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

by Sakiv Koch

  He had never done that before. My tingling cheek burned. My eyes streamed. Sobs wracked my chest. I ran away from my hamlet blindly, determined never to return to that house, convinced that these people must have found me lying somewhere or adopted me from an orphanage. They could not be my real parents.

  It was in this state of mind that I first thought about going to Rachna's house to see her. It was the first time I admitted to myself that her having gone away was what had been troubling me. A smile slipped between the tracks my tears made on my face.

  I magnanimously thought that I could quietly walk into her house and witness her pure joy at seeing me, her gratefulness for my giving her a chance to say sorry for never having come to see me at school or home.

  Since I had never gone anywhere by myself (except for my school, of course), the distance of seven miles that lay between Rachna's house and mine felt like the breadth of a continent, sufficient to take me away from that realm of oppression and cruelty forever.

  My design at that moment was to give Rachna a last farewell (stoic and heroic on my part, pleading and tearful on hers) and then be gone forever, to carry out my existence in the remote and harsh mountains bounding Jalgarh. The fantasies of Rachna begging me not to go, of Father sinking into a marsh of regret for what he had done, of Ma crying and praying for my return without letup, gave wings to my feet.

  I was so immersed in the sour pleasure of my misery that I trotted on without paying the requisite attention to the path I had taken. It was only when my shadow began to lengthen to a monstrous size, gliding before me over ridges and dipping into shallows, that I became conscious of the lateness of the hour and the strangeness of the place.

  It was hours before I found my way to the bulbous valley housing the bazaar where Rachna lived. I hadn’t been there since the evening Ma and I had gone to attend Rachna’s birthday party years ago. The sadness that had then looped around my heart returned in full force as I stood before her door in the deserted street.

  I vividly saw the tall woman and the little boy who had exited the same door and left behind a stricken girl in a roomful of baffled guests.

  Just as I raised my hand to knock on the door, the town clock struck the hour of midnight. I froze in that attitude, my arm raised in the air, my face lifted to the window which would light up when I knocked. When I knocked now became if I knocked, and the question was soon settled in the negative. Shyam’s image rose before my eyes – he was hideous and terrible in my imagination, mad with rage at my disturbing his sleep.

  A minute later, I began to whimper, thinking how pained and worried my parents must be by now, how stupid I had been to run away from them. Cold and hunger, too, hiding beneath a veneer of feverish excitement until now, bared their fangs and took large bites out of my failing courage.

  Curiously, the person for whom I had come to the distant town, for whom I’d thrown myself in this terrible state of homelessness, got out of my mind completely. My only remaining concern at that moment was to find something to eat and somewhere to lie down without freezing to death so that I could get back to my house in the morning and fall at my parents' feet to beg their forgiveness.

  My trying to find my way back at that hour was out of the question. The knowledge that there were many men and women around, even if sleeping and completely unaware of my existence, was my sole comfort. As minutes passed and my despair grew, I formulated a theory that loud knocks will bring forth Shyam while soft noises will awaken only his daughter.

  For the next half an hour, my knuckles rapped against the door, caressing the wood just loud enough that I could barely hear the sound myself. When no Rachna came to chase away my woes, when defeat was conclusive and there was no hope left, I sat down at the curb and lay my head against the wall of her house.

  A body is a fantastic thing, particularly when it’s young and in good health. I don’t know how mine battled the currents of chill that were buffeting it from the ground and the air, how it coped up with the pangs of hunger that kept deepening with time. But it somehow managed to envelop my consciousness with some warmth. I dozed off.

  I would sit up with a start every time a dry leaf went gliding by on the cobble-stones, every time the town-clock struck an hour, and every time the building I leaned against groaned in making its settling noises.

  These homely sounds eventually stopped disrupting my disturbed dozing when a strange, harrowing sensation snapped me awake. I felt as though someone was drilling their gaze into me, breathing on my face, stretching a hand toward my neck.

