Deadlock

by Rafi Aamer

[Place: Siachin glacier, the highest battleground in the world, on the border of India and Pakistan]
[Time: Right after a major skirmish between Indian and Pakistani army units, leaving one officer from each side alive, lying on their chests and aiming at each other]

“Drop your weapon. You are a prisoner of war now.”
“The hell I am! You better surrender.”
“I will not dishonor myself.”
“You think I will? I will fight for my country till the last drop of my blood.”
“So will I!”
[An hour later]
“Are you ready to give up?”
“No. Are you?”
“That is not going to happen. As long as I have my rifle in my hands and it is loaded, I am not going to give up.”
“You can’t stay in that position for ever. Eventually you are going to move and I would be able to see something other than your helmet and then I am going to shoot.”
“We’ll see who moves first.”
[An hour later]
“You better give up. That way you can live.”
“I will live alright without giving up. I am going to grow old and attend my son’s 40th birthday.”
“I am going to walk out of here alive and free and I will live long enough to play with my grand-kids.”
“You cannot stay any longer in this position. I can. I have done a lot of endurance exercises.”
“What do you think I have been doing? Watching your stupid Bollywood movies?”
[An hour later]
“I think you are getting tired.”
“I am a soldier and soldiers do not get tired. Besides I have Rajput blood running in my veins.”
“You…are a Rajput?”
“Yes. Are you scared?”
“No. I am Rajput too. That means we are from the same clan.”
“That means nothing. All humanity in a way is from the same clan. That hasn't stopped any war.”
[An hour later]
“I think you are stiffening up a little. I am offering you again to surrender. You will be treated fairly.”
“Stiffening up? I can be in this position till the reinforcement arrives.”
“Reinforcement? Ha! Look around you, the conditions, the terrain. It will take weeks for reinforcement to arrive.”
“So be it.”
[An hour later]
“Why do you want to defend your country anyway? What has it produced beside Mehdi Hassan? And even he is from a town that is in India now. So he can be called half-Indian.”
“Oh yeah? Well, your best playback singer, Muhammad Rafi, was from a town that is in Pakistan now. So I guess he was half-Pakistani.”
“Are you trying to distract me with such talk?”
“No. I am not but you are. And it’s not working. I am as alert as ever.”
[An hour later]
“I am telling you, I am tough. You should surrender.”
“You have no supplies. We blew up your supply tent. You don't even have water for all I know.”
“I have milk in hip flask which is better than water.”
“I still have a lot of water to survive for another few weeks. After getting rid of you, I am going to go back to my tent, warm the water on my kerosene lamp and wash my face with it. Ahh…what a  comforting thought; splashing warm water on my face.”
“You….have a kerosene lamp and water?”
“Yes…yes…I do .... and you .... have milk?”
“And there maybe some teabags left in the supply tent?”
“Are you….are you .... thinking what I am thinking?”
“I think…I guess… yes.”
[Standing up] “To hell with it man! let’s have some tea.” 

PK 711

On July 9th, 2016, PIA's flight PK 711 was suppose to arrive Manchester, UK at 10:40 am en route to John F. Kennedy airport at New York where it was scheduled to arrive at 2:55 pm.

Passengers were informed on July 8th that the flight will be delayed by 9 hours. Apparent reason corroborated by the data available on flight status websites is that the plane that was supposed to be carrying passengers to Manchester and New York was sent to fetch Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his posse of incompetent darbaris from London and at the time of this writing PK711 is delayed by 15 hours.

What this means for the passengers?

At the minimum, it is a huge inconvenience for people travelling to Manchester and New York but that's not it. People who have connected flights from New York to other parts of United States will miss their connecting flights and will be stranded in New York for an unknown time. All this so the royal highness could travel with his posse.

What can the passengers do?

All flights arriving in USA from European destination are regulated by the Department of Transportation (DOT). For all practical purposes for DOT, PK 711 is arriving from Europe (Manchester, UK). Under DOT's regulations, all passengers arriving in New York on PK 711 on July 9th (actually arriving now on July 10th) are entitled to a ticket price refund or $1300, whichever is lower, by PIA. Passengers can file the complaint at DOT's website. Here is the link

http://airconsumer.dot.gov/escomplaint/ConsumerForm.cfm

It is important that the complainant allows the DOT to share the complaint with any regulatory body outside USA.

People arriving in Manchester, UK through PK 711 are entitled to ticket refund too under UK aviation regulations. Passengers arriving at Manchester can file a claim at

http://refund.me

Every passenger should make PIA pay for this so the rulers can feel a little bit of a pinch for this callous disregard of people's plight.

I will be at the JFK airport when this flight arrives and will convey the above information to as many passengers as possible.

PK 711

On July 9th, 2016, PIA's flight PK 711 was suppose to arrive Manchester, UK at 10:40 am en route to John F. Kennedy airport at New York where it was scheduled to arrive at 2:55 pm.

