by Sakiv Koch
The Apple, who had remained my nemesis since my first day at school, had become the headmaster now. He bowed again and again to the Prince and jabbed his thin, ink-smeared finger at me from time to time. I heard him speak my name and Raghu’s in the same breath, labeling us ‘Rash Raghu’ and ‘No-good Neel’ in a burst of spontaneous inspiration.
Just as the guard with the rope reached me, Rachna came between him and me. "You can’t do this," she said, addressing the prince. "This town, this province, is not in your jurisdiction."
"Juris-diction?" said the Apple, raising his eyebrows incredulously, as if it were the strangest word he’d ever heard anyone utter. The prince, too, looked confused.
"I don’t understand, Rachna," he said. "We are friends, you and I, and this boy insulted and attacked me. Should I overlook his crime?"
"And should I overlook yours?" asked a woman who had quietly entered the yard. All the guards saluted her. Every teacher, student, and staff member present there greeted her warmly. It was Rani Meena Devi, Sanjay’s paternal aunt.
"Why did you sneak here without telling me, without taking your guards along?" she demanded, coming to stand directly in front of the prince. "What happened to you today is a direct consequence of your wrongdoing in the first place. You can’t punish someone else for your fault." Prince Sanjay didn’t say anything in answer; he didn’t even raise his eyes to meet hers.
The Rani turned to the guards standing around me and motioned them to leave me alone. She then took the prince’s hand in hers and the entire royal contingent left our school, leaving me to deal with (firstly) my schoolmasters and (subsequently) my mother.
I had not seen the prince for a year after that, until the day of the annual function at my school. He had looked at me imperiously, demanding some gesture of deference. He looked so uptight I thought some lighthearted fun would do him some good. So I mimed choking a boy and then winked my left eye repeatedly to remind him of our year-old adventures.
Relax and smile he did not. He stiffened. His face darkened. He began to rise from his throne, but the Rani placed a hand on his arm and made him sit down again.
Chapter 8: The Compulsive Storyteller
Now sweep away the snatches of sounds and images I gave you of my encounters with Prince Sanjay and return with me to the night of the murders. Come live with me through that chilling night.
Wrap your arms around my shoulders and brace me as I follow the masked man to the bungalow sitting dark and silent atop Trumpet Hill.
Can you see the agony of my mind in the breathless quivering of my body – the agony of knowing that the Rani lay dead somewhere in that dark house; the greater agony of not knowing my father’s whereabouts?
Can you detect my uncertainty and the repeated failures of my fragile courage in my faltering step – the uncertainty of not knowing whether the prince was alive, of not knowing whether I would myself live to see my parents again.
The man I was following stopped at the gates of the bungalow and turned around quickly. I tried to get off the trail and dive behind a tree, but he saw me before I could do anything. I struggled so greatly for my breath that I had to hold on to my lathi and bend down to pant like a winded dog.
"Who are you?" the man called out.
I stood trembling with exhaustion, struck speechless with fear.
"What’s your name?" the man asked again, louder, starting to move toward me.
"Neel," I said. I straightened and began running, but my legs might as well have been made out of inanimate rubber for all the movement they made.
"Come here to me, Neel," the man said. "You know you can’t outrun me, so come here and tell me why were you following me."
"I—I—," I stammered, lifting my lathi for my last stand. If I was going to die, I’d bid my brief life my final goodbye as a brave little soul as opposed to a whimpering coward.
To my horror, I heard myself whimper and I certainly experienced what must have been the outer limit of cowardice. My bladder suddenly wanted to empty itself then and there. My lathi danced impotently in my shaking hands, as useless at that juncture as a stalk of wild grass.
“Speak up!” the man bellowed.
"I—I wasn’t following you," I managed to say hoarsely, through a dry, burning blockage in my throat. "I was just l-lost in the j-jungle without any light when you came from behind. I n-needed to get to the t-town."
