by Sakiv Koch
“Light the lamp, Smast,” Nina said.
“We’ve very little oil left, Ma,” Smast demurred.
“It feels wrong to leave you in darkness while I am trying to shed some light on the darkness of your life,” she said and chuckled self-deprecatingly. “But you’re right, of course. Nights are sure to come at their appointed time; our new oil supply is not. But I digress. Raj stood his trial and was sentenced to six months’ rigorous imprisonment. Our old haveli also transformed into a prison house during the first few weeks of his incarceration — all colour, conversation, joy, and humour marched out of our little world. The once-beautiful face was now one gigantic, pus-filled sore. I believe Ravi would have been more comfortable behind bars with his brother than he was at his home during those dismal days.
“Ravi was fundamentally a man in love — in love with his wife, who loved him back with all her soul, in love with the house he was building, in love with the small and the big things of the world: fields, trees, people, birds, animals, the skies, stars and sunshine, moonlight and rains and clouds. Such men can’t remain morbid for long, particularly when their conscience is free from any burden of guilt. He knew he had done the right thing and, if need be, he would do it again. ‘I’m sure Raj would never stoop down to this level of animality in future,’ he would say. I couldn’t help smiling at the tensile strength of his belief in his brother’s ‘suppressed goodness’.
“I had recounted to him what I had seen in Sona’s room without going into the details of the nasty things I had said to her. He was shocked and saddened. He sent Mohan Ram, our oldest and most trusted servant, to supervise Sona’s involuntary move to a new, larger, more airy room and the cleansing of her old chamber of horrors. It somehow didn’t surprise me much that she agreed to shift without any fuss.
“Earlier, Sona had issued a blanket injunction to the mansion’s charwomen never to enter her room. This was one of the reasons her practice of black-magic had gone undiscovered for such a long time. Ravi overrode that order, ensuring she wouldn’t be able to carry out such unspeakably execrable things again. I refrained from giving voice to the fact that Raj must have been privy to this devilry of his wife’s.
“We saw very little of Sona. She kept to her part of the mansion, but whenever we did come across her, she was always cold and distant without being uncivil. Which is how I preferred it, too. I had no intention of mixing-up with that woman in any way. I couldn’t wait for our new home’s completion so that we could finally get away from those destructive people.
“Ravi had singlehandedly freed the old mansion and all the other ancestral properties from their multiple mortgages. He had established several independent, lucrative businesses from scratch. The wealth these businesses generated was many times more than the incomes from the traditional family resources. In fact, the incomes from the traditional family resources would not have sufficed to pay off even a fraction of the debts that had encumbered those resources.
“What I mean to say is that everything, old and new, belonged to your father. Even then he meant to give the ancestral home to Raj, without retaining any share in it. Wives generally don’t encourage this sort of a thinking in their husbands. They do the opposite. But I completely concurred with his decision — I just wanted to be rid of those demons and was ready to pay any price whatsoever for it.
“Ravi had initially wanted to take them along into our new home (horror of horrors!), but these two factors: Raj’s attack on Dulari and my discovery of Sona’s hoard of dead things, convinced him that living with these relatives under one roof would be undesirable and impractical. Hooray! I said to myself, inwardly dancing for joy when he told me this liberating, buoying piece of news.
“Days passed, as they do without concern for miseries or celebrations. Raj astonished all of us one evening by showing up an entire month prior to the scheduled date of his release. ‘Released early for good behaviour,’ he mumbled in answer to Ravi’s question. The reason he gave surprised us even more than seeing him suddenly had. Good behaviour and Raj weren’t compatible with each other as a rule.
“He didn’t immediately stomp off to his room. In a departure from all precedent, he came and sat with us in the front garden of the mansion, where we had been having our evening tea before his appearance. He even accepted a cup of tea and sat sipping it quietly, looking at the darkling sky. Ravi was watching him intently, evidently deriving some kind of hope and joy from what he observed.
