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

by Sakiv Koch

  Just as Akilina started to rise from the ground, a tall, strong-looking girl dashed out of the main tent and ran toward her. Akilina, who had more or less attained an upright posture, collapsed back and started moaning on seeing the girl.

  “Come here, little one, and kneel beside your old mom,” Akilina said. “I am drawing one of my last breaths on earth, so please listen to my death-wish –.”

  “Get up and brush the dirt off your clothes!” Nadya returned, without paying the slightest attention to Akilina’s histrionics.

  “But I can’t! I am grievously injured. Listen to me –.”

  Nadya bent down, held Akilina by her upper arms, and almost hauled her to her feet, displaying strength that elicited a few lusty catcalls from a section of the crowd loitering about the circus grounds.

  “Even these onlookers who don’t know you in the least,” said the girl to the midwife, “know that you’re just pretending to be hurt.”

  “Now, that hurt me.” Akilina let out a big sigh to go with her expression of pain. “Aaaah.” She started to brush her dress unselfconsciously and glanced around as she did it. “Besides, little one, it’s not me most of these onlookers are interested in. They are practically ogling you!”

  As if to prove Akilina’s point, a young man wearing a monkey cap and doing the habitual drunkard's subtle dance came toward them and addressed Nadya in a tongue she didn’t understand. Nadya smiled.

  “I don’t mind being admired a little, Mom,” she said aside to Akilina, with just a touch of pleasure in her tone. She then turned towards the Monkey Cap, spread her hands, and shook her head in a gesture indicating she couldn’t communicate with him in his language.

  “You were right, Mom,” she addressed Akilina once again, now in a more-disconcerted-than-pleased voice, as the man in the monkey cap switched to English, which, too, was beyond Nadya's comprehension.

  “This man – and most of his companions standing back there – seem to have invisible pincers attached to their faces. They are groping, pinching, and biting me with their eyes. And all of them seem to be drunk!”

  Akilina noted, with a modicum of guilty satisfaction, that her smile had now faded from Nadya’s lips and her pretty nose had wrinkled slightly with the reek of some home-brewed liquor on her admirer’s breath.

  The monkey in the monkey cap, unfazed by a complete non-response from the women, still babbled on. He changed his language yet again – delved a dirty hand into a pocket of his dirty trousers and brought out a fistful of fresh and clean currency notes, which he then shoved into Nadya’s face with a lecherous grin on his face.

  Akilina grabbed the monied fist with a shriek of rage and bit into it with her sparsely toothed mouth, tasting the salt of sweat, the filth of the man’s skin (she would later say, “I can bet my remaining molars that that dog never washed his hands in his life, not once. Yuck!”).

  The sharp edge of a note left a small but painful paper-cut on her tongue. The man emitted a mongrel sound – half groan, half laugh – and pushed Akilina back with his free hand. The midwife staggered but didn’t release her mouth-hold on the monkey’s paw.

  The group of his loafer companions detached itself from the larger crowd and surged towards the scene of the scuffle. Several crewmen and performers materialized by Nadya’s side at the same time and, suddenly, on the very first evening of its arrival in a new and strange country, Vosk’s Great Roving Circus and Menagerie stood facing locals across sharply drawn battle lines.

  A one-eyed loafer spat out something in Bengali and threw a punch at Illya, the Clown, who was trying to dissuade Akilina from making the monkey’s hand her evening snack. Illya sidestepped the blow easily and rewarded One-Eye with a smart uppercut on the chin for his attempt.

  Hands, brown and white, fisted and flew about – some blows were evaded, some intercepted, and some landed. Legs became weapons and kicked, raising dust and producing cries. Just when the brawl threatened to grow bloody, a bespectacled young man ran into the middle of the fight and raised a hand in which he wielded a stethoscope.

  He thundered a few words, first in Bengali and then in Russian. The rapidly escalating violence ceased altogether (Akilina being an exception, letting the Monkey Cap off only after raking the visible portion of his face with her fingernails).