"And why were you passing through the jungle at this time of the night?" he asked as he stopped and stood looming in front of me. My eyes leveled only with the hollow of his throat. The breadth of his shoulders could curtain two persons of my stature standing side by side.
"My-, my father c-came this way," I sobbed.
"Whose lathi do you carry?" the man asked, taking the club from my hand and studying it in the light of his lantern. "Isn’t it the nightwatchman’s? Whose blood is on it?"
I gaped at the blotch, not knowing how to tell him it was the blood of his companions and that those companions had died by my hand.
"Did the watchman take shelter in your house?" asked the man. "Is he still hiding there? Is he alone or is there someone else with him? Speak out!! You must take me to your home immediately!"
“The nightwatchman is dead,” I told him. “He came to our house alone at first. And then – and then, men like you…"
“Forget the men!” he barked. “Was there a boy with the nightwatchman? A boy approximately your age?”
I had not anticipated his asking me questions like that. I was expecting brute violence from the start, but he had not laid a finger on me so far. He let the club drop from his hand and raised his lantern to my face.
"Hey, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?" he asked, bending down to peer closely at me. "Yes, I have! Aren’t you the boy who dared attack His Majesty at that school last year?"
"His Majesty?" I mumbled.
"King Sanjay," he replied.
"King Sanjay? " I asked, my confusion increasing and my fear decreasing in inverse proportion with each other. “W-who are you?"
"Oh, I forgot all about this sack on my head!" he exclaimed and tore his mask off, giving me a jolt of a not altogether unpleasant surprise. It was Prince Sanjay’s chief bodyguard – the one who had tossed me around angrily after hauling me off the prince’s chest in my school’s corridor a year ago.
A stream of dried blood ran down one side of his head and disappeared inside the collar of his shirt. I grew nauseous when I saw the origin of the bloodstream—the mangled half of an ear, the other half of which was entirely missing.
"I am not what these clothes make me appear," he said hastily, with a fact-negating wave of his arm. "I had to wear these to escape being killed."
He flung the mask away and turned his head to look at the bungalow. "Pick up the watchman’s lathi," he told me, whereafter he began mumbling to himself. “It’s no use going to this boy’s house if the watchman is dead and my king wasn’t with him. But where should I go then? Where could he be? My mind is not functioning anymore. Oh, God! What shall I do? What shall I do?”
I leaped to pick up my lathi and hugged it like a long-lost friend. The man took my arm in his hand and began walking listlessly toward the bungalow’s gates. "My name is Sohan Singh," he said. "Maharaja Pratap Singh, King Sanjay’s father, passed away last night. I suspect he was poisoned. That’s how the prince is the king now. The assault on the bungalow here began as soon as we got the tragic news. It was a two-pronged attack, both from inside and outside simultaneously. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that some of my own men are in cahoots with the killers.”
Sohan Singh pushed one of the gates’ panels with much more force than was necessary. It hit the gatepost with a clang and swung back at him. He stood so enveloped in some emotion that he didn’t ward off the gate which hit him full in the body. His breath began to break. His hands shook, making the light from his lantern writhe desolately on the ground.
I could see his struggle to keep hi
mself from weeping openly. I stepped nearer him, stood by his side, and looked up at him, but not with understanding or sympathy. I was impatient to move, to act, to know anything that might tell me where and how my father was. The confidence I’d first felt in finding this giant to be an ally was seeping out of me as fast as tears of grief fell out of his eyes.
He seemed to sense my impatience and lifted a hand to wipe his eyes. "It’s not easy to step in there," he said, pointing toward the house. "The beautiful, peaceful house has become—," his voice broke again, "— a graveyard tonight."
I wanted to say something, but my tongue had cleaved to the roof of my mouth.
"I just returned from the town’s police post,” Sohan Singh said. “It’s another graveyard. Every man shot dead. They must have attacked the post first.”
“What happened?” I croaked. “What’s happening?”
