Angels of Dystopia

Angels of Dystopia

Kranthi Askani

APK Publishers

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Copyright © Kranthi Askani 2013

First edition: March 2013

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To Shravani

Kranthi Askani 1

Part One

2 Angels of Dystopia

Kranthi Askani 3

1

We picked our way among the rubble on the floor. I had

already stubbed my toe once in the evening so I was being extra

cautious now. Among the litter of empty cans, splinters of wood,

shards of broken glass and singed smelly rubber casings, I found

nothing of great use until now. The cone of light traipsed past the

squat outpost and was now making its way towards us. I ducked and

beckoned for her to duck as well. The moon was only a sliver in the

sky; around it, the sky was peppered with dandruff stars, smallish and

powdery as if the sky had receded away from us since last night.

When we reached the embankment, Mrunalini said she

wanted to rest for a while. So we chose a banyan tree and flanked our

backs to it. They won’t notice that she was with me until dawn so it

was not a bad choice to get some rest. The cone of light from the

panopticon scudded over the wild shrubbery on either sides of the

embankment, skulked here and there briefly as if the man behind it

suspected a break in, or a break out.

Mrunalini was snoring lightly and a strand of her long hair

came loose and lounged on her cheek, slicked by the wet dribble of

her beady sweat. Through the rushes, I think I noticed some

movement and was about to alert her when the creature showed itself

out. It was a cat; it purred and meowed, assessed us both as if it were

asking us to explain ourselves. In the dark, earth seemed to have

acquired a specter of death, as if we were thrown back into the age of

primitives. All the creatures seemed to sense it too. There was no

hesitancy in the cat’s prowling. To the right of the embankment, water

lolled and licked the rocks of the bank and made the familiar burbling


sound. I hitched myself closer to her and with my back slumped

against the tree I dozed off for a while myself.

Mrunalini woke me up and hastily collected her scarf which

had slithered down. She said the panopticon light seemed to have

spotted them. She said she even heard the sound of shuffling feet.

Now, we picked our way through the verdure; under the sliver of

moon, with very little light, there was no way of telling if we had

stepped on a snake or a twig. Either ways, there was no going back.

So, we waddled forward, through knee deep wild shrubbery that

drummed our denim-swaddled feet.

The sound of water licking gave way to roar of a swilling

stream. This could only have meant that we neared the end of the

embankment. Now, it was time for us to consult our maps. From my

pocket, I retrieved the pencil torch and pointed on the splayed map

before me. Mrunalini squatted beside me and peered closer at the

map. The map and its feverish lines of yellow twining with blue, here

thick and here thin, circumambulating a blob or a disc on their way…

By now, the din of the water’s spume filled our ears and we crouched

low to feel the walls of the bridge that was humming with all the

water barreling through it.

We crawled down the muddy slant slowly holding onto the

tufts of grass with our fingers. Mrunalini said she was scared. I told

her it was alright but the truth was it was not alright. Why, the clumps

of grass were wet, weren’t they? Under us, the small pellets of rock

and mud made a rustling sound as they were loosed from the top soil

under out feet and haunches. As if to make matters worse, I noticed

the shifting shafts of torch-lights nearing us from where we had come

running. It was hard to make out but I knew we were not very far

from the iron railing that was clamped astride the bridge. Three shafts

of light danced about behind us as we waded in the dark, the roar of

the gushing water to our left and the shuddering iron lattice under us.

Once on the other side, I imagined it would be easy to climb

up and vamoose into the dark. But, it was a steep climb and the

cement stairs were chipped so badly it was difficult to tell in the dark

if we were veering toward the edge or away from it. And now, as if

this was not enough, the cat we had met on our way, slinked past us,

easily, far too easily. Mrunalini said we should follow the cat and was

Kranthi Askani 5

rising up to her feet, suddenly confident, to let her fingers loose from

the clumps of grass around her. The next moment, she staggered and

the loose soil rustled as it collapsed under her feet.

They say, the dark has made us all blind but other senses were

refined. I was willing to accept this logic, for now I had caught her

wrist reflexively and dragged her closer to me. This was not as easy as

it sounds. I had my feet dug into shallow tufts of grass so I could haul

her up. Over the incline, the cat was mewling as if to pity us. Aastha,

she said, staring into my eyes, she could have died. I was still holding

her hand; it felt slender and limp. She said she was very thankful. The

dance of torch lights on the other end of the bridge caught her eye and

she withdrew her hand. Now, we noticed one of the lights making a

tumbling fall and joining the dark under the dam. The other two lights

were now pointing to where the first one had disappeared. We felt

sorry for them.

On the map, I made a mental note of which way to pick in the

dead of the dark. Above us, the dandruff-sky groaned and we knew it

was going to shower any time now. Wind was whipping her scarf and

the tails of her scarf fanned out behind her like two tongues and licked

my face. The smooth silk of her scarf calmed me and it felt almost

romantic. If I could dispense the thought that we were running away

from the facility and that one of the guards might have fallen into the

water and died in the chase… if only, I could do that. I had managed

to steal a thick suede jacket on my way out which I was wearing over

a flannel shirt. The boots were hard-soled and the denim jeans quite

stiff. She managed to steal an old leather jacket the collars of which

she unclipped presently and raised a hood to cover her head. Her

shoes were womanly but sturdy enough for treading the forest and the

tapered jeans accentuated her haunches, but all the same they were

good for the trip we were on.

How long has it been since we last saw the sun? Six years in

total. At first, the sky was dull amber and everyone thought it was an

eclipse. But soon, it dawned on us that there was something else up

there in the sky, holding the sun away from us.

