Valley of Death

by Vickram E Diwan

  “For a moment I thought that you meant what you said, you spoke with such conviction in your voice. And that I was as much not a part of your life as any other woman.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense; you are my wife for god sake.”

  “That is the reality, you ‘have’ to live with, and otherwise your heart is not that enthusiastic about it anymore, correct?” She asked sitting on the bed.

  “Are you trying to cross-examine me? Why do you have to take every statement of mine in the wrong way?”

  “It’s not just that what you say Abhay, but your whole pattern of behaviour; I can hardly believe that you are the same man who-”

  “Please spare me!” Abhay said interrupting her rudely. “Don’t start again, for god sake, please!”

  “Then answer my question, who was the person you had gone to meet that day?” Payal asked him squarely.

  For a while Abhay did not say anything, when he raised his face he saw Payal still staring accusingly at him. “All right,” he said, “if it would make you feel any better, then listen; I had gone to meet Rudolf Schönherr.”

  The magic in that name brought an eerie silence in the room; even little Anshul was silent as if sensing the shock and outrage of her mother. The uncanny silence ended with Payal’s disbelieving voice, “Rudolf Schönherr! You…you went to see that Bastard! How could you; after all that I have told you about that vicious man…that vicious Warlock and what he did to me, how could you!” Payal spoke in an utter state of shock and surprise.

  “He had called me on his own initiative,” explained Abhay meekly.

  “What does he want from you?” Sensing some serious and imminent danger, Payal asked getting panicky.

  “Nothing; on the contrary, he had something to offer me.”

  “What?”

  “Some information which he wanted to share with me,” Abhay said carefully choosing his words.

  “I cannot believe I am hearing this; you went and sat with him, heard what that Bastard had to say!

  “The court has acquitted him on all the charges; how can then you expect me to go and meet him with a gun or any such thing,” replied Abhay.

  “His cunning lawyer may have succeeded in camouflaging the truth from the court; but you, you didn’t require any other person to explain to you his true nature. My own words were enough to tell you the viciousness of that Warlock.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “What do you mean?” Payal asked sharply. “What do I say?”

  “Everything, that he is a vicious man, that he is a Warlock and so on,” Abhay said without looking at her.

  “And you think that I have been lying to you all this while,” she vociferated.

  “I did not say that; I mean Rudolf had a completely different version of events and his perspective as completely different from yours. He narrated the whole episode in quite a different light from the way you have been telling me,” Abhay said quietly.

  “Oh! Now I see it; that’s what this is all about, you think that Rudolf and his version are correct and I am a liar, correct?” She again thundered as Abhay’s version made her feel a villain in the story.

  “I don’t know who’s telling the truth anymore,” Abhay said calmly.

  “What has he done to you? How could he brainwash you in just one meeting?” She demanded as she could see her world unravelling around her.

  “He is not the one who has brainwashed me,” again Abhay said calmly.

  “Oh I see; you mean that I have been brainwashing you, feeding you with lies. Well, how about this wise man, who is sending that ghost to haunt you, if not Rudolf?” Payal said to get a straight answer.

  Abhay now looked straight into Payal’s eyes and said slowly, “He suggested some other candidate.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me Abhay; let this also come out in the open,” Payal said in a confronting voice, looking straight in the eyes of her husband as if her only succour of confidence was vanishing before her eyes.

  “How about you?” he said.

  “My God; how much he has poisoned your mind; I guess its no use talking sense into you anymore; you simply are not yourself, you have lost all your capabilities of rational thought,” she said rising up from the bed.

  “Do you deny that you have been trying to use black magic on me?” Asked Abhay.

  “I won’t even dignify that with a reply,” Payal said with a latent contempt in her voice. “I’m calling the travel agent to book me a seat on the first flight to Shimla, tomorrow. No matter how disappointed my mother had been by my marrying you; I am sure she would still be willing to give shelter to her daughter and granddaughter,” Payal said infuriated.

