It’s 5.08 on the dashboard clock. Bertha is purring along quite contentedly. She has just had a drink at the Shell resto-bar at the corner of Perrot and Grand. 87 octane, Bertha isn’t finicky. She appreciates the fact that I froze my butt off filling her up.

Bertha is my Corolla. Cars are female. Trucks are male. Yeah.

I didn’t have to pick up Pierre, my carpool partner. He is vacationing in Punta Cana, the sumbitch, while my tootsies are below zero.

I’m a little ahead of time and therefore I probably won’t be seeing Tommy this morning. When I’m on regular schedule, Tommy usually appears out of the gloom, running so close that it feels as if I could touch him if I reached out. Of course it only seems that way.

After keeping pace for a while, Tommy speeds up and heaves himself onto the Mercier rail-road bridge with his kids, the cylindrical tanker railcars, ‘PROCOR’ emblazoned on them between the image of two tilted barrels of oil. They sway and nod at me as they follow Dad onto the upper tier of the bridge.

Up ahead, the sun is just beginning to play hide and seek through the lattice work of the bridge girders as it starts peeping over snow-bound pine forests of the Kanawake Indian Reserve on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.

It is white everywhere, as far as the eyes can see and the temperature on the dashboard says -22°C and that’s without windchill. The blazing tunnel of Bertha’s headlights is losing its stark contrast as the gold of the early sun bounces off six undulating lanes that reach into eternity.

At this point, others would start thinking of stuff that they have planned for the day – the meetings that are scheduled, assholes to sweet talk to, bosses to badger, what’s in the menu for lunch at the cafeteria, how low Pierrette, it’s big chested counter-girl, will be slung, etc.

Me, I’m not made that way. I slip into a reverie, this time my mind traveling back to engineering school, studying for my Bachelors, 1976…….

“Take the No.170 bus from the Shyambazar crossing. If you tell the conductor ‘matri asram’, he’ll drop you off right there at our doorstep. They know. Keep an eye on your bag. Hold it on your lap. Don’t get off to stretch your legs when the bus stops on the way, ok?”

It was Ma, her tone conversational, her directions written on the postcard I received that Friday morning, the week before my engineering school closed for summer. I remember the postcard clearly. The lotus that she always drew on the back of her postcards, on the side that had the space for the address. Postcards are defunct now. No one writes postcards anymore.

The leaves on the lotus on Ma’s postcards were always blue ‘sulekha’ ink and the lotus itself, red. She didn’t have green ink and she liked blue, she once said. Below the lotus, in her dear flowing handwriting, calm and assured, as if the wisdom of centuries was bestowed on her, were the words,” Amar Jobbu shona ke” (to my darling Jobbu).

I remember that summer in 1976. I was going to stay back in my engineering school dorm. Like all the other summers. Going home, if I could define what really was home, was just too much of a hassle. There was my father with his family. And there was Ma, by then a sanyasini (Hindu nun), in her asram. Dada (eldest bro) was struggling to settle down in his first job and Chorda (bro number 2) was tucked away in a dinghy hostel in central Kolkata, because his father couldn’t stand the sight of him.

It was one late evening a month earlier, very late, maybe around 2am. We had Turbomachines finals the next morning and all the guys in the dorm had their doors shut, desperately trying to cram up as much as they could. I was trying to focus on a grainy black and white photo in my text book, of the vortex at the exit of a turbine and my eyes fell on the family photo on the shelf right next. I remember suddenly feeling the urge to go see Ma that summer, instead of just sitting on my ass in my dorm room. I had never been to her asram.

A month of correspondence followed and here I was, holding her postcard with the detailed directions and the lotus.

Earlier, Subbu from Metallurgy had lost the toss and made the trip to the Madras Central Station to get the reservations (he had to be persuaded with a Len Deighton from Higginbothams’, I think it was ‘Bomber’. Subbu loved Deighton. I couldn’t stand Deighton.

I won’t bore you with the trials and tribulations of travel in the searing heat of 1970s India. Ma’s directions however had been platinum plated. The Uttamananda Matri Asram (Uttamananda Convent for women) was set in a leafy patch at a spot where the GT Road runs parallel and just yards away from the banks of the Hooghly, the asram itself nestled in between. As the bus no.170 slowed to a stop, I made out the solitary figure leaning over and peering to read the number board of the bus. She was swathed in a ‘thane’ (no-frills saree), dyed saffron, and a coarse cotton blouse, also dyed saffron. She looked frail.

As we walked into the waiting hall of the asram, I noticed the slight limp. Turns out, she’d just returned from ‘mushthi bhikhkha’. She and a few other inmates were helping run a girls’ orphanage where she managed the administration and taught English, Maths and History. To raise funds, she would cover the surrounding towns and villages, collecting alms for the orphanage. Non-perishable stuff like grain and clothes.

The Marwari grocers were the most generous, she said. “Aao Maji, Aao, baitho tho thori der. Itna garmi. Chai piyogi, thanda? Arey o Kanhaiya, zara ek glass pani la idhar, Maji ayen hain.” They’d hand her a small basta(bag) of rice or atta(flour). She’d sit a while catching her breath and be on her way, the bag slung over her frail shoulders. The travel was almost entirely on foot, on Hawaii slippers (flip-flops). She’d twisted her ankle on her last jaunt. It was now better, she said, dismissively.

I strain to remember that day. Time flew. Ma had prepared alu posto, kacha lonka diye, korayer dal and fulko rooti, on the small kerosene stove she had in her tiny ground floor room. I’d love to translate the menu for you into English, but right now the words are coming out in a gush and somehow I don’t think it matters.

Afterwards, we sat at the riverside on some stone steps that led into the river and watched as a small freighter made its way up the river. We were quiet. We both sensed that the time had come for me to leave. Ma reached across and hugged me and it felt the same as it did when I was little and came back home from the soccer field in Allahabad after school.

Then, very quickly she released me. The first step in being a Sanyasini is shedding all attachments, even personal ones. It had been, what, 10 years? She was still trying , I guess. It is hard not to hold and hug your own son, especially when you meet him approximately once in a year.

Ma stared across the dark waves at the freighter just when it sounded its Klaxon. “Gaye ki lekha bol tho, Jobbu?” (Can you read the name of the ship, Jobbu?).

I turned and took her frail body in my arms and hugged her. She tried to resist but gave up and sank into my arms. And there we sat, mother and son, and let our sobs mingle with each other. Mine demanded ‘why? why couldn’t I have had a childhood like everyone else?’ but of course, I left them unspoken. Over the years I have come to terms with it. I have realized I have it better than most. But at that moment it was all that came to my mind.

And Ma, what was she thinking as she hugged me? I have no idea what her sobs actually meant. Guilt? At having left us? I had always resented her leaving us. I had chosen not to see what my father had done to her over the twenty five years that they had been together.

Was it despair that I saw in her eyes as she wrapped her frail arms round me? Despair, that perhaps she wasn’t going to achieve what she had set out to achieve? Those questions popped in my mind then but over the years, as I have matured I have that realized Ma had achieved more than I shall ever achieve. She had led her life by the book. The way the Amish live theirs’. True to her faith. True to the innermost voices of her conscience.

Is this why I hate religion so much? Why I am an agnostic?

The bus back was not due for another hour. At the point of parting, the conversation always turns inane. The closer you are, to the one you are leaving behind, the more meaningless the words get. I have had meaningless words spoken to me ever since I went into boarding school at 12.

The freighter suddenly blew its Klaxon twice, don’t know why, there was no traffic on the river. Maybe it just wanted to say,”Phew! Home at last”.

“I’m not sure…… I can’t read so clear”, I said in reply Ma’s question about the name on the ship’s hull. Reading anything through tears can be dicy.

We sat there till the sun dipped over the sal forests on the opposite bank.

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Picture yourself at the edge of a swamp that is ringed by huge magnolias and conifers and ferns. The ground is a fetid, mushy muck with the stench of incessant rain. It is unbearably hot and you have found respite in the downpour.

