by Sakiv Koch
Joy and excitement, which had largely gone extinct for miles around, survived in just one heart, although there also they were surrounded by and buried under intense anxiety, nervousness and pain.
Smast stood a few feet behind the motionless, dew-bathed motorcar on the mansion’s driveway. Nobody else had arrived yet, not even the chauffeur. Smast moved a step closer to the majestic vehicle, expecting it to leap away from him in disgusted fury/furious disgust.
After all, it, too, had been materially affected by Smast’s insane, suicidal, unforgivable, irreparable, and yet unavoidable behaviour on the previous night. Although he wanted to focus only upon the journey that lay ahead, last night’s marauding memories took hold of his aching head and ran their full jarring course.
◆◆◆
Smast had still been imitating his mother’s fifteen-years-old behaviour in spattering Sona with his vomitus when something struck him on his jaw with a jaw-breaking force. Smast staggered and sprawled in the cold mud. Something powerful rammed into his side, making him scream loud enough, he felt sure, for his mother to have heard hundreds of yards away, even through the roar of the billions of water-drops hitting everything around continually.
If Mother had indeed heard the sound of his agony, she somehow refrained from running out to him. She must have continued to attack the tree trunk with all her might, throughout the night.
As he had lain writhing upon the ground, a more damaging rain fell upon him in addition to the one pouring from the skies. Darshan Singh attacked him, too, but his kicks were relatively ineffective on account of his Nina-inflicted foot injury. The taciturn driver’s blows, upon the other hand, were as strong as they were merciless. Not to remain behindhand in the noble work being transacted on his turf, Darshan Singh had turned his umbrella into a lance and driven it hard into Smast’s ribcage.
Sona had climbed into the motorcar at some point while Smast was prostrate and being beaten by her men. “Enough!” Sona’s command had rung out of the vehicle’s window after a few violent moments, halting the assault. Even in that state of fear, pain, and humiliation, Smast knew Sona had deliberately allowed the punishment to go on for as long as it had gone on. Although there should have been nothing surprising about this retribution, Smast had been both surprised and hurt by it.
The emotional hurt, however, was infinitely more manageable and hugely less debilitating than the physical one. Smast moaned as he began the process of raising himself to his feet. His face, stomach, left upper-arm, and left shoulder were afire. Some invisible monster stabbed him just below his heart every time he drew half a breath in.
I wish I had my crutch with me, he had thought as he got as upright as he could with the muscles in his left side knotting up. He had locked his gaze with the chauffeur’s malevolent stare. Darshan Singh had chuckled at finally having been able to lay his hands (or umbrella) upon Smast. All three of his chins had jiggled in pleasure.
“This was not even the start, Rat,” the little girl who lived inside Darshan Singh’s elephantine frame had said in that giggly, shrill, hated voice. “The start would be far more spectacular and far longer in duration. And the end, ah, the end ...,” he had rubbed his hand and made a face expressive of nirvana-like bliss at the thought of Smast’s gruesome end, but the vision was apparently so profound that he couldn’t find the words to articulate it.
Smast’s defiant stare hadn’t gone well with the chauffeur, who muttered a soundless oath and lunged at Smast. His heart jolted in fright but his thin arms came up in a fighter’s stance. The burly driver’s huge fists would surely have broken and battered the boy grievously, but Sona’s slender knuckles had tapped angrily on the motorcar’s windowpane and put a stop to any further violence.
The back door opened a few inches. “Hadn’t I ordered you to stop?” Sona’s voice, gone flinty, issued through the crack. “And you, he-buffalo,” she had next addressed Darshan Singh, who froze for half a moment and then started to shake like a dried-up leaf in an autumn breeze, “get the boy in and take us back home.”
“Y-yes, Ma-Malkin,” Darshan Singh had stammered, quickly getting away from the crestfallen driver and circling around to the passenger side of the motorcar. Darshan Singh had swallowed the humiliation involved in opening the car’s door for Smast. Once the boy was seated, Darshan Singh went back and got into the driver’s seat. He had driven the vehicle so jerkily that it felt like a bucking horse. The disobedient driver had been left behind to plod his way back.
