Luka and the Fire of Life Read online

  After Luka’s curse on the Great Rings of Fire circus worked so spectacularly, Haroun often warned him in a scary voice that his left-handedness might be a sign of dark powers bubbling inside him. “Just be careful,” Haroun said, “not to go down the Left-Hand Path.” The Left-Hand Path was apparently the road to Black Magic, but as Luka didn’t have the faintest idea how to take that Path even if he wanted to, he dismissed his brother’s warning as the kind of thing Haroun sometimes said to tease him, without understanding that Luka did not like to be teased.

  Maybe because he dreamed about immigrating to a Left-Handed Dimension, or maybe because his father was a professional storyteller, or maybe because of his brother, Haroun’s, big adventure, or maybe for no reason at all except that that was the way he was, Luka grew up with a strong interest in, and aptitude for, other realities. At school he became so convincing an actor that when he impersonated a hunchback, an emperor, a woman, or a god everyone who watched his performance came away convinced that the young fellow had somehow temporarily grown a hump, ascended a throne, changed sex, or become divine. And when he drew and painted, his father’s stories of, for example, the elephant-headed Memory Birds who remembered everything that had ever happened, or the Sickfish swimming in the River of Time, or the Land of Lost Childhood, or the Place Where Nobody Lived came to wonderful, phantasmagoric, richly colored life. At mathematics and chemistry, unfortunately, he was not so hot. This displeased his mother, who, even though she sang like an angel, had always been the sensible, practical type; but it secretly delighted his father, because for Rashid Khalifa mathematics was as mysterious as Chinese and twice as uninteresting; and, as a boy, Rashid had failed his own chemistry examinations by spilling concentrated sulphuric acid over his practical paper and handing it in full of holes.

  Fortunately for Luka, he lived in an age in which an almost infinite number of parallel realities had begun to be sold as toys. Like everyone he knew, he had grown up destroying fleets of invading rocket ships, and been a little plumber on a journey through many bouncing, burning, twisting, bubbling levels to rescue a prissy princess from a monster’s castle, and metamorphosed into a zooming hedgehog and a street fighter and a rock star, and stood his ground undaunted in a hooded cloak while a demonic figure with stubby horns and a red and black face leapt around him slashing a double-ended lightsaber at his head. Like everyone he knew, he had joined imaginary communities in cyberspace, electro-clubs in which he adopted the identity of, for example, an Intergalactic Penguin named after a member of the Beatles, or, later, a completely invented flying being whose height, hair color, and even sex were his to choose and alter as he pleased. Like everyone he knew, Luka possessed a wide assortment of pocket-sized alternate-reality boxes, and spent much of his spare time leaving his own world to enter the rich, colorful, musical, challenging universes inside these boxes, universes in which death was temporary (until you made too many mistakes and it became permanent) and a life was a thing you could win, or save up for, or just be miraculously granted because you happened to bump your head into the right brick, or eat the right mushroom, or pass through the right magic waterfall, and you could store up as many lives as your skill and good fortune could get you. In Luka’s room near a small television set stood his most precious possession, the most magical box of all, the one offering the richest, most complex journeys into other-space and different-time, into the zone of multi-life and temporary death: his new MUU. And just as Luka in the school playground had been transformed into the mighty General Luka, vanquisher of the Imperial Highness Army, commander of the dreaded LAF, or Luka Air Force, of paper planes bearing itching-powder bombs, so Luka, when he stepped away from the world of mathematics and chemistry and into the Zone of MUU, felt at home, at home in a completely different way than the way in which he felt at home in his home, but at home nevertheless; and he became, at least in his own mind, Super-Luka, Grandmaster of the Games.

  Once again it was his father, Rashid Khalifa, who encouraged Luka, and who tried, with comically little skill, to join him on his adventures. Soraya was sniffily unimpressed, and, being a commonsensical woman who distrusted technology, worried that the various magic boxes were emitting invisible beams and rays that would rot her beloved son’s mind. Rashid made light of these worries, which made Soraya worry even more. “No rays! No beams!” Rashid cried. “But see how well he is developing his hand-eye coordination, and he is solving problems, too, answering riddles, surmounting obstacles, rising through levels of difficulty to acquire extraordinary skills.”