66,050,000 years from now the ground you are standing on will be known as the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It will no longer be tropical then.

You will be discovered by a tiny creature, a member of a yet-to-evolve species called ‘homo sapiens’, a school teacher and amateur paleontologist who will notice one of your well-worn teeth the size of his wrist, poking out of exposed bedrock and starts carefully scraping, until he and several of his associates gradually unearth your whole carcass.

They will name you, “Scotty”.

They will estimate you to have been 62 ft long and just below 20 metric tons in weight and they’ll be pretty close. They will create a species name – Tyrannosaurus Rex, ‘tyrant king’, which is what you are at this point in time – the largest, most ferocious, most deadly, utterly brutal of all living beings. Every single creature on the planet is below you in the food chain.

You will not be the only one that the school teacher and his associates and researchers discover there. Over the next ten years they will find scores of other species, cemented deep within sandstone and bedrock, all within a 1000-sq.mile area that will acquire the moniker – “Dinosaur Alley”.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what’s happening with you right now…..

Directly ahead of you is a shallow pit, half filled with rain water and in it is a very large heap that is making a guttural sound while it jerks and shakes. It is covered in large thick scales and has a massive head that has a sort of shield jutting from the back of its skull. Over each eye is a long horn. Another smaller horn juts up from its snout. It has a parrot-like beak great for snipping at branches.

There was a time when the beast had been the haughty alpha male, too full of itself. Now it lies minutes from death, consumed by a cancer that has spread through it’s guts. As is the law of it’s society, the others have abandoned it and moved on.

The barely alive beast will be known in another age as a ‘Triceratops’. Swarms of flies buzz around its still nose, waiting. Also waiting, perched on some branches high up, are a squabbling gaggle of winged scavengers, deadly pterosaurs, kind of like storks with bats’ wings, the very first vertebrates to fly.

All day long, the pterosaurs had been riding the thermals and now they are ready to hop onto their lunch, the triceratops’ carcass. It is a sumptuous buffet, all 10 tons of it and over the next two-three days it will be picked clean.

But right now they are all waiting for the chief – you, T-Rex, to do the honours. They are wary of you. They are well aware that their flying skills are of little use on the ground and that if they come within reach, you will make them into a side dish. So, they’ll simply wait it for you to have your fill. You will pierce the triceratops’ scale armour and lay the innards bare, making it easy for them to dig in after you are done.

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You emerge from behind the tall conifer and your powerful hind legs propel you forward toward the now deceased herbivore. The pterosaurs scatter hastily and watch from a distance with cold mirthless eyes as you sink your huge fangs in, rip apart the dorsal scales and scoop out a large chunk of flesh which your tiny hands hold on to while you gulp it down, not bothering to waste time chewing.

Every time you open your huge jaws, a terrible stench rises from your mouth. It is not just the odor of rotten flesh. Barely visible under your large tongue are lesions, birthplaces of microscopic parasites that are gradually burrowing through your jaws. You had inadvertently picked them up from a hadrosaur that you had dined on. In time, the parasites will eat through your throat and jaws until it will become impossible for you to eat anything, much less hunt, leading to your demise. But that is still a long way off.

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You are so absorbed ripping pieces of the triceratops’ front thigh, that you fail to notice a streak of blinding white light appearing in the sly, far to the south. One instant it lights up the entire southern sky and the next, it is gone.

You have no way of knowing that that flash was a piece of extraterrestrial rock 7 miles across entering the earth’s atmosphere at 72000 miles per hour. In the next ten seconds, it will slam into the earth two thousand miles to the south with a kinetic energy equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT and leave a crater 120 miles in diameter and 12 miles deep.

The rock will become known as the Chicxulub Meteor and it will impact the earth at Yucatan, present day Mexico.

The last time a big rock hit the earth, it was 180 million years prior. The Wilkesland Meteor was a much larger rock (around 30 miles wide) that left a crater 300 miles in diameter under the Antarctic ice sheet and wiped out almost all life on earth.

In comparison, this one is smaller but that is little consolation for you.

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This deadly stone has not suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It has its history. It had been zipping through space over the millions of years that you and your ancestors lived and died and evolved. The making of this moment started long ago, millions of miles away, through chance events that stacked up one on top of the other, with a deadly finale that can be understood only in retrospect.

It began in the cold, dark, lifeless space just outside the Solar System, in a region that is like a scrapyard where asteroids, comets and meteors are born, out of millions of small rocks that are collectively known as the Oort Cloud.

(Next : The impact and its aftermath)

As an incubator of life, Earth has a lot going for it, something we often fail to appreciate fully from within its nurturing bounds.

But we are seekers, our quest for answers insatiable. We have sent rovers to the moon and Mars and probes to all the other planets in our solar system. Sometime in 2025, the Parker Solar Probe will fly by the Sun, coming to within 4.3 million miles of its surface, the closest we have ever gotten and come out unscathed. It will be the fastest object ever built by humans, reaching speeds in the excess of 430000 mph or 120 miles every second.

Yeah, Parker will be flying by the Sun at .065% of the speed of light. Imagine, New York to London in 28 seconds. I am plagued with premature ejaculation issues and even I take longer.

But here’s the thing. Simply sending unmanned spacecraft won’t satisfy us. For various reasons, be it adventure, anticipation of an apocalypse or simply commerce/greed, we insist upon taking ourselves to those places where survival is uncertain, worlds so distant that a simple transmission to your Neptune-bound spouse, such as, “Ooh, I’m horny as hell, send me your dick pic” will take four hours to receive and another four to respond to. That is, even if your spouse can get it up, given the oddities of blood flow in zero gravity.

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Multiple private companies have announced plans to put hotels in space soon. NASA wants to 3D print neighborhoods within a couple of decades. And while it will probably take longer than that to build and populate an outpost on even the closest planet, Mars, preparations are being made. Last summer, four NASA crew members began a 378-day stay in simulated Martian housing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Off-world dwellings look pretty cozy on NASA’s drawing boards, but it is easy to lose sight of just how hostile space is to humans.

Consider what will happen if you find yourself in low Earth orbit or on Mars or the Moon without a spacesuit on. You will pass out from a lack of oxygen within a matter of seconds, a condition known as hypoxia. You will die soon after. In the brief interval, all the gases inside your body, including any air still in your lungs, will expand in the absence of external pressure. Depressurization will also cause your internal fluids to bubble, not because they’re heating up, but because they are transmogrifying into their gaseous state. 

The temperature will not be much of a problem, even though thermometers in low Earth orbit produce readings from minus 85 degrees to plus 257 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on whether you are in shadow or in light. Space, as a near vacuum, has very little matter to conduct heat to or away from you, so you are not likely to feel instantly hot or cold.

While hypoxia is a real threat should your space vessel or extraterrestrial habitat leak, it is a manageable one. I am assuming you haven’t leapt naked out of your space capsule or off-world dwelling. But two other major challenges confront our fragile bodies when we leave our planet, neither of which has been entirely solved yet, even indoors……

Gravity and Radiation.

Gravity is determined by the mass of objects and their distance from one another. Because Earth is so big, it is impossible, while on it, to escape its gravity for any serious length of time. As a result, we don’t know very much about what our lives would be like without — or under some diminished influence of — this omnipresent attraction. On the moon and on Mars, which are smaller than our world, the gravitational tug will be much less: a sixth and a third, respectively, of what it is here on earth.

Conversely, radiation exposure intensifies with elevation, because there’s less atmosphere above you to block it. And you get a much larger dose if you get beyond the protective bubble of Earth’s ozone layer and magnetosphere, the magnetic field that stretches roughly 40,000 miles out at its most compressed point.

The solar and galactic radiation that washes over Mars, which at its closest is 34 million miles away, will potentially be 700 times as great as what passes through our magnetic defenses. Space travelers beyond low Earth orbit will also be bombarded with high-energy atomic nuclei from exploding stars throughout the galaxy, normally deflected by the magnetosphere and prevented from reaching the surface of our planet. Those particles are so heavy and moving so fast that they penetrate spaceships, spacesuits and skin, banging into other particles in their path and mutating and damaging cells in ways researchers are only beginning to understand. A single gamma ray burst from a nearby supernova can pass through six inches of lead easily.

