by Sakiv Koch
The king leaned away from the wall and turned to face me, breaking my waking dream of beating the hell out of him.
“Come here,” he commanded in an unbearably imperious tone of voice. My hands clenched-unclenched, just as Lt. Shakti’s fists had done whenever I made his anger spin out of control. I introduced a momentary lag into obeying the king’s order. I dragged my feet and yawned prodigiously. My intent was to make him notice that I had adulterated my obedience with insolence.
He stiffened, but didn’t react to my little show of defiance in any other way. This non-reaction didn’t help my frustration to climb down to more manageable levels. On the contrary, it rose higher. I craved a confrontation—the kind of showdown that Rachna’s telephone call had preempted at the king’s palace in Surajgarh.
I seriously considered spitting at him as I stopped a foot or so away from him. But the ever-vigilant dame, Reality, has a way of grabbing one’s wrists when one is on the verge of throttling the practical-minded sisters, Rationality and Sanity.
Sanjay gestured me to stand alongside him and look down.
“How long do you think it will take a man falling from here to hit the road down there?” he asked, startling me with the oddity of his question, aggravating the toxicity of my thought process. I jerked my wrists out of Reality’s grip.
“Why don’t you find out by jumping down?” I counter-questioned him. And then I winced and bit my idiotic tongue hard enough to wince some more. The king stiffened again. The gigantic dragon of my flustered ego shrank to the size of an insect in one instant, an insect the king could have crushed under a royal foot with perfect ease. But he did nothing—he allowed the tiny bug to creep into a hole of burning embarrassment and shame.
“Why did your majesty switch off all the lights of the house?” I asked him in a repentant tone of voice carrying undercurrents of an accusation. “Your majesty scared me out of my wits by not answering when I called your name.”
“I haven’t left my room since our arrival here,” Sanjay said. “I couldn’t hear your voice if or when you called out to me. This suite becomes soundproof with its door shut.”
The door in question wasn’t shut now. Something scraped against something else out in the living room. I recalled the broken lights of the foyer. We weren’t alone in the dark.
Chapter 10: A Missed Train
T he circus was a shoddy affair. The dirty fabric of its tents had been darned so many times that the patchwork itself had been patched up in several places. Most of the performers were either approaching or had already gone past retirement ages. They looked exhausted, their costumes and their haggard faces bespeaking a life even harder than circus performers’ universally hard life everywhere.
The animals were no exception: emaciated, underfed, long past their primes. Half of the seats in the big top had sold out on the opening night of this circus, but the succeeding nights had seen a dismal decline in ticket sales.
Except for Illya, who had been working as this third-class circus’s chief clown since its arrival in Calcutta, every other performer seemed halfhearted and lackluster to Akilina. Her horror knew no bounds when she saw the lion tamer, who appeared under the influence of liquor at all times.
Nadya came to the circus as a paying customer on its fifth night in town. She bought a full-price ticket for her infant daughter, too. Her intent was not to watch the show (which, as she had heard a thousand times from Akilina and even little Shyam, was nothing to write home about), but to do her bit to support the establishment while it stayed in Calcutta and provided employment to her father as well as business to several smalltime merchants and traders, including Shyam’s father, Sundar.
Akilina, who had been including herself in the paying audience every night, prophesied that the Big Cats Act was an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.
The lion slouched in its cage. The tamer prodded the king cat with his whip. The animal looked a bit too thin, a bit too old, a bit too lethargic to be still taking center-stage. The tamer was cast from the same mold, as like his lion in many respects as man and beast could be. The circus owned a tiger, too, but it had been unwell for over a week. So, the lazy lion and the indolent tamer presented little excitement and entertainment to their small audience.
The lion-tamer prodded the drowsy and disinterested lion again. The business end of the whip jabbed into an ulcerating wound in the animal’s neck; the festering pustule had remained undetected as it was hidden under the mane. The lion roared in pained fury and swiped at the tamer’s head with its gigantic paw.