  “They are useless skills,” Soraya retorted. “In the real world there are no levels, only difficulties. If he makes a careless mistake in the game he gets another chance. If he makes a careless mistake in a chemistry test he gets a minus mark. Life is tougher than video games. This is what he needs to know, and so, by the way, do you.”

  Rashid did not give in. “Look how his hands move on the controls,” he told her. “In those worlds left-handedness does not impede him. Amazingly, he is almost ambidextrous.” Soraya snorted with annoyance. “Have you seen his handwriting?” she said. “Will his hedgehogs and plumbers help with that? Will his ‘pisps’ and ‘wees’ get him through school? Such names! They sound like going to the bathroom or what.” Rashid began to smile placatingly. “The term is consoles,” he began but Soraya turned on her heel and walked away, waving one hand high above her head. “Do not speak to me of such things,” she said over her shoulder, speaking in her grandest voice. “I am in-console-able.”

  It was not surprising that Rashid Khalifa was useless on the MUU. For most of his life he had been well known for his fluent tongue, but his hands had, to be frank, always been liabilities. They were awkward, clumsy, butterfingered things. They were, as people said, all thumbs. In the course of their sixty-two years they had dropped numberless things, broken countless more things, fumbled all the things they didn’t manage to drop or break, and smudged whatever he wrote. In general, they were anything but handy. If Rashid tried to hammer a nail into a wall, one of his fingers invariably got in the way, and he was always a bit of a baby about the pain. So whenever Rashid offered to lend Soraya a hand, she asked him—a little unkindly—to kindly keep his hands to himself.

  But, on the other hand, Luka could remember the time when his father’s hands actually came to life.

  It was true. When Luka was only a few years old, his father’s hands acquired lives and even minds of their own. They had names, too: there was Nobody (the right hand) and Nonsense (the left), and they were mostly obedient and did what Rashid wanted them to, such as waving about in the air when he wanted to make a point (because he liked to talk a lot), or putting food in his mouth at regular intervals (because he liked to eat a lot). They were even willing to wash the part of Rashid he called his bee tee em, which was really extremely obliging of them. But, as Luka quickly discovered, they also had a ticklish will of their own, especially when he was anywhere within reach. Sometimes when the right hand started tickling Luka and he begged, “Stop, please stop,” his father replied, “It’s not me. In fact, Nobody’s tickling you,” and when the left hand joined in and Luka, crying with laughter, protested, “You are, you are tickling me,” his father replied, “You know what? That’s just Nonsense.”

  Lately, however, Rashid’s hands had slowed down, and seemed to have gone back to being just hands. In fact the rest of Rashid was slowing down as well. He walked more slowly than before (though he had never walked quickly), ate more slowly (though not very much more), and, most worryingly of all, talked more slowly (and he had always talked very, very fast). He was slower to smile than he had been, and sometimes, Luka imagined, it seemed that the thoughts were actually slowing down in his father’s head. Even the stories he told seemed to move more slowly than they once had, and that was bad for business. “If he goes on slowing down at this rate,” Luka told himself with alarm, “then pretty soon he’ll completely grind to a halt.” The image of a completely halted father, stuc
k in mid-sentence, mid-gesture, mid-stride, just frozen to the spot forever, was a frightening one; but that, it seemed, was the direction in which things were heading, unless something could be done to get Rashid Khalifa back up to speed. So Luka began to think of how a father might be accelerated; where was the pedal to push that would restore his fading zoom? But before he could solve the problem, the terrible thing happened on the beautiful starry night.

  One month and one day after the arrival of Dog, the bear, and Bear, the dog, at the Khalifa home, the sky arching over the city of Kahani, the river Silsila, and the sea beyond was miraculously full of stars, so brilliant with stars, in fact, that even the glumfish in the depths of the water came up for a surprised look and began, against their wishes, to smile (and if you have ever seen a smiling glumfish looking surprised, you will know that it is not a pretty sight). As if by magic the thick stripe of the galaxy itself blazed out of a clear night sky, reminding everyone of how things had been in the old days before human beings dirtied the air and hid the heavens from view. Because of the smog it had become so unusual to see the Milky Way in the city that people called from house to house to tell their neighbors to come out into the street and look. Everyone poured out of their homes and stood with their chins in the air as if the whole neighborhood was asking to be tickled, and Luka briefly considered being the tickler-in-chief, but then thought better of the idea.

