A Thorn for Miss R.: Book I: The Night Watchman

by Sakiv Koch

  In the autumn of the year Nadya turned eighteen, Sasha Vosk, now tramping through his fifties, decided to 'see' the world again — professionally and profitably this time.

  Akilina came stamping her feet into their tent one afternoon, squealing something over and over again.

  “Pack up, Nadya, it’s time for us to leave this madhouse,” she said. “That maddest of all madmen, Sasha has an itch in his hind paws. He wants to go international! He is taking us to the country of that terrible striped beast, the Royal Bengal Tiger.”

  “India?”

  “India.”

  Chapter 15: A Courageous Coward

  "You have done all you can!" Shyam cried with a sudden burst of energy. "Go save your life. Go!" I struck one last time, putting all my strength into the head of the hammer. The pounded arc came free from the rest of the floor, and Shyam fell to the ground level. The beam that had been pinning his legs remained jammed between the walls.

  I threw the hammer aside and bent my knees to jump down. A slab of concrete falling from above found the back of my head in its way, and the whole wet world drowned in utter blackness. The blackness didn’t dispel even when I opened my eyes more than forty hours later. Swatches of that darkness became immortal — they still live on.

  And they have nothing to do with my ocular vision (which has always been twenty-twenty). Although my head was swathed in a turban of bandages, I had not regained consciousness in a hospital. Nor within the comforting walls of my home.

  The first thing I did when I came to was moan (not in pain, but fury) and curse. Moan and curse. Vehemently. If, at this point, you find yourself pondering, “this Neel is a mighty thankless man. He survives a lightning strike, a petroleum gas explosion, a collapsed roof, a serious head injury, and a headlong fall onto smoldering debris, but instead of clasping his hands together and thanking his stars, he starts to throw fits of anger. He curses!”

  If you find yourself thinking along these lines at this point, I don’t blame you. I was angry and I was afraid. More afraid than angry. It was because of where I was. The place I found myself in shouldn’t and wouldn’t have mattered under the circumstances — except that I was in the one place in the entire universe whose sight, whose very thought made me sick with a compound of fear and rage.

  I was in Rani Meena Devi’s house, in the same room where she had been murdered, where Sohan Singh had been stabbed in front of my eyes, where I myself had been stabbed, and where I had broken and mangled the killer’s hand with the night watchman’s lathi.

  That room had been the fountainhead of all the nightmares that had terrified and tormented me for the last several years. It was the place where I had been robbed of the remaining vestiges of my childhood, my innocence, compassion, and tenderness.

  But the dread that both welled up from inside me and enveloped me from the outside did not stem just from the past of that bloodied space. In those first moments of dizziness, disorientation, and confusion, I felt and saw, with sickening clarity, the tentacles of that history reaching into and mauling my future as well.

  I don’t know whether this feeling altogether originated or merely intensified after I had seen — with my bodily eyes —a figure lounging in the shadows near that room’s gigantic fireplace. I tried to focus on something, on anything, to shut out that hollowing dread overpowering me so completely I was finding it difficult to breathe.

  I turned my attention to the state of my body, or rather, my body turned my attention to its state: I had gaping gashes in the palms of my hands, where the nails jutting out of the beam had bitten into and tore through my flesh. I was covered in lacerations, burns, and bruises.

  The sun had set and the house was dark inside and out. After that one night many, many years ago, when Meena Devi's husband had died of electrocution, the building had been stripped of electric wiring and every electrical device, from light fixtures and fans down to switchboards.

  Aside from the reclining figure near the fireplace, there were other people present in the shadowy room, but Rachna wasn’t there. My mother and father were not there, either.

  “He seems to have woken up,” someone said in a low voice.

  “Get some light here.” The answering voice — also low but incalculably imperious — came from the figure’s direction.

  Someone struck a match and lit an oil lamp. In its yellow, mustard-scented light I saw a tall man half-sitting, half-lying in an armchair.

