The Light of Dead Fires

by Sakiv Koch

  “What did you say?” Sona asked him. Her eyes narrowed, but they were twinkling with something that might have been amusement or malice, or a mix of both. Smast cringed and continued to kick himself inwardly. He was certain the destructive volcano of her fury would erupt now, and she wouldn’t have to make any efforts to lid it this time. He was about to burn prematurely because of his newly acquired, idiotic, and excessive audacity.

  Before Smast could think of a useless lie to mitigate the disaster he had created for himself, Sona started walking briskly towards the doorway where Pintu had stood a few moments ago. Smast followed her, almost at a run, feeling the same kind of relief that the towel-hit maid must have felt. He wasn’t sure anymore that Sona had heard him clearly, but he admonished himself to employ some of the good sense and self-preserving instincts that had constituted more than ninety-nine percent of his behavioural traits such a short while ago.

  Sona had disappeared into the shadows of a huge hall that lay beyond the gently-swaying curtains of the gigantic doorway. Two lamps burning at the far end of the room lit it up dimly.

  A leg jutted out suddenly from behind the left door panel. Its purpose was obviously to trip Smast up, but the leg’s owner’s timing was a little out — he had put his limb out a moment too soon. Smast could have walked around the obstruction, and thereby remained true to his recent resolve of employing good sense in every situation. But his crutch came alive in his hands and struck the now-retracting foot with considerable force.

  The resultant scream of agony made Sona halt at the bottom step of an immense central staircase she had just begun to ascend. Pintu came out of hiding, crying, hopping on one foot, clutching the other one in his hands.

  You mad rascal, you’ve gone too far this time, Smast screamed at himself, his mental torment greater than Pintu’s physical suffering. Smast let the crutch fall to the floor with a sharp clatter and leant back against the door jamb. The power that had filled his being last night seeped out of him, leaving him empty, hopeless — a mere husk of what he could have been if not for his uncontrollable follies.

  He felt ashamed. He knew his father would never indulge in avoidable acts of violence in spite of his immense strength. He also understood that maintaining one’s dignity didn’t equate to smashing one’s opponent every time, particularly when the opponent wasn’t a worthy one.

  “You’re so dead you already stink like a corpse, Rat!” Pintu said in an agonised whisper calibrated not to reach his mother’s ears. The fat boy’s face mirrored a confluence of pain, fear, and gloating. “Father is going to end your pathetic existence!” He then buried his uncharacteristically eloquent threats under an avalanche of exaggerated moaning and crying. In another instant, Sona reached where the two opponents stood and hopped respectively.

  “Would you quieten up on your own, or should I muffle up your hysterics?” She asked Pintu, flourishing her right hand as the figurative silencer she had spoken of. Pintu immediately stopped producing noise of any sort.

  “And you!” she then turned upon Smast fiercely, displaying the same splayed-fingers weapon to him, although in a somewhat less forceful manner. “Can’t you stop being so dramatically self-destructive?”

  Smast didn't need her to elaborate — he understood her meaning all too well. What he failed to understand was as to why would she want him to escape destruction, after what he had done repeatedly to her son, and particularly after what he had said directly to her so recently.

  A half-suppressed snigger from Pintu’s mouth alerted Smast to the danger bearing down upon him. Raj swayed slightly as he pattered down the wide staircase. Let him tumble down all those steps and break his neck, Smast prayed with all the force of his terrified heart, but the man descended to the floor safely. God didn’t seem inclined to harm Raj in any way even as he came at Smast with a very clear intent to hurt him.

  The space between the hurtling man and the stationary boy decreased rapidly. Smast wished he had not let go of his crutch. He started to flinch away from Raj’s right arm as it rose in air and became pregnant with a vicious blow, which would surely knock Smast down and leave a long-lasting, multi-coloured imprint of pain and humiliation on his face. And it was certain to be followed by equally potent brothers and sisters — a whole brood of slaps, punches, and kicks.

