by Sakiv Koch
“You didn’t need to die right now,” he said, his silky voice now ruptured with a mix of hatred and pain. We fought hand-to-hand in that white, swirling darkness. He had his lethal dagger; I had my still-leaking neck wound. His injured right leg impaired his feline speed. His nose bled. But he still inflicted five cut wounds on my arms—three on the left and two on the right one.
I had landed half a dozen (costly) punches on various parts of his iron-hard body. He barely noticed my blows.
“I shall cut you to ribbons, boy,” he said. “You should never have dared hit out at me.” He clearly loved the sound of his voice. I loved the fact that he was getting cockier by the second. He lunged. I stepped aside, took his forward-impelled head in my hands, and rammed it into the nearest tree trunk.
Lights out for him. They were barely on for me. I was losing a lot of blood from a lot of places. I staggered back to the Phantom. Two burly men occupied its front seats, while Kalicharan lay prone in the back. The colossal blow he had received on his face would have snuffed out stronger, younger men.
The goons were engaged in a heated argument involving a lot of gesticulating from both parties. They evidently believed that their friend the Silky Voice was invincible, that his taking upon himself any task of maiming or killing anyone was equivalent to that task being accomplished.
Cocky bastards. Just like yours truly. I arrived upon them like a vengeful wraith emerging out of the fog. I opened the passenger-side door, took one man in a vertebrae-breaking grip, and dragged him out before they knew what was happening. You know of my predilection for banging breakable skulls into unbreakable trees by now. I took a running step and introduced my newest victim’s head to a sturdy trunk with quite a bit of force. He went limp instantaneously. I dropped him and dashed back to the car to neutralize the third goon. My spinning head was as full of cocksureness by now as my poor bladder was full of unshed water.
I didn’t rate my chances of surviving the night as very high, but if I hadn’t been able to live a hero’s life, I certainly wanted to die a hero. A black barrel pointing out of the Phantom’s open window greeted me upon my return to the car. The gun-wielder’s hand was steady enough and his eyes hard enough to nip a couple of smart ideas budding in my mind.
I raised my hands in the air. The eyes were as ominous as they were hard. They glittered in the Phantom’s dome light. Although the man said nothing, his eyes told me he meant to put a bullet in my head. I opened my mouth to talk him out of his intention. He pulled the trigger before I could utter a word.
He hit me.
He missed his mark.
If these two facts were to be inscribed at the opposite ends of a scale from one to ten, with the ‘Miss’ printed at the left and the ‘Hit’ at the right, Mr. Hard Eyes’ shot would rate a score of two. Not because he was a lousy marksman. His bullet would have shattered my head at that point-blank range had that wisp of a man, Pandit Kalicharan, not joined his hands to form a double-fist and hit the back of Mr. Hard Eyes’ head just as the man shot at me.
The bullet’s trajectory shifted upward by a couple of inches as a result of Kalicharan’s lifesaving intervention. It grazed my scalp and flew off into the jungle’s canopy. Fresh blood curtained down from my head. It drenched my face and got into my eyes. I felt pretty certain that the time to bid the world an early adieu was at hand. I felt equally certain that a lesser being than me would have given up the ghost long ago. I didn’t know that the knife cut in my throat and the bullet wound in my head were identical twins in the sense that both were superficial and shallow (you could bracket me with those two injuries and call all three of us identical triplets in this regard).
Kalicharan’s blow had merely upset the man’s aim, without doing him any remarkable harm. Mr. Hard Eyes rallied quickly and took fresh aim. I punched his face with a power that compensated for the lack of force in Kalicharan’s effort. The man’s nose broke and spattered the majestic dashboard with his blood. His head snapped back with an audible protest from his cervical spine. I snatched his handgun out of his nerveless fingers and hastened to drag him out of the vehicle, soiling the interior still more with my own dripping blood.
Hard Eyes belonged to the same school of toughness as Silky Voice. He put up a fight despite his shattered nose and the gun in my hand. I abandoned my plan of stunning him via a hard meeting with a tree. Instead, I stunned him with the butt of his handgun.
