by Neil D'Silva
He slapped her right on the face. There was immense power in his hand; the bones were as hard as steel. She felt the blood inside her cheek. And slowly everything around her began to whirl.
***
When she opened her eyes, after an indeterminate length of time, she didn’t know why the surroundings seemed so unfamiliar. What was this stench pervading this room? What room was it? Why could she not move?
A thought grew into her mind—Was she dead?
Perhaps this wasn’t her, but her soul, trying to escape from the shackles of her body. But if she were dead, why did she still feel the pain?
Who was the man over her? He was saying something.
Wake up, bitch!
I will have no fun if you are passed out like that.
Nothing registered. Her mind told her she knew the man, but why couldn’t she place him? Why had he smeared that horrible white powder all over his face? Her head hurt; it felt cold. Something trickled down her temples and onto the surface she was lying on, which was cold too.
The man looked at her, smiled, and she saw his teeth, white abominations, shining through that horrid face.
It was the face of terror.
He raised something. It was his hand. No, it was something in his hand, worn around his knuckles. What was it? The infernal thing had four spokes, four cruel daggers of death. Instinctively, she knew she had to escape. This could not be her end. She tried to move, but it was a whimsical effort that yielded no fruit. The object in his hand looked menacing—shiny, glinting in the bright light that seemed to have suddenly flooded the place.
And he brought it down.
Two quick blows, on from the left and another from the right. Both on her thigh.
She could not see it, but she knew the mark now. She felt the warm blood flowing out of it, and the pain registered.
But there was no time to react to the pain. His hand rose again. The quartet of knives shone in the flickering light of the lamp, casting a shadow on the wall, and she knew this was it. This would be the final blow, for it was aimed right at her navel.
Her eyes were closed, hoping for a quick and painless death. She braced her slender abdomen for the attack. She almost felt the coldness approaching her, when the atmosphere was intruded upon by the sharp sound of a door opening and hitting a wall.
Maya heard a woman’s voice. She knew the voice. She turned to look.
But Bhaskar stood up, like an animal, and darted towards the woman who had just entered.
It took just one swish of the object he had in hand, and the woman recoiled in fear and pain, huddling up against the wall.
He looked at her, waiting, watching, when another man entered. Bhaskar was taken by surprise. He hadn’t expected two of them. The young man spryly kicked the attacker in his groin and challenged him to a fistfight.
Bhaskar put up his fist.
It was then that the two newcomers saw the menacing weapon that was attached to his right fist. It wouldn’t be a fair fight after all.
He swished the first blow into the air, and the other man—still unsure of what the weapon was—ducked and saved himself.
“Maya,” screamed the other woman, and this time she recognized the voice.
“Namrata!” she said weakly, and snapped back into consciousness.
With one bleeding arm, leaving Hemant to ward off the madman, Namrata came running up to Maya and freed her. She was momentarily aghast at the wound on her thigh, but she pulled herself and clothed her sister in her red kameez that she found discarded on the floor. Maya, dazed and exhausted, tried to get back on her feet.
The two men fought around Akram’s mutilated corpse. Hemant had now lost his benefit of surprise and began to receive a beating from Bhaskar, who was clearly the stronger man, more so because he had to spend most of his time swerving from the weapon on Bhaskar’s knuckles than lashing back.
Maya went to the altar and picked up what looked like a lamp filled with ghee. It was probably kept for some sinister sacrificial offering. In the warm surroundings, the ghee had melted into a clear fluid consistency. She took the container and poured all of it on the chair that contained the rotting corpse. Then she found a match on the altar and lit it.
Instantly, the flames went up, bringing an eerie play of light on everyone’s faces.
“Bhaskar!” she yelled. Her voice was different now, throaty because of the mucus that had risen in the throat. “Say goodbye to your father.”
Bhaskar stopped hitting the young man and looked at Maya, stunned. She held the burning match in her hand momentarily, and then with a swift action flicked it on the chair. The chair—made of nothing but rickety wood—instantly went up in flames.
“Nooo!” Bhaskar screamed. “I have yet to finish my atonement. He has to forgive me still.”
“There is no forgiving for monsters,” said Maya. She was now a woman possessed and, being so close to death, feared nothing. “Not here, not anywhere.”
There was no sound in the desolate confines for a while, except the crackling of burning wood. With that, the mortal remains of the dead aghori Baba Bhutachari began melting away, turning into an unrecognizable mass. It was a cremation long overdue.
Bhaskar knelt in front of the pyre, holding his crying head in his palms, his knuckle weapon facing skywards, still looking menacing.
Then, without any warning, like a snake darting at its victim, he rose from his kneeling position and aimed a neat swish right at the thigh of the young man with his knuckle weapon. Hemant, who had been staring at the blazing flames, did not feel the pain at first, but when the blood began to flow from the torn flesh of his leg, he clutched the wound and started wincing in pain.
Maya saw it, her head in a whirl. She heard the scream of the unfortunate young man. But she felt nothing anymore. She resembled some kind of devi, with her hair in disarray, a cloth draped over her shoulders and the bright sindoor disturbed but still shining in her forehead. The burning flames gave her a divine glow, making her seem more than human.
