Kumbhpur Rising

by Mayur Didolkar

  “Madam, my name is Sulochana. I died last night because of the negligence of the doctor. Now we are going to teach him a lesson and I want you to accompany me.”

  Ragini felt a ball slowly rolling up in the pit of her stomach. From where she was sitting, she could smell the grime and decay on the child. At close inspection, Ragini could see an x shaped incision mark at the top of the child’s breastbone. Postmortem, she thought and felt sick.

  But in a moment relief washed over her. This was a dream, surely a dream. You observe things so vividly only when you are dreaming. This was a dream brought on by too many things happening in the last few days. Scared shitless though she was, Ragini felt she could laugh at it tomorrow morning in the broad daylight, when it was all over.

  Sulochana (in Ragini’s dreams) climbed down from the bed and turned to her once more.

  “Madam please follow me, you have nothing to fear from us.” she said.

  One more proof, Ragini thought with more relief. The child speaks English like a convent school student and she was the daughter of a daily wages worker. She climbed down from bed and replied “Give me a minute; I need to put on some clothes,” indicating the sheer white nightie she was wearing. The child smiled and waited.

  A few minutes later (in Ragini’s dreams), Ragini, now dressed in a pink pullover and jeans, was following the child down the road towards the hospital. The road immediately next to Rajat’s farmhouse was a dirt road and Ragini could feel the cool touch of red clay to her sandal-clad feet. The child walked a few feet ahead of her, barefoot.

  They crossed a small field to join the only tar road of Kumbhpur. This morning, Ragini remembered having seen the Kumbhpur civil hospital about half a kilometer ahead on the road. She could hear the sound of the sea and smell the salty air. The walk was really pleasant. The child, clearly exhilarated by the air, was running ahead. Her dirty pony slowly flipped in the wind.

  “Hey, walk a little slow” Ragini called. Sulochana turned and waited for her to catch up.

  “I can hardly wait. It is all going to change from tomorrow.”

  Before Ragini could ask what she meant they arrived at the gate of the civil hospital. At this late hour, the building was deserted and dark save for a small overhead bulb in the porch to show the emergency bell. Ragini wondered if she rang the bell would she wake up from the dream. But the door was open and Sulochana walked in with Ragini in tow.

  “The doctor is asleep in his room upstairs,” Sulochana said and climbed the stairs. Ragini followed her. They reached the first floor and crossed a room marked ‘store room’ till they reached the third room on their left. Sulochana pushed the door open and walked in. A bulb went on, and Ragini followed her in.

  Doctor Thombre, dressed only in shorts, was tied to his bed. Another villager, grim and dirty, like Sulochana was standing next to bed. Very much like a relative waiting at death bed.

  “I brought the woman from the city,” said Sulochana and slapped Dr. Thombre across his face to wake him up.

  “Wake up doctor, we are going to perform an operation on you now, madam please stand in one corner and watch,” instructed Sulochana.

  ‘What else am I going to do? I am just dreaming,’ Ragini thought and took a chair by the wall.

  Sulochana and the other villager got busy with syringes and tablets.

  “My name is Mohan, I died in the same place a few years back .I was stabbed by a bull in the stomach. The doctor was so drunk when he operated on me, he finished the job the bull had started,” the other villager said. He tore open a packet and shook out several white tablets out of it into his palm.

  “Doctor we do not know what is wrong with you, so we are basically going to give you every medication available, open your mouth now,” Sulochana said pulling the rag from Dr. Thmobre’s mouth.

  The scream, had it been real, would have wakened half the town. Dr. Thombre screamed almost tearing Ragini’s eardrums and she waited for the dream to end. It did not. Neither did she hear anyone approaching to see what the commotion was all about.

  “It is a dream isn’t it?” She asked to no one in particular.

  Sulochana was pinching Thmobre’s nostrils to force his mouth open. When he opened his mouth and Mohan could make him swallow all the tablets in his palm, Sulochana turned to answer her question.

  “It is Madam, for people like us it is dream come true” Mohan had put the rag back in Thmobre’s mouth to keep him from throwing up the tablets. Now he was inserting a hypodermic syringe in a bottle, and preparing an injection. Ragini could read the inverted words on the bottle. It was a common cough and cold syrup. After draining the content, Mohan inserted the needle in Thmobre’s right arm and pressed the plunger. There was a foul odor in the room.

  The operation went on for about forty minutes (in Ragini’s dreams). During the operation, Thombre was injected with penicillin twice, he was also given injections of common cough and cold syrups, laxatives and assorted painkillers. Sulochana finished the job by opening his mouth and inserting a Nirodh condom down his throat.

  “If that does not finish him nothing will, come on Madam, time to go.”

  Ragini could not have agreed more.

  In some other part of the town, a small group of villagers gathered in a small group by the seaside. All of them were killed in the carnage of FUM, and now along with their Courageous Leader they were planning their revenge.

  The Courageous Leader was not among those killed that night. In fact, he did not even belong to the town. Not at least as per their memories. He was of an indeterminate age, always dressed in a white kurta-dhoti and his dark black eyes had a hypnotizing quality about them. When he talked, his eyes seem to do all the communication.

