by Sakiv Koch
“You are she. You are my hope,” Akilina said, uttering her first words since the night of Nadya’s death.
“Yes. My mother lives in me,” Runa reassured Akilina, verbally and in many other ways, not all of which involved words, but which were as expressive, as conclusive as though time had reversed its flow and brought the departed girl back into the fold of the living.
“She is me and I am she,” Runa said. “It’s always been like that.”
“Yes, yes. She is you and you, she,” Akilina murmured. “It’s always been like that. I just didn’t allow myself to see this fact before. I never lost her. But I am guilty of having lost you, my dear, for so many years. I am guilty of losing myself —.”
Runa put her small fingers on Akilina’s quivering mouth. The ancient woman and the little girl cried and laughed together.
And so it was that Akilina, who was in her mid-nineties now, started living to her fullest capacity once more, just as the end of her days loomed ever nearer. Akilina winced every time Runa practiced or performed any circus act, but she never dissuaded her granddaughter from doing anything she wanted to do.
Illya the Bumbler had begun bumbling unintentionally (like in everything else, intention made all the difference here as well). He had developed several interrelated ailments over the years, severely undermining his role as the primary breadwinner for his family.
Akilina had given up trying to find employment a long time ago. It fell to the children — Runa and Shyam — to sustain all four of them. Dire poverty lived with them like an inseparable companion. Their home was little better than a hovel and their meals often accentuated their respective hungers rather than keeping them at bay for brief intervals of time.
The breadth of Shyam’s shoulders was growing faster than the length of his trunk. He lacked the nutrition that the spurt in his growth required, but his strength still somehow increased exponentially with each passing week, so much so that people called him a freak.
Runa lost Illya — the man who had saved and raised both Nadya and Runa like a devoted, selfless father — in the fourteenth year of her life. Illya died mid-performance, while doing what he loved doing best — making people laugh. But he made the people who loved him cry bitterly when he wouldn’t get back up after suddenly falling on his face one night,
Akilina clung to life with gossamer filaments, watching Runa’s advances in grace and beauty. The old woman also watched Shyam’s undying devotion to Runa.
‘He’ll protect her when I am not around anymore. He’ll always protect her with his life,” she told herself every time she saw the two together. “This boy is a living wall — no monster will ever get past Shyam to harm my darling baby!”
This thought, this certainty, was Akilina’s ‘comfort pension’.
“I wish my Nadya, too, had had such a protector… she’d still be here with her poor old mom then.”
***
The chained giant was a death-row convict. His name was Baali. He towered over all the seven uniformed guards leading him toward the hangman’s scaffold. The guards spoke to him in sombre tones, appearing concerned about his feelings and his state of mind.
“I have never seen a man change the way you have transformed in the past year, Baali,” the head guard said. “From a dreaded butcher of men and women to a poet-artist-hermit whose verses and sketches have astonished and moved several highly learned people! Your advocates sent the governor-general your manuscripts and artwork along with your mercy petition hoping they would move him to grant you clemency. But the number and nature of your past crimes —”
“I know, brother, I know,” Baali whispered, wiping his eyes with the heels of his manacled palms. “The burden of my sins crushes my heart. My body will soon be killed, but my immortal soul…”
A heavy silence enveloped the small procession as it made its way to the dimly lit yard supposed to be Baali’s last earthly destination. A frail old man wearing a doctor’s white coat and a stocky young man attired in a hangman’s black clothes stood near a raised platform in the middle of the yard.
Baali’s enormous shoulders stiffened at seeing the gallows. His pace slackened. He muttered something under his breath.
“What?” the head guard asked. “Did you say something?”
“Yes,” Baali replied. “I said I miss my old life. I am going back into the world to live some more!”
He dug his heels into the cobbled floor, flexed his gargantuan arms, and sent two of his guards flying into a nearby brick wall. He then swivelled around with an incredible speed. The pair of guards behind him stood close together. Baali placed his huge hands on the sides of their heads and rammed their skulls together with a bone-crunching force.
