The Tenacity of Darkness: Book # 2 of A Thorn for Miss R.

by Sakiv Koch

  Chapter 9: The Tenacity of Darkness

  T he night sky was bejeweled—countless diamonds sparkled on an infinite sheet of blue-black velvet. The mountain lake mirrored the milky moon, the twinkling stars, and the exquisite hill gardens cascading down to the edges of the water. The universe seemed to have gathered all its beauty in that one spot. And yet, one entity dwarfed the magic of the night with the measureless miracle of her small, pure being.

  She sat on a lakeside bench, singing something in her soft, melodic voice, her dark, long hair rippling in tandem with the lake’s waters. I stood behind a tree, peeking at her covertly. She sang of a faraway man who doesn’t come home, a man dazzled by other places, other people, other things. It was impossible for me not to be dazzled by her that night. Let’s say ‘counter dazzled’. After all, I’d just had all my senses bound up and laid prostrate at the feet of a haughty princess. I had been utterly captivated, blinded, enslaved. But my Rachna effortlessly undid all that black magic that evening.

  She sang sublimely, but she did it only when she was alone or when she thought she was alone. Her paintings, her poetry, her stories similarly remained unseen by any eyes other than her own and mine. She held her art to be as private a thing as her religious beliefs. I disagreed with her.

  “Don’t make God rue making you so talented,” I’d tell her every time she created something interesting and impressive, only to hide it out of sight.

  “I am just a novice,” she would say. “It would take me years to produce anything worthy of performing, publishing, or exhibiting anywhere.”

  On the evening in question, her song was about… me, the man who doesn’t return. She didn’t know I had returned, even if just to bid her farewell. I still stood hidden, mesmerized by her nearness after having been so far away from her for so long. The fact that I was going much farther away, for a much longer duration of time, weighed my steps down. It felt easier to turn and leave than face the prospect of a painful goodbye that was sure to make her sigh and cry.

  She paused mid-song. “You can come sit here with me if you are not in too tearing a hurry,” she said, talking to me without turning her head. I wasn’t in any hurry. I had all night. I went and sat down beside her. She gasped at seeing the number of bandages adorning my body—one on my head, one around my neck, and five on my arms!

  She took my hand in hers and transported me to another bench—the one behind our old school, the place where I had come to know that hand more intimately than my own.

  That hand had now grown a bit larger, a lot more beautiful. Holding it made me want to end everything that would keep me from taking that hand in mine again for a long time to come. That length of time could also stretch into ‘forever!’—if she were to get married to someone in my absence!

  This thought filled me with so much dread I began to quiver. And Rachna, who was my private seismograph, registered that Neel-quake instantaneously.

  “Don’t worry,” she said matter-of-factly, patting my forearm with her free hand. She said nothing else, didn’t explain what she thought I was worried about. Her simple assurance and her simple gesture put me at ease. I suddenly felt the strength and freshness one derives from a long, restful sleep, as though my entire stay away from home, away from her, had been one disturbed, sleepless night.

  We just sat there at the lakeshore, without really saying anything to each other. I continued to fill my parched soul with that magic and that miracle. She sang again, producing lyrics and composing the tune then and there. The man in her old song comes back home in the new one. He is not dazzled by others anymore. He finds rest and peace in the place of his origin. The thought that he won’t leave home comes into his head, but it is a fleeting, watery determination, like a morning mist in summers. The temptation to be elsewhere is like the noontime sun. The man is back only for a goodbye.

  She divined everything. She smiled as she sang. It was not an ironic smirk, but a genuinely warm smile. A single teardrop fell from her left eye, salting her smiling mouth. She didn’t even mutter, ‘take care’ or ‘see you soon.’ I left her sitting on that lonely bench on that beautiful lake’s shore on that magically crisp night.

  That’s how one dies sometimes, in the lap of everything worth living on and on for…

  ***

  The farewells that I exchanged with my mother and father were far shorter and incomparably less memorable. Rachna’s song notwithstanding, it wasn’t as if I was going away forever. I would be back in India in just nine months!