As though I wasn’t losing enough fluids already, I ran to release the stream Silky Voice had forestalled whose outflow two or three ago.
It was hard to believe, but it had been no longer than a few minutes since Kalicharan had gotten out of the motorcar to relieve himself. When I turned back toward the Rolls Royce, I found Kalicharan standing in the glare of its headlamps. Not just standing, he was executing a Yoga posture—the Tree Pose! Half naked in the chilly night, with a beatific smile playing on his blubbery lips, his strangeness bordered upon insanity.
I ran to the car and started wiping its blood-smeared surfaces with my silk handkerchief. This particular exercise exhibited my own insanity—I was dirtying ten square inches for every square inch that I cleaned. We heard Silky Voice stir and moan. The three goons were unconscious, not dead, and they might have had more of their brethren spread out in the jungle. We needed to leave immediately.
I took a first-aid kit out of the motorcar’s glove box and thrust it into Kalicharan’s arms.
“Hey, madman!” I accosted him. “Are you waiting for me to die?”
“Why would I save your life if that were the case?” he asked coolly, matter-of-factly.
I couldn’t deny his logic, but I didn’t bother to thank him for what he had done for me.
“What were you about to tell me before you had to go and take a leak?” I asked him. “About my inability to slurp her spicy sweetness not arising not from the humbleness of my origin, but some other factor. What’s that factor?”
Kalicharan looked askance at me, his expression like that of a naughty child. I was a dead man walking (or standing still), and yet all I could think of was Princess Roop! He placed the first-aid kit on the motorcar’s bonnet, began humming a tune, and went to work on my throat, binding a white bandage around it after cleaning the cut.
“Just a little nick,” he pronounced. “Won’t kill you.”
The head injury was trickier. Hard Eyes’ bullet had plowed open a part of the wound I had earned at Shyam’s studio. Kalicharan—the man with so many tricks, skills, and quirks up his sleeveless arm—proved to be a fairly good provider of medical aid, too. He garlanded, turbaned, and braceleted me in white bandages quickly and efficiently, all the while continuing to hum, ignore my question, and cruelly keep his incomplete sentence dangling in the air before me.
All three of the thieves were sending up a chorus of moans and groans now. We got into the car. Although visibility was still pretty much non-existent and I had no idea of the direction of our destination, we started moving as quickly as I could manage to drive. It was better to stray anywhere than to stay put in that dangerous region.
In all my panic, pain, and frustration, I had failed to register the absence of any mark, swelling, or bruising anywhere on Kalicharan’s face, neck, or torso, whereas the blow I had heard being dealt to him sounded like it would leave a screamingly prominent imprint behind. A couple of minutes into our blind run, Kalicharan stopped humming and began talking.
“Your inability comes not from the non-blue tinge of your blood,” he said, “but from the fact that you shall be leaving for foreign shores very soon.”
Chapter 8: Exquisitely Fragile and Magnetically Beautiful
T he three circus bonfires flickered and sputtered. The night was ending, and the fires were about to burn down. The shadows they threw jerked as they shrank and faded, as though in mute desperation to cling to their shadowy lives. Everything else lay enveloped in a pre-dawn stillness.
A young woman came out of a cluster of tents and went toward the
river at a run. She dropped something on the shore and dived into the water fully clothed. Her dress ballooned around her as she floated downriver, going with the flow. After covering about half a kilometer, she turned around and swam against the gentle current with powerful strokes.
She came out of the cold water at the point she had jumped in. The object she had dropped on the ground was a jute bag. She picked it up, drew out a large, fluffy towel from it, and commenced drying her long, blond hair while walking toward the healthiest of the dying bonfires.
“Why don’t you come out here?” she said, directing her voice at a clump of trees at the edge of the circle of light.
“I am not here,” a husky voice croaked in answer. “I am asleep back in my tent.”
“I heard you scream when I jumped into the river,” Nadya said. She finished the process of semi-drying herself and began walking toward the spot where Akilina still stood ‘hidden’.