Mrunalini said she found something. What was it? A

compound wall, mossed and soppy… I helped her climb the wall. The

cat skulked past us, sniggered at us, and landed on the other side of


the wall with ease. Egged by this, I heaved myself up audaciously but

lost footing and flopped in the mud. I dusted myself up and Mrunalini

helped me climb pulling from above. From the height of the wall, it

felt alien to be out there, in the verdure. But we knew there was going

to be no distinction at all. Sooner or later, it would all be over; I can

already see the distinction between us, higher apes, and the rest of the

species, blurring.

Our feet were ankle-deep soused in the dry leaves. I may have

stepped on something slippery, for I keeled and steadied myself on

Mrunalini’s shoulders. She giggled and I said I was sorry. We

followed the jagged rows of bricks that took us into the bungalow. We

were not surprised to find the place empty. We found a room upstairs

where we smoothed the quilt mattresses and slumped on them. She

said we should rest for the night. I consulted my watch and it was

already seven in the morning. What was night and what was day when

there was no sun. She knew it too, and so did the cat. It lay behind the

door, making a curl of its body and locking its paws inside the

warmth. Aastha, she said, looking at me (I supposed, for it was too

dark in the room anyway), what would they do to us if they found us?

I said they would put us back in the prison, and perhaps make an

example of us for everyone.

Before sleeping, I wondered if I would wake up and find

myself alone. We had met accidentally earlier that day. What were the

odds, I thought, when I saw her? What were the odds that two

prisoners chose the same time of the same day to escape? But, there

we were, and we soon acknowledged each other’s subterfuge. There

was not much to be said. We merely exchanged our names and milled

about the barbed fence for the exit.

In the morning (for it was morning by my watch), I woke up

and found her still asleep, with her knees plated close to her chest.

Like a baby. It was about eleven in the morning and my stomach was

rumbling. The planet was now dead for the sun, for now the planet

was plagued with seething dark. When was the last time I saw a

cumulus cloud in the sky? When was the last time I saw a cloud and

thought, oh! I can see the face of a man in it. The moon seemed to

have traversed the length of the sky and settled somewhere in the west

now. What was east and what was west now? So much of our

Kranthi Askani 7

planetary life had been guided by the soupy warmth of the sun that

now we seem utterly at loss. It was as though this was all just a game

we were playing. The feeling was that of a child’s play. I was more

relaxed and oblivious. I can’t seem to be bothered with whatever the

alien mass that was hovering above the planet. There were so many

possibilities. Was there life on that heavenly body? Would someone

twirl a tasseled rope onto our planet and crawl down in the night. Oh!

There I go again, trying vainly to differentiate between day and night.

Mrunalini shifted in her sleep. She was the younger one. She

must be in her early twenties. I am thirty two but I feel strong,

stronger than her in any case. Aastha, she said and I looked at her. She

had very large eyes, her chin was a taper, and the cheeks plum. There

were many who told me they liked my facial proportions. But that was

in the past. The sound of mewling cat caught my attention and I

noticed our feline friend. It had made a place for itself in a corner by a

window ledge. It got to its feet and stretched as cats do when they

know they are being watched. Outside, the nocturnal creatures were

making tired sounds; the chirr of crickets petered now and the dragon

flies whirred up and down to no avail. The leaves from an

overhanging bough were beating against the window. I got up to my

knees and waded close to the window. With my elbows planted on the

sill, I watched whatever I could from inside. I could only see the

fireflies that scrawled patterns of glowing light in the dark. But that

was just a trick of the mind. Mrunalini hitched herself closer to me

and she was pointing to the fireflies. She said our mind was too slow

to process the information. The fireflies did not scrawl lines of light

with their tails. No, their tails glowed and that was that. She seemed to

know more that I had imagined she would. I pursed my lips and

frowned. I don’t think you can pick up facial features in the dark but

she seemed to have done that. She said she was a student of science.

Before she was pitched like a pea pod into the facility, she was a

student of science.

I asked her why the nocturnal creatures had still not come to

terms with the miasma of the dark on the planet. She thought they did.

But, the successive generations were still learning to adapt to this new

calm and new freedom. Imagine you are naturally selected by

evolution to rummage in the dark for food and sex but burrow


yourself between blades of grass for the rest of the day. Now,

imagine, she said, that your nights are stretched out and the days

robbed from you.

But the species of the planet had enough time. Six years is a

long time, I said. To this, she said something about how evolution was

gradual and incremental and so painfully slow. I nodded but I don’t

think she picked that up, for she was still yapping about the scientific

details of evolution. I held the flat of my palm to her lips when I saw

the twin shafts of torch lights doing their merry dance in the verdure.

Their lights caught the tip of the compound wall and I saw the fluff of

green on it. Six years is a long time, I thought. For plants to grow

unheedingly, without intervention from man, six years was a long

time. And, animals too, they were plenty of those these days.

Mrunalini peeled my palm from her lips and said we ought to

get moving. She had her arms wrapped tight before her, like an

obedient child. I bit my finger nails as I do unconsciously when I am

in deep thought. She grabbed her shoes and slipped them on. She

tossed my sturdy boots at me and I was twiddling with the knot of one

of the shoe, still contemplating what our next move ought to be. I said

we could stay here, in this house. She said, everyone was either dead

or had turned into a savage by now. The specter of death was a good

enough excuse for people to dredge up their reptilian instincts and kill

each other. Yes, I knew that. But surely, there had to be a scientific

way of protecting what little sanity there was in humans. We were

whispering by now. She said, yes, of course. I knew what she meant.

The facility was the scientific answer. But it was madness. The

facility was turning us all into mechanized machines for copulating.

Yes, she said. She did agree with me that it was not the best solution.

But, that was all they could muster up at the time.

The dancing shafts of light receded into the darkness. For

now, we were alright. She said the whole idea of hoarding up the most

attractive women for future seemed like a decent idea five years ago.

