by Sakiv Koch
Smast turned his head to look at her. Somehow, this piece of amazing information didn’t surprise him too much.
“That man, who was little better than a beggar on the streets before your father—.” This jolted Smast. She seldom ever made any mention of his father. Smast had long ago given up asking about him. Nina would start muttering, mumbling, scratching her face, pulling her own hair out by its roots whenever Smast requested any information regarding his father, whom Smast had never seen.
He had heard it said that she had gone crazy before Smast was born. That craziness manifested itself in several small things every now and then, but it erupted in full force whenever she was faced with anything associated with her late husband. That was the reason she had no belongings of his, no photographs or portraits.
She had stopped speaking now and her eyes shone with that wet, dangerous light that made her unpredictable, brash. “Your father…,” she said, speaking in a faded voice, as if she had suddenly gone far away, but then she snapped back. Her body grew taut. She whipped around in a half-circle and grabbed his upper arms. “It’s all about your father,” she said. “All about that man who abandoned me, who died and killed me and made me kill you, the man whom you never saw, the man whose spitting image you are, but whose image you have never seen.” She started breathing as quickly as though she had been running uphill.
The sound of a resounding slap filled the tiny house. She raised her hand to hit herself again, but Smast seized her arm and clung to it.
“Ma,” he said. “Do we have time for this—this—?”
“—this madness? No we don’t,” she completed his question and answered it, too. The gleam went out of her eyes and the tension out of her body. “In fact, we don’t have time for this or for anything else,” she said, sounding her normal, broken self once again. “They will come for you at seven o’clock in the morning, Smast.”
“And no, we can’t run away,” she said, answering his unspoken questions. “There’s nowhere for us to go. I don’t know it for certain, but I’m pretty sure someone is watching the hut, even in this weather. Why are they going to wait until morning to ‘come see you’? Darshan Singh was ready to visit you with his axe as soon as he learned it was you who had dared to hit his god. Aside from poor bonded labourers like me, he also bosses over half a dozen goons, all of whom materialised at his side within minutes of his sending the word for them to get ready and get going.
“I watched all of this with increasing dread. I knew pleading with Darshan Singh to spare you, or even to be gentle with you, would only increase his pleasure in his pleasurable task. As I said earlier, there was a reason Pintu came to Darshan Singh after getting kicked in the teeth, instead of going to his parents. That stupid boy knew, with uncanny shrewdness, that Darshan Singh wouldn’t pause to judge and condemn Pintu for letting someone get the better of him. There was only one way I could protect you…”
Smast’s heart started to behave like a drunken athlete—staggering, speeding up, leaping, stopping, sprinting.
“I sneaked upon him when he was busy expounding upon the tortures he meant to inflict upon my child. Snatching his axe from that coward’s hands was easier than I thought it would be. I raised the axe in air with the aim to open up his skull to the downpour. That would have served two purposes: ended a vile monster’s life and given rise to a much more serious crime than yours for everyone to focus their attentions upon.
“The startled goons didn’t have the time and the courage to stop me. Very few things in the world could have saved Darshan Singh’s life. A few mercenaries wielding wooden clubs didn’t number amongst those things.
“The thing that did save his life was extremely unexpected, greatly shocking. It was a voice, a calm, measured voice speaking with a deliberate insolence. It simply said: “Rotten eggs.” That voice not only arrested my arms, it froze the blood in them. The axe dropped from my nerveless fingers and fell upon Darshan Singh’s foot.
“He grasped his bleeding foot in both his hands and started hopping around while shrieking in his little girl’s voice at the top of his lungs. I had wanted to smash his head open; nothing happened to the head. I had wanted to do nothing to his foot, it got badly hurt. That’s how life inverts things at times.
“Sona came forward into the small circle of the raindrop-saturated light cast by the nearest field lantern. A servant held a large, black umbrella over her head, so that I couldn’t see her face at first.
“Everyone started greeting their majestic mistress; even Darshan Singh let go of his bloody foot to fold his hands in a namaste, but she paid no mind to anyone. She didn’t look at me, she didn’t address me, for which I am extremely grateful. When that woman makes you the focus of her attention, your skin crawls, your soul shrivels, the gods abandon you to your Sona-carved fate, and you want your existence to end. But she was, or she pretended to be, interested only in her son.
“‘I witnessed your little skirmish with that boy, my darling son,’ she said to Pintu in mocking, contemptuous tones. ‘You thought it beneath your dignity to grapple with him, even though he weighs a fraction of your considerable tonnage. You are a tiger only until your prey shows you its teeth.’
“Pintu, whom Darshan Singh had thawed out of his shock with considerable effort, froze again. ‘Come home with me, Pintu, I have a good salve for your wounds,’ she told him. Even in that bad light, we saw the boy quail at her words. She came forward, took hold of his arm and started to drag him away. At the very verge of the light, she turned back, shoved aside the stem of her umbrella and bestowed a look upon me. I can’t describe that look or its impact upon me, Smast. It lasted just for a moment, but I’ll carry its weight to my pyre.
