by Sakiv Koch
The rescuers who came running to the scene didn’t hear him crying, for the simple reason that he bore his pains without making loud sounds. In any case, they would not have paid him any mind, even if he had been advertising the gravity of his injuries as volubly as Pintu, the important victim of the accident.
But, upon the whole, when the pandemonium quieted down and Smast was left alone to hobble his way back to his hut, he was not altogether sad and angry: Premchand’s Gaban lay facedown in a puddle of muddy water. It was damaged beyond redemption, completely unfit to go back into Pintu’s ‘chest of boasts.’ Smast knew that after it dried up, the book would swell up just like his ankle (which had already begun the process), but the bloated pages would still be largely readable, just as his leg would carry him around in spite of its torn ligaments and tendons.
There were other ‘treasures’ still strewn about, items released from both of Pintu’s trunks. These things — books and well-packed items of food alike — were in a much better shape than Gaban, but Smast didn’t touch, didn’t even look twice at any of them, because none of these belongings of the fat boy’s were destined for the garbage bin.
Except for the two smashed up trunks.
3: The Thieving Rat
It was a full moon night. Dark clouds forcefully veiled the earth’s natural satellite, nullifying its fourteen-day-long labour in attaining its maximum luminosity. Smast sat working by the pond’s shore. He had a small bonfire going on a bed of rocks, getting from it both light and warmth.
He had a hill of tinder wood heaped behind the bonfire, to keep it alive for as long as he needed to. And he would need it for a long time to complete his ‘project’. He had Neena’s tools — a saw, a hammer, some nails — from the days of her construction of their hut, assets that had somehow escaped being traded off for some battered books or coarse sorghum flour.
The large stick that Smast used as a crutch lay across his lap. Mohan Ram, the only family friend Smast’s family had, had fashioned it out of a tree branch. Three weeks after the accident, Smast’s ankle still shied away from taking its full quota of weight. His head was better, maybe because it didn’t have to bear any burden except for the crushing-and-yet-weightless load of his thoughts and his dreams.
The world was a more habitable place because Pintu was confined to his palatial home, eating and sleeping his way back to perfect health, which (unfortunately) hadn’t been damaged much in the first place. The world was a more wonderful place, because Smast had finished reading Gaban and was re-reading it slowly now, by the light of his flickering fire glowing at the edge of the water and re-glowing on its surface.
Smast’s bonfire defied the clouds to open up, to drench it out of existence, but the mighty containers of water adrift in the skies were content with frustrating the ambitions of the even mightier moon and didn’t take the little fire’s challenge seriously.
Smast worked upon his project for a bit and then read for a bit. He took a roasted peanut from a small paper bowl every five minutes or so, trying to make his ‘treat’ last for as long as he could. He couldn’t remember having had as good a time as he was having at this particular moment. The only breach of unease in the small fort of his joy was the thought of his mother slaving away in her master’s paddy fields. The transplanting of saplings would go on well past midnight, and Smast wasn’t obliged to be home until Nina got back from her literally back-breaking work.
He laid his misshapen book aside, put another precious pearl of a peanut into his mouth, and resumed work upon the model house he was building out of wood planks. The plan for the model came from his heart, as though its blue-print had been etched there for years, and the planks for it came from the remains of Pintu’s broken trunks. Although Pintu’s servants had salvaged everything else from the crash site, they had left the pieces of the smashed-up trunks to rot where they had fallen, just as they would have left the copy of Premchand’s masterpiece behind, had Smast not scavenged it for himself before their arrival.
He wished he had more material at hand, but overall, he was content with his handiwork. A beautiful bungalow stood ensconced in its compound wall, complete with lawns and even a miniature body of water. He had used real grass to create the house’s green areas and real glass in its windows. The glass came from the town’s waste-dump, as did the nearly empty pots of glue and scraps of tin.
He had no idea what he would do with his ‘dream house’ once it was completed, but he felt a strange fulfilment in the act of creating it. It was as though something extremely immense had been coiled and compressed up in his soul without his being aware of it. This vastness was now unfurling itself, making its presence known, putting forth its first signature.