The shock factor working in his favor had worn off by this time. Two batons hit him simultaneously, one on his left shoulder, one on his upper right arm. The convict laughed as though he had been merely tickled and then elbowed one of the men who had just hit him.
The other hitter dropped his stick and extracted his whistle from his breast pocket with panic-shaking fingers. An uppercut broke the unfortunate would-be whistleblower’s chin along with his whistle and several of his teeth holding it between them. It had taken the butcher less than a minute to knock down six able-bodied men.
Only the elderly head guard remained standing. He had unstrapped his rifle, which he was leveling and cocking at the same time. “Stop right there, Baali!” he cried, clearly on the verge of tears. “You can’t escape! You are only making it harder for —”
Baali grabbed the quivering barrel and jerked it out of the head guard’s grip.
“Don’t want to break anything in your body, old man,” Baali said. “If you also want the same thing, do not utter a word. Not a syllable. Unlock my cuffs and undo my chains. My men will be here any minute. Seeing me freed from my shackles will be their cue to not kill anyone without a good reason.”
The head guard glanced at the watchtower situated over the northern wall of the yard. There was an armed constable up there, but instead of raising an alarm, the man was lowering a rope ladder down to the floor.
Baali chuckled. “Hurry up, now! Unless you want to hurry after I clobber one of your boys over the head with your own rifle — hey!”
The weapon he had just referred to suddenly flew out of his hand and fell at his feet with a hybrid sound of wood and metal striking stone together.
The stocky hangman had quietly moved to Baali’s side and snatched the firearm out of the giant’s hand. It was the poet-artist-killer’s turn to be shocked into momentary stillness.
The hangman grasped Baali’s right forearm, whose hardness and girth belonged more to a tree’s limb than a man’s.
“It’s ironic that the executioner wants to be executed tonight,” Baali said, pulling his arm away. It wouldn’t come free. He exerted more force. The result didn’t vary. Baali’s smile of superiority cracked on one side of his mouth. This had never happened to him in his entire life. No man’s strength had ever come remotely close to his own.
“You are my property,” the hangman said calmly, dragging Baali toward the gallows. The executioner was at least a foot shorter than the convict. Although the former’s chest and shoulders were enormous, Baali dwarfed him even in those dimensions.
Baali bellowed in fury. His rock-like head butted the smaller rock that was the hangman’s head. The head guard leaping for his rifle winced at the sickening sound of the crash. Baali bellowed once more. In pain this time. His chains jingled as he swayed on his feet, stunned by his own manoeuvre.
The hangman shook his abused head twice, rapidly, as though denying some unstated fact. He then ducked low, looking like he was lancing his property’s midriff with his shoulder, and picked up the elephantine Baali — weighing no less than a hundred-and-twenty kilograms — as easily as though he were lifting a man-sized effigy instead of a boulder-sized man.
The hangman scurried to his scaffold like a worker ant carrying a much larger, m
uch heavier insect than itself. The incredulous head guard looked once again at the watchtower. The rope ladder was snaking back up the wall. A siren pierced the air just as the hangman climbed onto the platform and stood Baali on his still-unsteady feet.
The prison doctor, who had stood like a gaping statue for the past minute and a half, exhibited signs of animation now. He wanted to say or do something, perhaps about the regulations governing hangings, but the head guard motioned him into absolute stillness again.
The blaring siren was bringing new boots into the yard. Some of the guards Baali had felled like so many saplings were getting back on their feet. A firefight started outside the compound walls.
But the stolid hangman paid little heed to the increasing commotion as well as the correct procedure laid out for executions. He punched the side of Baali’s head. The convict sagged. The hangman held him up with his left hand while putting a noose around Baali’s throat with his right hand.
The executioner then stepped back, took out a hood from his pocket, and put it over Baali’s unsmiling, terror-slackened face.
