by Neil D'Silva
The appalling condition of the house was one of the main reasons why she hadn’t called over her mother or her sister yet. Merely imagining her mother rolling her eyes at the filth made her uncomfortable. Her mother didn’t even switch the lights on when she went to the bathroom in her own house, fearing what she might see in the commode. And Namrata had a morbid revulsion of anything that slithered on its stomach or straddled along on its jointed legs. The sight of one cockroach would have kept her away from the house forever.
Then there was another thing. She knew that her decision to marry Bhaskar had been sudden; so sudden that her family hadn’t quite come to terms with it. On the other hand, she hadn’t yet properly settled into the domestic life with him. She had become his bride, but not his wife yet. Maya didn’t want her family to see them as a couple so soon. She wanted to ease into this life before calling them.
The Christmas vacation loomed ahead of her. She didn’t have to resume school until the New Year, which meant there was a lot of time. Bhaskar, however, had planned to resume school on the second Monday in December so that he could qualify for a half-month’s pay. Being a relatively new teacher, he wasn’t permanent yet, and he didn’t have the privilege of a fixed monthly pay.
However, what Maya wasn’t really able to come to terms with was the fact that her family hadn’t called her yet. There wasn’t even a cursory call the first morning of her marriage. Why hadn’t they called yet? She rationalized their action by telling herself that maybe they did not want to trouble her in her marital bliss.
But, all the same, it did worry her how they could be so uncaring of her, how they did not care how her new life was. She held the phone in her hands and ran through the received calls. The last call from Namrata had been on the day of her wedding. She thought she would give them a few more days. A call from them would have been good tonic for her frayed nerves. Her calling them wouldn’t be the same thing anyway.
Keeping the phone back in its cradle, she decided to resume the cleaning of the house. She got the mop and duster from under the kitchen shelf and unleashed the domestic woman inside her.
Despite her regular cleaning, the cobwebs seemed to get reconstructed with amazing rapidity. She brushed them off the ceiling one more time, and then swept the floors and swabbed them, though it wasn’t quite possible to clean the wooden floorboards. Everywhere she swabbed, new living organisms squirmed out and she lashed at them with her broom.
When the outside room brought her some semblance of satisfaction, she went into the bathroom. She had been putting off the bathroom till now, but the housewifely instinct in her didn’t like stalling on it any more.
The first thing she did after entering the bathroom was to open the wooden framed window to let some sunshine in. The moment she did that, she heard a flutter of pigeons and she realized, to her discomfort, that she had disturbed a happy pigeon couple’s roost. Inertia played truant and the window opened more than the force she applied; and she heard a sickening crunch of egg shells.
She didn’t get much time to mope over the lost brood, though. For, a thick black gecko emerged from the rotting wood of the window frame and, slithering furtively over her hand, escaped somewhere towards the roof. The clammy skin of the gecko felt like a jolt of electricity cutting across her fingers. Horrified, Maya left the window and ran to the sink and kept her hand under the full force of running water.
It was several gallons of water and almost half a bottle of hand-washing lotion later that she finally withdrew her hand. Her palpitations abated and she decided to resume with the cleaning process.
Maya hoped all creepy-crawlies were out now.
The sink received tender loving care from her first. Putting generous amount of detergent on it, she began scrubbing as hard as she could. When she saw its original white color emerge from its thick camouflage of brown, the housewife within her could not suppress a satisfied smile.
After doing the tiles that way too, she moved over to the commode. This was the grossest part, but it had to be done. She put the disinfectant generously and let it sit for a while.
The tank attached to the commode had dirty brown stains on it too but she knew she could get them out. The fascination of having a squeaky clean bathroom consumed her. Perhaps, she could even get a word of praise thrown her way from her tight-lipped husband. So, she went and fished out the scrubber. A particular spot turned to be nastier than the others, and it extended all the way to the back. But the perfectionist in her was challenged now; she had to scratch the ungainly smudge into oblivion. Steeling her spirit, she put her fingers behind the tank. She reached out as much as she could and then immediately withdrew her hand.
But, there was something soft back there. Something insidiously soft, and it seemed to move.
Once again, petrified that it might be a lizard or a centipede that she might have inadvertently roused, she backed off towards the door for a while. She stayed there, breathing heavily for a minute, looking at herself in the cabinet mirror. Her reflection taunted her, made her realize how moronic she looked heaving her bosom like that. Foolish of her indeed to be afraid of a reptile that was probably no longer than her little finger! The breathing eased, the courage returned.
She had to make that thing go, whatever it was. It was her house anyway; no intruders could trespass.
Carefully, she took the handle of the broom and tapped the front of the tank. She expected, with no mean trepidation, that a large creepy critter would crawl out from the back, but apart from a few tiny cockroaches and a disgruntled spider, nothing came out. She tapped again, this time closer to the top where she had felt the thing. Still, nothing moved.
Then she moved closer, and keeping her head flat out against the wall, she tried to look at what was behind the tank. It was difficult to see it that way, but finally she could make out a faint outline.
