The Destiny of Shaitan

by Laxmi Hariharan

  It is among the empty shell of yet another destroyed skyscraper that Tiina finds the little girl. Tiina spots her from the spacepod in the air and her heart skips a beat. For a minute she allows her heart lift at the thought of the little girl being Maya. And yet she knows it cannot be. It has been many years since her escape from Ka Surya and Maya like herself would be a grown woman now, almost eighteen But it’s something she lives in fear of - finding her twin in the worst possible condition. Pushing the thought from her mind, she hastens to set down her pod, making sure she is close to the place where she spotted the child, and in doing so, breaks a classic rule of not coming onto any demolition site. She shrugs philosophically, adding this to her already long list of crimes. Then, pulling out her sword, she runs in the direction of the girl. As she gets closer, she suddenly spots her tiny tail swishing from side to side and realises she is not human, but a catun. A cross between cats and humans, they are normally found on another planet just outside the solar system. The female catun had the best of both worlds. Beautiful human facial features, big eyes, lustrous hair, a graceful gait and the characteristic long, slim, feline bodies. Not surprisingly, they were much sought after by flesh traders.

  Tiina walks softly to the catun-girl, talking to her in a soothing voice, but she shies away, her body shivering with fright. When she puts her arms around the catun, the little one finally senses an ally and clings to her with all the strength of an alley cat. She picks up the girl who feels as light as a feather in her arms and runs with her to the small spacepod docked not far off. She straps them both in securely.

  As she takes off, the ever-vigilant air patrols spot her and, give chase with flashing lights and screaming sirens. Tiina zooms off with extra strong propulsion. In her hurry to give her pursuers the slip, she turns onto the wrong lane of the intra-planetary highway, into oncoming traffic. Dodging the various oncoming crafts, she curses her luck. She feels like she has made a career out of engaging with the police.

  Finally, as her craft comes to rest in front of the Wanch, there is utter silence followed by a loud pop as one of the door panels next to her comes undone and falls off with a crash. The entire craft then sinks further, collapsing by a few more inches. Grimacing, she opens the door on her side, which also falls off with a crash. As she looks at the fallen door, a hysterical giggle bursts up through her lips. She closes her eyes, lets out a deep breath, calming her heart, which is fluttering madly as if she has just downed a few cans of her favourite high-adrenaline asteroid nectar. Not surprising, she thinks to herself, as this is by far the biggest high impact journey she has experienced, since, well since she had escaped from the burning Ka Surya.

  She hastily pushes the thoughts of her charred mother planet away from her mind and squeezes out from below the now dilapidated driver’s section. Then, carefully replacing the earlier fallen spacecraft door panel, she limps to the other side, pushes open the panel and the catun-girl immediately leaps into her arms, resuming her earlier position of a wrap-around koala.

  Tiina cuddles her, then sighs and walks into the Wanch where she plops herself onto a barstool. Catching the eye of the bartender, she orders a shot of whiskey and some milk for the girl. Placing the milk on the counter, she manages to untangle the little girl’s hands from around her waist and plunks her down on the stool next to her.

  She looks down at the little catun, and is amazed to see that the milk in the glass in front of her has been licked dry. “Hey, you finished all your milk really fast,” she says, and is met with an unblinking stare.

  “Are you still hungry?” she asks.

  The catun does not reply, but simply looks at her with something close to adoration in her eyes. Tiina sighs again for the third time in a row and beckons the bartender, “Can I get some cookies, please?”

  The bartender stares at her in surprise.

  “Everyone around me is struck dumb today,” she exclaims, and then adds, “Not for me, for her,” her finger jabbing in the air, pointing to the catun-girl next to her, still staring at her unblinkingly.

  The bartender nods and returns with a bowl of cookies, which he places in front of the catun. As both Tiina and he watch, she flicks out a tongue and grabs them all in one gulp. Then, licking her tongue around her lips, she turns to look at Tiina once more with unblinking eyes.

  “What’s your name?” asks Tiina.

