A Thorn for Miss R.: Book I: The Night Watchman

by Sakiv Koch

  "Fine with me," says the photographer. "I’m charging double for this print, and you’re not leaving here until I am satisfied." He ducks under the cover of the camera again and Neel once more adjusts his posture under Shyam’s directions.

  Now is a good time to look at Neel closely, as he appears in the lens of the camera. His hair, though wet and plastered to his scalp, is luxuriant and lustrous.

  The forehead is the same as you saw in the jungle, broad and high, but as smooth, as free of furrows as it would become crisscrossed with the lines of disasters later.

  The part of his smile that lies shimmering in his dark, deep eyes makes them hypnotic. On the ridges of his cheekbones lies the bloom which mountains give to their natives. His nose is long and straight, mouth full-lipped, and jaw-line sharp. Overall, the angles and planes of his face fuse in a scheme of features pleasing to every eye, particularly the feminine eye.

  He is lean, not broad, and the countless hours he has spent exercising in Jalgarh’s Hanuman Akhara since an early age, speak for themselves.

  Shyam sees all this in a moment, grunts satisfactorily, and presses the camera’s lever a second time. But another flash of cosmic proportions accompanies that of the camera this time.

  A tongue of lightning has found and licked an LPG cylinder lying in the narrow backyard downstairs. Half of the studio in which Neel stands is gone in a split second, cleaved in the middle by a deafening explosion.

  Neel is thrown back against a wall. A searing brightness blinds him and scorches his flesh. Billowing clouds of brick-dust stifle his breathing.

  The deep rumble in the skies begins to die after a few moments filled with dazedness and agony. Neel raises himself to his feet and looks on at the devastated studio through slitted eyes. He sees Shyam on the verge of the gulf that the blast has torn open in the building.

  The old man is buried under a fallen beam. His tripod is tottering precariously on the edge of the newborn precipice.

  The apparatus tips over and falls on the smoldering debris below as Neel, coughing and fanning his face with his hand, steps toward the photographer.

  Shyam’s eyes, piercing and intense at all times, have brightened even more as the old man lies moaning and writhing, his underlip caught between his teeth.

  The beam lies over his legs, pinning him down just above his knees. Neel bends down and grasps the wooden beam to lift it off Shyam. It is heavy, and its ends are jammed against the studio’s walls.

  Cords stand out in Neel’s forearms, a hump rises between his shoulder blades, his hamstrings tighten, and a low, long ah whistles out of his mouth. The beam rises slightly in the air.

  Neel scrunches his face and arches his head back, his groan turning into an ululating cry as the strain in his ligaments crosses their tolerance limit. He heaves with one last superhuman effort to shove the beam over the edge, but a still-standing pillar on the ground floor blocks its way.

  The beam begins to grow heavier in his hands, as though it were turning from solid wood to stone. Neel opens his eyes and watches Shyam struggle frantically but futilely to wriggle out toward safety.

  Neel suddenly realizes that his hands are wet with his blood—nails jutting out of the old timber have gotten into his flesh and are tearing it downward.

  And then the wood begins to answer the call of gravity, leaving the heel of his palm, carving wounds down the middle of his hands, slipping digit by digit from his fingers.

  Tears well up in his eyes and his heart fills with unbearable pain as the beam comes free and pins Shyam to the floor once more, inflicting more damage with the new fall. The old man screams in agony.

  "My kneecaps are smashed," he says faintly after a moment, his words punctuated with pain, his mouth piteously attempting a smile. "Were no damned good anyway."

  Neel wipes his wounded hands on his kurta. The rain pelts him in the half-exposed studio. His head bends in shame as though he were personally responsible for the calamity. Behind him, the far wall crumbles, and the roof over it caves in.

  An inhuman groan begins to rise from the foundations of the building. The shattered house hums with strain under Neel’s feet. A crowd has assembled in the street outside, but nobody approaches to help.

  "You’ll have to leave me. Go!" croaks Shyam with urgency in his voice. "The whole place is going to collapse."