"It all began with the barking of Rani Meena Devi’s dogs," Sohan Singh said. “Rani Sahiba was reading a book in the drawing-room when all three of her dogs started barking in a frenzy – the way they do when a leopard comes down from the mountains. Two of the Prince’s guards were in the house at that time. I sent them to see why the dogs were so agitated.
"We heard gunshots a little later and the dogs were silent after that. ‘Must have been a leopard, after all,’ she said and resumed reading.
"The telephone began to ring just then. The Rani had difficulty listening to the trunk call because the nightwatchman was passing outside, blowing his whistle and calling out jaagte raho in his sonorous voice.
"She motioned me to go and silence him, but she got the crushing news of her brother’s death over the phone as soon as I stepped out. I heard her cry and rushed back in. The watchman also came in a moment later.
"The Rani had sunk to the ground and sat frozen, neither moving nor speaking, not responding in any way to my pleas to tell me what had happened. Prince Sanjay came down from his room after a minute or two. The Rani broke down at seeing him, took him in her arms, and kept him pressed to her heart for a long time. When she could speak, she told him he had been orphaned, that he had to get ready to leave for Surajgarh immediately.
"There were eight guards in the bungalow at that time. Other than the two I had sent out to pacify the dogs, the rest were in the quarters at the back of the house. I left to ask them to get ready for departure immediately.
“In truth, I just wanted to come out and be by myself for a few moments. My legs shook as I walked. I felt lightheaded, dizzy—just as I feel now—unable to bring myself to believe that Maharaja Pratap was no more."
Sohan Singh paused to wipe his eyes, which had begun to express his sadness again. He saw me staring at him.
"I am a big man,” he said. “I am perhaps stronger than you think I am. But my tears don’t make me any more unmanly than bleeding from an open wound does."
If my mother had said such a thing, I’d have dismissed it out of hand as just another splash of her philosophy, continuing to believe that men should not, could not cry. But this soldier’s words — maybe because I saw him practicing what he was preaching, or maybe because he stopped speaking forever soon afterward — impressed me greatly. What he said ensured that I would suitably wet the future pathway of my life with the water of my feelings whenever the need arose (and believe me, it arose often enough).
We stood undecided about where to go for a moment. The main gate gleamed faintly in the lantern’s light. On the other side stood the bungalow’s porch, drowned in thick shadows fractured by feeble rays of candles burning somewhere inside the building.
I had equally strong and opposing urges to run out and to step into the house. As I waited for Sohan Singh to decide where to go from there, I felt that he was likewise waiting to see what I intended doing. He depended upon me to take the lead. But the fourteen-year-old boy that stood with him had had enough of a night to stand paralyzed, without thought or action, for the rest of his life.
And so we stood like two beings poised for a leap—with the tension, the strain you feel as you coil your body to take a jump—two beings poised for a leap they might never take. So we stood, draining the remnants of our energies with the intensity of our stillness until Sohan saw or remembered something and began walking toward the porch. I followed him. He stopped and bent down to pick up a dirty piece of cloth from the floor.
"It’s the Prince’s cap," he said tenderly. "They have trodden all over it," he added in the tone of a devotee seeing a sacrilege.
We reached the main door of the house and stopped again, afraid to step inside. "What happened after you left to talk with the other guards?" I asked in the most solemn tone I’d ever heard my voice attain.
"What happened after I left to talk with the other guards?" he repeated, looking at me with bafflement. And then his face, along with its expression of confusion, got erased from my vision. The flame in his lamp had fluttered, gasped, and gone out with a dying shudder.
Complete darkness swallowed us. The settling noises that the old building made were our only connectors to the sense of being still on earth, of not being lost in the endless nothingness of space.
Sohan Singh began speaking rapidly then, if only to produce some comforting, fortifying sounds.
"I left to ask the rest of the guards to get ready for departure. I was in total shock after hearing of my beloved master’s sudden death. I just wanted to be alone for a few moments, so I didn’t go directly to the guards’ quarters. There is an old Banyan tree here in this bungalow’s garden. I went and sat under it, with my spinning head wedged tightly between my hands. A high-pitched scream pierced the fog around my mind. I jumped up and started running toward the drawing-room, from where I thought the sound had come.