  I let out a squeak of fear and fought to open my eyes, but my eyelids felt leaden. The back of my throat prickled and a scream boiled out of my lips. It had hardly begun when a hand clamped my mouth shut and stifled the sound.

  An intense shh accompanied the pressure of the hand. I stilled completely and opened my eyes. Mere inches from me stood an organic scarecrow, a living tree, or a breathing trash-can.

  I couldn't make out at first which of these things the woman standing before me resembled the most. Her thin, narrow face was so dirty it appeared deliberately painted over with mud. She had the knotty, wild hair of a scarecrow. Her big, unblinking eyes sat askew under a deeply lined forehead.

  Strips of brown sackcloth and fully-leafed green branches served as her only clothes. She held a swollen tarpaulin bag spilling out all manner of refuse and garbage.

  I caught a movement in the street behind the woman and saw a cat flash by on silent, stealthy paws. Seconds later, a large dog barreled into the street, growling fiercely. The woman jumped in fright at the noise and turned to look around.

  The cat reached the end of the street, but instead of exiting it, wheeled around with a cry. It almost collided head-on with the dog coming behind it. The dog snapped its jaws with a snarl but managed to snag just a few hairs out of the cat’s fur. The cat now came streaking back up the street.

  Like me, the woman was obviously puzzled to see this. She withdrew her hand from my mouth hastily. I stood up to see what had made the hunted animal turn around and run back into the maw of the hunter.

  Two dogs loped in from the other end of the street. The three hounds now chased the cat together. The cat angled to its left, broke its stride, and leaped onto a tree.

  Its claws scraped the tree’s bark without getting the requisite hold to take it up. Its panic-filled body slid back toward the ground. The lead hound pounced upon it. The end of the cat’s tail brushed the dog’s muzzle. The cat scrambled up the tree, out of the dogs’ range.

  I exhaled a long-held breath and watched the dogs apprehensively.

  “It looks as if the dogs planned this attack,” I muttered, surprised at how the animals stood silent and motionless under the tree, as though waiting for something definitive.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, suppressing a shiver. The woman said nothing. She shifted against the wall until she was in the shadow of Shyam’s doorway.

  I could still see her head. Instead of being pointed toward the tree, it was turned toward the mouth of the street, as if she anticipated the arrival of something or someone else.

  A tall man with a pitch-fork in his hand walked soundlessly into the street. There was something so sinister about him that I, too, moved into the darkness of the doorway and shrank beside the woman.

  The newcomer wore a dhoti-kurta. He had a coarse blanket draped over one shoulder, while a bag hung from the other one. The man strode to where the dogs stood.

  Though he made no sound, one could tell that the animals belonged to him and that he was angry at them. They whimpered and tucked their tails between their legs at his approach.

  The man shrugged both the blanket and the bag off his shoulders, nestled the pitch-fork in the crook of one arm, and started to climb the tree. He went up like an ape and rested at the lowest branch of the tree.

  The leaves over his head rustled and trembled as the cat moved higher, stepping onto branches so thin I was scared it would snap them and fall.
The man’s purpose was evident to me now. It chilled my heart with dread and filled my mind with loathing.

  I had wanted to raise an alarm from the beginning, but I was frightened of the dogs, which were intermittently glancing in our direction, as though rearing to get their fangs into some prey, any prey.

  “We should wake the people up,” I whispered. The woman once again placed her palm on my mouth and shook her head vehemently.

  “Noooooo,” she croaked. “Shhhh”.

  One of the dogs twitched its ears and turned to face us. The cat cried piteously at the same moment — its eerie wail like that of a terror-struck child.

  The treetop began to quiver. The man had climbed onto a stout branch high up in the tree by this time. He lifted his pitch-fork and stabbed at the cat, which had already gone as high and as far as it could go. It parried the thrust and hung midair for a moment. The man, evidently practiced at this, jabbed the fork at it in the same motion and struck the cat.

  He chuckled viciously as the cat crashed through the branches with a blood-curdling cry and fell amongst the waiting dogs.

