Never Say Die

Never Say Die

The Boss was going to be furious. He had missed Sama again today: five hundred times now.

He pictured Boss in his silver-grey tiled office, surrounded by white walls which had bookshelves lined with books and files, all tussling with each other for space. He would be sitting in his thickly padded black leather chair with a dark wood ornate frame, its center pointed at the top like a throne. He could see himself standing on the other side of the polished wooden desk which was as large as a dining table for ten people. The boss always wore the same clothes: a black customized formal suit and a blood-red tie; his hair pulled back in a slick back style. He would look at him like a mother looks at her teenage son in whom she has entrusted the care of his infant sibling, and he has let him fall from a chair. Sitting in his chair still, Boss’s hand would stretch across a six feet wide desk, close around his neck in a vice-like grip, and flip him out like a mosquito. 

Angelo had completed numerous assignments before Sama with remarkable success. There had never been even minor mix-ups or slip-ups. He always did his job with meticulous planning and perfect timing. But this recent assignment given almost 25 years before had cast aspersions on his reputation and spoiled his equation with Boss. Boss was losing patience with him and regardless of all his previous successes, he suspected that if he failed one more time he would be transferred to the fourth floor where all unfortunate field agents were chained to their desks for an eternity sorting files and recording everything in a computer.

Angelo’s organization was humungous, as vast as the sky, no portion of the earth untouched by it. Agents did twenty-four-hour surveillance of billions of their subjects. As soon as they received the Order, they would move in on their subject. Their job was to deliver the subject to Boss. After inspecting the files, Boss would decide on the placement of the subject. The most crucial aspect of the mission was the timing. Even a second’s delay meant that the subject was out of bounds for that particular day. It was like swatting a housefly. You didn’t get the timing right and the wretched thing was gone. The agent would have to wait for another Order, without which the subject could not be touched.

When Angelo’s present assignment had been communicated to him twenty-five years ago, he had just finished the delivery of a subject. Assignments usually came one after the other without any break in between. It was like hopping from one stone to the next while crossing a stream. He had always done it with a lot of ease. Except for this present one.

The first time he had to pick this one up was when she came popping out of her mother, Janine’s womb at 10:52 a.m., Metro Maternity Hospital. Janine, who had miscarried four previous fetuses, started getting premature labor cramps at 9:10 a.m., seven months into her pregnancy. She was wheeled into the maternity ward at 10:00 a.m. Angelo had been at her side when she arrived at the hospital; her brows puckered, mouth trembling and forehead covered in sweat.

In the somber, hushed atmosphere of the surgery room, he waited patiently while the doctor and his assistants administered syringes and drips. As the medicines started taking their effect, Janine drifted into a peaceful sleep.

No… he objected, no.

You have to push her out.

Angelo looked at the white and pink plastic clock on the wall above her bed-10:50. Wake up, he shouted. But there was no rousing her.

Sama came out at 10:52 p.m.; a pinkish blob with black rivulets running down its head. She had arrived late by 12 hours; a habit she wouldn’t break for her lifetime.    

Angelo had tried explaining to Boss that the error had been made by the Time department when it fixed the time for Sama’s collection. To convince his recalcitrant boss, he had gone down on his knees and asked for another assignment to prove himself.

Boss had stared at the groveling Angelo. In his faded blue jeans, grey hooded sweatshirt-the uniform of all agents because it allowed them to blend in every kind of crowd- scruffy jet black hair, deep brown lustrous eyes, and freckled skin, Angelo looked like a seventeen-year-old boy.

A devilish grin appeared on Boss’s perfectly chiseled olive-toned face.

You can get one more chance, but not another assignment. Get me that girl only, Boss had said, his voice booming in his brightly-lit office.

And so it was that Angelo had been saddled with Sama for twenty-five years now. Angelo, who had delivered countless subjects, had somehow not been able to bring this job to fruition. For the five hundredth time today, she had escaped. 

Why?

Sama was always late. Always. Always.

One time, he had to collect her from The Scientific Museum on the Gulf Road; Sama was 7 years 3 months old at that time. A lot of other Agents had also gathered outside it. They had received information that there was going to be a bomb blast by some terrorist organization. At exactly 1:00 p.m., the northern part of the museum that housed the exhibits of desert animals went up with a deafening roar in a cloud of black smoke. It rose like a rocket and then slowly like a hot air balloon. All his colleagues rushed in to collect their subjects. He looked at the time. His collection time was 1:22 p.m.

