No one knows about the Deity or the Devil, but Darkness crouches everywhere, fluttering dark wings.

I first met MaryJane during my second year at Dane Bheem Medical School, Karachi.

I had recently broken up wth my girlfriend. She was beautiful, intelligent, charming — a woman I had thought was my soul-mate, naive shit that I was. We’d had a difference of opinion. I had held that sleeping with one’s best friend behind one’s back is wrong. Especially when a particular someone had gone to Lahore to talk to his parents about a very special engagement ceremony.

She had believed and acted otherwise.

So we broke up, and I got a crushing ride in the grinder while she floated away on the wings of indifference. I wept alone in my room. She laughed with her girlfriends as she walked past my room, her easy voice pummeling my heart into ashes.Three days later, a sympathetic friend offered me a date with MaryJane, and I accepted.

A week later, I was hooked.

MaryJane was a wonder, a mystery. A portal through which I entered another realm of existence. Every moment with her was ecstacy, every beat of her cannabis-lined silken heart a draught of euphoria. She curled around me, her smoky shadows fluttering and flickering in my tiny room in the hostel, and I listened to her whispers amidst the cacophany of Metallica and Iron Maiden blooming from my Pentium IV. I listened and nodded and dreamt and slumbered.

So it was that one fine day I found myself on the Medical College Black List. I would be allowed to rotate through Dermatology only — the last rotation of fourth year — and then be sent home without taking the finals. My parents had to be informed,’college rules, Mr. Malik!’, and a letter would precede me home.

I went to my advisor, shook with trembling hands his own. He, taking pity on me, allowed me one last chance. Go back home after the Derma rotation, study hard for the finals, score above eighty five percent in them and you’re through. I smiled at that last despite my own fears. His nostrils flared and his eyes grew narrow. He asked me what was so damn funny. I laughed quietly and called him an asshole. His Charlie Chaplin mustache shook and bristled.

Screw you, sonny boy. I don’t care whether you take the finals or not, but now you’re sure as hell not going through Dermatology . Go back home right now.

I read the college rules booklet. It was true. I could still it in the finals if I was prepared to take the chance of getting kicked out of college in case I couldn’t score above eighty five. I had around two months to prepare myself. It was possible.

I packed my bags and left for the airport.

And it was while I sat in the waiting lounge that the bald guy came over and began talking to the old woman.
—–

A short, thin man, almost of midget proportions. A blue sports jacket, almost too big for him, flapped on his body with BASKETBALL PROS AT WORK: WE RULE etched across the chest, snapped in the middle by the zipper. He was almost bald. Scraggly oily hair crept across his scalp like dying tree roots. He did not have any eyebrows.

Alopecia areata, I thought to myself. No question about it.

“Madam,” he said to the old woman. His voice was gentle, soft. Fell on the ears soothingly. “May I make one request?”

The old woman looked up from the Sipara she was reading. She must have been near seventy years old.

“Yes?” She gazed at his face suspiciously. Her own was wrinkled and had tiny moles on the cheeks.

The next flight to Lahore wasn’t due for another hour. The lounge was almost empty. So the bald guy sat down next to her and spoke, always looking into her eyes.”

“Madam,” he began. His barren head bobbed a little sideways as he did. “I noticed you reading your Sipara of the Quran. I presume you’re a holy, or at least a religious woman. So I will come out and say it. Please don’t be alarmed. I am a troubled man.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a holy woman, but you definitely look troubled, young man.” She edged away from him. Beneath her glasses her eyes had begun to scan the lounge restlessly. Even sitting across from her, I could see the dead cataract in her right eye.

The bald guy smiled. He was about thirty, I guessed, and when the corner of his lips lifted, his age showed from behind the disease that had left him hairless in countless places. There was a thin march of restless ants’ stubble above his upper lip, grey and almost beneath the skin.

“I know what I look like, ma’am, but I assure you my looks are misleading. Will you,” his eyes bored into hers, “please bless me?”

The old woman looked straight ahead. I saw her looking at something that wasn’t there. Then she slowly turned and said quietly, “What is it about, son? Are you trouble too?”

“Sorry?”

Are you trying to pull one over me? Is this a joke?” Her face was suddenly becoming red. Her nose had begun to quiver and a tiny mole on it seemed to throb.

“No ma’am. Like I said, I’m just a troubled man and I want your blessing and prayer.” He was playing with his left ear now, curling it, rubbing it. His expression was calm. He twiddled with his ear and went on, “If you’re not comfortable doing that, I will go away, ma’am. I will stop bothering you right now.”

The old woman put the Sipara carefully down in her lap. She wore a green dress with red flower prints, and the book almost merged with the cloth, so thin was it. She adjusted her shawl around her neck and glanced at the bald guy. I watched her face surreptitiously. Still wrinkled, but disgust had left it.

