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

by Sakiv Koch

  Nadya stood just inside the imperial building’s corridor. She had her daughter in her arms and her mother, Akilina, stood holding her hand.

  “Congratulations, Papa!” someone yelled from somewhere, blowing away the just-born reverential stillness, ushering in a long-lived wagging of slanderous tongues. His escort half-dragged, half-carried a statuesque Mohan away. Only Nadya saw the water falling from his eyes. It mixed with his blood and dripped from his saturated beard in reddish globules of remorse.

  ***

  The judge was a middle-aged British man who appeared to possess more pointed features than a porcupine. The customary powdered wig sat a bit askew on his rather pointy head. His nose terminated in a sharp tip a fly would have thought dangerous to land upon. His lower jaw converged in a v-shaped chin that seemed capable of cutting the razor aiming to shave it of its thorny stubble. The fingers of his hands tapered quite a bit — not like a lady’s comely fingers, but like a hawk’s talons.

  He licked his dry lips from time to time. The tip of the tongue that darted out for these moistening duties exhibited the same needle-like pointedness as that of his nose. The tops of his ears were lost to view under his wig, but it wasn’t hard to see elves in your mind’s eyes when thinking about the shape of the judge’s ears.

  He cleared his throat and spoke in a shrill voice.

  “You may state,” he addressed Nadya, who stood in the witness stand, “the manner in which this—this man assaulted and violated you.”

  It had become evident to Nadya within ten minutes of court proceedings that the judge was not bothered so much about the nature of the crime committed against her as with the racial element involved in it.

  The public prosecutor was an exceedingly obsequious man happy to let his lordship do the prosecutor’s job, too. The defense lawyer was a bottom feeder who had completed his degree from a third-rated college after failing his exams a record number of times. He generally got open-and-shut cases with impoverished men as his clients. His fee was low, but he earned it without much exertion on his part.

  The trial had entered its thirteenth month. Nadya had been unable to depose in the court so far on account of her ill health, the difficult birth of her daughter, who had needed continuous attention and care from her young mother for several weeks after coming into the world, and Illya’s horrible accident, which took place right after Runa, Nadya’s daughter, had finally outgrown her susceptibilities as a premature baby.

  Nadya stated the events of that fateful night with as much brevity as possible. Something propelled her to portray Mohan’s crime as a ‘spur of the moment’ impulse, although she knew that his intent to rape her had been premeditated. The medical examiner had already presented the fact of Mohan’s having injected Nadya with some potent sedative as an irrefutable piece of evidence.

  Nadya didn’t know any of this. She was unwittingly committing perjury in an attempt to soften Mohan’s sentence. Mohan, who had been so inhuman, so beastly, so monstrous to her, understood every word his victim uttered in Russian before the court translator repeated her lie in Bengali and English. He gaped at her incredulously.

  The thorny judge first frowned and then scowled down at her.

  “You seem to harbor some sort of pity or sympathy for the accused, Miss Nadya,” he said, speaking sternly enough to scare the girl. “It is entirely misplaced, this sense of compassion. It is, in fact, a criminal offense to make false statements under oath, Miss. And for whom? A native dog who had the audacity to victimize and brutalize a defenceless woman. Not just any woman at that, but a white woman!”

  His squeaky voice grew thunderous toward the end of his little talk. His face flushed, and spittle flew from his mouth.

  Nadya, who scorned the nature of the judge’s scorn, forgot her fear. Her natural temerity billowed in her.

  “The color of my skin or his has nothing to do with it!” she said in a clear, ringing voice. “I know this man is a monster — he ravaged my faith in his goodness, which, in a way, was worse than ravaging my body! But I know, I can clearly see, how he punishes himself for his deed every moment of every day. The harshest possible sentence you mete out to him can never equal the degree of his self torment. Awake or asleep, he burns in the hell of his own making. That’s all I want to say.”

  Why am I saying all this? Why am I doing this? she asked herself as soon as she stopped speaking.

  The judge harrumphed loudly. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down several times, producing clicking sounds as it moved.