  You must have noticed by now that I have no eye for the details of people’s clothing. But I could not stop myself from gazing at the various articles of this man’s attire.

  He wore black riding breeches, a red silk shirt, and a sky-blue neck scarf. Hand-made calf-leather boots adorned his feet. Brilliant jewels gleamed from the rings on his fingers.

  I didn’t need to look at the uniformed guards standing around him to know the identity of the tall man.

  “Prince Sanjay,” I muttered, feeling sure I could sit up with some effort, but I made no effort to stir.

  “King Sanjay,” one of the men from the King’s entourage corrected me harshly. “Rise to your feet—"

  The king waved the man silent, rose from his chair, and came near my bed.

  “How are you, Neel?” he asked.

  “Why am I here?” I counter-questioned.

  Sanjay shrugged regally. “I needed to see you,” he said.

  Needed. Not wanted. I struggled to keep my temper’s fuse from igniting, but it was proving difficult. It was proving difficult despite my very vivid memory of the first face-off I had had with Prince Sanjay so many years ago.

  The Rani had rescued me from the prince’s wrath back then. There was no Rani now, and the Prince had since become a Maharaja, a king.

  “I don’t like this snobbery, this highhandedness,” I said, in spite of all the good reasons I had not to say that exact same thing. There was the predictable collective gasp of disbelief from the liveried guards.

  “What kind of a person are you,” I continued to address Sanjay, “to bring me into this house, into this room while I was unconscious? How could you bear to come here? You were sitting so indolently near that fireplace just now. Have you forgotten how you once had to hide inside this very fireplace to save your life? Have you forgotten what you saw while you were—”

  The torrent of my words was dammed here. Sanjay leaped at me and clamped my mouth shut. He did it with more speed and strength than I thought him capable of carrying around in his lanky, thin frame.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” he hissed through bared, clenched teeth. The lamp’s flame sputtered and shadows shifted in the room. I noticed with superfluous relief that the guards stood rooted to their spots. From my privileged situation of such extreme closeness to the king’s face, I saw that his eyes were bloodshot, black-rimmed, and excessively bright.

  A vein throbbed in his left temple. His subtle perfume’s scent had mixed with the sharp odor of his sweat, large drops of which dripped from his brow steadily. After I had heard five or six tick-tocks of a grandfather clock placed on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, I clasped Sanjay’s wrist with one hand and plucked his palm away from my mouth.

  Sanjay lowered his head and took a step back, muttering something he might not have muttered, said, or shouted ever before to anyone (except for Rachna, of course): “I’m sorry.”

  His arm flopped to his side in dejection. His eyes moved from side to side, avoiding contact with mine.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “The entire purpose in coming here was to be able to get over at least some of this-this…”

  Words failed him. He swept his hand in a small arc to cover the room.

  “Your intentions were noble,” I said, “long as you applied them only to your own most exalted self. But to bring me here against my wishes is nothing short of abduction. I’d now like to obtain Your Majesty’s permission to leave—”

  “It wasn’t His Majesty the King who brought you here,” a voice boomed from the
doorway. Father stepped into the room. Ma walked a step behind him.

  “We did it,” he stated with a finality that was akin to a ‘The End’ printed on the last page of a book. “But even if His Majesty had done so in his depthless wisdom, you are nobody to question his intent or his motives.”

  Deprived of my ability to retort, I made a face. Ma must have seen me do that because I saw her shake her head slowly, one time, from side to side—her ‘cautionary shake’, not the ‘deprecatory shake’, which, once started, took some time and acquired a lot of speed before stopping.

  My parents greeted the king reverentially. Father then came to stand near the head of my bed. Ma sat down beside me.

  “You were in this hell together, the King and you,” Father continued, “and you came out of it together. He, a king, doesn’t feel any shame in admitting that he is traumatized and needs healing. You, a night watchman subsisting on a municipality’s salary, are too proud to say that you, too, need complete recovery from the events of that night. If that is to happen, the process must start here, in this very spot.”