She was holding a rosary of black beads now. I had not seen from where she had produced it. Her fingers began to tell the beads rapidly. “A blessing and a prayer, you say?”

“A blessing and a prayer, ma’am,”said the bald guy softly. His eyes had become large now, were growing larger. I noticed for the first time that they were pale blue. They shifted from the old woman’s face to her fingers on the rosary.??” A blessing and a prayer, is all I’m asking.”

“Then tell me what you want me to pray for,” she said in a dry voice.

I crumpled up the newspaper in my hand and put it aside. With no armrest on my seat, I folded my hands together and leant forward.

The bald guy’s throat clicked. His hand pressed and pulled his ear faster. It was cold, the middle of January, and a stream of sweat was crawling across his forehead lazily. With no eyebrows to hinder it, it trickled down into his eyes. He blinked it away.

“Bless me, ma’am, and pray. Pray to your God that he leaves me. He leaves me be.”

“He who?” She counted the beads. Her gaze was sharp, the cataract falling on his quivering hands.

“He. Your God knows him of old. Please just pray for me, please.” Almost drenched, he drew his jacket’s zipper down, and I saw that his hand was trembling. There was a tension in the air; the lounge was silent. I have never experienced silence like that since. It was like the stillness of a slaughtered chicken. Except there wasn’t a single flap. “Bless me, ma’am, for I need an old sin cleansed.”

The old woman stopped telling the beads. Still clutching the rosary, she brought her hands together in front of her, forming a saucer. I saw the cataract wink at the bald guy as she prayed silently.

I have a strange imagination. Plus I had just smoked a joint in the men’s room.

I think I saw a moth slip through her fingers and flutter away.

It was green and ugly.

—-

I boarded the plane. I always fly Pakistan International Airlines if I can help it. They are better than the rest of the local airlines comfort-wise and the student discount is pretty good: thirty percent off. Inside the plane, the stewardess smiled at me perfunctorily. Her front tooth had black lipstick on it.

My seat was in the middle row. The plane was a Boeing 747 and there were ten seats in each row: four in the middle, three on both sides. The bald guy was already seated on my right in the aisle seat. He glanced up at me and then rubbed his ear absently. He had zipped his jacket up again.

The plane took off ten minutes later.

I took out Clinical Dermatology by MacKie and began to glance through the different kinds of fungal infections. The light was insufficient, so I adjusted it till my seat was bathed in a halo of mellow yellow. A fat man sat between me and the bald guy. His chin drooped onto his chest as he snored. Pimples danced and glistened on his greasy face as a shimmer of light from my side fell on him. His hand covered his crotch as he slept, occasionally pressing down on it.

The stewardess came by and asked me if I wanted any newspapers. I said no. She smiled. She still hadn’t cleaned the lipstick off her teeth. I thought about telling her, but she was talking to the bald guy now. He nodded and said something.

A boy of about twelve sat in the window row, talking intently to his little sister. She looked at him, grinning. The boy’s seat was separated from the bald guy’s by the aisle. Right next to the window sat a lanky, tired-looking man. He had about three days’ worth of bristles on his cheeks. He was constantly rubbing them, and at times he snapped at the two children. The little girl, about five, sat between him and the boy.

I read my book, and dozed off.
I lay on my seat. It was black marble, smooth as a woman’s breast, straight as an ironing board. It was an altar and not a seat, I realized, and felt the steel blade of a knife pressing against my neck. There was no fear…only wondrous amusement. I hadn’t had the time to graduate, and here I was about to be slaughtered in a world composed of black-and-white: there were no colours.

I had time to look at the floor. It was cobbled and grey, the shadowy stones simmering in the ground. Sandals and cloaks were scattered everywhere in my line of vision. Somehow I knew I lay in the dungeons of a castle in forgotten nightmares. I was bound so terrifically I could not move a muscle. Even if the rope hadn’t been there, lethargy would have kept me immobile. The air was redolent with spices and whispers. I could not see my captors, but their voices brushed past my ears. Their hands moved up and down my body. Sighs drifted around me. A door opened somewhere, there was a slam. Then the gritty, chirrup sound of stone grating across wood.

Wooden steps clattered somewhere.

And the knife sliced through my arteries; the blood began to flow. It was thick black.

Yes, you can see the steps, can’t you? said somebody…
…and dazzling hues burst through the slits in my eyes. It was the light. It had melted and the whole spectrum had come together, coalesced together.

“They’re right there behind the dark. All you need to do is let your eyes focus past them and then slowly let your vision slink back in.”