  It was the Courageous Leader who had managed to resurrect some of the dead. Their spirits, always wondering around their town had heard the call and come answering to it. After that, for the last two months, they were plotting, the Courageous Leader being their ringleader.

  The Courageous Leader stood and addressed them, “My friends, the time has come. I have received word that Sulochana and Mohan have quiet competently finished off the bad doctor. By tomorrow noon, there will be sufficient carnage and chaos in this town to ensure that the authorities will be tied up. Then we will move in. I want this town to be taken latest by sunrise the day after. There will be a couple of er…accidents to ensure that once the carnage starts the town will receive no external help whatsoever. I have made arrangements for the same, so you need not worry about that quarter. Now, does everyone remember what they are supposed to do?”

  Everyone did. The instructions were passed on the night before and were fresh in everyone’s mind. Only two of them were walking the earth as the undead for more than two weeks. Those were the two who truly understood the stakes. They knew it was not only about revenge, but also about survival in their second innings, in a manner of speaking. Every day they would feel their skins getting looser and looser, and their flesh slowly leaving the bones to hang by itself. Rays of sunshine brought a fresh wave of pain to their tired bodies and just as an infant understands that sucking at his mother’s nipple will satisfy his hunger, without understanding the nourishing qualities of milk, they understood that their old dead bodies needed fresh blood and flesh. The blood and flesh was to come from their oppressor’s bodies and if there were not enough of them, they could always invent more oppressors by inventing more crimes, perceived or real. After all it was a matter of survival. They were not about to let go of the second chance their Courageous Leader had provided them with.

  Chapter 3

  Ragini woke up to the sound of Rani calling out to her. She opened her eyes groggily, and raised her eyebrows. Rani was asking her something.

  “I said did you feel the cold in the night?” Rani asked her.

  “No, why?” Ragini said sitting up, but before Rani could answer Ragini understood. She was dressed in a pink pullover and blue Levis jeans. Quite a heavy nightwear for a night in June
.

  “A little, yes” Ragini said, wondering all the time about the dream. She had the dream last night, when she had seen Dr. Thombre being murdered in a rather gruesome fashion, but just how did she get into these clothes?

  “Or did you sneak up the room upstairs, to meet the handsome stranger last night?” Rani asked giggling.

  Ragini slapped her hand as she knew she was expected to and turned to the bathroom just outside the main house. Her cigarettes were in her pocket too, as she lit one and turned to the bathroom she noticed the flakes of red clay still clinging to the underside of her toes. She knew she had taken a shower just before going to bed, and she remembered washing her toes during her bath so where the hell did that clay come from? Was she walking in her sleep or was it more than just a dream? Ragini found the second possibility so horrifying, that she chose not to think about it.

  When she came back to the main room Alok, Rani, Rajat and Rakesh along with the stranger were all sitting cross legged on the floor, enjoying breakfast served by a lady who looked around a hundred and thirty her last birthday. She was serving omelets and bread along with tea, and as she poured Ragini a cup, Ragini noticed the stranger talking to Rajat animatedly.

  “Has to be the girls’ parents, I tell you.”

  “Boy what a way to go,” Rajat said and set the cup down.

  “What happened?” Ragini asked, even though she knew what it was all about. She felt a small trickle of sweat running down her backside.

  “The surgeon at the civil hospital got murdered,” Rajat said.

  “Well to call that murder would be an understatement,” The stranger said.

  Ragini looked at both of them questioningly. Alok lit a cigarette and told her “The doctor was found tied to his bed this morning, he died of an overdose of practically every medicine available in the dispensary, I have heard they even found a condom in his airway.”

  Ragini felt she had never come this close to a scream in her adult life. She remembered the methodic, almost obsessive way, with which Sulochana was tearing the wrapper on the Nirodh, so that she could stuff the condom down the almost dead doctors’ throat and felt sick.

  “Ragini are you ok?” Rani said with concern.

  “I am ok,” Ragini cupped her hands to her mouth, and whispered something in Rani’s ears .Rani nodded with womanly understanding. Ragini stood up and almost ran to the bathroom.

  IT WAS REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Her heart thudded with terror, as she emptied whatever her stomach contained, in the toilet. As she grabbed the cold porcelain and fought for breath, the scenes from last night played out before her eyes at an agonizingly slow speed. The long walk with the child, the sound of sea in her ears, the pleasant salty smell of sea in her nostrils and then the gruesome, if clever, murder of the civil surgeon. The child saying, it was a dream come true. Suddenly, she could not believe that just four days back she was in the bed of a five star hotel making out with two fat, overweight ad executives. This was a strange new world, very unlike the painful, occasionally nightmarish, but essentially mundane world, that she was used to all her life.

  ‘This is neverland,’ Ragini thought and started cackling till her cackles turned into a dry laughter that scared her more than anything that had happened last night.

  ***

  Chapter 4

  Standing under the hot sun, police Inspector Vinit Kamble had a feeling of surrealism. He was standing guard during the address by the state education minister to the science college on their foundation day. He was late for the ceremony because he was investigating the strangest murder of his career.

