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

by Sakiv Koch

  Before leaving to get help, the watchman had asked the prince to close and bolt the door from the inside. The door had not been subjected to any kind of movement for a long time. Its top hinge relinquished its hold on the panel after the prince had heaved it shut and engaged its old-fashioned chain bolt. The door leaned out of its frame a bit, stretching the chain too taut for Sanjay to unlatch it once his fire became lethally smoky.

  He had kicked the heap of coals and burning sacks, but he did it a bit too late. He was losing consciousness fast, but his mind had been apparently still working. As it does in every Shiv temple, a narrow channel ran from the base of the Shiv-Ling to the end of the chamber. An inch or so of mossy-looking water stood in the channel. Sanjay had wet one end of his shirt in it, covered his mouth and nose with that horribly-stinking garment, and lain down on the floor to await rescue or death, whichever arrived earlier.

  Sheru had run in as soon as the chamber had cleared of smoke and now stood barking soundlessly near the prince’s head. The prince himself was making a low, strange sound, a mix of moaning, spluttering, coughing, and wheezing. His chin had sunk into the hollow at the bottom of his throat.

  He clutched his midriff with both his hands. His entire body writhed and quivered tortuously as he struggled to draw mouthfuls of air in rasping, agonized gasps. From where I stood, I could see that his eyelids were gummed closed and that the hair above one of his ears was matted with dried blood.

  He squirmed and shrank more within himself when Sheru touched the prince with his snout, attempting to lick his face. "Plea-se..hel-help...," he pleaded when he could finally manage to speak. I remained at the threshold, finding myself unable to move and help the boy lying (dying) in front of me.

  Seeing him in that state stirred no pity in my heart, no sense of urgency in my mind. I don’t know whether it was because of some streak of animality that the night had awakened in me, or because I was entirely wrung off – dried of all feeling, exhausted beyond measure in body and spirit.

  "W-watchman, is it the watchman?" the prince asked. "Ple-please call off your dog –," He broke off and started coughing so violently I thought he would begin spouting blood. "W-why don’t you a-answer?" he asked when he could speak again. His voice, though still faint, was already starting to sound imperial and commanding.

  He cocked his head and opened his right eye a crack. The sun, directly in his face, dazzled him and forced the eye closed again.

  "Y-you—," he started.

  "What are you making all that noise for?" I spoke coldly, cutting him off. "Get up and start moving if you want to come with me. I’ve to go home."

  The prince remained silent, his head once again cocked to one side, and then more water began to flow out of his eyes.

  "You can cry on the way out," I said, and started moving toward him. I bent down, snatched the wet shirt from the prince’s hands, and pressed it against the knife wound on my arm, which continued to feel like a fire burning in my flesh.

  The prince let out a startled scream. Sheru suddenly wheeled around and bared his muzzle at me. That dog was a classic threat maker. This – this primacy, this superiority, this importance the prince still wielded, even in that state, over me – so infuriated me, so blinded me with unreason that I lifted my club and struck out at Sheru.

  The dog sprang aside, avoiding my one-handed blow easily. He leaped at me and butted me with his head. I fell like an axed sapling. Sheru straddled me, placing a paw on each side of my chest. I lay wincing, my eyes tight shut, certain that the dagger-strewn jaws would tear out my throat in a moment.

  But the dog just stood over me for a moment, tongue hanging out, breath warm and quick, and then withdrew. When I raised myself to a sitting position again, I saw that the prince had sat up, too. Although he was still crying, coughing, and moaning, he was watching me with reddened, weeping eyes that blinked constantly. And yet, his gaze was steady enough.

  "I c-can’t walk," he said after a few moments’ silence, pointing toward his feet. One of them, I noticed, lay at a twisted angle, toes pointing inward towards the other leg. His breathing was growing more laborious. The air rasped in his chest each time he inhaled. His swollen tongue vainly tried to moisten his dried, swollen lips.