  Nine months. A significantly short or a significantly long period of time, depending upon where you are going and with whom.

  “I’m proud of everything you’ve done for your king so far,” Father said after quickly terminating a rare hug with his son.

  He’s not my king, just my employer, and I have not done anything noble or courageous, I wanted to tell him, but I merely smiled and nodded in agreement. His glad gaze sought to meet mine, but my dishonest eyes were skittery.

  Father was referring to two things when he spoke of his pride in me:

  Saving King Sanjay’s life through my brilliant stratagem of exchanging the king’s attire with Lt. Shakti’s (which I had done, as you may recall, to humiliate and torment Shakti rather than with any intent to save Sanjay’s life),

  Saving the king’s Rolls Royce from being carjacked in a remote jungle.

  My dear father never asked me as to what I was doing with the king’s Rolls Royce in a remote jungle in the first place. No one else ever asked me that question, either, although I had concocted a cock-and-bull story involving some specific intelligence input I had received from an undercover source regarding a group of killers…

  The king had been away from the palace when I had purloined his car. Seeing me so battered and cut-up had probably given him such personal gratification that he had not bothered to enquire about the cause of my injuries. He had frowned when he saw the damage that the Rolls Royce had sustained. My heartbeat had quickened, fearing he would accuse me of taking his invaluable motorcar without authority (stealing it, in other words). I feared, too, that he would order me to pay for its repairs.

  He did nothing of the sort. He placed an order to import two new Phantoms to take the place of the one I had ruined. That’s apparently how kings did things.

  Sanjay didn’t question me. Nobody other than him had the authority to do so, although a couple of crafty courtiers asked me a few exploratory questions disguised as queries about the state of my health. I told them my fabricated story in a very sketchy manner, declaring I wasn’t at liberty to disclose all the details yet.

  I recounted the same limp tale to father, rounding it off with the same blanket lie about the dictates of secrecy preventing me from telling more. He beamed and shone as though I had exhibited gallantry in superlative degrees.

  Ma, on the other hand, worried and fretted enough to outdo Father’s beaming and shining. “You don’t allow your old wounds to heal before going and getting new ones,” she said to me after I wriggled out of her everlasting embrace. “Leave this risky job and come back home!”

  My mother knew that there was a fat chance of my doing that—coming back home for good, that is. If ever there had been a probability of that happening, it passed with Rachna’s utter silence earlier in the evening. I would have given up everything alluring me away from my family and friends if she had asked me once!

  Does that sound likely to you? Or do you find yourself thinking along these lines: “There’s no way this shallow man would have stayed away from corridors of power, wealth, and beauty even if Rachna had begged him to do so one thousand times?”

  You’ve begun to know me too well. Rachna, too, knew me inside out. She knew asking me not to go away again would be absolutely futile. I didn’t read my own self as accurately, as spontaneously, as she did. Although our shared silence on the lakeshore had been companionable, warm, expressive, even necessary, her not asking me to stay stung me. At some level, I had wante
d her to entreat me not to leave her, not to go so far away from her.

  She knew that such a request would only have stoked and fed my fiendish ego. She knew that asking such a thing would have put a superficial layer over the substance that she had somehow drawn out from somewhere deep inside me. Even her asking about the origin of my myriad wounds would have launched me into a self-aggrandizing account of sham-heroism.

  Ma bathed me in numerous philosophical splashes, but I got all of them mixed up in my impatience to leave. And leave I did.

  Too soon. For a faraway place. For far too long.

  ***

  I metamorphosed into a butterfly. I spread my new wings and took flight.

  King Sanjay had been angry with me after my one-and-only phone call to Rachna. He wouldn’t take me along on his hunting expeditions, making me fear he would refuse to take me to Toronto as well.

  Although the sourness of his mood hadn’t abated in the interval between the telephone-hall incident and the designated day of our departure, Sanjay didn’t destroy my dream of going abroad.