He put the finishing touches to an overhanging gallery on the first floor and, as his thin arm drew back from the miniature building, a fat leg smashed into it. The entire structure rose in air and then settled back with a tinkling of once-broken glass breaking again. The angles skewed out of true and the gallery sagged down.
The shoe-clad calamity struck again, razing down the entire front section of the compound wall this time. Smast sat stupefied, his mouth agape, his hands frozen over his facedown book and his bowl of peanuts. A pudgy hand got into his hair and tilted his head skywards, forcing him to look at a face twisted with that brand of malicious pleasure that had caused so much destruction and pain three weeks ago.
“Didn’t think I would catch you out, Rat?” Pintu asked, retaining his hold on Smast’s hair, while eyeing Smast’s creation with a curious eye. The fat boy’s head was swathed in yards of bandage. Underneath all that cloth, there is just a pinprick of a wound, if that, the thought formed in Smast’s darkening, crumbling mind of its own accord.
“Hm, what have you built here?” Pintu asked, a shade of thoughtfulness entering his voice. Smast’s head jerked, as though an absolute stranger, an alien, had addressed him. Pintu’s voice, with something approaching thoughtfulness in it, was indeed a stranger’s voice.
“It’s just a model house,” Smast said.
“IT’S JUST A MODEL HOUSE, WHAT?,” Pintu thundered, vehemently and loudly enough to scare the birds roosting in the trees around the pond. His face darkened with a particular type of anger, reserved for a particular type of omission.
“It’s just a model house, Sir Pintu,” Smast said, kicking himself inwardly for making bad things worse by his crass absentmindedness.
“What did you make this model house for?” Pintu asked next.
“For no particular reason, Sir Pintu,” Smast replied.
“No particular reason equals a general reason, it does, it does!” Pintu said petulantly, showing off his learning, daring anyone to deny the validity of his deep observation.
“It does, yes, it does, Sir Pintu,” Smast echoed, eager to please the privileged bully.
“Then give me the general reason for which you built that model house!” Pintu commanded, taking immense pride in his cleverness.
“It-it is just my d-dream house, Sir Pintu,” Smast faltered.
“Meaning thereby?”
“That I sometimes dream of living in such a house one day, Sir Pintu,” Smast said, having a foreboding that he was plummeting down the most dangerous path he had ever taken, but unable to stop himself in spite of his desire to change tack and speak something, anything, other than the truth.
“You mean,” Pintu said, his voice suddenly ice-cold, “you are dreaming of living in my home one day?”
“N-no, Sir Pintu.”
“Why did you make the model of my home then? You want to take it over one day?!”
Smast sat stunned. He could say nothing. He had never seen Pintu’s home; nobody had ever described it to him. Smast’s surmise was that even though Pintu sounded extremely, gravely serious, he must be joking.
In his confusion, in his extreme desperation to appease the cruel beast, in his foolish but fervent hope of saving his dream home from further destruction, Smast laughed a tiny, nervou
s laugh in anticipation of the punchline, which Pintu would deliver after the obligatory pause.
Pintu delivered a punch instead. To the head. “You thankless bastard, you are laughing at me, mocking me?” He said through gritted teeth after knocking Smast down.
The fire spluttered, as though outraged at this senseless cruelty. Lying on the ground, Smast felt the first spark of an emotion that, until that night, had never materialised in Pintu’s presence. Watery traces of an impotent anger always bubbled weakly in Smast’s blood after the overbearing, overweight boy would leave the scene. Smast said nothing and sat up.
“Speak up, you thankless bastard!” Pintu yelled. Smast held his tongue, even though he knew he would only enrage Pintu further by not responding to him in any way. He began to gather his things and started to get up with the aid of his crutch.
It was then, as he struggled with the process of attaining the upright position, that he felt the change in the quality of the furious silence that emanated from Pintu.
