by Sakiv Koch
One un-fine day, when several massive clouds were also on a colliding spree with each other, bellowing spine-tingling thunder, I booked a long-distance call to Jalgarh. I didn't do it from the post-office in the city. What fun would that be? I did it standing beneath the all-knowing, glassy gaze of the telephone-hall tiger, in a voice loud enough to attract Sanjay's attention.
The operator took me for the king and called me 'his majesty' in tones so reverent I got a glimpse into a deity's feelings when a worshipper lies prostrate before him in a temple. That was my first (albeit unwitting) impersonation of King Sanjay. I didn't bother to inform the operator that I wasn't majestic in the smallest degree.
I was waiting for the connection to go through and for Sanjay to come in. The two events occurred at the same instant. Someone picked up the phone at Rachna’s house in Jalgarh just when King Sanjay came into the hall.
"This is Neel. I want to speak to Rachna," I barked into the mouthpiece, trampling upon Shyam’s ‘hello’, not bothering to ask after his state of health. I sensed the King stiffen behind me. The air in the hall became charged. Literally. I touched the surface of the telephone table and got a big static-electricity shock.
Sanjay uttered not a word, moved not a muscle, but his mere presence acquired a menace I never thought he had in him. After a few minutes of waiting for Rachna to come back from wherever she had gone, minutes during which I feared the eerily quiet king would transform into a demon and start devouring me, I began the act of putting the phone down with the intention to bolt from the hall. Tricycle vs. locomotive—no contest.
The phone’s receiver was an inch away from its cradle (and the connection was half a second away from its termination) when a tinny, magical, breathless voice spilled out of the earpiece in a rapid stream.
"Hello, Hello, Neel, Neel. Is that you?" Rachna asked, giving me just enough time to interject a ‘yes’ before running on again: "How are you? Do you like it there? When are you coming back home? Do you eat enough?" and a dozen other interrogative statements of the same kind.
Her tone of voice sounded more cheerful than it did during all those telephonic conversations the king had had with her. She was panting from obviously having run a considerable distance at a considerable pace.
"How are you?" I put in when I got the chance. The query came out as perfunctory, dry, hurting. Not because I wasn’t interested in her answer, but because my attention was focussed more upon the man standing absolutely still behind me than upon the woman pouring her heart out to me.
The man, the monarch, was rapidly degenerating into something sub-human. A jealously so potent and a resultant rage so fierce emanated from him I suddenly feared for my very life. Rachna said something, said quite a lot actually, which I didn't quite register.
What I did register was: "Why did you call me if you have nothing to say to me?" Her question, her hurt, made me wince.
"I, I —," I stammered, wanting to erase her pain, wanting to make her happy again. Not just to show the king that I, too, could talk to her without his permission, but for the sake of really reconnecting with her after so many days. At the same time, I wanted to swivel around and face Sanjay, even if just to take the imminent thrust of his rage-dagger in my chest rather than my back.
And then the line went dead, the earpiece now emitting only an accusatory wail in my ear. I jerked around in a blind panic. Our gazes met and grappled with each other. Soon as I came face-to-face with the tyrant, my fear fled and the old madness filled my head again. Just like that, without having exchanged a word, far less a blow, we were ready to tear each other's throats out.
Time slithered by, moment after bristling moment. Without breaking eye contact, the king extended a long arm toward a set of swords hanging crosswise against a wall. I gripped the cold butt of the model 29 holstered at my side, completely oblivious to the fact that my foremost responsibility was to protect the very man whom I was now raring to kill.
The phone screamed, startling both of us, cleaving the thread of our hostilities in the middle. It is hard to say as to who lowered his eyes first. I think it wasn’t me. The phone rang and rang, as though shaming us into becoming human again.
The king moved. I stepped back. The pecking-order was re-established. He took the call. You can guess who the caller was. You can also guess that I was once again excluded from the conversation.