Smast’s neck had gone iron-stiff with tension on the ride back. Sona had never before made him sit in the front row. She didn’t say a single word to him, although he had cringed the entire time, sure she would now declare that he wasn’t to go to Devgarh after all. This fear was great enough to suppress the myriad of pains growing in his body like wild grass after the first showers of monsoons.
Sona said nothing. At some point, she lowered a window and threw out the unimaginably expensive shawls that Smast had soiled. Darshan Singh let out a small shriek at this, as though he had been stabbed in a kidney. He was clearly a novice at handling the motorcar, and the conditions were bad enough even for experienced drivers. The wipers were moving with all their mechanical might, but they barely made any impact on the sheets of water streaming down the windshield.
The motorcar, whose interior had already been sullied by Darshan Singh and Smast’s wet and muddy clothes, swerved off the road at a sharp bend and got into a scrape with a banyan tree. The tree won the skirmish hands down, and the motorcar proceeded towards its destination with a number of dents and scratches marring its left flank.
Sona had still said nothing, not even to rebuke Darshan Singh. In complete sympathy with its driver, the battered vehicle had trembled, skidded, jumped, and bumped its way to the mansion. When the car had finally stopped, Smast felt as though all his joints had come unhinged. His insides had crept up and amassed in his throat in a bid to escape his rattled and shaken frame.
The heavy rain had slimmed down to a drizzle. Smast had sat motionless while Sona climbed out of the motorcar without waiting for Darshan Sign to trot around and open her door. She maintained her icy silence, but slammed the already-damaged door very hard after getting out.
Darshan Singh had shuffled after her with the umbrella; he was visibly shaking, evidently from his terrifying experiences of being burnt and being forced to drive in such inclement weather. Smast, too, had been shivering quite badly when he got out of the vehicle, as much because of the dreadful cold as due to the dread that the immediate future held.
Now that his Devgarh-trip had turned into a lost cause, he had wanted to run back to his hut. As much as he absolutely loved this mansion, he had determined never to come back here. It would be best for us to leave the town altogether, he had thought. And in the wake of this thought, a faint flicker of hope had illuminated the darkness of his heart, fractionally alleviating the pain, the cold, the fear, and the despair racking his body and mind.
Why don’t mother and I go and live in Devgarh? He asked himself. What could be more logical and more desirable? Nobody would be able to find them in the vastness of humanity that lived and thrived in the metropolis. They, too, could live and thrive in that city of opportunity. Hadn’t his father built everything from scratch, a scratch that was buried miles beneath the hard rock of debt? Smast had no such additional handicap.
Propelled with this new ambition, he had started to walk toward the mansion’s front gates for one last time, feeling certain that nobody would stop him, nobody would be interested in him anymore. Nobody would show any interest in me now except, he thought with a new gust of fear that blew out his minuscule flame of hope, except perhaps to do more of what the driver and Darshan Singh did to me in the fields.
Walking was already an ordeal due to the punishment his body had taken and the freezing cold inhabiting his wet clothes. With this new surety, that he was now a living football, a fair game, for everyone who fancied playing, his feet stopped m
oving him forward. He had reached the dark pocket that the bamboo grove manufactured every night to spite the kerosene lamps illuminating the driveway.
The rain hadn’t liked being thin and silent; it quickly reattained its former fullness and steady roar. It pounded him mercilessly. The probability of his falling seriously ill with the intolerable cold was speeding towards complete certainty with every passing minute. But Smast welcomed this onslaught of water: the sentries at the gates had scampered away into the guardhouse built at one side of the main entrance, away from the wicket-gate, which pedestrians used to pass in and out of the mansion.
He had been able to slide the gate’s dead-bolt out of its housing, push the gate a little, and slip out. The hope that had been snuffed out a minute ago rekindled in his heart as soon as he stepped onto the road leading away from that place, that place he loved with all his heart, that place which was all his and which was inalienably not his at the same time.