  The stars seemed to be dancing up there, to be swirling around in grand and complicated patterns like women at a wedding decked out in their finery, women shining white and green and red with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, brilliant women dancing in the sky, dripping with fiery jewels. And the dance of the stars was mirrored in the city streets; people came out with tambourines and drums and celebrated, as if it were somebody’s birthday. Bear and Dog celebrated, too, howling and bouncing, and Haroun and Luka and Soraya and their neighbor Miss Oneeta all danced, too. Only Rashid failed to join the party. He sat on the porch and watched and nobody, not even Luka, could drag him to his feet. “I feel heavy,” he said. “My legs feel like coal sacks and my arms feel like logs. It must be that gravity has somehow increased in my vicinity, because I am being pulled down toward the ground.” Soraya said he was just being a lazy potato and after a while Luka, too, let his father just sit there eating a banana from a bunch he had bought from a passing vendor while he, Luka, ran about under the carnival of the stars.

  The big sky show went on until late at night, and while it lasted it looked like an omen of something good, of the beginning of an unexpectedly good time. But Luka realized soon enough that it had been nothing of the sort. Maybe it had actually been a kind of farewell, a last hurrah, because that was the night that Rashid Khalifa, the legendary storyteller of Kahani, fell asleep with a smile on his face, a banana in his hand, and a twinkle on his brow, and did not wake up the next morning. Instead he slept on, snoring softly, with a sweet smile on his lips. He slept all morning, and then all afternoon, and then all night again, and so it went on, morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, night after night.

  Nobody could wake him.

  At first Soraya, thinking he was just overtired, went around shushing everybody and telling everyone not to disturb him. But she soon began to worry, and tried to wake him up herself. She spoke to him gently at first, murmuring words of love. Then she stroked his brow, kissed his cheek, and sang a little song. Finally, growing impatient, she tickled him on the soles of his feet, shook him violently by the shoulders, and as a last resort shouted at the top of her voice into his ear. He let out an approving “mmm” and his smile broadened a little, but he did not awaken.

  Soraya sat down on the floor beside his bed and buried her head in her hands. “What will I do?” she wailed. “He always was a dreamer, and now he’s gone and decided he prefers his dreams to me.”

  Soon enough the newspapers got wind of Rashid’s condition and journalists came snaking and oiling around the neighborhood, trying to get the story. Soraya shooed the photographers away, but the story got written just the same. “No More Blather from the Shah of Blah,” the headlines shouted, a little cruelly. “Now He’s the Sleeping Beauty, Only Not So Beautiful.”

  When Luka saw his mother crying and his father in the grip of the Big Sleep, he felt as if the world, or a big part of his world, anyway, was coming to an end. All his life he had tried to creep into his parents’ bedroom early in the morning and surprise them before they awoke, and every time they had woken up before he reached their bedside. But now Rashid was not waking up and Soraya was really inconsolable, a word which, as Luka knew, in reality had nothing to do with games, even though right at this moment he wished he was inside some other, fictitious version of reality and could press the Exit button to get back to his own life. But there was no Exit button. He was at home, even though home suddenly felt like a very strange and frightening place, with no laughter, and, most horrible of all, no Rashid. It felt as if a thing that had been impossible had become possible, a thing that had been unthinkable had become thinkable, and Luka did not want to give that terrifying thing a name.

  Doctors came and Soraya took them into the room where Rashid was sleeping and shut the door. Haroun was allowed inside, but Luka had to stay with Miss Oneeta, which he hated, because she gave him too many sweets to eat and pulled his face toward her so that he was lost between her bosoms like a traveler in an unknown valley that smelled of cheap perfume. After a while Haroun came to see him. “They say they don’t know what is wrong with him,” he told Luka. “He’s just sleeping and they can’t say why. They have put a drip into his arm because he isn’t eating or drinking and needs nourishment. But if he doesn’t wake up …”

  “He’s going to wake up!” Luka shouted. “He’ll be awake any minute now!”

  “If he doesn’t wake up,” Haroun said, and Luka noticed that Haroun’s hands had tightened into fists, and there was a sort of fisty tightness also in his voice, “then his muscles will deteriorate and his whole body, too, and then—”

  “Then nothing,” Luka interrupted fiercely. “He’s just resting, that’s all. He was slowing down and felt heavy and he needed to rest. He’s looked after us all his life, to be honest with you, and now he’s entitled to take some time off, isn’t that right, Oneeta Aunty?”