“What is that you are holding in your left hand and trying to hide from my keen sight?” the brute asked in silky tones, his bulging eyes gleaming in the firelight.
Smast felt a chill sprint down his spine. A cold sweat beaded his forehead. The foetus of his righteous anger expired in the womb of his circumstantial guilt.
“Show me,” Pintu murmured, softly.
Smast extended his left hand and exhibited the fat boy’s own book to the fat boy.
Pintu grinned with an ecstasy of pleasure. His eyes bulged some more in his excitement. His hands stole behind his back and clasped themselves there as he rose to his toes in an attitude of magnanimity. “Thief,” he said as though he were bestowing praise upon Smast for some rare talent. He then looked more closely at the other things heaped around Smast’s ruined artefact.
He swooped down upon the paper bowl, scooped it up, and emptied its contents into his mouth in one go. “Are those not the lids of my trunks, thief?” he asked, still speaking conversationally, while munching upon Smast’s peanuts. “Yes, they are,” he answered his own question. “The thief stole my book, the thief looted my trunks and the thief wants to steal my home. Huh, you thieving rat, isn’t that right?”
The thieving rat said nothing. A darkness the likes of which he had never known before in all the dark years of his life was filling his numbed heart and mind.
“And that mother of yours is in on it, isn’t she, Rat? That scheming, greedy bitch—,”
That heavy tree-limb, Smast’s crutch, smacked Pintu on the mouth, silencing him effectively by bloodying his lips and breaking two of his teeth.
4: The Abandonment of Gods
Smast fled with terror lodged in his chest as palpably as a bullet. What terrified him the most was the absolute silence reigning behind him. Pintu should have raised a racket loud enough to reach and breach the clouds, but he wasn’t so much as whimpering.
Smast had used up an incredible excess of courage—a courage he didn’t even possess—in silencing the bully. He didn’t have the residual bravery remaining to turn his head and see just how effectively he had done the silencing. He moved awkwardly, painfully, his breathing beginning to shorten just after running a hundred yards up the same tragic road down which he had hurtled with the pony cart such a short while ago.
Now that the dwindling fire was no longer his—just as the other things he had left behind were no longer his, including, very likely, his freedom—rain came down to meet the thirsty earth with a vengeance.
Smast didn’t stop moving until he reached his hut, which, as always, was engaged in the egalitarian act of distributing to its floor some of the liquid bounty its roof was receiving from the skies. He ran in, banged the pitiful door shut behind him and leaned against it. He doubled-over, holding his sides, panting. His ankle was on fire and his head felt as though Pintu were pounding it continually with his big fist.
His heart continued to beat furiously even when his breathing normalised. He knew he had fathered an absolute, undiluted, and unbridled disaster; he knew that the consequences of his unthinkable, impossible crime were about to strike, crush, and annihilate not just him, but also his unsuspecting, innocent mother.
He wished she were home already so that they could get away in the double-layered invisibility afforded by the thunderstorm and the darkness. He then wished he’d not struck Pintu at all. From there, his wishful thinking sprouted a hundred, equally useless branches: that Pintu had not ventured out tonight; that he, Smast, had not ventured out tonight; that Pintu hadn’t been born at all; that he, Smast, hadn’t been born at all and, savagely, with a savage, short-lived pleasure, that the good-for-nothing young demon had fallen dead from Smast’s blow. This way, the identity of his killer would remain a mystery forever. Hopefully that’s the reason that human drum made no sound, he thought. But the flimsy, bloody hope couldn’t arrest his rising panic.
Someone rapped at the door. Smast almost fainted with fright. “Get away from the door, Smast,” Nina said, gently pushing the ragtag assembly of knotty planks and warped boards that served as their main door. Smast somehow couldn’t bring himself to lean away. Nina had sounded calm and collected, but she was back hours before the scheduled time of her return.
“Smast,” she called again, her inches-away mouth producing a voice hardly audible in the din the water made in falling. Everything makes a sound when it falls, Smast’s unhinged mind formed the thought, I shall, too, when they cut me down.