"As I came around to the front of the house, I saw two of my men standing guard on either side of the drawing-room’s door. ‘What happened? Who just screamed?’ I cried. Instead of answering me, the two looked at each other. One of them nodded slightly and the other raised his rifle at me.
I was still moving toward the door rather quickly. Seeing one of my own men aim his weapon at me shocked me so much I didn’t see the steps—these very steps that you’re standing on now. I stumbled and fell. That fall knocked two of my teeth out, but it saved my head from the bullet that the guard fired at me just then.
"I fell and rolled to that side, behind those pots, where they couldn’t shoot at me without coming out and pointing their long rifles at the ground. That’s always an awkward thing to do. I freed my pistol from its holster with shaking hands, beginning to understand what was happening—."
A bout of coughing interrupted Sohan Singh’s narrative. He cleared his throat and spat on the ground. I had realized by now that he was somewhat like me, something of a storyteller, unable to tell anything without laying it out in all its gory, juicy, saddening, or thrilling detail (as the case may be).
"Did you see my father?" I asked him, still curious to know the rest of the night’s disastrous events, but much more eager to know anything, the smallest thing, about my father. I was yearning, more than anything I had ever yearned before, to get the shadow of an assurance that he was safe wherever he was.
"Who is your father?" Sohan Singh asked in turn. "Was he here tonight? What was he doing here?"
I told him, as quickly as I could, how my father had had to leave our house to get help for the watchman; how some men, wearing masks such as Sohan Singh wore earlier, had tried to force entry into our home soon after Father left, and how the nightwatchman had died under our roof. I suppressed only the fact of my hitting one of the killers on the head with the nightwatchman’s club. "I don’t know where my father is and how he is," I finished.
"I saw him," said Sohan. "I saw a man throwing rocks at a house in the valley. He crouched behind some bushes and aimed large stones at the windows and the door of the house. I was in a mind to shoot him. I was nervous, afraid, and angry enough to shoot anybody who didn’t outright look like an ally. Nobody l
ooked like an ally to me an hour ago. Nobody looks like an ally to me now. I was about to shoot him in the back when I luckily saw what he was throwing rocks at—"
"It was one of the men trying to get in our house," I said hurriedly, cutting him off mid-sentence.
"Yes, it was," said Sohan Singh. "It was probably one of my men, but I am not one-hundred-percent sure—"
"Yes, yes" I interrupted him, cutting him off midsentence again. "What happened next? Where did Father go from there?"
Sohan Singh did not speak for a long moment. His breath, loud and labored like mine, began to work faster. I knew he was angry before he uttered a single word.
"I am a captain in Jalgarh’s Royal Army," he said, the tone of his voice flinty for the first time. "If you—the son of a mere peasant—keep interrupting me, if you behave as though you know what we should do next, if you act as if it were a waste of your precious time to stand here and listen to me vent some of the unbelievable pain and horror I’ve lived through tonight, I am going to walk out of here right now. Instantaneously." His breathing grew even quicker, as he fueled his anger with his words.
I didn’t know what had rattled him so much, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being left alone again.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I apologized quickly and insincerely. I hadn’t liked the derogatory tone he had employed while referring to my father.
"Don’t show the lack of refinement in your upbringing by interrupting me again," he cautioned, whereafter he picked up the thread of his narrative immediately, as though he had dropped it only to clear his throat or to have a sip of water.
"I was there, behind those gigantic planters behind you, with my pistol in my hand. I understood now that the person or persons who had murdered our king were after Prince Sanjay now, he being the sole and undisputed heir to Surajgarh’s throne.”
My heart sank. I had been hoping/expecting that he would first tell me about my father, whom Sohan Singh had seen throwing rocks at the would-be intruder bashing our door in. But I held my tongue.