by Sakiv Koch
***
The small crowd cheered as the opponents walked into the makeshift ring. A tall man and a little child — that's how Mohan appeared standing beside Anton, although the gigantic strongman was just a boy himself, less than half Mohan's age.
Anton Kasarov had a good-natured face, which wore an expression of anxiety as the 'referee' motioned the fighters to begin mauling each other. Mohan came upon Anton like a tornado with fists, throwing dozens of punches in as many seconds, intent upon turning his opponent's midriff into pulp.
The crowd sang "Mo-han, Mo-han" in tandem with his lightening-fast footwork. Nadya winced, holding herself responsible for Anton's troubles. She stood clutching Mohan's spectacles in one hand and the soon-to-be-his fountain pen in the other. He is indeed a fighter, she thought. What is he not?
The giant himself watched Mohan raining blows upon him with an expression depicting more astonishment than pain. Almost a minute into the fight, his activity remained limited to being a punching bag. He raised one enormous hand and pushed Mohan away from his body. He bunched his other hand into a frightening fist and took an almost gentle swipe at Mohan's jaw.
Mohan jerked around and flew off his feet as though a motorcar had struck him. A little drizzle of blood fell on the nearest members of the audience. Nadya winced again and wiped a drop of blood from her left cheek, now blaming herself for Mohan's wrecking.
Mohan lay on his face, unmoving. Anton watched him, horror-struck at his own handiwork. After a long moment of absolute, stunned silence, the crowd catcalled and booed the poor strongman—a person most of them had known and loved since he was a twelve-year-old living tower (he was more of a tower than a boy even back then).
The referee bent over Mohan to determine the extent of damage. Just when Illya's prediction of 'no rest of life left' appeared to have come true, Mohan stirred, motioned the referee away, and rose to his feet slowly. He swayed a little and shook his head vigorously before bringing up his fists again. Several women had given up the essential function of respiration when Mohan went down. They now resumed breathing with their hands on their hearts as their hero struck this heroic pose. He advanced, zigzagging ,upon a hapless-looking Anton.
"No," said the giant, beginning to back away. Mohan stalked him with his head slightly bent. Anton retreated further. Mohan lunged. Anton turned his back and fairly ran out of the ring. Unsure of what to do at this unusual turn of events, the crowd raised a hybrid of cheers and abuse.
The referee raised Mohan's arm in the air and declared him the winner. Mohan came to Nadya with a blood-rimmed mouth. She handed him his spectacles and the pen. He took the glasses but declined to take the pen.
"Later, in a better place," he murmured, brushing her ear with his lips, leaving a smear of his blood on her skin.
Nadya shivered at that touch. Accidental, she wondered, or deliberate?
***
Illya sat dejected, staring at nothing, the food on his plate untouched. A housefly bomb-dived on his fish-curried rice. A bony, withered hand shot out and frustrated the fly's designs. Akilina jabbed a finger of the same hand into Illya's side.
"Wakie up, lazy-head, it's hundred o'clock already!" she cried. "That fish didn't walk into the circus and those rice didn't cook themselves. It took me a lot of effort to cook your dinner. Gobble it up like the good baby clown you are."
Illya started to eat mechanically.
"What's wrong with you, anyway?" she demanded. "Thinking of that damned runaway woman again?"
"No, old mom," said Illya. "I am just worried about Nadya. That man–."
"That man is no cause for worrying. He is an eraser of worries. Didn't he save us all on our first day here? Doesn't he always turn all unpleasant situations and all malaises into good situations and pleasant conclusions? How courageous, how brave a man! A lion would have quailed at facing Anton. Worry about something else, if worry you must, my baby clown."
"I don't know," said Illya. "I hope Mohan doesn't harm my Nadya. She is so–."
Akilina had never allowed him to finish a sentence yet, and she was not about to break this tradition now.
"She is a very strong and capable girl is what she is!" the midwife exclaimed. "Even if Mohan were not the nice and cultured gentleman that he is, he would still be incapable of harming our darling Nadya."
"Is she–, do you think she–," Illya bumbled, "–will she fall for him like–?"