  But then that’s what Smast had been brought here for — a sound beating for his unthinkable crimes, a beating that would crush his new-fangled, infantile spirit out of its one-night-old existence. It was just that Sona had somehow managed to un-prepare him for this fate. And she had done it in spite of his determination not to be ‘taken in’ by any of her tricks. He hadn’t forgotten even for a fraction of an instant how Sona had deceived his mother with such absolute ease all those years ago. And yet —

  His heart stilled for a beat, his eyes screwed shut, and his shoulders hunched as Raj’s heavy hand descended and struck flesh with a nauseating smack. There was no accompanying pain, no jarring impact, just fear, bafflement, and a cry that wasn’t his.

  Smast opened his eyes and then blinked them rapidly. He had difficulty believing what he saw: Sona was fighting Raj ferociously, scratching his face, trying to bite his hand, exerting all her strength in trying to push the man away. Smast then knew that she had taken the blow meant for him! He knew this for a fact, but his mind still couldn’t grasp the enormity of what she had done, what she was doing. The feeling that he was merely living through a dream recurred.

  Raj struck her again — a full-bodied slap on the left side of her face, which sent her staggering into a wood-and-glass showcase. Her cry of anguish joined the sound of breaking glass, the squeak of shifting wood, and the crash of delicate things shattering on the floor. Instead of stopping after a moment, the noise began to bloom. The showcase toppled and slammed into an identical case standing parallel to it, which in turn fell and took a third of its kind down with it. The cascading cases, with Sona helplessly draped over the first one, rammed into the front wall of an enormous aquarium housing several fish. The tank exploded with a deep boom. A wave of escaping water propelled lethal shards of glass several feet away, drenching Sona completely.

  All the three showcases, deprived of their etched-glass shelves and shutters, lay hugging each other amongst the ruins of the priceless vases, figurines, and crockery that had nestled in their bosoms. In this suddenly-created zone of wet and dangerous debris, Sona writhed in pain along with her beautiful, expiring fish.

  Although Smast couldn’t look away from the horrible destruction he had caused inadvertently, he was aware that both Raj and Pintu were watching the disaster with an equally shocked fascination. A small crowd of servants, gardeners, drivers, and guards had gathered at the entrance to the big hall, but it appeared as though every one of them had lost the capability to move and come to the aid of their mistress.

  It was the monster himself who went to Sona first. He bent down and tried to help her up, but she swatted his hand away with a half-choked scream. The scream continued to well out of her throat, falling and rising in pitch, as she regained her feet with immense difficulty.

  She was bleeding from a hundred cuts, most of which were small, but a few on her hands, forearms and face were serious gashes freely gushing blood. Her expensive silk sari was reduced to tatters. She slipped and fell down once more with the first step she took, but she would still not let Raj help her. Her maids, collectively reanimated at the same instant, rushed towards her and then all of them stopped together abruptly, at some unspoken signal from Sona, who wouldn’t accept their help either.

  She extricated herself with a herculean effort, injuring her body more and more in a bid to minimise the damage to her towering, inflexible, unreasoning pride. And yet, she had lowered her guard and taken a literal beating for Smast’s sake — something that was a million times more staggering than the destruction he had just witnessed.

  He got so powerfully disoriented that he lost hold of the self-awareness that had finally come to def
ine him twenty-four hours ago, just twenty-four meaningful units of time out of the hundreds of thousands of degrading moments through which he had dragged his existence until the last night — the night of revelation, of heartbreak and elation, of knowing who he was, and of being proud of that knowledge.

  Now this woman, with her expensive sari reduced to rags, her skin shredded just like her clothes, and her face masked in blood, was undoing the substance of that night and rebuilding it in shapeless lumps.

  She limped out of the room, leaving behind footprints in her sacrificial blood.

  15: The Definition of a Home

  Smast’s head spun. He bent down to pick up his crutch and fell upon his hands and knees on the wet floor. The fish from the shattered aquarium were finishing their throes of death and becoming still one by one. All of them appeared to be staring at him with their glassy eyes — you killed us, they screamed in a ghostly chorus, growing louder and louder in his crumbling mind.

