Lounge Fiction Special 2025: ‘Khalil’ by Tanuj Solanki

I must have seen thousands of them by now.

In the early months, one saw mule carts carrying bodies—dead, alive, maimed, sizzled, punctured, blown—and there was, among other feelings, always that scintilla of consideration for the mules: those poor, poor beasts, burdened with raw panic, with devastation, whipped from hopelessness here to hopelessness there.

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One doesn’t see mule carts in videos of Gaza any more. At least, I don’t. Are the mules still alive? I wonder. What are they eating? Or have they been eaten?

*****

All this, or at least most of it, in my year of reading War and Peace.

I’m nearing the end of the novel now, and I can’t remember if there are any mules in it. There are horses, though, loads of them, stallions and geldings and mares, all. And then there are the men on the horses, hussars and uhlans and dragoons and other cavalrymen.

As battles go on, the horses suffer and the men suffer. In describing all this suffering, Tolstoy sometimes turns to similes of utter simplicity, as if the subject matter itself forbade linguistic flourish. Blood flows from a shot horse like a spring. Blood flows from a shot arm like a bottle.

When the men suffer too much and there is no food to be found, they eat horsemeat—an act, I imagine, of mercy and betrayal both.

In the early 19th century, which is when Tolstoy’s novel is set, there could be no war without horses. There could be no peace without horses either. It remained the same way for another century or so. And then, soon after World War I, the status of the horse, a status that had held its own for two-and-a-half millennia, if not more, was lost irretrievably, and from being central to war and peace alike, from being the stuff of songs and myths and sagas and, later, novels, the animal became, for the most part, an object of figurative art, wherein the beauty of its form (no doubt undeniable) became its main draw.

The horse lost, in effect, to horsepower, and its place in the stories we tell ourselves vanished with that loss. There will never be another Marengo now, never another Chetak. So long for the paragon of muscle and celerity and loyalty, the abettor of grand human will, evicted now from the fields of glory.

But… but what about those mules in Gaza, those beasts of unendurable burdens? Did those mules have names? Mustn’t their praises be sung?

If the Gazan mules didn’t have names, or if their names cannot but be unknowable for us now, it seems important to me that we give them names. As important as any other act of memorialisation. So, here, I give the name Khalil to a chestnut one from the videos I’ve watched. I’ll try to give Khalil a suitable myth.

*****

There was that video of 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou being burnt alive on a bed under a hospital tent. Everyone saw it.

The day I watched that video, my War and Peace reading had Tolstoy describing why Moscow went up in flames during Napoleon’s five-week rule of the city. That Moscow was all made of wood was one thing, but Tolstoy saw the root cause in the Muscovites’ way of resisting the French—by abandoning the city. They didn’t welcome the invading army; they chose, instead, to let their city be vulnerable to arson and accident.

It’s a privilege, I thought after reading the segment, to have a vast country to retreat to, to have the option to simply leave one’s city, and to let one’s home and possessions be burnt to ashes, if that is the price, just to feed the conviction that the conflagration will entrap the enemy. To have the invader dismayed through the simple act of migration. To offer a vacancy when the other expects grovelling and screaming. To need no mercy, no speck of humanity, no streak of conscience.

*****

A few years ago, I read a novel in which the narrator-protagonist, a 29-year-old man named Saransh, is shown to be deeply affected by images of the drowned Syrian child, Alan Kurdi . While looking at those, Saransh also happens to note the child’s name and whispers it to himself. Alan Kurdi.

At once he realises how crucial anonymity is to the processes of forgetting. Because now he knows the name and has whispered it to himself, the images of the child’s body are burnt more sharply in his mind, and the story—unknowable beyond a point, beyond knowing that there was an effort to migrate on the father’s part, to leave a shattered abode for an unwelcoming country, to risk everything because everything was already at risk—is committed forever to his memory.

Later, while speaking to his girlfriend, Jyoti, about the effect the images have on him, Saransh says: “We know a child’s body is sacred. On some level, in fact, I would even say that we know it as the only sacred thing."

The only sacred thing.

How must Saransh have suffered, I wonder, with all the Gazan videos of dead children, amputated children, famished children, blown-to-bits children, crying children, shell-shocked children… and the other videos, of parents beating chests, of siblings adenoidal with grief, of eight-year-olds caring for two-year-olds, of someone opening a shroud for one last peek and giving the departed child a serene smile, as if to say “it’s over, my child, it’s over, at least it is over for you".