  And what a murder it was! The cleaning woman had found the doctor in that condition. She had screamed her guts out before fainting. Those screams had brought a couple of nurses and an unfortunate patient running upstairs. Thankfully, one of the two nurses did not faint and called the local police chowky. The constable on duty and the P.S.I. rushed to the hospital immediately. When Vinit reached there a little before eight in the morning, the doctor’s living quarters were smelly and messy like a butcher’s drainage. There was puke (contributed to by the nurse who did not faint, and the patient who did, and also the police constable, a veteran of thirty years on the force), there was blood dried over the doctor’s face and there was the unmistakable odor of body’s waste.

  More than the smells, what really made Vinit feel as if he was living out some kind of nightmare, was the method of murder. There were empty syringes lying near the bed. Some were stuck on the doctor’s forearms, on his stomach, and even on his forehead.When they removed the doctor’s body from the bed, Vinit found one syringe also inserted in Thmobre’s penis.

  The postmortem revealed that the doctor had died of asphyxiation and an overdose of different medicines. They found medicines for cough and cold, painkillers, a couple of laxative tablets, a few crushed antacids all inside Thmobre’s digestive tract. The airway was blocked with a badly crushed condom. They were doing an analysis on the doctor’s blood to find out the injections he was given. When Vinit thought he had seen enough, he headed back to Kumbhpur.

  The immediate suspects of the murder were obviously the parents of the little girl who had died just a day back. The mother was ruled out, since she herself was admitted to the district mental hospital because of hysteria. The local police arrested Damu, the girl’s father .He was sleeping off another bad hangover by the side of a field. He claimed innocence and Vinit believed him instinctively. Damu was an ignorant brute villager. If he wanted to avenge his daughter’s death, he would have mostly hacked the doctor to death with a saw. There was a gruesome symmetry to killing a quack with medicines. Somehow Vinit could not imagine this method occurring to a guy like Damu.

  And then there was the little matter of the footprints at the crime scene. Before his death, sometime during his torture, the doctor’s bladder had let go and when Vinit reached the place in the morning there was still a small pool of yellow urine near the foot of the bed. And there were faint tracks made by a bare foot in that urine from the foot of the bed to the door. The tracks were progressively fainter as they went farther, but near the bed they were still clearly visible to the naked eye.

  The tracks belonged to a child who could not have been more than three of four.

  Even if Vinit bought the idea of Damu killing the doctor using all the medicines, who was with him at that time? Damu’s other child was barely a year old and besides as drunk and stupid as Damu might have been, even he would have enough sense not to bring a child along on a murder . It did not wash, simple and clear as that.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ Vinit asked himself.

  Vinit Kamble was a good cop. He had studied hard for his exams and got through the front door in the department without greasing any palms. In the last eight years, he had made his reputation as a somewhat naïve, but honest, cop. He was known as one of the most tenacious officers in the rural force. He was a good family man, he loved his wife and one daughter dearly and his elderly father had no complaint from his only son. In eight years of police work, he had solved three murders, in one case tracking down the murderer all the way to a small village in Jharkhand.

  But something about this particular crime made him uneasy. It was not just the gruesomeness of the crime, it was the unspoken feeling that he could feel coming from people surrounding him. ‘The doctor got his just desserts,’ was the general feeling. Vinit knew why people would feel that way. Dr. Thombre was a drinking, skirt chasing, no good son of a bitch. In his mind, however that did not justify the crime. Not because of any feelings of sympathy towards the victim, but because he knew that when justice was delivered outside courts, it often became addictive. Very soon, you had every person making the decisions of right and wrong by themselves, and deciding punitive measures as retibution. There was a name for this kind of society, it was called anarchy.

  Standing under the hot sun, Vinit felt very, very uncomfortable. He suddenly wished he had taken his leave and go
ne to Pune, where his pregnant wife and daughter were staying with her parents. Something about the town was spooking him.

  He would have been a lot more spooked if he knew he was about to be shot at by one of his subordinates in another minute or so.

  Ragini emerged out of the bathroom to find the stranger standing outside. She smiled at him politely, and started towards the house when the stranger spoke.

  “I wouldn’t tell them about last night if I were you Ragini.”

  Ragini took a moment to understand, and then she turned towards him slowly and lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about,” she said, even though the way the stranger was smiling, she knew he knew.

  “Oh but you do darling, the walk on the road at night, the change of dress from the see through nightie to the pullover and jeans, the murder of the doctor, all that jazz!” The smile never faded from the stranger’s face.

  Ragini continued to smile and Neeraj’s admiration for the woman grew in multiples. He knew the moment Ragini left the room that she was not making a visit to the bathroom to attend to some feminine hygiene issues, as she had indicated to everyone. This was one woman who made a living out of not letting other people know her inner feelings. Neeraj could identify with such people.

  “You were there too,” it was a statement not a question.

  “Yes I was. Only I was involved into it a bit more than you were” Neeraj stamped his cigarette and walked towards the house. Ragini watched him and reflected.

  That very moment Neeraj’s nemesis was entering the municipal limits of Kumbhpur.

  Chapter 5