The Light of Dead Fires

by Sakiv Koch

  Nina shook her head upon hearing the part about Smast’s needlessly hitting Pintu with his crutch. “You shouldn't have done that,” she said, “you should never have struck him.”

  “I agree about the time I hit him in the foot — I could and should have avoided that,” Smast said, somewhat defiantly, “but I’m glad I punished his foul mouth last night and in the morning today. If he ever dares abuse my mother in the future, I’ll hit him again, and again, harder each time.”

  He didn’t give Nina an opportunity to tell him off, by carrying on his narrative, coming quickly to the belief-defying part where Sona had grappled with Raj in order to protect Smast. Nina’s eyes rounded, her eyebrows rose up an inch and her mouth hung open. She listened with bated breath as Smast recounted Sona’s horrible accident, her extensive, disfiguring injuries.

  Nina listened with only perfunctory interest as Smast told her about the time he had spent with Cat in the Dream Palace, just grunting once to acknowledge her appreciation at Cat’s having given Smast a book.

  The acquisition of a new book was invariably a watershed event in their lives, which always made Nina squeal in delight and excitement. When he had brought the ill-fated copy of Gaban home a few weeks ago, she had given almost as much tender care to the water-damaged book as she had to Smast’s injuries. But right now, she was completely oblivious to the book (also wet, but to a much lesser extent) lying on her cot.

  Her half-addled mind was clearly struggling with the alien concept of Sona shielding, rather than harming, Nina’s child, and that, too, when the said child had repeatedly hurt Sona’s own son. Smast concluded his tale by telling her about his encounter with Sona at the mansion’s gate, about her understated effort to prevent him from leaving.

  Once he finished speaking, a strange, thick silence, unperturbed by the din of the rain upon the leaky roof, enveloped the little hut. Mother and son sat lost in shared fears but different beliefs. While the fog in Smast’s mind continued to grow denser, rendering him blind, suffocating him, he saw that Nina’s eyes were clearing up, growing more aware, more focussed. He looked at her with expectation, but concluded quickly that she wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t let him know what she was thinking: her mouth had compressed into an uncharacteristic hard line, denoting a resolve he couldn’t sway.

  Their always-hungry lamp was about to give up the ghost for the night. Nina got up from her seat and retrieved a small tin box from an alcove. Prying its lid open, she did something she almost never did — gave the lamp another meal of precious oil, so that the dying, gasping flame steadied and gave forth an exuberant orange glow in gratitude.

  This wasn’t all. From a battered box, whose contents were generally reserved for Diwalis or Smast’s birthdays, she brought out two white candles, both used sparingly on earlier occasions, and touched their eager wicks to the lamp’s benevolent flame. Smast saw that she was intent upon bringing about a festive atmosphere, intent upon celebrating something, something that was clearly shattering her heart even as she rejoiced in its happening.

  She then lifted the book, examined it lovingly, looking thoughtfully at the damp that had crept into the margins of a third of its pages, making them stick together in their time of calamity, rendering their wet skins vulnerable to tearing. After a while, she began to read aloud. Her voice was raw and jagged from her marathon session of speaking last night, but she still managed to transport Smast to a magical world, in spite of the immense weight of troubles that lay upon his head. Her strained vocal cords soon began to produce croaks after a few pages, so Smast took the book from her and read until the last of the festive trio of lights winked out.

  ◆◆◆

  The squawk of a horn jarred Smast awake. A stench of gasoline fumes abused his olfactory nerves. He sat up with a jerk, his heart hammering in his chest. The black motorcar sat idling outside, backed up right to the door of the hut. Another couple of feet and it could raze the mud wall to the ground with absolute ease.

  Nina was sitting on her cot, her hands clasped together in her lap, appearing much calmer than Smast felt. She wasn’t even looking at the vehicle intruding into their home. Her gaze was directed at the slice of sky visible from the hut’s lone, small window.

