by Zuni Chopra
Across the street from me, the tongewala had deposited a small bent figure with shrunken, useless limbs. His body had turned a sunken, hollow black, shredded at the edges. His face, I assumed, was turned away from me. I couldn’t really tell, for his head was a raw, mangled mass of blood-soaked flesh and bone. It clashed horribly with the dirt-filled brown of the road. Vaguely, my mind questioned whether his left leg had always been missing.
Every part of me throbbed as though swollen already, ready to burst crimson at the slightest provocation. Yet I dared to imagine that I was mostly unhurt. For it was only when oxygen returned in great gulps that the burning under my right eye began to sink in. And it was only when I looked straight down at the sea of rock again and realized it was tinted a sick, bright red, clustered around the dense, unmoving bullet, that I lifted my hand to register the gash on my muddy cheek, my blood finally becoming one of the puddles I’d so tried to avoid.
Chapter Nine
People tell me that you never need to worry about being able to find your way home. I couldn’t understand them in the least; did they mean I’d never get lost? Did they mean those I could love and trust would always surround me? Or did they mean that my heart would always eventually guide me to happiness? Or perhaps they meant all of those things at once?
Right then, it was swirling about in my mind, over and over, like the clanging of pots and pans in a soapy sink when my mother does the dishes.
I was walking, just walking, pushing through the smoke and fog, forcing myself not to panic by focusing on the irrelevant. Around me, there were calls for help, for warning, for God. I had fled from where the men with guns began to pour in from brash, hulking brown jeeps. Fleetingly, I had longed to question whose side they were on. Then I realized it did not matter. They were holding guns. Something animalistic inside me had risen to the surface and propelled me through the smallest of hidden cracks and keyholes to set me on the track home. Or what I believed was the track home. I did not know.
People rushed away from the site of the blast as I had, hoping for nothing more than preserving a fraction of what had been their life. A wooden sign, shattered and splintering, crunched beneath my shaking feet, bearing a discoloured C. Chana.
Only the old men seemed unchanged. They watched as the road and the air grew red, as the wounded were brought away and uselessly bandaged, as chaotic gunshots calling for order echoed in the evening, and they sat and read their newspapers on the front porch with the same indifferent look in their eyes.
Such was the flow of familiar unfamiliarity that I did not even notice when I reached my road. Men and women swarmed around me, some going one way, some the other, some not moving at all. Then I felt a firm hand grip my arm, and I was yanked up and out of it all.
‘Thank all the gods you’re okay!’ Ma panted as she held me against her on the front steps. ‘Oh, no!’ she murmured when she saw my face, worry and care misting around her. She tilted my chin this way and that, trying to quickly ascertain the damage.
‘Is everyone else . . .?’ I whispered, thinking of the houses I had passed, and which of them Rani Auntie might have been in, or worse, the Alis, so hoarse that I went unheard.
Past her arm, something black and deformed was lingering like a disease in the pores of the soil. Ancient cracks splintered through maggot-infested wood; bare, dead branches, contorted like amputated limbs, hung limply in the chilly air; a small, parasitic flame loitered wickedly within the crevices of decay. And my stomach contracted, filling my thin, white-veined lungs with nausea at the thought of how much of the tree was yet living.
‘Ma,’ I croaked, ‘our chinar.’
She clicked her tongue impatiently as she caught me by the elbow and spun me around to face the door, muttering something about priorities.
Mr Qureishi was seated in the living room, looking as though the bomb had just exploded two inches from his enormous nose. His eyes were wide and he was clutching his briefcase with the air of a drowning man gripping a torn lifebelt. On the desk beside him, a crackly old radio that I’d never seen before was belching out a long blurred sentence.
Ma marched me upstairs immediately and began to wash my face with a wet cloth. Once all the blood had been wiped away, she sighed.
‘There. It’s not so bad, is it? It isn’t a deep wound at least.’
Right, Ma. Sure it isn’t.
