by Sakiv Koch
I stepped onto the trail and, in my eagerness to get to the town and find my father, almost caught up with the man. I made so much noise with the patter of my feet that the man slowed down and stopped. Just as he turned his head to look over his shoulder, I dropped to the ground, landing painfully on my club and suppressing a gasp with difficulty.
He still held the lantern in front of his body and, luckily, I lay in the long swath of shadow he threw behind him.
"What a night," the man said in a voice that curiously sounded broken to me. He shook his head and resumed walking. I rose to my feet, my mind once again functioning at some rudimentary level, and followed him as soundlessly as I could.
The man, already walking at a brisk pace I found hard to keep up with, suddenly broke into a run, forcing me to run as well.
See me if you can, on that terrible night, as I ran down a line of dirt parting a dense jungle, chasing a man who could and would kill me instantly if he saw or sensed me.
See that fourteen-year-old boy, clad in his pajamas, hair tousled and eyes straining, carrying a club taller than himself, propelled by his love for his father, weighed down by the images of the two men he had put to their deaths.
See me on that night, so you can understand readily that that night could never really end for me, so you can know that it never ended for me. That night spawned a brood of nights like itself. It played hide and seek with me. It would withdraw from my life until I made myself believe everything was fine again and let my guard down. And then, whenever I was most vulnerable, it would spring back and reopen my wounds.
I ran down the trail until my breath began to first crack and then detonate in small explosions inside my chest. My fuel was no longer my physical energy but my will-power, but even that was dwindling fast. I doubled over but ran on, zig-zagging in and out of the footpath and getting scratched by the branches and brambles on the wayside.
A small stream lay ahead. The trail curved to run parallel to it. The man took the turn running and disappeared out of my sight. I stumbled onto the bend, fighting for each breath, knowing in my heart that I would collapse if I didn’t stop immediately.
But stopping was not an option I had and collapse I could not. I was learning on my feet, a great deal prematurely, that life could demand more than one could give. One had to create and spend that extra-strength simultaneously, like a water-tank emptying at its bottom while filling up at the top.
I could see the man again as soon as I came out on the last, straight stretch of the trail. The town’s twinkling lights lay less than half a mile away. But the man wasn’t headed there! He swerved to his right, going towards Trumpet Hill, towards Meena Devi’s sprawling mansion sitting atop the gently sloping hill.
Meena Devi was the younger sister of the Maharaja of Surajpur. She had come to Jalgarh in all the splendor of a royal bride many years ago. But her luminosity had soon been eclipsed by tragedy (Mother always used that phrase when telling me about Meena Devi). A month after her marriage, her husband gave Meena a special gift—something no one else had in the entire district at that time. The gift of electricity. The new couple gave a small party the day after, inviting my mother and father to perform in their home under the "spectacular" glow of electric bulbs.
At some point in the evening, while my father worked his way out of a barred and locked chest, a fuse blew and extinguished the magical bulbs. Meena’s young husband went to "fix" the problem. He touched the poorly insulated live power line in his ignorance. When a servant went to look for him after several minutes, the celebration turned into mourning.
Meena Devi had had no children and her parents-in-law also passed away in the next few years. Her brother, the Maharaja, requested her to return to Surajpur several times, but Meena Devi never agreed to do that. She spent most of her time looking after the poor and the sick, ran a school for girls, and in time, became an active participant in the country’s struggle for independence. People began to refer to her as Rani—the queen—even though she had not married into a royal family.
The Rani sometimes called my mother over to her house and she occasionally visited us as well. They were not exactly friends, my mother and she, but, as Ma liked to put it, they understood each other and could work well together. Ma told me—and I had seen it myself on several occasions—that the only person to whom the Rani really opened her heart, the person with whom she laughed, with whom she became a child herself, was her nephew, Prince Sanjay, who visited her for two months every summer.