  "I’ll d-die soon..." he declared before breaking down. "Ah, Father. My f-ather. My aunt..."

  I froze. I froze halfway between sitting and standing up. Though I wouldn’t become his bodyguard for more than ten years, I became his servant at that precise moment. That moment, born of the series of catastrophes that had befallen me on that night, conceived the greater calamity that would shatter my life in the future.

  Time became pregnant with my doom. It was at that moment I realized that I had not lived through this nightmare alone – unknown, unseen, this boy had shared it with me. It was at this moment that I saw, felt, lived the pain that was searing, cutting, crushing his being.

  Whereas I only feared for the safety of my father; he knew his had been murdered. I had horrible misgivings about what might have happened to my mother; his aunt had been killed in front of his eyes.

  Although the shirt I had taken from him was blood-soaked now, I wet it again in the channel and gave it back to him. "Please wait here, your Highness," I murmured as deferentially as I could. "I’ll run and bring help."

  Prince Sanjay said nothing; he didn’t even seem to have heard me. I lifted my club from the floor, backed out of the chamber, and ran out as quickly as I could. The state I was in – my head swimming and sinking, my vision clearing and blurring as though someone was lighting candles and blowing them out in a dark room, breath as broken and ragged as Prince Sanjay’s – my running was no more than a shambling, stumbling walk.

  My memory of that journey from the temple to the town is like images seen and recollected by a passenger dozing in a bus's window seat – waking up with a start at a particularly shrill horn-blast or a particularly nasty jolt and then sinking back into sleep.

  The town was overflowing with streams of men and women – bewildered, incredulous, scared, grief-stricken people – each looking like a small child who has wandered away in an overcrowded bazaar and can't find his parents again. Many men and women stood weeping in the manner of people who are not aware of crying.

  And there were policemen, swarms of policemen. Dozens stood cordoning off the bungalow on the hilltop. A score more combed the woods at the foot of the hill. Some stern-looking constables stood questioning a few peasants visibly quaking with fear.

  The superintendent of police was an Englishman ensconced in the throne-like saddle of a tall white horse. The superintendent directed the police operations like an opera conductor, using his riding crop like a baton. A line of medical orderlies carried out bodies from the bungalow and deposited them in the back of a truck.

  I looked at the scene from behind a tree, feeling reluctant to draw near that death-field even in daylight, with so many men present there. I leaned against the tree trunk, catching my breath, scouring that press of people for one glimpse of one person, the one person whom I had never before had the need to search for, the man who had always been there for me.

  I stood completely lost, completely torn between the need to get help for the prince and the equally compelling need to rest my exhausted, wracked body a little more. A figure creeping upon me from my left side remained completely invisible to me until a set of pincers closed over my wounded arm and dragged me out from behind my tree. I shrieked in agony. I bent my knees and threw myself back in order to brake my involuntary advance.

  Like a battalion of drooping puppets controlled by one hand, every person turned and looked at me, filling me with guilt and shame, as though I had been caught committing some despicable crime. I lashed out with my lathi at the sepoy holding and dragging me so inconsiderately.

  My one-handed blow was completely ineffectual. The only purpose it served was to anger the policeman. He raised his free arm and slapped the back of my head. My eyes watered. I was so
enraged I felt it was blood pouring out of them. The watchman’s club, feeling like an organic part of me by now, as though it were my strongest limb, automatically came between my palms. I raised it a short way and rammed its lower end into the sepoy’s foot with all the force of my frustration and trauma.

  He immediately let go of my arm and started to hop around on one leg, clutching his foot with both his hands, cursing me vilely. My fury abated quickly. A fear reared up in its place. Several men rushed toward me. I turned around and took to my heels, forgetting that I was innocent, that I had an urgent mission to carry out. I had taken only a few tottering steps when the horsed Superintendent overtook me.

  He wheeled his horse around, blocking my path. A slew of rough hands grabbed me, forced me to the ground, and pinned me there. Someone snatched the lathi from my hand. Another policeman grabbed my hair and pulled my head up so that the Superintendent could get a good look at me.