But even you can't guess the degree of pain and frustration this exclusion caused me. It was the longest chat they had ever had. Her voice was slightly higher pitched than normal. It was so sweet it was practically overripe. I left the hall of humiliation after the first three or four minutes.
***
I can't say how things might have turned out if Rachna had not called back at the precise moment that she did: bloodshed, death, disgrace?
I can't say for sure if she had anything to do with the lid that the king very obviously capped his murderous rage with, although it is easy to imagine that she had designed, manufactured, and fitted the said lid.
The next "I can't say" of this series would be: what other mad, reckless, suicidal things I might have carried out, had an agent of change not come into the Surajgarh Palace immediately after the telephone-hall fiasco.
It came in the shape of a post-card-sized photograph. Coloured. It was carried there by a Maha-Pandit (a greatly learned man, that is). A hill of laddoos, halwa, pooris, kheer, and other high-calorie delicacies of the same kind had been erected within minutes of his arrival. He methodically demolished and transferred the entire table-breaking quantity into his belly within as many minutes.
To see the superhuman speed with which he chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed, one would think he had to have an elephantine stature. But his physique made a scarecrow appear plump by comparison!
The dining hall was mildly chilly, but this man wore just a Gandhi-style dhoti and nothing else. His chest was caved in upon itself. It was as easy to count his ribs as it would be to count those of a lab-specimen skeleton. His arms were no thicker than the handles of broomsticks, and his legs were only slightly heftier in comparison.
His Adam's apple was the only Adam's apple, in my considerable experience, which could put my old master's famous apple to shame. This pencil-thin man was completely bald. His skin was stretched so taut over the frame of his bones that he appeared incapable of aging. I thought he was about fifty years old before revising my estimate to sixty and finally settling for a number closer to forty.
His eyes were this remarkable man's most remarkable features. They peered out from cave-like hollows beneath his jutting forehead. A redness overlaid their native blackness so that his eyes looked like perpetually smoldering coals. The man himself might have had a grave and philosophical bent of mind, but his eyes always appeared amused at some secret, elusive aspect of creation.
This small man's formidable name was Kalicharan. He arrived in Surajgarh with that pre-cursor of doom—that photograph—a day after my showdown with the king.
Sanjay had gone off on a hunting expedition a few hours after our confrontation. “Captain Neel is not to come along!” was his inflexible command before his departure. There was nothing to be said or done about it. If he thought I would be crestfallen at missing the opportunity of combing through dense jungles at his heels to witness the mindless killing of hapless beasts, he was highly deceived.
"Good riddance," I said to myself when I found out about his royal decision to leave me behind. But my heart sank right to the level of my calves the very next moment.
"What if," I asked me, "what if he doesn't take you along to Toronto???"
This thought dispatched me straight to a brown study, both figuratively and literally. Figurative part: self-explanatory. Literal part: I went to a beautiful reading-room with wood-paneled walls and French windows looking upon a lake.
My apprehension steadily snowballed into a full-fledged depression. Being able to go to Toronto was more or less my primary reason for having accepted Sanjay
's job offer. If I wasn't going there, I wasn't staying here (Father reared his frowning head in my mind's eye and blasted this decision to pieces).
In this abstracted, despairing, gloomy state of mind, a love that I thought had forsaken me forever returned and embraced me. It re-captivated me with a force that transported me to another world, that transformed me into a much stronger, more substantive man. I started working on a story, or rather, a story started working on me.
She and I stayed up all night, absorbed in each other, expanding and elevating each other. By the following morning, my wrist was stiff and eyes bleary, but my heart and mind were fresher, more joyous than they had been in a long time. I decided to place another call to Jalgarh. Sanjay was away—there was no possibility of another bloody war between him and me. There was no one else I could talk to in that entire comatose palace. Even if there had been some such person, they wouldn't be Rachna.
