Immortals

by Kaayn, Spartan

  There was still a long journey ahead for them.

  They decided that they would reach Henna’s house and then decide what to do next. Jai did not think that it was a great plan but Henna had insisted. To reach her house, they needed to get to Dhanbad and then on to Jharia, where amongst one of the many colliery villages, Henna had a home and a family that she had left behind a long time ago. There were no phone calls and no letters exchanged other than a money order that Henna sent her family every other month. She had been dutifully doing that because the extended family of her parents and her three siblings needed that money.

  Also, she hoped that the money would help avoid her siblings ending up like she did.

  Henna had a family that she loved. The family had fallen on hard times when her dad lost his job to disease and to the closure of many of the mines. The mines were a mess, an unregulated haphazard maze with scant regard for planning and safety. They were a testament to the greed and corruption, first of the British colonial rulers and then of the bigoted plutocracy that ruled over the treasure now. The perfidious and callous handling by the government of the mine district had ultimately resulted in a large-scale collapse of the mines. Now, the entire swathe of coal was burning underground and the city of Jharia was sinking, soon to be swallowed up in the red-hot abyss of burning coal embers.

  Henna had loved going to school. She had attended school until the eighth standard and she had loved to read. However, between her dad’s unemployment and cirrhosis, and her siblings’ needs, her schooling was terminated when she was fifteen. From being the darling of her house, she became a liability for her parents. They started searching for a groom to marry her off. But fate had other plans. She caught the roving eye of a lecher, a trafficker who used to recruit girls from villages to be thrown into the thriving flesh trade of Mumbai. He offered a deal to Henna’s parents that was too good to refuse.

  She was ordained the saviour of her family. There was a plum job for her in Mumbai: a job as a house cleaner that paid very well and which would be the only lifeline for five souls who would otherwise have succumbed to penury sooner rather than later. There had been an inkling that the job entailed duties more than housekeeping, but they were not in a position to probe any deeper. Bad finances are a great motivation to moral turpitude. They needed the money and the less they probed, the less would be their guilt. Henna was thus packed off to Mumbai, sold into the hands of thinly guised traffickers to save her family from ruin, impecuniousness, and death.

  Henna was bitter at first, when she realised the betrayal of her family. But with time, she learnt to forgive them. She understood the pressures of being hapless and hopeless. Her years with Bhai reduced her to a soulless rag but she understood and found succour in bringing herself to forgive her family for what they had done to her. It was ironic, but it brought relief to her to be able to do that in her darkest hours. Forgiveness also allowed her to go back further down memory lane, further from her parent’s betrayal of her, and thus allow her to access the happy space of her carefree and loved childhood.

  It was ten, by the time they reached her home. It was a little village by any standards, and lay thirteen kilometres into the countryside from the majestic Grand Trunk Road, and proper roads ceased after about five of those thirteen kilometres. The rest was a patchwork of cart-track and no track at some places. The only evidences of an Incredible India that had percolated to Henna’s village were the Pepsi and Wills hoardings above the shanty tea-shops. The roads were unlit as were the majority of houses. There were only a handful of houses that had brick walls.

  Henna’s house had brick walls. There was also a hint of a lit electric bulb inside the house.

  The doors were opened by an elderly lady who had the finely chiselled features of Henna’s face and was old enough to be her mother. She gasped on seeing her daughter and it took a moment for it to register on her. Tears were already flowing from Henna’s eyes even before the door opened and she fell, sobbing, into her mother’s arms.

  Jai picked up the bag and followed mother and daughter into the courtyard of the house. The courtyard was large, and a scooter stood in one corner beneath a giant neem tree. Three goats were tied to the tree on a single trifurcating leash. There was an enclosure for hens and a couple of emaciated roosters stood in silence looking dumbly at Jai and Henna as they were brought into the courtyard by Henna’s mother.

  Jai sat on the creaking wooden cot in the verandah and Henna was ushered inside the house by her mother.

  It took an hour for the emotional meeting of a long-lost daughter and her family to settle down. Henna’s father was away for the week. She had two younger sisters, and a younger brother who was twelve years old now. After many tears had been shed, Henna’s mother came looking for Jai. Jai took a much-needed bath and had a change of clothes. The clothes belonged to Henna’s father and were two sizes too big for Jai.

  Henna saw Jai in them and started laughing.

  Jai smiled too. He was happy to see Henna smile for the first time in a long while. Jai had been introduced as a friend of Henna’s from Mumbai, and no more questions were asked.

  Henna’s brother, Ashfaque, was sent scurrying to the village sweetshop to get littis and rasgullas. Jai had a couple of each and it was followed by a dinner of hot parathas and a spicy chickpea curry.

  Henna’s mother promised Jai chicken curry for lunch the next day.

  Jai retired to the room assigned to him. He desperately needed to sleep. However, the lingering excitement of the events of the preceding day, coupled with the hot and humid room, denied Jai any sleep. He picked up his bedding and headed for the cot in the courtyard.

  He passed another room on the way where Henna and her mother sat talking to each other. Henna was sitting on the bed and her mother sat on the ground, crying.

