by Sakiv Koch
He felt convinced that she would have him whipped before sending him off for good. The parting gifts she meant to give him would be imprinted on his very skin, perhaps scarring him forever. And those scars would turn the last three weeks of his life into the deepest sort of mockery.
He vividly saw, within the space of a few dark seconds, every item he had come to treasure — the books, the money, the clothes, the blankets, the dreams — being snatched back from him amidst riotous peals of laughter erupting from Pintu's and Darshan’s exulting mouths.
He saw, with equal clarity: hunger and cold pouncing back upon him and his mother; the few grams of weight he had recently gained melting away; the good effects of the much-needed rest Nina had obtained in the last few days being undone by unceasing slavery.
“Would you like to come with us?” Sona’s voice halted the train of his fears. He couldn’t grasp the meaning of her simple query until she repeated it. When he did understand her question, the sooty fear-train vanished into thin air, replaced by a gleaming locomotive of thrill rushing on at a great speed.
“Yes, I would like that very much,” he said dreamily, but then the red flag of reality went up and stopped the locomotive on its shiny tracks. “But I can’t go. Can’t leave Ma alone,” he added. It was then that Sona’s brilliant smile, which had withstood the rather-disgusting assault of half-masticated food so bravely, faltered and fled.
Her eyes hardened and her hands shook with enough intensity to spill a little water on Smast’s shirt. She began to pant, as though she weren’t standing absolutely still but running uphill with all her might. Her careful, tight control over herself was developing major cracks and crumbling in front of Smast’s eyes. Fear took both his heart and mind in a choking grip. She had been the shield that had kept everyone else’s furies from hurting him. That shield was now itself a sword to rip him open. She was revealed to him in her true form now, and that form was every bit as terrifying as Mother had always claimed it to be.
He couldn’t think of anything to say or do, so he started to cram as much food into his mouth as his mouth could take, believing it to be the last of its kind that would make its way to his stomach for the rest of his life. He chewed and swallowed like a machine whose raison d’être it was to shovel as much food into itself as possible.
His tear ducts were almost open and he scrunched up his face in an effort to keep the insistent water of his disappointment at bay. In all his life, he had never so much as stepped out of his town. To be able to go to the great city of Devgarh had been one of his fondest, keenest desires. He had heard and read dozens of tales of adventures other people had had in that bustling metropolis, with its immense bazaars, its majestic forts, its lush gardens with gigantic fountains, its breathtaking circuses and carnivals.
His imagination would automatically substitute him, Smast, in place of the lucky heroes of those stories. There was nothing in the world, except for the unthinkable, unacceptable element of abandoning his mother, that could have forced Smast to decline Sona’s magical offer. He was still wolfing down her food when Sona spoke again.
“We’ll see about it,” she said, her voice tighter than usual but reasonably steady, given her very-recent quaking. She had spoken as though all decisions were ultimately hers to make. She set the glass of water in front of Smast and walked out of the Dream Palace.
He spent the day sulking and brooding, something that had never happened before in that haven of joy and tranquility. The overcast day also sulked away.
The late afternoon was a grey, noisy, biting entity. The fireplace had just sprang to life to wrestle with the chill and Smast was gazing at the cheerful flames wistfully when Sona entered the Dream Palace for the second time that day.
She said nothing but it was obvious to Smast that she wanted him to come with her. He got up and they stepped out together. The wind was an uproarious army of assassins, stabbing every inch of exposed skin, storming into collars and cuffs.
A battalion of black clouds was marching on swiftly, thundering out heart-stopping war cries. The earth underfoot was hard and frosty. The black motorcar stood idling on the mansion’s driveway, indifferent to the aggression of the weather.
Before stepping into the vehicle’s warm bosom, Smast cast a last, parting glance at his father’s wondrous creation — the home that would be inaccessible forevermore after this moment. He saw Pintu peeping out from a window. Although he was quite far away, there was an unmistakable expression of glee on his fleshy, enormous face.