“I have seen your poems and your sketches. Highly overrated. Just like your strength,” the hangman said before pulling the lever that took out the wooden ground from beneath Baali’s freakishly enormous feet.
***
The sun peeked over the horizon, looking pale after a long day’s shift on the other side of the world. Its first rays dispelled the darkness of a narrow, scenic road wending alongside a canal bank. A morning breeze traversed many gardens, many orchards to gather a concoction of scents and bring it to a young woman walking down the road. The long tresses of her waist-long, blue-black hair rippled with every step she took. Her blue eyes sparkled with an extraordinary vivacity.
Runa wore a beige salwar-kameez with a crimson, hand-embroidered dupatta. Although not expensive, this outfit, particularly the dupatta, was her most prized possession. She did not own anything worth even a modest amount of money, but her beauty, elegance, and grace exceeded a queen’s.
A young woman named Lalita was walking with Runa. Lalita was the same age and the same height as Runa, but their similarities ended there. Lalita had short, unruly hair and a pair of big hazel eyes. The cut and style of her clothes were as fashionable as Runa’s, but she looked somewhat slovenly.
She was pretty and attractive in her own way, but there was something strange about her, as though she was not all within herself. Her hands gesticulated on their own, like they were conversing with each other, even when the girl was not speaking. Her eyes skittered continuously, groping under trees, checking bushes, inspecting the skiffs bobbing on the water.
A twig snapped at a little distance, somewhere in the woods thriving on the right side of the road. Lalita glanced sharply in the direction of the sound. It didn’t alarm Runa, because she knew (or she thought she knew) whose foot had cracked the stick.
“Don’t worry,” Runa whispered to Lalita. “It’s just old mom, following us to make sure we are okay.”
Lalita didn’t seem to hear. Her shoulders had tensed and hunched. Her pupils seemed dilated. This pre-dawn saunter by the canal-side — undertaken at Lalita’s quiet-yet-irresistible insistence — was turning disastrous. If Runa couldn’t reassure Lalita of everything being alright within the next few moments, her mental equilibrium would tip over and smash to ‘wailing’ smithereens, bits and pieces that would take days, if not weeks, to fuse back together into her default state of everyday peace and simple joy.
Lalita was like that — she could be either quietly joyous or volubly downcast, with no gradations of mood between the two extremes. Lalita had come into their lives on a night when a flood of grief and a conflagration of bereavement had simultaneously drowned and burnt Runa’s world — the night of Illya’s death. She had been among the audience watching Illya’s last performance.
Runa had seen a wild-looking girl crying wildly when the big top emptied. No one had seen that girl before. No one knew where she had come from and with whom. She wore liberally patched clothes that might have fit her properly a few years back, when she must have been far smaller.
She cried with the same force as Runa, as though Lalita, too, had suffered an unspeakable, irreparable loss. She looked starved, but she hadn’t sneaked into the circus without paying for her ticket — that little chit of paper was clutched tightly in her right fist when she came back home with Runa later that night.
The girls had become constant companions from that time four years ago, but Lalita’s origins and history continued to be as mysterious to everyone as they had been back then. Asking her too many questions always triggered the ‘wailing smithereens’ state. Runa was content with what she knew about her friend. She felt no need to keep digging for more.
They loved this particular canal-road meandering through vineyards, meadows, and quaint woods. They generally went out walking around sunset, but Lalita had taken it into her heart last night to come to this spot for a morning ambulation. The girl had frowned when Akilina had proposed to go along.
“You walk not, old mom. You hobble shamble stumble! We big girls. Big big. We together alone go see young sun fly up! You no go!”
And so Akilina had not come with them. But she is behind us, Runa thought with a stab of unease on her old mom’s behalf. This gargantuan effort would cost the old woman a lot of aches and pains for a long time to come. What if she twists an ankle and falls down? Runa shivered at the thought.
