2. If Light is In Your Heart

You Will Find Your Way Home

Her sister Mirriam had died after working there at the RARS for only three weeks. First she’d started to lose her hair and then her teeth got loose and started to fall out and then, she’d died, suffering all the life-curdling effects of radiation sickness. Makisma gritted her teeth. Imagine the scope of irresponsibility: to create toxins that would be life-threatening for another 50,000 years! Nuclear power and nuclear waste: the gift that keeps on giving…. How great had been ‘Great Britian’ and its offshoot Amerikkka, that cabal of criminality which words failed to describe… the criminality of the white power and their ‘advanced’, developed societies.

Yes! That was the key to controlling her thoughts better — to remember and focus on the truths that all agreed on; that she too condemned: the insanities and the indignities, the huge human rights abuses that the White Western Kaffirs had visited on every continent of the globe; how over the course of five centuries, they had fostered war and division and spread disease deliberately, to occupy lands held for thousands of years by ancient cultures, how they had pillaged and plundered, and raped and created whole populations of mixed race people, the hybrids who, so often, desperate for acceptance by the ‘Master Race’, joined hands with them in their global genocidal crimes against Black and Brown humanity… Colin Powel, Barack Obama, the second generation of immigrants from South India, like Priti Patel… She was glad she’d attended the extra evening classes where fragments of facts were brought together to create sense. How the profit motive had ruled, even when humanity had faced the first Covid 19 pandemic. The innocents, died in their millions and the psychopathic white parasites, like Gates, added more profit to their billions…

‘Submission is the Key to Salvation, Submission is the Key to Salvation’ she mouthed the words urgently, like a prayer. If enough synapses in her brain lit up with this thought along with her righteous rage at White Kaffir crimes, perhaps the punishment would be less. She’d written those words out, hundreds of times at college. Come on, Makisma, haven’t you learnt your lesson? She bit her lower lip so hard, blood appeared.

Since the Saudi House had gained the upper hand on every land except China, India, Canada, parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, since half of White Kaffir Europe and its hybrid, bastard populations had escaped to Australia, the divisions between humanity had become crystal clear. It wasn’t just that the Saudi House of Wisdom had extended its laws such as women needing a male relative’s permission to work, to travel, and to marry. No, everyone’s life-choices had been whittled down to only two: Experience One’s Self, followed by pain and death or live numb and dumb but free of this… this atrocity to one’s brain and identity, which she was about to receive.

Makisma saw her face reflected in the screen opposite. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes unnaturally bright, the streak of blood dribbling down to her chin. Had she gone mad? Her heartbeat drummed louder and faster. She was recalling Mahmood being carried off from beside her, while she had stood in dumb shock. He’d been strapped down in one such booth by four members of the POVPOV.

Makisma’s fingernails were tingling, turning numb. She looked down to see that her index and middle nail beds were glowing amber. Breathing heavily, she placed the electrode-laden helmet onto her head. With shaking hands, she carefully adjusted the angle of the fine translucent tube that looked a bit like those cotton ear buds things her grandmother used to keep in the bathroom. If she didn’t put it on properly, with the right amount of contact and pressure, the female POVPOV would come and do it for her. And she did notwant to be touched by those beasts. Better to just get it over with than be carried in and strapped down like an animal…. like Mahmood had been. A loud sob escaped her lips. Makisma was terrified.

She closed her eyes and prayed, ‘Ya Allah, let it be over soon’. Swallowing hard and saying ‘Bismillah’ three times, her shaking right hand reached out and she pressed a button to the right of the screen, opting for the intense five second shot of pain. She preferred it to the more-drawn out (over the course of half an hour) milder version of the same chemically-delivered punishment. The screen flashed a medium amber colour. So she was being allocated a Grade Three — more painful than a Two, but not half as bad as a Five. The Five was quite unbearable. Mahmood had experienced that, and his personality had changed afterwards. He was just a shadow of his former self. That cheeky smile, those fiery, hope-filled quotes from her favourite poet, Rumi — all gone.

Now, her tears would be seen as the natural response to the pain being administered to her via the cingulate of her brain. The electrodes on the helmet would spread a charge to both of her brain hemispheres. Meanwhile, her amygdala would get trained through the rush of chemicals being delivered via the right ear channel. They would not realise her tears were not from the pain of what they were doing to her, but arising out of her criminal emotional attachment to Mahmood. Yes … her tears were for him, and for her parents and her grandmother, her tears were for her tiny baby whose heart had pulsed with life for only a few short weeks.