  Henna sat resolute on the bed, listening stoically to her mother cry.

  It was very difficult on the conscience of a family to barter away a daughter for a few square meals. This guilt had led them away from their daughter and there had been practically no contact between the family and their daughter, save for the money order that they duly received from their daughter every month or two.

  And all that simmering and suppressed guilt was venting itself tonight.

  Jai let that be. He knew this catharsis between mother and daughter would probably help Henna overcome the trauma of her ordeal in Mumbai.

  Jai had a lot to ponder about himself. He realised that he had cheated death twice. In fact, not cheated, but been dead twice, and had come back from the grave each time. The thoughts and the possibilities swirled in his brain but he had no answers to them. As there were no answers, the thoughts soon meandered into nothingness. The cool of the clean village breeze, and the spectacle of a peaceful, nearly full moon overhead, quickly lulled Jai to sleep and before he knew it, he was deep in tired slumber.

  Chapter 9

  The Ambush

  Henna’s Village, Jharia

  Jharkhand, India

  10 May, 2012

  A dull thud awoke Jai.

  Years of living on the wrong side of law had made Jai very sensitive to noises.

  Another thud followed.

  Jai was wide-awake now. There was a faint but audible rustle of leaves being trampled upon, under tiptoeing steps.

  Jai had tucked away his gun under the mattress, on the bed in the room inside. He could feel the presence of men within the courtyard. He still had his eyes closed but he could sense about three or four persons in the courtyard. They could be armed and there was nothing that Jai could do against them, without his gun.

  Jai knew there was no way other than to make a run for the room and his gun. He just hoped that his bolt and run would surprise them and give him enough time to make it to the room. He would dive right into the room and under the bed, grab his gun, turn around, and start shooting.

  This planned, Jai jumped from his bed and ran towards the room, ducking and weaving along the way
. Multiple shots rang out simultaneously. He did not feel anything hitting him. He was running towards a pillar that shielded the room from the courtyard.

  He was almost near the pillar when he felt it. A hot searing round entered his back somewhere at his waist. He fell flat on his face spread-eagled on his stomach. He tried flexing his legs but could not get up. The bullet had gone through the spine and had severed his spinal cord into two. He had lost control of his legs in an instant. He was running on them an instant before, and now his legs were just dead weight under him.

  All he could do now was to turn his head around to catch a glimpse of his assailants. There were four of them who had been shooting at him. The guns had gone silent now. Henna had come running out of the house. A bullet had rung out and had narrowly missed her. Henna ducked instinctively and fell on the floor. Her mother and sisters came running and crowded around her. The assailants rushed closer to them, waving their guns at the family. Henna’s brother stumbled out of the door and one of the assailants fired his gun. The bullet caught him in the head and he dropped dead. There was a wail of anguish from his mother, who immediately knew that her son was dead.

  One of the assailants moved closer to them and asked:

  ‘Who amongst you is Juliet?’

  There was a stunned silence and no one spoke.

  ‘I just need Juliet. No further harm will come to anyone else.’

  There was a moment’s silence and then the assailant raised his gun at Henna’s mother.

  Henna shrieked in horror and raised her arm.

  The assailant raised his arm and with precision, pumped a bullet each into Henna’s mother and her two sisters. They all dropped like rag dolls.

  There was absolute terror on Henna’s face. Jai saw her face contorted with shock, fear and anguish writ large on her face.

  The assailant lowered his gun on to her head and said:

  ‘This is from Rashique Bhai.’

  The shot rang out and the bullet was buried deep inside Henna’s brain even before the line was complete.

  Henna just slumped there, the blood trickling down from her face onto her lips. Jai saw Henna’s beautiful face sink into the abyss of the night and he howled.

  The assailants who had given him up for dead turned their attention towards him. Two of them ran to him, put a barrage of bullets into his back, and the one that finished him caught him in the back of his head right between his ears.

  Chapter 10

  The Moons

  Domus-Nova

  Mouse-tail Galaxy

  Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD

  Jai woke up on the bed in the white room as before; pinned to it by the paralysis of his body. Nothing much had changed. The walls were luminous white and the strange clock with the sixteen-hour face still hung on the far wall.

  There was no sign of the old man.

  The wall at the foot of his bed shifted and there was a dull whirr of the machinery as the door in the white rolled up. The old man in the ‘bomb-squad suit’ walked through the door and towards him.

  The visored visage drew up next to Jai’s face. The old man was smiling a very benevolent smile.

  He raised his hand and pointed it to the wall on Jai’s left. Jai seemed more in control of his faculties today and could turn his neck to follow his arm. The finger pointed to yet another section of the white wall. Jai’s eyes remained riveted to the wall as if he were waiting for something to happen.

  And at that moment the wall seemed to shift and then a section of it drew up, revealing another room beyond, with a cot and someone on that cot, hooked up to a silvery machine above his head, that spewed fine sparkling blue wires that entered his head, shrouded in a very fine white mist.

  Jai was puzzled and he turned his head towards the old man by his side.