Angelo watched the scene unfolding before him. Concrete, glass, wood, steel, all tumbled down on the helpless victims like confetti. Sparks, fire bursts, painful shrieks were ejected from the toppling mound. Ambulances and police cars started coming to the scene from every direction like zombies in a zombie apocalypse.

At 1:20 p.m., Angelo entered through the thin, narrow jagged crevices of the mound. Coughs and groans greeted him. He looked through a blanket of dark grey haze for Sama in the sea of dying bodies. Hoping against hope that she would be there. This was going to be the 121^st time he had come for her since that fateful day of her birth. At 1:22 p.m. when he did not find her, he knew she had not made it for the school trip she had been excited about for one full week.

He later found out that she had got up late and missed her bus.

There was always something that would cause this delay in her appearance at the predetermined time. When she was younger, Janine was the one responsible for disrupting Angelo’s plans. Not that Angelo blamed her. Janine always meant well. She would try to drill the importance of punctuality in Sama but just failed to act as a good example.

Janine had three great passions in life-Instagram, gossip and clothes. Keeping tabs on celebrities, friends, and friends of friends on Instagram was tireless work. Discussing people’s engagements, marriages, relationships and financial status meant taking an active interest in your fellow beings. And changing at least five outfits before going out was a sign of diligence. And if the consequence of this was tardiness or any inconvenience to Angelo, so be it.

Once, Angelo had had to pick up Sama from Street 11 on her way to school in her mother’s car. But Janine had been talking to a friend on the phone about another friend’s sister’s fiancé and she missed the turn. Angelo, who had gotten used to these upsets just like a husband gets used to a wife’s temper, merely shrugged and retreated to his luxurious abode in a high –rise which rose up as high as the clouds to ponder the mystery called Sama.

As a premature baby, Sama had looked like a small mouse when she was born. She had slowly blossomed into a rasgulla, a ball-shaped dumpling of cottage cheese, which is small in the beginning but swells up when simmered in sugar syrup. ‘Roly-poly’, ‘munchkin’, ‘cupcake’, is how her mother’s friends described her. As a teenager, she lost most of her baby fat but remained plump in a cute way. Her hair, the color of faded black jeans - Sama didn’t like shampoo- her owlish eyes behind her thick spectacles, her oval face and pastel-colored frocks –Sama didn’t like wearing jeans- and her head bent down over a book much like her mother’s over a phone made Sama the most inconspicuous child ever. 

As a woman, Sama turned out to be the complete opposite of her mother. While Janine was more interested in the present and the living, Sama was more interested in the past and the dead. Her three great passions were -history, art and writing. Not having many friends, Sama was considered a recluse. An assistant archivist at the National Gallery of Arts, Sama was a workaholic. Having no flair for small talk with her mother’s friends or any interest in lengthy conversations with her mother, Janine and Sama had grown apart over the years. At 25, Sama lived alone in a small apartment in a 10-storey grey building a few blocks away from her parents. It was here that Angelo hovered about most of the time now, waiting for the specifics of his next assignment.

It was exactly at earthly midnight that the tablet went blink, blink. Angelo was in a meditative repose at the time. He opened one eye to see if it was an important message; he did not want to read about any new policy decisions regarding earthly phenomenon. When he saw the ‘Alert’, his other eyelid flew open instantly like the cork of a bottle of champagne. He sat up straight and read the message carefully: the 501^st mail of his ‘Sama Narang Mission’. 

8:00 p.m., Shaheed Park: Death by lightning. 

Angelo took in a deep breath; this mission was now testing his patience. He resolved to have a word with Boss if this also resulted in failure. He would demand that someone else be assigned to this case.

When Angelo’s feet touched the ground the next day, he was greeted by a delicious spring morning. The sky was glorious with the balmy sun. Dew laden green leaves were swaying in a dance of their renewal; cuckoos and doves were flitting and cooing from one branch to another of the local Sidr trees. Angelo sucked in the sweet, fresh air in great gulps before it got clouded by the smoke of the human vehicles. What bliss!

Wait…. no…no, no, no……….. How will there be any lightning in this clement weather?

Was Sama going to be eluding him once again?

By 4 o’clock, dark clouds started gathering, giving Angelo a ray of hope.

Sama’s workplace friend, Maria, called her and insisted that Sama accompany her to the exhibition in the Shaheed Park Museum. Sama reluctantly agreed, warning her friend that the weather didn’t seem favorable. But Maria brushed aside her objections, calling the God of Rain impotent in Kuwait. How sacrilegious! Angelo thought.  

