Night Theatre

by Vikram Paralkar

  Grandiose thoughts, perhaps, but he allowed himself to think them. After all, the brightness in the east was growing every minute, and the world was preparing itself for something that had never before come to pass and never again would. If ever in all of history a moment deserved philosophical meanderings, it was this one.

  ‘Whatever will happen will happen.’

  With this thought he tried to rise, but the weight of the air pressed him back onto the stairs. The weight of his eyelids too, heavier than the earth itself. He allowed himself to shut them, just for a second, just to blink himself alert, and he felt the teacup slip from his fingers.

  Before him grew a tree. It was a raw bud first, then a quick sapling in damp soil. Then an eruption filled the world, gnarled and mottled bark churned out of the earth, and leaves, like fluttering moths, fled from the trunk, drawing branches and twigs in their wake until the full, familiar form of the banyan stood under a cloudy sky. He recognized it – his old, estranged friend.

  A boy was effortlessly climbing the tree. From his shoulder swung a bag, empty except for a few pages of newsprint. The branches left dry scratches on his arms. His slippers flapped, caught in the leaves, and he kicked them off. Beetles, crickets, caterpillars oozed from the bark, crawled along the endless branches. The tree was trying to bewilder him. It had built a maze to conceal the nest. It was clever, but not that clever, and he would outwit it.

  For days, there were eggs in that nest, and by now they had to have hatched. The impatient skills of a surgeon squirmed in the boy’s hands. The chicks would soon be his. He would first render them inert in formaldehyde, then stretch them out on a dissection board, pin their wings and limbs with needles. And then he would bare their lungs, their livers, their hearts, with his scalpel. He would sketch diagrams in his books, unearth organs that had never before been described. The new organs would be named after him. He would be listed in textbooks. Students would memorize his name for their exams. But the tree was jealous. It wouldn’t share its bounty. It tried to confuse him with its green curtains. Once or twice he went down blind alleys, slipped and scrambled to regain his foothold. But he kept climbing.

  And then suddenly there it was – the nest. He’d almost missed it in his hurry. The eggs had released their tenants into the world. The outsides of the shells were speckled with green, the insides white as ivory. The naked chicks thrashed. Twigs pricked their featherless sides, tried to warn them – they were no longer in their wombs; they should look around, beware. But they were still blind, their eyelids purple. The boy was out on the branch. It was flimsy but would support his weight. He extended his hand, cupping a piece of newspaper with which to scoop the chicks from the nest.

  A crow flapped into view. It ignored him, brushed past his fingers, landed on the brim of the nest. At that sound, the nestlings balled themselves, opened their beaks, stretched their gullets. The boy pulled back his hand. The heavens opened, grub flowed from the mother’s beak, and the nestlings fed. Their heads bobbed, their limbs scrabbled. And the boy allowed himself nothing more than the permission to perch on the branch and watch. Every nestling had something astonishing in it. Something that a single cut could destroy but not even a thousand stitches create.

  But then the cloud that hung over the tree drifted away, dragging its shadow behind it. The lidless sun stared down. Walls of leaves keened in panic, darkened. Fire pruned them to meshes, revealed their hidden latticed veins. Spelled in them were the secret patterns of all life, glowing with a radiance he’d never known. The nest was just a ruse, a distraction the tree had used to draw his attention from the leaves themselves. He rushed to read them, to piece together this final mystery, but the sun burnt everything away.

  Only nest and branch remained, jutting out of a naked tree. He was trapped. There was no foothold below him. No earth to which he could ever descend. The nestlings in their charring nest weakened, dried, thinned to skeletons, and their mother flew to battle the tyrant. With her sharp beak, she pecked at the sun, cracked open its shell, swallowed a drop of its molten yolk. The morsel scalded her throat, and her eyes bulged. Her wings convulsed like a cloak in a storm, an awful wound opened in her neck – a wound that no suture could ever close, and she uttered a caw.

  But the caw was not the caw of a crow. It was the cry of a human. A cry of pain or surprise, maybe even the first cry of a newborn child. The tree, the nest, the crow, the nestlings, all turned to dust, and there it was again, the village laid out before him at the foot of the hill. And above it, the yellow edge of that ancient, deathless orb, creeping over the earth’s rim.

  Fourteen

  IT WAS LIKE BEING SLAMMED against a wall, this awakening. How much time had he been under? It couldn’t have been long – the sun was below the horizon one instant and above it the next – but still he’d been dragged to such depths that he felt like a diver struggling to reach the surface. He lurched, hit his shin against a bench, felt the pain crackle in his bone, but still pushed on, feeling his way against the wall.

  The corridor felt longer than he’d ever known it. The sounds continued, what seemed to be wailing, or screaming, yes, that was what it was, that high-pitched sound. Then someone called out to him, the pharmacist, perhaps. Her husband was clutching the doorframe, and she was hiding behind him. He turned the corner to the back room, and the instant he reached the doorway, everything fell absolutely silent.