“Look, Mom,” Nadya continued, “I am not saying that nothing can drive me to end my life, but if that hypothetical cause were to have the size of the sun, what has happened to me—what Mohan has done to me—is the size of the moon. It is extremely large in itself, but insignificant in comparison. You have to stop shadowing me. You have to get off this suicide-watch duty you have imposed upon yourself. You must see and recognize the sun of strength that shines inside your Nadya!”
“What did you jump in for?” Akilina asked with a pronounced quiver in her voice.
“To take a swim.”
“Why did you want to swim with your clothes on? They could have dragged you down.”
“Do you want me to swim without clothes? The circus doesn’t draw as many spectators as the ‘raped girl’ does.”
“True!” Akilina said, finally emerging from behind a tree. She looked more haggard, emaciated, and sleep-deprived than ever before. Expressions of shock and horror had gained permanent residence on her face. “I can’t wait for Sasha Vosk to pack up and leave. I never wanted to come here in the first place, but when do madmen listen to sane women?”
Nadya turned abruptly, bent at the waist, and vomited on the ground. Akilina fairly jumped out of her shriveled skin.
“You are not well,” she yelled. “You must have caught a cold!”
Nadya straightened and turned to face the only mother she had ever known.
“It’s not that,” Nadya said. “I think—.” She paused and a little hesitation latched onto her manner for the first time in her life, “—I think I’m with child.”
Akilina became a statue of incredulity. Fear and even a shade of revulsion crept onto her face. Several moments passed, during which neither of the women spoke. The flames of the fires devolved into glowering embers. An exploratory contingent of flies alighted on Nadya’s vomitus.
Akilina finally spoke. “You think?” she asked, a trace of hope in her voice. “You don’t know for certain? Wouldn’t a monster’s child be a monster, too? Did you know that I gave Mohan the Monster my eye patch? Ha! Ha! I wish I had gouged out his other eye, too. He defiled you! He deceived you! He deserves to die! If the monster has put a monstrous life inside you—.”
“Calm down, Mom,” Nadya said in a soothing voice. “What is inside me is mine, not any man’s or monster’s. In any case, I’m not entirely certain of being pregnant…”
Akilina peered intently at her daughter’s face in the slowly strengthening sunlight.
“Then we have some hope,” the old woman said, but she spoke of her hope with stark, cold despair in her eyes.
***
Akilina’s worst fears had come true. Nadya was pregnant. Akilina found this unspeakably horrible, but Nadya took it in her long, elegant stride. Her only note of regret was: “I am a little too young to be a good mother.”
But she offset the thought of this handicap with: “But then my baby will have you, Mom—a super grandmother! She will also have the entire circus as her loving, caring, doting family, just as I did and still do!”
Nadya was convinced from the start that she would bear a girl-child. After an initial period of extreme agitation, during which Akilina thought incessantly about ‘weeding out the evil sprout’, the old midwife fell as much in love with the unborn child as she was in love with the mother-to-be. Her devotion thereafter was undiluted, unconditional, and unlimited.
By Akilina’s calculations, Nadya was three weeks pregnant when they discovered the miracle of life in her. The circus was finally uprooting itself from Calcutta after an extremely successful run. The last few weeks’ business had been especially brisk, evidently bolstered by the notoriety generated by Nadya’s rape.
The fact that the raped woman had conceived the rapist’s child and had decided to give birth (rather than abort the ‘abomination’) had filled the big-top to its full capacity, even though the crowd-puller herself had stopped performing. Mohan, the Quicksilver Monster, was undergoing a fast-track trial, which attracted a lot of nationwide attention in its own right.
“I feel a little unwell,” Nadya told Akilina the morning before the scheduled departure of the circus. It was a novel sentence for Nadya; she had never had occasion to utter it before. The ‘little unwellness’ turned out to be a raging fever. A racking cough racked her chest. She experienced chills and shortness of breath. Nausea and vomiting afflicted her. Her lithe body had its first brush with weakness and lack of energy.