“‘Wait until seven in the morning before you go to see her boy,’ she commanded Darshan Singh, who stood at a little distance, trying to manfully stifle his girlish moans. ‘Y-yes, Maalkin,’ he said, visibly crestfallen at having to postpone the quenching of his thirst for nearly eleven hours. ‘And don’t dare touch him when you are there,’ this command struck him like a second fall of the axe upon his injured foot. His mouth worked, but no squeals issued out of it.
“You may think it impossible, Smast, but I was even more astonished than him. That woman, my sister-in-law, was never the one to soften her blows…my sister-in-law…”
A clump of straw fell from the hut’s abused roof and landed onto the oil-lamp. It ate up the flame with a hungry sizzle and drank up all the oil. Blinded tendrils of an acrid smoke curled in the darkness and stung the backs of their throats.
In that cough-infested stillness, in that complete sensory blankness, as though time had just ended or was just beginning, there was a noiseless implosion, deep within Smast’s chest. Like a new, personal big bang.
5: A Venomous Welcome
Smast’s thoughts ran themselves into complex knots and tangles. Truth dazed him. Future terrified him. But that vast, immense force compressed up deep inside him — the first inkling of whose existence he had gotten while creating his model-house earlier that evening — started to expand. It grew into a large, warm pocket around his heart, driving away a part of the cold dread that clutched it.
“I went mad nearly fifteen years ago,” Nina spoke in the dripping darkness, not bothering to relight the lamp. “It’s just my awareness that I am mad that keeps my surviving sanity from leaving me altogether. I’ve not been an ideal mother, Smast — no, don’t try to deny the truth, especially since you don’t know the truth. I’m not speaking about material deprivation alone. I’ve kept you deprived of knowledge also, the knowledge of your true legacy. I can’t pre-judge whether this knowledge will arm you against whatever is coming or whether it will harm you more by making you wistful, bitter.
“I have been trying to make this judgement ever since you started to understand and express things, and I still remain largely undecided. Besides, you know how difficult it is for me to speak of him —” She fell silent. Smast knew it wasn’t just difficu
lt for her, it was literally maddening; it made her crazier.
Smast got up, groped for the tin mug, filled it from an earthen pot, and brought it to Nina. He said nothing, but he knew that she would either conquer or defeat herself tonight, with the same end result. She drank up the entire mug and refilled it noisily from one of the streams flowing in from the roof.
“Water,” she said. “It was water that took him away. He chose to flow with it. He abandoned me for—for—” She started to mutter, becoming agitated again, but at least she was no longer inflicting violence upon herself.
“They’ll be here exactly at seven, Ma,” he reminded her gently.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “And we don’t own a clock. Ha, ha. But I’m done dilly-dallying, Smast. Your forefathers have been the prime landlords of this town for generations.” Smast absorbed this unlikely information, so incongruous with the tattered fabric of his life, without comment. He didn’t want to derail his mother with expressions of wonder and questions of disbelief. Her act of reviving what she had killed and buried so deep in her heart such a long time ago was a superhuman endeavour.
“Your grandfather, Shri Somdatt Anand, inherited considerable wealth from his father. Lands, buildings, cash, gold, cattle. He was a good man with just one flaw — he was vainglorious in the extreme. He was a philanthropist, but his charity always came stamped with his name, whereas true charity is supposed to be made in complete secrecy. He was more interested in what people were saying about him than in what he was doing for them.
“His donations and endowments became legendary in the entire province. Since it had self-glorification as the driving force behind it, his philanthropy was misdirected, miscalculated, ruinous. An unusually long spell of draught reduced his income drastically. He was forced to sell some of his lands at throwaway prices. He got behind on his tax payments. For the first time in centuries, an Anand was forced to borrow money. And then, he needed to borrow more just to service the initial loan.
“The rates of interest were exorbitant. The men he had helped all his life not only turned away when he approached them for help, but they also laughed at him, scorned him for his blindness. From being called a devta, a saint, he was now universally proclaimed a fool. The stress, the disappointment got to him fairly quickly. He fell ill and died at the age of forty-two, leaving behind mountains of debt for his motherless children.
“He had two boys, three years apart in age — seventeen and fourteen at that time. The e-el-elder one…” Her words trailed off; she was now doing the verbal equivalent of walking on burning coals barefoot.
“The elder one was my father,” Smast stated in an effort to help her along. She nodded.
“Yes, your father,” she said, her essence leaving their hut for some haunt of misery far, far away, while her body remained in it. “Your father, Ravi Anand…,” she gulped and strained as the name left her lips, uttered after more than fourteen years. “…it’s so hard to speak of him without wanting to die and go wherever he went…before meeting him, I couldn’t believe that such a man could exist outside of young girls’ dreams…he was the complete opposite of his father in that he sought self-effacement in everything he did…he simply didn’t know how to give up, and that trait — not being able to give up — led to his untimely death…”
She sipped the rainwater from her mug and remained silent for a long time. Something inside Smast was tearing its moorings and rising above the lowly abuse-zone where he had dwelt all his life, crawling on his belly, getting kicked all the time.
“The draught continued to parch the earth for a full year after your grandfather’s death, but your father had pitted himself against the army of adversity — both manmade and natural — arrayed at the gate of his mortgaged home.