At 5:15, Sama took the elevator to go down; Maria had told her to meet at 5:00. Angelo did not plan to leave her even for a second. He looked at his long time subject with a mixture of emotions. Was today going to be their last day? There was resentment, of course, for Sama had not been an easy case. She was tardy, absent-minded, too self- absorbed, too much of a bookworm, sometimes insensitive and unfriendly, but she was also honest and frank in her opinions and full of crazy ideas – she had once thought of writing a comic book about paintings talking to each other.

Angelo felt a tinge of regret.

He looked her up and down. She could do with some tips about her dressing style. A knee-length dark brown loose tunic with black stripes thrown hastily over a pair of black leggings made her look like a 40-year-old woman. Angelo merely shook his head. He was almost done with this one.

Sama and Maria were one of the few people who turned up for the exhibition. The sky outside was an ominous black. However, in the safe confines of the museum, they felt safer and lazily ambled through the paintings, sculptures and photographs of young, upcoming Kuwaiti artists.

At 7:45 p.m., they came out of the museum. In contrast to the serene calm of the museum, the wind outside was raging wildly. It looked like the beginning of a storm. Sama looked at Maria accusingly. Maria shrugged her shoulders as if to say: One can never be sure about the unpredictable God of Rain.

They quickened their steps to the open parking lot on the far end of the park. Suddenly, drops as big as coins began to fall. This slowly turned into a deluge. Sama and Maria realized they would not make it to the car. Maria signaled to the clump of trees on the pavement nearby. They darted towards them to take shelter. Angelo was gliding right above them, satisfied everything was going according to plan.

The tree offered only a mild respite. Its leaves and branches consistently shedding water on the two women who stood dripping wet and trembling from the watery spray of the stormy wind.

At 7:57, there was a flash of lightning. But it was really small and the rumble of clouds following it was not very alarming. Maria told Sama they could wait for a few more minutes for the intense pouring to slow down. Sama merely gave her a nod, she had had too much of this outing.

At exactly 7 o'clock, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, Sama’s hair started standing on end and her skin began to tingle. But it was so trivial compared to the resentment she felt towards Maria that she completely ignored it.

At 7 o'clock, 59 minutes and 55 seconds, Angelo’s eyes which had not left the two women even for a second looked up at the furious sky. He saw him. The Lord. Tall, proud, angry. In his hand, a thunderbolt. Crackling and sparkling. And down it was hurled. Angelo knelt, his head bowed in awe and reverence.

It was a cloud to ground lightning bolt. Fatal.

8:00 p.m.: Angelo raised his head, knowing that one of them or both of them were dead.

What happened next changed the course of Angelo’s career in the organization.

Instead of a dead body or bodies, Angelo saw the two women running to the car in a state of panic, screaming and cursing.

Incredulous and fuming, Angelo knew it was time to confront Boss. He didn’t care whether he had an appointment. He was seething with the unfairness and duplicity of the whole assignment as he made his flight towards Boss.

Face to face with Boss, Angelo lost his nerve. After all, he was talking to the God of Death.

I want to know why she doesn’t die, he asked timidly.

Boss raised an eyebrow.

I have been behind her for 25 years. Today, it seemed like I would finally get her. At least tell me what went wrong today? He asked, his voice sounding more confident.

Boss’s lips twitched.

Oh Angelo, don’t you know that for lightning to be deadly it needs a conductor to pass through a person’s body?

Yes. So……?

Boss got up from his throne. He came to Angelo and put his hand on his shoulder and with a completely deadpan expression said: Sama was late for meeting Maria.

So?

He took a long pause.

In her haste, she forgot to wear a bra.

What? exploded Angelo, eyes as big as saucers. What has that got to do with lightning and death?

Well....there was no metal wiring to act as a conductor.

Angelo took a step back, completely aghast. 

Finding it hard to remain composed, Boss doubled over with laughter.

Angelo, dear Angelo….we have been pranking you all these years.

Boss wiped his watering eyes.

For a long moment, Angelo just stared.

Why? He finally asked.

Why? Angelo is there ever an answer for ‘why’ in this universe? He said with an expansive gesture of his hands.

With this Boss took up his place on his throne behind his desk, resumed his business-like face and dismissed the overwhelmed Angelo.

Angelo knew he had been hoodwinked, but there was still something he needed to find out.

He went to the fourth floor, took out Sama’s file and looked up her time and manner of death.

There it was in bold black letters.

Sama Narang

Born: 14 July 2010

Current Status: Living

Death: 27 September 2092--Age 82

Cause of death: Heart attack

It was going to be a long wait.