I had been sure that whenever he returned, Raj would come home drunk, enraged, ungovernable. But this man hardly appeared to be the same one my husband had handed over, nay, thrown to the police. Nor did his face wear its usual mask of impassivity. Today, it was more like a series of canvases of a capricious artist — expressions and emotions came fleetingly, giving way to other, equally nomadic feelings and thoughts.
“A maid had gone to inform Sona of Raj’s arrival. Sona came out to the garden in a little while, carrying her little boy in her arms. Raj didn’t rise at seeing her; she didn’t sit down at seeing him. The two glared at each other as though they needed to give immediate vent to their pent-up furies and malices. Their boy was mortally afraid of his mother. He had developed a heartbreaking restraint at an age — he wasn’t three years old yet — when self-control should be a completely, utterly unknown concept.
“But the lovely child with his rosy cheeks and curly hair started to wave his chubby little arms and coo excitedly as soon as he recognised his father, who had abruptly and inexplicably gone missing such a long while ago. Sona placed him down and the toddler went waddling to his father. Raj took him in his arms, pressed him to his heart and, in a gesture that was the Mt. Everest of all wonders, started to cry.
“Ravi’s eyes grew moist at seeing his brother’s tears. Anything that touched my husband’s heart inevitably affected me, too. Although I desperately wanted to contain them, tears started to form and drop from my eyes as well. Only Sona stood distant, dry-eyed, amused, with one side of her mouth curled in a hard half-smile.
“There was such a loud, insistent ringing of the bell at our main door that the bell-wire sounded in the danger of snapping. A servant came running to get Ravi. The servant whispered something to him and Ravi left to see the visitors. I stood there awkwardly for a few moments, feeling a pressing need to leave the taciturn couple alone, to allow them their reunion in some privacy. I was putting my intention into execution by climbing down the veranda stairs when the peaceful evening air was rent with the report of a gunshot and a scream.
“Our haveli was over a hundred years old. It was built like a fortress — ten feet high red-brick walls with massive, iron-banded wooden doors as its main gates. There was another, smaller pair of gates at the southern side of the mansion, used for taking horses in and out in the olden days. The garden we were in had its own compound wall, with a gate in the centre. When you stepped out of the garden, you got into the front courtyard, with its two entrances, its Shiv temple, and its lotus pond.
“My blood had frozen in my veins. I flew out of the garden, towards the main doors, screaming in terror, dreading that someone had shot my husband. It was one of those impossible minutes when one doesn’t want to reach the destination towards which one is running with all one’s might.
“I reached the main entrance and drew in a long, deep breath of relief — Ravi stood inside the threshold, looking highly agitated but completely unharmed. The doors were shut, latched and bolted. The air I had just inhaled exploded out of my chest in sheer panic as I heard a moan and saw a man lying on the floor, bleeding profusely from a wound in his chest.
“Someone started to pound the doors again. ‘Pl-please let him in —,’ the wounded man pleaded.
“‘You two, go back inside,’ Ravi said in a low but urgent voice, addressing me, his hand on the sliding bolt. I turned my head and saw that Raj stood just behind me, taking everything in.
“‘What’s happening? Who’s this man?’ I asked hysterically, c
ringing as the person outside continued to thump the doors in an obvious desperation to be let in. ‘Please don’t open the door!’
“‘Go inside,’ Ravi repeated, more firmly. ‘I’ll join you shortly.’
“There was no question of my budging from his side. He’d have to carry me away. Raj proved more obedient this once. He turned and walked briskly out of the front courtyard. Ravi slid the bolt out of its housing and started to open the door when another shot rang out in the road. There was return fire from just a few feet away. Ravi, perspiring in spite of the chill in the air, shut and bolted the door once more. ‘P-please, my b-brother—’ the stranger on the floor begged.
“‘Let me think, Tara Singh,’ Ravi said abstractedly. ‘I want to help, but I can’t endanger my family. How many — hey, Raj! What are you doing? Stop! Come back!’
