The Green Room & Devi Collection

by Nag Mani

  “Is it a deep cut?”

  She examined the bandage. “Doesn’t look like. It’s not bleeding anymore.”

  The inspector sat back and inhaled deeply, studying her. “And where were you when he was beheaded?”

  “What has it got to do with me?”

  “Just asking? You know police work. Formal questioning.”

  “I was in my room…”

  “So you didn’t see him that night after you retired to your room?”

  “What? What is with these idiotic questions? A woman was almost raped in front of the entire village, and you here are sitting in front of me and blabbering like a baboon. If you don’t want to file an F.I.R. you better leave this room and drown yourself in some tiny hole of shit!”

  “Look, here, Aditi!” Inspector Mishra straightened his posture, his voice calm and calculated. “I am your friend! Whatever you think I am doing, be clear on this – I am here to help you. And let me tell you, you are in deep trouble! What happened in his house is none of my personal concern. You didn’t do it and after that I don’t give a damn! I will report the case and carry out the routine work. Arrest some absconding criminal and put it on him for all I care. But you need to call your husband and get out of this village… as soon as you can!”

  “I will not leave until I have those men behind bars. I will file an F.I.R. I will go to court.” Aditi suddenly realised that she was brave. She had never spoken like this to anyone. It was always her husband she relied upon for her justice, father before marriage and husband after, and none of them ever took a stand for her. Now that she had no one but herself to fight her fight, she found the courage that she had assumed never existed. Yes, she would go to court. Yes, she would do anything to defend her honour and dignity. “And if you can’t help me, I will find someone else.”

  “File an F.I.R., will you?” Inspector Mishra retorted, his voice still low and soft. His skin was brown and tanned. His face hard. Lips slightly apart below thick moustache. His already greying hair cropped short. “Who will be your witness?”

  “Everything happened out in the open…”

  “You think it is that simple? But believe me when I say, no one will come forward. I have been here in this village for almost three years now. And let me tell you this, no one wants to mess with their family. And besides, where is your guardian? A woman cannot go to any court without a guardian. No lawyer will take up your case unless your husband agrees to it.”

  “You think I am another of your illiterate village women? You think I can’t get lawyers to fight my case?”

  “Here. Let me tell you straight. Om Prakash Singh is dead. His wife and son think you are the culprit. Oh god-damn-it, the entire village thinks you performed some dark magic last night. And not just last night. Three people have died in a span of two weeks, and every time, you were to be blamed. They want revenge, and you quite well know what sort of revenge that will be. You will only irk them further if you go about setting the police on them. You can file an F.I.R., but I don’t have enough men to arrest them all. They will come after you. I can hold them for a night. I can take them to my station for questioning. It is across the river. A storm is coming tonight. They won’t be able to across it back once it comes. But once they return, there is nothing more I can do.”

  It took a while to digest the situation. Another quarrel broke out somewhere in the house. It was Laila again. “It’s easy for you men, isn’t it?” Aditi said blankly. “To punish a man, I need to go to a court, risk getting exploited, is it? But to punish a woman, all you need to do is drag her out and strip her naked. And there you go. You have punished her and taken your revenge. Rape. Why do you men see it as a punishment?”

  “Only men? They do it, yes. They play their part in doing it. But it’s also the women who punish her thereon.”

  Silence. Even Laila wasn’t shouting. Then a baby started crying.

  “Manish Singh is trying to contact your husband. Be ready. I need to sort things out.” The inspector stood up, his heavy frame towering over her. “He will help you get out of here.” He opened his mouth to say something else. Hesitated. Shook his head and left.

  Few minutes later, a girl of nine poked her head in. “Aunty,” she whispered and as if scared, silently carried a plate of food into the room. She set up a stool beside the bed, looking down all along.

  “Come here, Zoya,” Aditi reached out to her and stroked her hair.

  “Why? Food is not enough for you?” Laila walked into the room, her eyes red and lips trembling with rage. “You want to have my daughter as well?”

  “You will not speak like that!” A thin man entered behind her. Razzak, Laila’s husband. Rushing in, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her out of the room. Words were exchanged. A bit of scuffling. Then there was a ringing sound of a slap. Zoya froze in her act of laying out the food, staring at the door. Aditi pulled her into an embrace. More people seemed to have gathered outside the room. More voices. More men. An old woman began to cry somewhere in the house, but no one seemed to pay any attention.

  “Aunty, are you a daayan?” Zoya asked her in tone so polite that Aditi smiled at the irony.

  “Who told you that?”

  “My mother. She says you know dark magic. That you worship in that haunted temple.”

  Aditi bit her lips, not knowing how to answer.

  “Zoya!” Laila shouted from somewhere in the house. “What are you doing with that cursed woman? Come down here. NOW!”

  Zoya wriggled out of her grip and dashed out of the room.

  The windows of the room began to rattle. A distant thunder. The police officer had said that a storm was coming. But she couldn’t stay here. This wasn’t her home. Something heavy crashed outside the house. A commotion broke inside immediately. People ran. Doors and windows were slammed shut. The wind was picking up speed. She rose to her feet. She had to go back to her house. But then… she remembered what awaited her there… behind that closed door, in that corner room. She had lived there for two months now, ignoring the presence, forcing herself to believe it wasn’t real. But it was – for the previous night it had replied.