Makisma placed her trembling left hand on the screen. The back of her neck prickled with fear. ‘This too shall pass, this too shall pass’, she repeated again and again with the four fingers of her right hand tapping each word on her knee. Her darling grandmother had taught her to dance her fingers in this pattern, like a talisman that would protect her when there was no-one left to protect her. It was this ability that had long saved her from the Brain Reforming Ideas Team — BRIT to you and me. Her daily yoga practice, where she’d learnt to control her heartbeat and breathing rate had also helped keep her under the radar of the Vice Police just about all her life. Until Mahmood, that is. She thought of her life like that, B.M and A.M. Why not, when the Sheikhs were also renaming time and space, days and epochs? Today, Jumma, the Gathering Day used to be called, ‘Friday’.

Truth to tell, over the past two months, she’d sort of lost large dollops of her willpower. Survival for what, when all whom you love, are gone? This was going to be her first nano dose of the chemically-induced dressing down of her brain capacity. So be it, she thought, a sense of abject resignation passing over her like a wave of shitty shame. Maybe it is better to live numb and dumb, than to feel anything, deeply. How loss leaves you anchorless, directionless, hopeless. And yet somehow, as she sat in the pod, in the space of one bright second, she realised that her losses defined her more than all that she had gained from silence and compliance. What would being comfortable count for, if she felt neither love nor joy? In an hour or two, she would have a husband. The mullah and the two witnesses to the ‘marriage’ would even now, be calling the Vice Police to track her movements. She could not go through with it, despite her promise to her sister to stay alive, no matter what. What did she love now? Makisma answered her own question immediately. She loved her losses! For were they not the symbol of her love, her life, the reason for her being? Oh yes! ‘T’is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’.

Ah, the voices of the poets! Can they ever be silenced and drawn out, root and branch, from the depths of the human spirit? If ever that happens, then we really will have lost ourselves.

The light under her hand began to flash green and she imagined the burning of her brain cells. Who would she become? In ten seconds, would she become more stupid than the blondes they cultivated genetically and socially, for cuteness alone. CAL Gals, they called them, referring to the sexual availability of blonde girls from California in the 1960’s. But surely, just like now, most people went about their daily lives, going to work, producing and consuming and following the pattern their society laid out for them: in those times, it was normal for Whites: over-exploiting the planet, and poisoning land, sea and air with their nuclear power stations and their pesticides sprayed by airplanes over vast one-crop fields. They called it ‘progress’, being ‘developed’. The Exploiting and the Exploited nations, more like. And they called Economics a science! It was a joke, covering their crimes as they robbed their way around the globe.

‘Too much analysis, too much analysis’ the words flashed across her face in urgent italics, reflected from the screen opposite. Now the green laser light was flashing directly on her eyes. Instinctively, she closed them. Makisma took a deep breath and visualised the mandala pattern in her parents’ bedroom when she was twelve years old. There was something so soothing about its square and triangular patterns, large at the outer edges and gradually disappearing into infinity at the centre. Now, the face of her grandmother who’d looked after her when her parents disappeared, formed in the centre. She smiled slightly, tears rolling out from under her tightly-closed eyes. ‘Yes, yes, this too shall pass. Her breath too would stop one of these days. Maybe today… Well, why not today? They had taken everyone she loved from her. Suddenly she relaxed and felt no fear. The most forbidden of words formed in her brain, ‘Better to die free, than to live as a slave’. She tried to recall who Mahmood was quoting when he whispered these words to her.

Smiling, full of excitement, feeling fully alive like when she had met Mahmood, Makisma unbuckled herself and threw off the helmet.

Before the world got bloodied and battered, whipped and slashed and sprayed into submission by the bans and fatwas issuing like machine gun fire from the Saudi House of Virtue, was this is how it felt, to be alive?

Opening the pod door she stepped out, stood straight and sang the words, precious as pain-formed pearls, to the slow-moving crowd on their way to work.

‘Better to die free, than to live like slaves’.