Passengers were informed on July 8th that the flight will be delayed by 9 hours. Apparent reason corroborated by the data available on flight status websites is that the plane that was supposed to be carrying passengers to Manchester and New York was sent to fetch Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his posse of incompetent darbaris from London and at the time of this writing PK711 is delayed by 15 hours.

What this means for the passengers?

At the minimum, it is a huge inconvenience for people travelling to Manchester and New York but that's not it. People who have connected flights from New York to other parts of United States will miss their connecting flights and will be stranded in New York for an unknown time. All this so the royal highness could travel with his posse.

What can the passengers do?

All flights arriving in USA from European destination are regulated by the Department of Transportation (DOT). For all practical purposes for DOT, PK 711 is arriving from Europe (Manchester, UK). Under DOT's regulations, all passengers arriving in New York on PK 711 on July 9th (actually arriving now on July 10th) are entitled to a ticket price refund or $1300, whichever is lower, by PIA. Passengers can file the complaint at DOT's website. Here is the link

https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/file-consumer-complaint

People arriving in Manchester, UK through PK 711 are entitled to ticket refund too under UK aviation regulations. Passengers arriving at Manchester can file a claim at

http://refund.me

Every passenger should make PIA pay for this so the rulers can feel a little bit of a pinch for this callous disregard of people's plight.

I will be at the JFK airport when this flight arrives and will convey the above information to as many passengers as possible.

What is wrong with science?

An imaginary dialogue taking place in the 16th century

Priest: So explain to me why moon revolves around earth and not just drift off into the space?
Scientist: I don't know.
Priest: Ha! But I know! God keeps it revolving. Why don't you scientists accept that there is a God?


An imaginary dialogue taking place in the 19th century

Priest: So explain to me why moon revolves around earth and not just drift off into the space?
Scientist: Because of Earth's gravity.
Priest: Oh, the gravity. So tell me, if larger objects keep pulling the smaller objects, things should keep collapsing. Why hasn't the universe collapsed into a single massive object?
Scientist: I don't know.
Priest: Ha! But I know! God keeps the things apart through the divine force. Why don't you scientists accept that there is a God?

An imaginary dialogue taking place in the 21st century

Priest: If larger objects have more gravity, pulling the smaller objects, things should keep collapsing. Why hasn't the universe collapsed into a single massive object?
Scientist: Because the universe is expanding and this expansion is accelerating due to the Big Bang.
Priest: How did the Big Bang happen?
Scientist: I don't know.
Priest: Ha! But I know! God made it happen. Why don't you scientists accept that there is a God?

What is wrong with science? Why doesn't it accept that there is a God? In the shortest possible answer: God is none of science's problems.

Science is the study of nature, using natural means, understanding natural phenomena and their natural causes. It does not and cannot resort to supra-natural if it fails to find a natural cause of a natural phenomenon. As implied by the three imaginary dialogues above, science has no problem, never had, saying "we don't know" when science cannot find an answer from the natural realm and as implied by those very dialogues, some people keep pushing science to replace God with "we don't know" which will never happen.

Existence or non-existence of God is not something science concerns itself with and yet the demand of science to accept the existence of a supreme creator never relents.  From Galileo to Darwin, scientists have come under criticism and sometimes persecution for just doing science. In none of his books did Charles Darwin say, "there is no creator of life" and yet he is criticized and ridiculed day in and day out by religious folks because his "science" differed from the creation stories of all major religions.

Of all the questions posed to science by people who want science submitted into accepting the idea of a divine creator, the most famous question is  "what was there before Big Bang". I have heard this question hundreds of times and hearing it always leaves me a little bit frustrated because I feel that whoever asks this question should first invest some time to understand the things because this is not a valid question. It has a word before in it which implies backward continuity of time through the Big Bang which is nothing more than a hypotheses. According to all we know, the time was also created as the result of Big Bang. This is just an example, a prime one actually, of getting into a quarrel with science without knowing how science works or what it's conclusions are so far. Most of such questions are based on human intuition which has been shown, time and again, by science to be completely unreliable. Our brains have been evolved to survive and recreate and not to intuitively understand the deep universal realities. If you want to test the reliability of human intuition, go read the theory of special relativity or quantum mechanics and just try to understand them based on nothing but your intuition.

While my basic assertion is that science is not in the business of accepting or denying the existence of a God, it's true that some practicing scientists are and have been very vocal about their atheism. The first names in this regard that come to my mind are Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. Carl Sagan famously said. "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and Richard Dawkins, in an interview, said, "I am an atheist for all practical purposes. Meaning I don't claim that there is no God but I don't see evidence of existence of a God". The common thread in both those assertions is evidence. Science deals with measurable, empirical and falsifiable evidence. All these scientists are saying that there may very well be a God and everyone is free to believe in one, or two or a whole army of Gods but there is no measurable, empirical and falsifiable evidence of any. Once again, they art sticking to what's called the scientific method and that method insists on keeping natural in the study of nature.