The hope-flame grew into a small log fire after he had covered approximately half the distance to the plantations. He had thought of some powerful things he would say to his mother to convince her to come away with him, to convince her to leave behind this life that wasn’t fit even for animals, let alone human beings. It would be extremely difficult to make her see my point of view, but I shall manage it somehow or the other.
Thunder and lightning were savaging the skies. Each step that he took filled his savaged body with pain, but his heart had been dancing in an unfamiliar, pure excitement, which was different from the guilt-adulterated excitements he had experienced for the past three weeks.
His left upper arm had bruised horribly from one of the driver’s kicks. There were other spots all over his body competing for the top place in terms of the damage they had taken, but they were all close seconds or thirds. It was to his burning upper left arm that something latched itself with a force that had made him scream out at the top of his lungs.
He almost fainted with pain and terror, for he had not seen or heard anything in the moment preceding this sudden, agony-filled horror. The hellish grip on his arm vanished, only to take hold of the back of his neck. The next flicker of lightning showed him the hate-distorted face of the driver, who had evidently walked a considerable distance in that murderous weather and, equally evidently, attributed his disgrace and his troubles to Smast.
The driver, whose name Smast had not learned, had turned Smast around wordlessly and, still holding him by the scruff of his neck, marched the boy back to the mansion. The guards at the gates had gaped at them in a mix of fear and amazement. The driver had motioned one of them to follow and had pushed-dragged Smast to the shelter of the porch, where the motorcar was parked askew, showing its recent, ugly wounds.
The driver had snarled in anger and tightened his grip on Smast’s neck, obviously holding him responsible for the damage to his beloved vehicle. The driver had then commanded, once again with a motion of his arm rather than through the use of any words, the by-now-drenched guard to stand guard over Smast, whereafter the silent chauffeur had disappeared into the storm-ripped darkness cocooning the house.
He had returned after a few minutes with a malevolently-gleeful Darshan Singh. “Were running for your hidey-hole, Rattie?” he asked with a chuckle. “Did you think we’d let you go, particularly now that we are at long last allowed to shower all our love and affection on you? No my baby-Rat, no!”
Smast, who was continually shivering, shuddered more pronouncedly. But he quickly understood that Darshan Singh and his crony weren’t allowed to ‘shower their love and affection’ upon Smast, because they didn’t as much as touch him, not even to take hold of him in the brutal manner the driver had adopted earlier.
After uttering more of such non-executable (at least for the moment) threats, Darshan Singh had led Smast to the back of the mansion, where several servant-quarters were built alongside Pintu’s pony’s stable.
“Your royal chamber for the night,” Darshan Singh announced, ushering Smast into the smallest of the quarters. The fat man somehow restrained himself from shoving Smast roughly into the drably-furnished, dimly-lit room. After throwing in a handful of imprecations at him, Darshan Singh shut the room’s door and bolted it from outside — a superfluous action, as the room had a window large enough for a fully grown man to pass through.
Smast’s physical suffering at that moment had been the most extreme he had ever experienced until that point in his life — severe pain and freezing cold were two different, equally ferocious beasts tearing him apart. But the sheer, unspeakable indignity of being shut in like an animal had pushed everything — every thought, every feeling — aside, so that the cause of the shaking of Smast’s body changed from chills to rage in an instant.
He had charged across the length of the small room and thumped the blameless window shutters with a glass-rattling force. He was clambering up to the window-sill when he heard the bolt being slid back and the door opening behind him. He got down and whipped around with the intention to attack the entrant and fight him tooth and nail, even if it cost him his life.
However, the person who entered into the room was not Darshan Singh or the equally demonic driver, but the pretty maid. Her face was glistening with the raindrops that had evaded the protection of her small, dripping umbrella. The bruise mark under her left eye had faded almost totally. She took careful inventory of the various marks of his multiple injuries and his bedraggled appearance.