It seemed like a bunch of pages of some sort.
Encouraged by her discovery, and laughing at her own stupidity, she took a comb from the cabinet to wedge out the pages. What could they be?—she thought. Probably a porn magazine. Some men did that; they read all sorts of things in private. In any case, Bhaskar had been a loner in this house for a long time.
After a bit of struggle, the thing fell out.
It was a magazine. Only, it wasn’t what she had expected. A porn magazine would have been tons of times better.
From the floor, the now open centerspread of the magazine stared back at her.
And in that one moment, Maya felt a surfeit of emotions, and none of those could be termed as pleasant. The image wide open on the floor was of a woman, and she was naked too, but that was not what scandalized Maya. A man was with the woman. He had a blood-soaked knife in one hand and a plate in another. The woman’s torso was cut open at the side, a perfect V-shaped cut, and the missing part of her flesh was on the plate, placed like a pastry, with a spoon and fork to boot.
Maya began to feel dizzy. She collapsed on the floor and took the magazine in her hands. It was titled Gore and when she flipped its pages, she saw on each page images of people being sliced, being cut open, being stretched on the rack, being hit with nails on their limbs, being slit open at their throats.
And it contained articles about people whom the world doubtlessly categorized as monsters. It contained the biography of Raman Raghav, the serial killer of Mumbai in the 1960s who had killed homeless people in their sleep by bludgeoning them with sharp objects. It contained his photograph, replete with a dispassionate expression that chilled her spine.
And it contained human body parts. Torn limbs, detached fingers, severed heads, dismembered eyes, it had them all. It had pictures of road and train accident victims and people who had died gruesome deaths, their bodies mutilated in the worst ways imaginable. There was a full-page picture of a man who had died when an iron rod from an under-construction building had fallen on him, impaling him then and there like a kabob on a skewer.
The magazine was nothing but a page-
by-page account of depravity in all its gory forms. By the time Maya reached the last page, she felt she had just had a trip to hell.
***
When she finally came out of the bathroom, she was a mess of sweat. Shoving the magazine back in its place, brought herself out and staggered to the chair beside the window. Her mind was still in a nervous state, whirling all around her, giving her a splitting headache. But when she tried to shut her eyes for some relief, she was tormented more as the gruesome images she had just seen began playing in her mind like a bizarre action replay.
Her husband—what did she know about him?
Nothing.
Why had she been drawn to him?
She didn’t know.
But she knew a few things now. She knew he read gory books, books with more blood in them than words, and probably fantasized about them. She knew he ate meat like a predatory animal. She knew his own body was mutilated, almost to a horrific extent.
And she knew he had sex like an animal.
She was then remembered of his warm organ within her. The pulsating, throbbing thing that took her to the brink of heaven and back, several times each night. She thought of his fingernails digging deep into her flesh, his teeth buried into the smooth flesh of her breast, his sinewy legs pinning her legs down on the rickety bed.
Somehow, these feelings overrode her suspicions of him. She realized she could not love some parts of him and hate others. She had to love him as a whole.
A man is the sum of his parts, and most of Bhaskar’s parts were such that she couldn’t do without. Let him read Gore. Perhaps that is what made him what he is, she said to herself.
She sat for a long time like that, without responding even to the pangs of basic instincts such as hunger and thirst, and finally fell off into a doze. A few minutes later, her unsupported sleeping head toppled over. This made her wake up with a start and she sat ramrod straight. The sun had almost reached its noontime zenith. The street below had become a hubbub of the chaotic activity that she was slowly getting used to.
Her eyes opened wide only when she saw the ascetic again. Looking at her sternly from the street, he yelled:
Bam Bholenath!
This time, there was no mistake. The man was indeed looking right at her window, straight into her eyes.
He had probably been staring at her dozing form all along. He was in the same garb as the previous day—black and red—and he appeared quite imposing standing there with the human bone and some kind of bowl in his hands. With his eyes blazing red under his bushy eyebrows and his darkened lips mouthing some incoherent words, he gave Maya quite a fright. She couldn’t take his pertinent stare, which seemed to look at nothing else except her. She shut the window with a bang.
***
It was close to midnight when Bhaskar returned home that night. Maya had stayed at home most of the time. However, in the evening she had ventured out for a bit, but only till where the vegetable vendors sat. All along the way, she had kept looking at the people around her nervously, immediately lowering her eyes when anyone looked back at her. When she had come out into the main road, she had felt at ease. This region had several women milling about, buying their sundry things. However, on returning home, she had again been struck by the nervous discord that had been haunting her ever since her wedding day.
Bhaskar made a few perfunctory inquiries about her day, and she said that she had been at home most of the time reading. She thought of asking him about his day too, but she didn’t dare to. For some reason, she kept imagining herself naked and dead, a wedge of flesh taken out from her naked torso and placed in a dinner plate, Bhaskar drooling over it.
As he was removing his clothes, Maya said, “When are we going to start looking for a new place?”
“Soon,” he smiled , “as soon as we start getting some money.”
