by Sakiv Koch
Smast looked at his father’s face and laughed, his chuckle sounding to his own ears like a madman’s chortle. He suddenly became aware of someone standing motionless near the dark fireplace.
“Mama brought out this portrait from the storeroom this morning,” Cat said, coming forward. “It used to hang here in the special room all the time until about two years ago, but then…,” she trailed off as several servants entered the palace and started lowering the chandeliers in order to light them up.
One of them got a log fire going in the fireplace. Yet another person, an old, tall man wearing a monkey cap, carried in a large tray laden with food. He placed the tray on a table and removed his cap, liberating a shock of cotton-white hair. It was Mohan Ram, Nina and Smast’s only friend in the entire world.
Mohan Ram looked keenly at Smast, taking in the battered portrait and the way Smast clutched it to his chest. He patted Smast lovingly on the head and gently pried his arms off the canvas. “Don’t worry, son,” he said in his baritone voice, which always brimmed with kindness, “the artist who painted it is passionate about it. He can mend it again. Go ahead and enjoy your dinner.” He turned and walked out of the palace, carrying Ravi’s portrait with him.
In a minute, the other servants also left. The dream palace was now illuminated with a two-toned light: the restless, intense blaze of the firelight, and the soft glow of the chandeliers. Although his hunger was intense, Smast’s first glance and first craving were for the library on the gallery above.
Cat observed that look of longing. “You can go up there and take any book of your choice,” she said. She was wearing a white frock and a too-large-for-her-neck necklace of pearls, obviously her mother’s. She held a large doll pressed under her right arm, and a canvas bag was slung on her left shoulder.
Vastly more noticeable than the presence of these things on her person was the absence of a certain expression, a certain attitude, that had always been a part of her demeanour before. She wasn’t aloof today. A timid smile played on her lips, its essence reaching her grey-green eyes. Before now, those eyes would look at him unseeingly, as though he had had no substance.
“Mala is to get married today,” she stated matter of factly, introducing her doll to Smast with a little twist of her body. “Would you be a guest?” she asked somewhat hesitantly, placing a hand over the strap of her bag in a manner indicating she would take it off her shoulder and bring its contents out only if Smast said yes.
“Yes, please,” Smast said eagerly, gratified at the little girl’s inclusive gesture. A look of pleasure came over Cat’s face. Smast suspected that in spite of her privileged-child status, she was deprived of playmates, at least at her home. The reason wasn’t hard to visualise — it was a pretty heavy, vast, and nasty reason: Pintu.
“Pintu hates dolls,” she confided as she set down the shyly-smiling Mala and started bringing out the articles necessary for completing her doll’s domestic happiness, including her husband, a handsome young fellow attired in an Englishman’s suit. “And he hates my friends even more,” Cat went on. “He says I give them more importance than I give him. So, not one of them dares come play with me anymore.” That ‘anymore’ told sordid stories of several little girls being bullied, scared, tricked, and threatened by the terrible oppressor. Smast started to feel glad for the three good thwacks he had given the fat boy.
“That was extremely brave of you,” she said with awe in her voice, as though her mind was completely in sync with Smast’s. Before Smast could admit to being brave or deny it outright, she arced across the palace and flew up the staircase on the other side. She came back very quickly, a little out of breath, clutching Vishnu Sharma’s Panchatantra in her little hands.
She started to lift her arms to offer the book to Smast, but he snatched it from her greedily and then felt guilty about it immediately. “It’s for you,” she reassured him, a warm smile breaking out on her face this time. “Mother said you could have —,”
Smast’s stomach rumbled with the intensity of a couple of malevolent storm clouds. Cat motioned towards the tray of food and skipped there ahead of Smast. She laid out the sumptuous meal for him. Except for Pintu’s torturous exhibitions at his feeding frenzies, Smast had never seen such rich food in such quantities at one place before. For a moment the sight and the aromas of the feast felt sufficient to sate his hunger forever. But then the same things sharpened that appetite manifold.
