by Sakiv Koch
“What’s wrong, son?” Nina asked, a little alarmed. She groped for the matches again and relit the lamp after removing the stray straw from its bowl and replenishing it with a little oil, while Smast told her about the model-house he had built and about Pintu’s claim that it was exactly like Pintu’s house.
The clouds continued to bombard the earth with barrage after barrage of water, making it hard to believe that such a phenomenon as a draught could exist in nature.
“Your father designed that house himself. He literally built that house with his own hands,” Nina said slowly, coming back to sit besides her son. She took his hands in hers. “He lives on in you, Smast,” she said. “You would be his spitting image if you were not so malnourished, my child. I wish I had realised this miraculous fact earlier … you may not have been forced to lead this beggar’s life then …” She was sinking back into her usual quagmire of guilt and bereavement.
“Look at me, Ma,” Smast appealed to her. She looked at him, saw the warm smile on his face, and pulled herself together.
“On the first day of my new life as Mrs. Ravi Anand, there was a huge uproar in Raj’s portion of the old ancestral mansion. Raj and Sona were screaming curses at each other. From the raucous sounds that mutilated the joyous air of my new home, I judged there were blows involved as well.
“I followed my husband to the hall where they fought each other with unbelievable malice and violence. I stopped at the threshold and watched from the corridor. There were a couple of maturing bruises on Sona’s face and neck; she was bleeding from her mouth and her nose. But she wasn’t crying, she didn’t even look daunted or shocked. I looked at Raj’s face and saw a long, deep scratch, starting from beneath his left eye and running to his jaw. The front pocket of his shirt hung torn and flapping in the crosswind blowing through the hall.
“They went for each other’s throats again, but Ravi intervened and pushed them apart. ‘You two should be ashamed of yourself, fighting like wild animals when you should be welcoming your sister-in-law,’ he reprimanded them and then turned to give me an apologetic smile.
“The violent husband and wife swivelled their heads in perfectly synchronised moves and fixed their combined gaze upon me. In that moment, their mutual animosity vanished as completely as though it had never existed. Their hands crept towards each other and their fingers intertwined. That look…,” A note of fear crept into Nina’s strong voice. “Pure, unadulterated, poisonous hatred dripped from their malevolent eyes like water from wet clothes hung to dry in the sun.”
6: Inside the Cobras’ Nest
“Imagine a beautiful face with a radiant glow upon it. There is a small pustule right in the middle of the forehead. The pus-filled pimple distracts you at first, but you are too completely lost in the beauty of the face to be greatly disturbed by its one blemish. The first few months after my marriage were like that beautiful face. The pustule was Raj and Sona’s antagonism towards me, but I was too immersed in my own bliss to give their meaningless hatred much thought.
“My father had gifted me one lovely cow calf as my wedding gift. He could barely afford it, and both Ravi and I had begged him not to strain his means in giving us anything. But Father wouldn’t listen to our protests. ‘You’re my child,’ he said, ‘you can’t stop me from giving you a small token of my great love for you.’
“I loved that little animal deeply and had aptly named it Dulari. One day, Raj got more drunk than usual and went to the cowshed where Dulari lived with the rest of our cows. He owned a horsewhip, which he had taken with him to the cowshed. He singled out Dulari and started flogging her mercilessly. The herdsman came running in at hearing the calf’s piteous cries. He begged Raj to stop, but each appeal of the herdsman increased Raj’s fury and he beat my poor Dulari even harder. At last, the old man snatched Raj’s whip out of his hands and tried to run out of the shed.
“Raj caught the herdsman after a few yards’ chase and beat him to within an inch of his life. He left the man writhing on the ground and went back for the animal. He raised his murderous arm to strike Dulari again, but a hand caught his arm and spun him around as though he were a puppet.
“Raj swore but his words froze at his lips when he saw his older brother. Ravi’s eyes blazed with an anger he had never felt before. A crowd had begun to assemble in the pastureland abutting the cowshed. Someone had run and summoned me, too. Sona was already there when I reached the scene. A few men were carrying away the herdsman. Raj quit pleading forgiveness when he saw me running to my poor Dulari, who watched me heartbreakingly with her big, wet eyes.