  "Do you keep your tools on this floor? Saw, ax, hammer?" Neel asks surprisingly calmly.

  There issue only guttural, spluttering sounds from Shyam’s mouth when he opens it. "You can’t cut through the beam, it is, it is—" he manages to say after taking a breath.

  "I don’t intend to cut the beam," Neel says. "Where are the tools?" There is a creak and the lip of the floor sags beneath them.

  Neel watches the beam, fixed like a bridge between two walls. He puts a foot over it and presses down; the beam does not budge.

  "Hurry, please, the tools."

  Shyam points toward a doorway with a limp hand. "There is an alcove behind—" But Neel is gone and is back with a burlap sack before the old man can finish his sentence. Neel draws out a saw. Shyam screams at seeing it.

  "No, no, let me die here. Don’t cut my legs off! No, please, no!"

  Neel throws the saw aside, then the ax, and brings out a sledgehammer. He lifts it above his head and brings it down close to Shyam’s, striking the floor lustily. A howl of terror escapes the old man’s mouth.

  Neel continues to hammer the floor, dealing blows in an arc around the photographer’s body. As the crack in the floor begins to widen, the roof above also starts to sag down more dangerously. Of the remaining two beams overhead, the farther one falls nine feet behind Neel’s back with a thunderous crash.

  The nearer beam comes loose on one end and swings in the air, knocking out the glass from the window through which Shyam had first called Neel.

  "You have done all you can!" cries Shyam with a sudden burst of energy. "Go save your life. Go!"

  Neel strikes one last time, putting all his strength into the head of the hammer. The pounded arc comes free from the rest of the floor, and Shyam plummets to the ground level. The beam that fell on him remains jammed between the walls.

  Neel throws the hammer aside and bends his knees to jump down. But a couple of roof tiles falling from above find the back of his head in their way. The whole wet world drowns in utter blackness.

  Chapter 3: The Elasticity of Steel

  You’ve seen me in the aftermath of the storm and in the calm before it. And I can now see the two letters of your answer to my question—am I a murderer? —in your eyes. There glitters a large N in one eye and, like a shiny teardrop, a big O in the other.

  Or, maybe, you don’t cry for me. Maybe your eyes are running to flush out the dirt that has gotten into them. Several dust-devils are afoot on the hill where you stand gazing at a beautiful valley, more than twenty-five years before my accident at the photographer’s.

  A country road winds its way through the underbrush and the shallow pools of water dotting the valley floor. There is a bend in the road around a grove of firs. One can indistinctly make out my conduit to this world—the house in which I was born—through the trees’ foliage.

  At that time, in the third decade of the twentieth century, there lived a very strange couple under that solitary roof. If you peered in at the window set right beside the kitchen’s door, you could see a small boy sitting on the floor, playing with a pair of handcuffs.

  His eyes twinkled and his rosy mouth curled in a smile as the boy watched a woman kneading flour at the kitchen’s countertop.

  There was nothing remarkable in the woman’s clothes: she wore a cotton salwar-kameez with a dupatta knotted at her back.

  There was nothing unremarkable about her person. Fluidity rippled in her tall frame, as though she were wired to an invisible source of supple grace. She held her head in the way of self-reliant, strong people. And yet her face, as beautiful in its features as in its expression, held a smile characteri
stic of men and women who derive all their happiness out of giving joy to others.

  She sang a folk song of the hills in a voice that could lend melody to mindless babble. Her eye constantly switched between her boy and the gravel path visible from the kitchen’s window.

  "Mama," the child chirruped with a peal of throaty laughter. He lifted the handcuffs in his chubby hands and tossed them behind him with a spasm of his little arms. The heavy metallic device smacked him on his forehead instead of clearing his head.

  The handcuffs then dropped onto his legs with a dull thud. A redness materialized on his skin, promising to mature into a bruise in a little while. He sat dazed for a moment before two streams of tears began to flow from his eyes.

  "Ooh," cooed the woman, "my darling Neel."