He began to eat, voraciously at first, until the most vicious pangs of sheer want disappeared, giving way to an exquisite yearning. He now began to appreciate the individual tastes and flavours of the many dishes laid out before him. A maid brought in fresh rotis and pooris every few minutes, and there were jugs of spiced buttermilk and steaming hot cow-milk with a touch of kesar in it. After a minute, he saw an altogether new tray, coming straight from heaven, bearing three little hills of motichoor laddoos, gulab-jamuns, and rasgullas.
His left hand automatically opened his new book, his right hand made morsels of delicious food and conveyed them to his mouth, and his body gave up its hoard of pains and aches in the curative warmth of the log fire. He looked up and once again imbibed the endless beauty and grandeur of the special place his father had built with so much love. He knew that a fraction of his parents’ un-lived dreams associated with it had begun to be realised with each moment he was getting to spend here — the Dream Palace was itself becoming happier by making Smast happy.
The evening grew into a gleeful, young night. Stars peeked in through the skylights, pleased at seeing Smast appropriating a grain of his birthright for the first time since his birth. Cat went on with the rites that would make Mala the ever-blushing bride of the boy in the Englishman’s suit.
“What happened two years ago?” Smast asked her in the interval between the end of the main-course and the start of dessert. “Why was Father’s portrait removed from here?” he elaborated as he lifted the first gulab-jamun and put it into his mouth, closing his eyes in anticipation of the flood of sweet deliciousness that he knew these purple sweetmeats to contain.
“Didn't you notice?” Cat counter-questioned in a voice and manner too sombre for a little girl. Smast’s hand arrested itself on its repeat journey to the dessert tray. “Didn’t you notice the tear-wounds in the canvas?” she asked.
Smast could say nothing; he just shook his head. “One day, somebody stabbed it right where a person’s heart is,” Cat said. “Mother and Father blamed each other. They had a bad fight about it, too. But both of them denied having done it. All the servants were questioned and warned against daring to do any such thing again. Mohan kaka got the tear stitched up, but there were two new ones after a week. Mother took the portrait down after that and locked it away. She just brought it out this morning, for you.” Cat told him while she paraded Mala and her bridegroom in circles around a burning candle — completing the sacred ceremony of their marriage. But he could tell that she was doing it perfunctorily now; her heart wasn’t in it anymore.
Just as he, too, couldn’t bring himself to put another gulab-jamun into his mouth. “Did Pintu —,” he started to ask.
“Yes, yes,” Cat cut him off, nodding her head several times. “I’ve always believed it was he, although he never admitted to having done it, not even when Ma took him in her room for questioning. In spite of his denials, Mother forbade him strictly to enter this place. Pintu hates everything associated with our departed older brother, because he thinks our parents love the memory of their dead child more than they love him. He —,”
She suddenly fell completely, utterly quiet. A tangible wave of menace swept into the dream palace. Even the stars appeared to jerk back in revulsion. Smast turned his head towards the entrance. Pintu loomed in the doorway, his protuberant eyes gleaming in the firelight like those of a wild beast. Darshan Singh lurked just a step behind Pintu.
Cat looked crestfallen and afraid. She aborted the last of the seven pheras around fire, thereby leaving her doll tragically
unmarried. Cat gathered her things and left within a few seconds. Pintu made way for her as she walked past him, but Smast saw him nudge her with his elbow ever so slightly, like a deceptively gentle prelude to a gruesome tale.
Pintu glared at Smast for a few seconds before turning around and leaving. Darshan Singh made deliberate slashing movements with his right hand, his chins bouncing in tandem with his violent gestures. And then he, too, limped away into the night, leaving Smast alone.
He sat motionless for several minutes, futilely trying to come to terms with his fear-streaked confusion. He didn’t spare even a casual glance for the still-loaded dessert tray as he got up with the aid of his crutch, his new book now tucked firmly under his right arm — the place the box of cookies had occupied in the morning.
He, too, left his Dream Palace and started hobbling through the garden, towards the entrance gates, not caring whether the sentries would let him out or not.