“‘Go to hell,’ he said to his brother. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’
“Ravi simply took hold of Raj’s left forearm and started to bodily tug him along. Raj exerted all his power to break Ravi’s hold. When he didn’t succeed, he swung his whip at Ravi. Ravi caught it as though it were a twig thrown at him by a small boy, pulled it out of Raj’s grasp and threw it away into the tall grass of the pastures.
“The crowd was growing in size. A couple of women-servants freed Dulari from my heartbroken embrace and promised to tend her well. I walked out of the cowshed and saw Raj taking hold of tree trunks and gateposts to prevent being dragged along like a wayward schoolboy. Ravi was immensely strong from his years of working in the fields; Raj’s grips were useless against his brother’s strength. Raj fell back to pleading and promising good behaviour once again, but nothing Raj said or did slowed down the rate of his involuntary advance through the town’s streets to the town’s police station.
“A throng of people followed the brothers. More people spilled out of their homes and shops, their disbelief turning into satisfaction as Ravi pulled Raj up the police station’s steps with such force that the younger brother’s heels skimmed air. Once they entered the building, Raj flew a short distance and landed painfully in an empty cell of the lockup.
“Ravi banged the door shut and turned the key in the lock himself. The station-in-charge, whose hands Ravi had greased so much on Raj’s account that generations of his children would be born with oily hands, watched Ravi with his mouth hanging open in sheer amazement. Ravi said nothing to him or to anyone else, turned around, and left the scary building.”
Smast’s spine straightened some more, his shoulders squared, and his chin elevated itself by a few degrees, as though declaring to the world that they would never bend, stoop or sink again for any reason whatsoever. He felt the power coursing through his veins grow perceptibly.
“He strode back to our house so fast that I had to literally jog to keep up with him. I looked over my shoulder and saw Sona following us. The expression on her face was unreadable, but she was watching us with an intensity that started an unpleasant tingling in my spine.”
Rain-chilled wind still swept through the hut—in from the cracks of one wall and out through the chinks in the other, but the gusts didn’t feel like lashes on Smast’s skin today. The little flame trembled in those tiny tornadoes and threw up quivering shadows all around them. Tonight, he looked upon the shadows as though they were moving art forms. Everything that had depressed or defeated or scared him until tonight started to fill him with a wonder, a happiness, a joy now.
“Ravi held his head high as we passed countless people murmuring, ‘you did the right thing’, ‘should have done it earlier’, ‘may that fiend never get out of jail’, ‘that beast can’t be your real brother’, etc.
“We reached our home in a few minutes and entered it together. Ravi took my hand in his as soon as we got out of the public eye. ‘I’m sorry, Nina,’ he said. ‘I’ll go take a look at Shyam Lal and then bring Dulari here—”
An explosive, disruptive sound of clapping in the entrance-veranda interrupted him. We turned around and saw Sona standing in the doorway, mock-applauding us. Her implacable mouth was curled on one side in a knowing, annoying, harsh half-smile, and her eyes were so hard you could have poked them with a stick and broken the stick without doing any harm to the eye
balls.
“‘So, what’s the motive, big brother?’ she asked Ravi in that slow, deliberate way of hers, her voice full of contempt.
“‘Dangerous animals should be kept caged,’ Ravi said calmly, unfazed by her barely-contained hostility.
“‘It’s not like he’s not broken a bone or two in the past,’ she said. ‘You never punished him, never humiliated him until tonight. On the contrary, you always shielded him by using your influence and your money. Is a dumb calf suddenly more important to you than your own brother? Your motive is standing right besides you, sir, ecstatic at having achieved her purpose.’
“This baseless accusation stunned me. How could this shameless woman tell such blatant lies to our faces? How could she blame us for her husband’s hate-propelled, monstrous crime?
“What she did next made my blood boil with a fury I found impossible to bridle. She spat on the floor, so close to our feet that a couple of inches here or there and her poisonous saliva would have physically besmeared Ravi’s shoes or mine.