I was going towards the telephone hall when Kalicharan arrived and gave my imagination some fodder to chew on while he himself exhibited those astonishing chewing and swallowing feats. I stood and watched him until he finished eating (which didn’t take him long to do).
He had a cloth bag placed at a little distance from the crockery and cutlery heaped before him. He placed his spidery hand upon the bag and pulled it toward him as soon as some servers cleared the table. He rummaged in the bag, took something out of it, and laid it facedown on the table.
"Hello there, lucky young man," he said, abruptly turning his head to look directly at me. I had observed him in the belief that he was unaware of my presence. His burning-coals gaze disconcerted me a bit. I was surprised at the quality of the sound of his voice. One would have expected a reedy, thin, weak voice to issue out of his reedy, thin, weak chest, but what issued out was a rich baritone cracking slightly at its edges.
I looked around to see if there was a ventriloquist hidden somewhere in the room, lending Kalicharan that deep, powerful voice. His eyes danced mischievously, although the corners of his mouth didn’t lift to form a smile.
"Like to break arms, don’t you?" he asked in that his-but-not-his voice. I wasn't just taken aback this time; I staggered back. The one arm that I had broken (with the watchman's lathi) rose in my imagination, pointing twisted, mangled, accusatory fingers at me.
"H-how do y-you know?" I stuttered.
"Know what, lucky young man?" he asked.
"The arm—," I began to say.
"Arms, heads, legs," he cut me off. "You martial men like to break bones, shed blood, even take lives. That's what I meant, lucky young man." His red-black eyes burned, twinkled. "But I see that there's a particular arm with the power to drain your face of its color."
I didn't respond. I couldn't believe his words when his own eyes gave them the lie.
"This guy knows something, Neel," I told myself, "and he's very, very sharp—that's probably why he's shaped like an arrow. Look out, boy, that's a deadly projectile sitting there. All that food isn't making even a small bulge in that puny belly!" I ran on talking to myself in this fashion, and the man went on probing, reading, weighing me with those combusting coals of his.
“Stop calling me 'lucky young man’,” I told him rather peremptorily.
"You are a man, right?" Kalicharan asked.
I didn't bother to confirm the obvious.
"Yes or no?"
"Yes," I blurted out, miffed at being made to answer.
"Are you old, middle-aged, or adolescent?"
"None of these."
"So you are a man and you are young. Let’s now consider the 'lucky' part. Would you call yourself unlucky, what with the kind of physique you have?" he stopped speaking and exhibited the ocean of differences between his build and mine by waving his bony arm back and forth between us. "The strength, the vigor, the good looks, the primed health that all manner of bacteria and viruses in their billions can lay siege to for years without breaching its defenses. We now come to your social and economic position—a high-ranking officer with a pretty heavy salary package." He cleared his throat without really needing to do it. "And lastly, there's got to be a beautiful young woman, if not a dozen or a score of them, waiting breathlessly to give up her family name to take up yours. Lady fortune is extremely partial to you. You are a lucky young man. Do you disagree?"
I couldn’t disagree. His voice was hypnotic. He was not exactly speaking wisdom, but you could listen to him prattle on about even sillier things than the list of my purported charms and accomplishments for hours altogether.
His eyes didn't merely smile now; they laughed. His mouth became a straighter, grimmer line. He sighed and placed a hand on his forehead.
"Ah, how pitiable is your crass ignorance!" he said next, beginning to contradict everything he had just said. “All of this comeliness means nothing. Nothing! Strength and good looks mean nothing. Youth means nothing. This youth will vanish. This strength will turn into aches and pains in the blink of an eye. You will be as much ashes and as many charred bones as I will be and the king will be. There's no such thing as good luck while we draw breath in this vile world!”
He stopped and looked at me with one hand still placed on his forehead. His other hand had remained on the table all this while.
I laughed. Spontaneously. There could be no other response to Kalicharan's absurdity. After a moment's lag, he started to laugh with me. Aloud. His entire being laughed this time, not just the eyes. Little, regular explosions of mirth; his ha! ha! ha! akin to the caw! caw! caw! of a hungry crow.