So far, most of what we know about the effects on the human body of these threats comes from astronauts in low Earth orbit, and because safety is a paramount concern, we don’t send many of them up there, and we don’t let them stay for long when we do. Six months is the average length of a visit to the International Space Station, and fewer than 300 people have made the 250-mile voyage.

The magnetosphere still shields the I.S.S. from most of the radiation. Only 24 humans who flew in the Apollo program have gone beyond it. As the moon orbits at an average of 238,000 miles away, which is way outside the shelter of the magnetosphere, these 24 souls were constantly at peril, even while inside their spacecrafts.

Here’s the thing….. Though the two dozen Apollo astronauts spent little more than a week at a time without the magnetosphere’s protection, they have died of cardiovascular disease at a rate four to five times higher than that of their counterparts who stayed in low Earth orbit or never entered orbit at all. This suggests that exposure to cosmic radiation might have damaged their arteries, veins and capillaries.

How then do we plan to survive a 21-month round trip to Mars?

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It would be foolhardy to send people to Mars, or to live on the moon, until we can be reasonably confident that they’ll survive getting and residing there. But the space-based medical science needed to make that possible has been hindered by small sample sizes that aren’t representative of the general population.

All of the Apollo astronauts were very carefully selected super-healthy white men born between 1928 and 1936. That is a limited demographic. In order to ensure long-term off-world survival, it is necessary to find out how ordinary, not so healthy people will react to that environment. You don’t learn to treat illnesses from healthy people. It is when people get sick that you understand how people get sick and how to prevent it.

It’s like pandemics. Before epidemiologists can figure out how to protect the population, they must wait for harm to come to enough people to expose the causes. If space travellers are less-rigorously screened medically, the chances that someone will have a health emergency up there will increase and turn the unwell traveller into a sort of guinea pig for space medicine research. Yeah, there will be horrible, painful deaths, our cells will mutate, our babies will be disfigured, stunted.

However, unlike the pandemics of the Middle Ages, whether over years of living and reproducing in deep space, we will learn to cope and protect ourselves, is a question that has yet no answer.

Fortunately our own thirst for answers ensures there will never be a dirth of guinea pigs among us. Hey, for the first Mars mission, if NASA picks a 69-yr old guy like me riddled with pre-existing conditions, I’ll go, no question about it.

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Scientists once thought that we wouldn’t survive in the absence of Earth’s gravity. Without this still barely understood force pulling us downward, how would we swallow? Wouldn’t our tongues slide back into our throats? Wouldn’t we choke on our own saliva? And if we survived those perils, wouldn’t escalating pressure in our skulls kill us after a week or so?

All those questions got answered when, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin returned from his single 108-minute orbit around our world, in humanity’s first trip beyond the mesosphere, he proved that our internal musculature could maintain our vital functions in conditions of weightlessness. He ate and drank up there without difficulty. Technically, he hadn’t escaped Earth’s influence. To orbit is to free-fall toward the ground without ever hitting it, and he was in a condition known as microgravity. This felt, he reported, like being in a suspended state, a condition familiar to anyone who has been on a roller coaster or jumped off a diving board. Gagarin said he got used to it easily.

I suspect, given the then ongoing intense east-west rivalry, Gagarin was bullshitting. Either that or he had a strong stomach. On a first flight, many astronauts feel intense motion-sickness which can lead to nausea, headache and vomiting. But you acclimatize eventually.

About that nausea thing, researchers only learned about the prevalence of those symptoms in the 1970s, well past the Mercury and Gemini and into the Apollo programs and it was only when they heard Skylab astronauts talking about it with one another over a hot mic. Competition was (and still is) so intense that astronauts were notoriously stoic and unforthcoming about any symptom that might have grounded them.

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On Earth, your body maintains your blood pressure such that enough oxygen reaches your organs and waste is ferried away. One of the biggest oxygen users — your brain — is positioned above your heart for much of the time you are awake. But microgravity suddenly stops pulling blood downward into your legs, just as lying down or getting into a pool does, except more so. That lets blood collect in the upper body, triggering pressure sensors in your heart and the carotid vessels of your neck, which then send hormonal instructions to urinate more and decrease blood production. (This is why you often feel the need to pee shortly after climbing into bed or sinking into a swimming pool.) On our planet, that’s usually enough to reduce your blood pressure and rebalance the system. 

In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce, to help enhance taste. 

These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell of body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases. 

Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O (Low Earth Orbit). 

The longer astronauts stay in microgravity, the more they change. Here are some of the stuff that happens to them up there…..

– Because they don’t need to support any weight, bones and muscles begin to atrophy — much faster than they do in advanced age on Earth.

– Bone density in the hips and spine decrease by 1 to 2 percent per month in space, compared with 0.5 to 1 percent per year in elderly Earthlings. The calcium that leaches from the bones is expelled in urine, increasing the risk of kidney stones.

– Muscle mass decreases. That is why astronauts must exercise vigorously for more than two hours a day to keep in decent shape. They also must constantly dab their skin with a towel while excercising, to prevent their sweat from beading and floating into colleagues or equipment.

– The spinal discs between spinal vertebrae spread farther apart. Astronauts grow taller, but the stretch causes the lower back to hurt.

– On earth our body’s sensors raise our blood pressure when we rise up from lying down, so that we don’t faint. These sensors atrophy with disuse. This degeneration, along with reduced muscle mass, is why astronauts must be carried from their capsules when they return to terra firma after a long mission.

Once back on earth, the body recalibrates to normal, but protracted stays in microgravity (the current record, 437 days, was set by the Russian astronaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995) make for painful recoveries. After 340 days in space, Scott Kelly, a NASA veteran of three previous shorter missions, described the period immediately following his return as “much, much worse” than those of earlier trips: “All of my joints and all of my muscles are protesting the crushing pressure of gravity,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Endurance.”

Legend has it that Polyakov, unlike Kelly, strolled out of his capsule unfazed, bummed a cigarette from a friend and started smoking, no kidding. So, I guess the reaction to gravity varies person to person.

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Of course, physiological recalibration and recovery is relevant only when an astronaut returns to earth.

But what if you never came back and instead, planned to stay in orbit or on the moon or Mars or any other off-world for the rest of your life? What if you were one of the travellers on a future cosmic ‘Mayflower’?

If you are one of those purchasing a one-way ticket, relax, even that question is being researched at this very moment – how to create artificial gravity in space.

(I think this needs a sequel, don’t you?)

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Although Christ’s Second Coming is mentioned in multiple places on the Bible, the specific line mentioned above appears somewhere in the closing pages of the Bible.

Do you have a copy of the Bible? Get one immediately, if you don’t. If the Almighty senses you own a Bible, he’ll leave you alone, even favour you. Kinda like…“Let’s see..hmmm..Spunky has a Bible and he isn’t even a Christian. Transfer a million into his bank account, will you Pete?”

Getting back to the Bible quote above, just who is “I”? Jesus? If yes, there’s so much that I want to say to him. Like……

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“No, thanks, pal. If you make a second visit, here’s what will happen – you will leave with your work unfinished, just like the last time. The number of screwball evangelists and pedophiles who will only multiply after you are gone.

I shudder at the thought of more Mike Huckabees, Roy Moores, Mike Pences, Jerry Falwells and other faux Christian raving lunatic nutcases.

Besides no one speaks Aramaic anymore, Dude. We won’t be able to follow your hubba hubba hubba.

And then again, what exactly will your mandate be, the second time around? Surely you won’t be pressing for the same old ten commandments? Heck, half those commandments do not even qualify as crimes in the penal code anymore. 

Take a look at the commandments. The ones on killing and stealing are still a no-no, but the rest – like adultery or the one about coveting your neighbor’s wife, his house, his pets and his grain – relax, times have changed – these all du jour now. We can do them and with gusto and be just fine. Everybody covets everything nowadays. 