  “Besides, His Majesty wanted to see you,” Ma put in. Ma had said, ‘wanted’. But Father wasn’t finished.

  “I apologize for abducting you, my son,” he said dryly before turning to speak to Ma. “Didn’t I tell you that your son is too much of a coward to face his past squarely?”

  I winced. Ma winced. I tried to steer the conversation to some other topic.

  “How is Shyam Kaka?” I blurted out before realizing I couldn’t have asked a worse question of my parents. Got no response. Cleared my throat and wiped my brow, which, I now realized, had turned into a living faucet releasing as much sweat as the king’s had recently.

  Salt got into my eyes and stung them. There was a heavy silence in the dimly lit room. It was clear to me that the onus to do or say the next thing rested upon me. Me, a poor invalid. A martyr. I shifted in the bed. Groaned somewhat dramatically in the hopes of softening Father’s heart. Failed miserably (his face was an open book and contempt was writ large on it at the moment).

  Ma, on the other hand, suffered from my suffering. I sat up with a Herculean effort and pressed a hand to my wounded head. It came out to be the wrong hand — the wounded one. I moaned. The contempt on Father’s face deepened.

  I had been his ‘little lion' until the night of the murders. He was convinced that his only son had inherited his natural, limitless courage. When, after that night, he found a great deficit of that emotional strength in me, Father completely understood and accepted the frayed state of my nerves.

  Whenever I would jump at sudden sounds, or grow pale at the prospect of venturing out alone after dark, or wake up screaming in the middle of the night, he reassured me of everything being all right. His big, strong hand on my back would help me sink back into sleep.

  It was only after I had disappointed him bitterly by taking up the profession that I had taken up — that of the night watchman — that he began to consider me spineless and worthless.

  Do you see the irony in that? Take up a torch, a whistle, a lathi, and go out into the black night when everyone else is sleeping cozily in their beds. You are lonely, cold, desolate, and unarmed (a lathi is effective against only small and rational fears).

  Your beat is large and you have to cover every inch of it every night. You invariably become the first target of any planned or unplanned attack in your area. Take it from me, there is an ‘either/or’ relationship between cowardice and a night watchman — you can not be both at the same time. You can not be a night watchman if you don’t have some measure of bravery in your heart.

  But I couldn’t — even Ma couldn’t — make Father see this self-evident point. Father wouldn’t budge from his conviction that by not becoming an escape artist (especially because I had been training since my birth to become an illustrious one) I had squandered away my life.

  “He could have taught little children like his grandfather did,” Father would say to Ma. “Or, if he was incapable of improving other people's minds and lives, he could at least have made them laugh by becoming a circus clown.”

  Although he observed my not-unnatural-under-the-circumstances terror at finding myself in the Trumpet Hill bungalow so unexpectedly, he wouldn’t consider my saving another man’s life at the risk of my own an act denoting courage and selflessness.

  In a way, Father exhibited something akin to selective amnesia where my overall personality development was concerned. This wouldn’t have mattered so much if I didn’t love him with all the life and force of my being. I looked up to him in everything.

  And so, I wanted desperately to measure up to whatever standards he had set for me in his heart. All of us do that with our heroes. Father had been my hero not only during my boyhood (when even the most nincompoop of men are the most infallible idols to their sons) but also when I’d grown into a man.

  But herein, too, like in so many critical things of life, lay a contradiction, a paradox: I was not disappointed with myself for having disappointed my father so much, so bitterly, by becoming the night watchman of our area.

  I felt no shame, no guilt, no littleness in sleeping soundly through afternoons and getting ready to go out to my work at nighttime. I would take long baths in the evenings, dress immaculately in my starched white pajamas and my knee-long khaki kurta, girdled in the middle with a wide, studded imitation-leather black belt.

  I would then sit down to oil my lathi — the same one that the night watchman of my boyhood had left behind in our house — before oiling the pair of my newly-sprung, luxurious mustaches which I wore, in the first few years of my youth, to lend my face a more imposing, more mature look.