“She walked out of the passage, once again slamming the palms of her hands into each other, making a travesty of the gesture of clapping. When the shock that had turned me into a stone wore off, I started to follow her with the intention of teaching her some manners. But Ravi restrained me by once more taking my hand in his. ‘Leave her be,’ he said. ‘She’ll be okay. She just needs some time alone.’
“That was your father’s blanket prognosis for every diseased person’s diseased behaviour — that they needed more time to be alright. As though being evil and being afflicted with common cold were equivalent things.
“‘I think we should just throw the thankless, rabid bitch out on the street,’ I told him. He burst out laughing at the choice of my words and probably also at the expression on my face, which, I’m sure, made me look like a rabid bitch myself. It pained me that he found my genuine anguish and rage funny, but I could do anything to amuse him, to distract him from the much greater anguish that I knew was tormenting him.
“So I took him into our front garden, asked him to wait there for a minute, and brought out my little notebook. He knew I wrote poems and stories, but I had not let him see anything I had written so far. I had been shy, diffident. When I started to read aloud to him, my ideas and my expressions felt ordinary, extremely childish to me. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but he listened with rapt attention and told me I was ‘marvellous’.
“After about two hours of dwelling in my make-believe world, we went to the site of our under-construction house. It was nearing completion at that time.” A thrill ran through Smast’s entire being once more at the mention of that place. “It gave rise to waking dreams in our hearts whenever we went there. On that evening, it acted as an additional layer of balm to soothe our aching (Ravi’s) and angry (mine) hearts, respectively.
“I was still seething at Sona’s cheap, intolerable act of figuratively spitting in our faces. We walked back to the ancestral home, where we were to live for just another seven months or so before shifting to our new home. I lay in our bed for hours, waiting for my husband to finally fall asleep, knowing it would be difficult for him to do so tonight and for many other nights to come. But he was emotionally so exhausted that he did fall asleep finally. I listened to his soft snoring for a few minutes and then tiptoed out of our room.
“A narrow brick passage, lit only by a small lamp hanging on a wall, led to the cobras’ nest where Sona and Raj lived in a separate section of the house. I wasn’t about to knock on her door, which was actually not her door at all. I shoved it so violently it hit a wall and rebounded at me. I was lucky not to have my teeth knocked out; the door smacked my hand which had smacked it in the first place. The action and reaction thing. The karma and phala thing, most crudely exemplified.
“This only served to fan my fury until I was fairly shaking with it. I stepped into the room and scanned it for my adversary. It was a large room, dimly lit and filled with incense smoke. The one candle burning in the far corner, beyond the bed, transformed its floor into a lake of inky darkness.
“The room appeared empty, except for Sona’s little boy, who lay sleeping dangerously close to the edge of the bed. The bedsheet was rumpled and wet. Clothes were scattered everywhere. Plates and utensils, some of them still containing old, cruddy remnants of food, provided disgusting company to the heaps of unwashed and smelly garments. It was hard to believe that I was in a part of my own home.
“Although everything was absolutely still, something was very wrong. Underneath the masking fragrance of the incense, there was a stink of rotting flesh and a salty whiff of blood. I went further into the room even though I felt an overpowering urge to run back to my husband.
“There was a curtained alcove in the wall to the left of the door. I drew the curtain aside, watching my hand tremble as it performed the simple-yet-extremely-hard action. I heard myself scream as I saw the contents of the alcove: six or seven headless birds lay in a heap. Streams of blood ran down the wall to pool on the floor near a mound of little heads. There were other objects strewn about: slices of lemons, green chillies, some larger bones, clumps of hair, and a bloodied handkerchief I recognised as Ravi’s from his monogram on it.
“I stood frozen. The dead stares of the birds made the same accusatory appeal to me that Dulari’s living eyes had communicated a few hours ago. The birds’ little beaks, gaping in everlasting shrieks, and their raggedly cut throats drove the last vestiges of courage from my pounding heart.