It is in fact all covet, covet and more covet now. There is no law against thinking of grabbing something, which is what coveting is. Barring the first ten years, I have covetted female body parts all the fookin time and I swear I have never been struck by a bolt of lightning.

Furthermore, things have changed quite a bit since the last time you were here, dude. Those days ground zero used to be a tiny 4000-sq.mile fertile crescent around the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and you thought that was the entire world. Well, I have news for you – it has grown a whole lot larger and far more complex. There are other hustl…I mean messiahs, now. The do-gooder that you are, you will run afoul of the establishment pretty quick.

Heck, you’re the world’s champion ‘run-afouler’. You’ll be in trouble the moment you open your mouth ta speak, I am definite about that. I’ll level with you – things are much worse than can be imagined, way beyond any messiah’s intervention, trust me on this. 

More significantly, we enjoy sinning. We have realized that no matter what we do, no matter how virtuous we are, we are still going to be screwed anyway. Hey, there are some of us who don’t even get the opportunity to show off our virtuosity, we are fucked the moment we are born, no kidding. Like the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome. Know what I mean? We now understand that the ancient concept of sin->mea culpa->punishment->redemption is nothing but shitty myth. So, we don’t want you parachuting in to spoil all the fun. Just do yourself a favor and cancel your trip, bro. 

Then there is the “soon” in that Bible quote below the pic. Just when is soon? If you absolutely insist on a second coming, don’t make it soon, please. Wait until maybe 3500AD. I and any surviving reincarnations of mine shall definitely be dead by then.

And try not to pick that same eastern Mediterranean fertile crescent as your landing site. Believe you me, they don’t like you in that joint anymore. They might even crucify you a second time over there. It hurt like hell the last time, remember?”

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I feel good about my harangue. The other two Abrahamic religions also mention a second coming, though with tiny variations. Islam says Jesus will come down and defeat ‘Al Masih al Dajjal’, the false messiah and restore Islam to “the Mahdi and his followers”. Shudder.

Of the three faiths, Judaism seems like the only one where events have overtaken the second coming and already achieved what the second comer was mandated with – the establishment of a separate Jewish homeland. It is done! With brute force and American support. The remaining thing on their to-do list is the rebuilding of “The Temple”, whatever that is. Why is this a thing at all? They can build whatever the fuck they want in Israel, can’t they?

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The only faith that doesn’t scream “second coming” is Hinduism. It’s simple. Hinduism does not believe in labels. Good and bad, right and wrong, these are seen as pointless.

Hinduism simply tells you what the consequences of your actions are, in a very non-judgmental manner. It lets you choose. Hinduism has no day of reckoning , no gotterdamerung, no apocalypse being anticipated with bated breath.

I know why. Hinduism has no fucking messiahs.

 

 

 

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Copenhagen, May 2009

It is not known exactly who first brought the tulip to Northwestern Europe, but the most widely accepted story is that it was a 16th Century Flemish diplomat, Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, an ambassador for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, to the court of the great Ottoman Emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent.

Enchanted by the flowers and on hearing that the Ottoman Emperor in turn had received them from an envoy to Libya, Busbecq had brought some over and planted them in his city of birth, Amsterdam. And there they flourished.

After that it didn’t take Europe too long to turn tulip-crazy. Today, The Netherlands and Denmark turn golden, crimson, orange, pink and purple in the early summer, with tulips bursting forth in every garden and every street corner. Millions of tulip tourists travel to Denmark and Holland from all over the world just to take in the sights of undulating rainbow-colored tulip fields.

May, 2009 was no different. Copenhagen was teeming with strange new faces, mainly young European and American students taking a sabbatical from their studies for a bit of fun and frolic. The tulip fields were exploding with colours.

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In the hubbub, no one took particular notice of the man from America who had come here ostensibly on business, but wanted to enjoy some tulip-gazing first.

Even though he was 39 at the time, the robust, boyishly handsome man seemed not a day more than 25. Just as any young tourist would do, he rented a bicycle and began pedaling around the busy streets of Copenhagen, one hand on the handle-bar and the other recording the sights and sounds with his Sony Handycam.

The American freely mingled with the local Danes, especially the girls, who fell for his eyes. He had very distinctive irises in his eyes – one hazel blue and the other deep brown, a condition that is known as heterochromia iridum. Only 1% of the world’s population have it. It made him instantly recognizable to those who had seen him before.

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The American had in fact been playing the part of a tourist. His true intent was to study the layout of the city and to this end he wandered around, recording not only the sights but also his own voice as he narrated into the camera the places that he filmed, including whether some of those places could be considered his ‘Plan-B strategic targets’.

One building in particular caught the American’s fancy, even though it appeared unremarkable. It was a nondescript office building that had the offices of Thai Airways, the Dexia Bank and other commercial firms. He biked by the building multiple times, studying not only the structure but the traffic patterns around it, throughout the day.

The American also noted the presence of one vehicle that seemed to be a permanent fixture of the scenery – a police van, parked across the road from the nondescript office building.

The American knew why there were cops permanently stationed on the scene. Besides the airline and the bank, that building also housed the offices of Morgenavisen Jyllands Posten (The morning Jutland Post), an independent center-right newspaper which supported the Danish Conservative Peoples Party.

Four years prior, the Posten had published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, lampooning the prophet and that act of sacrilege had outraged the Muslim world, including most moderate Muslims and non-Muslims, yours truly excluded. It is not true that God does not have a sense of humour.

Now he, the American, was going to help take the building down, with every living soul working within its walls, including those working at the bank and the airline.

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His cover was that of an American businessman who needed media coverage for the launch of his products, through advertising and publicity. To this end, he simply walked into the offices of the Posten one day and zeroed in on a comely female staffer. He charmed her pants off, one thing led to another and soon she invited him in, showed him around the layout of the office and even introduced him to her colleagues. She hoped that this was the start of not only a business relationship but also a personal one.

To the American, being recognized as a familiar sight by those who worked at the Posten, was critical to the success of the plan. More importantly, since the building was under constant police surveillance after the publication of those cartoons, letting the police officers see him come and go and thus establishing an ostensibly harmless pattern, was essential.

Later, the female Jyllands Posten staffer who had earlier shown the American around, was shell-shocked when she realized whom she had been friendly with. She testified that he seemed very professional, every bit like the businessman that he had claimed to be.

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The American tourist’s Copenhagen recconaissance mission had been sponsored by a very scary man named Ilyas Kashmiri, who was at the time a member of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle and leader of the Pakistan-based terror group, Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami. Prior to that, Kashmiri had been a decorated officer of the Special Services Group (SSG), the special operations black ops wing of the Pakistani Military.

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Ilyas Kashmiri gained notoriety in the Jihadist community, when he wrote an instruction manual in the art beheading. He would spend time in Pakistan’s terrorist training camps, showing rookie militants how to  carry out a beheading without much fuss and blood. Kashmiri is credited with the beheading of an Indian Army soldier in a raid across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Kashmir, February 2007. He carried the severed head into the Pakistan side and later that afternoon, organized a soccer match with the soldier’s head as the ball.

But here’s the good news – one needn’t worry about this Ilyas Kashimiri prick anymore. He is currently scratching his head, wondering how come those 72 virgins he got look so ugly. Two years after he acted as the American’s handler, Ilyas Kashmiri died a very violent death, when he received an uninvited guest, an American MQ-9 launched Hellfire missile, that went right up his sphincter. The titanium-sheathed projectile tore him apart, just as it was designed to do.

Pity. I would have wanted his demise to be a much slower one.

Ilyas Kashmiri’s transition from army officer to a terrorist with a $ 2 million bounty on his head must have been a seamless one, given the fact that the two (the Pakistani establishment and the Pakistani terrorist brotherhood) are nothing but two arms of the same evil.

There is speculation that Kashmiri had never really left the Pakistani armed forces – he had only been posted (seconded, if you will) to the Al Qaeda.