“He fought relentlessly, indefatigably and smartly, exploiting such few, unimportant, forgotten assets that had somehow remained unencumbered. In a few years, he started to defeat rank upon rank of the great enemy. He was able to do this in spite of harbouring a saboteur in his home—his younger brother, Raj Anand—”
“Pintu’s father,” Smast muttered in understated wonder.
“Yes,” she confirmed, “Pintu’s father. He was an unruly boy with twin streaks of violence and extravagance. Ravi tried to be both a father and a mother to Raj: Ravi became a pair of overly-indulgent parents. He couldn’t give much time to his brother, for the simple reason that he spent most of his waking hours working, but he hardly ever said no to any of Raj’s unending demands.
“The younger boy began to give full vent to the dark desires that he had been forced to suppress when his father was alive. He began with the usual addictions: gambling, drinking, and womanising. Before his brother had a clue to what was happening, Raj graduated to threatening and beating up both his creditors and debtors. One day, he attacked a woman they ironically called ‘untouchable.’
“Your father, who had shielded Raj from the consequences of his actions earlier, couldn’t condone this crime. Raj went to prison for the first time at the age of eighteen. Raj had expected Ravi to spend a little money and save him again. He had asked Ravi for forgiveness, but your father wouldn’t budge from his decision to let the law take its course. Someone told me he cried for over an hour after the police took his brother away.
“‘My brother has a heart of gold,’ he would say to everyone while Raj languished in prison. ‘He never knew a mother’s love; our father also didn’t have much time for him. He’s just love-deprived and will come around one day.’ Ravi never paused to think that he, too, had had the same deficit of love that Raj had had. When someone pointed this fact out to him, your father said, ‘See, Raj is repenting his behaviour. A man full of remorse is a reformed man. All he needs is a wife to fill the blank spaces of his heart with her love and he’ll stop doing such destructive things.’
“When Raj returned home after eight months, Ravi started to search for a suitable match for him in good earnest. No respectable man would allow that hoodlum to see his daughter’s face, let alone marrying her. In the end, they had to settle for a woman who had as many question-marks hanging around her as her future husband did. Sona was the youngest daughter of a butcher who had been hanged the previous year for killing a man in a drunken brawl. Some people said she, along with two of her seven sisters, worked the streets of Devgarh—”
“What does that mean?” Smast asked. “Did she sweep the streets?”
“I’ll tell you its meaning some other day,” Nina replied evasively. “Besides, your father believed it to be a malicious rumour. Anyway, Sona consented to the proposal and became Raj’s bride. She didn’t exactly bring out the gold in her husband’s heart, but she somehow managed to keep him from committing any new mischief. In Sona, Raj found the kind of companion a normal man generally doesn’t seek and doesn’t find in his wife: he could gamble, drink and smoke with her; he could quarrel ‘colourfully’ with her, which is to say, he got back plenty of what he gave to her. There were other things they did together, things I wouldn’t mention to you even if I knew fully about them.
“The main thing is that your father’s objective had more or less been met through this marriage of two devils. He could now turn his complete attention back to his beloved work. He never asked Raj to lend him a helping hand, nor did Raj volunteer to do so.
“Ravi didn't stop until he had singlehandedly destroyed that army of adverse circumstances that had killed his father and dimmed the Anands’ glory. He had not only regained every lost thing, but he had also built a much higher pinnacle of wealth and success than any of his forefathers had ever done.
“He was twenty-nine when he felt the need to marry. Raj and Sona had had a son by this time. Apart from taking what they needed (and much, much more) from Ravi, they interacted very little with him. He could have easily married any mighty lord’s daughter. Pundits buzzed around him with proposals from some of the most renowned families of the province, whispering tantalising sums of dowry in his ears.
“One day, he was coming out of the mansion of one such family when he saw a young woman cycling down the street. She was still mastering the art of balancing and steering the vehicle simultaneously. A stray dog started chasing her while barking ferociously. The woman screamed, wobbled and then toppled, squeezing her eyes tight shut in anticipation of the myriad pains of a dog-bite, a jarring fall, a damaged cycle, and a deep humiliation.
“The dog’s growling suddenly turned into a yelp and it scampered away. The bicycle magically stilled halfway through its fall and a thrilling touch braced her shoulder. She opened her eyes and saw the breathtakingly striking man she had seen crossing the street a few moments ago. He stood gripping the handlebars of the tilted cycle with one hand, his other hand steadying the precariously off-balance young woman. He straightened the vehicle as easily as though both it and the woman riding it were made of paper.
“That’s how your father and mother met, Smast. He prevented a minor accident I was about to have and made my entire life an endless collision with agony…
“I was an orphan whom a very loving, very caring family had adopted at an early age. Ravi met my adopted father, a clerk in the postal department, the day after our little encounter and asked for my hand in marriage, making me the luckiest and the most unfortunate woman in the world. We got married after a very short but extremely sweet courtship of just three months.
“He had paid off the mortgage against his ancestral home years ago, but he wanted to build a new house for us —”
Smast's heartbeat began to accelerate. “The house Pintu lives in?”
“Yes, that house,” she confirmed. Smast shot off the cot and then dropped back onto it.