Why, people were barbaric out there in the streets. In the dark, we had

lost all our rationality as though we were only pretending to be

rational beings in the first place. Plunged into darkness, the people of

the planet had no reason to continue being human. What was our

future? No one knew for certain. Of course, the scientific clan tried to

Kranthi Askani 9

muster up courage; they said they knew what this alien mass in space

was. But reports of astronauts failing to return from their expeditions

from their tour to this alien mass (what should it be called: an alien

planet?) spawned a whole set of sub cultures that believed in fatal

death. At first the governments thought they could deal with the

situation. But as days passed and anarchy overwhelmed constructive

thought, it was all over.

I was a mere professor of English literature before the time I

spent at the institution. The scientific details evaded me most of the

time. Mrunalini said we were safe for the time being. Yes, I nodded.

But in the dark, what are nods? In the dark, what are emotions? You

could as well have your eyes welled with tears and in a minute later,

your cheeks pawed with tears. But no one would notice you. That was

dark to me. I think it allowed people to isolate themselves, to shroud

themselves in solitude. Our electricity lasted for little over half a year

I think. With everyone vandalizing everything, there was little scope

for reason in the public minds. When I consider all of this, I agree the

whole idea of setting up the facility sounded logical.

But, five years in the institution and I have had it. We were

certainly not the first ones to escape; there were others but they never

returned to tell their tales so I am assuming they found a home in the

dark. How many facilities were out there? How many people were left

over on the planet? These are the questions that plagued my mind

mostly in those early days. When I heard that the government had set

up a facility which recruited attractive young women and protected

them from the barbaric brutes outside, I knew what I had to do. But

that was half a decade ago. I have tried to escape from the facility

twice in the past. Once I got till the main gate when I was thwacked in

my head with a torch and woke up with a head band in the morning

(Ah, there I go again, trying to assert my mornings and nights! What a

dumb thing to do).

In the dark, we picked our way gropingly lest we stepped on a

sniffing snake or a sleepy wolf, or worse a human. One must be weary

of the humans now. If you have lived out here in the dark for so long,

chances are you would have turned into something inhuman. But,

why, one would ask, were we running away from the facility, and

more importantly, into death and its paraphernalia. Why else? It was


because we lost our sap, we feel like pitted grounds. We feel like the

slugs that coughed green blood under a trampling foot. We were, in

short, mechanized pods on a pair of limbs that carried all the

equipment that was necessary to procreate. We were valued for our

capacity to copulate and populate the planet in the future. But

increasingly, no one believed in future. I think, even the women

behind the whole idea of a facility lost their resolve.

Mrunalini said she found a locked room. Should we price it

open? Yes, sure, why not. So, there we were, pounding the rusted lock

with the stub end of a rock. The cat was watching us from the landing

where it sat curled up as always. Outside, the sound of soughing of

trees paused and picked up again, this time a little too raucous. I

dropped the stone to a side and pushed the door open. Mrunalini thrust

the pencil torch into my hand. In a minute, we were soused in stench.

It was unmistakable. This was the stench of death. Why were we

walking into it? Mrunalini held back while I made my way inside. The

toe end of my shoe caught a crack in the tile and I nearly tripped.

Slowly, one by one, the surfaces of objects turned rigid and solid.

Through the haze of spider webs, my eyes caught the reflection, a

grainy one, of the woman holding a slender shaft of light in her hand.

I straightened myself and with the flat of my right hand, wiped the

face of the mirror and regarded my face with absolute calm. It had

been over half a decade since I saw myself in a mirror. There were no

mirrors in the facility.

It was a dead man’s body; skull and bones. Termites and ants

had gouged through his skeleton sprawled on the floor. There was a

bottle by his side, the label of which I could not read. Whatever was

inside it had obviously dried and left a urine-coloured stain. Over his

skull was a larder like the ones you find in the kitchen. In it, I found

gunny sacks emptied of grains they once contained. The wood slats

and the latticed doors of the larder were riddled brutally by the

crawling mandibles-brandishing species. Lice, variegated in sizes,

seemed to live in harmony with cockroaches. There were some glass

jars with metal lids that were intact. But whatever was inside it

seemed suppurated and green-slime caked, puffed up even. Food was

aplenty in this room; that was for sure.

Kranthi Askani 11

Outside, Mrunalini was petting the cat. Both turned their

heads and eyed me seriously when I kicked the heel of my shoe into

the floor to get rid of the insects that had crawled up my denims. I

stamped my feet on the cracked floorboards but it was hard to tell if I

got rid of every one of those crawling species. Mrunalini nestled the

cat in her lap and was stroking its mane. Thanks to the broken

window sashes and the torches we had with us, we could at least see

each other. Otherwise, it would have felt like we were marooned and

on the bed of ocean living in harmony with the creatures that scuttled

and scrawled in the sand.

I dropped my torch in the dark and was groping for it at my

feet. When the light of her pencil torch caught my eyes, I felt exposed

like a rabbit in its burrow. She desultorily held the light about my eyes

for a while as if she was assessing the rest of me. With my eyes

blinded with light, I could not see the person behind the source of this

lancing light. I said I was not enjoying this. She was speaking to her

cat as if it was her little sister and laughing at my predicament.

We, three of us including the cat, climbed the stairs to the

attic of this empty house. Here, the place was caked with bird

droppings and smelt strongly of bats’ urine. Mrunalini yelped when

the cat slithered out of the folds of her hands to the ground and into

the dead of the dark downstairs. She flicked her torch light in the dark

and called after the car but it had disappeared. Only the distant sounds

of a presence under us, nothing substantial to locate.

There was fleece all over the room, sort of whitish fleece.