“I turned to leave. My scream had apparently disturbed the sleeping boy. He didn’t wake up, but he moaned and turned, edging even closer to the three feet high precipice of the bed. I dove for him but something heavy and pliable lying on the floor tripped me. I stumbled and pitched forward headlong, barely managing to avoid falling upon the child.
“I had forgotten all about the child by this time. The floor, or what lay down on it, gripped the entirety of my horror-tinged attention. Sona lay enshrouded in the blue, smoke-hazy shadows rippling on the cold stone floor. Her eyes glistened in the almost-darkness like a beast’s. Her black hair was spread out in a circle around her head, like dark rays of a black sun, and her mouth gaped like the beaks of the birds she had butchered.
“Though she emitted no sound, her body was convulsing powerfully. I started to inch backwards, wanting to get away from her, aiming to get out of that eerie, evil place. Something cold and strong grasped my ankle and almost tripped me again. I screamed once more.
“‘What’s the hurry, my dear sister-in-law?’ her voice asked me silkily as her hand restrained me forcibly. ‘You’re not welcome, but let’s have a little chat now that you are here. Would you like something to eat? A pigeon or a sparrow? Ha, ha, ha!’
“My anger flared up enough to shoulder a part of my fright aside. ‘You are the animal here,’ I said, jerking my ankle out of her hand and standing my ground, ‘you eat those dead birds.’
“‘Fiery,’ she said, continuing to lie on the floor.
“‘And how can I not be welcome in my own home, you dishonourable wretch? Do I need to remind you that you and your blood-thirsty wolf prowling in his prison cell are merely parasites here?’ My blood was warming up rapidly. ‘You belong in the sewer from which my husband rescued you. You filthy, stinky, mean bitch—.’ She sat up with a jerk and hissed at me like a snake. I gasped and took a step back.
“Sona’s mouth curled in that hateful half-smile of hers. Her hair fell in front of her face like a veil torn in the middle. ‘You’re going to be more fun to deal with than I had first thought,’ she said.
“‘Shut up and listen to me!’ I shouted, hiding both my fear and my shame at being afraid under loudness of voice and harshness of words. ‘If you ever dare to do anything remotely like your spitting act today, if you ever dare to insult or trouble my husband again, I promise you that you, your little brat, and your beastly husband will all join the number of the town’s beggars. I’ll personally throw you o
ut of my house. You bite the hand that feeds and clothes you, you stupid bitch? You should lick our boots and wag your tail at us day and night. All you and that wolf ever do is fight, chew, claw, and kick each other. Why are you now pretending to be desolate at his being put away?’
“Sona’s semi-smile was gradually shrinking in size. She ground her teeth; her eyes flashed and nostrils flared. I wasn’t cowed, not yet. I pointed towards the alcove. ‘And what butchery is this, you butcher’s daughter?’ I demanded, unable to stop myself from growing more acidic every moment. ‘Black magic won’t harm me and it won’t do you any good, you cruel twit! If you kill one more thing in this house, I will—’
“That’s as far as I got. Sona had begun to mutter something and was now rising to her feet in her stiff, slow way. At the same time, her boy finally tipped over and fell to the floor with a sickening thud.
“The child was clearly hurt and was bawling at the top of his lungs, but Sona paid him no mind. She didn’t hurry to get to her feet. She didn’t even turn her head to look at him. Her gigantic shadow rose and quivered on the wall behind her.
“She made a strange, clicking noise in her throat and came towards me. She didn’t rush at me. Her steps were slow, rigid. I was half a foot taller and at least twenty pounds heavier, but it was I who turned on her heel with a sob and fled like a hare from a wolf.
7: The Wolf Returns
“The small pustule on that beautiful face began to redden, widen, and weep. The radiant skin started to break out with other, identical acne…”
Smast fidgeted on his cot. “I’m sorry, Smast,” Nina said, “it’s the old poetic tendency that’s trying to dig its way out of its grave, but as you said, they’ll be here soon…I wonder if it will ever stop raining. Rains make me so uneasy…”
The flame fluttered and shrank, warning of its imminent demise if it were not given more oil for sustenance. The brave little light died of starvation after a minute, plunging the hut in total darkness again.