  He closed his eyes, dropped his head, shook it from side to side to throw off the shades that kept folding over his vision. The teacher was standing by the side of his bed. There was dismay on the man’s face, or something else, and his hand was held out in front of him, the wrist bent back and fingers fanned as if he were holding a blizzard at bay. The boy was on the mattress on the floor, propping himself up on a hand. When the surgeon looked at him, the boy started to lie down again, as though he’d suddenly remembered the instructions not to rise.

  And then there was the woman. She was standing too. Her face was so different that the surgeon might not have recognized her were it not for the tube in her throat. It wasn’t a grimace of pain, no, it was anger. Her lips were pulled back, her teeth pressed to each other. Was she the one who’d screamed? She was quiet now, though heaving with such emotion that he could hear her breath whistle through the tube.

  But apart from this, none of the three looked any different. They weren’t doubled over, weren’t clutching their sides. They weren’t fainting, falling. There were no rivers of blood. The baby in its crib was as limp as when he’d removed it from its womb.

  The surgeon entered the room, and the teacher took a step back, raising his arm as though to shield himself. The surgeon grabbed the man’s wrist. His own hand felt numb, as if someone had pumped it full of anaesthetic, but that was just the residue of sleep still coursing through his veins.

  ‘Stop moving,’ he said, and searched against the bones of the teacher’s wrist. Once he’d found the spot, he held his fingers there.

  There was no pulse.

  He dropped the wrist, then pressed his fingers into the man’s neck, poked under his jaw. Everything was still, lifeless. With the other hand the surgeon felt his own neck, and instantly his strong, fast pulse tapped back against his fingertips.

  ‘How? It’s already dawn. Then why hasn’t—’

  ‘Ask him, Doctor Saheb, ask him,’ said the woman.

  The pitch of her voice was so unlike the few meek sounds she’d made all night that he had to remind himself she was the same person.

  Her husband cringed. ‘Maybe it will take a little more time, Saheb. It should happen any moment now, and—’

  ‘Don’t lie,’ said his wife, cutting him off in rage.

  The boy jerked on the mattress at his mother’s cry, drew his legs to his body, locked his arms around his knees.

  ‘What … what’s this? What’s going on?’ the surgeon asked.

  The teacher kept avoiding his eyes. The woman stabbed a finger at her husband. ‘He just told me, Sahe
b. Right now, when I asked him why nothing was happening. Now, now he tells me, after everything—’

  The man shrank under her. ‘Saheb, forgive me, I really didn’t think this would happen; so I didn’t mention it to you.’

  ‘Mention what?’

  ‘The angel in the afterlife, he told me that things might not go exactly as planned. There could be a problem. He couldn’t guarantee everything.’

  ‘Problem? What are you saying? Tell me exactly what he told you.’

  ‘The angel told us—’

  ‘No,’ his wife said. ‘He told you. He didn’t tell me anything. You alone.’

  ‘The angel told me that the state in which we would be sent back, this state between life and death, he told me … it wouldn’t be easy to change us from this to living flesh. We have clots throughout our bodies – in every blood vessel, in the heart, in the brain. He would have to turn all of these to liquid and add new blood. Make it all flow. At the very same moment, he would have to bring every organ to life, all together, or we would immediately fall dead. He believed it could be done, but he’d never done it before. It was all very complicated. He tried to explain, but I didn’t understand most of what he was saying. I just trusted him.’

  ‘But you didn’t trust me.’ His wife was shrieking now. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘If I’d told you, you would have refused. You wouldn’t have come.’

  ‘How dare you. That’s my right. I had the right to refuse. It’s my life. These are my children too. You told me everything would work out without any trouble.’

  ‘That’s not true. I never said that. I just … I didn’t want you to say no just because you were afraid.’

  The surgeon put his hand out to shut them up. ‘Now tell me again, slowly this time. What exactly did the angel say? What did he say would happen if your blood didn’t start flowing at dawn?’

  ‘He said that this, our return to life, it could be delayed.’

  ‘How delayed?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘But still, did he mean hours? Days?’

  ‘I don’t know, Saheb. I just … I don’t know.’

  ‘So it could be months. You could just remain stuck here like this.’

  ‘No, I really … I can’t believe that the angel would let that happen.’

  All the surgeon could do at this was shake his head. To have come all the way, come back from the dead, while leaving a question like this hanging. What could one even say about such folly?

  ‘Did he at least tell you whether it would be the same for all of you? Or would this resurrection be more difficult for some than for others?’

  Behind the teacher, the boy had been inching back along the floor. He was now cornered against the frame of his mother’s bed.

  The teacher pressed his eyes shut. ‘The angel mentioned that some of us might come to life later than the others, and there was no way for him to know which would happen when. I assumed he meant the difference would be a few minutes. I didn’t give it that much thought then, didn’t ask him.’

  An ear-splitting rasp jolted the surgeon. The woman had let herself sit down violently on the wire-frame bed, making the rusted legs scrape against the tiles. But no, nothing about her had changed. She just sat there with her palms pressed to the sides of her face, looking overwhelmed.

  The surgeon’s breath now drove through his nostrils in short, hot bursts. ‘All night, every time you opened your mouth, you spoke about the dawn. Nothing else. Not a word about this.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor Saheb, I … really, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t think I deserved to know any of this?’