I groaned and rubbed my neck. It was bloodless. The plane floated placidly. It was 4:00 am by the radium in my watch. Summer sunrise would arrive in an hour. I flexed my legs, and the fat man mumbled in his sleep. His bloated head lolled against my pillow, darts of pimples pushing in like needles into a pincushion.

“Aren’t they marvellous? People are always trying to build castles in the air. They don’t realise there’s one in every bank of clouds if one but knew where to look.”

I turned my head. The bald man was talking to the little girl across the aisle. She stared at him, her eyes circles of wonderment, looking very pretty in her pink frock with flower bows at the neck. Her brother’s face was carefully blank. From time to time he jerked his head back in a futile effort to splay his hair. I could tell though that he was listening to the bald guy. It was the way he sneaked occasional glances out the window at the dark flowing by. He wore a sharp yellow T-shirt with twin guitars crossed on it in a red X and GIMME A GUITAR BEFORE YOU READ MY REPORT CARD below it in a psychedelic zigzag.

“Can I see it? Can I see the castle, bhayya?” said the little girl to her brother. She was holding his hand and squeezing it now.

He looked at her and smiled nervously. “I can’t see any castle, dolly. Hush now.”

“Can I see it? Why can’t I see it, bhayya?” She pulled at his jeans.

“Of course you can,” said the bald guy. He was still messing with his ear, this time inserting a finger and yanking it up-and-down repetitively. He was doing it so fast his finger had almost become a blur. “Sonny boy, tell her to look just below the wing of the plane.”

“I can’t see anything, mister,” the boy replied coldly. “Neither can she. We don’t like fairy tales.”

“I do, I do.” The girl jumped up and down in her seat. “I loveee fairy tales. There are princes and princesses and dragons and fairies. Mommy tells me one every night, mister.”

“Your mommy’s smart then. She tells you about things that may be beautiful, may be terrible, but still are true.”

“No, they’re not.” The boy was slicing his hair with his fingers. “They’re silly stories for kids.”

“I am a kid. Bhayya, show me the castle. Mister, tell him to show it to me.”

I glanced at their father — who I was presuming he was. He was sleeping, spittle drooling down his chin. I doubted the girl would whine so much if he were awake. As it was, she was now tugging at the boy’s shirt, her face beginning to pout. “The castle, bhayya? Where is it?”

“I don’t know, Mehru. Stop pulling my shirt. You’ll wake papa up.” The boy frowned and turned to the bald guy. “Mister, stop fibbing to her. She’ll wake the whole plane up if she gets any more excited.”

“You’re mean, bhayya.” The girl’s eyes began to get misty. The boy tried to put an arm around her, but she pushed him away. “You’re a mean bhayya. My friend Nazo’s bhayya takes her to toy stores too. You’ve never taken me to a toy store.”

“I did too. At Eid. Mehru, I’ll buy you a big dollhouse when we get to Lahore. Promise.”

“I don’t want a dollhouse. I wanna see the castle.” Mehru started to cry silently. Tears big as the Ritz slid down her cheeks turning murky in the dim glow from overhead.

The boy looked helplessly at the bald guy. “Now you’ve done it, mister. She won’t stop now.”

The bald guy burped suddenly and gave an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about that, sonny. Quite rude of me.” He leaned across the aisle towards the boy. “Would you mind if I switch seats with you and show your sister the magical castle in the clouds?”

The boy gazed back at him doubtfully, then glanced at his father. He was still sound asleep, his eyelids fluttering as if insects were moving under them. The girl’s chest was beginning to hitch. She had turned her back to her brother. The latter threw up his hands for a second and slipped out of his seat. “All right then, mister. But if my papa wakes up, you’re gonna have to explain to him.”

“No problem, son.” The bald guy got up to shift across the aisle. “And I don’t like mister. You can call me Ali.”

“Okay, Mister Ali,” said the boy solemnly. “My name is Shan and this is my sister, Mehru.”

“Nice to meet you, Shan and Mehru,” he said with a smile. He had positioned himself by the girl’s side, was gently pushing the seat back a bit. Mehru sat a little hunched in hers, but when he grinned at her, she smiled right back. Her cheeks glowed pink from the tears.

“Okay now, Mehru. Let’s have a peek at yon castle, shall we?” said the bald guy cheerfully. He reached across the girl, carefully avoiding the father’s arm, and pushed the window cover straight up. The girl’s eyes widened a little when her father mumbled in his slumber, but she didn’t say anything.

I had been watching this whole melodrama with a casual interest, but when the dark outside the glass gaped, I also turned a bit. So did the boy. He played with his hair all the time, much like the bald guy had played with his ear.

Nervous tics, I thought, amused. Though I might not get through fourth year exams, I was beginning to enjoy playing Doctor Incognito.