Perhaps a dog’s! That explains the cat’s behaviour, I thought. Here,

we found books, a large pile of them, infested with moths and termites

of course. The pages of some of the books were intact, rest yellowed,

and still others chewed with damp and peppered with small gluey

eggs. Mosquitoes were making it a lot difficult to continue our

investigation of the home. So we thought it would be nice to simply

sit somewhere on the landing that was not caked with droppings or

stenciled with the amazing variety of small eggs. Mrunalini said she

was hungry. Yes, of course, I was hungry too. I said, let us eat the cat.

At this, she growled at me. I said I was sorry.

A sharp ache rose up inside me and seemed to grip my heart.

It was time to take the pills. We had enough of those stuffed in our


jacket pockets. But there was no water to wash them into our gullets.

We tried our best in sucking them up with our spit. The pain in my

chest subsided but I noticed that my crapulent stomach was cackling

and I cringed, for now the pain resumed and I dropped to my knees.

Mrunalini hunkered down beside me and asked where it hurt. I said it

was my stomach. She patted the lapels of her jacket and produced a

small bottle of pink pills. She gave me one and said it will take a

while but the pain would eventually subside.

It did, but a good two hours later. What was it? I asked. She

said she was a doctor back in the facility and knew everything about

the pills. At first, I thought she was only joking. Who could have

thought the facility was so repulsive that even doctors were running

away from it.

The high ceiling of the hall where the spiral staircase led up to

the floor above was mossed with tendrils. Green, like the cancerous

cells, spread its fangs all over the house, mossing a window slat here

and a ventilator shaft there. Our torches were dimmed and we killed

them. Now, we sat in the dark, our backs resting on the peeled wall

that felt damp. We asked each other if it was a mistake. After all, we

were fed well in the facility. No, she said, it was unbearable. She

could not have taken it anymore. What did she think would have

happened to all those poor things who had escaped before us? There

was a silence now between us. She thought for a long time and said it

was highly improbable to think they would have lived at all. What did

she mean? Aastha, she said, as if my name was a sibilant cry issued

from the depths of her heart.

We were both shook from our calm endearing discussion with

a tintinnabulating sound from above. It seemed to be issuing from the

attic. The cat came screeching and jumped into Mrunalini’s lap. We

flicked our index fingers on the shaft of our torch lights and off we

went, a little tremulously, toward the origin of the sound. My foot

nudged a bottle and it rolled on the muddy tiles coming to a halt in a

crack. The cat seemed to have regained its strength, for now it jumped

to its feet and was whining. I scanned the surroundings; mostly spider

webbed as if the spiders were at work right now, right then, as if

within an eye blink the web would grow nearer. So, I fixed my gaze

on the lattices and laces of the minute art of spider’s trapezes. I could

Kranthi Askani 13

not wash the image of spider web nearing me, closing on me, with the

blink of an eye.

Mrunalini and the cat were at the door and I was still on the

landing where I was digging my shoe into the stiffened corpse of a rat.

The stench of bat’s urine greeted us for a second time as she threw the

doors open. The tintinnabulating sound pulsed in my ears as the attic

doors creaked open. Mrunalini darted inside and quelled the sound. It

could have just been an alarm clock. But it amazed me how an alarm

clock could have stayed in working condition after all these years.

Wasn’t it mossed? Did the termites not like the taste of the clock? I

could see the lancing dance of her torch light shaft in the dark. She

seemed to be flicking her torch like a child does in the dark, exploring

the amazing things one could do with light in the dark.

I heard the cat screech and I think I even heard a muffled

squeal. Now, the shaft of light straightened and cast strictly through

the attic door into the dark, along the floor. Mrunalini, I called. No

response. The hand holding the torch seemed to have grazed the floor.

Something was not right. Was there someone else in here? Now, the

empty high-ceilinged house echoed with the absence of the sound. It

felt like I was robbed off my ability to hear sounds. So utterly calm,

capricious too, for I thought there was someone behind this. On the

landing, I cowered so my back would chafe the mossy wall as if moss

was all I could trust in this house. Now, I climbed slowly, my shoes

finding for the cracks in tiles for firm grip. Mrunalini, I called again.

Whatever happened to the cat? And, then, there was a knock on my

head and ground rose up to meet my cheek.

I felt lifted up by two pairs of hands. I may have heard the

cacophonous blabbering which I could not quite make out. My head

was dizzy and my neck slack like a dog’s tongue. Whoever was

hauling me obviously was not making a good job at it, for they

knocked my shoes off in the first place. And they banged my head

into the blunt edge of a table as they heaved me up and planted me

over it. I felt the hands groping me, feeling me as if this was a bizarre

creature from an alien planet that had never seen a human before. The

searching hands patted my bosom and unzipped my jacket. Now, the

hands slipped inside and reached for the inside pocket. My pills, they

were after my pills…


When I woke up with my head humming, I reached for the

source of irritation and pain to find that a cloth was tied on my head.

Of course, this cloth was now stiff, caked with my blood. My hands

quested for the torch and I couldn’t find it. Whoever the abductors

were, they relieved us of our travel kit! Where was Mrunalini? I didn’t

want to alert the abductors so I groped in the darkness with my

forearms flailing.

Something else was going on at the same time. It took me a

while to realize that I was being ferried somewhere. It was the din of

the jeep, like the silent rumble of something moving inside me. In the

dark, I felt the flat of my palms chafe against the tarpaulin. It occurred

to me that I should be shrieking but I was calm. It must have been the

sedative. It dulled and lulled me. We were on a flat road and going at

a steady speed. This almost felt like the old times when you could just

climb into your vehicle and hit the road. Mrunalini was lounging at

my feet. She was breathing alright and came to senses when I drubbed

my hand on her heart. She yelped and squealed at me. I told her what I

thought was going on. She said she was scared. Yes me too. But I told

her it was alright, nothing to worry.