And by the way, holy books foretelling scientific discoveries cannot be treated as evidence in scientific halls. People coming from all religions claim that their particular scripture foretells scientific discoveries but those claims are usually a matter of interpretations and those interpretations invariably follow the scientific discovery and not the other way round. There are many other problems with that approach, which requires a separate examination which I am not going to do here, due to which almost all leading scholars, very wisely,  have advised there followers of not going that route,

Thanks to science, the amount of things we know today about our universe outnumbers the things we don't know about it. There are only a handful of questions left unanswered. It's true that during the investigation of those unanswered questions, we might discover a whole new set of unanswered questions. Science will keep trying to find the answers and in the meantime it will keep pleading it's ignorance about those answers saying, "we don't know." If you feel the urge to say "Oh but I know and the answer is God", read the top of this article again.

Note: However unneeded this maybe, I must say that I am not trying to prove any religion wrong. All I am asking is to keep the faith and science in different realms.

The great Pashtun spirit

The history of Pashtuns is a history of constant struggle of a people for their rights. Post-partition, this struggle, in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly NWFP) region of Pakistan was mostly spearheaded by leftist political elements. In fact, the leftist elements in KPK pre-date the creation of Pakistan People’s Party which later became the torch-bearer of the Left in Pakistani politics. Today, it seems hard to imagine that once this region was the bastion of non-violent liberal politics.

In past two decades, KPK has been a source of a stream of bad news, news of religious extremists taking over parts of it imposing inhumane conditions on the populace, news of hard-hitting reaction by the armed forces of Pakistan resulting in millions of people getting displaced in the conflict, news some of which I just don’t find the heart to mention here. Every bit of such news has been very hard for me to take since, hailing from Punjab, I always considered KPK my second home; a place that was, for many Punjabis like myself, a scenic refuge away from the mundane life.

Alas, today’s generation is probably deprived of the experience KPK had to offer prior to the onslaught of extremists (and nothing will make me happier to know that I am wrong and the things are still exactly the same). I have been to almost every part of Pakistan but I was surprised to find out the liberal attitudes in the KPK region. Despite all their overtly religious outlook, in my personal experience, there were no one in Pakistan more liberal than Pashtuns. I am proud to say that some of the people who initiated me on the path of liberalism by way of showing and teaching me the true values of liberalism were Pashtuns.

To some non-Pashtuns, especially my Punjabi fellows, this may come as a surprise because out there in Punjab the image of a Pashtun we had was of an extremely conservative religious person. Half of that image, according to my own experience, is true but not all of it. A vast majority of Pashtuns I have encountered in my life are practicing religious folks who hardly ever miss a prayer in a day. But what I also experienced was total lack of any desire to impose their religious values on strangers. I would love to share two of my many memories of the generosity of the Pashtun spirit.

On a journalistic assignment, I was once visiting the town of Takht Bhai in the company of an Ahmadi colleague. We were having lunch at a chappal kabab place. It was almost time for the noon prayer. We were sharing the table with an elderly Pashtun. I asked him if he could tell me where the nearest mosque was. He turned out to be the Imam of the local mosque and offered to escort us to the mosque after he finished his meal. When he did we got out of the restaurant and while I kept walking with the Imam, my Ahmadi friend stopped right outside the restaurant. I whispered to the Imam that my friend won’t be joining us because he was Ahmadi. That stopped the Imam short in his tracks. He turned around and shouted to my friend, “you worship the same Allah, right? So, come along!” Which he did with a wide grin on his face.

At another time, while I was a college student, a bunch of us were travelling through the valley of Swat in the middle of the month of Ramadan. None of us were fasting and it was the Zia era. There was no food available to be bought. Starving, we saw an apple orchard right by the road so we stopped the car and went into the orchard. There was not a soul around. We started pocketing the apples that had fallen off the trees when we saw a Pashtun, probably the owner of the orchard, rushing to us yelling in Pashto something which must have translated something like “thieves”. When he reached us, he asked the obvious question; what did we think we were doing? We told him we were hungry and there was no food available. When he hinted at the fact that this was the month of Ramadan and we were supposed to be fasting, I offered him the Shara’i excuse of travelers not being obligated to fast. He asked us to wait and came back with a paper bag. He started picking apples from the trees, bagging them while delivering a mini lecture to us on a mix of why you can’t just enter an orchard and pick fruit off the ground most of which is rotten anyway and travelers travelling in air-conditioned cars should not resort to quoting Shari’a exemptions on fasting. He handed the bag to us when it was full of apples. When we offered him money for the apples, he said, “oh now you want me take money for helping you commit a sin? Go on your way! You are a bunch of thieves but still my guests.” Those were the sweetest apples I have ever had, made sweeter by the kindness of a great man.