  “My good woman,” he said in a heavily patronizing tone, “what if he’s putting on an act of remorse? Just as he had pretended to be reliable and decent before he showed you his true colors?”

  This argument stumped Nadya. Her already-low spirits collapsed altogether. The judge struck his desk with his gavel and pronounced the sentence: fourteen years’ rigorous imprisonment in Kala Pani, the most dreaded and far-flung prison in the entire country, reserved normally for the most-ardent and hardy political prisoners struggling for their nation’s freedom from the British Raj.

  She didn’t glance at Mohan as she left the witness stand. She looked, instead, at her mother, seated at the very back of the courtroom. Runa slept in Akilina’s arms. The baby’s little, chubby hands were curled into dimpled fists, and her rosy mouth’s corners lifted in priceless smiles from time to time as she dreamed whatever infants dream about.

  The corners of Akilina’s thin mouth curled earthward and her blue eyes flashed daggers at Nadya, who wasn’t surprised at finding her old mom full of a seething fury toward herself. For the first time ever, an icy silence hung like a moving wall between them as they wended their way back home.

  Nadya might have attempted to break the ice, so to speak, had she not been extremely angry, too. The object of her wrath wasn’t Akilina, of course. It was she, Nadya, herself. How could she pity that pitiless man? How could she soften toward someone whose heart must be a jagged stone, whose soul must be a blob of darkness, whose conscience must be as nonexistent as sunlight in a night sky?

  The judge’s last question to her had torn away the eye-patches of stupidity covering her criminally gullible mind’s eyes. She couldn’t be completely certain that Mohan really regretted sinning against Nadya, against Nadya’s daughter. Wasn’t he a consummate actor? And what if he were not acting, what if he were full of genuine remorse? What did that change for Nadya or her innocent baby? Being sorry for one’s monstrosities couldn’t replace actual, tangible punishment for those monstrosities.

  Nadya shook her head and dismissed Mohan and his fate from her clarifying thoughts. She took her old mom’s hand in hers. Akilina jerked it out of the younger woman’s grasp. Nadya grabbed it again and held it in a manner precluding its escape again. Akilina’s wiry fingers wouldn’t wrap around Nadya’s palm at first. It took Nadya almost half a minute to melt the frost of Akilina’s ire.

  ***

  Illya’s recovery from his horrendous injuries had been slow and replete with relapses. He looked as though several men had beaten him with clawed hammers. He had been bedridden for weeks.

  Their combined savings had run out almost entirely. Nadya was thinking of writing to Sasha Vosk for an advance payment against future services. But before she could take the difficult step of asking for financial help, she received devastating news of Sasha Vosk’s death.

  His magnanimous heart had given up beating while he lay asleep in his tent in a circus-ground in Bombay. His sparingly used, beautiful voice had fallen silent forever. The composed mien, the steady gaze, the silver hair, the rare-but-deep laughter, the lean body with its inexhaustible endurance, and the heart—the heart that loved passionately but silently, without any outward show—were all obliterated from the physical dimension, to live on in Nadya’s own fond, pained heart.

  There were no touring circuses stopping in Calcutta at that time. Akilina started working odd jobs, but they were extremely hard to come by for an old woman who couldn’
t communicate in the local language. Nadya, who had picked up smatterings of Bengali and Hindi, worked as part-time domestic help in some reasonably well-to-do households in her otherwise poor locality.

  It was still very hard for the two women to provide for the baby, look after Illya’s medical needs, and put two square meals a day on the table (figuratively speaking: they didn’t have any tables or chairs in their one-room tenement, just two straw mats and one sick-looking cot for the sick man).

  Little Shyam was always around; running little errands; fanning Illya’s sweaty face; preparing and giving her milk bottle to Runa when Nadya was out working; running and summoning Nadya hurriedly whenever the baby cried her head off because of colic; even changing Runa’s nappies when the need arose — this he did in spite of Nadya asking her many times not to do it.