‘Listen to me,’ she barked, suddenly anxious. ‘Don’t you see now, Zoon? Don’t you understand why we can’t live here any more? The armies are fighting at the border, in the city, as we speak! That bomb in Nowhatta will be the first of many more now. Much worse could have happened to you. I don’t know what your poor Tathi would have done if—’
She stopped and stared at a moth on the mirror.
‘Your poor Tathi!’ she cried suddenly, shoving me aside.
Halfway to the door, she paused and turned.
‘I’m going to get Tathi. Don’t touch your cut. Don’t go downstairs. Stay in your room, lock the door, don’t be too loud, and don’t answer to anyone unless you hear me come in. Mr Bhukhari is waiting in the living room to sign the papers and I am dealing with far too much right now to have to endure any nonsense from you as well. Got it?’
My head seemed to nod of its own accord.
As she stumbled down the stairs, I heard Mr Qureishi give a frightened yelp.
‘Those men are getting closer! Look, they’re halfway here already! You know, I . . . I really think I ought to leave! Listen, Mrs Razdan, it isn’t that I don’t want to help with the sale. I do. But I’m afraid to say that I’ve decided to place higher value on my life as of now than on my business. It may sound ridiculous, but there it is. I hope you don’t mind?’
‘Of course not!’ Ma replied, trying her hardest to pay attention while, by the sound of it, searching for her second shoe. ‘You have somewhere to go, I suppose?’
‘Yes, I’m headed to my aunt’s. She lives a couple of minutes from here, over on Boulevard Road. She probably hasn’t even realized what’s going on, poor thing. Perhaps I can grab her and make a dash for it.’
The front door was thrown open dramatically, letting in small wisps of mist, and a clatter of footsteps preceded an eerie silence.
It was broken by the voices of the portraits erupting in hurried mutters. Even the emperor had lost his jovial grin in the wake of the imminent—I shuddered—battle. I felt as though I had missed a step going down the stairs, and my stomach had lodged uncomfortably in between my rapidly constricting ribcage.
‘Dear,’ came the voice of the empress. ‘I think now is the time for me to recite this piece I’ve been—’
‘Not now, lamb!’ whispered the emperor, mortified. ‘She wants you all to know,’ he continued, louder, ‘that she has lived here for over 200 years, and that in all her time she has never, and hence will never, see her home succumb to evil.’
This summary seemed, rather than saving time, to have led to an increase in the muttering. ‘Very true, very true,’ murmured the kisan, his eyes hooded and his head lolling on his shoulder. I doubted he had any idea what we were talking about.
‘Listen, we’re all with you!’ called the Mughal warrior, pulling out his elegant blade, then staring about importantly, as though challenging someone to declare any form of cowardice.
‘We . . . we are,’ said the scribe, his eyes having dulled in their usual soothing glow. ‘Fear can be a powerful manipulator. But you mustn’t let it change the way you view yourself.’
He had lifted himself off his pile of dusty pillows and seemed to want to elaborate on this, but at that moment, one of the Pandits coughed pointedly. They all fell silent, staring at the back wall, some looking astonished, others eager and excited at this event; the Pandits had had rare cause to speak in the past.
‘Zoon,’ began the Pandit furthest to the left, my great-great-great-(I didn’t even know how many greats)-grandfather. ‘You know what’s waiting down there. You know what you must do. You must do wha
t I had done, so many, many years ago, and was foolish enough to believe no one would have to do again.’
‘There will always be a sign,’ croaked a Pandit towards the right, whose image was a faded black-and-white photograph. ‘You will know when the time comes, and when it does, you mustn’t hesitate.’
A flash of recognition stirred in my mind: Rahul Razdan, the first Guardian.
I didn’t move from my spot on the bed. It seemed my bones were sinking into the mattress like it was quicksand.
‘Listen,’ cut in the only portrait printed in colour, speaking briskly and importantly, ‘you’re really all we have left at this point.’
I blinked at him, thrown by his matter-of-fact cynicism. It didn’t do anything to calm my nerves, but before I could contemplate the matter thoroughly, voices had broken out again, some helpful, some chaotic, some frightening.