  Quiet and stillness descended upon the scene. No one spoke or even fidgeted for a few moments (again, with the exception of Akilina, who first rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand and then spat vehemently at the feet of the unfortunate Monkey Cap).

  Firelight glinted on the lenses of the newcomer’s spectacles, hiding his eyes behind curtains of mirrored flames. He slung his stethoscope around his neck and opened his mouth to speak, but an explosive sneeze contorted his face and convulsed his entire body.

  A fine spray of spittle flew from his lips and laundered the rather dirty working eye of One-eye. Stethoscope muttered an apology under his breath and wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief.

  Akilina nudged Nadya.

  “Now, that’s a gentleman right there – a Russian speaking gentleman, no less. Must be a doctor, or he would not have draped that metallic snake across his shoulders. And just see how he has subdued these lowly dogs without really doing anything.”

  The doctor turned towards the chief of the aforesaid lowly dogs.

  “This kind of a thing wouldn’t do,” the doctor said twice, in each of the languages of the two opposite camps. He was a man of medium build, but the voice booming out of his chest might have belonged to a giant.

  The monkey visibly quaked in his cap and stopped sucking the back of his bitten hand. He rolled up the lower part of his cap and pinched his earlobes between his thumbs and index fingers in the most basic and humiliating expression of apology.

  “Don’t you think it would be nice if you forgot the way to these grounds for the next few weeks, eh?” said the mild-mannered doctor, dismissing Monkey Cap with a wave of his hand. The crushed loafer turned and trotted off with his tail tucked between his legs, followed closely by One-eye and the other classy gents of their illustrious band.

  Crewmen and spectators also dispersed as the petty excitement waned.

  “Thank you, sir,” Illya addressed the doctor, speaking slowly for the foreigner’s benefit, “for rescuing both my mom and my daughter from those rascals.”

  The doctor looked embarrassed at being thanked.

  “I believe it was the other way around,” he said, coming along at a snail’s pace but speaking clearly. “I think I rescued the rascals, especially from your mom here.”

  Illya chuckled. Akilina made a claw of her hand and gouged out imaginary eyes while roaring after the fashion of a Royal Bengal tiger.

  Nadya remained silent, endeavoring to get a look at the doctor’s still-hidden eyes behind his gleaming glasses. As if just to oblige her, the doctor took off his spectacles just then and started to polish their lenses with his handkerchief.

  His eyes were black-brown and fiercely bright. The color of his hair matched that of his eyes, but the day-old stubble on his chin showed a few dots of silver here and there. He wore khaki trousers, a blue cotton shirt, and brown leather shoes.

  “Decidedly handsome, even if in a little-too-delicate way,” Nadya thought. There was something else about him, something she found harder to define – the doctor appeared calm, self-possessed and diffident, somewhat nervous, at the same time.

  The man under the microscope of her observation had finished cleaning his glasses and was putting them back on. He turned his head abruptly just then and looked her in the eye. The look, starting as full and frank, turned furtive in a split second, and the doctor jerked his head away, leaving the glasses sitting a bit skewed on the bridge of his nose.

  “I am the vet for the circus,” he said in the way of introduction. “My name is Mohan Kumar.”

  “A vet?” Akilina pointed towards his stethoscope. “What, you feel Bengal Tigers’ chests with that thing?”

 
Dr. Kumar laughed. “I studied to treat the maladies of that most dangerous and cunning species of the animal kingdom – man. And so I call myself a veterinary doctor. I think that people who treat animals exclusively are proper doctors.”

  “He’s a strange man – trying to understand what he does or what he thinks would be like mental contortion of the highest degree,” Nadya thought.

  As though to confirm her impression, the man exhibited another oddity in his otherwise flawless-looking character the very next minute. They had turned to walk towards the newly setup office-cum-residential complex of the circus. Mohan abruptly changed his stride to swagger like a man walking on air – like a man extremely happy with himself, a man acutely self-conscious of his power and influence.

  He seemed to have thrown down and crushed underfoot the mantle of modesty that had appeared as much a part of him as his skin just a few moments ago. He turned to look around at the breaking knots of people, drinking in their admiration for his recent display of heroism.