Sometimes, I feel convinced that the inexorable violation of the one thing Saransh considered sacred would have made him kill himself. At other times, I see him trying, like a maniac, to learn the names of all the dead children of Gaza, to etch each name on his mind, to take the full burden of memorialisation upon himself. Perhaps this is imagining Saransh as a mule of sorts, a mule bearing the infinite weight of an enormity that just won’t end. In this second scenario, too, I see him dying eventually, his brain haemorrhaging from overactivity. I see blood leaking out of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth.

But there is a smile on his face as that happens.

*****

It’s been more than a year, and more than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Sometimes, to evade the abyss that the videos threaten to push me into, I try the inadvisable: I try to understand the enormity in relative terms. In the Battle of Borodino in 1812, which features prominently in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there were more than 68,000 killed or wounded in a single day. A historian compared the carnage to “a fully loaded 747 crashing, with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours".

Then there was 1 July 1914, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when about 70,000 died. Then there was Babi Yar, where more than 33,000 people were murdered inside two days in September 1941. Then there was…

It doesn’t ever help, this relativising, and if it ever takes me away from one abyss, it very quickly brings me close to another. The analytical brain chips in too, asserting, for instance, that the battles, being military vs military, make for bad equivalences with Gaza. Among the three examples above, the only eligible comparison, the analytical brain says, is Babi Yar.

And then there is nothing to do but laugh between the abysses, for in Babi Yar, the people who were killed were Jews. I laugh, yes, but not because there is anything farcical in this, or because I see anything lending itself to a pat comment about history. I have, in fact, come to resent those who are fond of saying “first as tragedy, then as farce". The way I see it: first as carnage, then as carnage, as carnage now and forever.

Between the carnages, though, some of us try to hold on to memory, a task that requires its own depth of imagination, and which therefore has no quarrel with the fictive element.... We want to remember everyone’s name, we want to remember everyone’s story, and if these can’t be known, then we will remember what we can very well imagine.

*****

On the day the bombardment began, Khalil the mule felt the coursing of new currents in his mule mind. He brayed once to his owner, Jamal, and went out on his own, with the cart attached to him. He followed the next big explosion. At the site, Khalil made himself available for the ferrying of the wounded to the hospital. On this first day, over three trips, Khalil saved 17 humans and one cat.

He did the same thing the next day, and the day following that, and every day thereafter, and he did all of it without needing food or water, without anyone holding his reins, without any whipping.

There would often be a bomb site that would have people trapped under the collapsed building. In the first such situation, Khalil, driven as much by frustration as by a mystical awareness of what he needed to do, bit a length of exposed rebar and pulled hard. After a few seconds, the whole concrete slab began to move!

The men around him clapped and whistled and patted Khalil on his rump. Two children were saved from under the debris, but they were in such a state that to take them to the hospital seemed pointless. Once again, driven by frustration as much as awareness, Khalil started licking the children’s wounds. Minutes later, the children came to consciousness and revealed their names: Fathima and Zahira. The men around concluded that Khalil’s saliva had turned into some kind of life-saving medicine.

Later, as the hospital was blown up, Khalil took to licking wounds of all kinds. This produced mixed results. It was observed that his saliva worked better with children. Khalil also bit umbilical cords when needed, sawed off unsalvageable digits and limbs with his teeth, and dug graves and water wells.

When it got tougher, with food impossible to find, Khalil brayed and brayed till those around him understood that he was offering his body as food. There was some confusion initially, for mule meat is haram in Islam, but the notes in Khalil’s braying convinced everyone that nothing he offered could be haram. A slice of Khalil’s rump was then cut. Those who ate the meat called it a most nourishing blessing. The blessing went further, for Khalil’s wound filled overnight and he was as good as new the next morning.

Everyone wanted to do something for Khalil, though, and soon enough, from outside the territory of the possible, or perhaps deep within it in an unrecognisable way, shoots of grass began to be seen amidst the crush of collapsed beams and columns.

A clutch would be passed hand to hand, then another added to it, and then another. Over an intricate logistical system that ran of its own accord, these clutches turned into a pile by the last leg, such that there was always enough food for Khalil, which he munched on gleefully right after he had been cut.

Then, one night, when his body was regrowing the part cut just hours back, a thousand-pounder blew Khalil to smithereens. The nub of solace he provided was thus wiped out like much of all else. But some of the blessing, meagre as it was, persisted, in ways stranger than imaginable.

Whether the bomb ended Khalil’s extraordinary story or not is now seriously doubted. There is talk of concrete moving on its own, of water wells coming up in parched places, of tents’ tethers being held tight in gusts. Some Gazans mention a cart that ferries the dead and the dying on its own, with no mule at its front.

They never make videos of that cart.

Tanuj Solanki is the author of four works of fiction, the most recent being the novel Manjhi’s Mayhem. He is the founder of The Bombay Literary Magazine.

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