Letting out a war cry, she lunged at her husband with all force, throwing her entire weight on him till he fell right out of the door and into the hell’s kitchen outside.
She found herself to be within reach of the rod that she had when she had entered. The usually agile Bhaskar was now on the floor, head facing down, shocked into numbness by the fact that a woman, his wife, had attacked him with such vengeance.
Straddling him, one leg on each side of his body, Maya raised the rod as far as it could go. Then, holding it not unlike a baseball bat, she let it go with its entire force onto her murderous husband’s head.
“Maya!” he implored as the blood began to trickle along his sides. “Don’t, Maya, I love you.”
She hit him once more. This time right on the back.
“We will always be together.”
She came down upon him again, and he stumbled into a standing position, his hands folded, pleading with her to stop.
She flung the rod and spat at him.
“Call the police, Namrata,” she said.
She couldn’t look at him. He looked like an infested worm, standing in supplication like that. She looked away but wherever her gaze fell, she could see nothing but mangled bodies.
And then she felt something move behind her.
Even before Namrata could shout the warning, Maya realized what was coming.
The blow hit her right in the upper arm, and she reeled with the shock.
The impact was intense, and the hall reeled around her. Despite that, she turned to see what had hit her. It was Bhaskar again. Blood covered every inch of his face, but he was still standing, preparing to launch another attack. He clenched his fist, the one that had the knuckle weapon on it, and Maya was petrified.
“I told you…” he stammered for words didn’t come out freely from him now. “We will always be together.”
The knuckle was aimed right at her navel.
Then something snapped. It
was like a bolt of lightning that propelled her into action. She wasn’t Maya anymore, a spirit of a higher plane of existence was guiding her now. She did not see her husband anymore; instead she saw in him a misguided devil, one who fed on the flesh of others. Such a person could not be allowed to live. It is the job of Mother Shakti to exterminate such pests.
With a loud cry, Maya ran into her bleeding husband, completely unmindful of the lethal weapon he had in his hand.
Several things happened within the next split second.
When Maya lunged forward, Bhaskar realized how much his wife hated him. This epiphany was accompanied by Bhaskar pulling back his weapon, letting his arm hang down by the side of his body. When Maya collided with her husband, the weapon was safely away, but Bhaskar reeled under the impact. He staggered and fell backwards.
The rusted iron rack with jagged shelves that held the knickknacks was right behind him.
Bhaskar crashed right into it. One of the iron shelves penetrated into his back, and he stayed that way, impaled, motionless more due to the shock than due to the physical circumstance.
Maya stumbled backwards too, and her sister and her badly injured boyfriend helped her to find her feet.
Slowly, the squeaking sounds grew louder and bolder.
The three survivors stood and watched the rats. The rodents had probably smelled the blood on a dying man, and now they immediately scurried from every corner of the confined space, leaping over everyone’s toes, their noses sniffing the air. They came, in all sizes, some as large as kittens, and landed upon the dying Bhaskar. His pain was evident in the way he yelled, his eyes growing larger and larger till he could move no more. The rodents clamped at his feet and his eyes and one of them nibbled at his testicles. Another entered right into his torso and began tearing off his abdomen, coming away with bits of his entrails in its mouth.
Bhaskar stopped breathing long before he could witness himself becoming fodder for the rats.
~ ∞ ~
Epilogue
Even weeks later, the news channels hadn’t had enough of the gruesome discovery. Anuradha, now sitting up with a neck cushion to prop her still numb head, surfed through all the news channels. Maya sat at her feet, her eyes still moist with the crying of repentance for the anguish she had caused.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Anuradha had told her. “There are people like that. You can never do anything against black magic.”
Maya knew there was no magic. She did not believe the oil did anything. It was all in the mind. Bhaskar had it in his mind too, and that had led to all the carnage. Visuals of Akram and Padma haunted her at every moment. She felt guilty about them, and no words anyone could say could get her out of that feeling.
“What will you do now?” Namrata asked. “Won’t you go to the school again?”
Maya shook her head.
“Maybe you should look for something,” she said. “Sitting at home like this won’t help you come out of it.”
Maya nodded.
Her mother continued watching the censored visuals of the interiors of the abandoned shed. Halfway through the report, she was mentioned too, and a photograph of her taken at the hospital was flashed across the screen. The report billed them as victims of a crime beyond their control. Bhaskar’s face was shown regularly throughout the segment, labeled as Serial Cannibal.
Maya could not take it anymore. She went into her bedroom and shut the door to keep away the sound. She read a magazine that had light motivational stories and comic strips. She even laughed at a couple of them, but it was a muted sardonic laugh, more like she were laughing at herself.
Then, after she had read through almost half the magazine, and even the TV volume outside had ceased, she got up and put on her yellow-striped bathroom slippers. She opened the door of her attached bathroom and went inside.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She was haggard; she had aged ten years in the past few weeks with her monstrous new husband. Namrata’s insistence came back to her mind. You must now take care of yourself. Probably, there was truth in that.