  A woman appeared at the door with an oil lantern, placed it on the stool beside the untouched food and left without a word.

  Had it been some other time, Aditi could swear that she wouldn’t have even looked at the food. She would have marched out of that house, empty stomach, but her head held high. But this was a different time altogether. Her pride came in waves, making her restless to do something, anything to get away. But then came the incidents of the morning. She had been molested, beaten, almost stripped naked and almost raped in front of half the village. What were the sharp words of a mother compared to that? With this thought, the restlessness would ease and she would slump down on her bed and close her eyes. One more night, she assured herself, and she would leave and never return to this village again.

  The chapattis hardened and the kheer turned cold. The storm grew ugly. Strong winds buzzed in through cracks in doors and windows. Chickens and goats were brought inside, and they too sat huddled in a corner of a room.

  As the night matured, the winds brought in distant shouts of men. Aditi sat up, shivering. The clouds continued to thunder, promising a rain they had never seen before. Zoya appeared at the door. “Aunty!” she whispered, excited and frightened at the same time. She had brought news. “There are men,” she said, her eyes wide. “They are marching through the fields. They are carrying torches; I saw them from my window. And Ammi says they might also have swords. One of them even has a gun!”

  Aditi cupped her face. “Are they coming this way?”

  “No. They are heading for the river.”

  Aditi knew she had to leave immediately. These men must be going to the police station to bring their leader back. She was uncertain if Razzak would give her away. Nevertheless, she had to leave. She walked out and down a set of stairs into a hall. Another fight had broken upstairs. Utensils were being thro
wn in the kitchen. The woman who had brought the lantern stood anxiously at the doorway of a room; her husband, Salman, Razzak’s youngest brother, sat on the edge of a bed behind her. Aditi opened the main door and stepped out.

  “Abba!” Zoya screamed.

  Razzak came running down the stairs. “Where are you going, Madam?”

  “I cannot stay here! I thank you for helping me, but there is nothing more you can do.”

  Salman came out and nodded at Razzak. Let her go!

  “But where will you go? The first place they will march to is your house!”

  The entire family was in the hall now, some on the stairs, some peeping from their rooms.

  “I can handle that.” Aditi tried her best to keep her voice from quavering. She had no idea what she would do. Yes, her house would be the first place the men would vandalise.

  “Go to the fields,” Salman said. “Hide there. In the morning I will arrange for a boat, cross the river and take you to Purnia. Till then, hide!”

  Aditi noticed Laila standing on the landing of the first floor. Though she had put on a stern face, she didn’t speak a word now that Aditi was actually leaving.

  Shielding her face against the wind, Aditi turned around and started walking. She didn’t know what to do, so she just kept on walking. She heard Zoya call out to her but she didn’t look back. She didn’t know for how long they watched her. Her eyes were set on the dark shape of her house. A little light came from the backyard. And a cornfield struggled with the winds in the front. She reached the veranda and stared at the door. A lock hung on the latch. The key was in Om Prakash Singh’s house, along with some other belongings. On her left was a window to her room. She had forgotten to latch it from inside. It lay wide open. She peeped in. The dark shape of her bed. Her clothes spattered across it. A chair. Piles of books on a table. A cupboard.

  Two men carrying torches marched along the main road. She ducked behind a pillar on the veranda. They too seemed to be heading for the river. The cornfield ahead was alive and angry. Leaves rose and fell in waves. Dark and intimidating. She could hide there for the night. She stepped down the veranda. But what if the men searched for her in the field? The lands beyond were barren. She would be trapped then. Then came a big drop of water on her head. And before she knew, the clouds burst into a heavy rain.

  Desperate to search for a safer place, she turned around to see mango trees rising from behind her house. The Aambari – the mango plantation no one dared to enter! If she took shelter under the trees, she could make her way to the river and the lands beyond if the men did chase her. She ran to the trees. The foliage provided respite against the rain. The world ahead was dark and threatening. Thick, gnarly trunks rose before her, blackness resting in between. She stopped and leaned against a trunk and slumped down on its roots. The clouds rumbled. Heavy raindrops pattered down over the open lands. A lone light far away somehow made its way thought the vast expanse of fields.

  And then she saw him – a tall man. A very tall man. He appeared from behind her house and marched silently into the plantation, looking straight ahead. He was dressed in white. And in the relative darkness, even at this distance, she could somehow see his face. It was white. A dark beard ran down till his chest. He looked young, and strong. Attractive. Seductive. She saw his lips move. He was muttering something, chanting. Then two fragile figures appeared behind him. Two girls, following him silently.

  Aditi let out a cry of surprise. She knew the girls very well.

  And she also knew that they were dead.

  The ground began to tremble!

  No. Not an earthquake. Aditi felt vibrations travelling through the earth, emanating from somewhere deep in the forest, as if a heavy voice was saying something. Only that the source was monstrously big and was buried deep in the ground. She turned to look at the trees. The blackness had darkened. And something even darker lurked in it. The vibrations silenced everything else. The clouds swirled quietly. Raindrops hit whatever surface they could and shattered into a hundred droplets, ever so silently.