Twenty or so people passing by, turned and stood still in shock, their faces registering disbelief. She laughed and felt like she was floating. Her arms spread, as if to embrace the crowd, and she started spinning like the Sufis of old. But unlike them, she did not spin silently. No, she continued calling, calling, calling with all the power of her being, with all the pent-up emotion, suppressed since her parents disappeared; all her emotion repressed since she saw her still-born baby. All the suppressed energy exploded out of her body, propelling the air out of her lungs into a song “Better to die free, than to live as a slave” her voice ululated the vowels loud, again and again as she pulled the black veil off her face and head. Her long salt and pepper hair flowed free, twirling around her waist. Another crime. Women’s hair was viewed as an enticement to vice. In all public places women must cover up every strand of their hair, from the age of nine. The sight of an unveiled woman in public, hair flowing freely, was such an unusual spectacle, that all the bearded men, of various complexions, stood transfixed like stone statues.

Spinning faster, Makisma called out Rumi’s poem, ‘Your heart knows the way, Run in that direction.” It was these rebellious words that had brought Mahmood to her. In the whirling pattern of light and dark shapes and faces, she didn’t notice one tightly veiled woman was about to record her. This woman was taller than the rest and she lifted up the camera embedded into her middle fingernail. Though her eyes were hidden behind korranglasses, her mouth was visible -: her lips were drawn back into a snarl, hatred crackled from her, like the fires that used to burn heretic women in Europe of the Dark Ages. Makisma was spinning faster now, oblivious to how the woman next to the one with the camera, heavily veiled, seemed to fall and then other women seemed to trip and all were falling on top of the one with the camera. After a few seconds, Makisma began to spin more slowly as she noticed the heap of dark-cladded women on the ground. What was going on? It could not be accidental! She laughed with joy. She was not alone!

Her spinning slowed to a stop and she laughed again, silvery peals that bounced across the square where music concerts had been held, during those years that spelt a previous epoch. Other women joined in, both those on the ground, and those standing protectively around Makisma. Their laughter was pure joy, for the spy in their midst was now squirming helplessly under a mass of giggling, black veiled bodies. The bearded men stood still. They had all turned their gaze away from the spinning woman, to the growing rugby pile of black-veiled woman. Shoes and sandals were flying off and female arms, feet, legs, calves were getting exposed. Not since the days that Muscamden had been simply, ‘Camden’ had so much female flesh been seen in public.

The men were too shocked to do anything. They could not touch the black- clad women, even if they’d had the presence of mind to help the spy. By decree of the strictest of fatwas, only the female officers from the POVPOV were allowed to touch women in public even for the purpose of arrest. Later, after those men had been taken into custody, each of them would claim that one or two of the women had simply tripped or fainted perhaps, and then more and more had fallen over one another.

Everyone knew women’s periods make them unstable, and being weaker, they faint much more than men ever do. And so attributing the falling down to a combination of accident and the general emotional weakness in women, none of the men thought to make a 000 call. Each thought someone else there would do that. How were they to know that none actually did? Eventually, ‘dereliction of duty’ was one of the charges dragged out from the White-Washed Times. The Mullahs did that, when the Sharia laws didn’t quite cover some infraction.

But more than three years had passed without any major infractions. All the public beheadings, hands chopped off for theft, stones thrown at women accused of adultery who died, slowly, painfully, buried up to their chests… These terrifyingly harsh punishments proved to be the strongest of deterrents. The torch of rebellion and revolution had dimmed into vague shadows from lthe past. Until now… Makisma’s singing, her laughter, her bright-faced spinning… ignited first a sense of protection for her and then: the fire of protest was lit.

Makisma’s eyes shifted from the mass of women crying, laughing, screaming on the ground to a still figure in the distance. One man by the electronic tree… was it… could it be Mahmood? He was bearing the compulsory long, uncut beard and the uniform of the Vice Squad. But the way he stood, his head cocked to one side? When had he returned, to live in his mother’s house? Would he even remember her after his ‘treatment’? He ignored the mass of women piled on top of one another to his left. He did not look at the men dotted about, gazing now at Makisma, now at the throng of women on the ground. He strode in her direction, the hated bright green Allah prod in his right hand. The temperature of his hand must have risen for the prod was flashing its warning red light at the top.

Makisma felt giddy. As she swayed unsteadily, her eyes widened as they locked into his. She could not see his mouth, It was obscured by the beard. But his eyes… were they not smiling? She… she couldn’t be sure… “If light is in your heart ” she murmured.

“You will find your way home” he answered.

Soundlessly, slowly, like a delicate petal in a gentle breeze, her whole body trembled and Makisma collapsed into his miraculously outstretched arms.