by Neil D'Silva
Where was he leading her?
There was no time to think or wait. There were no questions to be asked.
The only thing to do was to turn heel and run, run as fast as her legs could take her.
So she turned, and she ran. When he noticed, she was already a dozen feet away from him.
Pity her short, squat legs didn’t help her much though.
After the fall, she looked up, her face stained with the mud of the earth, and saw his sinewy frame looming right over her head.
~ 11 ~
A Handicapped Bitch
“It is absolutely strange,” Maya told Bhaskar when he returned home around midnight. At the outset, it used to irk her that he stayed out of the house until such a late hour. He didn’t drink alcohol, and so she wondered where he spent his time after school hours. But then she saw those pictures and that made her lose all courage to prod him further. In fact, she stayed secretly happy that he wasn’t at home most of the time. Except only to eat, fuck and sleep.
“What is strange?” he asked. He had already stripped her naked and was forcing his way inside her and trying to squeeze her breasts at the same time, much like he were trying to milk a cow.
“Padma called me today saying that she wanted to come for a visit.” Maya felt the pain but did not show it; instead, she guided his organ into her. “But she didn’t turn up at all.”
He grunted and began moving his groin slowly over her.
“I tried calling, but she didn’t answer or even return calls. I am worried about her.”
“What the fuck!” he ceased and yelled at her. “Here I am trying to have a good time after a long day’s work and all you speak about is somebody that didn’t turn up? She’s not a child; she will find her way home eventually.”
“I am sorry,” she mumbled. This wasn’t the first time he had raised his voice at her. The first time was three days ago when he was sitting on the floor eating something that looked like dog meat. She didn’t really care what he put into his mouth anymore. But there was this fleeting look of revulsion on her face that he caught. He had then gone on a tirade about how people should respect other’s choices if they expected their own to be respected.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it all the time,” Bhaskar said, bringing more momentum into each penetration.
***
Next day, after Bhaskar left home for school, Maya had an unexpected visitor who put a large smile on her face. As soon as she saw her at the door, Maya shed all her stonewalled reticence and gave her a tight hug.
“Namrata!” She almost leaped with the happiness on seeing her kin. “Finally you visited.”
Namrata didn’t share the same kind of ebullience though. She stood at the door and asked, “Is he home?”
Maya shook her head and Namrata entered the house.
“I was quite miffed with you,” Namrata said, keeping her designer handbag down. “I didn’t want to speak with you again, really. It was all so sudden, Maya. You did not even wait for us to start liking him.”
Maya asked her to sit and that was when Namrata looked at the utter helplessness of her abode. “Come down quite a few notches in life, haven’t you Maya?” she commented.
“Do not rub it in, dear,” Maya said as she offered a glass of water to her sister. “How is Ma?”
“Fuming. What else could you expect? She hasn’t yet accepted that you could marry someone so all of a sudden and go live with him miles apart. She refuses to speak with you.”
“That’s precisely why I don’t call either,” Maya said. “The moment I call, she’s going to make some sarcastic remark that will put me out of gear for days. It is better I wait, she will come around. Do you remember it was the same thing with Samar?”
“Yes. I remember trying to drown the arguments with my earphones, but I could still hear every shout and every curse.”
“It was a bad thing that happened with Samar,” Maya said in a pensive tone. “He was just becoming everyone’s blue-eyed boy, and I was looking forward to my life as Maya Samar Punekar. What did I know then that bad news was lurking right around the corner?”
“But isn’t it still a mystery?” Namrata asked. “Was it really suicide? Was he that unhappy?”
“No, of course he wasn’t. We were in fact booking a vacation that very morning. We even booked the flight tickets.”
“Then what do you think? Suicide, as the police said?”
Samar had worked in one corner of the city, but his body had been found in another corner. That fateful afternoon, two years ago, Maya received a call from the railway station office. Someone in a gruff dispassionate voice asked her to come and identify a body on whom a railway pass bearing the name Samar Punekar had been found.
She called Namrata instantly, and the two sisters rushed to the station morgue, where Namrata, always queasy at the sight of blood, stayed outside. Maya went in with shaking limbs and hung on as the impassive attendant lifted the bloodied white cloth off the body retrieved from the tracks a few hours ago, under a railway over-bridge.
There was nothing identifiable left on the body. The train had passed clean over the body, cutting it into two halves at the abdomen. The backbone protruded out from both sides, and portions of it were seen under the loosely cut entrails. The intestines had spilled out of the torn abdomen, which the morgue people had haphazardly gathered and shoved it into the body cavity. The knees jutted out of weirdly bent legs. The right hand torn right off the shoulder joint, was now placed beside the body.
She saw the face last, her eyes clouded with tears. There was nothing left of the face to see anyway. The face she had once fallen in mad love with was cruelly mangled. The flesh of the cheeks had withered away due to the heat of the impact, revealing the creamy white mass of mandible and teeth inside. The hair, caked in blood, was now stuck together in a stiff mass.
There was no way for her to even hug the body for one last time. There was nothing left of it to hug.