I searched with my hands on the floor for a weapon of some

kind. There was nothing on the floor save for Mrunalini’s torn scarf.

The jeep now crunched gravel under it as it keeled to a side. And then,

a loud bang on the metallic top landed us both cheek first on the floor

and my already sobbing head developed a terrifying ache. I woke up

to find a lattice of variegated colours dancing in the pupils of my eyes.

Blood dribbled down my cheek, daubed my hair on its way,

circumnavigated the curlicue of my ear and now glistered in the

flames of torch on my face. They spoke but it was all a distant

mumble in my ears. I felt curled up inside me. I felt as though my

body was slithering down, melting away from me. Hands held me,

heaved me up for a second time in the day. And I totally blacked out.

When I awoke, there was light in the room. The shimmer of

yellowing light seen through drugged eyes made me feel like I was

being hosed down the intestines of a very large creature, its walls

tepid. The walls around me seemed to susurrate as if I was a wasp

slurring into darkness through the mouth of a humungous polythene

bag. My eyes were heavy and I was laid supine on the floor. I could

Kranthi Askani 15

feel the strange pressure of the floor on my back, as if I was being

lifted and dropped, buoyed even. It was as though I had

metamorphosed into an insect that lodges itself on the hump of a

camel’s back as the tall animal hooves across the desert.

My eyes adjusted to the light around me and I noticed the

stalactites on the roof, sharp, tapered and crowded like the inverted

clumps of grass. The source of light, a lantern, I noticed was being

drummed by moths. A tall and domineering woman jumped to her

feet when she noticed my glazed eyes set on her. As she dashed

outside, I noticed how her form melted into the dark, assimilated, like

a creamy spool in dark coffee.

She returned, equipped with a satchel which she unzipped and

upended before me as she kneeled, her billowing skirts ballooning

about her shins, rustling... I noticed her eyebrows met in the middle

making her look as if she was glowering at me. With great effort I

parted my dry lips and she pressed a sweetened cap of bottle to my

lips. I sucked as best as I could. She retrieved a syringe, tapped the

needle with her index finger and fed it to my sleeve. My vision

dimmed and I felt becalmed. I wanted to ask her about Mrunalini. But

she was gone and so was I.

The wick of the lantern was dithering and I was kneeling by

its side, cupping my hands to steady it, warm it and lift it as if the

flame was a mere putty thing I could lift in my hands. I raised my

hands to my lips and produced my tongue to lick the putty flame,

dollop by dollop, until I had eaten the whole. Now, inside me, the

flame multiplied like a great cornucopia of soughing leaves flushing

me with that yellow haze. I felt warm, I felt as if I was burning from

inside. Desert sand whipped up like a cobra hood and slapped me with

a pattering force that prickled my skin. And then, there was the sting

on my sleeve again. Something moved inside me, a force that stamped

its feet on the conflagration inside me, dousing the flames on its way.

Here my heart, there my head; fingers to toes; instep to forehead… I

woke up and there she was, the eyebrow girl. She was sliding the

syringe into her kit and before repairing to the dark behind her, she

met my gaze once and off she was gone. My head was dizzy but the

prickling sensation had left me as if it was a worm feeding on me.


The smell of kerosene awoke me. The lantern was leaking and

in the pool of kerosene around it, I noticed the multiplied reflections

of the flames reaching up to the rims of the spill and beyond. Wisps of

smoke trickled into the shimmer above the lantern, rose and rose until

they joined the dark. I elbowed myself up, the ground under me was

gritty and it pricked the scabs of my wounds to send shivers of pain

about. Where was the eyebrow girl, I thought as I blubbered back to

the ground, my muscles curling up under my weight. Blood pulsed in

my ears as if it wanted to be relieved, as if it felt trapped inside me

just as I felt trapped in here. The smoke slowly filled the cavernous pit

and I was nearly coughing when the girl darted inside and pinched the

flame between her fingers killing it. Now, we were thrown into the

dark again.

I parted my cracked lips and whined pitifully, my voice barely

spilling out of me. The girl replaced the old lantern with a new one.

As she carried the lamp in her hands, at the level of her bosom, the

light like a halo round her head, I wondered if she was an angel. When

she leaned before me and loosed the strap of the satchel, I managed to

slip my hand out and hold her wrist. The shock of my agility caused

her to drop the syringe. She cursed under her breath and lifted the

sleeve of my blouse to inject. But I objected to it, my weak,

whimpering crying seemed to bemuse her, for now she paused and

sighed.

Where was I? I asked. To this, she said we were in an

underground facility where women were being taken care of.

Apparently, men were ferrying us down to their strongholds when the

women found us and saved us from those brutes. What did they do

with Mrunalini? She was being treated as well.

It went on and on like this for a while. While I was

recuperating, the eyebrow girl took great care of me. Slowly I gained

the energy to elbow myself up and stake my back against the bumpy

wall. When I met Mrunalini I had this image of hers in my mind:

bandaged head, scabbed knees and crippled, weak slug-like thing.

But, she was doing quite well. In fact, she said she joined these

women in their quotidian activities which included waking up early in

the morning and going out to protect other women like us. Surely,

they must have heard about the government facilities, I asked. Yes, an

Kranthi Askani 17

attack was orchestrated three times in the past and on all the three

occasions they could not even get past the main gate. So, currently,

the army of women was planning on something archaic. They were

hoping to infiltrate the facility with one of them. Here is where we

figured in. They wanted us to go back into the facility so this army

here would be able to break through the fortress and make merry.

I told Mrunalini it was not a good idea. At this, she shushed

me and grabbed my arm furtively, draping our hands with the

flounces of her scarf. She said yes, she was aware of that. But, we

were hostages here. All this time, I thought I was being taken care of

but tuned out they had a plan for us.