“See the dark, Mehru?” said the bald guy (His name’s Ali. Stop thinking of him that way, I admonished myself). Ali took Mehru’s finger and jabbed with it into the dark. “Look there. See, just below the plane’s wing, just where the wing meets the darkness.”

Mehru’s eyes were big as they bored into the dark. I saw her fidget a little when Ali gently manned her finger to a diagonal, but she didn’t take her gaze away. A lock of ebony hair dangled into her left eye.

“There. There. Right there, can you see it?” he whispered. The plane was silent enough for me to hear it. A blond stewardess strode by the aisle, looked at Ali, paused, then shrugging her shoulders moved on. “You can just make out the steps. Big giant steps in the clouds leading up. Up across the rocky cloud bridge. Have you seen Shrek, the animated movie? Do you remember when the ogre goes to rescue the princess? He comes to this smoky, fiery mountain?” Mehru fervently nodded her head. Her fists clenched in concentration as she blinked quickly, desperately, into the dark. “The mountain looms up and up and there are stony steps going round and round till Shrek reaches this bridge beneath which fire and volcanoes and lava blaze, and finally he comes to the tower. See, Mehru, what I’m telling you. Look hard enough and you should see the steps in the clouds and the bridge across them…”

The boy was leaning across the aisle, I noticed. It was understandable. I was half falling out of my seat myself, so spectacularly did Ali tell the story. Though neither of us could see anything since the window was too narrow, Shan’s mouth gaped open. He twisted a bunch of his black hair, twisted it into curls that spiralled round and round. I remembered I used to play with pendulums in my physics lab back in high school. We were supposed to set up stands and hook metal rods up to them and thread strings through holes in balls and ball bearings and spin them around, tick-tock them to-and-fro, and make stupid calculations on graph papers and find out the value of gravity and the force of gravity. Shan curled his hair and phantom pendulums spun in my head.

“…and if you concentrate long enough, you will see the purple lightning set the clouds on fire. Look closely, trace out the bridge, follow the fires, and you will come to a moat made of blue-black clouds. It rises and falls at the edge of the steps — you can’t see anything inside the moat — and if you follow your eye across that, you should see the gates: huge, tall iron spikes and rails outlining the entrance. Do you see, do you see it, Mehru?”

I watched Mehru’s face now. Her lips were apart. Her tongue was in the corner of her mouth and she licked her lips with it. She peered into the dark with the intensity of a med. student studying an open heart surgery. Both of them had forgotten her father by now. The latter was shaking a little in his sleep.

“Do you see it, Mehru? Do you see it?” Ali was saying it repeatedly again. “Do you see the castle; do you see its towers and turrets now?”

The girl’s finger began to tremble from exhaustion or ecstasy I didn’t know. She had begun to mumble something. I perked my ears and leant towards her till my chin almost touched the fat man’s vast belly.

“The castle,”Mehru whispered, her eyes full of wonder, her finger full of fairy-dust. “It’s so pretty. Mister, does anybody live there”

Before Ali could reply, Shan jerked in his seat. He got up hurriedly, and the next thing I saw was the girl’s father opening his eyes and staring at the bald guy. Sleep-crumbs nestled in the corner of his eyes. He stared at Ali as if dazed. Then jerked and sat upright. He was wearing an earring in his left ear and it shuddered and danced as he reached out and prodded Ali in the chest with a thick, callused finger.

“Who the blue fuck are you?” He blinked repetitively and pushed Ali away hard. Redness was beginning to creep across his forehead. His head was a mesh of black hair sticking out in bunches, and he patted it as he glared at Ali.

“Just a fellow passenger, my friend,” said Ali gravely. One of his hands fingered the zipper on his sports jacket and the other reached for his ear. “Just showing Mehru here what wonderful shapes clouds can make.”

“What in hell are you talking about? Get away from my daughter. Shan,” he almost snarled this last. He had spotted the boy standing in the aisle. He rubbed his eyes as if he could not believe them. All the traces of sleep had departed from them. “Get over here, right now.”

Ali looked at the father’s face for one long moment. Then he stood up and said softly, “It was my fault. Don’t be mad at him, right?”

“Shut up,” said the father coldly. “Shan, sit next to your sister.” The boy didn’t move. “I said sit.”

The plane shuddered a little, and Shan lurched. Giving Ali a strange look –both hateful and fearful at the same time — he quietly slipped across and sat down. Mehru’s eyes were riveted on Ali’s face. There was a scared look in them that I didn’t like at all. It told me a lot about what went on in their household.

“What the fuck are you looking at, huh?” the father said to me, his eyes flickering almost contemptuously across the book in my hand. I stared back at him frostily. I may be just twenty-one but I am over six feet. He mouthed something, looked away, and began to shake Shan’s arm.