  The land jerked away when the airplane took off. The iron-bird roared and jittered as it rose. But rather than pointing its beak skyward and taking me above the delicate clouds patrolling the skies, the aircraft dived right back at the runway it had just left beneath it. My shriek got lost in the chorus of screams that rang out in the cabin. The plane thumped back onto land, eliciting more screams as it decelerated to a juddering halt. My shouts of terror were the shrillest and the loudest. I expected to be crushed, torn, or incinerated to death. The king, I saw with dismay and envy, remained reasonably calm and composed in that seat-belted, white-faced, hyperventilating assembly of hypertense people.

  A bird had hit the airliner just as it pulled into its ascent, forcing the pilots to land it. A cavalcade of ambulances and fire engines surrounded the plane, but the pilots had handled the emergency in a highly professional manner, resulting in zero injuries to the people onboard and minimal damage to the plane.

  Kings didn’t have to wait for long in passenger lounges. We were airborne just an hour after the accident. My first-ever experience of flying—something I had been excited about boyishly—had shaken me badly. All my anticipated fun turned into a very real fright. To make things worse, a particularly malevolent patch of turbulence caught, shook, and worried us midway across the Arabian Sea, as though the plane were a bone caught in the teeth of a gigantic dog. I felt certain that the aircraft will break in two and plunge into the unimaginably dark waters below.

  That turbulence ended eventually, but my terror continued to hold me in its inexorable grip. All my bravado dissolved like so much salt in a beaker of water. I didn’t savor the layover at Heathrow half as much as I’d have done if things hadn’t started on such a terrifying note. The prospect of the second phase of the journey made me want to take a boat to North America.

  What tortured me as much as the solidified dread in the pit of my belly was the king’s cool, unperturbed demeanor. He seemed to enjoy himself. The smile of contentment on his face startled me disproportionately, as though I had seen him sprout wings.

  With one exception (which you know all about), King Sanjay enjoyed almost nothing, smiled at nothing, reveled in nothing. But here he was, relishing everything that made normal people wince and/or recoil in fear.

  “Neel, you are a highly resilient boy,” Ma would tell me every time I descended into (generally self-dug) pits of anxiety or sadness. Father mostly disagreed. I mostly agreed.

  Whereas my panic had rendered me blind to everything on the first leg of my maiden international journey, my innate ability to rebound, to recover quickly from stressful situations, enabled me to take in my surroundings as soon as our next flight took off from London.

  The five-star luxury, the scrumptious food on offer, and most particularly, the stunning air hostesses of the first-class cabin soaked up all my misery and fear within a matter of minutes. Little shoots of joy sprouted in my rapidly thawing heart, growing into a full-fledged garden of thrill when we landed in Toronto.

  A uniformed chauffeur met us when we exited Pearson. He drove us to downtown Toronto in a Rolls Royce Ghost with Surajgarh’s insignia emblazoned on its bonnet. The city charmed and captivated me enough to make me want to walk through it, explore it, at a leisurely pace rather than hurtle through it at the highest permissible speed.

  Dusk was falling. The city was putting on the jewelry of its uncountable lights, which threw glittering reflections on the surface of Lake Ontario. Looking at it brought to my mind another lake, a much smaller but equally beautiful body of water. I saw a bench by the shore of that other lake. I saw a woman sitting on that bench. She said something to me. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear the sound of her voice…

  We arrived at our destination—a beautiful building situated on Wellington St. W. A private elevator took us to a palatial penthouse on the twenty-seventh story of the building. Like the penthouse’s vast covered area, exceeding ten thousand square feet of space, its charms were endless—a well-stocked library, floor-to-ceiling windows, a wraparound terrace with an exquisite roof garden, a private splash pool, a bar housing hundreds of artsy bottles, and so on and so forth.

  It had six bedrooms, one of which was assigned to yours truly, making me feel like a Very Important Person indeed! While I drank in the place's grandeur, the king went straight to his kingly master suite and closed his door without so much as a terse nod to me. His spirits were inversely proportional to mine—his mood improved when my spirits sank into some dark bog, and vice versa.

