by Sakiv Koch
There was a spotted, stained mirror back at the hut, nailed upon the wall opposite their dwarfish window, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had looked into it. He placed the dessert platter on a table, took out his wallet, and counted the money in it. There were five crisp one-rupee notes and one mind-boggling, beautifully coloured ten-rupee note! Yes, it still remained a ten — a zero placed after a one, and the number spelled out in alphabets, too, as a double surety — even after he had blinked several times and brought the note progressively closer to his eyes until they were crossed.
He was holding fifteen! rupees in his hands — the sum a staggering hundred-and-fifty times the largest amount of money (ten paise) he had ever held at any one time before! He felt giddy, sat down, picked up the book he had been reading before being summoned downstairs, and put a laddoo in his mouth.
It overwhelmed his tastebuds. His eyes closed and his head tilted back in a pleasure unadulterated with any extraneous factors at that moment. His heart, too, was experiencing a similar mix of contentment and thrill. There were dozens more of sweet orbs on the platter, promising him an abundance of culinary delight; there were hundreds of books reposing near him, assuring him an infinitely deeper, infinitely more sustainable joy.
His immediate future held a great number of such sensory adventures and enriching acquisitions as the hot bath, the sumptuous meal, the princely clothes, the shoes, and the grand sum of money in his pocket.
He knew that this dazzling, paved-with-gold pathway would lead to some terrible place, to some destination of pain and suffering that would be far greater in magnitude than this current happiness, but he was determined to extract as much goodness from each instance of this destructive-yet-marvellous plane of existence as he could.
In line with this practical philosophy, he devoured delicacies and chapters at a remarkable pace, pausing now and then to admire the hypnotic articles of his attire and the quivering, ever-shifting paintings the slowly-departing sunlight made in collaboration with the skylights.
All too soon, the gathering gloom of twilight began to erase those sketches of living colour. Evening threw a thin mantle of obscurity over the pages of Smast’s book. And then, after a muted bustle downstairs, the fireplace roared to life. The chandeliers began to descend with a squealing resolve emanating from their chains. They came back up swaying merrily, rekindled, shoving the juvenile darkness out of the palace.
Smast basked in the palace’s glory for awhile and then, as his desire to not budge for a long, long, long time from that magical place deepened to an almost unshakeable decision, he stood up to leave. He looked at his crutch thoughtfully, debating with himself whether to take it with him, and thereby tarnish his overall lustrous bearing, or leave it where it stood leaning against a wall, to be consigned to the same refuse-pit where everything else he had brought to the mansion in the morning had gone.
He hesitated for only a moment before picking up the tree-limb that had served him so well, that had borne his weight without any complaint, that had, in a way, embarked him upon the glittering (and treacherous) road to this unspeakably wonderful place, a place that was both immutably his and irrevocably alien.
He retraced his steps back to the main gates, marvelling at the discrimination between his modes of arrival at (by motorcar) and departure from (by foot) the mansion. A shiver crawled down his spine as he passed the pocket of darkness stitched up by the bamboo thicket. Sona’s white bandages and her big, brown eyes gleamed faintly from amidst the dense shadows of the grove.
She stepped out on to the driveway and raised a hand — the wrist wearing a bangle of white fabric — in air as his somewhat-scared gaze met her somewhat-stricken eyes. “You’re leaving,” she stated under her breath, more to herself than to him.
Smast didn't feel the need to respond to her — neither by mirroring her gesture nor by saying anything back. He continued limping forward, half-hoping, half-fearing that the gates wouldn’t open tonight to let him go. The sentries glared at him, stung by his utter disregard for their mistress. Their postures were stiff with the potential to thwart his purpose, to repel his advance, to send him back to the beautiful haven he had never wanted to leave in the first place.
But some kind of a signal must have flown over Smast’s head to the reluctant sentries’ command-receptors — they unbolted the gates and flung them open for him to pass.