  And then, before you could be sure that any such transformation had come about, he was once more walking along like a perfectly modest and cultured man. Nadya felt dizzier than she had ever felt while taking a potentially-lethal leap from a trapeze.

  Someone grasped her arm gently from behind and steered her away from her small group of fellow-warriors.

  "Pay him no mind," the person holding her arm whispered in her ear. She turned to look at Sasha Vosk himself, a man who normally uttered all of a dozen words in a day.

  "Pay him no mind," Sasha said again, "or you wouldn't have any mind left soon enough. I knew him for a couple of years when he came to Russia a decade back. I chanced to meet him again in London three years ago."

  The great man appeared more talkative today than she had ever known him to be.

  "Did he say he was a vet?" Sasha asked her. Nadya nodded her still-spinning head.

  "And later he said he was a regular doctor," she said. Sasha laughed.

  "He is no more a doctor or a veterinary doctor or a dentist than you are an engineer, Nadya. He is a first-class quack, though, with a first-class healing touch. He is a money-lender when he has the money to lend. He is a prizefighter when he has nobody to heal and no money to lend. He is a drunkard occasionally, although you would never know it even if he came before you sloshing full of whiskey."

  Nadya glanced in the direction where Mohan stood listening patiently to Akilina's non-stop babbling. How can that slightly built man be a prizefighter? she thought. He doesn’t look like a moneylender. Or a drunkard. Is Sasha joking?

  But then she remembered the fistful of money the Monkey Cap had shoved into her face. Maybe Mohan had lent it to the Monkey Cap. That's probably why the rascal was so submissive.

  She realized that Sasha was watching her watching Mohan. The old man smiled indulgently.

  "Mohan is many things," Sasha resumed, "but more than any one thing that he is, he is not any one thing. I know I am convoluting my words, Nadya, but that man can't be described without twisting and warping words and sentences. He is an enigma. And I am telling you all this because women tend to melt and become puddles around his feet. Women, young and old alike, tend to evaporate into a thin mist and cling to him for as long as they can. The longest of these durations feels extremely short to such women, without exception. That man is a walking bear-trap, where women are substituted for bears. If I could help it, I wouldn't have allowed him within a ten-mile radius of my circus. But I can't help it, and here he is, and here he is going to stay until we pack up.”

  Nadya's eyes had been gradually widening at the sheer volume of this stupendous speech. Everyone had always considered Sasha incapable of uttering more than a few sentences at one time. She looked at him with a wonder that, for the time being, marginalized the confused-amazement she felt about Mohan.

  "I know I am prattling on like your old mom over there," Sasha resumed, his voice already growing hoarse around its edges, "but I had to forewarn you to pay him no mind, or pay him just as much mind as wouldn't drive you insane. He is strange, and even his strangeness is shifty – he is strange in one way one minute and in an altogether different way the next minute. But he is not evil. I don't want to wrong even that man by giving out the impression that he is evil. As much as I have known him ... I want to confess that I wanted to find out more and more about him when I first met him, although I am no woman, of course. As much as I have known and analyzed him (even though he is unanalyzable), he is a deeply unformed person with a depthless potential, or a multiplicity of potentials, to be anything. A deeply unformed man with the skillset to form into anything bordering absolute perfection! Phew.”

  Sasha finally stopped to draw breath. He shook his head. He bent down at the waist and placed his hands upon his knees, as though he had just finished a marathon.

  "The bastard knows I am talking about him," he said. "Go have your sip, and try not to drink yourself to heartbreak and ruin."

  Nadya turned and literally ran towards the spot where he, the Quicksilver Man, stood patiently. She even forgot to thank Sasha in her impatience.

  Chapter 18: The Butterfly and the Vultures

  A caterpillar is intent upon remaining a caterpillar. He is okay with people wrinkling their noses at his ugliness. He doesn't mind his inability to take wing and fly. To him, his lowly station on earth is his own business, nobody else's. But, like death, life is also inevitable. The metamorphosis is unstoppable. Wings do sprout. Dazzling beauty does come forth. And fly I do.