  There is no reply from her. Tiina sighs again and gestures to herself. “I am Tiina. What’s your name?” she asks again, tapping the girl on her chest.

  The girl blinks then says, “Mini.”

  “Mini?” Tiina says, a delighted half smile breaking out on her lips. The name is so apt and fitting for the tiny bundle.

  The girl blinks, then puts her head down on her hands on the counter and closes her eyes. A tear drop rolls down her cheek pathetically.

  Tiina looks at the catun-girl helplessly, then looks to the entrance doors of the bar, past which she can just see another spacepod draw up. A rather pudgy man with the legs and tail of a plutonian reptile, but the torso of a human, a round face, crowned with a mop of blonde hair, steps up.

  Tiina picks up the little catun and walks towards him, reaching him just as he steps inside the entrance gates.

  “Hey, Edgar,” she says.

  “Hey, Tiina!” He nods a reply. His eyes are drawn to the catun nestling in her arms.

  “This is Mini,” replies Tiina to his unspoken question.

  “Another one?” asks Edgar.

  “What can I say?” replies Tiina. “Every time I see one of these little catun-girls, I think it could be Maya. I have to do something. Can’t just leave them to die out there or …” She shudders “… meet a fate worse than death …”

  “Surely you dramatise,” exclaims Edgar.

  “You know I am correct. Well …?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, will you take her and send her back to Orvieto?”

  “All the way back to her home planet?” he exclaims.

  “She’s even smaller than the others I found so far. There’s no way she can make it back on her own.”

  “That’s what you said last time,” he responds in mock anger.

  “Well, the catun was tiny, last time,” Tiina replies looking at him beseechingly and fluttering her eyelashes for good measure.

  Edgar is mesmerised for a second. Then he clears his throat and says, “OK, OK. You don’t have to pull all your feminine wiles on me now.”

  “Great,” says Tiina delightedly. “You are a sweetie. One in a million. A man after my own heart …” she is about to go on heaping the compliments, when Edgar interrupts her. “Enough, enough. Save some for later.”

  “That’s a good point,” says Tiina. She tries to unravel the catun's arm from around her to hand her over. Mini burrows further into Tiina and refuses to let go. Tiina looks at Edgar for help.

  Edgar sighs and then shrugs his shoulders. He bends down and silently waves his palm over the little girl’s face. Mini shuts her eyes, her breathing deepens, and she falls into a deep, restful sleep

  “Wow, I sure wish I could do that, I could use a good, uninterrupted night’s sleep,” says Tiina.

  “That’s because you think too much,” says Edgar. “The weight of the universe and all that …”

  “You mean you don’t believe that I must save the future?” chuckles Tiina.

  “Whatever …” Edgar shakes his head, takes the little girl into his arms, and walks out of the bar towards his spacepod. He opens the panel at the back and takes out a small, cosy travel carrier into which he carefully places Mini, then places the case on the seat next to his and straps it in.

  “So long then Tiina. Try to stay out of trouble …”

  Tiina leans over and kisses his cheek. “I love you too …”

  Edgar blushes, then gets into the spacepod. She watches him take off softly. Then, squaring her shoulders, turns and walks back into the Wanch.

  Looking around her, Tiina draw
s in the familiar reassuring feeling of the place — a throwback to the early seventies, the walls crowded with posters of familiar pop & rock stars, the same ones that she and Maya had put up in their room. They had been so young, naive caught in the first flush of the pre-teen years, just discovering their sexuality, entranced by the music of the seventies, which had a chord with both their rebellious hearts. They were twins, not identical in looks, but mirror images in every other way. And they had that uncanny ability of reading each other’s thoughts. Those were the early years, growing up on Ka Surya.

  Coming back to the now Tiina smiles. She is in the company of friends.

  The first time Tiina walked into the bar, it all seemed so curiously familiar. Nostalgia, the thick taste of homesickness, coated her tongue and she could feel the well of melancholy erupt sharply in the pit of her stomach.