He could no longer bear to be away from his mother. He needed to hear her voice; he needed her tremulous hand on his head; he needed her vestigial madness to cope with this gargantuan madness. He now felt guilty for all the food he had eaten, all the warmth he had soaked. If he could, he would undo the best moments of his life and share the starvation, the deprivation she was enduring even as he feasted and grew comfortable.
He stopped in a pocket of dense darkness created by a thicket of bamboo trees bordering the driveway. His courage flickered — now bright and intense, now fading to nothingness — as he lifted his good foot again and again to cross from the soft grass of the lawn over to the hard stones of the driveway and face the sentries at the gates.
He jumped and screamed as something — a snake, what else could be so silent and so quick? — landed on his shoulder and sank its fangs into his scant flesh. He screamed again, struggling to get the reptile off his body.
The guards came running to where he stood, but they turned around without breaking their long strides and went back to their posts. His reeling consciousness then registered the lack of any pain in his shoulder along with the presence of something much larger than a snake behind him.
“It’s alright,” Sona said in a heavily altered, fuzzy voice. He started to calm down. “I’m sorry for startling you like that.” She came forward and he couldn’t help feeling sorry for her when he saw her in the light of the street-lamps lining the driveway. She looked like Saraswati, an old ragpicker woman, whom a pack of stray dogs had mauled at the town’s wasteland a few years ago. She had escaped alive only because a street-performer with a brown bear was passing by. This man possessed an old rifle; he had to shoot down two dogs before the rest of the pack backed off and ran away.
After that, packs of different kinds of animals — mean boys picking cruelty from each other like a virulent infection — had chased and tormented Saraswati because of her hideous disfigurement.
Smast noticed how close a long, deep gash had come to taking out Sona’s right eye; there were several other, equally nasty cuts on her cheeks, her forehead, her nose, throat, and the visible parts of her arms and hands.
One of the most scary ones had cut through her bottom and upper lips, on the side where her half-smile usually nestled. Only the other half of her mouth moved freely, and she wasn’t about to engage in the act of smiling for a long time.
Most of the bigger gashes had been stitched up with a shiny black thread; there were several bandages wrapped around the wounds on her arms, giving her the look of a doll rescued from the maws of a rabid dog and put together for some destitute girl.
He was gaping at her, unable to believe that she was in this—, this unspeakable condition just because she had come to his, Smast’s, rescue.
“Must you go back?” she asked, speaking with difficultly, evidently in a lot of pain. She left the second part of her question unspoken: does none of this matter to you enough to make you stay here?
“Yes, I must go home,” he answered.
“Isn’t this home?”
“Home is where Ma is,” Smast said and crossed over to the driveway. She didn’t follow him. She didn’t call out his name. She didn’t command anyone to restraint him and bring him back. She was letting the prisoner go without serving any sentence whatsoever. When he reached them, the gates opened fractionally for him and then clanged shut again.
16: The Stranger in the Mirror
Just as Smast came out on the long road between his home and his home, a dust-storm started to defy gravity and send generally-humble dirt gambolling up in the skies. For the second time that day, grit got into his mouth, erasing the last traces of the taste of the food he had eaten. Soil got into his eyes, stinging them, turning them red. He made a largely-useless screen of his fingers and peered up at the stars, which now looked unwashed, impoverished.
The anaemic moon appeared embarrassed, keen to go into hiding. As though they were answering its call of help, ragged clouds raced from the horizon and veiled the moon. A stern rain came along after a few minutes and slammed the flying dirt back into its place, turning it into a lowly mud.
Smast unbuttoned his shirt and put his book next to his skin in an effort to keep it dry. He hurried along, but still got completely drenched by the time he reached his hut. Its littleness, its inconsequentiality, its defects, and deficiencies were never so stark in his eyes as they appeared now. It was hard for him to believe that he had been away from it just for a day.
He was surprised to see light winking from the myriad gaps in the planks of the front door. It was far too early for Nina to be back home. Leaves of absence were rare and extremely hard to obtain. She had to go to work even when she was sick — one day’s rest mostly entailed a highly disproportionate reduction of her meagre wages. There was no mathematics involved in such deductions, only Darshan Singh’s whims and the twisted pleasure he derived from robbing his peasants of their already-skeletal earnings.