The only piece of skin intact, one on the thigh, bore the tattoo. It was a tattoo of a mermaid, which he had got done as a college dare, and had always been embarrassed that someone would see it. But now, there was no way he could hide his embarrassment from anyone.
When the Station Master gave her his wallet that contained his credit cards and other documentary evidences, she sat down on the bench and let the tears flow for two long hours.
Everything had seemed like an accident back then, or probably a suicide. The police had wanted to shut the case. And they did.
“How is life with him?”
Maya detached herself from her morose emotions and became alive to the question from her sister. “How is life with Bhaskar, you ask?” she began. “I don’t know. There are times when you cannot just rely on your conscience. Conscience is such a handicapped bitch anyway. It merely tells you what is wrong and what is right, but it does not tell you which you must choose. Was it worth leaving everything behind and settling with him? I don’t know. Was it love that brought me to him? I think so. I felt it deep within me, I feel it still, but now it is more like a caterpillar whose cocoon has broken. The love hasn’t developed into a butterfly yet, but its sheltered protection is gone. It is naked and exposed, left to the elements to survive.”
“You should go out more often.”
“Who tells you I don’t? People come to meet me too. See, haven’t you come today? Yesterday Padma was to come, but she didn’t make it.”
“Uh-huh…” said Namrata. “See, if there is anything you need, call me all right? Do not hesitate. Hemant and I—you know Hemant, right?—we will both be there to help you. I will leave now, okay?”
“Won’t you stay for lunch?” asked Maya when Namrata prepared to get up.
“No, don’t bother,” she said. “I will have to leave now. I had an off at work today, so I thought I would see you. Also, I have to go Christmas-shopping with Clara.”
“Ah okay,” Maya said despondently. “Keep visiting.”
&nbs
p; “Why don’t you come home too?”
“I will,” said Maya. “Soon I will.”
***
No sooner did Namrata leave the house than Maya found a newly familiar face ascending the stairs. She was about to shut the door but she stopped, waiting for him to reach her door. It was Akram, the landlord’s son.
“Hello,” said Akram. “Bhaskar home now?”
“No,” she said. “He is rarely home during the days.” She didn’t know why she told him that. Strange men should not be told when pretty women are alone in their homes.
“I wanted to see the rooms,” he said. “My father has finally planned to repair this block, and he wants me to assess the existing damage. Do you mind if I come in? It won’t take a minute.”
There was a boyish restraint in the manner of his asking. Maya could relate with that. Her husband cut an intimidating picture anyway. Bhaskar was indeed a Stone Man who inspired fear in others and this young man seemed to be no exception.
But, under that fear, there was also an eagerness. A fondness, perhaps? Or maybe she was just over-reading into the situation. She said, “Yes please, you may come in for sure.”
The words came out a little more eagerly than she had expected. She masked them with a clumsy smile.
He walked in and brought out his measuring tape and writing pad and set to work. He moved from one wall to the other of the room, sometimes squatting, sometimes stretching, taking measurements and jotting down his findings. Maya kept her eyes fixed on him, finding his sophisticated youthful energy attractive even when he was engrossed in some elusive calculation; in fact, he looked all the more appealing then because of the way he twisted his nose upwards with the edge of his forefinger.
“I see you have given the house a much-needed woman’s touch.” His words aroused Maya out of her preoccupation.
“Yes… yes I have,” she said hastily, fumbling for words. “Is Bhaskar your friend?”
“Everyone is my friend,” he said. “But no, I don’t know anything about him apart from the fact that he stays in a room my father has rented out. He pays me rent regularly and I am here whenever he needs me.”
“What do you do otherwise?” asked Maya. “I mean, when you are not collecting rent or scrutinizing mold-infested walls.”
“I just got through my MBA,” he said, puffing his chest. “I’m looking at studying management further in the States.”
“All the best.”
“All right, I got what I needed.” He folded his writing pad. “I’ll get the contractors here next week. And here’s my number. If you need anything, call me.”
Maya saw the visiting card he held out. It was a smartly designed card, furnished with his phone number. She took it almost reverently, and kept looking at him as he exited the house.
That night, when Bhaskar came home late at night and settled down for a horrific meal of some large red-skinned fish, she didn’t feel like telling him about the two visitors she had.
~ 12 ~
Tattoo of Death
Padma’s life was reduced to a photo album that obstinately played on in her mind. They say when people are at the end of their tether, their lives flash before their eyes. Now lying here, stripped and fractured in more ways than merely physical, Padma saw glimpses of the life she was perhaps leaving behind.
She saw herself as a nerdy teenager in pigtails running into her house and announcing her SSC Exam result to her beaming mother. She saw the trophy she had won as an eighth-grader for an elocution that still shone on a shelf in her house. She saw her husband holding an umbrella over her head on that one night it had rained suddenly when they were returning from the theater. She saw her ten-year old son Gaurav who must be asking about her even now.
The images did not leave her, and perhaps mercifully, they did not permit her to slip back into complete consciousness.
Then, slowly, more recent memories started plaguing her—hazy memories of the past few hours.