“Charming fellow, isn’t he,” mumbled Ali, and I had to grin despite myself. I covered my mouth with my palm.

The plane drifted on.

I looked at my watch. It said 4:30. The journey would soon be over. The fat man’s head lolled across Ali’s shoulder now. Spit glistened in the suture of his lips, one thread of it creeping relentlessly towards Ali’s jacket. Ali hummed a tune, oblivious of this peril.

When I couldn’t keep it back anymore, I spoke up, “Hey, mister.”

An amused smile spread on Ali’s face, but he still stared straight ahead. “You heard me before when I was talking to the kid. Ali. The name’s Ali.”

“So you were wondering when I’d start talking to you,” I said, smiling a little myself. “So what’s the deal with you and this castle thing anyway?”

At the word ‘castle’, I saw Mehru perk up her ears. The father was still talking angrily to Shan. The boy had his head down. I had an idea he would have gotten more than just an earful if the plane hadn’t been so full of people. Mehru gave us a quick glance — her face was pale like the sickly moon I had glimpsed earlier that night — and turned back before her father could notice.

“Well, mostly, it’s a story my grandmother used to tell me.” Ali peered out at the dark, then at me. The smile was gone from his face. “However as I grew up and learnt more of life, I learnt to understand and appreciate more of these myths and legends.”

‘So you’re saying the castle in the clouds is a legend around your area or something?”

“Nope,” he said seriously. “Not around my area or my village if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I replied, feeling warmth suffuse my cheeks.

“That’s okay.” He yawned suddenly and glanced at his wristwatch. “What I am saying is that once you go through a certain phase…”

That was when the plane began to buck.

I remember that exact moment in time when hell yawned, stretched, and exploded around us that night. My brain expanded with the burning imageries MaryJane brings with the package, and time burnt around me in slow, kaleidoscopic whirls.

And Ali, the bald guy, a patient in dire need of treatment for his hair disease, began to scream like a little girl.

—-

The plane bucked.

It lurched in the air, shuddered. A deep rumbling, groaning sound that hurt my teeth rose from the metallic walls of the plane. The seat directly in front of me crashed back like a sack full of body parts and smashed into my kneecap. Pain swept through my body like a grinning saw blade, and I yelled, while trying to get a hand between my leg and the seat. A thirtyish woman with big sleepy, blue-lined eyes stared at me upside down from the seat. Her lips parted and she said, “I’m sorry”, in such a comically apologetic voice that I wanted to har har despite the pain.

But the bald guy was screaming. Screaming to wake the dead in the earth thousands of feet below us.

He had leapt out of his seat. His eyes bulged from his sockets. His nostrils flared and settled like a wild animal that has scented death hovering nearby. His hand was twisting his ear, twisting it so frantically that a line of blood had appeared behind the lobe. The other hand flapped in the air like an airborne fish. On his face was a ghastly expression of absolute terror.

“He’s here,” he shrieked. “Here.” His shoulders rose up and down as if he were doing some terrible dance.

“What’re you talking about?” I grabbed the seat. The woman was trying to haul herself up and out of it. A middle-aged guy with a widow’s peak was trying to help her up, his mouth open in an O. He looked bewildered.

The fat man was finally up. His chin quivered as he tried to take in what was happening around him, ready to sprint down the aisle. The plane throbbed as if daring him. A whiny vibration was dancing in the floor now.

“He’s here. He’s here,” babbled Ali. Spit bubbled on his lips which had turned blue. “He’s here to take me.”

I gave one tremendous push up and slid out from beneath the seat, right into the fat man’s lap. He slapped at my back as if he were swatting a fly, then gave up. His belly was so soft I could almost sink into it, but I opted to slip out past Ali to stand in the aisle. It was like standing in deep water with waves pelting my ankles. The floor heaved and sank like a magic carpet.

“Shut the fuck up, you crazy asshole,” snarled somebody behind me. I snatched at the nearest seat as a particularly nasty wave rushed through the aisle, and glanced around. It was that charming, happy-go-lucky father. He was glaring at Ali, his hand clenching and unclenching. “Shut the fuck up. You’re scaring my kids.”

Ali turned around, saw the guy, saw through him, and went right on screaming.

“Ali, calm down,” I yelled. The plane was bucking again now. It jerked back and forth like one of those tiny balls you place on your palm and roll. “Where the hell is the captain?”

Someone began to bawl nearby. I turned. It was Mehru. She was holding her hands to her ears and howling. Tears slipped through her closed eyes and slid down. Shan was petting her arm, trying to hold her to his chest, but she pushed him away with her elbows.

“Shut him up somebody.” Their father was shouting himself. He was almost out of his seat, but the plane’s shuddering and ramping wouldn’t let him get up. “Shut him up, shut him the fuck up.”