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While he was still in Copenhagen, the American was having detailed exchanges with Kashmiri on how the plot would go down. Three, maybe four heavily armed militants would gain entry into the premises of the Jyllands Posten, taking advantage of the American’s familiarity there. Once inside, they would lock down and massacre everybody inside.

And to the plan, they would add a twist of lime and soda – they would behead the victims and throw their heads out the front window onto the street below.

The plan was not to end it by killing themselves. Islam does not condone suicide and they saw themselves as devout Muslims. They would simply hunker down and fight off the security personnel to the bitter end, till they were shot to death.

Simple. When you are ready to die, unburdened by the stress of having to keep an escape plan in mind, no plan is too complicated.

At one point, Kashmiri was heard telling the American,”Make sure the hostages are dead before you behead them. Beheading while alive is messy, too much blood spatter. They are not like chicken, you know.” Kashmiri then made the kokro-ko-ko sound of a chicken and the phone line dissolved into raucous laughter.

The beheadings would be symbolic, a powerful message to the world and the American and his cohorts would be feted as heroes (dead heroes) all over the Jihadist brotherhoods of the world.

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Unbeknownst to the American and Ilyas Kashmiri however, every move he made, every step and every bike ride he took, was being monitored and recorded by both, the American and the Danish intelligence services.

The Americans in fact knew all about him. Heck, why wouldn’t they? He had been working for them. He had become an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, after he was nabbed with a kilo of pure heroin that he had tried to smuggle in, from Pakistan.

The American was a wily survivor. He promptly gave up all his associates and while they got long jail terms, he copped a plea deal and became an informant. Later on, as his work with the DEA chugged along, he would slip off out of sight, time to time for brief periods but to the DEA he was a young rich kid and heck, boys will be boys, right?

To the Americans, he was one of the good guys, albeit rash, immature, prone to doing childish stuff.

What the Americans couldn’t realize was that he was actually, in espionage terms, the equivalent of a double agent. While he made the Americans believe that he was working for them, he had actually gradually radicalized and turned into a deadly instrument, the perfect weapon for his terrorist masters. White-skinned, Caucasian looks, tall and swarthy, fully fluent in American English, he could pass off as a white American Christian male without a problem.

And why not?

David Coleman Headley was born Daood Sayed Gilani, son of prominent Pakistani diplomat and radio host, Sayed Salim Gilani, and Irish-American socialite and heiress, Alice Serill Headley. Fortunately for him, he got most of his mother’s genes and looking at him, it was impossible to tell that he was anything but white.

Denmark was happy with it’s ‘tulip tourist’.

And the Iblis …….. with his velvet glove.

Summer hath beeeegun. It’s 14°, reason enough ta laze in Pub Cousi, riverside St Anne de Bellevue. That’s Manny, the owner, with the Gazette crossword.

St Anne. That’s one thing about the Quebecoise. Name any name and they have a saint with that name.

I hope ta be St Spunky a century from now. Given the pricks who have achieved sainthood, beatification should be a cinch.

I just have to figure out how ta get a halo.

I bin reading up on it. Here’s the thing about halos. Once you have one, take care not ta move yore head suddenly. Halos are serene, godly. They don’t react so fast ta sudden head movements. There’s a time lag. You might bump into your halo and that’s sacrilege.

Pub Cousi, it’s a typical Quebec pub. Pool table, slot machines with retirees trying ta top up their RRSPs, grizzly bearded master, bonny pink cheeked bar girl. Rows and rows of delicious micro-brewery supplied beers you’ve never heard of. An atmosphere that promotes lazing. Generally genial tipsy atmosphere.

And the pint of Rickard’s Red. The tipsy, boozy feeling. Nary a care in the world.

This is a blessed land. God zeroed in on a tiny arid sliver of land in the Levant. He musta bin drunk. Jesus woulda stood a much better chance in Canada.

I beg yore pardon, my speech is slurred, my spelling atroshus. But…. DILLIGAF?

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DILLIGAF

Original spunkybong word

“Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck?”

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Here’s your daily routine when you come in for work over here. You go to your locker. Punch in the combination (you know it by heart). Step back immediately, because the door springs open and if you’re around 5ft10in, the latch hook will strike you right between the eyes leaving a painful blister. Of the 7 billion people in the world, there must be a sizeable percentage with that bruise on the knocker by now. It’s our badge of honor.

So you’ve just opened your locker door and stuck your head in. Hazardous act. Your steel-toed shoes for the shop floor reside there, along with cotton socks that haven’t been washed since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s niece forgot ta wash hers. 

Now you flap the locker door this way and that, to let the insides of your locker deodorize. The process is slow since the whole locker room stinks and therefore diffusion from higher to lower concentrations is retarded. The best thing to do is beat it from there as fast as possible.

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Soon as you emerge from the locker room, you head for Oasis (the cafeteria) for your morning 100% Columbian Moka and muffin. And a chance to take a closer look down the counter girl, Pierrette’s, T-shirt. And that’s one thing I tell all my male friends. If you start your work day with baobabs in your mind, you’ll breeze through and have everyone eating outa yore hands, I swear.

Propulsion Department, aka ‘Jiggle City’, population 45, 88% female, 12% wimpy male. Female boss, Nurse Ratched she be called. Jaws rectangular and chest flat, like the Sasketchwan. Imagine, they have a boss who looks like a Canadian province.

Propulsion dept is also known as Gossip City – three out of four words you’ll hear there are ‘whatever’, ‘totally (pronounced ‘toatly’)’ and ‘like’ –  

“And I was like, toatly blown last weekend.” 

“Ooooh! Did he, like, finally make a pass?” Excited ripples in voice.

“Toatly. He like went even further…” Giggles.

“Whatever”. Envious, doesn’t want to show awe. 

Propulsion is a good venue for meditative regeneration of brain cells, aided of course by visual stimulus.

But I digress. 

After Pierrette, you walk briskly into your own department. Strolling in is frowned upon. Long purposeful strides if you are male. Dainty, quick, prim steps if you’re female (jiggles, if you’re equipped ta jiggle). High heels going tack tickety tock. Vague, vacant, glassy smiles. You head for your tiny cubicle.

You click on your pc and laptop and survey your tiny table, coffee in hand. Your family photo was on the left of the WO files. Now it’s on the other side. The stickies you left on the monitor appear rearranged.

You’re certain Mitch McPuck has been there sometime during last night.  

No one has ever actually seen or met Mitch McPuck. But we all know he exists. How he got his name is a mystery. The Irish surname may have come because statistics since the early 1960s show that he lets us be and doesn’t finger anything over the St Patrick’s Day weekend, every year. Other days, we’re all fair game. He steals in at night and snoops through people’s drawers.

Mitch pays special attention to female employees’ drawers, it is rumoured…….

Barbara in Critical Parts, says that the thought of Mitch McPuck going through her drawers turns her on and has greatly improved her sex life at home. She has even started calling her husband Sidney, Mitch, while having sex, she says. Sock it ta me, Mitch! Harder! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Sidney doesn’t give a fuck whom Barbara fantasizes about as long as he is the one fucking her. There, see? That’s the difference between you women and us men.

Stephanie in Experimental has started leaving panties in her top drawer. They’re gone by the next morning, she claims. Oriana at GasGen is positive Mitch McPuck can fly and that he zooms off to his Timbuktoo warehouse every morning to inspect the night’s worldwide panty haul. The story goes that Mitch is making a giant patchwork quilt out of the panty stash.  

Be that as it may, you settle down, flick on the overhead light and survey the 100 or so emails waiting to be dealt with. There’s the morning contact meeting in a half-hour. You’ve been to zillions till now. They’re nothing but a load of crap. Analyses of last night’s hockey game between the Habs and the Philadelphia Fillies, while 15 pairs of male eyes ogle the stockinged legs and low altitude décolletages around the room. Sighs, yawns, burps and stray farts are punctuation marks as the boss briefs you on all the stuff that’s happening around you. 

After twennie minutes it’s over and you disperse. That’s when the place erupts into action. All hell breaks loose. Phones going off every second. Folks hurrying around, cell phones ringing.

