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

by Sakiv Koch

  They caned me later. They made me stand in the sun with my arms raised straight for hours on end. The spinster always looked at me as though she wanted to roast me alive. I looked back at her in a much worse way. She and I had become blood enemies. It was within her power to get me expelled from the school. She exerted that power. A power greater than hers shielded me. Rani Meena Devi, the chief trustee of the trust that ran our school, put forth two beliefs when my case was brought to her knowledge:

  children shouldn’t indulge in the kind of base mischief I had indulged in.

  adults shouldn’t seek to destroy mischievous students’ careers without giving such students every opportunity to step off the treacherous paths they might have strayed upon inadvertently.

  There was no moral or official authority higher than the Rani’s in our district. As a consequence, the fuming spinster couldn’t get rid of me. I deferred my plans for tormenting and humiliating her to a future date. But all that is beside the point.

  As I said above, Rachna is the point, always, invariably, even when I hoodwink you into believing otherwise.

  She remained catatonic that entire day. There was no change in her state the next day, not until lunch break. She showed signs of life during the break after I met with a little accident.

  We were playing tug-of-war. She wasn’t playing, of course. She wasn’t even watching the game.

  The rope was old. It had probably gotten wet a couple of times at some point in the past. Its core was rotten. It broke in the middle. The opposing teams went flying in opposite directions. The last boy at the rope in each team got the maximum battering. I was the last boy at the rope in my team. I banged the back of my head against a tree-trunk, and the head of the boy in front of me rammed into my face. Double whammy.

  All the boys who had fallen groaned or cried. My shriek was the loudest of all. It was my cry that brought her running to the site of our accident. She kneeled beside me and soothed my (then unwrinkled) brow. When I trudged toward the school’s dispensary, one eye weeping of its own accord, she placed a hand on my arm and wiped my cheek gently with her handkerchief from time to time.

  "Do you know what happened on my birthday?" she asked in a low voice, in a flat tone, as though she had already asked that question several times and didn’t really expect anyone to answer her.

  I shook my head, suddenly feeling more sorry for her than I felt for my battered self. "But Ma started to tell me about her mother," I said, speaking out of one side of my mouth. "She said she would explain everything to me in time."

  Rachna lowered her head without saying anything.

  "I can tell you everything that Ma told me. It’s not much at this point. It’s about a little girl born in Russia many decades ago. Her name was Nadya, which means Hope," I rattled on, wanting to somehow end her desolation with my chatter.

  Rachna still didn’t say anything. She had held my arm all along on our slow, arduous walk toward the school building. As we approached the entrance, she steered me in another direction, using my arm like a rudder. We started walking toward a grove of fruit trees behind the school. We came to a small garden that some older students tended in their free time. She and I sat side by side on a wooden bench placed between two mango trees.

  "The year was 1890; the river Volga flowed un-spanned by any bridge ...," I began Nadya’s story just as Ma had started it and retold it in all its detail, stopping with Akilina, the midwife, rowing down the Volga after she had found her son lying dead on the floor of her house one morning.

  It took me a long time to recount the tale because of the swelling on one side of my face. The skies darkened and a drizzle started to fall, evoking the smell of soil. The first drops of rain that kiss the earth and make it fragrant always transport me to that patch-garden at the back of our old school.

  We sat there, drenched and silent, long after I had finished speaking. One of her hands had moved at some point in time and clasped mine.

  It became a ritual for us after that evening – I’d stay up until late every night, listening to Ma’s story. I would retell it to Rachna the next day, with a few flourishes of my own. We sat in the same garden, on the same bench between those two parrot-beloved trees. We didn’t change that place even after a fire burnt and blackened a small woodland that bordered the patch-garden and formed our chief view.

  Her hand always found mine. In time, I learned to gauge how she was feeling just by the way her fingers nestled in my palm.