  My liberty to leave the mansion yesterday was an illusion, a trick Smast thought, but not with any sense of betrayal, hurt, or even surprise. He got to his feet and looked at Nina. She didn’t shift her eyes from the cloud-shape that so mesmerised her, but she nodded once, as though in a silent answer to his unspoken question.

  He put on his shoes, — each with more windows in it than the hut had — picked up his crutch, and stepped out. His blood suddenly boiled over and he thumped the trunk of the motorcar aggressively. Its engine purred loudly and it leaped forward a few feet before stopping again. The driver’s door opened and the uniformed chauffeur stepped out.

  He glared at Smast while opening the back door for him, obviously feeling humiliated and angry at having to serve a nobody like Smast. For some inexplicable reason, Smast, who should have reacted brashly, given his recent tendencies and behaviour, lowered his eyes to the ground humbly and got quietly into the motorcar. He was more-than-ready to fight with powerful people like Pintu, Raj, Darshan Singh, and-, and Sona — yes, Sona, too — at the slightest provocation, but he felt no urge to engage in any hostilities with people who were essentially like himself: unimportant, dependent, manipulated.

  They travelled in absolute silence. When they entered the mansion, the chauffeur stopped the car just short of the wooden bridge and motioned with his head for Smast to get out. The motorcar sped away even before he had gotten both his feet on the ground, nearly toppling him. He steadied himself and stood on the driveway for several minutes, waiting for someone to come along and do something, take him somewhere, finally mete out whatever was in store for him.

  Nobody came; nothing happened. He looked up at the strengthening sun and then at a spot of magnetic beauty fifty metres away. The Dream Palace sat dreamily by its pond, in the vast eastern gardens, calling him in a voice that Smast felt was his father’s. Smast got off the driveway and wended his way to the palace.

  He shuddered with a mix of pleasure and foreboding when he reached its threshold. He thanked heavens (and Sona) that the magnificent doors were unlocked today as well. He tiptoed into the palace timidly, his heartbeat quickening again with the memory of the indescribable moment when he had first seen Father yesterday. He shambled by the pool and went straight for the staircase leading up to the library.

  Once he climbed up to the overhanging gallery, with its panelled walls, its carved-wood balustrade, its upholstered armchairs, its ornamental lamps, and its bookcases (his breath shortened at seeing so many books in one place), time jumped forward the way the motorcar had in the morning. 7:30 A.M. and 12:00 noon appeared to have become conjoined twins.

  A noise downstairs made Smast stir out of his hypnotic cocoon of pleasure. He blinked in wonder as he stretched and looked about. The autumn sun was positioned directly above the stained-glass skylights, so that a rain of colours fell into the palace.

  He peered over the balustrade at the lower level. Two men were kneeling by the pool, while four more were carrying a large tub of water into the palace. The water in the tub was obviously hot; steam rose dancing from its surface.

  One man pulled a plug from a socket built in the pool’s bottom. The water currently inhabiting the pool protested with a loud groan and started to swirl dejectedly as the drain sucked it down.

  Once the pool was empty, the man holding the plug put it back in its place and the men with the tub started to pour its contents into the pool. Another, identical tub, with minuscule clouds of vapour rising out of it, was brought in after a few minutes. The third tub filled the pool.

  Smast watched the entire operation with amusement, which transformed into amazement in an instant. The youngest of the servants — a man with a severe cast in his left eye — looked up at Smast and beckoned him downstairs. />
  “It’s for you, your highness!” the man sneered. “A royal bath for your royally filthy person! Please come down before the water cools off and we are made donkeys again for your sake!” There was a lot of acerbity and bitterness in the man’s manner and voice, but the other servants didn’t seem to harbour any ill will towards Smast.

  They fidgeted and looked embarrassed. One of them whispered something in the young servant’s ear. The advice didn’t have the desired effect upon the man, whereupon a burly gardener grabbed his upper right arm and fairly dragged him out of the palace.