  She bent backward without moving her feet and placed a hand on the floor so that she stood arched like a rainbow. She brought her inverted head near the child’s and rubbed his cheek with her own.

  He had her eyes and her mouth. Laid side by side, their faces became mirror images—she was pained with his pain, but she smiled for him, and an identical smile erupted on his lips. He raised his arms in the air, clapped once, and squealed in delight. "Fooflap," he said.

  "You want Mama to do the foot-clap for you?" she asked, laughing. She rose through the air back to her feet like a peacock soaring from the ground to a tree-limb, wiped her hand with a dish-towel, and flattened some dough into a strip. She then turned and squatted on the floor in front of Neel.

  She kissed his brow where it had turned a light purple and stuck the dough on it.

  ‘It will reduce the inflammation,’ she said, wiping his tears with her dupatta. The next instant, her lower-body changed its position in one swift, indiscernible motion and her legs draped themselves around her neck so that her feet met before her face.

  She clapped her soles together, the expression on her face one of deep concentration, as though she would forever store the pleasure her performance gave to her son.

  "The benefits of having a contortionist for mother," said a voice from the open window. The woman and the child looked up together, but there was no one at the window except for a pair of sunbeams flowing radiantly into the kitchen and mottling its floor with puddles of orange and gold light.

  A smile of expectation came onto the woman’s face as she unraveled her body and turned her head toward the kitchen’s entrance.

  The door creaked as it opened. A man appeared in the doorway. He took a step in and stood at the threshold for a moment. His clothes were moist and stiff, as though they had dried while he wore them. Drops of water glistened in his hair.

  Two curtains of chains and manacles hung down from his shoulders, meshing together and jingling every time he moved.

  The boy stood up, raised his arms in the air, and went reeling and stumbling to the man. The man laughed, heaved the chains off his body, and lifted Neel in his arms.

  "Papa," cooed the boy, placing his hands on the man’s cheeks.

  "How did my Little Lion get hurt?" the man asked, looking at the patch of dough on Neel’s forehead.

  "The hazards of having an escape artist for father," Neel’s mother replied. She stood up and placed a hand on her heart. "And the hazards of having an escape artist for husband, too. When I picture you lying handcuffed and chained inside a locked box at the bottom of a river, or hanging upside-down above a bed of spears by a rope burning strand by strand, my heart beats so wildly I fear it would burst in my chest. I don’t know how I deluded myself I was brave before we got married. I am a coward, Ravi, an outright coward."

  Ravi took a step toward his wife and embraced her with his free arm. "You are the most courageous person I know, Runa, my darling,” he said. “You know my father was a school teacher. He had the safest job one can imagine. You also know how his classroom’s ceiling fan fell on his head one peaceful afternoon. A fan made my mother a widow. My grandfather was a soldier. He was shot seven times during the Jalgarh Siege. He not only survived that war fifty years ago but also celebrated his ninety-seventh birthday last month! A chicken is as non-daring as a being can be, but that doesn’t save it from being cut off in its prime. For my part, I promise you that no matter how they chain me and where they hang me, I’ll always come back to you on my own two feet, with my heart beating strongly."

  Runa looked into his eyes, smiled, and rested her head upon his chest.

  "Please go change into dry clothes before your train of sneezes starts," she said after a moment, "and give your Little Lion to me. It’s time for his dynamic stretching lessons."

  Ravi laughed. "You started stretching him statically and actively and dynamically and I don’t know which other -ally right from his cradle. One day, he will be able to stretch himself right out of the eye of a needle."

  Runa took Neel in her arms. She touched the lining of his sleeves. "And you have been sewing your tools-of-trade into his clothing ever since he started wearing clothes. As if that wasn’t enough," she said, smiling knowingly, "you’re already into his advance-conditioning." She took Neel’s mouth in her hand and, gently opening it, extracted an oblong metal chip from under his tongue.

  Ravi’s eyes widened and his face paled a little. "I didn’t put it there," he said. "I didn’t even know it was there."