Such was the kind and generous Pashtun spirit that I kept encountering on my numerous trips to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I hope that despite all the stabs taken at it by so many, that spirit is still alive and someday I will, once again, enjoy the great Pashtun hospitality.

Ghosts

A story by Rafi Aamer

John and Mary had been saving money for a long time to make the initial payment to buy their own house. By their calculation, they were still a few years away from having enough money to buy the house of their dreams; a small unit with two floors in a quiet neighborhood of San Jose. They could not believe when their real estate agent friend told them that because of the housing crash, they already had enough money to buy a house.Now. Not years from now, but now. In fact Estella had a house she could show to them. It was one of those abandoned properties that was now some bank’s liability and the bank had put the house on the market on a throwaway price. They went to see the house and fell in love with it on the first sight. Like all abandoned properties, it needed some fixing to do but it wasn’t that bad. They did not have to wait anymore.

Mary, being a stay home wife, started the fixing and decorating as they moved in and within a few days, they had made that house a perfect home for them to live and have kids and raise them.

But there was something that was not so right with the house.

There was a night when John was working the night shift when he received a call from Mary’s cell phone. It was very early the morning and John wondered why Mary was using the cell phone and not the home phone. When he answered the call, he heard a terrified Mary asking him to come home immediately. She wouldn't tell him what was wrong. She just kept crying and pleading John to come home. John drove home that was only a few miles away. When he got home, he saw Mary sitting on the steps outside the house in her nightgown shivering in a perfectly warm night. John ran to her and took Mary in her arms.

“What’s the matter honey? Are you alright?”

“I’m scared, “answered Mary, “I was sleeping and I was woken up by the sound from the other bedroom. The sound…”

“All houses make sounds honey,” John said cutting her off.

“No, no, not that kind of sound.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard…I heard a baby crying.” Mary said and broke into tears.

“You were sleeping. Maybe you dreamed about it and woke up.” John said consolingly while rubbing her back with his hand.

“No. It wasn’t a dream. It continued after I woke up. It continued for a long time. I could hear it so clearly. I was frozen with fear and couldn’t move. And then when the sound stopped, I grabbed my phone and ran out and called you.” She said, sobbing.

John helped Mary inside the house assuring her that it was just a hallucination.

But strange things kept happening. One night, John could swear that he too heard a baby crying but he dismissed it again as his mind playing tricks on him, something caused by Mary’s episode. Then there were other sounds, people talking to each other, whispering, and sometimes giggling. John kept reassuring Mary that they were just paranoid due to what happened when Mary hallucinated about hearing a child crying.

It only took John a few days to realize that he was wrong. That was the night of the party.

They, John and Mary, were not the ones who were having a party. They were sleeping in their bed. This time it was John who woke up, not because he heard any noises, but because he was thirsty.

John went downstairs to the kitchen to get water. The kitchen was part of the living area and it had a big window through which you could see the backyard. The window was covered with drapes and as John entered the kitchen, he saw flickering lights filtering in to the kitchen through the slits of the drapes. Curiously, John parted the drapes and what he saw sent a chill through his spine. There were people, backyard full of people, dressed for a party, drinking, laughing, dancing. The backyard was lit with different colors of lights. At the center of the crowd was a young man donning a black gown and he seemed like the center of attraction of the whole crowd. He had a big grin on his face. John kept looking at the scene thinking that he was just having a dream and he is going to wake up any moment now. He actually made a conscious effort, trying to make his mind wake him up, to no avail. He stood there for a long time mesmerized. The strangest thing was that there were a lot of people who looked like talking and laughing loudly but John couldn't hear a thing. The scene was completely silent. The first sound he heard didn't come from the party going on in the backyard. It came from behind him, the sound of a loud intake of breath, a big gasp. He turned around and saw Mary who was standing with wide eyes fixated on the scene in the backyard with her hands on her mouth. All blood had drained from her face. John hurriedly put the drapes back and hugged Mary who was shaking violently.

That night, they checked into a motel.

The first thing John did the next morning was to call Estella to find out who were the previous owners of their house.

“I don’t know. You bought this property from a bank since it was an abandoned property. I can check with the bank to find out. Why? Why do you want to know?”

“We want to know why they abandoned the house.” John replied.

Estella had the information in a couple of hours. Previous owners: David and Tiffany Rodriguez, current address: unknown.

John picked the phone book up and started calling every David Rodriguez. He had little hope to find the one he was looking for. The first five people he called told him that they had never lived at that address. It was the sixth one who said, “Why? Who wants to know?” John explained to him calmly that he wasn’t calling from any bank or any sort of similar organization. He was calling because they had bought David’s old house and they wanted to know a few things, some unusual things. After some hesitation, David agreed to meet them but refused to give John his address. Instead, he gave John the name of a coffee shop in a small town some 20 miles from San Jose and told him that he would meet them the next day at the coffee shop.