  The man crossed Aditi at some distance, as if she did not exist, and continued to walk deeper into the plantation, towards the source of the tremors. Even though she couldn’t hear him speak, she somehow understood what was happening. He was calling out to someone. And that someone – the someone buried deep inside the earth – was replying. The girls stopped dead. Though their faces were impassive, they seemed to be resisting something. They turned back to look at her, their eyes completely white, as if pleading for help. The man raised both his hands. The girls were lifted off their feet. They hovered in the night sky, as if some invisible rope was lifting them from their waists, and as he moved his hands, they began to glide forward.

  With a sudden jerk, the bearded man dropped his hands and the girls fell to the ground – Aditi shrieked – and then they rose. The vibration intensified. First they walked. Then their legs broke. They fell forward. Aditi covered her mouth and dropped to her knees. The girls rose again and began to move on their knees. Then their backs broke. So they pulled themselves with their hands. Not a hint of sorrow or pain on their faces. It was when their hands broke that everything happened all of a sudden.

  The vibration stopped.

  Lightning – darkness shattered.

  Winds whistling. Rain pattering. Clouds rumbling.

  Movements above.

  And Aditi looked up…

  She saw the Devi hunched on a branch.

  Her screams were drowned by a ferocious thunder and she remembered no more.

  II

  CHAPTER 3

  THE SUMMONS OF THE VILLAGE

  In the September of ’99, a man presented a cheque worth Rs. 40,000 to the cashier at the Katihar Bazaar Branch of State Bank of India. It was forwarded to the then manager – Mr Manoj Prasad. Mr Prasad verified the signature and cleared the cheque. In a span of two days, the same man visited four different branches of the bank in the neighbouring cities of Purnia and Araria and withdrew cash amounting to 2.1 lakhs. A week later, a Purnia based doctor reported fraud. He claimed he had lost his cheque-book and someone had forged his signature to withdraw the money. He personally visited the Regional Business Office in Purnia and had tea with some men in closed cubicles. The outcome of the meeting was a phone call to Mr Prasad. His senior informally told him to arrange the amount cleared through the cheque and deposit it back into the doctor’s account. The matter should be taken care of before higher authorities caught the slightest wisp of it and initiated a probe.

  Mr Prasad cried foul. His job was to check if the signature matched with the one present in their database and not track down its origin. The signature had indeed been a match, for it had safely passed the scrutiny of four other branch managers. It was the duty of the doctor to report theft and invalidate all the cheques. That evening, Mr Prasad received a call from an even higher authority. He was again unofficially told to quietly settle the matter by the following morning. There was no time for unnecessary investigation given that the bank was already burdened with work. The other managers had already complied.

  Mr Prasad consulted his wife, Aditi Prasad. “It’s okay,” she said. “Pay the money. It’s not going from your salary, after all.” Yes. Because after all, she knew, like others, that as a manager what sort of income he made with every loan he passed. The rates were fixed. He would take his share and pass on the rest to the divinities seated above. And that was the main reason the other four branch managers didn’t flinch depositing the money back into the doctor’s account. They were just giving back a percentage of what was never theirs to maintain regularity in the bank and continue receiving what was not theirs.

  But Mr Prasad would not budge. He had done nothing wrong. He would not succumb to pressure. Eventually, the clerk who had actually handed the cash had to cough up the amount and return to the bank. Mr Prasad felt a tingling sense of pride for what he had done. He had stood for the right. He was a brave man.

  One b
usy day in April, 2000, he received a transfer letter ordering him to take over a branch in one of the remotest villages of Araria near the Nepal border – Ufrail. No promotion. Just a transfer. The designated branch was a crumbling guest house built in the British era. There was no electricity. Mr Prasad found out that the village was on the other side of the Bakara River flowing southward from Nepal, which cut it off from the rest of the area. A makeshift bridge had been built across the river by the villagers. The bank ran on a generator puffing throughout the day.

  He had been allotted another of those ancient guest houses on the edge of a mango plantation, more commonly referred to as the forest, or the Aambari. The branch was a mess. It was suffering from numerous bad loans. He sweated day and night working at his desk. Innumerable files lay in piles, dozens of accounts waiting to be opened, loan defaulters working their way up for more loans. The staff were most unpunctual. Most of the managers who ran the bank earlier did only so on paper. Though their attendance records were flawless, they were themselves touring the neighbouring cities of Nepal with their families. It was frightening in the beginning. But he managed to hold himself together, for some time.

  Rs 40,000 was not a big amount, after all.

  Aditi Prasad stayed back in Purnia. She was in love with their newly constructed house. Not because it was fancy or an envy-of-the-neighbour – just a three-room set with traditional kitchen and simple flooring and walls – but because it was her home. She had designed it, looked over its construction and even personally watered its budding walls. It didn’t turn out as beautiful as she had expected. There was shortage of cash now and then and labours were not easy to handle. The kitchen did not turn out as she had planned and… but it was fine. What you love need not be beautiful.