  The year when she had lost Maya, they had both been almost ten and the music from the seventies had enjoyed a revival. The music had been downloaded, re-engineered, re-mixed and re-sung and had achieved instant cult hits. That was the year when Tiina and Maya had recreated their own summer of love on Ka Surya, the same year she had met Yudi & lost him. The memories of Maya and Yudi were forever intertwined in her heart.

  She had found love and lost family, all in the space of less than forty-eight hours. A coming of age with a vengeance she liked to call it. And over the last few days, Tiina feels like she has come close to reliving those same feelings again. She realises that life often repeats itself.

  Egreog had appeared in her life the previous weekend. She had spotted him at the weekly Saturday Salsa night at the Wanch. Seated at one corner of the dance floor, she had been admiring his dancing skills. Tiina herself was still an amateur having just taken up dancing a few weeks ago.

  It was obvious to her that Egreog loved to Salsa. She could see right off that he was really good at it too. To her surprise he had looked straight at her, smiled and walked to her, leaving his beautiful dancing partner stranded right there in the middle of the floor. He held out his hand to her. She took it and was swept off to where the move and the music mattered more than life.

  Their next meeting took her as much by surprise.

  Egreog had looked out of the air transporter he was in, on his way down to the beach. Through the steady downpour of rain, he spotted her, not less than four feet away, walking, on her way home. Captured in slow motion. A snapshot tucked away in the corner of his mind. Her mobile device beeped right then.

  “Hi?” said Tiina.

  “Enjoying your walk?”

  “Where are you?” she smiled, recognising his voice.

  “That was you in orange, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like talking to yourself?”

  “What?” she asked, puzzled.

  “I saw you talking to yourself,” he said.

  “Oh!” Tiina laughed, embarrassed at having been caught in the act.

  “It’s cute …” He reassured her.

  Then, realising that he must not be far away, she asked, “Where are you?”

  “In the transporter which just passed you,” he laughed.

  “Oh!” she said, not sure what to say next.

  “I’m seeing you tonight, right?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She laughed again, happy that he had asked.

  “What time will you be there?”

  Regaining her composure, she answered, “Mmmmm, not too early, not too late? At the right time?” she teased.

  “The right time …” She felt him digesting that. “OK, then,” he agreed.

  A scene from “When Tiina met Egreog”. A tableau etched in her mind. So innocent and yet her mind was to replay it over and over again in the coming months.

  Him. Watching her watching the rain.

  “That was innocent, right?” she would ask herself many times. Then why did it bother her so much?

  Later that night, waving to the few people she recognised at the Wanch, Tiina walked across to where the regulars sit around chatting.

  The music changed to a Tango and an elaborately dressed middle-aged, intergalactic couple walked confidently onto the floor, taking the first Tango Stance. The man was human enough. But his female partner was arresting to the eyes. She was extraordinarily beautiful, of mixed extra-terrestrial race, as far as Tiina can tell. With long, perfect deer legs, elegant hooves, doe-shaped slanting eyes, and a pointed head from which long blue hair cascaded down her back almost to her feet.

  Tiina followed them across the floor until her attention was again caught by Egreog, walking towards her. He went to the end of the long chrome bench on which she was seated and, to her amusement, asked the four people seated between them to get up. He squeezed in next to her, his face shining with pleasure at seeing her again.

  “Hi,” he said, sliding in, “how are you?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “A little tired. So, what did you do today?”

  “Well I bought these new dancing shoes,” she said, holding out her feet for his inspection.

  “I liked the sneakers you wore this morning.”

  “Sneakers?” Tiina smiles “Does anyone call them that anymore?”

  “The short cut off trousers, too.”

  “They were not cut off!” she exclaims.

  “I could see your ankles.”

  The comment felt very intimate coming from him. It wasn’t as if he had seen her naked she thought. Tiina was embarrassed at how her thoughts had raced so far ahead. “Did you like what you saw?”

  “I liked that you put out your hand to feel the raindrops and then started talking to yourself,”

  Tiina was speechless. Caught in the act of making love to herself.

