by Neil D'Silva
It did not matter to him any longer who she was. He didn’t ask her after that first night, and she did not tell. It did not matter. She was his company in the loneliness, and, truth be told, he was terrified that he might lose her if he pressed too hard. He toed the invisible line she had drawn and stayed within those unspoken limits. He was the unschooled and unlearned one here, the new dude in town, and so he let her take the lead in everything—from the topics of their conversations to the things they did on the mattress. It was surrender.
It also did not intrigue him that she did not ask anything about him. She knew he came from a small town, but she never asked which. She did not ask about his family or his qualification or even about the job he held in this studio where they made love every night. It did not puzzle him. He knew The City was carefree; such questions made no sense when people got what they wanted.
Then, one morning, when he was under the shower in the tiny cubicle of the studio toilet, he saw something in the mirror that horrified him.
He saw himself.
It took him a moment to realize what was wrong. He had shrunk. Shrunk, as in, reduced. His body wasn’t what it was. He had muscles once, some unremarkable biceps too, but they were gone. His upper arms were but spindly tubes. His chest had withered, flattened out against his ribcage, and his belly had curved inward as if he were sucking in his breath. He turned and could easily feel the knobs of his hipbone, his skinny legs jutting out from beneath them.
Mortified, he quickly wrapped a towel around himself—realizing that he could turn it halfway more around his body than he could do earlier—and stepped out.
She was on the floor, sleeping.
He shook her awake. “What’s happening to me?”
She sat up immediately. Looking at him from the top to the bottom, she asked, “What?”
“I don’t know. Am I sick? How have I become so thin?”
She stood up and placed her arm around his shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“Just look at me.”
She did. “What? I don’t see anything. You have always been like that.”
“No!” Harry screamed out, for the first time in Mimi’s presence. “This is not how I am.”
“But you are!” She smiled as she drew in closer to him. “And I love you like this.”
Love!
Had she just uttered that word? That word which has brought nations to their knees? That word which has tempted even the gods and caused catastrophes? What was he, a mere mortal, in its presence then?
“What? Don’t you have to say anything?” she laughed.
“I… I don’t…”
“Anyway, it is day now. Time for you to dress up for work and time for me to leave. We shall meet again tonight.”
She sashayed away to the door, and he could not keep himself from looking at her. In fact, he stared at her—at her back, at her fulsome hips—and then he had another shock.
She was… healthier. Yeah, that was it. Plumper, even. Her body shone as if it had been fed something that both nourished it and made it blossom.
That was when the dread set in. What did he know about her? What was she? Was she even a woman?
His heart dropped into the pit of his stomach.
Was he the prey she was feeding on?
***
But he could not resist her.
That night when she came to him in the bar where he was nursing his drink, finding him as she always did, he had to take only one look at her sea-colored eyes and one whiff of her earthy perfume, and he knew he was done for. When she opened her arms, he knew there was nowhere else to go. Like a dummy pulled by a string, he submitted to her and for all those moments that he made contact with her, he could think of no other pleasure that came even close.
“You worry a lot,” she said when he was spent. “You are here now. You are not alone. I am with you.”
He felt himself thinner still, and those arms of hers weren’t just hugging him; it was a squeeze. Was she squashing him?
“I am all right,” he said without meaning it.
Were her teeth different now? They seemed to have grown whiter. Sharper.
“You are worried.”
He was scared to tell the truth, that he was intimidated by her. Part of him wanted to tear away but the larger part wanted to stay in her squeeze. He said something else instead. “It’s my work. It’s difficult. That’s my worry.”
“Whoever said surviving here was easy?” She laughed that laugh again. “It will take every ounce of your energy but at the end of it, it is bliss. What would you have done in your small village anyway?”
He said nothing further. But he did not sleep that night. As she slept peacefully, snoring away as if nothing mattered, all he could was to keep staring at her.
***
The next night, he left the studio before she arrived and walked around The City. He wanted to purge himself of the nasty thoughts that had been brewing in his mind about her. He wanted to be soothed by the embrace of The City and not some unknown seductive woman who was sucking the life-juices out of him. He could not refuse her, and he feared he would kill her because that was much easier.
The very next moment, he castigated himself for that diabolical thought. Never before had such a thought entered his mind. The woman—that woman—had turned him evil.
There was something about The City that caught his attention. It had changed. It had improved. How long had he been cooped up in the studio?
The lanes looked slicker; the lights of the shops looked brighter. There was music pervading the air—not a single song but a mélange of hundreds of songs playing in as many establishments. The buildings looked statelier, as if they had fresh coats of paints, and even the cars that stood parked outside them looked sleeker and poised to run extra miles.
It was true what he had heard then—The City is growing all the time.
He was a fool to let himself be trapped in the worries of his own mind. He was here to make the most of his life in The City and what was he doing? As he stood on the ballast that lined The City’s big beach, he made a decision—he’d give up this job and the woman and start afresh.