"She's in far less danger of falling for him, charming though he is, than of falling from the cursed trapeze or even of falling ill from all those strange foods that she keeps eating here. Now, eat and fret no more about our Nadya, or she'll start worrying about you."
Akilina's tone grew soft. She patted Illya on his head. "There's no one, not even me, whom she loves more than she loves you, my son. If you lose health fretting about her, she'll lose more health fretting about you."
Illya put his heart into eating and licked the plate clean quickly.
***
A nightingale sang in a grove of Gulmohar trees in full bloom. A magical rain of petals floated dancing to the ground. A full moon shed a milky light strong enough to gaze into and read dreamy eyes. A nomadic breeze coming off the river carried snatches of fishermen's music along with a pot-pourri of scents—woodsmoke, jasmine, magnolia, and tuberose. It lifted Nadya's hair in blond waves. Countless leaves nodded and murmured to each other.
"Can we stop here for a moment?" Mohan asked Nadya. The upper row of his previously perfect teeth now sported a gap. Lends a dash of toughness to his otherwise delicate features, Nadya thought. The right side of his face, where he had taken Anton’s blow, was still swollen, so that he spoke at an even slower rate than usual.
Nadya stopped. "Is it a good enough spot for you to accept your prize?" she asked, extending the fountain pen toward him. "I am glad to have lost the bet to such a brave man."
Mohan smiled his new, slightly blemished smile.
"Anton is an easily scared man, afraid of his own inhuman strength. Another freakish punch of his would have turned me into a sack of broken bones." He took the pen from her and clipped it in his shirt pocket. "Any spot would have been good enough to take the pen from you, yes, but for these–," he took a red velvet pouch out of his trouser pocket and handed it to Nadya, "–for these, I needed a place of beauty."
Nadya untied the strings and opened the pouch. She drew out a set of exquisite filigree earrings—two miniature sunflowers with two miniature bees hovering over them; the bees suspended with metal threads so fine they were almost invisible.
Nadya held them in her palm, mesmerized. Mohan watched her with an equally intense delight. "I've never seen anything half so beautiful," she muttered. "Thanks for showing them to me." She then put the pair back in its pouch and put the pouch back in Mohan's hand.
Delight turned into bafflement on Mohan's lopsided face. "But these are for you," he said, extending the pouch once more towards her.
"I can't accept these golden earrings. I couldn't accept even those artificial ones that you purchased the other day. I lost the bet; I take nothing."
The broken-tooth smile broke out again. "This has nothing to do with winning or losing. It's a gift."
Nadya shook her head. "It's too expensive and there's no occasion for gifts right now. Maybe when the circus leaves the city in a couple of weeks? I could take and give a farewell gift then, but nothing made of precious metals, please."
The nature of Mohan's smile changed—it became more open, more radiant, in spite of the swelling on his face. He took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket, next to Nadya’s pen.
“Is love a good enough reason for exchanging gifts?” he asked, taking her milky-white right hand in his coffee-colored left, his light-brown eyes boring into her deep-blue ones. "I have never wanted anyone, anything like I want you. Will you marry me, Nadya?"
He asked the question in a superfluous way, as though the answer was a foregone conclusion for him, as though the possibil
ity of a 'no' was a sheer impossibility. In the next beat, he took her in his arms and his mouth descended upon hers. In the same beat, she, contortionist and athlete par excellence, literally vanished from his embrace. His lips tasted nothing but the sweet woodland air.
He was a statue of incredulity while she was a blur of fluid motion—from a one-eighty-degree splayed-leg position on the ground to a backward roll and a jump that brought her to her feet, her speed and agility defied belief.
"No," she responded from her new position a few feet away, laughing as she brushed a film of dust off her clothes, her cheeks hot and flushed. "No, I'll not marry you."
Mohan stood petrified, still in the pose of a man hugging and kissing nothing. His mouth hung open, so that a lightning bug flew in and out, pulsing its light on and off on its risky exploration.