It was an underground cavern of some sort; lanterns were

propped on pitted ledges where I could make out the slivers of spent

wax stuck here and there. The stalactites of the roof tinkled as if all

our stars of the sky were mere ends of long tapered stalactites too.

They swaddled me up in a puffed up suit in the room when I was

recuperating. Now, they gave me a gown which had a sash to tie

round the waist and two eye-hooks to button the front. The bodice was

frilled and the sleeves three-quarters. Mrunalini seemed utterly busy

with whatever it was she was doing. I was left alone in the nocturnal

wilderness peppered with hazy yellow lights. What surprised me was

the fact that there were no ants, termites or rats in this place. I wanted

to whisk my hand when it was caught; I wanted to slap a woman or

two, for I was curious and there seemed to be nobody giving me the

answers.

I met the eyebrow girl and demanded for her to give me

answers. She said I would have to wait, for the queen of this cavern

had gone out on an expedition. It would be a day or two before she

returned. Would I be so kind as to be patient until then? Yes, sure, so I

waited like an irate teenager wanting to thwack her lover when he got

here. When I was introduced to the queen I felt a pang of joy followed

by a desire to twiddle her scarlet rings of hair. It was a short woman

with fairly short features. Her bosom was meager and when I asked

Mrunalini, she said the queen was only nineteen. Oh, nineteen and a

queen! Six years of darkness and this is what women were up to?

She was treading with a child-like gait from the jeep she

climbed out of. Under the arched proscenium of our cavern, she


paused perhaps to collect her thoughts and leaned on the heels of her

feet as if to smell something in the air. Far in the horizon over her

shoulders, sky groaned and a sharp line of lightning reared down to hit

the ground under it. Now the sound reached us and I looked at the

queen’s pale features: blunt nose, smallish eyes, a prominent mouth

with far too plum lips, and a forehead that looked angry for it was

wrinkled all the time. The women parted to let the queen in. Now, we

filed in behind her to snake into the cavern’s deep lodge. Mrunalini

was behind me in the line. She made a clutch at my dress’s sash and

twiddled with it nervously.

Before going inside, I noticed the rows of jeeps outside. Some

of them had torn tarpaulins and others pretty much new. I noticed the

tattered trolley of a jeep, a dented one and knew from instinct it was

the one we were being ferried in. Thank goodness, I thought. Another

deep gash streak of white lanced the air above us and like rabbits we

cinched the pleats of our gowns and hurried down the cavernous pit.

Glumly, we stepped behind the next one’s wet foot print, for now it

had started drizzling outside and some of the water made runnels and

reached the pit.

I think a couple of them slipped and landed flat on their

haunches inviting laughter that rippled about in a wave and gripped

everyone. Behind us, the sky was dribbling and before us the queen

had paused in her gait. She was randomly selecting girls for errands to

run. What was a girl in her teens doing playing queen and all? Why

wasn’t anyone asking and why was I so glum and preoccupied? I

think it had to do with my memories of a bright white day: blue sea of

a sky and scudded milky white clouds sailing in it… And what do we

have today? The dark and its gothic trappings…

Mrunalini said she was being queasy. She had grown a little

leaner since we got here. I imagined I was leaner myself but it was

difficult to tell. The queen now whipped her pleated gown and

climbed up the pulpit where she sat on a chopping wood block, her

hands clasping the head as if in despair. All around us was silence.

The usual twittering chirpiness of Mrunalini was quelled too. She was

silent, cowering into the flounces of my gown. The queen jumped to

her feet and sashayed closer to the rank of women who were

crouching in the front row. She said the last week was a particularly

Kranthi Askani 19

bad one for not only did they lose some of the soldiers but also lost

their hold on the swilling waters of the river. Men were everywhere,

she said. Silence!

And some more silence; it had now stretched between us like

a paper-thin flake which would tear any moment now. Someone in the

very end raised her voice to declare that they had been able to

overpower a men’s jeep and save two sisters. At this, the women

around us began nudging and poking at us. Mrunalini curled up

behind me unwilling to move. The queen wanted to see us so we

climbed up the stairs of the pulpit. She reached for my hand and said I

was fortunate. I thanked her. It was brief and then we were ushered

down.

Later, we took our share of pills, stuffed them in the inside

pockets of our gown lapels and trudged past the nervous ones, past the

sibilant cries and the staccato rages, to our own little place. Here, we

both shared a quilt mattress spread-eagled on a sort of military bunk

bed that croaked when one of us shifted our weight in the sleep.

Mrunalini said the queen was a joke. I shushed her. This was

obviously not a feeling that was shared by many so it was prudent to

keep mum until we understood the enormity of this life in a cavern.

In the night, before the fumes of sleep asphyxiated me, I let

my mind wander into the past, the unassailable past at the government

facility. That first week, I can still see it in my eyes. They gave me a

pretty saree to wear and shooed me into a room full of strangers. All

the women glared at me as if I were after their share of pie lessening it

by a degree with my presence there.

I sat with my elbow flat on the puckered duvet of my cot and

pinched the leaves of the potted plants. The window looked out into a

garden where crickets chirred and the panopticon lights danced. The

grass blades remained more or less aslant and always beady. If I

strained my neck I could see the vaulted entrance, its high peeled

surface where a lonely bulb hovered, and under it, the guards going

round and round sharing a cigarette and wringing hands and gossiping

most of the time.

One of the women came up to me and sat by my side. I met

her gaze and smiled, but the woman – with a long brow and chignon


hair – gave me the look of amusement and said it was going to be

tough in here. And it indeed was. But I kept telling myself it was

better than being out there where men had turned into savages. One of

the things about the government facility was that it was always fully

lit and it struck me odd that there should be electricity here when the

world outside was plunged into darkness and lawlessness prevailed.

