by Sakiv Koch
"You’re a very beautiful little girl, Rachna, but like a bud, you hold more beauty than you possess at present," Ma said, spraying some philosophical mist even in that state of mind. "Many, many happy returns of the day, child. I’m sorry for not giving you the gift I brought for you."
"Thanks," Rachna murmured, still looking bewildered at the transformation that had taken place in the short amount of time she had spent away from her party.
Ma told me later how she had seen the light in Rachna’s eyes go out and felt horribly guilty about it.
"I am sorry," Ma said to her. "We spoiled all your fun. But we’re leaving right now!"
Rachna said nothing, but she must have responded in some way because Ma left my arm and knelt before her.
The children behind us had long since grown uninterested in these uneventful events and resumed their chatter and their little games. Their mothers were letting their theories flow forth garrulously, probably disagreeing with everyone who didn’t agree with them, using their scandal-production-and-enrichment whispers which were meant more to be heard than missed.
Shyam, a massive, barrel-chested, powerhouse of a man, stood with his lips parted and head hanging, like a chit of a girl chided for some gross mistake.
Ma took Rachna’s hands in hers. "Where is your mother?" she asked.
Rachna moved her lips, emitting breath rather than forming words. At first, I couldn’t make out what she had said. But she kept chanting it for what felt like a long time. "I don’t know…I don’t know…I don’t know," she was saying.
Ma’s eyes grew moist and bright. She rose to her feet, took my arm again, and hauled me to the head of the staircase. Shyam drew a sharp breath as if someone had punched him suddenly, but he said nothing.
"Goodbye, Rachna," Ma called out apologetically, sorrowfully as we began to descend.
My hope to evade the girly stuff had come true, but I was dismal as we rode out of the bulb-valley and left its corded lights shimmering behind.
Chapter 5: The Night Watchman
In my boyhood, the staccato thud-thud of a lathi—a long, steel-tipped club—and the shrill cry of a whistle outside my window woke me up every night.
I would gingerly draw the edge of the curtain away and look out into the darkness. A glimmer of light would suddenly erupt into the night and then fade away, leaving a ghostly afterglow behind.
My heart quickened its beat and my ears grew hot as I watched, sight rendered useless by the blackness of the night, imagination whittled overactive by the eerie procession of the sounds and flashes that did not disturb the stillness of the night so much as deepen it.
I'd slowly lower my head back onto my pillow and dream for a moment with open eyes, conjuring up frightening images of what lay beyond the walls of my home, the terrible things that walked the hills when we 'good folks' slept in our beds.
One midsummer night, in the fourteenth year of my life, I woke up and saw a face pressed against my bedroom window. The face’s eye-sockets looked hollow. The mouth, stretched wide against the glass, emitted a long, soundless scream.
The claws that flanked the apparition's face made a grating sound on the glass with their long nails, printing smears of blood on the pane. The thing outside hissed and the window began to rattle in its frame. I was sure the monster was going to come in, tear my limbs apart, and begin to devour me alive.
"Papa, Ma, Papa," I began shrieking, "Bhoot, Bhoot, help, Papaaa…."
Father—lean, powerful, heavily muscled in his vest—skidded into my room the next moment. A bloody and terrible battle was imminent. I picked up a sharpened pencil and wielded it like a dagger. Father went to the window, and to my horror, began to open it just as Ma came running into the room. She stopped abruptly at seeing the creature outside.
"Stop!" she and I cried out together, but while my shout was a hysterical appeal to my father to keep the window closed, my mother’s was an injunction to me to stop screaming. Instead of shrinking back in fright as I had expected her to, she joined my father at the window.
"Please hold on for a minute,” she said to our horrifying visitor, speaking incredibly calmly. “I’ll be with you in a moment."
When she wheeled around, her eyes were wide and face drawn. She left the room as hastily as she had come in, somehow still managing to give me a reassuring smile.
Father closed the shutters and drew the curtains before turning and looking at the pencil that I still clutched tightly in my fist.