  All the others left, too; the last to go motioned toward the steaming pool. “The temperature is just right. Your change of clothes is over there, by the pillar,” he said kindly before turning and leaving, closing the door behind him.

  Smast came down, his surprise unabated, fearing that this was an elaborate prank devised by Pintu, or even Raj, with the aim to burn or drown (or both) Smast. He hobbled all the way to the front doors — the only point of entry into the palace — and bolted them from inside. He hastily curtained the three windows which afforded a direct view of the pool from the outside.

  He then went back to his ‘royal bath’ and examined the table by the pillar upon which his ‘change of clothes’ lay. His hands let go of his crutch and his fingers grasped at the new garments in sheer, uncharacteristic greed: the black trousers (immaculately tailored), the navy-blue shirt (so soft, so beautiful), the sleeveless, hand-knitted woollen sweater (a spectacular blue design on a black background). Even the undershirt, underpants, and socks were more elegant, more expensive than anything Smast had ever worn. And the shoes! They were brown, made of pure leather, exquisite! Before this moment, he hadn’t even known that a liking for footwear nestled somewhere in his heart.

  He believed he had never seen even Pintu attired in such fine clothes. He had definitely never seen Pintu wearing shoes half as grand as this pair. A flush of pleasure ran through Smast's entire being and then a shudder of disappointment shook him from head to foot.

  A certainty that all these treasures belonged to Pintu and had been kept there to make Smast slaver at the mouth took hold of his mind. Smast dropped to his knees frantically and put a unworthy-looking foot into one shoe to check the size. It fitted perfectly! He then lifted the shirt and stretched it against his shoulders — the shirt, too, was boy-sized, not buffalo-sized.

  When he carried out the by-now redundant operation of picking up the trousers to see if they, too, were meant for a thin boy and not for an obese demon, something heavy rolled out from the folds of the rich fabric and fell down with a clink. Smast bent down eagerly and lifted a black-leather wallet from the floor.

  He gasped when he opened the wallet’s fold and saw what looked like a sheaf of real notes in its currency compartment. His head started to spin. He placed everything back on the table, took the shoe off his foot, placed it gently besides its companion, and then got out of the rags covering his body.

  He tested the temperature of the water with the toes of his left foot. It was rather hot, but he stepped into the pool nonetheless. He grimaced as he lowered himself to a reclining position on the bottom of the pool, laying his head back against a cushioned groove designed to provide rest to the back of people’s skulls. In a short while, the long-resident aches, tensions, and soreness of his body started a mass exodus.

  Even as his physical relaxation deepened and expanded, his mental faculties narrowed to an intensely materialistic beam, focused entirely upon the regal things lying within his reach. As though hurt at Smast’s showering all his attention upon new things, his oldest associate, hunger, suddenly knocked loudly from inside his belly, but Smast managed to ignore it completely.

  Upstairs in the library, his head had been filled with the ingredients of his deepest-rooted, most-sought-after love: titles, cover images, author biographies, enticing promises of tantalising stories. He stopped thinking of even those boundless givers of pleasure, solace, courage, and strength. Unable to wait any longer, he climbed out of the still-deliciously warm water, dried himself with a huge towel laid upon another, humbler stool, and started to get into the dazzling articles of clothing with a mix of excitement and anxiety.

  Just as he was tying the laces of the second shoe in a clumsy, risky knot, someone knocked on the door. Smast yelped involuntarily and cast about for a place to hide, reacting as though he was without clothes, whereas he was now fully dressed, with the wondrous wallet in a back-pocket of his trousers and the awe-inspiring shoes on his feet. Those shoes. He didn’t want to sully them — he wanted to have them but not wear them, perhaps keep them on a shelf, away from dust-abundant floors and roads.

  He felt a profound shyness at the prospect of having to appear in this new get-up before others, and yet, and yet he didn’t want to get out of these soft-and-light-as-dreams things. He already saw everything he was wearing and carrying, including the money in the wallet, as irrevocably his. If anyone had suggested the word ‘charity’ at that point in time, Smast would have treated that person the way he had been treating Pintu recently.