“I admire your courage so much,” she said in a whisper, “even if everyone else thinks you are mad and suicidal. Here, I have brought you these.” She handed him a bundle of clothes along with a towel and a cloth bag.
The clothes, although clean and ironed, were just rags. They were Smast’s old garments, the ones he thought had been thrown out or burned! Holding his heavily-darned, threadbare shirt, trousers, and sweater in his hands made him feel as though he had been liberated, unburdened, cleansed. He took his cheap, misshapen shoes out of the cloth bag and felt a tingle of eagerness in his feet.
The shy maid turned around and left the room. She shut the door, but did not bolt it from the outside. Smast changed back into his old clothes, shedding the rich things Sona had ‘gifted’ him without any sense of loss or unease whatsoever. The mound of glittering illusions had been shovelled away. The reality stood garbed in its true, irreducible form.
Smast passed the greatest part of the night awake, lying reasonably warm under coarse, thick blankets. The town clock audibly mourned the passing of each miserable hour. The door of the room opened again just as the tireless clock was striking the hour of five o’clock in the morning. The pretty girl stepped in, carrying a small storm lantern in her hand.
She was shivering visibly. “Are you awake?” she had asked unnecessarily, as Smast lay with his eyes wide open. He sat up in his bed. “I’ve been asked to tell you to be ready in half an hour,” she had said.
“Ready for what?”
“I’ve not been given that information,” the girl replied breathlessly, as though she were in a tearing hurry to get back, “but I think they are taking you to Devgarh with them.” She had then turned to leave. “I wish you a train load of luck! May you return in one piece!” she said over her shoulder as she disappeared from his view.
Some other servant had come to fetch him after a quarter of an hour. Clouds had rained themselves barren sometime after midnight, and a thick fog now rendered the world a sightless and claustrophobic place. The servant had brought Smast to the porch, where the motorcar that Darshan Singh had battered last night stood scarred and silent.
◆◆◆
Now, as Smast waited for whatever was about to happen to begin happening, he dreaded the prospect of the journey that lay ahead. He knew instinctively that now that he had triggered Sona’s wrath, he wasn’t going to escape merely with a beating and a rollback of privileges and luxuries. Smast understood that the core of his crime didn’t lie in the physical act of having thrown up all over Sona —
an execrable thing though it was in itself — but in the fact that he had imitated his mother.
He suspected that had he offended Sona in an original manner, in a manner that had no connection whatsoever to his mother, Sona might have stretched the limits of her tolerance to let him off far more lightly.
My punishment, he thought, is just beginning. As though to prove his point, a set of apparitions materialised out of the fog and approached the motorcar. It was the wrong set, an incomplete one: there were three men and two children, no woman. Sona wasn’t coming. Without her around, Smast was a hare. Without her around, Raj, the driver, Darshan Singh, and Pintu were all wolves.
And that’s the way she wanted it — she was giving something incalculably desirable to Smast and turning it into a nightmare. The irony of the situation was so immense that Smast actually staggered with it before realising that the staggering, and the accompanying flare of agony, had been caused by the jab of an elbow into his swollen ribs. A fat, fatly-elated wolf’s first bite.
Darshan Singh laughed merrily at his junior master’s manoeuvre. The driver displayed all his crooked teeth in a twisted grin. Raj looked as though he were unaware of Smast’s existence and, therefore, Smast’s ceasing to exist would be an equally unnoticeable thing. He casually dusted something off his coat and climbed into the backseat of his motorcar.
Only Cat’s widened, stricken eyes told Smast, in one brief, guarded glance, that she felt his pain and misery. Her glance wasn’t competently guarded, after all. Pintu saw it originate in his little sister’s eyes. He took the chin of her sweet face in his lumpy fingers and tilted her head back sharply. Cat gasped and Smast’s hands fisted for what would undoubtedly have been the very last blow of his life.
The driver and Darshan Singh would fall upon him once more and ensure that Smast wouldn’t be able to make the trip he had wanted so desperately to make, a trip that he now wanted to avoid equally desperately.