by Neil D'Silva
The auto-rickshaw stopped once after about three kilometers, and Padma got off. He slumped lower in the rickshaw seat so that she could not see him as she passed by. Then, when her auto-rickshaw started again, he yelled at his driver to get a move on and he did.
The driver did not ask any questions. He assumed this was a matter of romance and did not interfere. He was being compensated handsomely anyway.
Finally, she stopped at an apartment block after a twisted journey that took them through the thick of traffic. He stayed put in his vehicle till she got out and carefully saw the house that she entered into. When he found that out, he asked his driver to take him back to where they had started from.
The next day he did not go to school but positioned himself in the morning outside the house that Maya had gone into. At around 8:00 in the morning he saw her husband Samar coming out of the house. He was dressed in a formal shirt and trousers and had a case in his hands. He evidently worked in a corporate office of some sort. He walked the way to the railway station and got into a train going towards Churchgate. Bhaskar entered the same train through the next doorway, and kept his eyes focused on his quarry. Samar found a seat and sat, which meant he had a long journey to traverse. He got up only at Marine Lines, the one but last station on the route and moved towards the door. By now the people in the train had dwindled, and hence Bhaskar tried his best not to show himself to his victim under any circumstances.
Marine Lines is a very busy railway station. It is the hub for many corporate offices and the railway platform and the bridges are always crowded. Bhaskar stayed out of sight but made sure he kept Samar in sight as he wended his way through the early morning office-goers to reach his destination. The man took a foot over-bridge and came out on the eastern side of the railway platform. Bhaskar followed him. When he got down, he walked his way to a huge office building named Paramount Technologies that was very close to the station and disappeared inside.
Bhaskar could not go into the building but he did not want to return with only half the job done. So he spent the whole day in the vicinity, trying to arouse no suspicion by visiting the various shops and getting different things done. He sat at a roadside tea vendor in the morning, bought a newspaper and sat on the curb to read it, then entered a salon for a shave and a haircut and then entered a restaurant for a lengthy lunch. All the time, he kept his eyes focused on the people who entered and left the office building. It was in the evening, when he was sitting in the restaurant and sipping on his third tea of the day, that he saw Samar emerging from the office building.
He smiled when he spotted Samar coming out alone.
Bhaskar looked at his watch. It was 6:10. The darkness was just beginning to make its presence felt. Samar was walking away towards the railway station. Bhaskar followed him like before and found that he was gearing up to board the train back home to Borivali. The train would approximately take an hour and a half at this peak time to reach Borivali. And he was right. At 7:45, Samar alighted from the train on Borivali Station Platform # 3, and Bhaskar alighted from the door behind his, following his every move.
Borivali platform was quite busy at this time, and that would make things difficult for him. But he had the general idea now. As Samar slipped away homewards, Bhaskar took another train to take him to his own home in Naigaon.
Bhaskar followed Samar for three days until he decided to make his move. He remained in the shadows until then, taking care that Samar wouldn’t see anything of him.
On Friday, he made his big move. He chose Friday because on that day Samar was quite late in leaving from his office. Bhaskar waited outside for him, wondering what had gone wrong. He thought whether there was another exit from the building that Samar may have used. When it was nearing 9, Bhaskar thought he should leave too, but then he saw Samar coming out of the building.
Then the routine followed as usual, and Bhaskar found Samar sitting in the train leading him homewards to Borivali. What prompted Bhaskar into making his decision was that this train was a Virar train, which meant it would pass through his home station at Naigaon.
It was a late hour and the crowds were sparse. As Kandivali, one station before Samar’s destination, began to approach, most of the people got ready to leave the train. Samar stuffed his newspaper in his bag. Bhaskar thought this was the best time to make his move. Deftly, he brought out his handkerchief. Then he took a small bottle from his trouser pockets. It was a bottle he had been carrying since three days now, waiting for the opportune moment. His uneasy mind played with the label on the bottle, his fingers having absentmindedly peeled off the label till only part of the word remained—Chlorof…
He had snitched the bottle from the school laboratory when no one was looking.
Until now, the opportunity had eluded him but today he felt something strange in his bones. He had to put the plan into action, come what may. So when the crowd began to thin and the seat next to where Samar was sitting was vacated, Bhaskar promptly went and occupied that place. He sat close to Samar, almost touching him, and both men looked at each other. Samar’s expression was of annoyance but Bhaskar smiled at him the way a stranger does to strike a friendship.
Samar busied himself looking out of the window. The station was almost approaching and he had to get up. It was complete darkness outside and aside from the stray lights from the railway platforms and the shabby settlements next to the tracks nothing could be seen. These fleeting sights made Samar pensive and it was too late when he felt the sickly smell of chloroform permeating through his nostrils.
The strange man had placed a handkerchief under his nose. He saw the white cloth for an instant and felt the strong odor it contained, but that was only for a short while. Soon he felt the entire train compartment closing in on him and he passed out.