The astonished man’s scalp and face tore open as though he were just a rag doll filled with red ink. A spray of blood flew into the air, most of which fell on the old lion’s muzzle, exciting it into a frenzy. The iron mesh of the cage was lightish in weight and rusted through. The injured lion tamer fell backward. He hit the mesh. An entire section of the flimsy cage collapsed under his weight.
The lion looked unsure of itself for a moment. It had been born and bred in captivity, but a primordial instinct made it spring and run toward the exit of the huge tent. Pure mayhem descended on the big top. People screamed their heads off and ran pell-mell. Just like the escaped animal, all the humans also angled toward the exit, ending up blocking it with their entangled bodies.
Akilina shook so much in her fright she seemed to execute a jerky dance sequence. Her worst fear had come true. She and Nadya were seated near the big top’s sole doorway, so that whenever the baby cried long or loud enough to distract the audience, Nadya could step out to soothe or feed her.
Their proximity to the exit didn’t enable them to exit the tent, though. Six or seven boisterous lads sitting next to them thronged to the doorway in one energetic, panicked body, shoving the two women several yards back in their frantic haste to escape first.
Some men coming in at the doorway pushed these altruist lads several yards back in turn. These newcomers numbered amongst a dozen crew members with nets, prods, sticks, and water buckets bearing down upon the lion from different points, trying to surround and subdue it.
The bewildered animal swerved and bounded in the direction where Akilina and Nadya stood with the baby in Nadya’s arms. Akilina put her frail and quaking body in front of Nadya. The young mother had another line of defense. A clown hurtled itself at the lion just as the confused-scared animal sprang at the women in its way.
The enormous, clawed paw that had maimed the tamer struck Illya on the face like a lethal slap and spun him in the air as though he, too, were a rag doll. But whereas the lion tamer had gotten away with just the one swipe of his lion’s paw, Illya bore the full brunt of the king beast’s pent-up furies, its never-before articulated wildness and ferocity.
The clown had barely hit the floor when enormous jaws clamped around his head. A wild thing screaming wildly fell upon the lion, raking its head with little, blunt fingernails, biting it with crooked teeth not sharp enough to puncture the leathery flesh, going for the beast’s left eye and nearly gouging it out just as she had gouged out Mohan’s eye. The startled beast woofed and relinquished its death hold on Illya’s head. The old lion’s novel urge to fight and escape died down completely.
The crewmen got it under control and led it away as though it were a lamb. Its trainer didn’t survive the night. His carotid artery had been severed in two places. Illya fought bravely to fend off that sly robber, Death, although the breach presented by his severely traumatized head was too wide to guard well.
He couldn’t even sit up in his bed on the third night after his sacrificial mauling, let alone boarding the train that was supposed to take all of them out of Calcutta.
Chapter 11: The Fury of Worms
W e weren’t alone in the dark. That scraping noise hadn’t been a figment of my overworked imagination. I had felt King Sanjay stiffen beside me yet again. He had heard that disquieting sound, too. The intruder(s) went absolutely still after that one (obviously inadvertent) slip.
We remained absol
utely still, too. I was angry and afraid in equal measures. Some of my anger was directed at my own idiotic self. I had left my model 29 in one of my suitcases, all of which were somewhere in my room, which was somewhere in this sprawling penthouse drowned in a jungle-like blackness. The king was also unarmed. He hadn’t brought any weapons with him from home, although a special diplomatic dispensation allowed the two of us to bring and carry our firearms with us at all times.
The thousands of miles we had traveled to come to this haven of peace and tranquility had made me complacent. I had presumed that dangers and threats wouldn’t follow us here. You don’t commit such glaring mistakes if you are a true professional engaged in the business of providing security. After all, the king hadn’t brought me here at such great expense because I was his best pal.