  “Yes, Luka,” said Miss Oneeta. “That is right, my darling, I am almost completely sure.” And a tear rolled down her cheek.

  Then matters got worse.

  Luka lay awake in his bed that night, too shocked and unhappy to sleep. Bear, the dog, was on the bed, too, whiffling and mumbling and lost in a doggy dream, and Dog, the bear, lay motionless on a straw mat on the floor. But Luka was wide awake. The night sky outside his window was no longer clear, but cloudy and low, as if it were frowning, and thunder grumbled in the distance like the voice of an angry giant. Then Luka heard the sound of beating wings close by, and he jumped out of bed and ran to the window, stuck his head out of it, and twisted his neck around to look up toward the sky.

  There were seven vultures flying down toward him, wearing ruffs around their necks, like European noblemen in old paintings, or like circus clowns. They were ugly, smelly, and mean. The biggest, ugliest, smelliest, and meanest vulture settled down on Luka’s windowsill, right next to him, as if they were old friends, while the other six hovered just out of reach. Bear, the dog, woke up and came to the window fast, growling and baring his teeth; Dog, the bear, leapt up a moment later and towered over Luka, looking as if he wanted to rip the vulture to pieces there and then. “Wait,” Luka told them, because he had seen something that needed to be investigated. Hanging from the ruff around the Boss Vulture’s neck was a little pouch. Luka reached for it; the vulture made no move. Inside the pouch was a scroll of paper, and on the scroll of paper was a message from Captain Aag.

  “Dreadful black-tongued child,” the message read. “Disgusting witch-boy, did you imagine I would do nothing in return for what you did to me? Did you think, vile warlock infa
nt, that I could not damage you more grievously than you damaged me? Were you so vain, so foolish, feeble pint-sized maledictor, that you thought you were the only witch in town? Throw out a curse when you can’t control it, O incompetent pygmy hexer, and it will come back to smack you in the face. Or, on this occasion, in perhaps an even more satisfying act of revenge, it poleaxes someone you love.”

  Luka began to shiver, even though the night was warm. Was this the truth? Had his burning curse against the circus boss been answered by a sleeping curse on his father? In which case, Luka thought with horror, the Big Sleep was his fault. Not even the arrival in his life of Dog, the bear, and Bear, the dog, could make up for the loss of his dad. But on the other hand, he had noticed his father’s slowness long before the night of the dancing stars, so maybe this note was just a hideous lie. At any rate he was determined not to let the Boss Vulture see that he was shaken, so in a loud, firm voice, like the one he used in school plays, he said, “I hate vultures, to be honest with you, and I’m not surprised that you are the only creatures who stayed loyal to that terrible Captain Aag. What an idea, anyway, to have a vulture act in a circus! Just shows you the type of guy he is. This, also,” Luka added, and tore the note to bits under the vulture’s cynical beak, “is the letter of a nasty man, trying to make out that he could make my father ill. He can’t make anyone unwell, obviously, but he does make everyone sick.” Then, summoning up all his courage, he shooed the big bird off his windowsill and closed the window.

  The vultures flew away in disarray, and Luka collapsed onto his bed, trembling. His dog and his bear nuzzled at him, but he could not be comforted. Rashid was Sleeping, and he, Luka, could not get rid of the notion that he himself—and he alone—was the one who had brought this curse down on his family.

  After a sleepless night, Luka got up before dawn and crept into his parents’ bedroom, as he had done so often in happier times. There lay his father, Asleep, with tubes running into his arm to feed him, and a monitor showing his heartbeat as a jagged green line. To tell the truth, Rashid didn’t look cursed or even sad. He looked … happy, as if he were dreaming of the stars, dancing with them while he slept, living with them in the sky, and smiling. But looks weren’t everything, Luka knew that much; the world was not always what it seemed to be. Soraya was sleeping on the floor, sitting with her back against the wall. Neither parent woke up, as they always used to do when Luka was sneaking toward them. That was depressing. Dragging his feet, Luka made his way back to his own room. Through the window he could see the sky beginning to lighten. Dawn was supposed to cheer people up, but Luka couldn’t think of anything to be cheerful about. He went to the window to draw the curtain so that he could at least lie in the dark and rest for a while, and that was when he saw the extraordinary thing.