  He looked about eagerly for a mirror, but couldn’t find one. If he could have seen his own image in a looking glass, he wouldn’t have immediately recognised the unbelievably dandified, nervous, somewhat good-looking boy staring back at him as himself. If he could have somehow observed the dominant-at-the-moment dimension of his mind, he would not have recognised it as something belonging to him.

  But he was merely a boy dazzled by a reality that had been an impossibility just three days back, a reality that was largely an impossibility even today, at that very moment. His power to process the surge of new emotions, desires, and hopes flooding his world was like a lone, leaky bucket employed to bail out a ship taking water in a storm.

  He combed his damp hair with his fingers and walked to the door without using his crutch for the first time since the pony-cart accident, marvelling at the perfect fit of everything that he was wearing — nothing was too large or too small, even though nobody had taken any measurements of his limbs, torso, and feet. He slid the bolt back with slightly quivering fingers and was relieved to see just Mohan Ram, and no one else, standing at the door, carrying a large tray laden with several dishes of food.

  The old man looked at the boy with bemused eyes for a long moment. Smast fidgeted uncomfortably, once more feeling as though, rather than being dressed like a prince for the first time in his life, he was utterly naked. Mohan Ram came in, placed the tray upon a table and left wordlessly, leaving Smast strangely dissatisfied, as though he were guilty of something despicable.

  Mohan Ram had always been their loyal friend, guide and saviour. He had undergone several hardships, had incurred Raj’s wrath on uncountable occasions, for Nina and Smast’s sake. To a great extent, they owed their lives to Mohan Ram. Smast revered the old man. He couldn’t bear to have Mohan Ram think lowly of him in any respect. Smast’s shoulders slumped, his head sank.

  “One day, you’ll be as handsome as your father,” Mohan Ram called from outside, perking Smast’s spirits up as abruptly as he had (inadvertently) deflated them. The old man reappeared in the doorway. “May you become as immensely great, too,” he added a blessing to his bit of praise and walked away.

  Smast ate alone, wishing Cat would come and join him today as well. He saw her through a window twice, but she didn’t come in. She didn’t so much as wave or nod to Smast. She carried her doll under her arm and her canvas bag was slung from one shoulder, but Cat was continually looking over her other shoulder, as though she were not a Cat after all, but a mouse that had a big, vicious tomcat after it.

  The said big, vicious tomcat also came into Smast’s field of view once, and it was all Smast could do to refrain from picking up his just-discarded crutch and have a go at that hated predator again.

  Smast finished his meal, alternately glancing at his elusive reflection on the kaleidoscopic surface of the pool and the accusatory pile of his old things. The pret
ty girl with the fading bruise mark below her left eye — the one who had spoken out openly against Pintu yesterday — came in quietly, bringing with her the much-anticipated platter of dessert.

  She placed the triad of laddoos, gulab-jamuns, and rasgullas before Smast and began to put his old, much-darned clothes and well-ventilated shoes in a sack. His heart dipped a little at seeing his things disappear just like that, destined for a garbage dump.

  He caught the girl looking at him sideways, appraising his transformation in awe. When their eyes met, she jerked her head away, smiled shyly, gathered the plates and bowls he had emptied of their delicious contents, and walked out of the palace, casting a parting glance towards him when she reached the door.

  Smast lifted the dessert-platter and went back up to the library, pausing at every window in an effort to coax its transparent panes to act as looking glasses. He managed to glean a vague idea of his appearance after consulting five separate windows of varying sizes, placed at different angles relative to the sun’s current position. By the time he ascended to the gallery, his need to stand before a true mirror was as acute as a physical hunger.

  He was a little puzzled, too. He believed he had seen an item of furniture with an inbuilt looking-glass near the pool yesterday. But he wasn’t quite sure about it, since, until an hour back, mirrors had held the same attraction and functionality for him as a shovelful of muck.