"Come on," said Nadya, coming near him, not laughing anymore, "don't look so stricken. You have everything going for you. You practically own the world. You can choose a much better person than me. Some ravishing Indian beauty, closer to your age and your intellectual level. I'm not good enough for you. I feel that I am too young, too unprepared, to marry for another decade at the least."
Mohan blinked. The corners of his mouth drooped into another sort of smile. I’ll have to call him Smiler from now on, thought Nadya abstractedly. He put the pouch back in his pocket and put his glasses back on.
"I understand," he said. "I am not white..."
"This has nothing to do with race," said Nadya, "and you know it. I am a circus woman, and there's no culture as equalizing as a circus's. If anything, I like your differentness. Every woman in the circus adores you, craves the tiniest bit of your attention. I just–."
"It's okay," said Mohan, cutting her off. "I know the lies Sasha told you about me. That man could never tolerate my–my–. I don't know why, but he hates me. He always spreads lies about me."
Nadya shook her head. "He didn't–."
Mohan cut off her again, this time by touching her arm tenderly.
"It's okay," he said. "I've always had to push women away. It's the first time I've got a taste of my own medicine. And then, I am what, eighteen, nineteen years older than you? You somehow just upped and enchanted me the very first moment I saw you. Knocked me down and out. But–," he raised his other hand, the one that wasn't touching her arm, and silenced her as she opened her mouth to say something, "–but, it's all right. I think I can live with the idea that you are not with me, that you are far away somewhere, but that you think of me, remember me, even miss me...Can I–, can I hug you, take you in my arms, press you to my heart? Just once, just one time, before I let you go?"
Nadya hesitated, a hesitation so weak it hardly registered. The flush on her cheeks deepened to a greater bloom. A band of lightning bugs had joined the first reckless explorer. They formed a moving constellation of twinkling stars beneath the canopy of the woodland. Petals of flowers lay strewn in his hair, in her hair. The full moon continued to be a philanthropist, bathing them in his extravagant, enticing light. The breeze was an intoxicated girl, fragrant, sensuous, laughing.
And then she was in his arms, pressed to his heart. He enveloped her with a firmness that left no room for any acrobatics, any escape. She closed her eyes and savored this nearness to this extraordinary man. Time became timeless. She felt, for the first time, that she may want to be–.
A jab in her neck punctured the still-forming thought. She gasped. Her body began to grow leaden, began to topple. She put her entire strength in opening her eyes, but the lids lifted only fractionally and then fluttered like birds tied down with leashes.
Mohan was smiling again, a different species of a smile this time, something sub-human, an ugly snarl.
"I can live with the idea of your not being with me," he said, "but I can't bear the idea of someone else taking you first."
She struggled to struggle, to scream, to stay awake.
The man whom Sasha had categorically described as "not evil," started taking Nadya's clothes off as soon as she fell unconscious. He then raped her in that 'spot of beauty,' taking his time about it. He did it until the horrified moon disappeared and the disgusted breeze fled elsewhere.
Hope. Ravaged.
Chapter 4: Seeds of Deception
K alicharan lay sleeping on the four-poster bed of the guest-chamber. I stood at the foot of the bed, watching his mouth open and close, his puny chest rise and fall, in tandem with a rhythmic snore. The picture, reposing on the said chest, came up and dipped on those waves of deep sleep.
I moved around to the head of the bed and proceeded to free Princess Roop’s photograph from Kalicharan's twig-like fingers. His snore changed into a guffaw instantaneously, organically, without any break in the original sound waves. His eyelids snapped open. Those burning coals of his eyes regarded me coolly, knowingly.
"That was an artistically faked sleep," I said with a modicum of embarrassment at being caught out, relinquishing my hold on the picture.
"You try to rest with a piece of dynamite on your body," the naughty man challenged me, sitting up. "Do you see, darling, that I have another rival for your love and affection?" he continued in an altered tone of voice, gazing longingly at the princess, talking to her picture!
He sighed and addressed me once again: "Alas! that I am no king. You can't imagine how hard her royal highness the princess Roop has fallen for me. Not surprising, though, huh? With all my charm and killer looks—"
"Killed looks, you mean," I said and started laughing. He added his caw-caw to my ha-ha, mocking himself without reserve.