Women ran the whole place so it was no wonder that you saw

women everywhere you went. The morning after my first night which

I spent mostly sleeplessly (this I am sure happens all the time in a new

place), I seem to have fallen asleep at the brink of dawn. But again,

what was dawn? There was no sun. Anyway, in the morning, we were

all paraded to the communal bathing rooms where we had to slip out

of our sarees and fold them up before stacking into the bathroom

cupboard. It was a pigeonhole setup of some sort and my initials were

already in place. We were made to stand in a row along the damp

smelling wall which was clamped with a large pipe. This pipe had

vents which sprung open to swill cold water that numbed one’s senses

in less than a minute. The women were all less than thirty years old

and in good health I thought. Most had long hair that slickly stuck to

their backs and made them look like sea undines. There was just one

bar of rationed soap and we had to take it back with us. My own soap

slithered on more than two occasions and I dropped to my knees to

pick the slippery thing in my hands. Like a gelatinous fish, the soap

went snorkeling away in the running water on the floor and I was

acutely aware of my rear exposed to the wardens and other women.

The wardens were all suited up military-like, their hair pinned

up tightly into buns and their waists belted. Slung on their shoulders

were mikes into which they spoke every now and then. These mikes

crackled and hissed all the time, a sound that was to become the

background of life in the facility. Denuded of our clothes, every day,

in the shower, we puckered, drawing our knees and hands together not

so much as to shield our glistering nakedness but the teeth-chattering

cold we were subjected to. Why can’t they heat the water, I once

asked a woman next to me in the line; she regarded me with her large

eyes and said nothing.

We were mostly fed on pills and although I felt queasy in the

beginning I got used to them later. After a while, the grilled windows

Kranthi Askani 21

did not bother me and the fenced compound was an irritant that I

could dispense from my mind. I made very few friends in the first

month. The wardens kept their watch on us always and there were

cases when their sticks landed blows on many a woman. In the

shower, we would at times notice the scars on the back and our eyes

would meet briefly but there was nothing to say.

The butterfly-winged clock on the wall before me threw the

haze of our room into a quiver and sleep lifted of our eyes. I woke up,

stretched myself like a purring cat and staggered to the window, my

eyes still whorled up, as if I was expecting the fringe of sun rising in

the horizon. But there it was, the night in all its desultory makings still

moored to the ground, never lifted up, like a forgotten umbrella on the

floor. That morning, the woman next to me never woke up again.

They said she suffered a heart attack but we gnawed at each other’s

ears, for we thought there was more to it. For some time, the gloom of

the death was upon us but soon the veil was lifted up and we felt

exposed again.

Finally, the day had come for me to perform my task. I felt

like a dithering shadow of the flame, my resolve not withholding and

a wisp of shame reared up into me as if a hand had been squeezing my

heart from within. I felt ashamed of myself and I hoped for a heart

attack that would put me away. Two wardens came to pick me up and

I noticed how all the women in our hall, out of deference as if for the

dead, kept mum and dropped their heads into the rift of their drawn up

knees as if to squish their heads in fury. The wardens, very

businesslike, between them, wadded me up the staircase where my

eyes caught the reflection of light on the burnished handrail. On the

stairwell, I think I heard the house hiss and croak to admit me into its

belly as if was a foreign thing until now but now being admitted.

The wardens in their military uniform, the lapels badged and

buckled under the swell of their bosom; the rims of their collars

trimmed with silver; hair pins like thumbtacks on a round globe… I

let them carry me into the shower, and I was going to let them bare

me to the cold sprightful chill of the water. But here I was wrong, for

now they had a warm bath prepared for me. The enamel of the bathtub

into which I was carried had the curious sheen of grey green on its

mouth. One of the women working there gathered the frills of her


skirts and cinched them up between her thighs as she neared the tub

and offered to scrub me clean. I said I would manage but the wardens

were far too keen on my cleanliness so I had to let the poor thing

scrub me up and down. Like a queen, I raised one leg after another to

plant them up on the rim of the tub while the woman soaped, scuffed

and scoured me as if I was a creature they had pried out from

somewhere far too uncouth. I felt tickled of course; the gentle touch of

foreign finger tips on my pale skin was not easy to accept. The

woman was far too genial I thought, for she spryly toweled me, dried

me and powdered me all over while the wardens watched.

One of the things about the facility was that it was peopled

with women and women alone. The guards and warden were women;

ones who ideated and ran the place too. In a way, this was comforting

what with all the communal bathing and the wardens laughing at us as

we bared everything to frightfully cold water.

Later, they gave me a nice pink georgette saree hemmed in

sea-waves-styled glaze pattern, rose pink bangles and slightly pale

blouse. They said I would have to slip a pair of white shoes on. The

shoes were the only component of this paraphernalia that did not fit

properly. But I managed. Through the hallway with light fixtures that

drowned the place in a sort of somber yellow, we proceeded at a

snail’s pace as if I was being walked to my execution. In the end, we

reached the large metal door where two guards were sharing a

cigarette. One of them ground the cigarette under her shoe and greeted

the wardens. The door was opened and the pair of hands withdrew

behind me. The metal clicked shut behind me with the wallow of a

turnstile and I suddenly felt at a loss.

It was the size of a cricket stadium, brightly lit in the center.

The glass dome over my head was way too high and the slates of glass

that curved like petals to meet at the top made it look like I had

suddenly walked into a pickle jar and was looking at the capped lid

from inside. It was way too calm and I wondered if I was let free to

run away. Oh, but why dress me up, why clean me up like a mother of

pearl? I made a clutch of my saree pleats and lifting one leg after

another, gingerly, waded towards the central vault. Here, a stirring

sound beckoned me. The marble floor was so sickeningly clean it

made me wonder if I was in a dream after all. I climbed the milky

Kranthi Askani 23

white marble stairs that circumnavigated a fountain which sprung up

and down like a filigree round a humongous phallus of rock in the

middle.