  Runa looked from her husband to her son. Neel put his thumb into his mouth and smiled brightly at her. She kissed him and nodded slowly. "I hope picks and fetters and handcuffs remain only playthings for him."

  Hope. Symbolized by dawn, by the sun. The light of day is hope; the act of rising is hope. And the sprouting of seeds, in spring, is hope. Hope is the beacon of desire and the propeller of its own fulfillment. Who does not know all this about hope?

  What you may not know, unless death has shoved life aside to brand its cold kiss upon your brow and then run away tittering, with a promise of coming back again without any advance notice, is that the converse of hope is also hope.

  Hope is a double-headed coin.

  Chapter 4: Forfeited Gifts

  This is India in the ‘60s. You are young. The primordial hunger of love has awakened in your heart, whetting its own edge keener by the day. You dream of finding your love anywhere but in a pundit’s bag.

  However, you know that’s where it will probably be. Looking at you shyly, or looking away from you even more shyly. Peeking out of a piece of cardboard. Postcard size. Mostly black and white. Stacks of love in a priest’s bag. Bundles of hope. What you select is hope; what you leave is hope, too—for someone else. Take your pick.

  But it’s not just a question of selecting your intended life-partner out of that ubiquitous bag. It’s also a matter of going into that bag yourself. You are also someone’s hope.

  And so, my mother sent me to Shyam the Photographer’s that day, to create another Neel, a Neel with all the amenability and deception of stillness. But we almost lost the original Neel in the process.

  It wasn’t the first time I had gone to Shyam’s. I had been visiting his home since the age of seven. The first time I went there was to attend a birthday party. It was the birthday of the girl who had bitten my hand the previous day, which happened to be my first day at school.

  A little girl with long hair had run up to me as soon as I entered the classroom.

  "My name is Rachna," she said, "What is yours?” And then, without waiting for my answer, continued breathlessly, “I am the class monitor. Where would you like to sit?" She turned to look back at the room’s several rows of desks. "There in the front, with Kumar, or at the back, with Lallu Lal? We have just two seats unoccupied at the moment."

  The end of a long ribbon dangled from her ponytail temptingly. I took the ribbon and tied it to the doorknob while she was still surveying the spaces available for me.

  "In the front," I said.

  "Very good." She took a step forward. The door swung a little before drawing her ponytail taut. She gasped and almost fell. A wave of chuckles rose from the male isla
nd of the class, frothed by clucks of disapproval from the female peninsula.

  Rachna swiveled on her feet, untied the ribbon, and turned toward me swiftly, faster than I could have expected. Her face had turned redder than the sun which had just cleared the horizon outside.

  Her hand lashed out. I could already bend backward at a ninety-degree angle by that time, so she just managed to slap the space where my head had been a moment ago.

  I was ready the second time, anticipating another attack. So, just as it came—a kick—I flipped back in the air and executed a handstand my mother would have been proud of.

  Rachna lunged and swiped a couple more times before realizing the futility of her attempts. Besides, my amazing antics were making me a hero in the class. Even the girls stopped condemning me. Their collective wow matched the boys’ energetic ooh each time I evaded Rachna’s blows with something spectacular.

  Rachna stood still for a moment, looked at me meditatively, almost philosophically, and smiled. And though she stood with her back turned to the students, a hush fell in the room just as she smiled. She turned on her heels and went to sit at her place.

  I stood triumphant, regarding my new fiefdom with something more of a smirk than a smile on my face when some unseen entity behind me grabbed and twisted my left ear so cruelly that it not only wiped the expression of smugness from my face but also brought the water of sudden agony and humiliation to my eyes.

  "Mama," I cried as the power behind me turned me around to face itself.

  My gaze first fell on an apple—Adam’s apple, that is—which, by the virtue of having two moles placed side by side on it, just above a small wrinkle in the neck, appeared to have eyes and a mouth of its own.

  Next, I saw the two wiry ends of a drooping mustache and a weak chin ensconced between them. Before I could discover what lay above, a mousy voice commanded me to keep my eyes down.