From the moment she had tripped during her clumsy running escape to when Bhaskar had caught her by her hair and had brought her on her feet.
She had given him a cussword, the worst she knew—scoundrel—but he had clamped her mouth so tightly that she had even found it difficult to breathe. Then he had physically carried her, all 73 kilograms of her, like she were a baby. He had practically run with her slung around his shoulders, keeping her mouth shut with his sweaty palm, and brought her to this derelict junkyard.
It had crossed her mind that he might try to rape her. But from what she had heard from the peon, rape seemed a distant, and even somewhat optimistic, possibility.
At the junkyard, he had hoisted her up the cars. She hadn’t thought it were possible for anyone to lift her, but he accomplished the feat with an amazing ease and that scared her. He had seemed almost inhuman, almost spidery as he went up, limb following limb, and reached the top. He had sat down when he reached the roof of the structure. That was when she had seen the gaping hole.
He had held her at her armpits and allowed her legs to dangle into the hole.
“This might hurt a bit,” he had told her.
But, before she could protest or brace herself, he had released her. She had fallen several feet until she hit ground. It hadn’t been a safe landing by any means—the crunch of bone was almost audible. When she had tried to move her legs, she had been certain of a few fractures.
And then she remembered having passed out.
Now her eyes were open, but what she saw made her wish she’d never have been able to open her eyes again.
The man tied to the opposite corner of the smelly room was undoubtedly dead. His eyes, no more than glazed marble stones now, were still open and staring lifelessly at her plight. The corpse had been torn open, and rats were holding their own little private feast. They jumped up and down the dead person, tearing off bits of flesh at every trip they made to the rotten fleshy parts. She perceived a twisted smile on the rotting face of the corpse, a smile that seemed to invite her into its dead world.
Another half-eaten girl lay in another corner. Her entrails hung out and spilled on the floor. But, something moved. Was it in her cheek? Was she alive? How could she, with half her gut hanging out, and with that wide gash that carved the deep wedge between her breasts? But, indeed, her cheek moved. Padma squinted. And, just then, to her utmost horror, the girl’s cheek tore open and out poked a tiny rat’s head from the cut in the cheek, playing as though it were having a ride in an amusement park.
The tap on her shoulder was slight, perhaps even polite, but when she turned to look, she realized there was no congeniality there at all.
Bhaskar sat down next to her, smiling dispassionately, gauging her face.
“Such a pretty face,” he said. “Those lips… all that flesh makes the lips really stand out.”
“Bhaskar…” implored Padma. “Let me go. You know me. I am your wife’s best friend.”
“Lovely things, those lips. Juicy. Soft as petals.”
He moved ahead and touched them, even as she broke into a sob, trying to move away.
It was then that she discovered the bonds that held her wrists to the pole. She wriggled like a fish, looking for the slightest relief; but there seemed to be no respite.
“An artist’s delight,” he went on. “Perfect portrait material. Meaty, but what symmetry!”
Bhaskar sat like a frog, his tall limbs surrounding her plump body completely. He held her by the back, and then leaned forward. She resisted, trying to keep her face as far from him as she could, but he was infinitely stronger than she was. One arm on her back and the other on her thigh, he proceeded and placed his broken lips on hers.
He moaned and Padma flinched as his breath entered her mouth.
She writhed, but he only held her tighter. With his tongue, he parted her lips, pushing them further and further, until he found space to put his tongue into her mouth. She pulled her tongue to the back of her mouth, but he reached there eventually, and g
radually eased the tongue out of its reluctant position.
Then he did two things in quick succession.
First, he pulled his mouth back all of a sudden, so suddenly that he tore off a bit of her lip, which bloodied his teeth.
Second, he used his other hand to tear off her blouse, and pulled it off her chest, leaving long scratches on her smooth back. Her hands were tied at her back, and there was nothing she could do to hide her breasts, except scream through her bloodied mouth, but that did nothing to deter him.
When his hand moved to the waist knot of her petticoat, she looked at him in alarm.
“Bhaskar, please… don’t do this…”
He sat like a toad though, a derisive smirk on his face, speaking nothing, his eyes riveted on where his hand was. And the hand moved. In a single deft move, the piece of clothing was ripped off entirely, leaving only a thin strip of apologetic garment to take care of her modesty.
Then, he moved back. He stood up, and walked into another corner of the dimly-lit room. She couldn’t see him but she heard the sounds he made. The sounds of metal striking metal did not bode well at all.
“Bhaskar… I have a son,” cried Padma.
She heard nothing in response but the metallic clatter.
“Don’t do this…” said Padma. Her voice was pleading but there was no insistence left in it. Muted by tears, her words couldn’t have had much impact anyway.
The next moment, Bhaskar was beside her once again. This time, he was naked too. Nothing on his body except a loin cloth around his privates. Looking at that body sent a shudder down Padma’s spine. His muscles shone in the semi-darkness. She could see that he was built like a steel sculpture. Each fold of his body appeared hard as sinew; there wasn’t an ounce of undesirable flesh anywhere.
If he just rapes me and leaves me, she thought, I’ll run away from here never to return, and forget all about this nightmare.