You look at your computer clock. Its 5 minutes to 8am. Got that meditative regeneration thingee coming up.

Venue- Jiggle City. In five minutes. 

The first thing that a guy at my work learns is how to sling a rubber band across the room and hit a designated target. His training is considered complete if he can sling a rubber band right across, from the loading docks to the ladies’ locker room.

Like any large organization, ours is awash with rubber bands. From thick, tight small blue rubber bands to long, thin, stringy beige rubber bands. Rubber bands are used, not only for handling stationery but also for holding together padded envelopes containing small loose engine parts such as screws and washers.

Here’s how you zing. Stretch out your left hand in front of you, index finger pointing out. Hook the rubber band over the thumb, close to its tip and pull it taught.

And then let go. The rubber band will zing away to the target. The velocity and range will depend upon the thickness and circumferential length of the band.

And do remember, zing is a verb, like sing. You can say, “I zang her real good” and I won’t bat an eyelid. The rubber band is the zong.

Zinging zongs is a multi-faceted science. You gotta know projectile motion, parabolic trajectories, integral calculus, do what you have ta do. At work, remember to take a zing break every half hour and zing only those who are likely to zing you back. That way, your rubber band stock level will not be depleted.

Sometimes, rubber bands are slipped into handbags and taken home. Mandy, at warehouse, does that all the time. She steals the tiny thick blue ones and takes them home. She claims that, ever since she started filching that exact size, her husband, Otto, has never had a problem maintaining his erection.

Our in-house Japanese-Canadian, Asahi, has devastating aim and his zingers really bite, so we’ve named him Yammy (after the WW2 Jap C-in-C, Yamamoto). Likewise, László, our resident Hungarian-Canadian is ‘Otto’ (after that Nazi special forces guy, Otto Skorzeny). László can get you right on the earlobes. More than painful, it’s irritating. If you hear a sudden scream “Ouch! László, you m—–f—-n’ SOB!$%*”, it means someone just got his earlobes zung.

Of course ‘zung’ is a word. It’s the past participle, silly.

Sometimes, skirmishes break out during the lunch break. Or when the boss is called away to a meeting. We stage our own little OK Corrals. Sudden Son Tays. Merry Mai Lais. And once in a while, a Guadalcanal. Rubber bands zing all around you like zipping hornets. They sting if they strike open skin. Once Francois hit Sandra over at Manutention and soon their men folk came to exact revenge. They met with a barrage and had to do a Dunkirk. And just like the Germans in ’41, we let them leave.

One rubber band has even made it to China and back. Steve was dueling with Gaetan when he sent one zinger way over all the cubicles and right into Tonya Salerno’s open attaché case. She was packing papers for her trip to Harbin and didn’t notice. When she came back after 15 days, Steve dropped by to pick up his rubber band. He produced evidence that it was actually his. She laughed. They talked. He laughed. They dated. They’re expecting their second child anytime now.

To my young, unattached facebook friends, don’t try zinging any girl over there, just because I said it’s fun, OK? And don’t do it at work either.

Always don’t do the things I do or write about doing.

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Homo Homini Lupus

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Muridke, Punjab

Islamic Republic of Pakistan

October 2000

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’’جہاد میں گزارا ہوا ایک دن بھی سو سال کی عبادت سے افضل ہے۔‘‘

“Even one day spent in jihad is better than a hundred years spent in worship.”

The words, spoken in chaste Urdu, were delivered in a flat monotone, devoid of emotion, the voice soft but slightly high-pitched, almost effeminate. The man who spoke them sat cross-legged by the window, on a red and black striped rug that covered the floor, wall to wall. Ailing from the after-effects of six high velocity APS rounds he received while planting an IED years back near Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, he leaned against some large cushions to support his back. From time to time, he grimaced as he twisted his torso to his right to pick up the cup of heavily scented cardamom tea that he drank in gallons throughout the day.

Yes, he had known and fearlessly courted pain. He had exulted in suffering as no one in the Afghan War ever had. To his faithful, he was known as the Emir. The name on his birth certificate – Hafeez Mohammad Saeed.

Well into his 60s, the man was short, overweight and entirely humorless. His faith, Islam, did not take kindly to any kind of humor. Laughter, jocularity or pranks, these were frivolous, haram.

Pig eyes barely open in slits, the Emir’s eyelids flickered constantly many times a second, the way that the eyes of someone trying on contact lenses for the first time, would do. True to the stereotype of an Islamic fanatic, he had a beard, though it was moderate in length and his hair was long and unkempt, most of it hidden under a pakol, a round-topped Pashtun cap that is made of wool and looks like a round bottomed bag when not worn. The wearer usually rolls up the sides nearly to the top, forming a thick band, which then rests on the head like a beret.

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A heavyset and heavily bearded man sat on the floor in the shadows, by the door. Heck, everyone here was bearded. If you were clean shaven, you stood a good chance of receiving a 7.62mm projectile, exiting the barrel of a Kalashnikov at 715 meters per second, right between your eyes, before you could even begin to explain yourself.

The hulk’s eyes were half closed, appearing to be in the midst of grabbing a shut-eye. He was actually wide awake and extremely alert, the fingers of his right hand only inches away from a 9mm Mauser automatic which lay flat on the rug next to him, it’s safety off.

Known as just Suleman, the mountain of a man was the Luca Brasi to the Emir’s Don Corleone. Like Luca he didn’t say a word, didn’t even nod, but unlike the Godfather heavy, Suleman accompanied the Emir wherever he went, like a shadow, staying with the Emir from dawn every day until he retired for the night.

Suleman’s loyalty to the Emir was total. It is easy to be ready to give your life for a man to whom you owe it. Two decades prior, a Soviet fragmentation grenade shrapnel had removed a part of his brain that powered long-term memory.

Still, there was one day that Suleman would never forget…..

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It was late 1986 and the writing for the Soviet forces was on the proverbial wall. Morale was low and frequently Soviet infantrymen had to be threatened with execution if they didn’t stand and fight the fanatically committed Mujahedeen. But how could you fight a culture that was willing and ready to die? The Soviet economy in shambles, the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, would soon make up his mind to withdraw from an unwinnable war. But that was still months away.

Late one night in November, outside Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan, Suleman was sitting at the wheel of the Toyota Tundra pick-up truck, waiting for the Emir (he was known only as Abu Hafiz then) and six of his Pakistani jihadis, who were putting the finishing touches to the camouflage over an IED on the dirt road that Soviet replenishment convoys frequently took, when entering through Tajikistan. Abu Hafiz was one of the few Pakistanis who were fighting alongside the Ahmed Shah Masood-led Northern Alliance. The Tajik-born Lion of Panjshir had taken to the young Pakistani Mujahid who would one day be known as the Lion of Lahore.

Maybe they were upwind, because they didn’t hear it coming. Suddenly they came under withering fire from a Spetsnaz platoon that had materialized out of nowhere over a knoll just yards away, dropped off by an Mi-24 Hind and the next thing he knew, a fragmentation grenade came crashing through the windshield and skittered around next to his foot.

Suleman dove but unfortunately not far enough. When he came to, he felt himself moving, slung over someone’s shoulders. It was Abu Hafiz and he was staggering under Suleman’s 220lb weight and trying not to lose his footing as he slipped and slid over the rocky terrain. All the others died that night, but not before wiping out the entire Spetsnaz platoon. The Mi-24 had back-tracked in but that was a mistake it would regret – it got blown out of the sky by a CIA-provided infra-red homing Stinger that one of the Mujahid had had ready.

“Leave me here, Abu Hafiz, go while you can. Inshallah, I’ll make my own way back if I can,” said Suleman, his words hoarse with pain, jerky with the bobbing that the Emir’s shoulders did as he ran.

“If I left you here, how would I be any different from those infidel animals, Bhaijan?” panted the Emir.

It was only after they had reached the tiny hamlet of Kamshar, that Abu Hafiz collapsed and let the tribesmen take over and nurse them back to health. No one really can tell how he was able to cover that distance with a 220lb load and six rounds in his back. It was seen as a miracle and Abu Hafiz was elevated to Emir, a status which was a hair-breadth short of Prophet.