  I will never forget the horror of the next one minute, that one bloody, nightmarish minute as three pairs of jaws and claws tore the howling cat to pieces. The man laughed again as he jumped to the ground, hit one of the dogs with the fork, and put the limp, misshapen mass of fur into his bag.

  Lights had appeared in several windows. Some angry voices demanded to know what devilry was going on, but the man only chuckled and poked his dogs with the fork.

  They began to snarl and bark madly.

  “Just a damned dog-fight,” the man said aloud, his face turned skyward.

  People groaned and cursed, but they turned off their lights and went back to their warm beds. The man put his blanket on his shoulder and walked away. His beasts, licking their chops, followed him.

  Only silence, stillness, a few knots of bloody fur, and an indelible memory of savagery were left in the street. I was fated to witness this kind of savagery again, years later, in a similar street, on a night much darker and colder than this one.

  I realized after a few moments that the scarecrow woman stood so tense, so motionless that she wasn’t breathing. She still held my mouth rather tightly, stalling my respiration, too.

  She seemed to have fallen into a trance and forgotten me entirely. I pinched her arm gently, jolting her back to consciousness. She reduced the pressure on my lips and shushed me again before freeing my mouth.

  She turned to face me. Her garbage bag entangled her feet. She tripped and fell on her bottom. I gaped at her and then looked away – most of the articles of her strange clothing had turned askew with her fall. Her body, still strong and (I am ashamed to say, for my observation might have been a mite too keen and lasted a moment too long) well-rounded, did not seem to belong to her emaciated, haggard face.

  She appeared more concerned with her ‘belongings’ than her sudden nakedness. She swept the tidbits of refuse that had spilled out on the road back into her bag.

  “Who you?” she asked as she stood up clumsily, readjusting the branches and rags in their original positions and orientations. From the sound of her voice and the labor she seemed to put into enunciating each syllable, I could tell that her voice-box was not accustomed to much work.

  “What doing…here?” she asked, halting in speech and eating up words from her sentences. I said nothing. My eyes, after their brief and involuntary digression, were once again fixed on the spot under the tree where the cat had fallen. She followed my gaze and shook her head.

  “Some nomadic people…make medicine from cat parts…use fur…eat meat. Who you? Why here…in the nighttime?” she demanded with a wave of her hand, expressive of the darkness and solitude of the night.

  I couldn’t speak.

  “You thief?” she asked. I stared at her, more amused than shocked that she should think so.

  “I boy,” I said, unable to answer her in any manner of speech other than her own, unable to utter anything that wouldn’t be superfluous, that wouldn’t be downright idiotic.

  The woman opened her mouth to say something but ended up just laughing at the ridiculousness of my answer. I felt compelled to elaborate in some way.

  “I little girl’s friend,” I said, pointing with my thumb to the upper story of the house, where I assumed Rachna would be sleeping peacefully. The woman gasped and her eyebrows gathered down upon her large eyes, pushing them down into tight, horizontal slits. She pointed a finger at me, either a threatening or an accusing gesture—I couldn’t decide which. No words left her trembling lips.

  Her hand began to quiver with the intensity of her unspoken thought. The shaking spread to her entire arm soon. Her bag began to spout out the treasures she had put into it moments ago.

  Expecting a new horror and afraid to make a sound, I shrank back and squeezed myself into the most compact form I could attain. But the woman just turned abruptly on her heels and marched out of the street, leaving behind her a trail of trash.

  I was once again left alone in the street—with my terrors, my hunger, my desolation, and the cold. And my body, unaccustomed to being awake at that hour, once more fought against all my troubles and discomforts to draw a thin and torn sheet of sleep upon itself.

  Dawn found me bobbing up and down in the swamp of a nightmare so vivid, so gripping it held me powerless to wake up and repel the horror. I had substituted the cat in my dream. The ragged woman, twenty feet tall and having a grotesque face with no mouth, pushed me off my perch in a high tree to a trio of hellhounds below.

  A pressure built up in my chest, pressing down my heart palpably. I struggled more and more desperately to open my eyes.