“It would be good if we get a house near the school. It would cut down on the commuting.”
“I agree,” he said, rubbing some kind of oil all over his body. He did that each night, and she didn’t fail to notice it made him wince as he applied it. “Somewhere nice. It will happen.”
“Yes, someplace where there are more people I can talk to,” Maya said. “It gets so lonely here in the daytime. I don’t know anyone. It’s frightening at times with all the people looking in through the window.”
Bhaskar nodded, rubbing the oil over his chest.
“Why do you use that stuff?” asked Maya.
In reply, he grinned. He took the small bottle that contained the oil and held it out to her. “This,” he said, “is precious. It is relaxing and smooth. Don’t you like it?”
Maya didn’t need to sniff at it; the smell pervaded all over the confined space anyway. It had a strange kind of fragrance, like sandalwood mixed with orange peel, but when it entered the nostrils, it left a metallic aftereffect behind.
“Maybe this is the cause of your allergy?” she asked.
“Don’t worry your pretty self over it,” Bhaskar said, “and now I am hungry.”
He served himself. Sitting on the floor like always, he poured out large chunks of meat into his dish. He also got out a glass of wine. Maya sat on the chair, pretending to read a book, but observed him minutely and declined his offer to partake of the wine. She looked at the redness of the wine and an interposed image formed in her mind—that of blood, the kind she had seen in the magazine, and the carnivorous gluttony unfolding in front of her. He took each bone with his bare hands and tore off the flesh with his teeth and that image intensified.
When she could take it no more, she said she was sleepy and went to lie down. The events of the day took their toll on her and she faded away into a fitful sleep, only awakened when she felt her legs being rudely hoisted in the air, and her body being jabbed at repeatedly by a huge chunk of meat. She opened her eyes just a little, and saw her husband’s contorted face in the semi-darkness with eyes tightly shut, pummeling her with great intensity, till he finally collapsed on her body, writhing in pleasure like a huge python squirming all over her.
~ 9 ~
Flirting with Danger
After yet another restless night, Maya got off her bed at the break of dawn. She made her frugal breakfast of toasted bread, applied jam on it and ate. Sitting at her place by the window, she looked at her husband sprawled out on the bed, his one foot dangling down from the bed and his mouth partly open and drooling over the pillow. He squirmed restlessly in his sleep, scratching his body and trying to swat imaginary mosquitoes. He mumbled something, and Maya tried to hear it, but all she could make out was a jargon of enigmatic rubbish.
He woke up after the sun rose, and stalked away, almost naked, to the bathroom, yawning noisily as he went. She shrank in her chair, hoping he wouldn’t notice her for she wasn’t up for a morning session of animalistic sex. Thankfully, he didn’t come to her, but went to the kitchen and prepared for himself a dish of three eggs.
Maya went to the bathroom for her bath, and when she reemerged, he was already dressed.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Out,” he said. “Will be back for lunch.”
They had no further conversation.
By midmorning, Maya was up and about, busy with her various chores in the kitchen. While she was scrubbing the utensils, she thought she heard a tap on the door. She stopped scrubbing, and after nearly a minute, the tap occurred again. It was a soft tap, just about inaudible, as if the caller was rendering an apology for disturbing the stillness of the house.
Maya told herself it was certainly not Bhaskar, for Bhaskar would have well-nigh torn the door down if she had delayed so much in opening the door to him.
When the knock happened a third time, she moved closer to the door and asked in a meek voice, “Who is it?”
There was a momentary pause, and then the visitor said something that Maya couldn’t catch. She looked in through the peephole. It was a man, a well-dressed one at that. She wondered who it could be; this vi
sitor seemed to be quite sophisticated for these parts.
Putting on the safety chain, she opened the door and put her head out. “Yes?” she asked.
“Excuse me, is Bhaskar at home?” the man said. He was quite young, could not have been over twenty-five.
“He is not at home,” Maya said and receded.
“Oh! I thought he’d be,” the visitor said. “All right, I’ll come back.” He had a smile on his lips, and for some weird reason, Maya compared that smile with her husband’s. This smile was warmer and it seemed to come straight from the heart. Unlike Bhaskar, this man’s eyes seemed to smile along with his lips too.
“I could give a message,” said Maya. “I’m his wife.”
“When did he marry?” the young man asked in genuine puzzlement, not impertinence.
“We married last week.”
“Oh, did you? Er… congratulations… So Stone Man isn’t alone anymore. Oops! Sorry, sorry, you’re his wife. Sorry I said that.” In that moment, he looked like a college boy who clumsily tries to hide a cigarette when his professor passes by.
Maya laughed. “Stone Man, eh?”
“Please don’t tell him I said that.” he begged.
There was something even in his apology. Maya couldn’t help being reminded of school again. She was reminded of her good students who apologized in similar fashion when they erred. There was nothing to do with such people but to forgive them with a laugh.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not offended. But why Stone Man, for heaven’s sake? Is it because he looks a bit stoned most of the time!”
“I… I don’t know…” he said. “It’s just the name everyone here calls him by.”