  Loose and still, as though unconnected to a living person’s body: Sad

  Finger-tips drumming on my hand for a fleeting moment: Anxious

  A tightening of the grip: Angry

  Thumb describing rapid circles on my palm: Impatient

  The flutter and lift of the entire hand, like a distressed bird’s attempt to fly, before falling back onto my palm and remaining there in the sad mode: Guilty.

  She had cause to feel all these, including the last emotion, as Ma’s tale unfolded. Do you see that I have listed only ‘negative feelings’ here? Does that mean she was never happy, excited, or hopeful when we were together? Or, does it mean that I was selectively color-blind – seeing only the fire-ravaged woodland’s bleakness and ignorant of the radiant vegetation rebirthing beneath the burnt underbrush?

  When, on moonlit evenings, she asked me to sit awhile longer, why did I always take it to be a sign of her desperation to stay away from her home? Why did all her smiles appear to me like curtains to hide her misery? Why did I get so disproportionately angry when anyone so much as raised his or her voice while speaking to her?

  Her quietness always denoted her sadness to me. On other days, when she appeared a bit lively, I became commensurately anxious. I didn’t want any element or entity to spoil her good mood. My zeal invariably resulted in my irritating her a thousand times with my over-protectiveness.

  I picked several fights on her account. She would often defend the person I had beaten up for her sake. This naturally infuriated me. But her (inexplicable and unjustifiable back then) attitude hurt me more than it angered me. I couldn’t see at that time how I was raising a barbed-wire fence around her, with "Danger of Neel, Keep Away" painted on it in big red letters.

  Consider this one illustrative incident: You are a student on the verge of graduating from high school. You’re swarthy and big–-bigger and older than that boy, Neel.

  One morning, just before your final math exam, you happen to be standing outside the examination hall's door. You are scowling, most likely with the effort to recall some elusive arithmetic formula. In that abstract state of mind, which often precedes a test, your gaze falls on Rachna. It remains fixed upon her while you’re still wearing that uncomely frown upon your forehead.

  Before you have the slightest idea of what’s happening, two hands suddenly grip your collar and drag you across the corridor to a little lawn screened from the general view by some dogwood trees.

  You’re now involved in a fight you didn’t start, a fight you didn’t want. But since you’re stronger (or so you have the small consolation of believing later, when it is all over), you come out on top. You come out on top, literally speaking, at the worst possible moment. The Apple finds you straddling a smaller boy (Neel) and pummeling him just when the bell announcing the start of your exam rings.

  You are not aware that Neel, who was beating you until the time of the appearance of the schoolmaster on the scene, let you gain dominance at that instant deliberately. You’re unaware that Neel had been on the lookout for the advent of a school authority from the start of your bashing.

  All you know is that you’re being hauled to your feet and slapped on the face by hands larger than Neel’s. You’re next taken to the headmaster’s office. Your pleas for being allowed to first write the exam fall on deaf ears. You stand to lose an entire year from the calendar of your student life.

  Who do you think was ultimately blamed for that student’s tragic plight? The Apple? No, he was just doing his duty a
s a teacher and a disciplinarian, after all. The student himself? No, how was that poor boy to help it in any way? I? You would think so, and so it should have been.

  But the world is more warped than it is round—the entire fault-finding machinery of the school, led by the knobby-eyed spinster mistress, determined Rachna to have been the cause of all the misery heaped upon that hapless boy aspiring for matriculation.

  Here’s a sampling of the various verdicts pronounced against her:

  "She instigates that devil of a boy, Neel."

  "The haughty girl thinks it’s a sin even to look at her."

  "She’s just hungry for the power she can exercise over innocent young boys."

  "If young girls are becoming so whimsical, our ancient and great culture is surely counting its last breaths."

  This instigating, haughty, power-hungry, whimsical, culture-killing girl often went with the Rani to the district’s charity hospitals and orphanages. Rachna helped care for destitute, handicapped, leprosied, terminally ill people who had no one else to look after them.

  I had been under the impression that Prince Sanjay had first met Rachna through Rani Meena Devi. This wasn’t the case, though.