She slowly lifted the hem of the knee-length short pants she was wearing. She bunched it up and lifted her leg to the height of the mirror. It was still there, the pain as well as the mark. The scars will always remain, the doctor had told her. How true he had been, without knowing half the truth. The tattoo of death was a reminder of how close she had come to hell.
Then, it suddenly welled up inside her—a movement that began in the abdomen, then swept into her gullet; and then she bent her body and threw up into the sink.
As the water from the faucet cleared away the mess she had just vomited, a fearsome thought entered into her mind.
She hadn’t eaten anything. No, this wasn’t be a food issue.
This had been her constant fear. She looked up at the calendar on the wall. The events of the recent past had made her forget a few important schedules. Yes, she had skipped her periods. The alarm rose within her like a crescendo.
We will always be together.
The words had haunted her all these nights; it seemed as though they would never go away.
A stench began to torment her senses. It was the same odor that she had initially despised, then desired and now feared.
The emptiness of the bathroom began to scare her. She wanted to run out and sit with her mother, but as she proceeded to open the door, she saw a face in the bathroom mirror.
The face had been ugly when she had lived with it, and now it only looked uglier. It was just a flash, but she saw the holes in the skin where the rats had nibbled out bits of the flesh.
And it said something.
Atone.
You have to atone.
END
Glossary
(in alphabetical order)
agarbattis: incense stick, used in worship rituals
aghori: a type of ascetic, a devotee of Lord Shiva, noted for occult practices such as conducting rituals in crematoria, wearing shrouds, and smearing ash of cremated corpses on their naked selves
Amavasya: New Moon
asana: a yogic pose
beedi: local cigarettes made by stuffing tobacco into betel leaves
bhakt: devotee
bhakti: devotion
bhang: an intoxicating drink made from the leaves and petals of the cannabis plant, consumed mainly during the Holi festival
bhasma: ash
biryani: a preparation of rice mixed with vegetables, meats and spices
chai: tea
chakli: a spirally-shaped savory eatable made from various types of flour and spices
charas: cannabis
chillum: a local pipe used for smoking
damaru: a small drum with two surfaces that can be held in one hand, created by Lord Shiva himself
deeya: a traditional earthen lamp that contains a wick made of cotton and ghee
dhaba: roadside restaurant, frequented by long-distance travelers
dupatta: a thin rectangular piece of cloth draped by women over their chests
gulab jamun: soft spherical sweets made by deep-frying a batter of flour, milk, sugar, and later kept in sugar syrup
halwa: a sweetened dessert made with various ingredients added in milk
hijra: eunuch
jata: the matted coils of Lord Shiva’s hair that are tied on top of the head in a specific way
kameez: a long robe-like garment, the upper half of a salwar kameez ensemble
kandeel: a decorative lantern hung in prominent places during festive occasions, mainly Diwali
kanyadaan: the part of the Hindu marital ceremony where the father (or guardian) of the bride gives his daughter away to the prospective husband
karanjis: a crescent-shaped sweet eatable made by stuffing sweetened grated coconut in a shell made of flour
karma: a person’s actions
khichdi: a rice preparation made by mixing lentils and spices
kurta: a loose traditional Indian garment for the
upper body used by men
laddoo: a spherical sweet made by baking a batter of various kinds of flour, sugar, dry fruits, and ghee
lathi: a stout stick, mainly used for support or as a weapon
lota: a kind of tumbler
lungi: a male wraparound garment for the lower part of the body, part of traditional attire of many Indian regions
mangalsutra: a necklace worn by married Hindu women as a symbol of their marital status
masala chai: tea prepared with milk, sugar and spices such as cardamom
mehendi: henna
mogra: Indian jasmine
mojris: a pair of typical traditional closed footwear with flat heels and without laces
mukti: salvation
naga: snake; here specifically the snake Vasuki coiled around Shiva’s neck
Neelkantha: a name for Lord Shiva derived from Neel (blue) and kantha (throat), thus literally meaning The Blue-Throated One
paan-beedi shop: a shop that sells cigarettes, betel leaves and nuts, beedis, etc.
padmasana: the yogic pose of the lotus
pakoras: a fried preparation of vegetable slices covered in a savory batter in gram flour
palloo: the free end of the saree that either hangs down from the back or is worn over the head
paneer: cottage cheese
pedha: a sweet made of milk, sugar, and flour; the primary sweet distributed during festivals and congratulatory occasions
poha: a traditional breakfast preparation of flaked rice mixed with spices
pishacha: a flesh-eating demon
prasada: the blessed food offering meant for devotees
rangoli: a folk art form in which designs are made on the floor in geometric patterns and vibrant colors, using materials such as rice flour, colored sand, powdered petals, etc.
rudraksha: the seed of the tree Eleocarpus ganitrus (known in India as the Ganitri tree), which is used in making prayer beads; word is a composite of Rudra (an old name for Shiva) and aksha (eye), hence literally meaning ‘Shiva’s eye’