After walking carefully for a few minutes, he negotiated a bend in the road and got out of the sentries’ (and Sona’s) line of sight. He let his crutch drop to the ground, bent down awkwardly, took his pristine shoes and socks off one foot at a time, hopping in place to maintain his balance. He stuffed the socks in his pockets, carried the shoes in his right hand, holding them with the care and tenderness given to a tray of eggs. He picked up the crutch and started trudging home bare foot. The road was cold, hard and cruel; it chafed Smast’s soles and made his limp more pronounced, whispering ‘blisters, blisters’ all the way.
17: Words Versus Deeds
The front door acted as a silent messenger tonight as well. Its chinks liberated timid rays of lamplight, which informed Smast that his mother had skipped work for the second day in a row. Unlike yesterday, he felt no surprise and no anxiety at this communication. If anything, he had been hoping she would be home. The money in his wallet empowered him to ask, to compel, his mother to take a much-needed break from her work.
He went through the painstaking process of putting his socks and shoes back on his tortured feet while standing up, executing remarkable feats of balance-maintenance through hopping and swaying like a happy drunkard. There was no way he was going to bring the seat of his trousers in contact with any surface that wasn’t absolutely clean. He smiled and winced simultaneously while covering the last few yards to the hut, each step giving rise to both — a physical pain and an anticipatory excitement.
He couldn’t wait to see the expression of incredulity that would materialise on Ma’s face upon seeing Smast in his new avatar. I shall spring in front of her with the suddenness of a bolt of lightning, he thought and chuckled. He couldn’t wait to see her initial disbelief gradually transmuting into gratification, into a smile of sheer joy.
He finally reached the door, knocked upon it once, and then pushed it open. Nina was sitting upon her cot, with no perceptible change in her posture since Smast had left the hut in the morning. He got the heart-wrenching impression that she had not stirred from that spot for the entire duration of time he had been wallowing in luxury. She was still looking out the small window, gazing at a swath of featureless darkness.
“Ma!” he called brightly, coming and standing before her as though he were a living work of art eager to garner admiration. She shifted her glance slowly, from nothing to everything. From blankness to him.
The figurative bolt of lightning he had been envisioning did fall — but upon Smast: Nina evinced no wonder, and what was even more more baffling, more painful, no interest, in his metamorphosis.
She gave him a perfunctory, lifeless smile and turned her attention back to whatever fascinating mysteries were unfolding for her beyond the window. He was too stunned to speak, to move, although an object hanging a few feet away was pulling him towards itself with great power.
He resisted the allure of the mirror for a full minute, staring at his mother, believing she would emerge from her inexplicable trance and finally be dazzled by-, by his magnificence. How could she not be?
“He came back,” she murmured just as Smast began to inch away, his shoulders first slumping in defeat and then beginning to square up again for the upcoming self-appraisal. Nina didn’t look at him and said nothing more. What little she had said she had stated to herself, not to him. The tone of her voice had been much the same as Sona’s had been at the mansion’s gates.
His monumental excitement had taken a great beating by the time he started examining his reflection in the anaemic light of the malnourished lamp. He was obliged to take the small, sullie
d mirror off its nail in order to view himself in his entirety, undergoing almost-comical contortions to achieve his objective.
He abruptly jerked the mirror, from time to time, to find out whether Ma was surreptitiously paying any attention to him now that he wasn’t looking directly at her. But she continued to remain completely, impossibly indifferent both to his appearance and his antics.
Ma’s lack of enthusiasm tonight felt like the forcible dunking of his head in an overflowing storm drain — a potentially-fatal form of torture Pintu had subjected Smast to on his (Smast’s) ninth birthday. Smast had been singing, in a rather loud voice, a popular birthday song that Nina had sung for him that morning. He was highly excited. Nina had given him his most valuable birthday gift ever — a shiny ten paisa coin! He was happily tossing and catching his prize, unaware that misfortune was sneaking up behind him in the form of an evil boy.