Smast pushed the door open and stepped in. His surprise at finding her home was nothing as compared to her shock at seeing him back. She had been lying prone on her cot. She fairly jumped out of it as soon as he entered. He noted, with a feeling of dismay, that only pain and fear lived on her anxious face, only panic and confusion peered out of her staring eyes; there was no expression of joy or relief at his return.
It was all about pain. Her hands shook, as though she had gotten palsied like that old woman, Saraswati, had towards the end of her insufferable days. Nina started mumbling something, again eerily like Saraswati would do in the worst weeks before her death, her dog-ravaged body shaking with tremors as she tried to shuffle away from persecuting, aimless, heartless boys.
Nina set to examining Smast with her trembling fingers. Ordinarily, she would have immediately asked him to dry himself and change into whatever non-wet clothes chanced to be available at that moment. He was literally dripping water onto the floor, but she dragged him closer to their small earthen lamp and turned him around.
The book nestling in Smast’s armpit fell to the floor with a loud thump, but Nina didn’t notice the treasure lying at her feet! She lifted Smast’s shirttails and looked at his back for evidence of lashes, while continuing to chatter like a madwoman, not giving Smast an opportunity to speak and put her mind at ease.
He understood now that the actual, physical pain that he escaped during the day had multiplied several times and bit, clawed, and gnawed his mother. Unbidden, the thought of Saraswati materialised yet again in his mind: snarling feral dogs tearing the woman apart, and before he could shove the terrifying image away, he saw that the person being mauled was not the old ragpicker, but Nina.
On finding that there were no marks on Smast’s back, Nina came around and, in the dim, fretful light of the small lamp, began peering closely at Smast’s face, checking it for bruises, pincering his mouth open to see if he had come back with all his teeth, and whether the teeth (which were all there, thankfully) were still firm in his gums.
Her fit of craziness had largely abated by the
time she got to checking his arms. She stopped gibbering and shaking, grew calmer. She bent down and picked up the Panchatantra, but she didn’t even glance at its title as she placed the book upon her cot! She then went and drew the small curtain behind which they changed their clothes. “Go get dry,” she said with a half-guilty, half-shy smile, “before you start a sneeze-train.”
Smast got behind the curtain, simultaneously beginning to change his clothes and recount all that he had lived through during the course of the day. When he emerged, reasonably dried up, Nina was sitting on her cot, absorbing every word he said, reliving all the memories those words unleashed, her eyes glazing over, gazing at something far away, something that was long gone and was never returning.
The ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth when Smast gave his impressions of the Dream Palace. But her face contorted in agony when Smast described his meeting with Ravi (that’s how he felt about it) and the magical portrait’s fall in the palace’s pool.
The fit of madness she had just overcome a few minutes ago threatened to rush back with redoubled intensity. Smast kicked himself inwardly for bringing up this particular matter and that, too, out of turn, sooner than it had taken place. But his first sighting of his father had been too powerful — the most powerful — experience of his life. He couldn’t have kept it to himself. Besides, to him, an omission of any kind was equivalent to a lie. Lastly, he believed that the time for Nina to finally heal, to finally incorporate her depthless hurt in her timeless soul, had come.
In spite of his fear that he had upset her tenuous mental balance, he continued telling his tale without any pause, noting with relief that her tectonic plates gradually stopped colliding and grinding against each other. Her tremors subsided and she settled into a listening attitude.
Amazement and bafflement (always better than the agony of bereavement) started to show in her eyes as Smast told her about his privileged, back-seat ride to the mansion with Sona, the punishment she meted out to Darshan Singh, the box of expensive cookies that Sona gave him. He told her about his first meeting with that demon, Raj. He talked about his own new, foolish, extremely stubborn streak, which had started this whole trouble in the first place and which was intent upon making things steadily worse. He expressed his own utter lack of understanding as to how he could have gone from a completely submissive victim to a suicidally belligerent retaliator in such a short period of time.