"Hmm, I had begun to fear my lion possessed more imagination than courage," he said, ruffling my hair. "Try to go back to sleep. Don’t leave your room until your mother or I ask you to come out!"
He left after giving this rather courage-reducing instruction. I sat listening to the sound of his footsteps hurrying along in the stone passage that connected my room to the main door, wondering if my parents had come across Aladdin’s lamp—one of my deep desires at the time—and had gained control over a djinn.
I waited for about sixty seconds before climbing out of my bed and tiptoeing toward the door of my room. An oil lantern burned in a corner of our courtyard near a scattering of my paper kites.
They fluttered in the wind and shot giant parallelograms of tailed shadows that shifted from wall to wall and almost sent me scurrying back to my bed. A blood-curdling scream froze me momentarily. It had issued from our drawing-room. I was shaking from head to foot by the time I reached the room and peeped in from behind its curtains.
Mother was kneeling on the floor, holding a blood-soaked towel to the head of a man lying on our best rug. He was covered all over with soot or coal-dust. Mother had placed a strip of cloth over his eyes. He moaned and writhed from side to side as Father tied a crude bandage over a deep gash on his right arm.
Father saw me and shook his head, whether admonishingly or resignedly, I couldn’t tell in the dim light. Ma, who sat with her back to me, turned and looked at me.
"You shouldn’t have come here, Neel," she said, "but now that you have, come help me while your father goes to get a doctor."
The wounded man suddenly twisted and gesticulated wildly with his hands. "The monsters are coming –." Father patted his shoulder and told him not to speak.
"I’ll also have to go to the police post," Father said to himself, standing up. "Neel, come lock the door, and don’t open it to anyone you don’t know."
"Ru-ru-ruthless demons," the man stammered as Father and I started walking toward the door.
He stopped indecisively at the threshold. "I don’t want to leave you alone, but this man will die if we don’t get help fast." I had never seen my father—whom I considered completely invulnerable and invincible by any force on earth—being afraid of anything before. My illusion of being completely safe in my home developed its first crack that night.
"I’ll lock the door from the outside also," he said after a moment’s hesitation.
"What if they—," Ma stopped midsentence. "Go very, very carefully, Ravi," she whispered, as though afraid she’d be heard by the monsters and demons the wounded man kept raving about.
I saw the lack of color on Ma’s face and the presence of fear in her eyes. My bottomless terror deepened further. I was suddenly aware, for the first time in my life, of how alone and isolated we were.
There were only a handful of houses in our hamlet, all of them occupied by shepherds who spent summers higher up in the Himalayas. We had to climb a forested hill to get to the nearest town, which lay four miles to the south of our valley. After Father stepped out, I locked and bolted our front door and hurried back to the drawing-room.
I crouched trembling by Ma’s side. "Don’t be afraid, Neel," she said, placing a comforting hand on my hot, throbbing head for a moment. "Your father will be back in half an hour. We’re perfectly safe here."
We looked together at the now blood-saturated cloth she held pressed against the prostrate man’s head wound. Her words sounded utterly false even to herself (as she’d tell me on several
occasions afterward).
"Murderers!" cried the half-conscious man. "Monsters! They killed her, they killed the Rani in front of my eyes. They’ll get the prince, too. They’ll kill you also.” His head jerked up and the cloth covering his upper face slipped from it. My head snapped sideways with shock. I retched. The man’s left eyeball was badly mutilated. There was a gaping tear in the pupil and a sickly liquid oozed from the wound.
Ma, too, recoiled in horror and disbelief, but not at the sight of the injured eye, since she must have seen it already. "Killed the Rani," she repeated slowly, her lips trembling. The man continued to mutter until a thin stream of blood started to trickle out of a corner of his mouth. He fell silent after that.
He had a big, round face, smeared with black dirt washed here and there with streaks of sweat and blood. He looked as tall as Father (about six feet and an inch or two) and almost as well-built.