  I tiptoed to his door and put my ear to his keyhole. He was doing what I had suspected him of doing—booking an international call to Jalgarh! He was about to talk to Rachna! Can’t say this didn’t rankle me. I left the penthouse in a huff. A breeze producing soft music in sugar maples’ canopies cooled off my simmering resentment. The beauty—natural and manmade, mobile and stationary, living and inanimate—all around me began to exert its pull on my attention.

  Every woman I saw seemed like a beauty queen to me. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, or raven-haired. White, black, brown, or yellow-complexioned. Blue, green, grey, or hazel-eyed. Tall, short, or medium. Skinny, heavy, or voluptuous. Young, middle-aged, or aging. With their warm smiles, their total lack of haughtiness, arrogance, or hostility toward a total stranger, toward an awkward, gawking foreigner, they were all divas, stars, heroines to me.

  And then I saw that the same thing applied to the menfolk as well. They nodded and smiled at me, some of them wishing me a good evening, as though I were a well-regarded acquaintance. My walk in the broad, tree-lined streets freshened me up despite the mental and physical fatigue of my long journey that had begun with a gut-clenching accident.

  I went back up to the penthouse feeling much better than when I had left it about half an hour ago. The apartment, which had been aglow with all its lights on just a short while ago, was puzzlingly dark when I returned to it. Even the foyer into which the elevator doors opened lay in darkness, which thickened as soon as the elevator’s doors closed behind me.

  Something crunched under my heel as I stepped toward the main door of the penthouse. It was glass belonging to the overhead light fixtures. The near-absolute blackness made me feel as though I were back in my town’s jungle. Ice sheathed my spine and froze my blood.

  I made for the main door leading into the penthouse. The door stood ajar, exuding an absolute, intense, unsettling silence. Every source of sound—TV, fridge, radio, telephone, King Sanjay—felt comatose or, in the king's case, worse. I entered into that sprawling maze doubly blind because of the darkness and my heightening panic. I groped around for a switchboard, found one almost immediately, and toggled the switches up and down frantically to elicit a response from the apartment’s lights. They remained dark.

  “Your majesty!” I cried in a gruff, choking voice that sounded like a stranger’s in my ears. A couple more shouts elicited as much response as I had gotten fro
m the electrical switches and light fixtures. I hesitated. I thought of running downstairs and getting help, but the impulse formed and expired within the same instant.

  I ventured further into the living hall. The expansive windows were not admitting any light from outside because someone had pulled their Venetian blinds down. I felt lost in that vast, blind space, with landmines of furniture everywhere. I wasn’t carrying a matchbox or a cigarette lighter.

  Who hasn’t barked their shin as a child? It’s a very unpleasant thing. I did it half a dozen times in a minute, at the end of which my eyes adjusted enough to distinguish darkness by its varying density. As a result, several vases, framed pictures, porcelain figurines, and other kinds of decoration pieces got saved from joining their fallen and broken mates on the floor.

  I somehow navigated my way to the master suite. Its door, too, proved to be unlocked. As I depressed the handle and pushed the door open, my heart went mad in my chest, clamoring to birth itself into the world through my mouth.

  A hybrid wash of starlight and streetlight dazzled me like a beam of high luminosity shone directly in my eyes. The outer wall of the suite was all glass, unclothed in any blinds or curtains, showcasing countless celestial bodies traversing their orbits peacefully.

  A figure stood leaning against this wall with its forehead pressed against the dark glass and its hands clasped behind its back. The figure was tall and lean. A volcano of fury erupted inside me. The bubbling, steaming lava of my rage was maddening enough for me to kick King Sanjay in his rather bony backside with enough force to drive him through the transparent wall and transform the haughty, crazy, insensitive monarch into a glass-studded, bloody pulp on the hard pavement situated some three hundred feet below.

  I slapped the back of his head in the most degrading manner possible. I then took his scrawny neck in a chokehold and shook him in the most humiliating manner possible. Lastly, I opened a window with one hand while continuing to shake him with the other, shoved him out the window, and kicked his ass with a loud and satisfying smack.