The first casualty of Pintu’s unprovoked attack was Smast’s coin. It vanished into a lidless drain after coming down from a toss and not finding Smast’s outstretched palm underneath — the said palm’s owner having been shoved violently from behind that very instant. Smast had staggered and fallen on his face. He had barely completed his gasp of horror when an immense power latched itself to the back of his neck and forced his head into the gurgling, muddy water of the storm drain.
After what had felt like an eternity of frantic struggling to extricate himself from the airless pit, just when his desperation to inhale became greater than his capacity to endure, the power that had been intent upon drowning him pulled his head out by his hair.
Smast had sputtered water, drawn a sobbing breath into his air-starved lungs, and put his head back into the gutter, voluntarily this time! He had opened his eyes as wide as they would go and groped the drain’s bottom for his lost treasure, but to no avail. It remained lost forevermore.
Pintu had yanked Smast out again and, after bestowing a few ‘birthday presents’ upon the little boy, had sent him home stinking, crying, and dripping smelly water. Smast had cried chiefly due to the Himalayan sadness stemming from the loss of his coin, a regret that had lodged in the pit of his stomach and hardened into something palpable, something always there, like his hunger.
It was only today, more than five years after that stormy morning, that this hoary knot had dissolved. The dissolver, the miracle cure for the old illness, lay in Smast’s classy wallet. But Nina’s colossal non-reaction was a new sickness weighing his spirits down.
Something deep in Smast’s sub-conscious had steeled him against the horrors of the future with the aid of the pleasures of the present, particularly as he believed that whatever he was getting from Sona belonged to him in the first place — it felt like a partial recovery of things stolen from him. Nina’s behaviour was bombarding his fortifications from inside, weakening him, making him fearful of things to come, and thereby rendering the things that had already passed less joyous, if not altogether joyless.
When he was done with the mirror and had put it back on its rusty perch, he walked up to his inert mother, took out all the currency notes from his wallet, and placed them in her lap. She looked at the money blankly at first, and then recoiled as though getting away from a poisonous snake.
She jumped up from her rickety cot, causing it to shudder and squeal shrilly. The precious pieces of paper in her lap rained to the floor and she leapt away from them. Their king — the ten rupee note — got twisted under the heel of her left foot. She started muttering something under her breath while vehemently brushing the front of her sari with her palms, as if cleansing herself of something unspeakably dirty and defiling.
Smast stood aghast for a long second. This horror was worse than the tragedy of the storm drain swallowing his prized coin. His body reflexively started to fall to his knees in order to retrieve the fallen treasure, but even in that great state of agitation his mind recalled the sharp creases of his trousers. Smast tried to avoid a meeting of his legs with the packed-mud floor. The resultant spasmodic movement to regain full verticality went awry and the dapper boy fell upon his face.
Ma was still speaking gibberish and swatting herself when Smast got back to his feet. A film of dust along with a couple of ominous stains now besmirched his beautiful clothes, deepening his heartache. He started thumping himself with his hands the same way his mother had been doing, while trying to suppress the sobs that were igniting deep in his belly and rocketing up to his throat. He gathered up the scattered notes and put them back in his wallet, after which he went behind the patched curtain in the far corner. For awhile, two different streams of sound — mindless mumbling and choked-up crying — could be heard mixing together in the hut.
When Smast emerged after a few minutes, he was wearing the second (and last) set of his tattered clothing. His eyes and cheeks were wet, but he wasn’t crying anymore.
He went to his mother and soothed her, comforted her in small-yet-effective ways that he had developed over the years. And then mother and son read together from Panchatantra until a thrift-driven darkness forced them to stop.
◆◆◆
Dawns began to bring forth electrifying promises of enrichment and fulfilment, with trace elements of fear that the day about to be born would be the day of reckoning. Dusks took him back into the embrace of his old, lustreless world. After three weeks of regular visits to the mansion, Smast’s stack of books, articles of clothing, and sheaf of bank notes had all posted discernible growths. His skeletal frame was beginning to fill out, too.