The watchman’s last words flashed through my numbed, crumbling mind as the monster I was chasing ran up Trumpet Hill. "They killed her, they killed the Rani in front of my eyes. They’ll get the prince, too," he had said.
I knew that the prince was staying with his aunt at this time. I had seen him at the annual function in my school two days ago, sitting on the stage as the chief guest, attracting all gazes to his shimmering kurta and his bejeweled pagdi.
He was the same age as I, perhaps two or three years older, very tall and thin. He had sat in his high-backed velvet throne beside the Rani, with a faint mustache and a fainter smile on his lip, supremely conscious of his infinite supremacy over us lesser beings, who sat on cheap rush chairs in the school’s hall.
Four gigantic men in crisp uniforms stood flanking the prince’s throne. One of these bodyguards pointed a thick finger at me while bending down to whisper something deferentially in Sanjay’s ear. Prince Sanjay’s lofty gaze descended and focused on my face. He inclined his head in a manner that required that I bow mine.
Sanjay had a good reason to notice me amongst more than three hundred students assembled in the hall.
A summer ago, on the afternoon of my thirteenth birthday, he had somehow managed to sneak out of his aunt’s house without his entourage. He had come to our school. Nobody recognized him because he was wearing ordinary clothes. He was looking for someone, stopping students and asking them questions. I was walking down the corridor in a hurry to go to the bathroom when he put up a hand and stopped me.
"Do you know a girl named Rachna?" he asked.
"Uh-huh," I muttered and started walking again.
"Do you know where she is right now?"
I knew where she was—she was in our classroom, busy dusting her head after I had put a fistful of chalk-powder into her hair. Rachna was still the class monitor. I had whitened her hair because she had admonished me not to leap over the benches while the students sat on them.
"I asked you something," Prince Sanjay said imperiously, grabbing my elbow.
"I didn’t ask you to ask me anything," I said, jerking my arm free. A small crowd of spectators—mostly girls—had gathered around us. I shoved the prince against the wall to underscore my strength. "Nobody touches me without asking my permission first."
I didn’t have the slightest idea as to who he was. It was both a bit surprising and entertaining to see his face turn red with anger. His lips quivered. I was hard-pressed to answer Nature’s irresistible call and so I ran away.
It was on my way back that I witnessed ‘Regal Rage’ for the first time. Not just witnessed it but also became its target.
I was perhaps the first-ever human being on the planet who had insulted, ignored, defied, and manhandled the prince. He was in no mood for forgiveness. Rachna stood beside him in this manner: hands on hips, head thrown back, eyes narrowed, mouth compressed – like a living flame poised next to a pool of fuel. Streaks of chalk-powder shimmered in her jet black hair.
"He must have been the one," she said, pointing toward me with her chin, as assuredly as though she had seen me being the one. The prince said nothing. He just started walking toward me with his head lowered and his eyes boring into mine.
It was the first time I had seen anybody’s eyes glaze over and harden. This disconcerted me. There was such inflexibility in his bearing that I felt as though a rock were flying at me.
I instinctively made a shield of my arm and took a step back. All sounds ce
ased suddenly. The newborn silence nudged my courage awake. It was a spectators’ hush, and I was the child of two performers.
I could not let my fellow students (especially Rachna) think that I had been frightened. My perception of their perception of me was that of an invincible hero, and I was not about to let a lanky boy—no matter how fierce and tall he looked—change that now.
And so, the arm that had raised itself in a protective gesture now swept down in a motion of exaggerated carelessness.
"You came looking for Rachna or a beating, eh?" I asked the advancing Prince.
Many students laughed. "Both, I am sure," said Lallu Lal—my trusted lieutenant since the first grade—with a fat chuckle of his own. The laughter was praise for me, ridicule for the prince. His mouth contorted more as he got angrier. He fisted his hand and leaped at me with a growl of fury.