He stepped away and allowed his mother to enter, sure that a mob of angry servants and armed policemen was at her heels, hungering to lynch him then and there. He noted with a shallow relief that she was alone. She moved past him and lit a small oil lamp, placing it in a dry zone amongst many streaming leaks.
The small flame ducked and shivered with every gust of the wind that barged into the hut through the network of cracks running in its mud walls. A thirsty tin cup rattled desolately against a hungry tin pot. A plump lizard lurked in the shade behind the lamp to swallow members of the curious moth parties that hovered over the flame.
Nina was drenched. She looked reasonably calm, given the turbulent circumstances. He watched her eyes to see if they were shedding their own rain, but there was too much moisture on her face to clearly make out anything of that sort.
She took his upper arm in her hand, walked him to his cot and sat him down. She remained silent while she towelled her hair and face dry, not bothering to change her dripping clothes for the simple reason that the one other sari she possessed was draped over the frayed clothesline strung behind the hut.
She was a tall woman in her mid-thirties. In spite of her haggard face and prematurely grey hair, she still retained some of the attractiveness that had graced her before she was widowed. Even though she usually uttered her words from under a perpetual cloud of exhaustion, she had the firm, modulated voice of a gifted narrator.
“That boy, Pintu, came to the fields where we were working,” she said, sitting down beside Smast and taking his hand in hers, her grip firm, reassuring. It had a calming effect upon his heart, which began to lessen the rate of its lurching and its thudding.
“He was walking more like an automaton than a young boy. Everyone ran to him out of curiosity. Not out of concern, just out of curiosity. I also went with my fellow peasants, even though I felt neither concern nor curiosity, but not going would have made me stand out. So I went.
“The first person to reach him, of course, was Darshan Singh, the fat supervisor, the only person to be driven by actual concern for the fat boy. There’s a reason Pintu went to the fields and not to his parents, and that reason is Darshan Singh. Darshan carried a lantern in his hand and he examined his master’s son by its fitful light.
“Although Pintu’s injuries were extensive — swollen, bleeding lips and probably a couple of missing teeth — he appeared more affected by shock than pain. He didn’t respond to the urgent questions Darshan Singh asked him in his thin, girlish voice. After
several minutes of just standing there, blinking and bleeding in the rain, Pintu simply raised his arm and pointed a finger at — me. So much for my wish to not stand out!”
Smast gasped and started to say something. Nina squeezed his hand and went on: “Darshan Singh was practically dancing with mounting frustration and fury all this while. ‘Just tell me the name, the first letter of the name, just give me a hint of his name, anything, anything, and I’ll drag that bastard, whoever he is, dead or alive, by his hair to this place and then break every tooth in his mouth, even if I do it to his corpse!’ he was saying just before Pintu pointed at me and stunned all the fifty-three people present there, including that hellhound, our supervisor.
“Darshan Singh was puzzled, as was everyone else, by this. I had been there with them all day long. How could I have done such a thing? But I wasn’t confused even for a second. In fact, I’ve been fearing such a thing for years.” She squeezed Smast’s hand again to forestall his protest. “I know, Smast, that you thought yourself incapable of doing any such thing even in a dream, but I knew it was a matter of time before that boy incited you enough to get the shock of his life, not to speak of an unbecoming gap in his teeth.” She almost laughed, but the sound was a hybrid of a sob and a chuckle.
“It took Darshan’s devious mind half a minute to decipher the meaning of Pintu’s silent accusation. When he did, Darshan Singh jiggled on the spot with an anger so intense, so disbelieving that his large face went extremely red and he appeared very likely to suffer a stroke. He ran to the tool-shed and came back with an axe, slamming its haft into his palm again and again.”
I’ll make a sound, too, when they cut me down, the chilling thought flashed through Smast’s mind again. “He said nothing to me,” Nina continued to speak. “He just grinned horribly and showed me the axe to tell me volumes without saying a word.” She paused. “That man, who was once our servant, who once touched my feet in salutation every day…”.