I saw a stewardess –the same one with the lipstick stained teeth — hurry towards us. Her arms were spread out in front of her. She kind of looked like Big Ethel running towards Jughead in those Archie comics I had read a hundred years back. I had an insane urge to laugh my head off, but then I glanced at Ali, and the humour died in my chest.

He had wet himself. Ali had urinated standing up, the front of his jeans dark and wet. The pungent, musty smell spread through the air. His eyes were almost rolling, and as the stewardess reached him and grabbed his jacket, saying, “Calm down, sir. Calm down, sir,” repeatedly like a parrot, he tore his ear straight out of his head, hollering like a throat-cut bull.

The stewardess screamed and flinched when he waved the bloody ear like a token in her face. Blood poured down his head in a constant rivulet, staining his sports jacket, spraying onto the fat man’s belly — who himself had clasped his hands together, mumbling prayers aloud, his eyes closed. Some of the droplets landed on Shan’s face and he cried in revulsion. His father was looking at Ali, open-mouthed. His eyes had gone so wide that I could see the red vessels snaking in the white.

“My God. Allah mere. He’s crazy.” I heard other gasps and howls from around me, but they were distant somehow like sounds in the night. Things were beginning to blur in front of my eyes. I shook my head, and grabbed the stewardess’s shoulder. She cried out a little, so I loosened my grip.

“Where’s the captain, where the hell is he?”

“Oh shit, he’s gone nuts,” she muttered, still staring at Ali. “It’s turbulence in the clouds. Thunderclouds. It’s the worst I have yet seen, but it’ll be over soon. Not for him though.” She jerked a thumb in Ali’s direction. Her face was pale but set in gravity now. I knew she was right, but still I shook her arm.

“Tell the captain to make the goddamn announcement. What is he doing?” Somewhere behind me suitcases and handbags thudded and clattered as the overhead compartments burst open. A woman yelped in both fear and pain. Ali bellowed in answer. “Tell him to do it now.”

The stewardess took another look at Ali and bolted. I saw two male stewards coming down the aisle. Their faces were shocked and determined both at the same time. One of them couldn’t have been more than my age. He nervously peered at the older guy again and again. The latter stared at Ali cautiously as he advanced towards him, his hands out.

“I know you’re scared, sir,” said the older steward soothingly. One of his hands crept into his pocket. “I know you’re scared and hurt, but we’ll take care of it fine right away.”

Ali stared at him with red-rimmed eyes, silent for a change. The fleshy, bloody ear glistened on his palm as he stretched his hand towards the steward almost like an offering. His short stature made him look like a bloodied doll.

“He’s here,” whispered Ali. A purplish vein wrestled with the skin of his forehead. “He’s here. Oh God, oh mercy. He wants to take me away. Away. Do you know what that means?”

“I don’t, sir. What’s your name?” The steward’s hand was twitching now in his pocket. “What’s his name, anyone?” He didn’t take his eyes off Ali.

“Ali,” I said softly. “His name’s Ali.”

“Ali, no one’s gonna take you away. We’re right here to help you, protect you.”

“You have no damn idea what you’re talking about.” Ali laughed suddenly. It was such a cheerful, natural sound that it chilled my blood hearing it from an apparently crazy man with one ear less. For that one moment, I thought I heard the sanity of the man come forth like Lazarus and speak. “You have no freaking clue.”

He lurched suddenly as the plane gave yet another haul, and slumped down in his seat. I looked down and saw the congealed blood on his head glisten in the lights. Where his ear once was flapped a clot of wet flesh, squirming with tissue fluids.

“The castle is empty now,” muttered Ali suddenly, and the plane shivered like a frightened puppy. “He needs someone to come back with him.”

“What was that?” The older steward came closer. He had a hypodermic in his hand now. The long, sharp needle jutted out, sloping and disappearing within his hands. “What was that about a castle?”

“The castle, you asshole,” Ali shouted, and the younger steward yelped in surprise, falling back. “The goddam castle where he will fix me up a glass of red wine on raw beef, what do you think?”

Behind me, there was a gasp. I looked over my shoulder; saw Mehru staring right into my eyes. There were gummy tear lines on her cheeks, her chest hitched, but she wasn’t crying any more. Shan had his mouth next to her ear, was whispering softly, but I was quite sure she wasn’t hearing a word. Their father still looked dazed. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed.

“He’s talking about the castle in the clouds, you know, mister,” Mehru said in low voice then. “The one beyond the moat.”

Ali was moaning now. He had tossed the bloody ear on the floor where it lay, curled, like a snail. One thin black hair waved out of the ear canal at me.