  A hand came to my aid. It shook my shoulder and killed the nightmare. I opened my eyes, blinked out my tears of relief, and saw Rachna standing before me. She stood incredulous, wordless, gaping.

  “Hello,” I said after what felt like minutes of silence. I intended to give her a smile in company with my greeting, but my lips felt so inflexible they might as well have been made out of marble.

  She didn't respond in any way. She stared so intently at me that she looked not just startled but also hostile.

  “I j-just came to see you,” I explained defensively, even though she had asked me no question.

  Her continued silence irked me unreasonably.

  “I came to give you a chance to apologize to me.”

  “Give me a chance to apologize?” she bristled reasonably. “To you! For what, for letting you ruin my life?”

  My recently-revived spirits died. My face fell. My fantasies of her getting tearfully glad to see me shattered and my heart brimmed full of sadness.

  She must have noticed this because the hard lines about her mouth softened. She sat down on the pavement beside me.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “You came here, during the night, all alone, just to see me, to talk to me?”

  I nodded. I might have just imagined it, but I thought her eyes lit up in their old characteristic way.

  “And you spent the night here, on this pavement, without even knocking on my door?”

  I nodded again, feeling brave and selfless. I told her how I had left home without a word, with the intention never to return. The light in her eyes went out.

  “Oh, Neel,” she said. “You shouldn’t have done that! Your parents must be worrying so much.”

  I suddenly began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “They—, dogs—, their master was a monster … he pushed the cat out of the—,” I stammered disjointedly and unintelligibly, pointing to the tree under which the cat had been killed.

  Rachna looked uncomprehendingly first at my face and then in the direction of my outstretched finger.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “They tore the cat to pieces right there,” I said, getting restless due to the acidic energy I had been unable to vent at the time of the butchery in the night. “Right in the middle of t
he street, and nobody, not one person came to its aid. In a street full of houses, not one man or woman came to help!”

  My voice rose higher with my anger.

  “Who tore which cat?” Rachna asked, clearly puzzled. “And please keep your voice low, Neel. Please don’t shout. It’s still very early.”

  “Keep my voice low?! Don’t shout?!” I shouted. “Why? How can my voice bother anyone who couldn’t hear the cries of the cat during the night?”

  “I did hear the commotion,” she said. “My father grumbled about it, too. But the noise fell away rather quickly. It’s nothing unusual hereabouts. In fact, there are so many dog-and-cat fights here – please calm down.”

  She drew her face near mine as she made this appeal. I rose to my feet at that very instant, all huffed up. My head reeled with the sudden motion. My balance went a little awry. My arms came up reflexively.

  The result of this convergence of my outgoing left arm and Rachna’s incoming face was that the back of my palm struck her cheek. She gasped in shock as she jerked her head away.

  I gasped, too. Not in shock. With fright. A swarthy, powerful man had appeared behind Rachna. It was Shyam, her father.

  His luxuriant mustache seemed to suffer a fit of apoplexy as his upper lip twitched in uncontrollable anger. In the hollows under his reddened eyes lay a deep, menacing blackness.

  Rachna turned to look up in his face and started to say something, but her father brushed her aside and stepped up to me with his jaws clenched so tight it was a wonder he didn’t grind his teeth to powder.

  He gripped my shirtfront, lifted me off the ground, and swung me around.

  “Dog,” he said in a barbed voice as I dangled from his hands. “You hit my daughter?!”

  He heaved me higher to throw me against a wall. Such a throw, had it taken effect, would have smashed almost every major bone in my body.

  Shyam stopped suddenly, in the very act of putting power into his intended thrust. His eyes widened a little. A bead of sweat formed and rolled down his brow with a remarkable speed.

  “R-Ravi,” he mumbled. I opened my eyes, turned my head, and saw my father standing in the middle of the street! His head was bent in a hostile manner. There was a strange light in his eye and a cold half-smile on his lips. I had never seen him like that before. But then, he had also never seen me like that before – about to be flung and broken like an offensive doll.