by Neil D'Silva
She stood outside for a considerable amount of time, near the place where devotees removed their footwear before stepping upon the holy floor of the temple. The temple chants rent the night air and she looked at the devotees entering in, with looks of extreme devotion writ large upon their countenances. She heard the dissonance of the bells each time a devotee rang them. A long time passed before Bhaskar came out of the temple gates, a smile of a job well done on his face.
“I have to wear my shoes,” he said. He bent at the shoe stand and rummaged through the hundreds of pairs to hunt for his footwear. It seemed to be an impossible task, but after a minute of assiduous searching, he fished out his cheap leather footwear, with the socks rolled like flat ugly donuts tucked into them.
He took the shoes and sat on a bench. Maya went and sat next to him, observing him keenly as he unrolled the first sock and shook it violently so that it opened out. Then he put the sock over his foot, taking care that it perfectly matched the contours of his toes.
“What are you looking at so intently?” he asked.
She became conscious that she was staring at his feet and looked away in embarrassment. “Sorry,” she said.
“No, it doesn’t bother me,” said Bhaskar. “You should know, however, when you observe things too closely, you might see things you don’t want to.”
Having said that, he put his left foot down and propped his right foot upon his left thigh. And then, in the illumination of the streetlight above them, and amidst the raucous chanting of the mantras inside the temple, she saw something that made her skin cringe.
His left foot was broken, mangled beyond repair. Three of its smallest toes were missing, leaving an obnoxious void beyond its cruel stubs. The wounds had healed badly and the stubs now jutted disconcertedly from what remained of the foot.
“Did that scare you?” asked Bhaskar, carefully gauging her reaction.
Maya kept staring at his foot for a long minute. The sudden discovery had left her too dumbfounded to speak.
“How…” Maya stammered, “…how did that…”
“It was an accident,” he said, even as she looked at him in continued horror. “It happened back in my native village when I was there two years ago. It was the harvest season and the farmers were busy harvesting corn. They use long scythes, those thin curved ones. Just one swoosh like this, and the ear of corn is cut clean in half. One of those scythes, carelessly kept on a ledge, fell on my foot. Leaving this behind.” He caressed the line of the wounds.
“Does that hurt anymore?” There was a grimace on Maya’s face even as she said that.
“No,” he said. “The pain was momentary even then, for I had passed out. What remains is the loss. But don’t be scared. Come on, feel it.”
Bhaskar guided her hand to his mutilated foot and placed it over the stub of his little toe. He kept smiling as she touched him, but she winced imagining the pain he must have felt. Then he took her slender finger over his second stub, and found the pain getting transformed into an unexplained emotion. No, this should not be happening, she told herself strictly. There was something perverse in touching anyone’s wounds. His disfigurement should have repulsed her, but she felt herself being pulled in all the more. And, when she touched his third toe, she let out an audible moan of delight—an almost sexual moan—which did not escape his attention, and he guided her hand upwards on his leg.
~ 4.5 ~
Respite for a Hog
Standing in his den of twisted pleasures, he surveyed the spoils. The number he needed was eight, and he was already three down, if one did not count the bottled heart he had stolen from the laboratory. He hadn’t been sure of the heart—he only knew it had belonged to a dead man, or was it a woman? He did not care. All he wanted to do was to please the man sitting inside, in his inner sanctum sanctorum, the place he had converted into a shrine for his idol. He nibbled on a few chunks of the heart. The chemicals had altered its taste a bit. He would have liked a warmer heart that had just stopped beating, but with all the vigil around, it was difficult to get fresh ones. His social camouflage had hitherto protected him, but he didn’t want his plan to go kaput before it was brought to fruition.
The rest of the heart, like many of the other cooked organs, were served to the man inside. That man—the Fallen Saint as he was referred to—had never come out of that confinement. He stayed inside and ate nothing and drank nothing but the offerings given to him. He did not ask for anything else. He did not wish to see anyone. He received everything he wanted in his room.
And it was now time to make another offering to him. But, what could he get at such short notice? These days he was busy with some strange emotions that were invading his own heart.
Yes, it was a woman—the same woman who had started all of this in the first place.
She was responsible for it all. Indeed she was. But he wanted her more than anything else. He wanted to lead a life with her; he wanted nothing more. He did not know what about her had enticed him so much. Was it her long hair, neatly parted at the center and tied into a long braid? Was it her kohl-laden piercing eyes that looked curiously at him whenever they were together? Was it her way of laughing at the slightest provocation, her hand cupping her lips and her head thrown back? Or was it that slender neck and those slight shoulders that aroused his basest fantasies?
If it had been just sex, he would have done away with her long ago. However, he knew it was more than that. He wanted an emotional bond with her. He wanted her to accept him.
Why didn’t he crave just her heart? That would have been so much easier. He could just add the organ to his collection, chop it into neat pieces, stew it over a fire or probably fry it, and then devour it with mushroom and parsley and a few herbs. It would taste good with toddy too. But he knew that wouldn’t satisfy him.