Akilina forced her to lie down on her bed. The old woman wouldn’t let the younger one get off the bed for any purpose other than making unavoidable sojourns to the washroom.
“But, Mom, we have to pack our things–.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” Akilina declared.
The circus was to tour the other metropolitan cities in India before leaving the subcontinent for its fatherland. Nadya’s worsening illness made it impossible for her to travel. Sasha Vosk didn’t want to leave the city without her. The entire circus mirrored Sasha’s reluctance to leave Nadya behind. Even the animals seemed depressed at the prospect.
But the show had to go on, and it couldn’t go on with any semblance of commercial sustainability in Calcutta. In addition, Akilina was opposed to Sasha’s intent of waiting for Nadya to get better. Opposing Akilina in anything was akin to fighting a hurricane with one’s fists or chewing pebbles with one’s teeth. And so the circus started the complicated, gargantuan process of packing up and moving away on the pre-appointed day.
The one person who wouldn’t leave Nadya’s side for any consideration—the man who grappled with the figurative hurricane and chewed the hypothetical pebbles to a fine powder—was Illya the Bumbler. And so it was that a midwife, a clown, and a contortionist came to live in a small tenement on the outskirts of the great, sprawling city.
They were the only three white-skinned people in their lower-economic-class neighborhood. Although all three of them had picked up a smattering of Bengali during their five-month-long stay in Calcutta, their lifeline was the local support staff that engaged with all touring circuses. These were multi-lingual, highly resourceful people.
Sundar was one such person—a general supplier who occasionally doubled as a strongman for the circus. Sundar was a widower. He had a five-year-old boy, Shyam. The motherless boy had practically lived at the circus during its stay in Calcutta, even when his father was away. He was like an affectionate, oversized puppy, always eager to help with chores and tasks too complex or onerous for a small child. Shyam was unique in that he was stronger than most boys twice his age.
He had big, watery eyes and curly hair. He became Nadya’s constant companion after her confinement to her bed, helping and aiding her in myriad ways that endeared the boy to her. As for Nadya herself, she wasn’t recuperating. Her health deteriorated. But the downhill gradient was so gradual, so gentle that her slide was imperceptible.
She had been on such a high summit of fitness that she was as healthy as an average person halfway down her decline. The same could be said of her spirits as well. She wa
s experiencing hormonal changes along with something far more debilitating than that—her being tied down to her bed was akin to first caging a mountain eagle unaccustomed to captivity and then tearing away her wings. Despite all this, Nadya was a head-high, chin-up person during the term of her pregnancy.
Old sages say that misfortunes like to attack their victims in hordes. Nadya’s fetus exhibited dangerous haste to come into the troublesome world in the thirty-fifth week of its gestation period. Akilina worried and moped incessantly, professionally likening Nadya’s sole ongoing pregnancy with Nadya’s biological mother’s numerous disastrous ones.
Akilina saw, with a horror that shriveled the core of her immortal soul, that the chances of both the mother and the child surviving were slimmer than the edge of a razor blade. She, who had been hellbent upon aborting the embryo, couldn’t now abide the thought of that same life-force being extinguished before really coming alive.
The baby came out in the world on a moonlit, breezy night as beautiful as the horrible night of her conception. She was a wisp of a thing, tinier than the tiniest premature infant Akilina had ever seen. But the newborn girl’s fingers were long and elegant, hinting at a tall frame in the future (provided she lasted long enough to have such a future).
The young mother had borne her pains stoically—merely moaning where another person would have shrieked at the top of her lungs. She almost bled to death, just as her mother had done at Nadya’s birth, but unlike then, Akilina was very much present and very much sober. She somehow managed to keep the fluttering, flickering flame burning.
The infant cried with an energy belying its tininess. The sound was short-lived, followed by an ominous, terrifying silence. The tireless midwife put her very soul into caring for the little angel who clung on to dear life with a colossal tenacity. Nadya, buoyed by her inexpressible joy, also re-embraced life with all her still-considerable power.
She smiled, laughed, wept. She had never seen anything half so exquisitely fragile, half so magnetically beautiful as her daughter.