“Raj was exiting the garden with a rifle in his hands. He reached the southern doors, unlatched them and ran out of the house before Ravi could stop him!”
8: The Death of a Dimension
The rainstorm’s rage lessened a little. It started to pull its liquid punches and the rivers flowing in from the roof became small streams. Nina refilled her cup with rainwater in darkness, drank it, and resumed her tale.
“Raj ran out into the street on the southern side of the mansion. God alone knows what had come upon him. He had always been a reckless person, but this was extraordinary behaviour for a man who’d just come back after serving time in prison, a man who had no idea what the gunfight was about and who the fighters were.
“But he ran out nonetheless and presented a large, if not easy, target to the men with the guns outside. A hail of bullets flew at him, eager to bite into his body. He threw himself to the ground and thereby avoided the first barrage.
“I cursed in a very unladylike manner when I saw what was about to happen: Ravi was turning back toward the main doors, unbolting them, throwing them wide open, and running out into the road. Unarmed, unprotected. He thought nothing of his own life in order to save his manic, suicidal, stupid brother. This angered and dismayed me so much that I, too, ran out after him, even though the man who lay bleeding on the floor raised his arm weakly in a bid to stop me.
“I tripped over a body lying at our doorstep, fell headlong, and thereby escaped being shot down. The body that saved me from becoming a body myself obviously belonged to the man who had been frantically trying to take shelter in our house. This man had died from a ghastly headshot wound and he lay between two enormous metallic planters that adorned the main entrance to our house.
“Raj was crouching behind a wall at the intersection of the main road and the southern street, taking fire from and firing back at several men. These men, at least six by my estimate, had taken cover behind the trees of the park that fronted our house.
“Ravi swerved around at hearing my gasp. He dropped to the ground besides me, his face ashen as he realised what he had done in his impetuosity — risked not just his own, but my life as well. My quailing heart grew just a shade lighter as he transferred his complete attention and care to protecting me, to getting me back inside the house safely. The dead man’s pistol lay by his side. Ravi picked it up. The planters provided excellent cover and Ravi was an exceptional marksman. Within a few seconds, he hit an arm and a leg belonging to two different men in the park.
“The attackers started to retreat. Ravi fired one more bullet and yet another man fell down with a scream. The rest of them panicked and started to run away in an attempt to get out of Ravi’s range. Raj scored his first hit then, shooting a running man in his back. Raj left his position and came running into the road, chasing down the last two men.
“‘Get back!’ Ravi shouted. ‘Raj, stop!’ But Raj had exhausted his capacity to listen and to obey earlier in the evening. The two men got away, although Raj fired twice more at them. He had physically entered into the park and was finally turning back when one of the wounded attackers shot at him.
“Raj jerked around with a scream and fell down.”
Nina paused. The town-hall clock declared shrilly that it was now midnight. “I’m hungry,” Nina said, but they had not cooked anything for dinner tonight. Smast sat transfixed by her words. Her voice was tiring, cracking at the edges, but the people, the images she conjured were fully alive to him.
“He didn’t die,” Smast said.
“No, he didn’t die. I wish he had — if he had, I would most probably not be a widow and you’d’ve known a father’s love, a human being’s life. Ravi screamed louder than Raj had and started to rise to his feet to go to his brother. I held on to his arm with all the might of my desperation. The man who’d shot Raj would have shot your father, too. ‘I am coming with you,’ I told him.
“But Raj saved his brother a tearing anguish by starting to crawl across the road towards us. He reached us in another minute and all three of us crept back into the house. The man, Tara Singh, who had managed to enter the house earlier, had also died. The man who lay dead outside was his younger brother, Suraj Singh.
“Ravi shut and bolted the door and literally fell upon Raj to see where and how much he was hurt. A bullet had grazed his upper left arm. It was a superficial wound, posing no risk to Raj’s limb or life.”
Nina paused again, as though too disappointed with the memory of the shallowness of Raj’s injury to go on. “I was relieved that day,” she said, “that he hadn’t got hurt badly.