All this time, Pintu had danced at the edges of Smast’s vision — lurking behind half-open doors, tree-trunks, hedges, never coming out openly in front of Smast, always glowering, exuding a dark, impotent menace.
Pintu didn't say anything, but he blew an airy kiss and closed one bulgy eye in a very expressive wink. I will be seeing you around, Rat, he said wordlessly with that kiss and that wink. Smast got into the motorcar with Pintu’s mother and they sped away. The road they took wasn’t the one that led to Smast’s hut. He noted with trepidation that they were headed towards the plantations where his mother worked.
When they reached their destination and got out of the motorcar, the taciturn chauffeur brought Sona a large umbrella and yet another shawl, even though she was already enveloped in two pashminas, beneath which a woollen sweater also guarded her body-heat from the voracious cold. She had not said a single word to Smast during their journey and she said nothing to him now as she took his hand in hers and started leading him down a dirt-road into the fields.
On one side of the road, a group of peasants was working in a vast tract of cauliflowers, the vegetables’ creamy-white faces steadily gazing up at the foreboding skies. On the other side, a few men and women were engaged in a field brimming with the bright green leaves of spinach and the yellow blossoms of mustard greens.
Smast didn’t see his mother, although he knew she was here. Sona continued to walk down the dirt-road, not responding to the eager greetings of her labourers. She was headed towards the far edge of the cultivated fields, where a dense forest lived and thrived like a scary neighbour.
The light was failing rapidly, particularly at the forest’s fringe, where thick shadows quivered with the wind-lashed frenzy of countless trees. Millions of shrivelled leaves and denuded branches were buzzing continually. A pitiable figure was striking the trunk of a big tree with a small axe. The blows were perfunctory, powerless, seeming to hurt the striker more than the struck. At a little distance, a fat man sat hunched over a heap of smouldering coals, shouting something in a voice incongruous with his gender and his bulk. The wind made the coals glow fiercely, casting a sinister red light over Darshan Singh’s mean face.
Nina loved trees — to her, each one was like an individual person. To force her to cut one was like forcing her to murder someone. The fact that she had agreed to do such a thing was even more shocking to Smast than seeing her doing it. But then the name of her compulsion flashed through his mind: Smast.
Nothing else on earth could have driven you to do it, Mother, Smast thought. A powerful, irresistible impulse to rush upon Darshan Singh and shove his head into the burning coals came over Smast. His body started to lunge forward to carry out this mission, but his left arm grew taut and jerked him back.
Sona’s grip on his hand was firm to the extent of being painful. She shook her head at him and continued to march him towards the spot where one axe was simultaneously wounding a heart and a tree. There was something so unbearably ironic in that admonitory shaking of Sona’s head that a pathetic peal of laughter escaped Smast’s throat with the suddenness of a shot fired accidentally.
Darshan Singh had obviously been unaware of the presence of his mother-mistress in his fiefdom. He turned his head at hearing the strange, bark-like sound that Smast had made. Darshan Singh squealed in shock and scrambled up from his stool with a greater speed than his obesity allowed. The stool slid from under him and toppled to the ground; the sadist-sycophant lost his fo
oting. His flabby arms milled desperately to keep his body from fulfilling Smast’s desire (of roasting Darshan Singh over his own coals), but gravity had too strong a hold upon him now.
With trembling flesh and a trembling scream, he fell upon his face. He rebounded away, with yet another, deeper scream, but the smouldering heap of coals licked hungrily at his left arm, shoulder, and chest. A flame came into being and ate up a swathe of the wool of his sweater and the cotton of his kurta beneath the sweater, singeing his flesh.
He rolled upon the ground to put out the fire, making as much noise as a dozen pigs being slaughtered together. Sona cast a look of disgust upon her obsequious employee and continued to walk towards her other, lower-grade servant — Nina — who had stopped attacking the tree to observe Darshan Singh’s rise and fall. She stood leaning upon her axe as though she would collapse without its support.