“He’s afraid of the King of the Castle.” Mehru stared at me, almost pleading.

“Okay now, Ali, take it easy.” The steward had reached me. I was blocking his path, so he nodded at me. I moved farther down the aisle a few seats behind Ali’s. The steward held the needle behind his back like those cartoon caricatures of doctors on the comic pages of newspapers. “Okay now, things are gonna be just…”

Ali sprang up with a hoarse cry. His arm shot out, fist closed, and caught the steward right in the abdomen. The latter cried out a cartoon-bubble ‘OOF’, and the needle flew from his hands like a missile and disappeared beneath the seats. The younger steward lunged forward to help the older guy up, but Ali lowered his head and rammed him just beneath the chin. The steward gargled out a muffled cry and staggered back, holding his throat.

I froze when Ali turned his face towards me. There was a wild, desperate look in his eyes that has haunted me since that night. He looked like a man who had been told to walk the plank when there was none. Blood still trickled down his head, his sports jacket drenched, the happy, confident declaration BASKETBALL PROS AT WORK: WE RULE soaked red.

He tottered towards me, his head penduluming from one side to the other. He barked a little cough and pointed over my shoulder. I didn’t turn. I was too afraid to turn. He grasped my shirt and shook me impatiently, gesturing with his eyes over my shoulder, and with a strangled moan I turned, trembling, and saw what he wanted.

It was a fire extinguisher hung neatly into a metal holder in the wall between the seats and the food-carts lined in the back of the plane.

I immediately looked back at him and shook my head. He smiled then — perhaps the most terrifying smile I have ever seen on a human face — stood on his tiptoes to put his mouth to my ears. I smelt his breath like rotten bananas and heard his words hammer into my brain.

“If I do not go,” he whispered like a confidant, “he’ll take you all.”

“What?” I asked, bewildered. My voice was shaking. I barely recognised it as my own. “What are you saying?”

His face turned blank then. End of emotions, the circuitry fries. He threw me roughly to one side and reached for the extinguisher.

I stared at him from the floor, my head throbbing from the collision with a seat’s armrest. He had pulled the extinguisher and the metallic body of the cylinder glared at me redly as he carried it almost mechanically towards the nearest oblong window. His head swept from right to left and drops of sweat flew everywhere. Some landed in my eyes, but I noticed the burning no more than I paid attention to the blood I tasted in my mouth. My eyes had been stolen. They watched something so incredible that for a second I thought I had slipped back into a parallel dream world. MaryJane’s parallel Dream World perhaps.

I saw:

The crimson sparkle from the cylinder as it moved through a halo from the overhead spotlights. The black depressor of the extinguisher drooped from its body like an exceptionally shiny, elephant’s trunk.

The crazy twinkle in Ali’s eyes as he stood before the window, the extinguisher paused in mid air. Ali caressed the clot that was once his ear almost lovingly, his eyes fixed at black infinity fringed with the morning sun’s golden shadow.

The terrified faces of the two stewards, cracked with horrified anticipation, frozen on a lancet of that horrible moment. The younger one had crammed his fist into his mouth, perhaps chewing the flesh between his knuckles.

The phantasmagoric dents and warps that flickered in the body of the plane; the blooms of pink and ember that exploded and imploded within the walls; the streaming, papery, momentarily suffocating blackness that whooshed through the cabin as if a giant phantom hand had tried to grasp the plane and instead had swished through in its intangibility.

That was when Ali turned towards Mehru. His lips drew back in a skull grin. He winked at her without the least bit of consciousness in his eyes.

“And to think I once had no use for organised religion. How’s this for the religious stories about the Al-Khaba’ath?”

Mehru looked at him silently. There was not an iota of fear on her countenance. Only gravity and inevitability. And gravity and inevitability in themselves can be the darkest and wickedest emotions on a six-year-old’s face. She watched his empty eyes, watched the cylinder, watched his bald head, and her eyes were big but brave when she lifted her hand.

She uncurled her index finger and waved a last good bye.

Eyelids flapping together and closing, Ali nodded his head once like a gutted goat hanging from a slaughter-tree…

…and swung the extinguisher.

—–

I arrived at Lahore International Airport at 6:35 am.

As soon as the plane touched down, I was out the exit and walking fast towards the nearest taxi.

Bumpy ride. Morning twilight dripping from the roofs of the houses, an eye out for me. The sun watching me from the sky, waiting for opportunities to throw bright needles at me. The swaying, watching green eyes in the greenbelt along the road.

I saw all these. A ten-year-old newspaper vendor pedalling his bicycle round sleeping neighbourhoods. He glanced in my direction. An old woman telling a rosary, walking by the roadside, brandishing a stick at a mongrel. She seemed to be waving at me too.