We looked at that ‘piece of dynamite’ together in the flickering light of two guttering candles: Princess Roop sat on an elaborately carved throne in a sunlit garden. A flowering magnolia tree shaded her. Her hazel eyes stood out even in that riot of color and beauty. The eyes were fiery and penetrating enough that her gaze went beyond the camera, beyond the place she was in, beyond that time, and came into the guest-chamber with us. That gaze brought her alive in the guest-chamber, but not just as a guest. She was the mistress, the absolute owner of all things and all beings around.
Her nose, cheekbones, lips, chin—every feature was chiseled to perfection in her heart-shaped face. Her beauty exuded no warmth, but it was perhaps even more striking because of the ‘I am impossibly above you; I am impossibly unattainable’ attitude she wore as palpably as her long, lustrous black hair.
She was wearing—no, not a princess's dazzling lehnga—but a button-down light-pink shirt, black trousers, and black riding boots. And although no part of her body (except for her neck) was exposed, she still aroused me as I'd never been aroused before.
"Do you wish to see her in person?" Kalicharan asked me in a tantalizing whisper. "Today itself?"
"Yes, yes," I replied, my throat gone dry and thorny.
***
The Phantom bore me to my suicidal destination at a murderous speed. Stray dogs, cattle, and pedestrians scattered and tumbled away from the road as though running from a natural disaster. I drove as if I had been driving big motor cars for years, whereas this was just my seventh or eighth time behind the wheel of any car, big or small. I glanced sideways at the dhoti-clad collection of sticks and knobs riding fearlessly in the passenger seat. I wondered if it would perturb Kalicharan to learn that I was an inexperienced driver.
"I am an inexperienced driver," I told him as I negotiated a vicious bend with a screech of tires, narrowly missing an enormous tree.
The serene expression on his face didn't alter, although he banged into the door and bounced back as I pulled the car out of the sharp curve. He waved away that potentially heart-stopping piece of information and casually informed me of an altogether different kind of fact:
"I need to make water," said he, lifting the edge of his dhoti to symbolize the urgency of the matter.
I jerked my head away and braked hard to avoid that gross visual. Kalicharan clambered out and began cracking dry leaves heaped upon the side
of the road with a steaming stream of water. It went on and on, that stream, now drowning in a puddle the poor leaves whose spines it had first broken. I honked the horn a couple of times, but Kalicharan finished his business only when I started to crawl forward, threatening to leave without him.
I grimaced when he came back in.
"Don't touch anything with that unwashed hand," I told him unequivocally. He wiped the offending hand on his dhoti and sat on the seat cross-legged, his bare (and not very clean feet) smudging the premium leather. It felt like sacrilege, as though a donkey had been let loose inside a temple.
It also felt like a crime. A guilt-hued fear flashed across my unreasoning mind: I'd misappropriated the Rolls Royce. I had been allocated a Chevrolet Impala for my exclusive use. It was a grand car in its own right, a car I couldn't have dreamed of touching a very short time ago, let alone owning it (in a way), but I somehow wanted to appear more, much more, than I was in reality.
From an extremely contented person, I had transformed into an extremely shallow one, as though my shadow and my substance had magically swapped places after looking at Princess Roop’s picture.
The probability of the princess ever seeing the vehicle I had arrived in was close to non-existent. Even if she did see it, it would make no difference to my infinite insignificance, but here I was, shadow-driven, puffed up on quintessential wrongness, hurtling down highways leading to very low ways.
We streaked forward in an even madder dash—as though the Phantom had been shot from a giant catapult. I resented the waste of the few minutes Kalicharan had spent emptying his bladder on those harmless fallen leaves. We had left early in the morning, and dusk was almost upon us. I'd not stopped to eat or drink anything, willfully blind to the pandit's needs and wilfully suppressing all my own urges. I despaired that I'd have to wait the entire night out to get a glimpse of the princess.
"Don't worry, you'll get to see that sea of beauty tonight," said Kalicharan, divining my thoughts, easing my mind but still making me wince (by patting my arm with the not-washed, just-wiped hand).