  A thrill of fear ran through his body. With Sona gone from the hall, he was as vulnerable as a hare ringed in by hungry wolves. His stomach clenched and bile rose in his throat, but nobody pounced upon him. He rose to his feet with the aid of his crutch and found himself alone in the hall. He looked at all the broken and dead things strewn on the marble floor and felt as though he had committed sacrilege in a temple.

  A band of servants entered the hall after a minute and started removing the debris and the fish. The men and the women goggled at Smast and communicated with each other in whispers and nudges. He felt that they were afraid of him — they would jerk their heads away as soon as his gaze met theirs. But their fascination for him was insatiable. They did much more gawking and speculating than actual cleaning.

  One elderly maid smeared a dab of balm over his heart by calling him our true master’s son. Another woman with a shrill voice and a large mole on her forehead made a jagged wound in the same wildly-beating heart by opining that his, Smast’s, poor mother will suffer the consequences of this madness. “He should never have dared hit Master Pintu,” she said, with a furtive glance accompanying her statement.

  “Master Pintu,” a pretty girl said with contempt, “should be kicked from morning until night, every day, by everyone.” She was about Smast’s age and had the remains of an old bruise fading from under her left eye. A collective gasp went up among the maids and the pretty girl suddenly looked scared.

  Smast turned and left the hall, going out the same way he had come in, limping along painfully with the aid of his crutch. A manservant was at work obliterating Sona’s glistening red footsteps, which showed that she had disappeared inside a smaller room in the far corner of the central courtyard.

  Smast had no notion of what he should do and what would now be done to him and to his blameless mother. He thought that the best thing would be to leave town and go somewhere far, far away from these demons. But the thought was murdered and thrown into a pit of despair even before it had finished forming fully in Smast’s still-spinning head.

  Darshan Singh was limping toward him. The bandage on his foot had come loose and trailed behind him in a muddy, bloody testament to his suffering. The fat man had clearly walked all the way from Smast’s hut and had fallen on his face at least once. His originally white clothes were now an earthy brown. His enormous face, wearing a mask of hardened mud, was twisted in a murderous expression.

  He was an influential man, who could have easily procured any means of transport to arrive at the mansion, but he had walked as a part of his penance for having upset his Mother Mistress.

  He snarled like a mad dog. Although the effect of the sound was ruined by Darshan Singh’s little-girl’s voice, there was nothing laughable about his expression and his intentions. Smast knew that the spiteful man would never let him escape. Had Sona not put a leash on him, Darshan Singh would have torn Smast to pieces by now. The leash was thankfully still wrapped around the rabid dog’s throat: he started to bark up a torrent of threats when he was still several yards away, but his tortured feet veered off the path upon which Smast stood.

  Darshan Singh eyed Smast’s crutch warily, as though he expected the length of wood to come alive and start clobbering him. This gave Smast a momentary, false sense of security, but he knew that Darshan Singh could summon a dozen armed men at the snap of his pudgy fingers.

  Once Darshan Singh had disappeared into the house, Smast started taking small, tentative steps out of the entrance hall, expecting to be stopped any moment. He came out of the hall and stepped onto the driveway without any challenge to his tenuous liberty. This time, he didn’t linger upon the bridge spanning the mansion’s stream.

  Going all the way to the end of the driveway was futile; the guards posted at the gates wouldn’t let him leave. So he stepped off the path and entered the eastern garden, with its pond and that incredible place at the pond’s shore. It was a spherical structure made entirely of polished teakwood and glass. It had a domed roof and intricately hand-carved wooden doors. Its picture-windows twinkled with jubilant rays of the sun.

  “Dream Palace,” Smast’s lips formed the words without conscious thought. The palace’s doors drew him forward, as though they were gigantic magnets and his heart had a core of iron. His sense of self-preservation, which had proven utterly defected so far, held him back. He knew that he had already strayed dangerously far into the territory of ‘too much daring,’ and that further acts of trespassing could not be the best way of mending things.