  "It’s just a boy!" the officer declared. He dismounted his horse. "Unhand him! Let him stand up!"

  Getting back to my feet wasn’t an easy thing to do physically and emotionally. I could feel my face burning red hot with a mix of anger and humiliation. Tears streamed out of my eyes. I cried before hundreds of people, fighting uncontrollable sobs to find my voice.

  Each second was precious, critical. The thinnest blade of time could sever the weak thread of the prince’s breaths — if he was still breathing, that is.

  "The prince, the prince—," I croaked. The Superintendent grasped my collar and drew my face close to his.

  "What of the prince?" he asked in a low voice, his tone flinty.

  "He is up in the old Shiv Mandir," I blurted out. "He is dying. He might be dead already. Hurry!"

  Something in my voice must have conveyed the truth and the urgency of what I had said. The Superintendent sprang into his saddle and spurred his horse into a gallop before the last syllable of my appeal had left my tongue.

  "Send the doctor to the old temple!" he commanded over his shoulder as he sped away. A detachment of mounted policemen followed him, while a constable ran toward the bungalow to fetch the doctor. The crowd watched the dust clouds raised by the horses float back to earth. The dust had hardly settled back when the tragic Trumpet Hill birthed a new commotion.

  Like a pendulum that had gotten stuck at one end for a while before coming free, the crowd swung back in the direction of the bungalow. I followed as best as I could – wobbling, sobbing, falling more than once. Many a people I knew well, including The Apple, my headmaster, looked at me with curiosity and concern, but no one seemed to recognize me, so great a change had that one night wrought in me.

  A white-coated old man – obviously the police doctor – hurried toward a jet-black horse tethered under a tree. The doctor shook his head and slapped his right leg with his briefcase.

  "Strangest business I’ve ever seen, I tell you! And at my age, too! Just one day before retirement! Strangest business," he growled as he mounted his horse and sped away.

  Six orderlies carried out a stretcher from the bungalow. All six stretcher-bearers were grunting and sweating with their effort. There were two bodies on the stretcher, one piled on top of the other. The body at the bottom of the pile was motionless. The one on top writhed and tossed about like a man on fire.

  I made strange noises in my throat to match the strangeness of my appearance. The crowd parted readily – jerked away, in reality, to avoid contact of any sort with me.

  I saw three things, all of them immensely satisfactory:

  a.) Sohan Singh still held his killer in that inescapable death-embrace,

  b.) the killer’s broken and mangled arm lay like a dead snake by his side,

  c.) the suddenness with which all his struggles stopped and his face stilled in inexpressible fear when he saw me.

  I didn’t give much thought to the deep malice and hatred in his eyes.

  I should have.

  Chapter 13: Kinds of Hiding Spots

  In spite of the fact (or perhaps because of it) that my mother is a self-acclaimed fountainhead of wisdom, I admittedly don’t have a single philosophical drop in my blood. So, I must once again dip into the pool of the numberless splashes she frequently, and vainly, made for my benefit during my younger days.

  "One single person coming suddenly into your life," she once said to me, "can be like the first rock in a shower of meteorites. More often than not, many others will follow."

  Whichever way you see it – the night watchman or Prince Sanjay as that first rock – many others did follow, plunging explosively into the calm pond of my life, blackening, tearing, and transmuting it irreversibly.

  The most radiant, spectacular, and irresistible of these people was Princess Roop. Also the most cunning and dangerous person I have ever known. You must be wondering as to why I’ve brought you so far along into this journey without mentioning her name before.

  It is because instead of creating words, my pen begins to scar and wound the paper every time I sit down to bring Princess Roop before your eyes. Today, too, the nib of my pen is like a dagger, stabbing and mutilating the skin of the pristine sheet that I have taken up to start the most frayed and tangled thread of my story.