He had a long mustache that dripped crimson drops from both its ends onto the rug. He wore khaki trousers and a khaki shirt tore open at the neck, around which a metal whistle dangled by a string. A lathi lay by his side along with a battered flashlight.
"Who is he, Ma?" I asked Mother, even though I had a pretty good idea of his identity by now.
"The night watchman," she replied, placing the strip of cloth back onto the watchman’s face.
"The night watchman," I repeated slowly, seeing the embodiment of the enigma of my childhood lying motionless on my home’s floor. The mysterious, invisible being of the whistle, the flash, and the club – moaning with pain and bleeding profusely.
The watchman suddenly sat up with astonishing ease, as though he were perfectly alright and had been merely napping. The masking gauze slid off his face once again. He gazed at me with his good eye for a disconcerting moment before grasping my arm.
"Sa-save him—," he cried, relinquished my trembling arm from his trembling grip, and fell back. With his silence came a stillness so absolute and so heavy that it strangulated every sound and movement that the surrounding night jungle had been resonating with a moment ago. The last vestiges of courage and reason fled our hearts.
Even the flames of our candles dwindled and darkness crept up closer to us. I felt that the walls around us had dissolved and we lay hunched and cowering in an open, unprotected space.
Ma sat like a statue, with her head bowed. She suddenly stirred and cocked her head to listen. "He’s been gone for more than forty-five minutes," she said, in a hoarse whisper that raised the small hair on the back of my neck. "But someone is coming. Listen."
I looked over my shoulder, as though I could see sounds.
"I don’t—," I began, but Ma hushed me by cutting the air with her hand.
"Shhh, listen," she breathed, pointing toward the outer wall of the room. Someone was coming toward the house at a run. "Ravi?" she called out, so quietly I could hardly hear her myself.
"Ravi?" she raised her voice, and it quivered as though she had been running herself. The sound of footsteps was approaching us fast, but there was no answer to her call.
"Papa," I shouted. "Papa!" The person outside was now at our front door. I could hear him panting, but he didn’t speak out, didn’t respond to our hysterical calls. And then this unseen runner moved past our door, moving away from us at the same speed with which he had come to us.
Our hearts beat painfully quickly. Dread crushed us more with each passing moment.
"Who could that be?" Ma said. "If it was your father, why didn’t he stop here?"
"Maybe someone was following him," I answered, with a quiver like Ma’s in my voice.
"But we didn’t hear…," she stopped to listen again. A wild dog began baying in the hills. An amnesic grandfather clock behind us released a mechanical bird to sing the wrong hour. Just as the bird drew back into its box-nest, the front door began to rattle violently.
"Who is-, who is it?" Ma asked, without receiving any answer. The watchman, who I thought had lost consciousness, stirred and began mumbling again. "Can’t stay—," he said, trying to sit up again and failing miserably.
We stood with our hearts in our mouths, cowering, completely bewildered, when we heard the beat of several dozen wings. Startled birds were taking flight from a grove of trees behind the house.
"There’s someone in the back courtyard," Ma said, her voice suddenly steady, her face taut. "Go get under that divan," she commanded, "and don’t come out until I ask you to."
And then a window smashed behind us. A rock arrowed in and hit the grandfather clock, bringing out its resident cuckoo bird again. More rocks crashed against the front door. The valley reverberated with bangs loud and ominous enough to make us jump out of our skins.
Those noises could have been made by firecrackers or by guns, but the probability of someone bursting crackers that night was pretty close to zero. The person pounding our door yelped in pain and all noise ceased abruptly after that.
"Please come hide with me, Ma," I pleaded. She shook her head and placed a finger on her lips. I slid under the divan and Ma pulled the bedspread all the way to the floor so that it hid me completely.
I lifted the sheet and peered out as soon as Ma left the room. The watchman’s blood had pooled beside his head and was inching toward me like a slow-moving deluge.
My entire body was clammy with a sweat of terror. I wanted nothing more than to hide and remain hidden, but the inexorable need to protect, to shield my mother overshadowed all my fears, numerous and deep as they were (except for the related fear for the safety of my father).