  In a few moments, he grasped the sun-warmed brass handles and pushed infinitesimally. He was sure that the stately doors would not budge, thereby protecting him from the fallout of yet another criminally mad action. But the doors answered his tiny application of force by swinging back invitingly. Smast stepped inside. For some reason that had nothing to do with the fear of discovery, his heartbeat accelerated until it pulsed in his eyes and ears.

  He looked at the fireplace built to fit the curvature of the room, the paintings on the walls, the quivering pictures made by sunlight streaming in through three skylights with multi-coloured glass. He saw the tasteful arrangements of sofas, armchairs and Persian carpets on the marble floors, the great chandeliers suspended from the ceiling.

  A small pool was sunk into the middle of the floor, directly under the central skylight, so that the pool’s water appeared clothed in a shimmering sheet of coloured light. Water again, Smast thought with a brief, wan smile.

  He looked upwards and his smile grew warmer, stronger. There was the ubiquitous overhanging gallery that Father appeared to have loved as much as bodies of water. Several beautiful bookcases, housing numberless intriguing titles, populated the gallery.

  Smast cast about eagerly for the staircase leading up to the library. It was upon the other side of the palace. Smast started to limp toward the steps with all the speed he could muster; he skirted the pool and then stopped abruptly. There was someone else in there with him.

  Smast had not been able to see this person before because he stood leaning against a broad pillar by the pool. He was a strikingly handsome man, clad in a chocolate-brown kurta. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and he had his arms crossed over his chest. He was gazing soulfully at Smast, his eyes, his mouth, his entire being smiling the most radiant, the most engaging, the most invigorating smile possible in the entire creation.

  Although the hall was brightly lit, everything other than the man’s smile dimmed and darkened. Smast forgot about the hundreds of magical objects stacked just a few yards away, for each of which he would have given everything he owned in the world (which happened to be just a few other books).

  “Smaaast,” the man called, the name coming from his lips like the susurration caused by a gentle breeze in a woodland’s canopy. Smast ran to him with a sob. Ravi’s smile didn’t falter, but he didn’t raise his arms to embrace his son. The two collided and there was a new, ominous sound of old fabric tearing. Smast drew back with a gasp.

  The life-sized portrait to
ppled and fell into the pool. Smast’s father was drowning once again, in front of Smast’s eyes this time. The bubbling water started to draw away thin wisps of Ravi’s being, beginning to dissolve his oily existence into itself. Smast threw down his crutch, fell upon his stomach, and lifted the portrait out. He tore his shirt off and started to dry the canvas frantically with it, smudging his father’s left ear.

  He was desperate to restore the portrait to its original condition — the damage he had unwittingly done to it felt like mutilation, like murder. He couldn’t bear the guilt corroding his soul. He couldn’t tolerate the sense of loss hollowing him out. He had never seen his father’s image before; he had never known such utter, relentless, infinite bereavement until this moment. He cried with all his might without being conscious that he was crying, without being conscious of anything but an all-compassing pain.

  He could now appreciate, more than ever before, his mother’s mind having unhinged after his father’s death. This encounter with only a picture was already deranging Smast. Merciful sleep somehow tiptoed into the torture-chamber of his mind and whisked his consciousness away.

  Dusk was falling when he woke up. An emaciated moon was peering in through a window. Timid moonbeams were skirmishing with impolite, audacious shadows. The shifting, deepening darkness heightened Smast’s sense of disorientation. It took him a long moment to realise where he was and what he had done in his blindness.

  He discovered that he was still hugging the portrait. His arms and shoulders were stiff. His heart was sore and terrified. A familiar fire raged in his empty stomach. He shifted a little and brought Ravi’s image into a patch of moonlight.

  There was a discoloured lump where the left-ear had been, a large tear near the frame of the canvas, also on the left side, a blotchy unevenness in the colour of the kurta, and a blob at the top of the head, transmuting Ravi's hairstyle into an inky smear. But his face, his smiling, angelic, reassuring face had been left unblemished by the fall in the pool.