The dawning day watched me, and I cuddled closer to my suitcase, nestling the Derma book in my armpit.

I reached home, said hello to my parents, had a fried egg with burnt toast, and went to sleep.
—–

I shudder, and the joint nods its lighted head. It watches me like an angry eye in the darkness.

It has been a month since the bald guy went lunar in the plane. I have lived in unreality since. My parents have pestered me, my brother tried to coax me. I only muttered something about preparing for my finals at home. They have read the letter the medical college sent them, taking it in with a surprising calm. They are more worried about my silence than my repeating a year. They probably haven’t forgotten the way I brushed them off when I walked into the house that day, my face smeared with grimy blood. I must have been a horrifying sight.

Just like the visions that wrap around me.

MaryJane, MaryJane! What Angels of Oblivion in your clutch are slain!

I smoke the joint. My first in a month. Its mist is here. The shadows are here.

The little girl.

He’s afraid of the King of the Castle.

The boy. His name was Shan.

We don’t like fairy tales, mister. They’re silly stories for kids.

The bald guy himself. Ali. Standing with the red extinguisher poised in midair.

The Al-Khaba’ath. What about them?

I know about them now. I have read the reference up. In the Prophet’s Sayings, in the various books of the occult that are scattered like ill wishes in our public library. It took me twenty minutes of reading. It gave me twenty nights of echoes. Faces grinning at the window. Pale bed sheets wrapping around me noiselessly.

Al-Khaba’ath: The children of evil that prowl through the night. The darkness that crouches everywhere, fluttering dark wings. The nameless ones that sit in forgotten clouds of doom.

The words keep prodding their fat fingers at my consciousness, and I bite back a scream…occasionally.

I smoke the joint. I have a feeling it will be my last. I am done with MaryJane. I have no idea whether I will be able to study for my finals. I don’t give a flying fuck anyways. But MaryJane! I know she’s no longer my love because she torments me now. Her smoky tentacles brush against my arms and in their wake rush the visions upon me.

In particular one sequence. One flow of imagery that my mind refuses to burn. One wasteland of memory that yawns its mouth open right in front of me.

I see it and I tremble…

…and MaryJane nods her pretty hideous head:

The red cylinder comes down. The glass shudders, but doesn’t break. He lugs the extinguisher back up, hoists it above his shoulders, brings it back down.

Smash!

Shards of glass shower everywhere. Some ricochet from the floor and fly sharply into my arms as I lie, dazed, on the floor. The air begins to whistle suddenly. Screams and crashes caterwaul, then are drowned in the rush of pressure-borne noise.

The bald guy stands in front of the window. The oblong hole sucks at everything around him: suitcases, flyers, ties, seat cushions. People slip and fall, food carts roll across the cabin, overhead compartments burst open. Even the spotlights flicker and sizzle in the vortex of air around the hole.

But the bald guy stands still in front of it. His head is bent down. The wind doesn’t even tug at him. He may have been standing in front of a god’s altar, so respectful and awful his stillness is.

And then he bends, thrusts his head forward, and starts squeezing through.

I lie, horror-stricken. I stare at his back. His shirttail has come out of his trousers and it flaps at me like a dead mouth. He is grunting, moaning now. He is very small, yes, but his head is stuck. He jerks it, twists it. I can see how red his neck has grown with the effort. Then he bellows once, pushes forward, and all at once he’s sliding forward, his feet waving in the air, one shoe falling off and onto the floor with a dhub!

I scream.

Not because he’s gone.

Because I have seen a flash of pink.

The pink arm that has pulled him through. The long hairy, fleshy, pink arm.

I scream and cram my fist into my mouth.

And then I’m up and rushing towards the hole.

The wind shrieks and pulls like a hag at my face, at my eyes. But I stare stubbornly through it. Outside is blackness veined through with sunlight. Clouds roll below me. Thunderstorm. It’s like watching a sea rage. Purple clouds, black clouds, golden clouds raise their heads and thrash them. Lightning boils up in a nearby pod and I see a silver voltage branch through a cloud bank.

And then I see them.

I see the steps.

Steps made of cotton, steps made of wool, steps made of cloud stone, which run through a particularly dense underbrush of clouds. Falling and rising and swaying and circling, the steps course like a rustle in a guitar’s strings through the sea of clouds to a distant infinity.

And I scream and I scream and I scream.

I will scream for long now. In my head, in my heart.

For lightning streaks through the steps themselves, turning them to fire, turning them to lava, turning them into a solid crimson path.

Standing on the path, frozen in his first step on a journey to the King’s Castle, is the shadowy, misty, burning form of the bald guy himself.

He seems to be holding hands with a shimmering pinkish arm. The arm flails beside him.

The arm ends nowhere.