  Surinder, Shyam’s father, also helped them in many non-pecuniary but nonetheless important ways. He was a nomadic performer, a freelancer, and a dry-goods merchant who moved from city to city, province to province, working for the largest circuses touring the country. As a consequence, Shyam had never known a long-term home, just as he had never known a mother’s love.

  It was Runa’s fifth month in the world and Nadya’s nineteenth in India. As it often does, life jerked to a near-stop every now and then and picked a dizzying pace at other times, particularly when a new circus finally set up its show in the city. Nadya felt as though she had got a new lease on life. She worked day and night, feeling new currents of vigor and strength awakening in her, pushing penury and hardship far enough that her family slept with sated hungers, and her stern landlord didn’t threaten eviction every morning.

  By the time Illya got well enough to move around on his own, Nadya had saved enough money to buy their way back to their own country. But Russia joined the World War I just then.

  And so it was that Nadya and her family hitched their wagon to Surinder’s cart. Their everyday desperation to be gone was gone from their everyday lives, making said lives, if not altogether joyous, significantly less stressful. Sometimes that is all the joy one needs to lead a decent existence.

  Chapter 13: The Reincarnation of the Mother Night

  I was an actor playing the Lord of Love in a strange, vivid dream-scape. My torso was bare except for a garland of white blossoms. I was clad in a silk dhoti, and held a flute in one hand. A king’s crown, studded with a peacock's feather, adorned my head.

  We were in a lush-green valley, complete with a mountain stream leaping and singing a few yards away. Cows grazed the sweet, dewed grass. Peacocks unfurled their plumes and danced around me.

  On the horizon stood — no, not snow-clad mountains or forested hills — but glass-fronted skyscrapers! Stunningly beautiful gopis stood surrounding me. They were women from many ethnicities and nationalities of the world, attired in saris, gowns, skirts, kimonos, pantsuits, etc. They talked, sang, danced, and murmured transcendentally philosophical things in my ear.

  My Radha sat near the stream, neither too far nor too near me. She was translucent, shifting and shimmering like light. She had Rachna’s face and form for a full minute — sublime, smiling, radiating a selfless love like all the other gopis. And then her light hardened around the edges and she metamorphosed into Princess Roop. Dazzling, as always, but also disdainful and aloof to everyone else around.

  Whereas Rachna would have come to me, had she continued to be Radha, Roop beckoned me to her in a remarkably imperial manner even for God’s consort when summoning God Himself. As I walked to where she sat on a grand throne under a maple tree, I glimpsed an audience of hundreds of conjoined twins watching Roop raptly. All of them were dressed like cowgirls and held big Colt Single Action Revolvers in their hands.

  An enormous wolf sat at Roop’s feet. It had burning coals for eyes. Roop lifted her left foot and showed me its sole. A dagger-like thorn jutted out of it, dripping large rubies of blood which sizzled when they hit the soil. I took the thorn between my fingers and pulled. The gigantic wolf growled. The thorn remained jammed in her foot. Roop didn’t cry out in pain. She laughed. I pulled again. My fingers were bloodied with her blood. The thorn slipped from my grip. Roop laughed more.

  I forgot the sanctity of the divine part I was playing in that weird drama in that eerie dream. I lunged at that thorn with my teeth. The wolf sprang at me. It took my right shoulder in its enormous jaws. It shook my shoulder again and again.

  “No! No!” I mumbled. “Leave me!”

  But the shoulder-shaking intensified.

  “Wake up!” the wolf said in English.

  I woke up.

  Cameron MacMaster stood bent over me, holding and shaking my shoulder ever so gently, completely unlike Roop’s voracious wolf in my dream. Cameron was Surajgarh’s estate manager for Canada.

  That was his official designation, but he did a lot many additional things for our common employer. Cameron was tall, well-built, well read, and well-traveled. He was a trained martial artist, an accomplished dancer, and a professional photographer.