Bhaskar let out a grin when the man passed out. He arranged him on a seat near the window and sat next to him to prevent him from falling off on the bench. He looked as though he were taking a nap but that didn’t pose a problem. Many tired people took naps on these long train journeys when they returned home.
At Borivali many people got off and some new people entered. If Samar had been conscious, he would have gotten off at Borivali too. But today there was a new plan in force. If everything went all right, Samar would not have to undertake train journeys anymore.
Then, as Naigaon approached, Bhaskar carefully got the unconscious man on his feet and placed his arm on his shoulders and walked towards the door. An aged man sitting on the opposite bench looked at him with a puzzled expression, but Bhaskar winked at him, gesturing with an outstretched thumb held to his mouth, the universal symbol to indicate a drunkard. The old man smiled in understanding.
Bhaskar propped Samar up against the partition that separated the door area from the seating area and waited until the train came to a halt at Naigaon Railway Station. When it did, he took Samar with his arm across his shoulder, got off the train, and dragged him on his feet till they reached the end of the platform, which ended into bushes. He prayed that no one would catch him or stop him, but at that late hour of the night there was slim chance of that happening.
When the platform ended, the illumination became low as the platform lights did not extend to a long distance. At that time, another sort of doubt entered his mind. He realized that the bushes near railway stations are havens for all kinds of perversion. Darkness keeps them away from decent human eyes. He kept his ears cocked for any kind of sound. At one end of the bush, he heard some rustling and turned around to see a woman attending nature’s call. The woman was just as embarrassed as he was and he turned immediately away.
He brought the passed-out man to some distance from the platform and lay him in the thick bushes that lined the tracks. They were appropriately away from the tracks too, well out of the way of any train that might pass by.
But just as he placed Samar on the pointy stones amid the bushes, the pain roused him from his unconscious state. A small groan was let out, which p
ut Bhaskar into a state of high panic.
And, just in time to make things worse, he saw two men walking towards him from the platform end. The men looked strong even in that darkness and Bhaskar wondered if they could be patrolling policemen. He thought for an instant of leaving Samar there on the tracks and run for it; after all, no one could recognize him. Even if Samar remembered his face, his would just be one of the hundreds of thousands of faces one encountered daily during their railway commutes.
He was about to run when he saw something in the darkness that made him stop.
He saw the men’s hands. Even in that dim light, he could see the two men were holding each other’s hands.
Suddenly his panic dissipated. These were not policemen after all. He knew what he had to do. He lay on the tracks, next to Samar’s fallen body, and brought his face close to his. He stayed there like that, shielding Samar’s face and muffling out his words so that they came out as moans rather than groans, and kept his ears on alert to hear the sounds nearby.
He heard the two men approach. They came and stopped near where he lay. He heard one of them squatting down and then he felt a hand on his bottom. But Bhaskar slapped the hand away in a swift move and the man immediately got up.
“These lovers want to be all by themselves,” the man told the other.
“Leave them then,” the other man said. “Come, let’s go find ourselves another bush.”
He lay there for a few moments more, till he was sure the intruders had gone. When he heard no interfering sound any longer, he sat up and looked at Samar.
The man slowly opened his eyes.
“Where—” he began to ask.
Panic began to grow in his still-sleepy eyes, and before the panic could have given rise to a full-blown problem, Bhaskar took a large stone that lay along the tracks.
And he committed his second mortal sin.
***
Bhaskar sat for long moments, sweating over the misdeed he had just committed. The corpse lay still as death. He felt a small pang inside him somewhere—the pang of consciousness pointing its finger at him—but he was becoming increasingly adept at quietening this pang. Instead, he took his mind to cheerier thoughts. He thought of how the widow of this unfortunate man would now be alone and, perhaps, available. It would be only a matter of time. That was what his twisted mind thought anyway.
He was about to leave the body there on the tracks but a thought entered his mind.
Why not?—he thought.
Why could he not kill two birds with one stone?
When he looked at his glistening wound, he did not see the blood. He saw the raw tissue beckoning to him from within. An animal in him woke up at that. Really, why not?—he asked himself over and over again.
Then, pushing the body further into the bushes so that no one would stumble upon it in the darkness, he came away from the tracks and onto the main road and hired an auto-rickshaw to take him home. He unlocked his house in a hurry, took the butcher’s knife he had invested in, wrapped it in a towel, hid it under his shirt, and came running back again to hire another auto-rickshaw to take him to the station.
He ran onto the tracks once more and came to the spot where he had hidden the body. Stray dogs had now begun sniffing at the bush, puzzling over what might be behind it that smelled so tempting to them. He kicked a dog out of the way. It let out a whimper, but then recouped and growled at his attacker threateningly. That is when Bhaskar removed the huge knife and waved at the dog in its face. The dog’s primal instinct told it that nothing good could come out of this uneven fight and it retreated into the bushes.