Next day, John and Mary drove to the small town David had told them about. It was a poorly maintained neighborhood with old buildings, some looking like they would fall down any moment, and streets in a bad need of repair. The coffee shop David had agreed to meet at was on the main street and the coffee shop itself looked like it existed in the early part of the previous century. When they entered the coffee shop, a young man behind the counter, who, for some reason, looked familiar to John, asked, “Are you here to see David?” When John said yes, the young man pointed to the corner table where a middle aged couple sat side by side. John and Mary walked to the table, shook hands with the couple and sat down on the opposite side of the table. The couple seemed to be in their late fifties and they were wearing cheap but clean clothes. After a few pleasantries, David asked John why he wanted to meet them.

“I wanted to know why you abandoned that house?” said John.

“Well, why do you think we abandoned it?”

“To be honest, I think you abandoned it because it is haunted and you couldn’t sell a haunted house. Maybe people in the area knew about that but we didn’t.”

“Haunted?” asked David with a curious look at his face, “No, it wasn’t haunted.”

“Then why did you leave it.” This time it was Mary’s turn to ask a question.

“I will tell you,” said David, “but first, I want to know why do you think it’s haunted?”

“We don’t think,” John said a bit aggressively, “we know it is haunted. We see and hear ghosts in the house.”

“Ghosts?” asked David and him and his wife looked at each other with puzzled looks on their faces.

“Yes, we keep hearing a baby cry in the smaller bedroom upstairs,” said Mary.

As soon as she said it, Tiffany's facial expression changed. She looked like she was about to start crying. She was looking in the distance. Then, with quivering lips and wet eyes, she lowered her head and said, almost whispered “Jenny coming home to have the baby.” Two droplets of tears fell from her eyes.

“And the night before the last, we saw some sort of a party going on with a young man in a black gown,” said John.

David, who was also looking in the distance, said, as he was in some sort of trance, “Ed’s college graduation party.”

They were all silent for a few moments that felt like hours. John, finally broke the silence, and said, 

“Who are Jenny and Ed?”

It was as if his question broke some sort of spell.

“Well, “said David, leaning forward and laying his arms on the table as if getting ready to tell a long story, “you know, Tiffany here, my wife, and I grew up in this very neighborhood. As you can see, it is a poor neighborhood mostly populated by Mexican immigrants. Our own folks came from Mexico. Tiffany and I married young, very young. But we decided not to have kids while we lived here. You see, we grew up in poverty and we didn't want the same for our kids. Neither of us is very highly educated but we decided to work hard, do as many jobs as we can in a day, work over weekends so we can get out of this town to some nicer place and then have kids so they can go to nice schools and don't have to live the life we did. And we did all that. We worked and worked and worked. It was tough, very tough, but the hope that one day we will get out of this town and have kids kept us going. After a few years, we had enough money to make the initial payment on a house, the house that belongs to you now. We had kids there, Jenny and Ed. We lived there for a long time but then the economy started going south. First Tiffany and then I lost our jobs. We could not find good jobs anymore. We tried to make ends meet by doing odd jobs but we couldn’t earn enough every month to pay the bank. So we started missing loan payments.”

Mary almost stopped David thinking something didn't make sense but she didn't because she couldn’t really understand what it was that didn't make sense.

“So, “David continued, “we decided to foreclose the house so we could at least get our loan written off and try to make a fresh start somehow. We went to the foreclosure court. We could not afford a good lawyer but the banks can. We tried our best but the judge ruled that we could not foreclose since we had the ability to earn. Ability. What a word! We were old now. We could not work anymore like we did when we were young. We are honest people and wanted to do the right the right way but the bank wanted us to work three jobs a day to pay them. We tried but could not do that. After that, we had no other choice but to abandon the house and come back to the obscurity of our hometown. The bank chased us but we had nothing of value left for them to take so they decided that we were not worth wasting time on. And, that’s the answer to your question.”

And it was at that moment that it hit Mary what didn't make sense. “Wait,” she said, “I don’t understand. You said you worked in this town for a long time and then you moved to the new house and had kids there. That should make you a lot older than you look to have two adult children, one becoming a mother and the other graduating from college. And you haven’t told us what happened to Jenny and Ed. How did they …?” Mary couldn't say the word.

“Die, you want to say?” asked David, “No. They did not die. The boy at the counter who talked to you as you entered is Ed and he could not go to college. He works here at this coffee shop. As for Jenny, Lord knows where she is. She got mixed up with the wrong sort of folks and fled town. I don't know where she is but I sure hope she is still alive. ”

“Then whose ghosts do we have in the house?” asked Mary, bewildered, to no one in particular.