“‘You shouldn’t have run out like that,’ Ravi remonstrated with him later, after we had come back from the hospital. Raj’s response was a pained smile and a gleam in his eyes. The police had come and taken the brothers’ bodies away. They had been able to arrest one of the men of the attacking party — the one whom Ravi had shot in the leg. The man whom Raj had hit had also been found dead in the park.
“The two groups were engaged in a very old blood feud. They were from a neighbouring town. Tara Singh had had some business dealings with Ravi. The brothers had come to our town with the intent to participate in an auction for a property going cheap, not knowing they would soon be selling their lives rather cheaply.
“They were passing through our neighbourhood when the enemy group attacked them. The brothers had come to our door with the hope of finding shelter, but death caught up with them before we could do anything to help them. The strangest thing in this strange, tragic, and terrifying event was Raj’s insanely rash behaviour. He could easily have gotten all of us killed.
“With a few slight variations, life resumed its old, mostly-joyous, slightly-troublesome course. Raj began to go to work with Ravi, something that elated Ravi beyond expression. ‘He didn’t ever work in his life before,’ Ravi told me, ‘not even when we were literally starving after Father’s death!’ Sona mostly kept to herself. Their quarrels erupted from time to time, but they were usually more vocal than violent in nature.
“After a few days, our new house was finally ready to receive us in its paradisiacal bosom. A pundit appointed an auspicious day for the house warming ceremony. Unfortunately, the appointed day was about two weeks away and custom dictated that we wait until then.
“Ravi came to our room one evening with a smile flickering upon his mouth, like light in a loosely-fitted electric bulb. ‘What do you say,’ he asked me in suppressed excitement, ‘to a holiday?’
“It was a highly superfluous question, Smast. What would I say, if not an emphatic yes? Would I ever decline such a beautiful, such a desirable prospect? We had never before gone on a holiday together, not even immediately after our marriage. Ravi simply hadn’t been able to find the time, what with his business and the ongoing construction work and his wayward sibling and that sibling’s witchcraft-loving wife.
“My spirits soared like a hot-air balloon and my heart brimmed with excitement — I was finally going on my honeymoon! But Ravi’s smile, which should have been radiant and constant, continued to flicker and he wouldn’t quite meet my eyes.
“‘Just the two of us are going
, right?’ I asked him.
“‘Um, y-yes, I mean n-no,’ he said, faltering uncharacteristically. The mouth of the hot-air balloon came undone. My spirits deflated and floated down limply. ‘Look, Nina,’ he said, taking my hands in his. He loved doing that — taking both of my hands in both of his. Maybe other husbands do it, too; I don’t know. ‘We are going to move out soon. Call that what you would, in truth it is a separation of families. I am not saying we shouldn’t separate from them — I know that living apart from Raj and Sona is the only way to live peaceably, but can we not part ways on a sweet note? Can we not spend some time together on a vacation, as a joint family before we cease to be a joint family?’
“‘No, we can’t!’ I declared! ‘I won’t go anywhere with those hyenas, least of all on a holiday! It would be much better to go to a cold, dark cave alone than to go to the world’s most scenic place with that couple!’
“‘Okay, darling,’ he capitulated, ‘only the two of us will go.’ But he looked so dejected and downcast afterwards that I had to give in to his desire. ‘I don’t want to force anything upon you,’ he said when I told him I was ready to go on his ‘joint family’ expedition.
“I said something to him in response that I won’t tell you, but it brought out his radiant, irresistible smile. And so it was agreed that the five of us shall go on a holiday, to a beautiful, very expensive, very exclusive hill resort in the Himalayas.”
The rain abated some more, now a mere skeleton of its former gigantic self. Smast, too, drank a little water and then stepped outside to make some.
“I could barely sleep that night — sweet waking dreams formed in my mind and seeped into my heart. We started the next morning. Our journey had three stages. By train to Devgarh, by bus to Jalgarh, and from there, a thirteen-mile trek on horseback to our destination resort.