Fall appeared reluctant to depart that year. Winter arrived, mild-tempered at first, slightly out of breath, as though it had come running from somewhere. It nudged autumn out and established its rightful reign. After getting settled in around mid-December, it began to grow hard and bitter with a vengeance. Cold waves washed over the region and swept away countless poor people and cattle.
The Dream Palace’s fireplace became as great a source of delight to Smast as its library. But his walks back home in the darkness of dreary evenings were harder, colder in inverse proportion to the warmth of the cheerfully blazing log-fires he would leave behind day after day.
Irrespective of the time at which he exited the mansion, he always found Sona standing in the gloom of the bamboo grove. The motorcar picked him up every morning, but never dropped him back, not even when ice-cold rains fell from the unforgiving skies.
The exception to the rule of Sona’s always being at the gates to see him off came late one night, when Smast woke from a deep, heat-induced slumber. The town clock was striking the ungodly hour of one o’clock in the morning. Smast choked back a cry of dismay. He couldn’t bear the thought of his mother waiting for him, intensely and futilely, to show up.
He ran all the way to the mansion’s gates. He growled at the guards when they looked at each other and hesitated for half a moment before throwing the gates open. He then sprinted home, as quickly as his legs could carry him. He no longer needed his crutch, but he still carried it with him out of an uncanny fondness for it.
When he reached the hut, panting and shivering, covered in a cold sweat, he found the hut dark and Nina sleeping peacefully, snoring gently. He stood staring at her dimly-seen form in disbelief for a long time, fanning a small spark of hope that she was faking her slumber. How could she have been so calm, so relaxed as to fall asleep, when, for the first time since his birth, Smast hadn’t been with her at bedtime?
Her breathing remained even; she gave no signs of actually being awake. At last, deriving some solace from the fact that she had the insulating protection of two new, thick blankets covering her (in stark contrast with the wintry nights of the past when she would continually shiver under a threadbare, coarse quilt) he changed into his ‘night-suit’ and got into his own bed, with its complement of three new, thick blankets.
Upon waking up in the morning, Smast was in for another shock: Ma, whom he had somehow cajoled into taking a long break, wasn’t home. Her blankets were neatly folded upon the foo
t of her cot and her work-basket wasn’t resting in its usual nook. She had gone to the fields for the first time in several weeks.
When he reached the mansion later in the morning, Sona was literally prancing about like an excited mare. “Want a special treat?” she asked him with an arched eyebrow. Her half-smile, a rare visitor these days, was playing upon her scarred lips and shimmering in her eyes.
As a rule, Smast never said no to any treat, special or ordinary. “Yes, sure” he answered and sat down to the sumptuous, hot breakfast that lay upon his favourite table by the pool. He tried to appear cool, tried to mask his rising excitement about the obviously very-exciting thing she had up her sleeve, but his sharp, involuntary glances at Sona, and the unusual speed of his chewing betrayed the true state of his feelings.
He ate so quickly, in fact, that a rather mammoth bite, largely unscathed by his molars, first scalded his tongue and then veered towards his windpipe. The resultant bout of explosive coughing propelled bits of food back out of his mouth. Most of these saliva-coated particles struck Sona.
Smast would recall later that she did not grimace, did not shrink back in revulsion. She started to pat his back with one hand and lifted a glass of water to his still cough-convulsed mouth with the other. He spluttered most of the water out, wetting her hand, which, too, failed to affect her in any noticeable manner.
“Easy, Smast, easy,” she said, her trademark quasi-smile turned a notch brighter than usual. “We’re going to Devgarh for a week-long business trip!” she announced with a flourish and then fell quiet.
Smast’s heart sank. “Right,” he muttered, wiping his lips with his silk handkerchief, believing that she was implying a termination of his visits to the mansion. The phrase ‘special treat’, he further believed, making his heart sink deeper, was used ironically: now, finally, the punishment he had so hot-headedly earned and so miraculously escaped (so far) would be administered to him.