I crawled out from under the bed, wishing I had not left my pencil behind in my room. The watchman’s lathi lay beside him, one end cleaving the stream of his blood in the middle. I rose to my feet and picked up the club. It was heavy and unwieldy in my hands, but my fingers tightened around it as though I were hanging by it above a bottomless abyss.
Ma had put out the lamp in the courtyard, drowning it in utter darkness. I stood indecisive in the middle of the yard, not knowing where to go and what to do, not comprehending why Ma had not come to hide with me and what she was doing now.
A sense of urgency suddenly gripped me with such intensity that it petrified me for a moment. I walked slowly with a hand outstretched in front of me, keeping the watchman’s club close to my chest, until I came to the corridor leading to the main door.
The passage, too, was a pocket of impenetrable darkness, but there was a glimmer of white above the door. A narrow shelf ran over the doorframe. I half sensed, half saw my mother standing on the ledge, her back pressed against the wall, balanced on a very small breadth of space.
Knowing she was up there, not only reasonably out of harm’s way, but also capable of inflicting harm upon anyone who might break in, knowing that she was my mother and that she was extraordinary, steadied my quaking limbs.
It inspired me both with an idea and with the courage required to carry it out. I turned and made my way toward the staircase at the other end of the courtyard as fast as I could. The banging on the door started again just as I reached our terrace.
Now that I was out in the open, alone in the darkness, the sound scared me so much I felt nauseous and nearly dropped my club. But I didn’t stop. Keeping my head low, I ran toward the parapet wall looking over the back of our house. Several stout branches of a neem tree arched over this part of the terrace.
I had been using this tree as my private pathway to the ground below and back up to the terrace for the last several years. I grabbed my usual branch with the intent to do the same tonight.
The wind had died down. A column of clouds hung low and unmovable in the skies. I tried to pull myself onto my branch but found it impossible to do so while I held the club in one hand. I lifted my arms above the parapet to throw my weapon onto the grass below.
But my hands didn’t relinquish the club because my eyes had seen the branches of my neem tree dip and sway, while the entire forest canopy was as still as though it were painted on a canvas. Someo
ne had taken the same route up that I intended to take down. There was someone hidden in my tree.
I remained frozen, anticipating the blow that would smash my head like the watchman’s had been smashed, the stab that would puncture my eye like his has been punctured. A long moment passed.
I exhaled my long-held breath. My galloping heartbeat slowed to a trot and a wave of blood rushed back into my spinning head. I must have imagined that disturbance, I told myself.
I relaxed and peered over the parapet again. A figure—a black blur against the blackness—shot out of the neem’s foliage with the suddenness and velocity of a rock released from a catapult's cup. I staggered back in shock and fright. A scream rose and died unuttered in my throat.
The figure landed on the parapet with the agility and surefootedness of a trained acrobat. It bent its knees for maximizing its momentum and sprang at me. I instinctively raised the watchman’s club in front of me like a vertical bar. My attacker rammed into the club. His throat met the solid, knobby wood of the lathi with a loud, prolonged crack. A sickening, squelching sound escaped the attacker’s mouth.
The force of the collision threw me backward. The upper body of the man fell onto my legs. His arms thrashed. He made a gargling sound. He convulsed epically before going motionless.
A three-fingered fist of terror, shock, and disbelief had been ramming my skull since the watchman stepped into our house. That fist now opened and gripped my throat in a stranglehold. I could not breathe. I could not move, think, or feel anything for a long moment. I went as lifeless as the dead body lying on me.
I felt a dampness in my trousers. A sense of shame jolted me back to whatever remained of my senses. I squirmed, thinking I had wet my pajamas in my terror. My father would never call me his lion again if/when he came to know of my cowardice.
But (thankfully) it was blood from my attacker’s mouth that had splotched my clothes (and not the loss of my control over my bladder). I scrambled out from under his body in revulsion.