  He had long blonde hair neatly gathered in a ponytail and intense blue eyes, which would crinkle and water slightly whenever he laughed out loud, which he did all the time. He believed that you didn’t need to be happy to laugh. This was his joy-mantra: ‘Begin laughing all the time and you’ll find yourself happy all the time!’

  He lived on the sixteenth floor of the same building that housed the king’s penthouse. We had waited quietly on the fire escape for almost a quarter of an hour after the intruders disappeared from our view. Going all the way down was risky — the men could be lying in ambush around the corner. Going back up to the penthouse was equally dangerous — they could be lolling on the king’s bed with their guns ready-cocked to shoot us down as soon as they saw us.

  The king wouldn’t let me knock on anyone’s door, for the complicated reasons I cited somewhere above. Cameron’s flat was on the other side of the building from the fire escape we were on.

  I had finally gone back up alone, leaving Sanjay standing on that narrow cage clinging to the side of that tall building, my heart thudding in my throat, expecting every moment to be clobbered on the back of my skull or shot through my head or, worst of all, hear a gunshot denoting they had hit Sanjay.

  I had located my room in the dark penthouse (barking my already-smarting shin again in the process) and retrieved my beloved model 29 from one of my suitcases. Overflowing with a buoyant confidence and energy that your weapons can kindle in you in situations of extreme duress, I flew back down to shield the king from all possible harm.

  Sanjay and I had then ascended the fire escape staircase to the penthouse, from where we descended straight to Cameron’s flat. The man hadn’t taken long to answer his doorbell. He had shown no signs of panicking upon learning what had happened. He looked like the kind of levelheaded man whose mental balance and equanimity were almost impossible to throw off kilter. In short, he looked like someone having every quality that I lacked so grossly.

  Cameron had accompanied us back to the penthouse and asked us to retire to our respective suites while he called up the building’s concierge and began taking care of things that needed care (restoration of electricity, cleaning of debris, replacement of broken light fixtures, fixing of locks, and installation of extra bolts on the main door).

  “Do all of you royal guys whimper in your sleep?” Cameron asked me when I sat up in my bed and shook my head to dislodge the dregs of my dream from my bleary eyes, accompanying his question with a pantomime of someone writhing and moaning rather comically.

  “I am not royal!” I told him, speaking English, which was the only language he spoke. Ma, who was a multi-linguist (fluent in Hindi, Bengali, Russian, and English, in addition to a working knowledge of Latin and Sanskrit) had imbued her eager son with an immense love for words and stories — both written and spoken — in his thumb-sucking, toddling days. So, speaking and understanding Canada’s primary official language from day one was not a problem, although
I had to request Cameron to repeat certain things slowly to get the hang of the accent and pronunciation novelties I’d had no acquaintance with until that point in time.

  It was uncannily important to me that Cameron saw me as the ordinary man I was. This was a feeling diametrically opposite to the suite of conceits and greeds that fueled my deceptive airs and pretences in front of others.

  “I am not a royal person,” I repeated, somewhat vehemently.

  “You reacted as though I had called you a leper,” he said, looking amused. “Anyway, my commoner friend, the police are here and they have got to talk to you. I wish we could make them wait until your jet lag had worn off. You look totally washed out.”

  I felt worse than I looked. Getting out of my bed, washing my face, changing into a pair of fresh clothes, and walking to the penthouse’s living room felt as arduous as climbing a hill while running a high fever.

  The police inspector standing in the middle of the cavernous hall was a lean man in his late thirties. He had alert, intelligent eyes. A sergeant stood behind him, with a notepad in his hands.

  I noticed the absence of the king in the room. His statement could apparently wait until he had slept his fatigue off.

  “Can you please tell us everything that you remember happening last night?” the inspector asked me.

  I told him everything, except for the untellable reason, which had compelled me to take a walk right after reaching the penthouse, leaving the king alone for over half an hour. The police officer just watched me with his penetrating, slightly disconcerting eyes, saying nothing, asking nothing, while his subordinate noted down my words in shorthand.

  “Can you please repeat one of the intruders’ parting words?,” he asked once I had stopped speaking.