The Vetala

by Phillip Ernest

  Weeks: they looked forward to weeks of loving each other, of loving India, of walking its country roads through the still savage winter heat of day, and passing the icy nights wrapped in blankets and each other’s arms in some field or deserted temple precinct, amidst the profound country silence touched by the voices of crickets and frogs. Sometimes they would stay in a village hotel, if they could convince the proprietors that they were legitimately married in the country they came from; and they could usually convince them, if only thanks to the admiration and amusement they inspired with their earnest but often bizarre Marathi and Kannada when they tried to explain why they didn’t have the same family name, or why they hadn’t brought their marriage certificate with them. And the fact that they were good-looking didn’t hurt, either—the perfect foreign couple from Indians’ most generous fantasies about foreigners. Some hotels (or their proprietors) were so grim that they didn’t feel safe making love there, and usually when they slept in the fields they were too threatened by the cold to do anything more than cling to each other, reluctant to separate even as much as they would need to in order to open their clothes. But they did so often enough anyway, because they were young and beautiful, and unspeakably happy to be here together. It was a very unusual undertaking, really, arduous and possibly dangerous, as they fully knew. Few Westerners, whether scholars or adventurers, could have thought of it, and even fewer would have dared. But Nada and Zoran were very unusual, and bold. For them, this was the most natural way to love each other in the land they loved.

  From Pune they headed south, as much as possible avoiding highways and cities, sticking to unpaved backroads through farmland and countryside. They talked with each other about what they saw and knew, practiced their Sanskrit with each other and their Marathi and Kannada with people they met on the road, ate in the grimy little restaurants of the villages, and once, when they were forced one evening to cross the main highway, at a big shiny one intended mainly as a stop for intercity busses, where they somewhat scandalized the affluent Indian travellers with their vagabond grunginess and lack of a vehicle, and managed to persuade the management to let them use the bus drivers’ showers for a price.

  Meetings on the road were a joy: the astonishment and delight they inspired even with their limited knowledge of people’s mother tongues, the pleasure people took in talking with them and their generosity and patience with their constant mistakes, the things they talked about and learned in these conversations about the humblest, realest things: the lay of the land, locations and distances, food, work, families, marriages.

  Over the weeks they built the epic of their personal history, refining it in language and detail as they told and retold it to the men and women with whom they shared the miles or sat resting under roadside trees and temple roofs. People wanted to know everything about them that they knew about themselves and their own gav and desh, village and country. They tended to assume that they were American, and to be a little mystified when they learned that in fact they were from a small country in eastern Europe where the language was not English. Equally mystifying was the description of their work. Why would a university in this obscure Christian country pay non-Indians to read Sanskrit and teach it to non-Indians?

  They were even more surprised when they learned that they were chiefly interested in vetalas, and they had a lot to say on the subject themselves which went far beyond the familiar and limited material found in Sanskrit literature. Village and countryside were swarming with bhuts and prets, ghouls and ghosts, which watched and influenced everything. Here, Croatians and Indians found their richest common ground, and they could walk for miles comparing their countries’ ghoul lores. Because Nada and Zoran were steeped in Eastern European vampirology—once the glory of European superstition, now dying as rapidly as any folk culture. Growing up, they had both spent a lot of time living with grandparents in the countryside, and had taken naturally to those ancient tales and traditions, and as they had entered adolescence, the vampire mythology’s themes of tragic love, subliminal sexuality, and alienation had appealed to their sensitive souls. The people they talked with on the road were intensely interested in this strange foreign subspecies of vetala, who lived on the blood of the living, slept the day away in his grave, and communicated his living death like a disease to those he fed on, often making it the gift of a dreadful kind of love.

  Such meetings were a joy, but they weren’t all like this. Sometimes people were mocking and insulting, particularly young men, shouting he gore or he makad—“Hey whitey! Hey monkey!”—as they sped past on their motorcycles, or inviting Nada to suck or fuck them as they passed them walking in the opposite direction, presumably not expecting them to understand, until Nada, perhaps, replied that, thanks for offering, but eunuchs weren’t her type. Once a motorcyclist punched Zoran in the shoulder from behind, then stared him in the face through the rearview mirror as he disappeared down the road ahead, his left fist defiantly raised.

  Such experiences reminded them of the risk they had exposed themselves to by undertaking such a long journey on foot through the countryside. Even two young Indians travelling this way would have been in some danger of being instantaneously surrounded, the man beaten and restrained while the woman was gang-raped before his eyes; so how much more vulnerable were they as foreigners, who are always and everywhere in the world easy targets because of their isolation and ignorance—and besides, everyone knows that Americans will fuck anyone and anything, so how could they complain? From time to time, walking or lying together under the splendid icy night sky, they were seized by the chilling certainty that they were being followed and watched; on such nights they would lie face-to-face under their blankets, exhausted but wide awake, clinging more tightly to each other at every innocent snap or rustle from the undergrowth.

  But their happiness was rarely interrupted this way, until the meeting that interrupted everything.