Smast noted with dismay that she wasn’t wearing the new, warm clothes he had bought for her recently. Instead, she was garbed in her old dress. Her threadbare sari and heavily-patched shawl battled the intense cold with the efficacy of a pea-shooter blazing away at a charging tiger. She shivered uncontrollably. Her pinched features, her widened eyes, betrayed a paralysing panic. But then, with an impossible exertion of willpower that simultaneously crushed and lifted Smast’s wildly-lurching heart, she mastered her trembling and composed her features into a state of attentive expressionlessness.
Sona and Smast, both dressed warmly and linked by their hands, stopped a few feet away from the woman who, in spite of exhibiting a superlative strength at that time, was perhaps the weakest creature in existence.
“Namaste, Mistress,” Nina said, bowing her head and relinquishing her hold on the axe to fold her hands in greeting. Sona ignored her salutation just as she had ignored those of the other peasants. Unlike the other peasants, this one remained frozen in the head-bowed, palms-together posture of a Namaskar.
Smast, who had experienced a savage joy at Darshan Singh’s accident, now felt as though he had been first hollowed out with a large knife and then crammed full of the darkest despair. His mother had been impoverished before his birth. She had been dispossessed and robbed of her sanity, of her very will to live, but she had somehow held on to her steadfast belief in her own dignity. This sense of respect for her way of living and thinking had kept her functioning all this time.
Today, she was letting go of this last straw, too. And Smast knew the name of the reason for which she was committing this spiritual suicide: Smast. The despair choking him from inside turned into a burning, acidic anger. His arm tensed up to snatch his hand out of Sona’s hold, which was still extremely tight, as though she had anticipated his attempt at escape. The energy required to win that tug-of-war with the deceptively-strong woman simply drained out of his frame. His shoulders slumped, even as his guilt-tinged fury flared.
His scathing anger, he finally admitted, was aimed at himself. It was intense enough to propel him to bash his head against the hardest surface he could find. But then how would you go to Devgarh? The small, but unfazed, part of his mind, the greedy, selfish, despicable, part of his being, which felt alien, revolting, and yet overwhelmingly powerful to Smast, whispered hypnotically to his larger, stricken consciousness.
What good would your resistance do? the newfangled fraction of Smast continued to beguile the larger, older Smast. Your mother is hell-bent upon fulfilling this devious woman’s designs. How can you not do their combined bidding? How can you help Mother by going against her wishes, even if her wishes are not her own, even if they are being rammed down her throat?
There was, of course, an element of truth to this — he now knew for a certainty that his mother would unequivocally support Sona and oppose Smast, if Smast tried to stick to his original intent of turning down Sona’s offer. She would go to extraordinary lengths to have me obey this devilish woman, Smast thought, looking from the axe lying by his mother’s feet to the scarred tree a few feet away.
I can’t help but go to Devgarh now, he surmised with a shudder of self-loathing and delight. But I swear to God that nothing, absolutely nothing will take me away from you again, Mother, once I am back. Not even you will be able to push me away, not even for a single day. This silent oath instantly made him feel a little better, a little less guilty, although the sight of his mother standing like the most abject beggar in front of him continued to lacerate his very soul.
The clouds let out a deep bellow and started to shed large, cold tears. Sona let go of Smast’s hand and began to fumble with the clasp of her furled-up umbrella. She flinched with each drop of rain, as though the skies were hurtling down hail instead of water. Nina, upon the other hand, reacted to the downpour as though she were watching it from under a warm shelter.
Darshan Singh forgot his agony and came flying at them with a belief-defying speed. He snatched the stubborn umbrella from his mistress’s hands, unfolded it with a violent jerk, and held it over Sona and (by compulsory extension) Smast.
In spite of the gigantic umbrella, the wind-whipped rain still managed to reach the woman and the boy in the form of a fine spray.
“Hold it a little aslant, you good-for-nothing elephant,” Sona snarled at Darshan Singh. She then retook Smast’s hand, all the while staring unblinkingly at Nina. “I’m taking him,” Sona stated matter-of-factly, sending a chill down Smast’s already-cold spine.