He realized he didn’t just want her heart. He wanted the feelings within, and those were so much more difficult to get.
***
But he had failed in his duties. He had to bring eight of the hearts, and it had been quite a few weeks since he hadn’t done anything in that regard.
What would the Fallen Saint tell him now? Would he chastise him? Would it be time for another brutal punishment at his hands? He could not bear another torture. Death would be better. He could not suffer any further loss of his own self.
But the offering had to be made.
Could the Fallen Saint be fooled, just this once?
A small flicker of hope shone in his eyes when a particular nasty thought entered his mind. After all, there are few who can distinguish between meat and meat.
He walked all the way to the garbage dump of the city. He was used to stinks, but here was a stink that made even his nose curdle. Yet, he did not flinch. He set about his task as a man who sets about doing a job that needs to be done.
He lured a pig out of its favorite place in the garbage dump by feeding it carrots. No one ventured near that dirty creek at nights. Finding the animal was easy. Pigs oink too much anyway. When the pig, fattened on the filth of the city, reached its last carrot, it sensed something over its neck.
Pigs are not designed by nature to be able to look skywards, and that seemed to be its only respite. For, that little restriction imposed upon it by nature saved it from the gruesome sight of the sharp ax blade falling clean on its neck. The poor porky beast was dead before it knew it was dying, the way it is written in the destinies of most of its ilk.
He quartered the pig right there and then. Up until now, he had had experience of only human hearts; a pig’s heart was quite a new experience. But he was willing to learn. Even the first human heart had been difficult. He had only known it would be somewhere in the left side of the chest. He had cut open the chest with utmost care. He remembered the blood. When he had finally found the organ, he had been surprised to see that it wasn’t as much to the left as he had thought, and that it was much smaller than he had imagined it to be.
He tried the same tactic with the
hog’s heart, using only his instinct to guide him. The different arrangement of bones impeded him, but he finally found it. It pleased him that it did not look much different than a human heart. After removing the heart carefully, he discarded the mortal remains of the animal into the creek and shoved the warm heart into a plastic bag. Strangely, the heart seemed to still pulsate even in the bag. Was that really true, or was it just his fertile imagination? Anyway, there was no time to think about it. He had a hungry and demanding mouth to feed back in the abandoned garage.
If he played it right, this could be his fourth heart offering to the Fallen Saint.
~ 5 ~
More Exciting the Second Time
The Diwali vacations had begun in schools and Maya could not come out of the house without eliciting a stare or two in her mother. Schools may overwork their employees, but they are quite fastidious about the sanctity of vacations. Vacations are vacations. Students and teachers are meant to stay at home, and schools are meant to become desolate.
That was why Anuradha’s worries grew when Maya stayed out late even during the vacations. It worried her that she could not tell her daughter to do things as she once used to. She could only give her counsel, but she wasn’t really sure how far that counsel would be accepted or acceptable.
Her other daughter Namrata did not have the privilege of a vacation. She worked at a mall, arguably the busiest places in the prelude to any big festivals. If anything, her workload had increased and she had begun coming home later than ever. But that was okay. Being the younger one, Namrata was built stronger. She could face any calamity.
During the mornings though, Anuradha saw her older daughter at home. They didn’t have to do much for the upcoming festival. After Samar’s death, there hadn’t been any celebrations in the house anyway. Except for a rangoli at the door, a couple of deeyas and a few customary kitchen preparations, the women did not do anything much for their house. As the day of the festival approached, Maya went out and bought a kandeel to hang at the largest window of the house. That was her only contribution to the festival that had practically the whole subcontinent in a tizzy.
On the day before Diwali, Bhaskar called her. “I miss you,” he said.
“We met just yesterday,” Maya said.
“And yet I am missing you.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go out for a movie tonight.”
Anuradha was working in the kitchen but her ears were outside, trying to catch every word that her daughter whispered over the phone. But Maya wasn’t so reckless. She spoke in the most unintelligible tone possible, more to spare her mother the worry if nothing else.
They met for the movie at Sterling, an old single-screen cinema at Churchgate. She felt the tingling sensation grow up within her as she saw him sitting on the stairs of the movie house waiting for her. He was looking different today; he had worn a brown kurta over a pair of faded blue jeans. She had never seen him before in a kurta, his traditional attire. The garb of his roots seemed to suit him to the hilt; it almost hid the fallacies that outlined his appearance.
“You look different today,” she said.
“Different good or different bad?”
“Different good! You look almost dashing, like the actor we have come to watch.” She pointed to the poster of Shahrukh Khan in army garb on a motorbike, with one lady riding pillion and another in the background. “You look almost like him.”
He laughed. “You are turning blind in love, my dear.”
“Maybe.”
“But, I’m much taller than he is! Do you like him?”
“Who doesn’t?” she asked. “And you? Who is your favorite? Actress, I mean. Katrina Kaif?”
She was in the poster with the actor. He looked at her dressed in her cleavage-revealing black dress, sitting astride the vehicle in skimpy shorts behind her hero. “Nah,” he said, “she is too bony for my taste.”