  “Yeah, go away; but that doesn’t change anything,” Abhay yelled behind her. After heaving with excitement and anxiety he shouted from his room, “Flight is only an admission of guilt.”

  He closed the door of his room forcefully and switched on the television. He put on an English movie on the cable and lay down on his bed, but was unable to follow it as tension lay heavy on his mind. He put aside the food that his wife had brought and ordered lunch from a nearby restaurant that he ate without any real desire.

  Lying on the bed late in the evening of the same day he remembered about the Japanese coin; a forgotten memory of the past once again came to the forefront of his mind. It was an incident that had occurred way back in his teenage years when he was in school. Every year the school arranged a picnic for the students. It was after such a picnic that Abhay had been walking back to his house on a dark winter evening. On the pavement beside the road he had seen a shinning foreign coin lying; something in that coin drew Abhay towards it and he jumped from the road to get hold of it before anyone else could.

  In a second, after he had left the road and got on the pavement, the tyres of a huge truck rolled over the road, almost touching the pavement; the truck had passed so close to the pavement that Abhay could feel the heat of its engine coming out of it. He stood there utterly amazed for a long time, as his heart raced very fast. One second, that had made all the difference. If he had not left the road just a second earlier then he would have definitely been run over by the giant truck. The negligent driver was driving without switching on his headlights on that dark evening; it was like death itself that had brushed past him.

  When he had opened his fist, it was by then full of sweat, and inside it was the same coin, which had pulled Abhay away from his otherwise certain death. The lure of the coin had saved his life; later he had found out that it was a Japanese coin; and all through his teenage life that coin had remained with him as his most precious treasure. He had carried that lucky coin day and night, never keeping it away from himself. Later of course, as he had grown older and wiser, he had slowly got over his obsession, until the very memory of that coin was buried deep in his mind.

  It was so deep, that until the remembrance on that evening, he had not even realized the very existence of that memory. It was a miracle for Abhay; that he still retained that long lost memory of that forgotten charm he once had. Maybe it was the fear of an encounter with death that had brought out the latent emotions in him, and had triggered off and brought to the forefront that long lost memory of a winter evening of his school-days.

  And now more than anything else, he wanted it back. He felt that if again he repossessed that lucky Japanese coin, his lucky charm, all his present troubles would vanish. Once again he believed in the magic of that coin like an adolescent. And now he had the difficult task of finding that coin; where could it be? Was it still somewhere in the house? Could it have somehow remained still there, even after all those years? He kept on taxing his brain to locate it through his memory and closing his eyes concentrated hard on that coin. He mentally travelled across his entire bungalow, searching, exploring every nook and corner; where could it be? Where? Every time he would come up as a possible place in the house where the coin could be, his mind would hurriedly cancel that option. He kept strai
ning his mind for a long time until finally, it gave him the answer he had demanded all along.

  He jumped out of his bed and almost ran downstairs; the junk in the garage at the end of the driveway was the answer. One section of that unused garage, a place just next to its right wall was the storing place for all the junk in the house. It was there, amongst that junk that he could hope to find his old stuff; if the coin could have survived the years of neglect, it was the only place that it could be.

  He was careful enough to slow down when he had passed the door of the living room in the lobby. Luckily Payal was not looking in his direction and was rocking the cradle of Anshul, looking at the television in the room. Once past the room, he again started to run until he reached the garage. He opened the locks of the shutter with the keys he had picked up from the lobby of the ground floor of the bungalow on his way there. Discreetly, keeping the noise as low as possible, Abhay lifted the shutter of the garage.

  Immediately he smelled the stagnating air of that place, which had been locked for a long time; he switched on the bulb in the garage. The pale yellow light of the bulb lit up the garage; it was filled with all kinds of conceivable junk. Abhay’s eyes frantically moved through it; finally stopping at the corner of the right wall, walking up to that place he pulled down the old cloth that covered the stuff stored in that place.