David stood up to leave, as did his wife, and said, “Miss, you don’t have ghosts of people in your house. What you are seeing and hearing are ghosts of our dreams and hopes. If that house is haunted, it is only haunted by our dreams that didn't come true. The dreams that we could not pack into our suitcases when we left. We did not have another home to take them to. We had to leave them behind.”

David and Tiffany left the coffee shop, hand in hand, dragging their feet heavy with the weights of their lives tied to them

Dominos

Dominoes - A story by Rafi Aamer

In the middle of a forest surrounded by deserted and long destroyed villages many miles south of Hanoi, Vietnam, crickets and cicadas were chirping in a deafening chorus in the middle of a hot a moonless night. And suddenly all of them went silent. 

All of them…not a single chirp. An equally deafening silence following by deafening chorus. The insects must have sensed that something was about to happen. Insects have this sense of knowing the things-that-are-about-to-happen. And then the silence was pierced by a loud, painful, ear-drums shattering scream—a human scream. A scream that the snakes in the forest felt on their skins and writhed in anguish. Apes fell from the trees and started scurrying around to find a place where they could stop hearing the scream. It was the kind scream that goes on and on. And then it died. And after a brief silence, there followed a cacophony of hisses-barks-roars-tweets-squawks, all animals registering their protest for this alien auditory invasion. And they kept protesting till the dawn.
------------------------
Years ago, at the same spot of the same forest, Private James “Jimmy” Saunders of the 3rd brigade of the 4th Infantry Division of United States Army, was hiding in a ditch panting. He had arrived in Vietnam a week ago and on that particular day his company had faced the biggest ambush of Vietcong they had ever faced in that particular region. It was a surprise because their company commander had a truce with the local villagers promising them safety if they didn’t give protection to Vietcong. Seemingly, the Vietcong from other areas had been using the thickness of the forest to secretly gather and mobilize their troops. When the ambush happened, Jimmy’s company was taken completely off-guard. Jimmy saw many of his comrades just being cut in half by the salvo of incoming bullets. They took heavy casualties and started to run away in all directions. Jimmy had been running for 20 minutes straight. He didn’t know where the rest of his company was. He found this ditch and decided to hide and catch his breath.
He hadn’t completely regained his composure when he heard footsteps coming through the thick foliage of the forest. He squinted to see and wiped the sweat off his brow. Slowly a figure emerged. Jimmy crouched and straightened his rifle trying to hold his breath. The person was heading straight towards Jimmy’s hiding place. The person was wearing traditional loose Vietnamese unisex top and bottom of the same color. It had a bag slung over its shoulder. “Is it a stray Vietcong?” Jimmy thought. The person was still heading towards him. Then it reached into the bag and got something out. Jimmy could tell by the way the person’s hand was enveloping the object that the object was spherical…and then the person brought the object to its mouth…”Shit!” Jimmy’s mind yelled…”It’s a grenade and this Vietcong bastard is going to throw it at me”. Faster than the blink of the eye, Jimmy aimed and shot. The bullet hit the target and the person fell down. Jimmy rushed towards it, rifle still aimed at the fallen figure. When he arrived at his intended destination, he saw that “the Vietcong bastard” was a lean, about 16-year-old, girl holding her shot leg crying loudly. Her hat had come off and her bag was on the ground. About half a dozen apples had spilled from the bag.
“What the hell, what the hell, what the hell.” Jimmy started shouting in the air while stomping the ground walking in circles around the wounded girl.
“What the hell were you doing here?” he yelled in the girl’s face leaning down, saliva dripping from his lips. The girl tried to utter some Vietnamese words between her sobs. But Jimmy kept shouting at her face the same question. The girl got scared and started to crawl backward till her back hit a tree trunk. She grabbed the trunk and used it to stand up on her one good leg. Jimmy’s mind was still aflame with a mixture of fear, anger and frustration that he had been accumulating all day and which had now started to grow like a jungle-fire, setting Jimmy’s throat, ears, eyes on fire. The girl yelled at him in Vietnamese but the only word Jimmy could understand was “truce”. “Oh fucking beautiful!” Jimmy hit his helmet with the butt of his rifle. “Now I am going to get court-martialed for violating the truce” he shouted. His anger started to take over him completely. He started walking towards the girl. She wrapped her arms around the tree trunk behind her back and pressed her back against the tree as if trying to somehow get inside the tree-trunk to hide from Jimmy. “First your Vietcong brothers kill most of my friend, and then you show up, God knows why, in the middle of the forest biting an apple like taking the pin out of a grenade and now you are gonna tell your people that I shot you and the Captain’s gonna have my ass.” His rage had completely taken over his mind. He was mad angry now. “You know what! Not gonna happen!” Saying those words, Jimmy plunged his bayonet into the girl’s chest. It went through her chest and got lodged in the tree trunk. “That’s what you get for not minding your own fucking business in a goddamned war.” He yanked the bayonet back. Since it was lodged deeply into the tree trunk, it came off the rifle’s muzzle and fell down beside the dying girl’s body. There was slit where it had pierced the tree trunk, and the girl’s blood was dripping from the slit. It looked as the tree was bleeding.