Another stick ruptured the silence with a resounding crack. Leaves and bushes rustled in a loud chorus a few feet away. Runa’s confidence in her knowledge of their follower didn’t just dip, it shattered altogether. Whosoever was moving behind the screen of foliage in the woods was keeping pace with them — something quite impossible for Akilina, whose back was now bent to the extent that her face remained parallel to the ground when she got as fully upright as she could.
“Who’s there?” Runa asked out loud, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
No one answered her question.
Runa gripped Lalita’s hand and began to run, dragging her along. The unseen person wasn’t falling behind. The line of trees would end after another hundred yards, whereafter the road and its close companion, the canal, entered a sugarcane field.
Runa looked at Lalita. The girl appeared calmer and more collected than she looked a few moments ago. Runa halted. It was better to confront their stalker right there, in that semi-open space, and not in the fields where the road was choked on both the sides by the tall stalks of sugarcane.
“Come out!” she said, facing the spot where she thought the stalker had stopped. “Show yourself!”
“I c-can’t!” someone answered. It was a man’s voice, sounding hesitant, its tone not the least bit threatening. But sounds could be even more deceptive than appearances. And yet, if the man meant them harm, wouldn’t he have come out and attacked them instead of remaining hidden from view?
“Why are you following us?” Runa asked. She could have sprinted back the way they had come, but she knew that Lalita had neither the speed nor the stamina to outrun a young (and presumably fit) male.
“I need your help,” the man said plaintively.
“Why don’t you come out, if you are as harmless as you want us to believe?”
“Because I am n-naked!” the voice replied, shrinking in embarrassment, growing lower in volume.
Blind panic flooded her mind and jammed her joints. She felt frozen. In a classic role reversal that was as unprecedented, as surprising in its own right as the situation the two friends found themselves in, Lalita squeezed Runa’s hand reassuringly.
“Fear not, fear not, I protect, I protect,” the nervous girl said, stepping forward to stand in front of the brave girl. An overwhelming love for Lalita filled and overflowed from Runa’s heart.
“We are leaving,” Runa called out, suiting the action to the word, walking back in the town's direction, leading Lalita by their still-linked hands.
Runa quickened her pace. There was no way she was stopping for a man openly professing to be wearing no clothes.
Lalita stopped and pulled her hand out of Runa’s grip, forcing her to stop, too.
“Attacked he could long time back when dark,” Lalita reasoned with her. “Boy sun throwing much light now.”
“She is right,” the man said from behind a tree. “I mean no harm.”
“Why are you — the way you say you are?” Runa asked.
“It’s a long story,” the man said. “Can you kindly lend me your dupattas, ladies? I promise to return them later, properly washed and ironed.”
Runa gasped. There was no way she —
Lalita grabbed Runa’s precious dupatta, removed her own from around her shoulders, balled them up together to form a riot of color, and hurled the united garments in the direction of the hidden man. The hasty union came undone midflight, growing a tail, plunging to the ground far short of its intended destination.
The young women turned their backs to the woods, whereupon a man as devoid of any articles of clothing as a monkey tiptoed out to the road. He seemed far more fearful and anxious than any of his two female benefactors had looked at any point in time.
His hands shook as he picked up the dupattas and wrapped both of them around his waist, like thin, overlapping towels, which, despite going around in several layers, still felt revelatory in nature.
“Thanks,” he called out once he had a sort of lungi draped and knotted around his waist. Overcome with a reluctant sort of curiosity, Runa turned her head, a few degrees at a time, to look over her shoulder. Her uncertain, probing look collided midair with the fluttery gaze of the man standing behind her. They froze for a moment, the dupatta-less woman and the dupatta-clothed man; they froze in their entireties — their bodies, thoughts, senses, and perceptions — as though they had separated a long time back and suddenly recognized each other at that utterly strange time and place. It was one of those rare, eerie, contradictory moments which are denuded of all awareness and heavily pregnant with an acute awareness simultaneously.