  The dirt flew all over the place, because of his hastiness in pulling down the old cloth. The dirt produced a strange spectrum when it was caught in the sickly pale yellow light of the bulb. Abhay coughed and with his right hand tried to remove the dirt from near his face. He was more cautious when he slowly started to browse through the heap of junk and placed the varied articles near his feet after observing them carefully. There were all sorts of things there, from his English notebook of the classeleventh to his woollen shorts, which he used to wear when he was a small boy.

  He found his old school magazines, blazers, his favourite board games, everything except the elusive coin. He could not suppress his smile when he read the entries of his school friends in his autograph diary. He carefully put that autograph diary in the pocket of his shirt and continued his search for his lucky charm. But it was nowhere to be found; and after an hour of search, by the end of which he was sweating all over, Abhay stood up completely disheartened and disappointed. He threw back the things that lay beside his feet into that heap and put back the old cloth to cover it. Just when he was about to close the shutter of the garage, he once again looked at that heap, almost as if hoping that the coin would jump out of it revealing itself. It did not of course happen, but something else did catch his eyes.

  The heap, which consisted of Abhay’s old stuff, was kept on top of a large trunk made of tin. Behind that trunk, which was kept next to many crates of empty bottles of soft drinks, something lay. From that distance, he could not be sure what it was, but there was definitely something there; maybeold trousers or shorts or a blazer? Some clothes had fallen there behind the trunk and he thought could the coin be in that?

  The thought pushed him back to that place; because the trunk was too heavy to bring it forward from the wall, he started to put away the crates of empty bottles. It created an empty space where he could stand and look at the narrow space between the trunk and the wall. He could see clearly that it was a cloth, but it was so far from him that his hand was unable to reach it. He looked all around the garage and found himself an old hockey; using it he patiently and carefully pulled out that cloth.

  He was disappointed when the cloth came out and in the light of the bulb, he saw that it was not a blazer or trouser but a red-cloth. Something seemed to have been tied in that red cloth; out of sheer curiosity, he sat down on his toes and untied the red cloth to look at its contents. Time itself stopped, the moment he succeeded in untying the knots of that cloth; he forgot to breathe when he saw the contents of that red cloth in the sickly yellow light of the lone bulb of the garage.

  One thing, which he still remembered from the Botany book of his school days, was the skull of a cat. And it was the same skull, with many other yellowish animal bones, which now lay before him in the red cloth he had untied. Abhay was shaking on his legs as he got up; he switched off the bulb, threw down the shutter of the garage and walked back towards the main building of the house.

  Abhay climbed up the stairs to the first floor of his house, and from the lobby, he could see Payal sitting in the living room still busy watching the television. He felt utterly distant from her, the isolation was complete; he felt he hardly knew that stranger, that unknown and dangerous Bengali woman, who lived under the same roof as him. He walked away to his bedroom and after switching on the tube light in the room closed the door behind him.

  He fell down on his bed like a broken man; he put the pillow close to him as if hoping to draw some comfort out of it. His fingers on the pillow cover felt something bulging; he put his hand inside and took that thing out. It was a piece of red cloth; identical to the one containing the skull of a dead cat which he had found in the garage. ‘Payal is the person who is trying to kill you, not me! You be wary of that Bengali woman and her evil ways’ –Rudolf’s words came back to haunt him. The thoughts were bubbling hot in the cauldron of his mind and he could find no way to escape the catastrophe.

  As if mesmerized, he picked up the phone and called a number and said, “Listen; can you meet me somewhere? I have to meet you urgently; I think that you may have been right and that my life is in grave danger…That far? …All right, I’ll be there,” Abhay said and cut the phone. He

  hurriedly changed his clothes and without informing Payal went out of the house.