  They had come across each other in the forest surrounding Trumpet Hill. Prince Sanjay was out hunting, aiming his rifle at a deer. Rachna came upon him from behind and shoved him with enough force to make him put a bullet into the ground, very close to his feet.

  Imagine the consequences if I had dared to push the Prince, making him miss his mark and putting his toes in the danger of being blasted from his feet! And what did the prince do when he turned around and saw the red-faced, angry girl who had dared commit violence to his exalted person?

  He merely blinked before apologizing to Rachna! Can you comprehend the incomprehensible? Yes? I, too, can do so now. I wish I could do so back then, too.

  The prince had been out without his guards that day, too (just like the time he had come to our school looking for Rachna). He loved to sneak out on his own. The Rani was always miffed at him for his laxity, but he was royally adamant about certain things. This devil-may-care attitude of his would vanish without a trace on the night of the murders.

  Hunting had been among Prince Sanjay’s chief interests until Rachna thumped his back and shook him up. When he came to see her in school, it was to tell her that he had decided to never kill any animal again! The rascal went moon-high in Rachna’s hard-to-win esteem in one sly, smooth motion.

  Guess who plummeted to the very bottom of the selfsame esteem? Yours truly, of course. Rachna stopped speaking to me after my memorable fight with the math-exam aspirant. Could anything be more natural than her snapping all ties with me? Nothing could be more natural, of course.

  And yet I was shocked, flabbergasted, incredulous, incensed, and so on, when I found the following note on my desk one non-fine morning:

  Neel, it would pain me immensely if you try to speak to me, or if you continue to make me an excuse for fighting with people. Rachna

  What?! My speaking to her would pain her immensely?! After everything that I had done to make her pain go away?! I made her an excuse for fighting with people?! After I had stood watch over her, without letup, with such dedication, such devotion?! After I had earned so many bruises and bumps and bloody-noses, all for the sake of her peace?! (This is how my thoughts raged at that time – the equivalent of many exclamation-marks and question-marks blowing and erupting in my mind.)

  I crumpled up her note into a ball and threw it at her desk. She didn’t even look up when it landed upon her open book. Unbeknownst to us, the knobby-eyed spinster and a school inspector stood in the doorway, watching this piece of drama.

  The two flew to Rachna’s desk in unison. While the spinster picked up the ball I had thrown at Rachna’s desk, the inspector snatched a sheet of paper from Rachna’s hand. He cleared his throat dramatically and began to read Rachna’s words aloud.

  Neel, I am sorry for my harsh words. Please don’t think I am thankless for the things that you do for me. We shall speak when all this unpleasantness passes away. I wish Ms. Lalita wouldn’t show up for her class today. She makes me so angry I have difficulty breathing when she’s around. Rachna

  I shall only tell you (though you must have guessed it already) that the spinster’s name was Lalita. The rest of what followed that morning – the tantrums the spinster threw, the humiliation Rachna had to endure (once again, due solely to me) – I’ll leave unmentioned.

  And then she was gone. Rachna picked up her bag and walked out, never to return to that school again.

  Chapter 10: A Homely Music

  You haven’t failed to notice, of course, that the root of Rachna’s unhappiness lay in the mysteries surrounding her mother and mine. These secrets, in turn, stemmed from the life of my mother’s mother, Nadya. All that had happened, and was to happen later, had been actuated one stormy night, decades ago, by a drunkard old woman in Russia.

  Akilina, the midwife, had developed an obsession with the family she had destroyed. She started living in the boatman’s house, becoming a boatwoman herself. After finding her son dead one morning, Akilina got into her boat and started rowing down the body of Volga.

  She stopped at every village and town on either side of the river, hopelessly trying to find out what had happened to Dmitry’s newborn. The infant had vanished from its mother’s side without a trace.