My employer, standing beside me, exuded his disapproval of my deficiencies in waves as dense as the darkness surrounding us. That I had left him alone and unguarded was an undeniable and undeniably shameful fact. I was about to make amends by doing something incredibly brave. I tiptoed across the room, shut the door, and locked it from inside without so much as peering out!
I flew to the telephone set, lifted its receiver, and found it entirely devoid of any tone, any signs of a live connection. The handle of the lock I had just engaged moved all the way down on its own. The men hunting my king were at his bedroom’s door now. Did they think we were sitting ducks, insignificant insects, defenseless lambs—to be shot, crushed, or slaughtered at their whim?
A blood-red bomb of fury exploded inside my head. The men at our door needed a new paradigm of thinking, a new way of life and philosophy. I decided to become their teacher, their guru. My methodology would involve superlative corporal punishment of the kind I had meted out to Sohan Singh’s killer in my boyhood.
I cast about in the dim room for something to serve as the chief instrument of my teachings. A heavy bag lay in a corner of the room. The tops of several sticks poked out of the mouth of the bag. I ran and pulled one out. It was a golf club. Taking it in my hands gave me the kind of confidence that my dear old lathi always filled me with.
“Here I come, students!” I whooped mentally as I strode purposefully toward the door. The king arrested my progress by placing a hand on my shoulder. The door handle moved yet again, its motion accompanied by an application of pressure on the door panel, which was an extremely sturdy, unbudging affair.
What I could see of Sanjay’s face in that absence of light looked drawn and tense to me.
“We must leave,” he whispered in my ear, motioning toward the door fearfully.
I thought he had gone mad. How could we leave if he wouldn’t allow me to open the door? He took my left wrist in his right hand and tugged me toward the outer wall of the suite. Did he want me to jump down with him to find out how long it would take us to become a mixed splatter of royal and proletarian pulp on the hard pavement situated a third of a kilometer below us? I’d much rather have taught than learned at that stage, but one’s boss’s inclinations generally override one’s own proclivities.
The king steered me to a door leading out to his suite’s balcony. His intent, I discovered upon walking out, wasn’t to engineer a double suicide but to use a fire escape staircase (something I had seen only in Hollywood movies until that indelible point in time) to make good our escape.
Sanjay locked the balcony door from outside, creating another barrier between us and my could-be students, although it was just a glass door likely to present no difficulties to people capable of coming through panels made of solid wood.
We began to descend at a brisk pace falling just short of running down the metal stairs. Running wouldn’t have accorded well with Sanjay’s kingly dignity and my mountainous ego, besides increasing the risk of stumbling and slipping on those scary steps.
I would certainly have felt vertiginous had I not been a man born and bred in hills. We were making a considerable racket going down, our feet slapping the iron underfoot harder than we needed to. Our mouths, which should have been producing desperate cries for help, remained clamped shut. He couldn’t scream publicly, could he? Kings are just as incapable of doing that as noble trees when woodcutters approach them with their axes and chainsaws.
I remained quiet, too, not because my inflexible pride had lumped in my throat, but because my shouts could easily have been interpreted as Sanjay’s. Kings, queens, princes, etc., are highly complicated beings irrespective of the sizes of their kingdoms, their ages, their nationalities, their philosophies, and their attitudes. You can consider me a first-hand authority on this erudite subject for a variety of reasons, some obvious, some poisonous.
We were nearly halfway down to the ground level when two silhouettes appeared on the metal landing connecting our penthouse’s balcony with the fire escape. It was hard to tell whether they were Indians or Caucasian. Other than darkness and distance, some kind of masks also obscured their appearance.
The men made no move to follow us. They just peered down at us while we stood peering up at them. There was no way they were unarmed, but they didn’t attempt to shoot us. I cringed inwardly and waited for those daredevils to make their next move, to outsmart and outclass me again. But all they did was laugh! They scoffed and mocked us.
“Welcome to Toronto, Your Majesty!” one of the silhouettes said, his words falling like a fusillade of corrosive insults upon my head. “We shall strive to make your stay highly memorable and extremely short.”