  Consider my elevation: from a night watchman to an officer in a royal army; from a paltry Rs. 5/month to a princely Rs. 500 every 30 days; and most importantly, from a dream-shattering disappointment to a heart-warming pride.

  I soared higher and higher, leaving the aforesaid 'lowly station' so far, far below it became invisible and indistinguishable.

  For Father, to whom I had become more or less extinct ever since I took up the night watchman's lathi, my acceptance of King Sanjay's gracious offer was no less than my rebirth. He fanned away the intervening years of 'shame and disgrace' and embraced me as though I had never sinned by going so radically against his wishes, his aspirations for me.

  He embraced me, not just bodily, but in my entirety. He re-embraced the fact of my being. Neel was once more his Neel, as he used to be until the night of the murders. Neel was no longer a roach of the gutters.

  Ma, on the other hand, was happily unhappy (or unhappily happy), depending upon where you stood when she splashed you with her sentiment. The money I earned was immaterial to her. A puny salary didn't belittle me in her eyes, and a thicker wad of money wouldn't aggrandize me for her.

  She was primarily happy because Father was truly, totally happy at my (unexpected, and to him, undeserved) rise. The secondary reason for her happiness was that I would now get to see more of the world than the six lanes of my rural beat. The tertiary reason was that on one of these several sojourns, I might come across a girl who would captivate me as soon as I set my eyes upon her. Ma wouldn't then have to keep treasure-hunting in Pundits' bags.

  There were other reasons due to which she was happy at my (totally deserving) rise. But the one reason she was unhappy was that I would be going away from her, for the first time in my life (I was already twenty-seven years old).

  And how did she take this news? I know you would want to know Rachna's reaction to this development. But I didn't want to.

  Or, worse still, didn't care to. At that time.

  I was so full of a raw, cheap, boyish excitement, that I didn't care to gauge how she felt about my going away so suddenly, so far away, and for such a considerable length of time (a year, at the least).

  I met her, of course. Or, rather, she met me, on the very day Prince Sanjay saw me in the Trumpet Hill bungalow and opened up this new vista of possibilities. She came to thank me for saving her father's life. She took my lacerated hands in hers and bathed them with tears of gratitude.

  She even pressed m
y fingers to her cheek (the said fingers were originally headed for her lips, but she became shy at the last moment and changed their destination).

  "I - I am so happy for you," she said while crying rather copiously over my supine form. Lying there, basking in my new-found glory, already growing somewhat bigheaded and capricious, I never cared to wonder whether some of the teardrops she was shedding might have sprung from the "parting from Neel" crack in her heart.

  I thought all of them overflowed from the flooded "Oh, Thank You So, So, Soooo Much, Neel" river that was rushing madly through her that day.

  Prince Sanjay, who had stepped out when my parents left the bungalow’s drawing-room earlier in the day, stepped right back in as soon as Rachna entered it. I am convinced that he had stood behind a curtain in the foyer for hours on end, waiting for her.

  He squirmed and tugged at his cravat the entire time she was petting, wetting, soothing, and thanking me. And she did all this for a long while.

  If the Prince was uncomfortable at her showering her attentions upon me, I felt absolutely stifled with the selfsame attentions after a point.

  I felt embarrassed. I felt foolish. I tried to build a dam around her loving, gushing heart.

  "It was nothing," I told her umpteen times. "Anyone in my place would have done the same thing. Stop making it such a big deal!"

  She never stopped making it a big deal, not just because it was a big deal, but also because she looked at everything I did through a gigantic magnifying glass. I could have just given Shyam the time of the day instead of saving his life, and it would still be a big deal for her.

  How then could she not be affected and affected terribly by the prospect of my going away?

  But I didn't give it a moment's thought. I didn't want to. Worse, I didn't care. At that time.

  ◆◆◆

  I flew. I flapped my multi-colored wings and took off. Far, far above me, so far up they looked formless and harmless, hovered birds of prey with sharp beaks and cruel talons. They locked their superlative eyes onto the blissfully ignorant, tiny me and glided on effortlessly, one lazy wing-stroke to my hundred laborious ones.