  The misshapen things that appear on the surface of the paper are more blots and smears than words. But each drop of ink I spill on my writing desk is a stream of fresh blood going into the web of damaged tissue that spans my being from my head to my feet. The telling of my tale, howsoever twisted and grim it may be, prevents gangrene of my soul.

  It’s not only because of Princess Roop’s insidious cunning and her crimes that her thought burdens me so unbearably. It’s more a confluence of mutual sins and guilt, a joint-account of deception and vengeance, an account which kept earning a high rate of interest on the twisted, perverse principal amount that we – she and I – put into it together.

  More than anything else, it is for my having renounced pure joy (Rachna) to go after unadulterated sorrow (Roop) that I can’t forgive myself.

  Roop’s stepping into my life is quite a ways off yet, and my motive here is not to dangle riddles before your eyes. I just want to point to that hazy spot in the distance, spanning years and continents, where you see dots of vultures hovering in the air, waiting patiently to scavenge the body of innocence that will succumb to death there.

  I began to head to that disastrous spot from the moment I saved Prince Sanjay’s life in those sacred ruins in Jalgarh’s forests. When the time came, I sprinted – not just walked – toward the malignant irresistibility called Princess Roop. A rope wound itself around my ankles, slowing me down, stopping me altogether at times.

  I would bend down to unknot, cut, or, in more benign moments, shake this rope loose. It would have been of little import, except that his bond was an organic one. This rope was alive. It was Rachna’s love.

  When the school inspector read aloud the note that Rachna had written to me, she had to bear an unbearable humiliation. She picked up her bag and left the school. It was all, of course, my fault. I had reduced her to the necessity of avoiding me, of not encouraging me (as the spinster would put it).

  I had forced her to write that note. What should rightfully have been feelings of remorse and guilt surfaced as slow-burning flames of anger and frustration. I was so desolate, day after day, gazing at the empty seat which she used to occupy that it became my habit to leave home for school, but not reach there.

  I would go sit for hours in the small patch-garden behind the schoolhouse, on the little bench where Rachna and I had sat, hand in hand, for so many evenings, immersed in Nadya’s story. The story itself was growing. Ma now read it to me from a diary almost every night, but the thrill of being a transmitter of the tale to Rachna was now gone.

  I could no longer relate it to her with my own flourishes. The birds still skittered through the underbrush; the lotus flowers in the garden-pond closed their petals each night and shut in the bloated bees hovering over them; the sun grew
redder as it sank toward the horizon every evening. But I could no longer study the expression of Rachna’s fingers resting in my palm.

  I began to grow irascible even at home. The following abilities forsook me:

  to close doors without slamming them

  to speak to my mother without raising my voice

  to pass in front of stray dogs without making them yelp in pain, etc.

  It is wondrous how, sometimes, the simplest things, the most straightforward solutions, don’t occur to us for great lengths of time.

  So, I kept suffering the torture of a ravaging thirst when water was within reach all the time. One evening, Father came home with a stern face and went directly into his room without talking to me, although I’d been standing by the door. After a while, Ma stepped out and called my name in a very grave voice.

  "Your father wants to talk to you," she said, pointing toward their room with a portentous finger. "And so do I," she added ominously. A couple of my heartbeats ran into each other. I wasn’t scared of my mother. But her telling me to go to my father felt like her pushing me into a lion’s den.

  "I’ll come later," I said, turning away from the house. “I’ve to be somewhere else right now."

  Ma was so troubled at my audacity that her mouth worked but no words came out. I started slinking away, but Father’s voice boomed out of the house like the report of a cannonball. It struck me motionless.

  "Neel! Come in here!" he commanded. Inside his darkened room awaited, not my father as I had known him all my life, but a stranger exuding a palpable heat of discipline and disappointment. He stood looming over me and frowning down on me, his mouth set and eyes flashing.

  "Where do you go every day?" he asked gently – employing the kind of soft tone which is harder than stainless steel.

  "T-to my s-school," I muttered. My face tingled and blanched. Father slapped me.