  I’d comb my hair, shining with perfumed oil, back from my forehead and place a watchman’s inverted-boat hat on my head. Sometimes, when she was in no mood to take a no for an answer, Ma would forcibly darken the rims of my eyes with kajal and plant a long streak of tilak on my brow.

  At last, just before going out the door, I would shine up my whistle and my torch with a soft cloth. I not only took pride in my “petty” job but also got vast quantities of joy and satisfaction out of it. If Father’s disappointment (which he went to considerable pains to display on a daily basis) ever dampened that joy, it would be for just a few minutes. By the time I covered the length of the dusk-shrouded lane leading out of our hamlet, I would be walking with a spring in my step, humming a tune, beginning to populate a new world in my head with new characters, new tales.

  “How is Shyam Kaka?” Father repeated my unfortunate question with his eyebrows raised quizzically, laying a sharp emphasis on the last word. He looked around the room to see if anybody present there was stupid enough not to share Father’s incredulity at what I had just dared ask.

  I saw Ma’s eyelids move rapidly in a flutter of guilt — it was she who had sent me to Shyam & Sons to get me photographed for matrimonial purposes. There were certain goings-on in our home that took place behind Father’s back. At that moment, lying wounded and humiliated in that scary room, I was thankful for the semi-darkness concealing my mother’s face from my father’s reproachful gaze.

  “You call that man your kaka, your uncle?” Father continued his barrage. “Whose brother is he? Mine? Your mother’s?” He raised his right hand and pointed his index finger at my face. “If you had gotten yourself in this state,” he said, “while saving the life of some other man, any man, even an animal, I would have knelt beside your bed and kissed your forehead in pride. But to have wasted your blood — my blood — to save a treacherous snake takes the top spot among the list of your mind-bogglingly stupid sins, even exceeding the soul-numbingly stupid crime of becoming a nocturnal watchdog strutting about uselessly in harmless lanes of peaceful towns!"

  Spittle flew from father’s mouth. I distinctly saw, with a somewhat perverse pleasure, those minuscule droplets come in contact with the unblemished skin of King Sanjay’s right cheek. Sanjay first pretended that no such thing had take
n place. He then surreptitiously dabbed his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

  Father had gotten out of breath. His chest rose and fell as though his insides were struggling to burst out into the world. Ma looked on at him with her scared-deer’s eyes.

  “Give him some water,” the king commanded. There was a perceptible measure of satisfaction in his voice – the same voice which had so recently sounded on the verge of quivering like an ordinary man’s. He had gained that satisfaction at my expense.

  Father threw his head back without relieving me from the shriveling heat of his glare (so that he appeared a bit cross-eyed) and emptied in one prodigious gulp a bejeweled goblet that appeared almost instantaneously at his side. He extended his arm to place the goblet back onto the silver serving-tray from which he had picked it up. But since his eyes were still boring into mine, he missed the tray by at least a foot.

  The goblet rolled away to a dark corner after falling to the marble floor with a harsh clatter. The King cringed and almost jumped out of his skin. Father’s eye-lock on me broke and his gaze lowered in defeat—His Majesty the King had gotten scared at that noise, whereas the two-bit night watchman had kept his composure (perhaps only because the night watchman’s father was present there?).

  Although we were a monarch and a municipal servant (respectively), we were both Drapers first. We engaged constantly in curtaining our fears, but our drapes fell short or developed holes more often than not.

  My curtain had not swayed at that goblet’s fall. The King’s had. I gloated. I had the audacity to actually smirk. Shouldn’t have. The Regal Rage flared up and blazed along with Father’s. The King’s jaw tautened and eyes smoldered.

  Father’s eyebrows descended threateningly over his eyes. He brought his straining face within a few inches of mine. I shrank back under their combined assault and started to scan the room for ways of escape. But, alas, I was no escape artist.