"Hey," Rachna called out. I don’t know whether she was addressing the prince or me. Never bothered to ask her. I rushed the onrushing Sanjay, grabbed his right arm, and swiveled him around with a swift, well-practiced rotary tug. Both of us now faced in the same direction—his back pressed against my chest. I then lifted him a few inches off the ground with a forward jerk. His feet swung from under him, and I let go of his body.
The prince fell on his back onto the floor. Before the air trapped in his lungs could make its exit in a gasp of pain, I pinned his arms with my knees and gripped his throat in both my hands.
"Neel!" Rachna cried. She grasped my shoulder and shook me, "Leave him! Right now! Do you have any idea who he—"
"He is At-Neel’s-Mercy," I said, cutting her mid-sentence, "that’s who he is. Right, friends?"
"Right!" answered a chorus of my cronies.
"Right?" I then asked the boy lying on the floor, shook him a little for effect, and then grinned widely when he convulsed furiously and futilely in answer to my question.
"Ha-ha-ha, he now wants to become More-At-Neel’s Mercy," said Lallu Lal, with a hand on his belly and his eyes crinkled in pleasure. My first warning of what I had gotten into—or rather, what I was sitting on—came when I saw his smile flee abruptly.
The second warning came when Rachna freed my shoulder from her grip and stepped back. The third and the last warning came when Prince Sanjay suddenly stopped struggling as he, too, saw something behind me.
I began to turn my head, but it suddenly snapped forward viciously. Something powerful had just struck me between the shoulders, on the base of my neck. The upper and the bottom rows of my teeth clashed violently, catching the end of my tongue between them. Blood began to fill my mouth and started dripping onto the prince’s face.
My unseen attacker then lifted me bodily off the prince and flung me against a wall. I hit the hard wall and then slid onto the hard floor, where I lay stunned for a long moment, watching a gigantic man, resplendent in gold and crimson livery, lift the prince as tenderly as though he were made of bone-china and might break anytime. One similarly clad man walked toward me with his paws outstretched. He pulled me to my feet as roughly as though I were merely a sack of sand.
His face was red with incredulous anger and his mouth trembled with some acute emotion. His hands were two iron traps crushing my arms. "How dare—," he gasped, having as much trouble in breathing as in believing what he had just seen.
Prince Sanjay stood leaning against a column a foot away from me. He looked unnervingly calm and relaxed with his hands tucked in his pockets.
One manservant used an embroidered silk handkerchief to wipe the drops of my blood adorning the bulb of Sanjay’s nose and the curve of his right cheek. A second servant produced a handheld fan from his sling bag and began waving it back and forth a few inches from the prince’s hot face.
A maidservant poured a glass of cool water from a bottle, both of which she was carrying with her. She offered it to Sanjay, but he waved it away. A vapor of immeasurable superiority hovered over the raging fire of his anger.
"Bring a rope," the prince commanded and a couple of his servants scurried away like worker ants.
The crowd had swelled to include more students, schoolmasters, peons, and clerks. Some young men not belonging to the school stood on the school’s compound wall in such postures of arrogance as though they (and not Prince Sanjay) were this painful, humiliating, and disastrous (for me) drama’s heroes.
At the same time, these vagabonds somehow gave the impression that to be involved directly in such a situation in any way whatsoever was immeasurably beneath their (non-existent) dignities.
I observed their cockiness while waiting for the arrival of the rope. Not knowing how else to vent his rage, the guard holding me had closed his hand around a fistful of my hair and yanked my head back. The only place I could look at, without lowering my eyes, was the top of that wall.
One of the cocks on the walls—the youngest of them—had a wooden slingshot tucked in his waistband. He had a few chance whiskers of new youth venturing out around his mouth.
But the expression on his face was that of a far older person. His name was Raghu. I knew he had been expelled from the school a year ago. He had spat in the face of an English School Inspector when the inspector asked him to tie his shoelace (the inspector’s shoelace, that is).