  It was around ten in the night that Abhay stopped his car in the parking lot of a trendy nightclub on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road. He handed the car keys to the parking attendant and went inside. The atmosphere was electric and the young crowd of revellers was dancing frenzy on the dance floor to the tunes of latest Bollywood, Punjabi, and English pop numbers, with psychedelic lights.

  Abhay didn’t find a stool next to the bar and after his order had been served, he had to drink his scotch standing. He looked all around to search for his appointment but was unable to find it in the large crowd.

  ”Welcome, buddy! I am glad that you could make it,” a familiar voice rung in his ears. Turning around Abhay saw Rudolf with an impish smile on his lips. “Come, let’s go to my table,” he said and led his guest, making way through the large gathering. He appeared to be a popular person there, as there were lots of hugging, kisses in the air, pats on the back and thumbs raised to him, all of which he answered cheerfully. “Meet my friend Kristen; she’s from Portugal and this is my buddy Abhay Batra,” he said introducing him to a fiery blonde who sat on the chair beside the table.

  “How du` you du` Mister Abhi`?” She spoke in heavily accented English.

  “I didn’t know that you had company,” Abhay said as she sat down on a chair and shook the woman’s outstretched hand absentmindedly.

  “Don’t mind her, she keeps to her own business and does not nags or interfere, which is more than you can say about Indian women, especially wives,” Rudolf said and laughed needlessly. His hair was wet and combed backwards; unknown to Abhay the former had sniffed coke in his car only minutes earlier and was on an artificial ‘high’ that the narcotic had brought about, and that was also the reason behind his unusually jolly nature. “This is a great day for me, brother,” he said cheerfully, while Abhay was seeing the diamond earring that he was wearing in his right earlobe, “I have concluded negotiations for opening up of six franchisees centres of my institute here in Gurgaon and also in Delhi and Noida. That is why I was busy since the afternoon and had to call you all the way here for this meeting. If you wait for an hour then you can also see me sing and perform here and join my friend Rohit and our other business associates and friends for night long celebrations.”

  “I am sorry but I cannot wait that long and need your help urgently,” Abhay said in an exasperated m
anner.

  “Sweetheart; I think you better went and check on your makeup in the restroom,” Rudolf said to his girlfriend in a sweet yet authoritative manner. She sat with a blank expression on her face for a few moments and then rose up like a wound up doll and went away. Rudolf looked at her ‘Jennifer Lopez bottom’ appreciatively – like numerous other men present there – as she walked away and whistled cheerfully. He summoned a waiter snapping his fingers and shot two small glasses to Vodka down his throat in quick succession and lit up a cigarette. After which he again turned to Abhay and said in a surprisingly composed voice, “What’s the matter my friend, you appear very tense; any new developments in the story à la Payal?”

  “I found a cat’s skull hidden in the garage of my house this evening,” Abhay informed him. “I fear that my enemies are again up to their old tricks and are using black-magic on me; I desperately need your help to save my life!” Abhay implored him.

  “How can I help you, my man; when you are still unwilling to face the truth? You are still clinging on false hopes like a mother-monkey hangs on to the corpse of her dead child. You still are unable to believe or say that it is your wife, who is trying to kill you and instead speak of invisible or unknown ‘enemies’?” Rudolf chided him.

  “I am not here to argue over these mundane matters with you,” Abhay said in an irritated voice. “Tell me straight, are you willing or capable of helping me or not?”

  “You also know quite well Abhay that I alone can help you; that is why you have come here,” Rudolf said throwing rings of smoke from his mouth. “And I won’t disappoint you; and also will do everything in my power to rescue you, but there is a limitation to what I or anyone else for that matter can do. Ultimately it is you, who will have to take the responsibility to salvage your life that is in dire straits and resembles a boat caught in a whirlpool and about to be capsized.

  “It is not easy for me to believe that the woman who I had loved with the bottom of my heart could betray my trust in such a cold-hearted manner,” Abhay said in a voice of deep pain and regret. “It all still appears to be unreal to me, a nightmare that I will wake up from and will not be amused about.”