“Bony?”
“Yeah, too gaunt.”
“So, what do you prefer?”
“A little more meat on the bones. Like maybe that woman in the movie about the southern soft-porn star?”
Maya let out a chuckle. “So that’s what you prefer—beauty with brains?”
“Yes. Brains are good. I like them. That’s what I prefer—dazzling beauty with delightful brains. Just like you are.” Bhaskar almost leered at her as he said that, and his gaze gave birth to the most curious fuzzy feeling in Maya’s bosom.
They watched the movie with interest. The hall was packed with families trying to make the most of their vacation time with the latest Bollywood offering, the way it works in the city. Bhaskar managed to get corner seats with difficulty, and ten minutes into the movie they busied themselves with their hand-holding, which was all they could do or desired to do in the packed auditorium.
During the intermission, they came out together to stretch their legs and to prepare themselves for the interminable post-intermission half of the movie.
“How’s the movie?” she asked.
“Good,” he said. “Seems like it will never end.”
“Are you complaining?” She squeezed his arm.
“Not at all. Want anything?” He pointed at the food stalls.
“Just popcorn,” she said. “And something to drink.”
“Be here.” He left her standing there in the corner, and went to the food counter. She looked at him for a while, how he towered above everyone else, his lanky frame easily wending its way through the throng, and how he immediately hooked the server’s attention despite the dozens of other people standing ahead of him. People jostled her and she moved. Having lost sight of him, she now occupied herself observing the rest of the people who had decided to spend half a day of their lives to watch Bollywood’s latest romance.
Then she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“What are you doing here?”
It was Namrata, her mouth open in surprise.
“Namrata…” Maya said stupidly.
“Okay, stupid question!” Namrata continued. “Of course you are watching a movie. But what happened to Inorbit? You traveled this far? Who are you with? Padma?”
Maya felt uneasy. Bhaskar was away at the moment, but he could arrive anytime. She couldn’t lie.
“I want you to keep this to yourself, okay?” she said. “Not a word about this at home.”
Bhaskar strode in just then, holding a tray with two tall tubs of popcorn—one salted and one caramel—and two colas. “Here, caramel popcorn, just the way you—” He stopped short as he saw the woman with Maya.
“This is my sister,” said Maya. “Namrata, this is Bhaskar.”
“Bhaskar?” Namrata said.
“A colleague at school.”
“Oh!”
The sisters had lived together for the most part of three decades. They knew each other’s idiosyncrasies quite well. Maya understood what her sister’s monosyllabic interjection meant. She could see the disapproval on her sister’s face. It was as if she were asking—What are you doing with him? HIM? Couldn’t you find someone who doesn’t look like an underfed gorilla?
“Namrata,” said Maya, “we will go back in now. Who are you with?”
“I am with friends,” she said, not taking her eyes off the man. She looked at him like he were a cockroach trapped in a glass jar. One side of her nose was crinkled, a telltale sign that she didn’t care for this man at all.
“Shall we go home together later?” asked Maya.
Namrata shook herself from her trance. “No,” she said. “You leave. I have dinner plans.” Her eyes did not leave Bhaskar’s face for a moment, and so were his eyes glued onto her face.
“Okay, see you at home then,” said Maya and tugged at Bhaskar’s elbow to walk with her inside the cinema hall.
All through this uncomfortable ordeal, Maya had been too busy gauging the reactions on her sister’s face to notice Bhaskar. But if she had seen his face even for a split second, she would have clearl
y made out the unashamed display of lust written all over it.
***
The sisters barely exchanged a word with each other on Diwali morning. Their mother began her prayers in the morning itself, and then holed herself in the kitchen trying to give the finishing touches to the various traditional sweets of the day. “A Maharashtrian woman’s real worth is adjudged by the kind of sweets she can prepare for Diwali,” she told her daughters, “and we have to do it even if we do not celebrate much. It’s a ritual we cannot refute.” In the few days before the festival, she had prepared chaklis and karanjis (both fried and roasted) and shakkarparas and laddoos of gram flour. The daughters did not disturb her at what she considered to be one of the things she had been born to do—preparing and serving Diwali sweets.
It was when she was done with her kitchen chores, changed into one of her lesser-used sarees, and settled with her daughters that she started the conversation.
She kept her eye on Maya, who was now reticent and withdrawn, and she tried her best to keep the conversation as cheerful as she could. They spoke about the girls’ father in a cheerful tone. Anuradha’s husband had died so long ago, and in such a painless manner, that it seemed all right now to talk about the lighter moments they had shared with him. They spoke of the grand Diwali party they had had once, several years ago, which had been duly attended by the entire Bhargava clan. They bitched about many of the relatives and a few of the neighbors.
The merry conversation was broken when Maya’s phone buzzed. Maya was in the middle of an animated discussion about how people should not spend on fireworks. She cursorily glanced at the caller’s name flashing on her cellphone. That made her pause midsentence and her expression changed. She immediately disconnected the call and shoved it under a cushion.