He then lifted his hand from the object lying on the table, flipped the picture over, and sat back.
I saw Princess Roop for the first time, and I stopped laughing abruptly.
Kalicharan continued to caw.
Chapter 3: Intolerable Ideas
C alcutta was spellbound. Vosk's Great Roving Circus and Menagerie had entertained and amazed thousands of Indians and British alike in the two weeks since setting up its tents on the shores of Hugli. Nadya was spellbound, too. Mohan had not exactly entertained her, but he had amazed her continually since their acquaintance.
He had proven Sasha right on almost every count. He had proven to Nadya that the name—the Quicksilver Man—that Nadya had secretly given him suited him perfectly. He was something and wasn't that same thing almost within the same moment: he could be telling someone something deeply philosophical, something profound, and, probably at seeing the sway he held over his audience, he would grow conceited and shallow right at the point of the greatest depth of his discourse.
Akilina adored him despite his caprices. Everyone else in the circus—performers, trainers, crew members, even the animals—adored Mohan. He treated the maladies of both man and beast with an equal degree of success. Groaning and moaning beings—two- and four-legged alike—would normally be found sleeping calmly after Mohan had paid them a visit. Even people who were privy to the fact that he wasn't an actual doctor tended to forget it; they sought his 'treatment' with full confidence in his healing powers.
The one exception to all this surplus adoring was Illya (aside from the reclusive Sasha Vosk himself, that is). The normally mild-mannered, affable clown had been downright rude to Mohan on a couple of occasions.
"Stop lending money to the junior clowns and dwarves, you greedy man!" he admonished the part-time moneylender once. "They are taking more time off these days than they ever dreamed of doing earlier. They now drink and gamble way more than they should, all thanks to you."
Mohan promptly gave up lending money to anyone after that. That should have, theoretically, won him Illya's approval, but it did not. There was something other than mere moneylending on Illya's mind.
"Are you mad?" Illya asked Mohan the second time the clown was rude to the quack. "There are better ways of committing suicide than getting into a fistfight with Anton. Cancel it, if you don't want to be crippled for the rest of your life! In fact, you would have no such thing as the ‘rest of your life’ if you step into a ri
ng with Anton!”
Anton Kovrov was a giant. His hands were organic sledgehammers in terms of their size and their potential to inflict damage. He was nearly eight feet tall and weighed over two hundred kilograms. You could hit him with all your strength, and whether he'd notice your effort would depend upon his state of wakefulness at that time. Awake, he might swat you away in irritation; asleep, he would not even wake up.
This time around, Mohan didn't heed Illya's advice. Mohan had set up the Anton-Mohan event after a brief conversation with Nadya.
"You might be capable of many other things, but you can’t really be a prizefighter," she had said to him a week ago, while they strolled in a woodland not far from the circus grounds.
"Been fighting and winning since I was a boy," returned Mohan with a smug smile. "I can beat anyone in the circus," he asserted.
She laughed.
"What? You don't believe me?" He sounded hurt.
"Have you ever seen Anton?" she answered his question with a query of her own.
Mohan faltered for a micro-second before striding along with a spring in his step.
"I can beat him any day."
"I don't think so."
"You want to make a bet? Ten rupees?"
"I don't gamble, not even when I know I am sure to win."
They exited the woods and came to a small fish-market near a wharf. A woman was selling trinkets out of a wicker basket.
"Okay, no money bets. How about I give you a set of earrings like these ones if I lose?"
Nadya raised her eyebrows. "You were extremely sure of winning just a few moments ago."
"I shall win. It’s customary to settle a bet’s terms beforehand," said Mohan, picking up a set of cheap-looking earrings. "And you can give me something like this fountain pen if I win. You'd better buy it right now if our bet is on."
Nadya laughed some more, but she bought the pen right then.