  ‘Saheb, I didn’t want to complicate things. I hoped everything would go according to plan.’

  ‘You decided to give me just enough information to keep me working, so that I would do whatever you needed.’

  ‘No, Saheb, please don’t say that. I trusted the angel. What else could I do?’

  As abruptly as she’d dropped onto the bed, the woman now snapped to her feet and smoothed the gown that had bunched around her neck. Her face was stony. ‘I’m going,’ she said, a ghastly edge to her voice.

  Her husband looked suffocated with fear. ‘Where?’

  ‘Back.’ She reached into the crib, snatched up her infant. Its lifeless head rolled back, swaying against the side of her palm. She flung her other arm in her son’s direction. ‘Come.’

  The boy cowered against the bed.

  ‘Come,’ she said again, but the boy just stared back, frozen on the floor.

  She took two steps in his direction. The baby flopped in her hand. The pharmacist stepped from behind the surgeon, her hands held as though ready to catch the child if it should fall.

  The woman now stretched her neck into forbidden angles as she bent down to grab her son. The boy’s hands were bunched into fists. He dug them close to his body, hid them between his legs, behind his back. After trying a few times to find and grasp his fingers, she forced her hand into his armpit, tried to pull him up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the surgeon asked.

  ‘To the village boundary.’

  The teacher now looked like a madman. ‘No. No, you can’t do that.’

  ‘Why? That’s better than this. Better than not knowing what will happen.’

  ‘But then, then, why did we even come here?’

  ‘Because you tricked us.’ The woman’s hair was smeared across her face. She tried to brush it away but couldn’t, not with the infant in one arm and her son struggling in the other. ‘Since the moment we reached the afterlife, returning here was all you could think of. I was trying to console myself, console us: now we’re here, let’s accept what we have, it’s not as bad as you kept saying it was, let’s take what God has given us and trust Him. But you? All you could think of was coming back to life. And for what? So that some of us could live and some of us die again? At least there we were all together.’

  She dragged the boy to his feet.

  ‘Baba, Baba.’ He clutched at the frame of the bed.

  ‘Stop this. Stop right now,’ said the surgeon, but even his voice couldn’t stay her. She tugged at her son until his fingers lost their grip on the metal rod. Her strength, her savagery, were astonishing. The surgeon tried to block her path.

  ‘Please, just stop and think about this.’

  ‘Saheb, I know what it’s like to have my neck cut. To die. When he first started talking about this, this new life, I was so afraid of what we would have to go through. But I agreed, because I thought it would just be one night of waiting, and at the end of it we would endure whatever was in our fate. But now what’s left? Just this fear. It’s morning. Soon it will be afternoon, then night. And what are we supposed to do, Saheb? Wait for the pain? Lie down here until our bandages become wet with blood? No, I don’t want to live like this. It won’t be life. It will be worse than death. The afterlife might be bad, but not like this. I won’t let my children suffer.’

  The teacher forced himself past his wife. ‘Please, just listen to me, I did what I thought was best. For us, for all of us.’

  ‘Come with us if you want. All of us can go back.’

  ‘You want to kill yourself ? Kill our children?’

  ‘Kill? How can I kill them? What’s left in us to kill?’

  The boy yanked his body back, snapped free of his mother’s hold. She clawed at him, but her nails just scratched his skin as he fell back.

  ‘Come, my baby, take my hand. Come with me.’

  The boy crawled away from her on all fours, quailed in the corner of the room, his body pressed against the wall. He shook his head in terror.

  ‘Please, just think a little,’ the surgeon said to her. ‘Think about what you’re doing.’

  The woman’s face crumpled. With her fingers still splayed out, reaching across the room to her son, her eyes and lips twisted into a hideous, soundless wail.

  The pharmacist tiptoed forward, slipped one hand
under the infant’s neglected head, the other under its buttocks, and the woman released it, slumped on the bed with her fingers like prison bars before her eyes, her nails digging into her scalp. The pharmacist’s hands trembled as she replaced the corpse in its crib, and then, with a quiet motion, she slid the box along the floor and put some distance between mother and child.

  It was a wonder the commotion hadn’t yet brought every villager to the clinic. The surgeon looked around, but the corridor was empty except for the pharmacist’s husband, who was standing outside the room with a look of bewilderment and fear. The portion of the hillock visible from the windows of the back room was fresh and serene in the morning.

  The teacher returned to his bed and sat turned away from everyone, the weight of his body on an angled arm. He shielded his eyes with his free hand.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ the surgeon asked.

  The man’s hand remained where it was, concealing whatever shape guilt had given his features.

  ‘Is there anything else you haven’t told me?’

  Through all this, the man had been protecting the jar connected to his chest. Air bubbled through it now with unseemly vigour.

  ‘There’s something more, isn’t there? Put your hand on your son’s head.’

  ‘Saheb, please try to understand, please don’t—’

  The surgeon’s eyelids were turning unbearably heavy again. Despite all this chaos, they kept dragging him down to some foggy abyss. There was a sickly shade to everything: the walls, the sunlight, the dead. They darkened, grew murkier, every time he blinked. He couldn’t deal with these abominations any more. He just needed to fall on his own bed and lose consciousness.