  The man smiled yet again and urged him to follow his finger pointed at the wall beyond the cot in the other room. Jai turned his head to the adjacent room and the wall beyond that cot started to shift. The walls drew apart from the middle, revealing what could possibly be a window on that wall.

  The view to the outside of that window was that of a breathtaking night sky. The sky was dark outside, with a spattering of beautiful stars glittering in the night sky. As he watched, the stars dimmed and an ethereal bluish glow filled the night sky. His eyes were riveted on the beauty of the sight and then a blue disk rose across the margin of the window. The disk rose steadily higher into the sky and painted the night in a hue of blue. Jai felt amazed and elated as he watched the lovely view. The disk made its way across the sky slowly and Jai’s eyes followed it all along. As the trail of the disk slowly faded away, there was darkness again and then there was another faint glow on the lower corner of the window. He waited, his eyes fixed on the small patch of sky that he had been allowed to watch today. The glow brightened and another disk, smaller than the first and distinctly whiter, came into view.

  This disk was smaller and yet radiated much more light than the first disk.

  The light was whiter, like the moon he was so used to seeing on Earth, and this white light dispelled the blue of the previous disk. Both the disks must look glorious in the night sky, thought Jai as he imagined the scene of the night sky. The white one chasing the blue one as they both sailed across the night sky, painting it in countless subtle shades of blue and white.

  Jai felt a sense of calm and happiness that percolated down to his core and he turned around to face the old man. He wanted to ask a million questions of that old man but he still had not found his voice.

  The old man raised a placard that simply read:

  ‘LUEON and MAJON – moonrise on the Domus.’

  The words meant nothing to Jai. He looked up quizzically at the man in the visor, who smiled and brought his hands to Jai’s face, placed them over his head and closed his eyes gently, to the whirring noise from above his head. He felt himself sinking deeper into darkness until it blotted him out of that room.

  Chapter 11

  The Ambush – Replayed

  Henna’s Village, Jharia

  Jharkhand, India

  10 May, 2012

  Jai jolted up from his dream, on the cot in the courtyard of Henna’s house.

  As his eyes opened, he saw the moon right over his head. A single moon, and this one not full, was shining through tiny cloudlets and bathed him in its milky whiteness.

  There was no one else in the courtyard… yet.

  Jai bolted up from his bed and ran to the room where he had hidden his gun. He pulled out his revolver, a gift from Ali a long time ago, and ran to take position behind the pillar overlooking the courtyard.

  After stationing himself behind the pillar, the absurdity of what he was doing struck him. But then again, this had happened to him the third time now. And he was not sure whether he should just dismiss it all as dreams of a tired mind. He decided, though, to remain behind the pillar for some time.

  ‘Maybe now is the time that I’ll find out,’ he murmured to himself, conniving with himself into beating his own rationality.

  He did not have to wait for long.

  There was a thump and a rustle of leaves somewhere to his left. The first assailant had jumped the brick boundary wall and had landed in the heap of chopped cattle-feed stored there.

  And then and there, rationality lost to oddity and Jai started believing in his strange faculty.

  Other noises followed the first thud – one more where the first had landed and two more thuds a little to the right. There were four thuds altogether. Jai knew it would be a hell of a difficult task to take down all four of them alone.

  He looked around and saw the glint of kitchenware propped against the pillar for drying. He quickly found what he needed.

  Three of the assailants were creeping up towards the house and the fourth remained hidden in the bushes to Jai’s left. From his position behind the pillar, Jai could see all of them. The hidden assailant lay to his left in the bushes while the others crept up
to the right of the pillar. Jai picked up the large, gleaming kitchen knife that was possibly used for chopping meat. He steadied himself by propping himself against the pillar and quietly turned around to face the assailant in the bushes. His own face was still hidden in the darkness around the pillar.

  He steadied the knife in his right hand holding it by the blade and the fingers of his non-throwing arm curled into a crack in the middle of the pillar, using it as a pivot. He needed to hurl the knife with speed and the pivot would help him get the desired speed in that hunched up sitting position.

  He took a last look at the other three assailants and threw the knife. It sailed the distance in silence and struck its mark, the target’s left half of chest. The intruder was hurled back and he howled in pain as he fell. Jai immediately picked up his revolver and turned to the others in front of him. All of them looked back towards the noise and two of them started for the bushes instinctively. The third one stood his ground and Jai knew he was the leader.

  He took aim from where he stood and fired.

  Jai was at an advantage as he was hiding in the dark and had a clear shot at the assailants. The bullet found the forehead of the third assailant and he fell dead to the floor. There was a loud report with the shot and Jai had given his position to the other two assailants with that shot. They started firing indiscriminately into the darkness around Jai. Jai scrunched up behind the pillar, waiting for the barrage to die down. The noise of the shots had awoken everyone in the village and lights flickered on inside Henna’s house too.

  The remaining two assailants could not risk exposure and decided to flee. Jai looked towards his left and saw one of the assailants climbing up the wall. He pulled his trigger and the bullet found its mark. The assailant was hit square on the back of his head and he slumped on the wall itself, half his body hanging on either side of it.

  The last assailant was nowhere to be seen.