When Bhaskar was alone once again, he prodded into the bushes and found the corpse. His eye glinting with the lure of temptation, he sat down, and tore open the dead man’s shirt. The prospect of human flesh set his senses tingling, and he brought the sharp end of the knife right onto the poor man’s chest line under the left nipple and pierced.
A little blood trickled out of the cut. There was no functional heart left in the man’s chest to pump blood out from the new wound.
Bhaskar then proceeded to tear open the wound. He did not know how to do it. He made cuts in the way one fillets a fish. Straight horizontal cuts in the region over the heart, and then vertical small cuts that enabled him to lift the skin over it. It was a difficult process, made much more difficult by the darkness and all the blood that did not allow him to see anything.
When he peeled off the skin, it was an unholy mess and the dogs began to come again, but they stayed at a distance. They had never seen such a sight before and perhaps even they wondered what strange beast this was.
Bhaskar struggled with the ribs. He knew there would be bones but he hadn’t expected them to get so much in the way.
In the distance, he saw a sight that sent a shock of fear through his being. Faint shreds of light had begun to illuminate the sky. He had no time to lose.
He lifted the cleaver as high as he could, and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the bony cage of the person’s thorax.
The force was so hard that he snapped several ribs.
Through his bloodied mouth, he smiled when he felt the smooth cardiac muscle with his fingers. He used the cleaver like a knife to sever the arteries and tugged the heart out.
One vein still held it back though.
He again brought the cleaver and severed it, much like a birthing professional cuts the umbilical cord when separating a newborn from its mother.
“Come to me, heart number one,” he mumbled.
Finally, placing the heart and the cleaver in the same towel wrapping it so that no one could recognize them for what they were, he placed the body on the tracks.
He sat in the bushes till he saw a fast train approaching from a distance. The train hurtled along the tracks, not showing any sign of slowing down.
The sound was deafening as the fast train approached, and there was a flash that illuminated his steely eye.
And eventually, when the train hurtled away into the distance, Bhaskar came out and saw the body.
Or whatever of it remained.
PART FOUR
The Beast Within
~ 21 ~
Aunty, How Are You?
Anuradha called Maya again the next morning from the safe confines of her house. The ring startled Maya, who was already in a state of nervous apprehension after the aghori had left.
“Maya,” said Anuradha, “you have to listen to me carefully. Did you find out anything about Bhaskar?”
“No,” said Maya. “I just called Padma’s husband. He must have informed the police.”
“Good. Don’t ask Bhaskar anything about it.”
Maya kept mum, but her mind worked up a storm.
“Any news of your missing friend?” Anuradha asked.
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
“No. But there was a message from her that she had reached Naigaon that day,” Maya said. “I called her husband and told him about it.”
“All right now,” Anuradha said sounding more serious. “I want you to listen to this very carefully. There is something really quite fishy going on here. I don’t want you to get shaken or something, but I want you to pack your bags and come back here. Leave your friend to the police. They will find her. Forget your husband too; there’s something very wicked about him. I have seen it. Tell me now—are you coming back here?”
Maya was scared herself. She wanted to obey her mother but listening to her would mean accepting that her own judgment was wrong. She did not want to give that leverage to her mother who would undoubtedly taunt her about it forever.
“Are you coming back here?” Anuradha said.
“Give me time to think,” Maya said.
“No thinking,” the mother said firmly. “There is no time to think. Listen to me. That woman who is missing, your husband surely knows something about that. I don’t want any harm to befall you. Come back Maya, please. If you don’t come he
re, I will come there and take you.”
“All right,” said Maya and disconnected the phone.
***
Anuradha kept the receiver of her landline back in its place and heaved. She knew Maya wouldn’t come back. She knew how pig-headedly stubborn her daughter was. Well, she could not blame Maya entirely for that. Part of that trait of obstinacy was indeed genetic.
She went into the kitchen and brought out the bowl of peas that she had to shell. She kept them on the couch and switched on the television. She skipped all the news channels—she could do without any more horrors for now—and stopped at a channel where a game show was going on. Like a pro, she kept on shelling the peas without looking at them, even understanding the rotten ones from the good ones merely by her developed sense of touch, and even began to smile at the jokes cracked by the game show host.
When she was down to her last peapod, she kept the bowl aside. She lay herself down on the couch and continued to watch how the contestants managed to come out of a locked cage.
The first time the bell rang, she thought it was something in the game itself, so engrossed was she.
But it was more insistent the second time. She realized that it wasn’t the cage door in the TV but her own house door that was beckoning to her. She mumbled something about pesky courier boys and got up.
Her daughters, especially Maya, had told her repeatedly to be cautious when opening the door. But perhaps it was the game show. Her slow mind couldn’t process two things at once. Without really looking at who the visitor was, she removed the safety chain.
It was too late when her visitor said:
“Hello, aunty! How are you?”
***