He shut his eyes and pictured himself living a happy life with his own family in an apartment of one of those skyscrapers. He qualified for a bigger job now; he’d make the upward leap. But he had to get rid of things first.
***
The next morning itself, he told his boss he was quitting. The boss did not say anything. He only nodded, gave him his pending salary of three months, and let him move out. With a sizeable wad of notes bulging in the pocket of his jeans, Harry felt like a rich man. But then he passed by the mirror of a roadside salon and shuddered. His face had sunken in further by almost an inch.
Doesn’t matter. He’d nurse himself to good health now.
He spent that morning roaming around The City. His lightness of weight was evident as he placed each step on the ground; it hardly left a footprint. His shirt hung loose and his jeans were held up by the last hole in his belt. One of the first things he did was to have a meal at a roadside eatery, and that gave him some sustenance. He then visited some offices that he had earmarked for application, but all he got was doors slammed in his face. Cocooned in his studio for close to a year, he had underestimated the struggle.
When night began to wear on and he realized that he had no place to shelter himself, the worry crept in.
The natural thought was to spend the night at a hotel or a lodge. Of those, there were many in The City, but when he went to their reception desks, he realized that they weren’t for him. The first thing they asked was for proof of identity, which he hadn’t been able to create for himself yet; and even if some of the seedier ones bypassed that necessity, they did not wish to give rooms to an emaciated jobless young man. When his efforts yielded no results, he came out into the streets, disillusioned again by The City he had given his heart to, and decided to spend the night like the millions of others who
had no homes here did—on the streets.
He found a place for himself, a place right under the poster of a movie starring The Hero, and he remembered his early days in The City. He wanted to become The Hero, but here he was, lying on the ground, using his shirt as a mattress. Did The Hero have to sleep like this in his early days too?
When he was looking at the stars above his head, with the sounds of nearby barking dogs among the many things that did not let him sleep, he was aroused by a hand over his chest.
“Why did you run away?”
He turned sharply and saw her again.
“I looked everywhere for you,” said Mimi, that smile still dancing on her lips. “And I find you here.”
“Why are you after me?” he asked. “Please go away. We have nothing to do with each other anymore.”
“But you do! You have come to me. You have come to me with stars in your eyes.”
He balked. “I never came to you.”
“But you did!” she said with the same unwavering mysterious smile. “I never go to anyone; they come to me.”
His eyes then fell on the other men sleeping beside him on the pavement. None of them stirred. None of them indicated any sign that they saw the woman. Only he did.
A dog came up close to where she was. He sniffed tentatively at the ground and then he ran away whimpering as if he had been struck. The woman only smiled.
And in that moment, Harry realized that he was in the jaws of death. This was not a woman but the personification of his dreams. This was what had been sapping his energy, bit by bit, and thriving on the loot. This woman was The City, the seductress that claimed lonely and gullible young men such as him and fed on their flesh.
That’s how The City thrives. Or, what else is there?
He stood up as fast as he could, and he broke into a run. He ran, not minding the hard concrete of the roads of The City fraying the skin of his soles. He ran, not minding the glares of the many neon signs and the traffic headlights falling into his eyes. He ran, not minding which turns he took.
But The City was endless.
With great fear, he realized he was a rat in a maze. He was in a labyrinth, and The City was mocking him, challenging him to find his way out. He had been chosen as the victim this once, and The City had him in a vice and she would not let him go.
He came to a dead halt in a lonely alley. He looked around furtively; there was nowhere to go.
The voice came from behind him: “You are where I need you to be.”
It was the woman’s voice. He did not dare to look at her. Instead, he looked straight ahead, almost obstinately. And he found himself staring at The Fracture.
***
As he found The City stepping forward to meet him, he felt even the last vestiges of energy in him drying away. He felt it seeping through his body into the ground; she was devouring him whole. He had to get away, but his paces only came as tiny steps now. His movement was in the direction of The Fracture.
“You wanted to belong here,” she said. “You do now.”
And then one of his steps found no ground to rest on. His foot found nothing but a blank depth, and he yelled as he realized what had happened—he had stepped into The Fracture.
Down he fell into The Fracture then with nothing to stop him, his frail body hurtling against the jagged edges of it, his bones smashing into fragments every time he dashed against its sides. He heard the voice of the woman from somewhere far above, at the mouth of The Fracture, and she was laughing as if she had accomplished something of great import.
He whooshed down, deeper and deeper, till the point where he could not hear that laughter anymore.
The only thing that he could hear were his own screams, and they were now blended with millions of other screams.
With horror, he realized those screams were of the men like him that The City had swallowed whole, on whose energies she breathed and on whose bones her skyscrapers stood.
***
It was the next day. The train brought another man to The City. For Mukesh, soon to be known as Mickey, the dream had come true.