  One morning, walking into the outskirts of a village, they came to a small roadside temple with three men crouching silently in front, dressed in the standard white cotton farmer’s costume of the countryside. The men looked up at them as they passed.

  They had just slipped out of Nada’s field of vision when one of the three men said, in Croatian, “What did you expect to find here that you couldn’t have found at home?”

  Nada felt her heart gripped by the cold nausea of fear. She and Zoran stopped, as if moved by the same impulse, and slowly turned to look back at the men. All three were staring up at them—or seemed to be, since the eyes of two of them were white blanks set in the harsh lineaments of their gaunt, sun-baked faces. The third had blazing red irises, and a young man’s broad, full-lipped face. Lupine teeth shone in his unsmiling mouth.

  For some time Nada and Zoran remained motionless. At last Zoran took two slow steps towards them. “Who are you?” he said in Croatian.

  “Fellow travellers,” replied the red-eyed one.

  Now that they were standing still under its full force, Nada felt her head spinning from the already brutal sun. Things seemed unreal. The man went on, looking at Zoran: “I like your girlfriend. I don’t like you. You won’t make it out of here alive. But she and I will be seeing each other again.” He chuckled darkly, the corners of his fanged mouth turning up in a smile.

  Zoran’s face twisted with anger. His body almost seemed to swell. Staring murderously at the man, he took one menacing, determined step forward, then staggered, collapsed, sprawled in the dirt before the three men, and lay still. Nada saw the red-eyed one rise, walk around Zoran, and slowly come towards her as the other two continued to look silently on. Darkness engulfed her. She felt herself fall.

  When she came to, she was lying on her side. The sun was touching the horizon. Zoran was still on the ground five feet away from her. The three men were gone, and no one else seemed to be around. She rolled onto her hands and knees and waited for her strength and balance to return. She immediately
felt that she had been sexually had, but there was no sense of violation or insemination (she slipped her hand into her pants to check), no injuries or even any sign that her clothes had been disturbed. She crawled over to Zoran, shook him by the shoulder, shouted his name.

  His eyes blinked open, then opened wide in terror and confusion. “Nada! What...? Are you all right? Where is he? Where is he?” he screamed, scrambling to his hands and knees, his eyes darting in all directions.

  Nada held him strongly by the shoulders. “Zoran! Zoran, it’s all right! They’re gone. They didn’t do anything to us. We’re all right.”

  Zoran looked at her in agonized amazement. “Nada! How...? You’re... dressed... not hurt...” They were both on their knees, facing each other, and he held her by the shoulders, studying her with wild eyes.

  “I’m all right,” Nada repeated. “We both fell down, and they must have left. Neither of us has been hurt.” She was still confused by the way her body felt, and now she was alarmed by what Zoran was saying. But he looked worryingly unstable, as if he were urgently trying to figure out what was real, and there were no signs that she had been raped, so she resolved to wait and bring the matter up again later.

  By now all that remained of the daylight was a smudge on the horizon, and the darkness was deepening around them, checked by the scattered lights of the village houses that grew denser further down the road.

  Nada said, “We’ve got to find someone in the village, eat and drink something, talk to someone, find out if they know who those people were. Obviously we won’t go to the police: out here they might be more dangerous to us than the people we just met. We can stay in a hotel in the village, then take a bus out in the morning.”

  They stood up, holding each other’s hands, took a few tentative steps together, then started to walk into the village.

  It was at this point that Nada began to notice something extremely strange, something impossible: there was not a living soul anywhere, not on the road, not around the buildings, not in the fields. Lights were on in the houses, the sparse streetlights were lit, but in the ten minutes since they had regained consciousness they had not seen a single person, not seen or even heard a single vehicle. Even the normally omnipresent dogs had vanished. Even insects.

  In the village, they passed another, larger temple. They went up to its door, looked into its lit interior, saw at the far end the lingam, the phallic idol, decorated with fresh garlands and with incense sticks lit before it. Nada felt the first cold stirring of dread.

  Continuing down the street, they came to a general store, open and lit. They rushed to the counter, which as usual formed the store’s fourth wall, opening directly onto the street. No one was there. Incense sticks were smoking in the idol box on the wall above the counter. An open bag of rice stood on the electric scale, and other items on the counter beside it—bars of soap, packages of biscuits, a handful of chillis on a page of newspaper, a box of tea.

  “Hello! Hello! Is anyone here?” they shouted into the store in Kannada and English, then turned around and shouted into the street.

  An empty liquor store, an empty restaurant, an empty hotel with its adjoining bar, all of them with the same appearance of having been abandoned only a minute before, in terror or in stealth.

  Now in full panic, Nada began to run, pulling Zoran with her. They were stumbling down the street hand in hand, fleeing to anywhere, when Nada saw something lying in their path: a body, the body of a dog, the first creature living or dead that they had encountered since waking up some half an hour before. Without hesitating, they ran up and crouched over it.

  The dog, a bitch, a typical shorthaired stray, had been disembowelled, apparently within the last minute: blood was gushing from her raggedly torn open belly, and her intestines were strewn over and around her. She was still alive, breathing in shuddering, voiceless whimpers,

  her grinning mouth chattering as if she were freezing. Nada wept, stroking the dog’s ears and head as her life rapidly ebbed away; but Zoran’s face showed less horror than resignation, as if what he was seeing merely confirmed something he already knew.