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A week later, Jimmy was discharged from the unit because he had threatened to kill some of his fellow soldiers and was sent back home to Houston, Texas. The Army had termed him mentally unfit for the duty and his friends were perplexed at his sudden metamorphosis into a crazy maniac who would pick fights on the smallest of things. But the officers had seen many such episodes so they were not as perplexed.
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Once back home, Jimmy’s life was divided into brief episodes of jail time, mental asylums and even briefer episodes of employment. He could never keep a job because no provocation was small enough for him to not react violently. One April day, when he was driving on Highway 90 going home after losing yet another job, he spotted a hoarding on the side of the highway with a brown flower of some sort under which there were bold blue letters forming the words “Vietnam Airlines”. There was a picture of Vietnamese girl right next to the brown flower holding a bouquet. As Jimmy’s car got closer to the hoarding, Jimmy looked at the face of the girl and pushed the brake pedal with all his might. His car screeched to a halt in the middle of the highway. He couldn’t believe it. This was the picture of the girl—the girl he had killed decades ago in a Vietnamese forest. The cars passing around Jimmy’s car started honking and Jimmy had to drive away but he did give the picture another glance and he could see, right beside the bouquet she was holding, there was a wound on the girl’s chest.
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A few weeks later, when Jimmy had written the hoarding-girl incident off as an illusion, as his mind playing a trick on him, he discovered a plant that had sprouted out of nowhere in his backyard. He didn’t pay much attention to it but when he came back after three weeks—he had gone to Arizona to borrow money from his brother, most of which he lost in Las Vegas later—the plant had grown into a huge tree that had occupied almost all his backyard. He didn’t know the names of the trees but he recognized this one. It was the same tree. No, not the same type but the same tree because it had a slit in the middle of its trunk oozing blood.
Jimmy ran out of his house, panting and profusely sweating, got into his car and sped away from his house. He got onto the highway. And there they were, hoarding after hoarding, lined neatly alongside the highway, all advertising Vietnam Airlines with a girl wounded in the chest holding a bouquet. Jimmy drove hundreds of miles for many hours but the hoardings never stopped. When he ran out of gas, he ditched his car on the highway and ran into the shrubs like a maniac…into the trees with blood-dripping slits in their trunks. Jimmy crashed down sobbing and pounding the ground with his fists. He spent hours there into the dark night and then stood with some sort of determination in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said to no one present. “I know what to do. I have to go there and cut that goddamn tree down.”
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Jimmy was standing outside the ticketing office of Vietnam Airlines with a huge poster in the window displaying the same wounded girl. This was the first time Jimmy was looking at the girl’s picture this close and there was no doubting. It was the same girl. Same pale face, same narrow eyes, same thin lips, same short black hair parted neatly in the middle and falling straight down on her cheeks. For a moment, Jimmy thought of the stupidity of his plan. “OK. I can go there but what are the chances that I will be able to find that particular tree,” he thought. The poster girl’s lips parted. “You will”, she said.
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Jimmy rented a Jeep at the Hanoi airport. He bought a chainsaw, a map and some food items and drove south. Once he started getting close to his destination, the population started to thin out. There were small pockets of houses here and there but the closer he got, the fewer of them he could see. When he arrived at the edge of the forest, he hadn’t seen a single house or a human being for tens of miles.
Jimmy saw a trail entering the forest and he started to follow it. About a mile down, he saw that the trail was forking into slightly left and slightly right. He was thinking of which side to go when he saw a boy, about 5-year-old squatting on the ground playing with branches. His presence startled Jimmy but the boy did not seem surprised or scared. As he saw the headlights of the Jeep, he stood up and as the Jeep crawled closer to him, he raised his arm and pointed to the right side of the fork. Jimmy followed his direction. Once he passed the boy, he looked into the rear-view mirror. There was no sign of him.
As it grew darker, it started to become harder to follow the trail with any good speed. After one sharp turn, Jimmy had to slam the breaks because, there, standing right in the middle of the trail, was a girl, maybe a little older than the boy Jimmy had encountered previously. She was pointing to a clearing on the left. As Jimmy steered his vehicle into the clearing and the headlights hit the girl’s face, Jimmy could see that the entire side of her face had gone and he could see her exposed jaw-line.
On all the turns and forks, Jimmy kept getting directions from children of the ages ranging anywhere from 3 to 15-year-old. Some had blown skulls, some had bullet holes in their bodies and many had charred skin.