Since that day, Suleman has made protecting the Emir his mission in life. If you wanted to take the Emir down, there was no question that you would have to kill Suleman first.

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After  9/11 and the consequent paradigm shift in the security environment of the world, Pakistan’s security establishment could no longer openly patronize terrorist organizations.

But in October 2000, they could and they did. It was the time when the Lashkar-e-Taiba could still operate openly with impunity. It’s minders, the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, ISI, only restrained it from carrying out those operations that might precipitate a full-scale war with India.

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It had all begun 13 years prior, in 1987. The ISI was flush with all the cash that the Americans were throwing at them, no questions asked, in the name of the Afghans’ war against the Soviet Union, a fight for which, the LeT had supplied 1400 trained Mujahedeens. It was a fight that the US had no business being involved in. Communism was crumbling anyway, it’s own self-destruct button already pressed and held down.

But that’s another story. Right then, in 1987, with American and Saudi dollars the ISI had set the Emir and his followers up in a sprawling 1200-acre compound on a picture-perfect countryside just outside Pakistan’s cultural capital, Lahore.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba had a different, far more deceptive, name then – Markaz Daawat Wal Irshad (Center for preaching and guidance). The then Pakistani President, Zia-ul-Haque’s Islamization of Pakistan had laid the groundwork for the channeling of millions of aid dollars to this compound which boasted a state-of-the art security system operated by the ISI. It had schools, farms, factories and all sorts of facilities within it.

The Emir’s aim had been to create a Medinat-al-Tayyiba, a pure city that would reflect life inside Prophet Muhammad’s 7th century Medina – an environment where there would be no music, no pictures, no TV, no movies, nothing – just prayer. The only ‘entertainment’ would be Islamic warrior songs played over loudspeakers and available in music cassettes. Women would be subservient, human but not entirely human. There would be no divorces and no such thing as a sexual abuse complaints. One could easily liken this to an accurate image of what hell really looked like.

Inside this ‘utopia’, the Markaz would enforce the Ahl-e-Hadith school of thought, a particularly virulent strain of the Saudi Wahhabism, which believed that there was no such thing as love, peace, democracy, secularism, multi-culturism and universal brotherhood. The only form of existence was in armed struggle, until the following were achieved……

Mass conversions to Islam, a gradual ‘purification’ until the whole world was Muslim, with the formation of one nation – the State of Islam. The world would have one single religion and one single system of justice and governance, the Sharia. During the interim period, when the process of the said purification was ongoing, non-Muslims would have to pay a jizya, a ‘protection tax’. There would be no challenges to the establishment of the new Islamic world order and therefore every able-bodied Muslim man and woman would have to undergo compulsory military training.

There was a tiny paradox here that the Emir might have failed to recognize – since only non-Muslims were required to pay the jizya tax, I should think that it would be in the Muslim rulers’ interests to let their non-Muslim subjects remain non-Muslim. The state would no longer be able to collect the jizya tax once they were converted, no?

But heck, to expect militants to make sense is insanity in itself.

The Muridke compound still exists and nothing has changed. It is still a nation within a nation. Like Waziristan, the north-western border region of Pakistan, the normal laws of the land do not apply to the Muridke compound. Unlike Waziristan, it is situated in the heart of Pakistan and wholly sponsored by the Pakistani state. It is like a black hole with a schwarzchild radius that no one who enters ever leaves.

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That evening, the Emir had a visitor, an American, who sat a few yards away and it was to him that he had directed those words about a day in jihad being better than a hundred years in worship.

When the visitor sat down, he did attempt but failed to cross his legs, not being used to sitting on the floor. He sat instead, on his butt, his arms folded over his knees and he listened to the old man, rapt.

Yes, even though he was soft-spoken, the old man commanded total attention when he spoke. Swaying ordinary Pakistanis into putting their faith and their lives into armed struggle and martyrdom, propelling them into a pattern of blind hatred that is incomprehensible to any westerner, required charisma and the Emir had oodles of it. He had demonstrated it in fact, when the American had walked in. He seemed to know everything about him – his marriages, his kids in the US, his drug smuggling escapades, his arrest with the 2kgs of pure heroin at Peshawar, the brief incarceration, the sudden born-again-Muslim awakening and finally, the release by the ISI into the custody and care of the Emir.

The American felt like a child, being told after he had been naughty that it was all right, everything would be fine.

“Islam,” the Emir spoke,” means submission, to the will of Tawhid, the one God and to his sole messenger, Hazrat Muhammad, our Prophet.” His beady, blinking eyes settled on the American. Then, noting the American’s wildly charged-up eagerness, he launched into another diatribe….

“Look at it this way – Even though there are five oceans and as many seas and all have their own currents, there is technically actually one ocean in the world, one body of water. The Pacific may not know that it’s waters might wash up at the shores of the Atlantic. Similarly there is only one religion in the world – Islam. It is just a matter of time before Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews and all those others, realize this. They don’t know it now but they were all actually born Muslims. We all belong to one faith and one God and we follow one Prophet – Hazrat Muhammad. Our job, yours and mine, is to accelerate that process of Islamization of the world. We have to work toward the day when there will no longer be any infidels, because every human being will then be a brother of the faith.

With that, the beady eyes opened a bit wider and rested upon the American, the gaze reptilian, devoid of emotion. He was expecting some sign of comprehension.

“Point me, Emir,” stuttered the American, his Urdu not as fine as the Emir’s,” Show me the direction you want me on. I am ready.”

“Stay here tonight. Suleman Bhai will show you to your lodgings. Tomorrow, there will be a man, a fauji (military officer), who will explain what needs to be done. Upto now, we have never attempted anything spectacular, like multi-target, multi-operative, large-scale strikes that stretch over days. Having you with the brothers could change that. Inshallah, you will be one of our greatest jihadis, one whose name will be spoken in awe, for years from now. Allah Hafeez, Bhaijaan.”

The American saw the man called Suleman rise and approach the Emir. As he passed by the American, he paused for an instant, to give him a look that said – I am going to watch you every millisecond, asshole.

Suleman stopped by the Emir, stooped and with a gentleness that would come as a shock to anyone who knew what he was capable of, helped the old man rise and followed him through the door, out of sight.

The American too made to rise but the man named Sajid placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “Please, remain seated for a while – a normal security precaution.”

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Ps:

The Muridke compound still stands, untouched till this day though, thankfully, the Emir’s vision – that one day the whole of Pakistan would emulate the Muridke ‘commune’ – hasn’t yet become reality.

Muridke boasts some very high profile alumni….

Ramzi Yousef – Kuwaiti-born militant responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in Manhattan. Status – apprehended in Islamabad, Pakistan and extradited and incarcerated in the US, serving life without the possibility of parole.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad – Pakistan-born 9/11 mastermind. Status – Extradited and incarcerated in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, no way he will ever see freedom again.

Anwar Al Awlaki – American-born Yemeni bomb-maker and terrorist master mind. Status – blown to bits by a Hellfire missile from an American MQ9-Reaper in 2011, when his convoy stopped for refreshments while driving through the Yemeni desert.

And now, the American I referred to in this post – David Coleman Headley (aka Daood Sayed Gilani), Pakistan-born son of ex-Pakistani diplomat and white Christian American mother, drug trafficker, FBI informant, 2008 Mumbai terrorist strike planner. Status – incarcerated in the US, scheduled to be released in 2048, when he will be 87-years old.

If David Coleman Headley’s crimes had been against the US instead of India, I am certain he would have received at least life without parole.

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One hopes and prays that some day, there will be an MQ-9 with a Hellfire and the name, “Hafeez Mohammad Saeed” on it. He has flipped the bird for too long.

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“I’ve been here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I’ve nurtured every sensation man has been inspired to have! I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him! Why? Because I never rejected him, in spite of all his imperfections.