  “I was in a transporter going down to the other end of the island. As we passed Hollywood Road, I remembered you saying that you lived there, and then there you were, walking by, not four feet away.” Egreog stares directly into her eyes. “Do you know the odds of that happening?”

  She shrugged, trying not to show how moved she was moved by the coincidence. “So that’s why you laughed?” she asked

  Just then, the music went up a notch to the much faster salsa beat, and Egreog put out his hand “Shall we?”

  The unerring precision of being caught in that act, by him, at that specific moment. What if it had been a heartbeat here or there? For months, she played it out in her mind, examining it from different angles.

  Why did it disturb her so much?

  The band at the Wanch was one of the few live bands to have survived. It was another reason she loved the Wanch so much. Most of the other bars boasted holographic bands and piped in music. As the band prepared to play their first warm up number, the clash of cymbals demanded Tiina’s attention.

  The Wanch was named after Wanchai, the most hedonistic of all the suburbs in Java. It boasted Peep shows, nudes and neon’s. Various bars with names like The Groovy Mule and Joe Bananas. They served up liquor and drinks from all over the universe. You could find women with blue eye shadow, unshaven armpits and greasy, shiny hair. Shuffling intergalactic sailors fresh off the space ships, crew cut and clean shaven, float in groups, sniffing hopefully for one-night stands. Others clearly from galaxies unknown shuffled in anyway, own-country rejects with fifteen-year-old nubile humans on their arms.

  Java itself was a satellite on the edge of the galaxy. The last human outpost before you crossed over to the other solar systems. Discovered recently, it had grown in just a few years to be space sin city. It was the first inhabited space that weary travellers reached when they come in from the long outer space journeys.

  It was no wonder that the enjoyment here had a touch of desperation to it. It was

  The perfect hiding place for Tiina. Where you could crawl underground, and pull the hole in after you. There was enough commerce to earn her living, yet the floating population gave her anonymity.

  The passenger ship from Ka Surya had deposited her on Java eight years e
arlier. Since then she had used her wits and common sense to survive on the streets. She has spent most of the first few months on Java sleeping on the streets. It was just her luck that she had landed in the middle of a hard winter on Java. One night she had crawled out of the night into the warmth of the Wanch and had begged and pleaded with the owner until he had relented and given her a job cleaning up the place and a small room over the bar to stay. In a few years time she was bartending at the Wanch.

  The year she had turned seventeen she was approached by a man in his mid thirties. He looked strong, like a warrior of some sort for he carried a strong sword on his back. Yet he told her that he was a magician by profession, performing at shows, fairgrounds and gatherings for the well to do citizens of Java. Entranced by her budding beauty, he had asked her to be his muse and play a leading role in his illusions. Soon he had become her father figure, her mentor and guardian all rolled into one.

  He had taught her to use the sword, training her every day. Pushing her, till she was as skilled as him at using the weapon. From him she also learnt to play the crowds, to use illusion to connect with people’s emotions, learning to bend them to her will. To give them hope, and create just enough fear to make life interesting, help them realise their dreams. Yet it had not been enough. It seemed to her nothing would fill that empty space inside her ... And so she had sought comfort in the familiar. She had gone back to bar tending at the Wanch and to her old room above the bar.

  That was until Egreog had come along.

  Tiina turns to look at him, his head on the pillow next to hers and feels some measure of faith return.

  As if sensing her gaze he opens his eyes “Is this real?” Egreog asks, pulling her long lustrous black hair away from her face. They are on her bed which is so narrow that the only way they can both fit in is by spooning together front to back. Now as they lie facing each other their noses almost touch, the cool wind blowing in through the open windows raises goose bumps on the curve of her back.

  “Is that real?” Tiina asks back, “your name?”

  He laughs and rolls over her, his elbows balanced one on either side of her chest, the length of his legs kissing hers all the way down to her feet. The soft smell of his skin cocoons her completely and she involuntarily sighs, already missing him when he will not be around.