Around the midnight, Jimmy’s jeep drove into an unexpectedly clear area and in the middle of the area was the tree. It felt as if the other trees surrounding it had just walked away from it. As Jimmy’s Jeep’s headlights illuminated the tree, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The tree had changed its shape. Its trunk had become smooth like a child’s skin, close to the top where the trunk divided into branches, there were two perfectly symmetrical holes like eyes. And the branches? No, they were not like any other branches. They didn’t rise up like branches do. They were parted neatly in the middle and fell evenly on the sides of the tree like hair. Jimmy got a little closer and saw the things that were weighing them, the branches-hair, down. At the tip of every branch-hair was a glistening, sharp, bayonet. Jimmy got out of the Jeep and with the chainsaw in his hand, he moved tentatively towards the tree. Once he got a few feet from the tree, the branches-hair started to swish and wave and suddenly Jimmy saw all the bayonets aiming at him.
“This is a not a girl only armed with apples that you would be able to kill so easily.”
Who said that? The voice was unmistakably the dead girl’s but it seemed to be emanating from the tree.
“I told you, you would find us.”
“Who is ‘us’? Who are you?” Jimmy asked in a puzzled voice.
“You know who I am. I am the girl you killed right here, right at this place.”
“Listen, I know what I did was wrong. But it was war. War makes you insane.”
“Yes, it does.” The voice from the tree said. “It makes you insane so it can live and rage. People don’t have wars. Wars have them. War makes you insane because sane people cannot kill strangers without any reason.”
“There is a reason. There is always a reason. One has to defend his country.” Jimmy said shaking his head. He was getting a bit calmer now for some unknown reason.
“A country is an abstract idea. By country, you mean the proximity in which you were born, which is real, and you didn’t make a choice in that matter. You defend that using insanity but insanity is nothing in itself. It’s just the absence of sanity. Like darkness is the absence of light. When sanity is taken out, it leaves a hole behind it. Rudderless boats don’t get anywhere and holed existences cannot survive so our proximities--call them societies civilizations neighborhoods--have devised pieces that fill the hole left behind by the departure of sanity. Religious duty, patriotism, tribal pride, family honor, these pieces go by many names but their purpose is the same, to fill the hole of sanity so when there is no hole and there is nothing felt missing, insanity can be waged upon the others.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Everyone is a slave of their proximities and these proximities guide everyone’s lives. They tell you how to behave, who to marry, what to eat, what not to eat and what is “acceptable”, only they call it “normal” and what is not. And then they tell you that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. What is considered a bad thing within the proximity is declared good, even honorable, when done outside the proximity. If someone starts killing strangers within the proximity for now reason, he is imprisoned. If someone does that to the people of a competing proximity, he is given medals for his valor. You killed me one day but did you ever think about killing the boy paddling madly towards you on his bike in your town last week?”
“That kid wasn’t trying to kill me.”
“Neither was I. I was just coming here to meet my lover. We were going to kiss for the first time. But you killed me, only because you were not in your own proximity. You see, you killed me and went your way thinking that that was it. It wasn’t. When my lover came here and found me dead, he went back to the village with my dead body in his arms. He convinced the elders to break the truce and mobilized all the youth with the help of Vietcong. They mounted a spirited resistance in the following months after which your proximity sent planes with Napalms that burnt our proximity to the ground. You didn’t just kill me. You toppled the first domino.”
“The first domino?” Jimmy asked, confused.
“Yes. You know the game where they make a long row of little tiles standing on their sides close to each other in complex patterns and then you topple the first tile onto the next one which sets out a chain reaction of dominoes falling one after another. Only the pattern of dominoes is not complex but random in a war. It has its own insanity. It’s random so it’s not predictable. It doesn’t follow any particular direction. It goes forward, backward, upward, downward, sideways and all other dimensions we cannot fathom. By killing me, you started this insane sequence. All the kids that you saw on your way died because of you started this domino sequence. They are all small domino tiles that fell because of your single act.”
Jimmy was silent for some moments and then he asked the question: why was he guided to this place.
“Because war dominoes are insanely random and insanely long. They take their own time to complete the sequence. You were guided here so that the sequence is completed. There is one domino, the last one, still standing. And that last tile is you.”
Jimmy couldn’t find anything to say.
“But,” the voice said, “I will give you a choice, although you didn’t give me one. You have to fall sooner or later. It is your choice to go back and keep living miserably and then fall. Or come into my embrace and I will give you serenity and peace.”
Jimmy’s hands couldn’t hold up the chainsaw anymore. He dropped it to the ground. At that very moment the cicadas and crickets stopped chirping. There was silence--such silence that Jimmy’s footsteps could be heard from miles. He walked up to the tree, leaned against it with his back and wrapped his arms around the tree trunk behind him. Hundreds of bayonets rushed towards him.
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A few days later, the rental company tracked their Jeep in the forest and saw Jimmy’s dead body sprawled on the ground with an old, rusted bayonet in his chest.