Who, in their right mind could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

– Al Pacino, as the Satan, in “The Devil’s Advocate”

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In architecture, a frieze is the wide central section of the inner walls of a hall or large chamber, usually a public place, that is decorated in panels, with bas-reliefs or even paintings (frescos). It is situated usually above eye level, way up, just below the cornices.

Friezes were popular with ancient Roman and Greek architects, glorifying the exploits of their rulers and their Gods, the Parthenon Frieze being the most famous and perhaps the most elaborate. Sculpted between 443 and 438BC, it is a high-relief marble sculpture that once adorned the upper part of the Parthenon’s inner walls. About 80% of the Parthenon frieze still survives. Not in Greece – at the British Museum in London.

Yes, if you steal, put your loot on public display in your most prestigious museum (or the crown), charge an entrance fee to anybody who wants to see it and say brazenly to the actual owners, “finders keepers, so fuck you”, then you must be British.

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Another frieze, this one sculpted in 1935, exists around the inner walls of the highest seat of justice in America – The US Supreme Court, the place where all judicial bucks come to rest. The frieze glorifies men who, through history, were known to have formulated laws and advanced the cause of justice as they saw it being relevant in their time.

In case you are a frieze freak, you might like to check out my post on The US Supreme Court frieze

The South Wall Frieze has figures of lawgivers from the ancient world. It includes Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Confucius and Octavian. The North Wall Frieze shows lawgivers from the Middle Ages onward. It includes representations of Justinian, Charlemagne, John of England, Louis IX of France, Hugo Grotius, Sir William Blackstone, John Marshall and Napoleon.

The sculptor of the friezes has attempted to remain as secular as possible. The Moses frieze depicts him holding only six through ten of the Ten Commandments, the ones that are usually considered the more secular commandments.

There is another figure on the North Wall, a bearded man cloaked in a flowing robe, his feet encased in the curved sandals worn by men who inhabit the Middle-East even today. In his left hand he holds the Holy Quran, it’s pages open and in his right hand, he has a long curved scimitar which he is holding, not by the haft, but by the upper blunt part of the blade, next to the hilt, the way a seasoned warrior is expected to hold it.

It is the figure of the Prophet Mohammad.

He is seen sandwiched between the Eastern Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, to his left and the Western Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, to his right. The frieze is positioned in the US Supreme Court Chamber depicted above. It is one of the two friezes on the sides that are not clearly visible.

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In 1997, six decades after the frieze panels had been carved, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked for the frieze of the Prophet to be removed from the façade.

While appreciating that Muhammad was included in the court’s pantheon of 18 prominent lawgivers of history, CAIR argued that Islam discourages depictions of the prophet in any artistic form. CAIR also took exception to the fact that Mohammad was shown holding a sword, which they thought reinforced long-held stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant conquerors.

This is notwithstanding the fact that the Prophet was known to have his scimitar by his side at all times, he and the faith he propagated being essentially a warlike culture. The Salafists, Wahabis and the Deobandhis actually believe that there is no such thing as peace and tranquility, forgiveness and mercy. To them, these concepts themselves mean giving in, submitting to something other than Islam – the very name a word which suggests ‘submission, to the one and only God and his Prophet, Mohammad’.

A prominent US-based Islamic Law scholar then stepped up and declared that the sculpture was in fact a great honor bestowed by non-Muslims and should be appreciated. Subsequently, Chief Justice William Rehnquist rejected the request to sandblast Mohammad, saying the artwork “was intended only to recognize him, among many other lawgivers, as an important figure in the history of making of laws. It is not intended as a form of idol worship”.

The court later added a footnote to the image on its tourist brochures, calling it “a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor to honor the Prophet Mohammad”.

After that one 1997 blip, nothing more has been heard from either the CAIR or Muslims worldwide, fanatical or moderate, about Mohammad’s presence on the US Supreme Court frieze.

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(Phew!)

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The dispute shows how opinions of Muslims on images of the prophet can get real petty and monolithic. The view that all representations of Muhammad are banned, not just those deemed blasphemous, obscures a more nuanced past, before the rise of those militant strains of Islam that ultimately influenced a group of desperados into trying to bring down the Jyllands Posten and the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine.

In comparison to the US Supreme Court frieze, I have to admit that the Jyllands Posten lampoons of the Prophet were in poor taste, though that still didn’t justify a fatwa and wholesale murder.

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A few years after the Jyllands Posten controversy, a 26-year old cyber security whiz named Edward Joseph Snowden settled down to work as a contractor for the computer giant, Dell, which managed computer systems that handled highly sensitive data for multiple government agencies in the US.

In March 2012, Dell assigned Snowden to the NSA’s Hawaii office which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea. Then, for some reason, just three months before he fled to Hong Kong, he joined the security consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamiltom, where his job was to break into the internet and telephone traffic around the world for the NSA.

It was around the time that Snowden was settling himself into life in Hawaii that one evening, he happened to switch on the TV and heard the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, blatantly lying under oath to the US Congress that the NSA was not tapping the phone calls and internet traffic of ordinary Americans illegally, without a warrant.

Snowden claims that that was when something snapped inside him and he decided to reveal everything. In May 2013, he took a leave of absence, telling his supervisors he was returning to the mainland for some medical treatment. Instead, Snowden caught a fight to Hong Kong, where he met with two reporters from the British newspaper, The Guardian.

In all, Snowden revealed the contents of 1.7 million classified documents, 160,000 email and text messages and 11000 classified online accounts, that he had managed to download while at Hawaii.

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Some of the Snowden cache revealed a new, previously hidden layer in the saga of the 2008 terrorists attacks, carried out on Mumbai by militants from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militant group. It showed that, months before the massacre, the British counterpart of the NSA, the GCHQ (General Communications Headquarters), had managed to hack into the laptop of a guy named Zarrar Shah, who turned out to be the technology chief of the LeT and one of the key plotters of the Mumbai attacks.

Soon, the British engineered trojan, that had inserted itself into the Shah’s laptop, spread like wildfire into all the other computers that it communicated with, inside the LAN network that the Pakistani ISI had set up for the LeT, in an apartment that was situated in a quiet neighborhood of the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Now, every comma and semicolon, every image and video, every communication between the Pakistani establishment, the LeT leadership, the ISI and the Karachi terror cell, was laid bare to the British in real time.

In the early days of the intelligence coup, the GCHQ learnt that Shah was looking for someone, a man who could pass himself off as a western businessman/tourist without raising any suspicion. He would have western citizenship and a passport whose authenticity would be unquestioned, since it would be completely genuine. He would get out there on the ground and conduct extensive reconnaissance of India’s financial capital, for the planning of the logistical aspects of a possible strike on Mumbai.

The scout would try to ascertain which was the best way for a group of militants to enter Mumbai, whether by land through Nepal (a long risk-frought over-land route) or by sea, direct to a deserted beach at Mumbai. There were hundreds of beaches available. Mumbai had a 60km long coastline. He would acquire maps, GPS coordinates – information that could lead even a blind man into Mumbai.

And of course, the scout’s main mandate would be to help identify a list of possible targets that would convey the maximum symbolism to the world. He had to record directions, traffic patterns, available transportation, etc, anything that would help the team get from A to B and then to C in a swift, seamless manner, expending as little time as possible.

The scout would also be mandated to figure out the best possible escape route after the mayhem but that was not a priority since the LeT didn’t expect the militants to survive and make it back to Pakistan.

Here comes the innate hypocrisy – while the LeT did not believe in suicide terrorism, deeming suicides as anti-Islamic, dying in a hail of bullets was perfectly acceptable and the LeT fully expected it’s killers to ensure they gave their lives away in that manner.

Meanwhile, unknown to Shah, the LeT had already found such a scout – an American with a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Christian mother. Fortunately for him, he had inherited almost all his mother’s genes and was therefore indistinguishable from other white folks.

That man went by the name of David Coleman Headley, son of Sayed Salem Gilani and Alice Serill Headley. Deceptive by birth, he had chosen to have his mother’s surname.

(Watch this space for Part-2)