Some people said that the inspector only got his deserts for wanting to demean an Indian. Others claimed that the Englishman was old, rheumatic, and suffered from gout. He had only requested Raghu to do it for him because he could not bend down himself. Raghu happened to be the only boy in the hall where the old man was stalled motionless for the fear of falling on his face on account of the loosened laces.
I didn’t know which version of the tale was true, but I knew that "Raghu on the wall" equaled "trouble in the yard." He and I had never seen eye to eye. We had, on the other hand, blackened each other’s eyes on quite a few occasions. We were like two stray dogs who couldn’t pass each other without going for each other’s throats. Our teachers had been relieved when one of us was thrown out of the school.
Seeing him up on the wall made me wish that his head would somehow replace mine on the chopping block. He smirked at me as he freed his slingshot from his trousers’ waistband and withdrew a small, round rock from his pocket. The rock went into the slingshot’s cup. He pulled the thick elastic band back with excessive enthusiasm, thereby stumbling on his precarious perch, and thereby missing his aim.
The shot meant for my face hit the brick column against which Sanjay stood leaning so casually. A shower of microscopic brick chips went flying in the air. Some of the gritty dust got into Sanjay’s left eye.
He gasped. The crowd gasped collectively with him. Sanjay’s guards unslung their rifles and drew out their swords. The guard who held me shoved me aside and sprang to his master’s side. Some of the other guards charged toward the compound wall. They dropped to their knees and aimed their weapons at the young heroes standing atop the wall.
And those heroes, pictures of courage and manliness until now, suddenly turned into animated caricatures of panic, throwing their arms in the air or covering their faces with their hands. The only person on the wall who was not cowering or whimpering was Raghu, for the very good reason that he wasn’t on the wall anymore.
"Catch the bastard and bring him here," someone commanded and all but two of the guards ran out of the school.
I was satisfied with the turn of events. My wish had miraculously come true. It was time for me to make as dignified an exit as I could.
I spat out a gob of bloody saliva, put one hand in a pocket, smoothed my hair with the other hand, and began sneaking out of the corridor. Someone placed a hand on my arm, making me jump in fright, but it was only Rachna. She began walking with me, pressing my arm reassuringly, making me feel that I, too, had a dedicated bodyguard now.
I remember that the sun was in our eyes as we passed through the melee in the yard. Rachna shaded her eyes with a palm and looked intently at my face.
Orange light rippled in the black wave
s of her hair. It lifted in the breeze and caressed my cheek. I experienced the sensation of being alone with someone in a crowd for the first time that afternoon. The feeling was a current of warmth in my chest. I only concentrated on this warmth, not on its cause, not on the person who gave it to me.
Being the shallow changeling that I was (and perhaps still am), I began to feel a little puppyish with a girl walking me protectively in just a few seconds. I was about to jerk my arm out of her gentle grasp when someone took my other arm in a very ungentle grip from behind.
"Where are you going, you dog?" yelled the guard who had thrown me at the wall earlier.
"You think you can escape after first assaulting His Highness’s person yourself and then getting your fellow dog to shoot at him?” He began dragging me back to where the maidservant was rinsing the prince’s inflamed eye.
"That boy was not Neel’s friend!" Rachna cried, still holding on to my arm and getting dragged along.
"Why would he want to hurt me then?" Sanjay asked, looking at Rachna with one eye closed, water dripping from his face. "Earlier, I intended to give him a light punishment—some whipping, perhaps—but this—," he pointed at his fluttering, reddening eye, "—this calls for something serious." He waved at a guard who stood with a coil of rope in his hands. "Tie this boy up and take him back to Trumpet Hill. I’ll decide what to do with him there."
I shuddered to imagine what could be a serious punishment if whipping was a light one. I looked to my teachers to intervene and save me when the guard with the rope began to walk toward me determinedly.
But every one of the masters I could see—still wielding their snakes and wearing their ‘always-do-only-what-you’re-told-to-do’ expressions—appeared satisfied to see me ‘get it in the end’. Each one of them had been predicting an ‘untoward end’ for me for years.