  When the shuddering body became still, they remained on their knees for some time, their faces bowed, Nada weeping softly.

  “Let’s move.” Zoran’s voice was husky. “Let’s get out of here. They’re here, he’s here. They’re all around us. Let’s move.”

  They got to their feet and started down the street out of the village, shuffling at first, then walking, then running, hand in hand, until they were again surrounded by fields and uncultivated land, lit by the cool sheen of the stars and gibbous moon. They ran for about an hour, breathing in gasps, down the road that gently snaked through the alternately flat and hilly landscape, devoid of any trace or sound of any living creature.

  They passed houses, near and far, lit and unlit, and the distant glow that some village cast on the sky, but Nada no longer had any idea of finding anyone out here, any idea or any wish. All she wanted, all they wanted (she knew it without his saying so, because they said nothing)—all they wanted was to reach the highway: it was unimaginable—even more unimaginable than the

  unreality they were now experiencing—that the highway would be empty, that there they would not at last find busses, trucks, people, anybody. But the road went on and on, and of the highway there was no sign.

  Nada stumbled and fell, taking Zoran down with her, and they tumbled together in the dirt of the road. There they lay, breathing in sobs, and soon actually sobbing, clinging desperately to each other, their faces pressed close. The absence of living things weighed upon her like a presence as they embraced in the middle of the road, knowing that no one was coming, but that someone was watching—one or many, or perhaps the conscious, malevolent land itself. Thus they lay for a long time.

  And then Zoran kissed her, once, then again and again, with rising passion. At first she was shocked and confused, turned her face, resisted, but soon began to respond, returning his kisses with equal ardour, like him slipping her hands into his clothes and grasping the beloved flesh that she knew she would soon be parted from, as from her own.

  The love Nada made to Zoran was desperate: it was her love for him in what she thought were their final hours or moments of life. But as his embrace shook her ever more violently, she began to feel that he had forgotten fear, and to wonder how his desire could be so untroubled by memory of the nightmare they had lived through that day. She began to feel that Zoran was not really there with her.

  And then she remembered the sensation she had had when she awoke with him in front of the temple,

  that unconscious, imageless bodily memory of a previous lovemaking or violation, of which the one that now possessed her was perhaps only a continuation. The frightening

  hopelessness that she had seen in Zoran’s face as they crouched over the dying dog had completely left him: he was all desire, unambivalent and furious, and she wanted nothing but to be transformed into the same. At moments she looked into his face: he was the picture of ecstasy, head lifted, eyes closed, mouth half-open. Their movements accelerated. They shuddered, cried out, and fell still in each other’s arms. After some time they separated, lay side by side on their backs, and fell asleep holding hands.

  It was still deep night when Nada was awakened by the sound of Zoran softly weeping. They were still on their backs, with hands joined. She turned her head to the right to look at him, and saw his profile palely lit by moon and stars, streaked with a glistening stream of tears. He remained looking up at the sky, but squeezed her hand when he perceived that she was awake.

  “Zoran,” she said, “don’t be sad. Let’s not even be afraid. Whatever is happening to us, we’re facing it together. They can kill us, but they can’t separate us, they can’t come between us.”

  “He does come between us,” Zoran replied in a soft, wrenched voice. “It’s happened twice. It happened again just
now, when we fell asleep here, like it happened when we fell asleep in front of the temple. I see him, I dream of him. Just now again I saw him... making love to you,

  I saw you making love to him as if he were me.”

  Dread plunged through Nada like a blade. “Who? Who makes love to me?” she whispered.

  Zoran’s face broke into a sob of agony. “Avinash,” he choked. “Avinash.”

  Darkness rose to claim her, flooded her breast like a freezing underground stream, sounded in her ears like an ocean. She turned her head to look up into the night sky, and for the first time felt despair, which despite her almost certain belief in their imminent death had not arisen in her before, because she had known that that death would be shared.

  But now what did they share? How did they possess each other, when Zoran did not even fully possess himself anymore? And who did possess him? Was it true what he said? Was he going mad?

  But at this moment, at least, he was himself, whatever evil may have entered him and perhaps still be lurking somewhere deep within him. The evil seemed to be attached to this place: perhaps they could escape its power by escaping its territory.

  Nada got to her feet, fixed her clothes—Zoran evidently made no connection between their unfastened clothes and his dream—and pulled him up by the hand.

  She said, “We’ve got to keep moving, keep trying to reach the highway. Whatever they are, their power must be limited; it may be confined to this place.”

  They resumed running down the road, ran for what seemed like hours until the sky began to lighten to their left. When the sun broke over the fields and low mountains, they were staggering, exhausted.

  Nada saw another village ahead of them, and felt not the least surprise when they found it empty. She knew by now that villages were part of the dream in which they had been trapped, and that their salvation (if there was any hope of that) would only be found if they met some break in the self-mirroring loop of this unreal landscape.