‘But you must be careful!’ came a voice from the middle of the wall. Soon I located the source: a sketch of an aged Pandit and his daughter. She had a rather wry look about her and did not move at all; it was almost as though she was part of the background. I wondered at how I had not noticed her before. My eyes shifted to the Pandit once again. His beard looked as though clumps had been torn out of it. His turban was unravelling at the end.
‘I have seen what Kruhen Chay can do,’ he continued. ‘I have watched him lure an innocent British soldier into his clutches and murder him the moment he had fulfilled his purpose. I have watched him shatter every window of this house and set alight every pile of snow. He infects and inflames the homes of the valley; I know the devastation he can wreak on Kashmir, and with time there shall be nothing left for him to consume; you must be very careful.’
‘You saw him murder someone?’ I whispered, sickened. To hear of it was one thing, and that ghastly enough; to witness a man have the life ripped from his feeble, frozen fingers was another thing entirely.
The Pandit nodded grimly.
‘And I was killed the very next day,’ he muttered. ‘Luckily I’d hidden my daughter in the broom cupboard . . . and taught her well enough to see that she kept him out . . . she took over . . . and she’d learnt well . . . perhaps I was too harsh on her then . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter how young you are,’ regaled one of the watercolours, interrupting as always. His colours were deep and vibrant, his pheran a bright white amidst fluffy orange pillows. His beard had been painted a deep brown, unlike the others; I suspected that it was his youth that always compelled him to speak. ‘What matters, in the end, is your strength of heart,’ he finished masterfully, ‘for it is that heart, and not your body, that is protecting us all.’
‘So no pressure,’ I muttered. ‘Thanks.’
Dimly she registered that she was screaming, and that someone was pulling frantically at her elbow. But it didn’t seem as though it was happening to her; she felt as though she was watching through a cracking, melting hourglass, a glimpse into someone else’s pain, into someone else’s grief. She could barely see a foot into her hazy, distorted surroundings, and her head spun.
The hand pulling at her disappeared. Immediately her fear intensified. All she knew was that she had to have it back, she had to have someone there, she couldn’t remain there, crouching in the blood-sodden dirt, on her own; and that without something to hold her down, she would be caught in the furious, fast-paced undercurrent of warped despair that she had always feared. She hadn’t even known who that person was; but somehow, in some small way, they had cared for her.
She yelled for help, for God, for anybody. But no one came. With her next gulp of air, she realized why. Smoke was billowing across the murky valley, squirming into alleyways and sanctuaries, strangling those foolish enough to clutch desperately at a fuming corpse, and who soon joined it in the hideous blackened pile of the dead. But she swore she would not be one of them. Not for herself, but for her daughter.
So Shanti planted a final kiss on the wrinkled forehead of her last loved elder, creating small rivulets of tears that ran down her still face, the only part of her saved from the charred rot caking her body. She lay unmoving, completely oblivious to this show of love. Her eyes were closed, but as though she had embraced death with open arms, as though she had known it was coming before it knew that itself. In a sudden gush of twisted desolation, Shanti almost laughed; she had died wearing her glasses. And after all these years, they had finally cracked.
My eyes skittered up to the bedroom mirror once more. I’d been sneaking quick glances at it for a while, each time hoping to see something encouraging and each time having these hopes dashed.
My hair was a tangled mess. No one looking at me then would have been able to tell that I had a fringe. Bits of black were sticking out of my stumpy braid. The slash across my cheek looked as though it had been made with a chainsaw. I looked closer and noticed my shivering knees. I shut my eyes firmly, forcing out the grave overlapping mumbles of the portraits.
This isn’t you.
But what if it is?
It isn’t.
Says who?
Says me.
Who even are you?
. . . I’m you, but smarter.
That makes no sense. So I’m like a two-faced rakshasa or something?
I never said I had a face.
So you’re an atma. I’m possessed. Perfect.
Zoon! Focus!
Sorry.