“Yes, Mistress,” Nina said. She was now half-drenched and small tremors were starting to break through the brittle armour of her self-control. “I thank you profusely for it.”
“For what?” Sona asked, her snake-smile (that’s how it appeared to Smast now) materialising on her mouth.
“For taking him,” Nina replied with a smile of her own, a smile that made Smast nauseous all of a sudden. Sona laughed out loud.
“It is completed today, right?” Sona, warmly dressed, relatively dry, asked cryptically.
“Right,” Nina said eagerly and earnestly.
“I was under the false impression all these years that it was already complete. That’s the reason I never even bothered to come take a look at you.”
Nina said nothing in response. The intensity of her shivering was increasing. Her eyes blinked continuously to keep the rainwater out. Smast couldn’t take it anymore. He had to go and stand with his mother. She cast half a glance his way and turned him as immobile as a statue.
The fields behind them had emptied as soon as the rain had begun. The last remnants of light, too, were fleeing quickly. It felt as though shadows were talking to shadows.
“I feel as joyous today,” Sona continued, “as I felt when I burned the little notebook of filth you left behind the day you slapped me and vomited on my clothes.”
Nina bent her head further down and struck her forehead with her clasped hands twice, as though punishing herself for her old sins.
“I don’t believe you have defiled a single sheet of paper with such filth since then?” Sona asked.
Nina shook her head vehemently to confirm that she had indeed committed no such crime.
“I could say a lot more,” Sona said, “but I am not used to being outdoors in such conditions. Besides, the power of mere words fades to nothingness in comparison to powerful deeds. I am taking him. We shall be leaving for Devgarh tomorrow morning.”
“Please don’t come back to my house, Smast,” Nina commanded Smast.
Until when? he wanted to ask her, but he didn’t. I will come back when I get back from Devgarh, he said to himself. Try to stop me then.
Sona turned upon her heel as soon as she heard Nina say this, making Smast turn with her. Darshan Singh, who had been groaning with the pain of his recent burns and the effort of holding up the large umbrella all this while, failed to move in sync with the mother-mistress. Cold water fell on their faces and heads for a moment. Sona’s hand lashed out and struck the fat man’s fat cheek with a sharp report.
Without a pause, as though slapping Darshan Singh was someth
ing as insignificant and as routine as swatting a fly, Sona looked over her shoulder at Nina.
“I want that tree cut down by tomorrow morning and I want you to do it without taking any help whatsoever.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Nina’s voice rang out in a response that heightened Smast’s nausea. Sona started marching back, towing Smast along, heading toward the unassailable cocoon of her motorcar. Darshan Singh trotted behind them, panting and moaning simultaneously. The chauffeur got out of the motorcar at seeing his mistress.
“Wait a minute, please wait a minute,” Smast said breathlessly, speaking for the first time, just as they reached the vehicle and the driver started to open the rear door.
“What for?” Sona asked, her reptilian smile irradiating her face.
Smast said nothing in response. Mere words had no power in comparison with powerful deeds. He opened his mouth and vomited all over her.
About Book II: THE GULLIBILITY OF DEMONS
Smast is finally going to the City of Gods! But Sona has withdrawn her protection from him, transforming him into a lamb thrown amongst hungry hyenas.
Smast runs for his life and reaches the backstreet of a royal palace. From the moment he first sees the lovely, guilt-racked princess, PRAGVI SINGH, his concept of ‘self’ vanishes absolutely — for him, everything will always be about Pragvi.
A demonic man is hellbent upon abducting Pragvi. Another, equally vile, demon is guarding her. Smast is about to get caught in a hellish crossfire that will make his previous misfortunes and perils appear childish in comparison.
Excerpt: The Gullibility of Demons
Chapter 1: The Hare and the Wolves
Dawn had been abducted by conspiratorial clouds gathered on the ground. The sun was under house-arrest somewhere behind an impregnable fortress of fog. The maniacal cold was shrivelling up things and beings. Colour and hope had fled the shivering world.