And then they walked back into the king’s home — as casually as though they owned it, as fearlessly as though we were indeed no more powerful than little earthworms.
Chapter 12: Crime and Punishment
T he men gathered in the district court premises went berserk when the police brought the rapist out of the prisoners’ van. He was a one-eyed man with a pair of thick spectacles and an unkempt beard. A coarse eye-patch blanked out the left lens of his spectacles.
“Hang him! Stone him! Burn him alive!” the mob advised itself in its many voices. It then surged forward to execute its intentions. The rapist didn’t flinch. He drew a deep breath, relaxed his body, closed his sole eye, and threw his head back in a yoga-like pose, seeming to want to be torn to pieces then and there.
The constables escorting Mohan were intent upon keeping him safe at any cost. They raised their batons and charged the charging mob. A few lusty blows dispersed the crowd in half a minute. But a rock came flying from somewhere and struck Mohan’s face, right over his right eye.
The lens of his spectacles shattered. Little shards of glass drove hungrily into his flesh. Blood filled and stung his functional eye, blinding him. He raised his handcuffed hands to his face, took off his useless glasses, and threw them on the floor. He wiped his forehead awkwardly with his sleeve; his eyelid worked furiously to flush out the salty liquid that had gotten into it.
A tiny smile lifted the beard-shrouded corners of his mouth as the constables herded him along toward the entrance to the courthouse. He was relieved at finding his eye uninjured. It was still transmitting the (justifiably) merciless world’s grim images to his brain.
He had embraced the idea of death; he was ready to have his body destroyed in its entirety, but the prospect of losing individual organs while retaining his (despicable) life was as scary to him as it is to any normal person in bottomless love with her wholeness.
Mohan had seen the ruffian who had thrown the stone at him — it was Monkey Cap: the man who had started the brawl in Sasha Vosk’s circus on its first day in Calcutta; the man who’d tried to force some money (originally borrowed from Mohan) on Nadya in exchange for services he had assumed, without any basis whatsoever, she would provide him readily; the man who happily licked Mohan’s boots every time he wanted to take a loan from Mohan (Monkey Cap took loans much more frequently than he took baths). The bastard still owed Mohan more than a thousand rupees.
Monkey Cap and his illustrious pals invariably led ‘welcoming committees’ of
this kind from the front whenever Mohan was brought to the courthouse for his ongoing trial. It was members of this elite group (including One-Eye, whose handicap Mohan saw in a new, tender light now) who expressed their desire to lynch Mohan most vehemently.
They had hitherto launched only rotten eggs and tomatoes at him, like rowdy spectators at a flop show. Their collective bravado had taken a giant leap since his last appearance on this public stage. The attempt to lynch him and the stone pelting were not only unprecedented, but they also showed a greater degree of courage than these gents possessed. Their violent hatred puzzled Mohan. It wasn’t as if they revered women in general, and Nadya in particular.
If anything, they were all misogynists of the worst sort. Mohan permitted himself another fraction of a smile, a half of it produced by the ironies of the world and the other half by the fresh memory of the beating that Monkey Cap and his altruistic band had just endured at the hands of the police constables.
Mohan grasped a sliver of glass embedded in the hollow beneath his eye and pulled it out with a gasp that wiped out the seed of his smile. There was another, bigger shard jutting out of his eyebrow.
“Leave that one alone,” the head constable walking beside him said gruffly. “It has dug in too deep. We’ll have the court medic take it out. That wound is going to need stitches. It’s a miracle your eyeball didn’t get speared as well.”
“This shows that God looks out even for sly bastards who deceive and rape their innocent friends,” a younger police officer said angrily.
Mohan’s bleeding face blanched under his beard. He hung his head in shame. But the remnant of his peripheral vision picked up something that made his chin jerk up with a neck-snapping force. His feet halted on the steps leading up to the courthouse’s entrance. The police officers shepherding him along also stopped moving. A momentary hush fell over the busy compound.