Tentatively, I let my eyelids slide open, petals on a blooming flower bud. The girl I saw in the mirror was tall and straight-backed. Her hair was thrown back over her shoulder in a jumble; people like her had no time for such things. She had the tiniest of scrapes across her cheek, no thinner than a mouse’s whisker.
I put my hands on my hips.
So did she.
I took in a deep, long breath.
‘Let’s do this thing.’
The living room has never felt smaller than when I walked in to find Mr Bhukhari at its centre. The black in his eyes seemed to have swelled, so that he no longer resembled a human as much as a bloodsucking insect. With a twisted grin like that of a poorly made puppet, he leered at me, waving a smudged piece of crumpled paper in the air—the deeds to the house.
Just then, I heard a gentle dripping of thick, clear liquid against the front window. I turned to stare at it, all of me tensing, as though it might spontaneously combust.
I heard a gulp, and whipped around to see Mr Bhukhari staring rigidly at the bare ceiling pressing against the strain of the snow at its corners. He clutched his papers so tightly that I saw whatever blood he had left leave his skin; he dug his shoes into the carpet, as though afraid he would be blown away by the wind.
A gush of water brought us to our senses; outside, a waterfall was streaming down the window in thick sheets. Beyond it, the world was thick smog and jumbled shouts. I stared at it, transfixed, as the ridges and bumps in the window grew more pronounced beneath the crystal cascade, almost as though all the snow on the roof had melted in that sudden instant.
A sinister hissing erupted from the fireplace; I turned my head so fast I felt the muscles in my neck twinge with the pain.
Drops of water had splattered on to the embers in the grate, thick and round, leaping back at once in wisps of steam.
I made to push my hair out of my face, and my hand brushed against moist, clammy skin, slick with sweat. I let out a small, controlled pant, and sucked in a lungful of hot air.
And that’s when I heard it—the gentle, elegant scrape of rusty claws against the inside of the chimney, accompanied by a foul smell that was growing dangerously familiar.
I leapt backwards as though I’d been burnt, my breathing becoming rapid and panicky, watching, listening as the sounds grew louder, punctuated by soft, dangerous hisses . . .
But nothing emerged.
And still nothing.
Mr Bhukhari let out a wild, fluctuating laugh, still smiling that horrible smile of his, with his mouth too full of teeth and his face a doughy mass of
pale, lifeless flesh.
And then I felt an excruciating pain in my abdomen, so that I gasped and clutched at it, blind to everything else. My enemy’s first strike. A harpoon had struck me straight through my stomach; I was the helpless, dying fish, flopping at the bottom of the boat.
‘No!’ roared a sharp, fiery cry.
And all at once, the fireplace burst into flame.
The pain in my stomach lessened slightly; I could think clearly again.
I’d never seen the fireplace come alight of his own accord before. I’d thought he couldn’t manage it any more. Somehow, his fire was brighter and greater than any we could ever have lit. Smoke began billowing steadily from the crackling logs, and yet not one wisp was allowed to squirm up into the chimney. The fireplace continued to dispense dollops of smoke, until it curved sinuously against the wood and moved to fill the living room. Inexplicably, despite the flames, the air had cooled slightly.
Gradually, like a buried fossil, a shape began to emerge before me, growing clearer every second. It was something akin to the silhouette of a man, but this monster was nothing like a man. He was large, so large that the splotch of misery meant to serve as his head was pushing up against the ceiling. Warped limbs and chunks of body parts emerged from every side of him, spasming and flailing as though they were still attached to their owners. Perhaps he had swallowed them whole . . . And one of them was my father’s. I forced myself not to tremble.
All of him was a sickening, rotting black. But even in this black I could see the grotesque carvings of his past: a thousand decades, a thousand faces, a thousand screams. When he moved, the air around him rippled and distorted, so that it seemed like all the world was a crude, crumpled drawing, and he was a rip in the paper.
I should have destroyed that fireplace when I had the chance, he remarked coolly.
I flinched, but tried to alter it into a look of disgust. I couldn’t let him see that his horrific, rasping voice, like the scrape of metal against rock, had nearly made my ears bleed.