  Akilina told everyone she met the story of Ferryman Dmitry. She begged her listeners to curse and condemn her. She called herself a murderer. People generally just shook or bowed their heads and walked away. Some took pity on the bedraggled woman who had obviously not slept or eaten well in a long time. They offered her food, clothes, or shelter.

  Winter was beginning to set in. Akilina had perhaps been struck by palsy. Her limbs trembled continuously and a part of her face had stiffened so that her speech was slurred. One evening, she left her boat and went behind a clump of bushes to relieve herself. When she returned, the boat was gone — whether someone had stolen it, or whether it had drifted away because Akilina had failed to moor it properly, she never knew. All she knew was that her end was near, that she would finally be rid of the undying torture that ate at her without letup.

  She was in the middle of a wilderness, with no sign of civilization for uncountable verst in any direction. All her bedding, all the warm clothing she had possessed, had been in the boat, along with her meager food supply.

  The air was progressively gaining chill and losing light. Akilina, torn with a simultaneous sway of pure ecstasy and unbearable agony, sank to the ground. Laughter and wailing welled out of her belly in turns.

  After a few minutes, the two disparate sounds mixed to form one stream of guttural, unearthly moans. She fell silent when a snatch of that sound penetrated her reeling consciousness. Hearing herself jolted her. She rose to her feet as fast as she could, more afraid than she had ever been in her life.

  She couldn’t stop moving. She was terrified. "Demons and monsters are closing in upon me from all the sides," she told herself, but she knew that it was she, Akilina herself, who terrorized her. As she ran with her slow, pathetic shamble, she knew that she was fleeing from herself.

  She felt her life draining out of her. Weakness made her dizzy. Cold seared her body to her very bone marrow. Her skin felt no more alive than the frost-bitten ground under her feet. Her release from her unbearable life was imminent. She suddenly felt a rapture of joy. This ecstasy abruptly transformed into an intense longing for some earthly happiness she had never found. With a hesitant, shaky hold, the urge to live gripped her heart again.

  Dawn was beginning to crack in the skies and white blankets of mist were rising out of the ground. The old woman sighed with a mix of relief and regret as she finally fell headlong into the underbrush. A spasm of pain ran through her body when she hit the ground. Her limbs relaxed after a moment, as though she were ready for a cozy sleep. But the earth laid its rightful claim on her the very
next instant, filling her with its chill and its hardness.

  Any movement in my body would be as monumental as an earthquake, she thought. Moving would destroy me utterly. She began to talk aloud after that.

  “What is left whole in me that it can now be destroyed? What was ever whole in me? My last wish is to bring my eye-patch from behind my left ear to cover my right eye. But that, too, entails movement. Any movement would destroy me. Although there is nothing left in me that can be destroyed.

  My eye patch...I can’t recall when and why I first wore it. Was it because my stepmother had once said that the brightness of my eyes would fade in the sun? Is there any brightness left in my eyes? Is there any brightness left in the sun itself? It’s so dark here. Is this my final pain? Am I experiencing the agony of death? I don’t care if I am. I only want to scratch away the itch in my left ankle..."

  Her mind took on an added life as the threads of her breath began to shorten and snap. In thinking of the most trivial things as she lay dying, she saw deeper into herself than she had done in all her years of unfailing health and clouded reasoning.

  "My last wish is not about my eye-patch. No, not my eye-patch," she said to herself. "I wish I could hold Dimitry’s baby in my arms—. What is this? I must have lost my mind. I hear music and singing. What can it be? Some man? Not likely in this jungle at this time. Some angel? But I am not going to heaven. Some demon? But demons don’t make music. What is it then?"

  The sound that had startled her continued to grow louder. Akilina made it out to be the tinkle of metal upon china.

  "Perhaps a spoon tapping a cup," she said. "How sweet it is, this homely music. I wish I had drunk out of coffee mugs, too, stirring teaspoons of sugar into them. I wish I hadn’t drowned my life and my child’s life and so many other lives in glass bottles and stone flasks. Ah!"