the world’s tallest tower, which will house a mosque on its top floor. Rumoured to have been appointed by an emperor who dreamed of being closer to his creator, above the 195th floor this future house of worship is all steel girders, beams, air compressed concrete composites, prefab wall units, and a vast variety of glass and insulation panels, for now. Soaring buttresses are to be added, and to foster the hype the tower’s final height will remain a closely guarded secret until launch day. Even mighty Google has been roped into submission; its unblinking satellite eyes reveal only a fuzzy image of the rooftop.
As it rises the tower will create its own microclimates where clouds condense inside the upper floors; it will rearrange the migratory patterns of local birds, and redistribute petrodollars from dishdasha pockets to Swiss accounts; it will rewrite personal histories; it will devastate the lives of its hundred thousand workers, shattering whole families and villages back east.
Ever since I figured out the various power dynamics at work here I have so wanted to be one of the privileged few. In the service of raising this as yet unnamed tower, local men in white flowing silken dishdashas will step out at odd hours of the day to summon western men in blue shirts with urgent messages. The blue shirts will then arrive at our work sites in silent cars, all chrome and polish, each vehicle bearing a three-pronged star or a cross imbedded in a sphere, the universally recognized symbol of crash test dummies. They sip delicately from frosted cups, or munch on white bread sandwiches, tossing styrofoam packaging out of their windows. These guys actually smile, bark further instructions through half-lowered tinted windows, and solicitously retreat. A final set of key players in dark suits whisper urgently into their cuffs, their Ray-Bans bending light.
And nowhere a single pixel to show the invisible hand of the builder.
And my role? That of a mere cog. During my three years at the Quality Control office, I have clawed my way into the frontlines of the Incoming Inspections Team, and more importantly, onto the Material Review Board. Seeing how everyone even remotely connected to the evaluation process has been lining their pockets, I have set up a foreign bank account and joined their ranks, letting through certain large shipments of materials that may appear borderline faulty, dented, smudged, or defective. My role in this underground economy is further facilitated by the willing ‘wink-wink suppliers’ who attach an extra fee to all their transactions to cover the komishuns. Some of these fringe benefits come disguised as wearable shiny brittle things that stick to our grubby fingers. Or they come on four shiny wheels. Some even arrive as shiny waxen bodies, in dyed platinums, natural blondes, and brightly streaked brunettes, dressed in slippery shed-able chiffons and silks and satins of every pastel shade with hidden zips and snaps and what have you. If an emperor can claim that he will build the ‘tallest building topped by the highest mosque’ in order to be closer to his creator, then I can claim with equal confidence that I shall be the one to pull it all down.
In the lobby of our promo centre a project simulation has been set up to play in an endless loop. To an accompaniment of soaring music, you can watch our tower, now tentatively named ‘THE’, emerge out of a grid network; frenetic cranes lob entire floors higher and higher, hopscotching each other’s backs until the 200th floor. Within five minutes the completed structure emerges from the sand to dwarf the puny camels and huts at its feet. And nowhere a single pixel to show the invisible hand of the builder. OMGOMGOMG! What sheer genius!
Last weekend I sneaked into the lobby with an IT guy and set the animation to play in reverse. Over the space of half an hour the mighty THE now implodes from the sky in slo-mo and vanishes into the sand.
No one jumps from its heights, and no blood is spilled.