Free Fire in the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam

wires in Uncleboy’s father’s garage. I asked him to explain the nature of his retreat from everyone in recent days, including me, and he gave me actual electrical sparks from the mouth; but the work of wires was overwhelming him, and, in fact, he wondered from time to time if doctors unhinged his head whether they would not discover his brain replaced with a nest of circuitry.
    Disconcerted by the way he was hedging, I pressed him, and asked him for the first time whether he was taking contracts from the Islamic Youth Party or any of the other parties that had been hiring engineering students for their military wings. These matters were not yet well publicized, and in fact I knew of them only after overhearing one or twoconversations between Grandfather and Uncleboy, a pair of diehard oldsters who had survived the years now peaking bones expanded motorcycle jumps, had thrived: garage after garage of bikes and nervy boys to motor them, hard sunlight on their hot-pepper-pouch street deals near alleyways, who had raised Niramish and me from scooters to full-power Hondas though we preferred the Warren tunnels, who could augur death in a pin-drop a hundred metres away. My owl’s intuition concurred as I peered into Niramish’s sign and the way his hulk bent forward at the accusation. I saw it in the twitch of his lame arm, in the laboured anger of his response, which I will not allow to grace the page so soon before his death.
    Years later, it would grow apparent that I was, in fact, the last of the mastans to know. That actually, Niramish’s bombs were feared and had exploded as far away as Mogadishu, where another state, another civil war, as you will recall. In fact, I found out long after all the national broadcasts began to speak of the Football Bang Electrician, whose signature explosives had garnered him the greatest notoriety of any terrorist figure in the country. He was featured as the subject of talk-show debates about the effectiveness of the new regime’s counterterror measures, was bequeathed bouquets of grudging respect for his perpetual evasion of the authorities, and continued practice of his deadly art. They even echoed rumours of the Electrician’s refusal to accept payment for his services, a detail that should have alerted Hedayat immediately to the truth. But I believed nothing for certain while my friend turned into a minor celebrity of sorts.
    However, the wider public would not know what he looked like until he died. Internal staff of the Ministry of Records and Sources swore at each other for not being able to tune in to his head with the shortwave radio, while the Black Organs invited Shin Beit for tips on tracing this destructive character. After our confrontation, Niramish no longer trusted my insights, and for the hours I would sit by his side while he rearrangedflux capacitors and hold his voltage meter, I tried my best not to irk him. Understand that while owls are solitude’s signatories and live best alone as undisturbed units, they also possess the capacity to build deep friendships, whose losses tear their confidence in the whole animal kingdom. The Madam’s regime had chosen the Electrician as a symbol, its greatest pariah, and I saw him reflected everywhere in the mirror streets, because who didn’t wear a football bag those days. I myself had several, although Gita urged me to abandon them and even purchased a rather expensive knapsack for me in hopes I would replace them. Even the fact that the cameras craned down from above and focused on their subjects through fisheye lenses, even the fact of armoured insect riot police descending on a crowd of youths without warning, open up, let us see now, of greedy eyes and amorous tongues licking chops for a crumb of so-called evidence: none of these facts could hinder their magnetic draw. In fact, the Electrician’s notoriety only increased their presence everywhere. The only person who didn’t wear