ABOUT NEIL D’SILVA
Neil D’Silva is an author from Mumbai, known for his works in the horror genre. His debut novel, Maya’s New Husband, was much critically acclaimed and stayed in the top ten of Amazon India (horror) for close to two years, reaching the #1 spot on multiple occasions. His next novel Pishacha and short-story collection Right Behind You repeated the feat. He is now looking forward to the release of his next book, titled Yakshini (Rupa Publications), and Haunted: Real-life Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits (Penguin Random House) Haunted is co-authored with noted paranormal investigator Jay Alani.
Neil is an active proponent of Indian literature. He is regularly invited to conduct workshops at prestigious institutions such as Mumbai’s famous N. M. College and recently at IIT Kanpur. He is the founder of an interschool litfest named Litventure. He spoke at TEDxTCET on the topic of The Art of Writing a Bestseller.
As a scriptwriter, his 300+ episode flagship show for children named Shiny and Sasha boosted the YouTube channel KooKooTV (Hindi), bringing it to 4 million subscribers. He also writes for television and web platforms. Two of his books, Maya’s New Husband and Yakshini, have been opted for a screen adaptation by Lotus Talkies Productions.
He was a winner at the Delhi Literature Festival 2015 for a short story competition organized by the publisher Readomania. His website NeilDSilva.com was the recipient of The Indian Bloggers’ Award for Outstanding Performance in Short Stories in 2017. He is also highly active on social media, and was listed as Top Writer on Quora for successive years 2017 and 2018.
LOST
Kiran Manral
He loved going to the mall, he did, and so did she. The crowds of people made him happy. He would laugh and run and she would chase him and gather him up and swing him in the air and they both would be happy. He was all she had, all of five, chubby-cheeked, with stone-black eyes that were exactly like his father’s and a smile that was the sun breaking through dark clouds. It was his birthday today. They would spend it at the mall all day, and in the evening, she would cut a cake for him and have some children from the small society complex they lived in for a small cake and pizza party. He was three today. No longer a baby, no longer a toddler, but a child. She didn’t know too many people to invite to a proper party; living on one’s own did that to one. And the other kids at the playschool kept a healthy distance from her son. He was strange, they said. And then the teacher had requested her to find a private tutor for the boy. “Perhaps he needs some more time amongst people before he can adjust with other children.” That week he had bitten a boy in the cheek and gouged out flesh, they had to sew the cheek back into place. They had never gone back to the playschool. After all, he was still a baby. He didn’t know how to control his temper. It was the other child’s fault. He shouldn’t have taken his wooden bricks away. She would teach him how to control his temper as he grew. He was still young; there was time enough for him to learn.
They normally visited the mall on the weekends. She would, of course, have to medicate him so he behaved. Through the week, it was just him and her in the house, alone. Watching television most of the time. Or when he played with the dogs, which was a lot of the time, he could understand their language and they could understand his. It didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t speak to people; theirs was a language he was reluctant to learn. She missed her husband. But that was how life was, he wasn’t around to see her child grow from a baby to a delightful young boy. Sometimes, she wondered how it would have been had her husband been around, how he would have dealt with this rather unusual child she’d given birth to. It is good he isn’t around, she told herself. Sometimes, everything happens for the best. It was strange, though, how he’d died one night in his sleep, his eyes transfixed on the baby’s crib, an expression of absolute horror in them. A heart attack, the doctor had said, it happens sometimes even to perfectly fit young men wh
o have no history of any sort of heart disease.
Her boy. He was the one thing that lit up her life. He was an easy child, a golden child, emerging from the birth canal feet first, draped in the caul. She had remembered her mother gasping in shock, as she waited for the doctor to assure her that all was well with the baby.
“What happened,” she had cried. “Is everything all right? Is my baby fine? Is it alive?”
There was no sound, but a flustered silence, with her mother holding her down as the doctor and the nurse took the baby to the side and checked its vitals.
“Why aren’t they showing me my baby?” she asked, dismayed.
Her mother patted her hand, “Wait, they’re just checking him.”
“Is everything okay, Ma? Did the baby look fine?”
It had to survive, this child. She had lost too many children in the womb to be able to bear the heartbreak again. It was why she’d made the bargain she did.
Her mother drew her breath in and hesitated a moment before uttering what they both knew would be a lie. “Yes, your baby looked absolutely fine.”
“Why aren’t they showing me the baby?”
“They will, they will,” her mother said, patting her head, stroking her hair, insisting she lay back and wait till they brought the baby to her. There was a long silence while she felt her breath begin to rise as muffled sobs in her chest as no sound apart from urgent, hushed whispers came from the doctor and the nurse. Then an anguished wail rent the air, and her chest reacted violently, with the primal surge of maternal longing surging from her breasts with the milk yet to come in.