The phallus was sculpted to perfection; it was tumescent and

nib painted in a hue of pink. The underside had the look of a stretched

organ, the skin on the verge of snagging its seams. Water sprinkled a

beady curtain on it every now and then anointing it. The meager folds

of the skin where the phallic rock met the cement plinth indicated at

the residual tumescence that was still left un-realized. As if this was

not bizarre enough, the nether end of the phallus was fringed with a

stiff belt of darkened bristles, which looked like they were made of

plastic and the black coat was thick varnish. The bristles were sharp-

tipped and they shrouded the phallus all over to make it look like

something beyond grotesque. It evoked a feeling of cryptic

underpinning as if the phallus indicated to something else beyond it

for which this was a mere symbol. And I have to admit I felt a sense

of devotion towards this symbolic gesture. Yes, I was terrified at the

thought of climbing the next steepled marble stair; I felt as though I

was slipping down the slope of something so unassailable that there

was no going back from here.

And then there was an apparition before me. I knuckled my

eyes and noticed the hazy figure approaching me. It was a mendicant

with a staff in his hand. He clubbed his staff to the ground and the

marble made a chink at that. He widened his eyes and I watched

myself amble towards him. I noticed his chest was peppered with tufts

of hair, grizzled and unwashed. His beard was a stiff unaired nest into

which I wondered if sparrows flew into at night. His eyebrows were

bushy and the eyes themselves deep and cavernous. He wore two

ropes of beads on him diagonally across the chest; the waistband was

another rope secured and fastened with a knot which I clearly made

out to be grimy and mucky. Other than this, he was naked to the bone.

He was as tall as I was and his hair grew into knotty tendrils like a

pine frond infested with sea weed. He seemed to have moved his lips

but it was hard to tell in that nesting beard. I looked away for now as

he clubbed his staff again and beckoned me inside.

I followed him as he picked his way among the moss and wet

mud inside his cave. This was an artificial setting pullulated with


mendicants much like him. My saree rustled between my feet and I

noticed the hem dragged twigs and dirt under it. Inside the artificial

caves which looked like bivouacs, one for each of these naked

mendicants, I pursued the trail of scuffed feet marks before me. Now

marble gave way to mud and bright lighting of the dome gave way to

stirring cornucopia of tropical forests. I was amazed at how this

setting, stilted as it may have been, was pretty much the thin these

men liked. Most of these mendicants were inside their own cave

bivouacs meditating or scribbling something in the sand with the

sharp glinting blade on the tip of their staffs.

I wanted to ask what they were or how was it that they got to

be here in the first place. What prehistoric peripatetic creatures were

they? Some of them I could see, for the curtains of their caves were

whipped out. Inside, with their eyes pinched shut and breath steadied

as if they were practicing staying under water, they seemed to be

pursuing a wisp of something in their minds. Their concentration got

me to suck on my bale. I followed my mendicant who finally

approached his own bivouac-cave and pointed his staff for me to

crawl inside. I crouched to get inside and my saree’s loose end caught

something in the wall and snagged. The sound of that tear got my eyes

welled not so much for the saree but for myself. Inside the plastic

cryptic setting, he made me lie on a straw mattress while he leaned his

staff to a side.

It was all over in less than a minute. On my way back, I

looked over my shoulder at the phallus in the fountain and wondered

if it would be wilting now, for its pulsing, humming energy was spent

in me. But the rocky sculpture was straight as the day it was sculpted,

its skin ribbed with veins that traipsed the length of it as if feeding the

tip. The bristling integuments weren’t drooping either. The filigree of

jets slapped water every now and then comforting the raging catharsis

surging on the precipice inside…

He was tumescent all the time. The naked mendicants, all of

them were more or less tumescent all the time. This man was carrying

his shillyshallying organ all over the place, pink-tipped and throbbing,

from the minute he clapped his eyes on me to the denouement inside

his plastic cave. The sack under his tumescent phallus was stiff and he

kneaded it once before he leaned over me.

Kranthi Askani 25

I climbed the last few steps wondering how the world had

come to this. My saree’s folds that I had gathered to tuck into the

waistband were still intact; the powder on my body, all the motes of it

still intact; my hair un-crimped, my cheeks pink; my bangles all in

place… Why, only my shoes had gathered dust and that was all there

was to it. Yes, the plastic caves were not very airy and I think I

sweated on my way up and down a little. Rivulets of sweat now

smeared the back of my silk blouse which had a knot with tassel ends

lolling between the shoulder blades. The pits of my arms were slightly

sweaty too. But now I was in the open, cast under the star bright dome

into the large stadium. I remember unconsciously walking towards the

entrance.

Here, I waited for the door to open. As if coming back from

shopping, or, as if coming back from office, very customarily, I

waited for the door to open while I scanned the surroundings of the

glass domed stadium with the raised pulpit of plastic caves in the

middle. I was to visit this place once in a month for the next five

years. As time passed, I noticed that on my subsequent visits, there

were wreaths of plastic flowers placed by the fountain. It would be a

different man every time and we got to shower in hot water and wear

the best sarees for this occasion, which whatever else they may say,

lasted for no more than a minute. Some of them were virile perhaps so

they lasted a little longer but none in the shrewd grasp of eroticism. It

was purely mechanical, not even the tucked folds of saree were un-

clipped from the waistband. The mendicants would lay us down on

their straw mattresses and beckon for us to raise our knees. These men

were on pills too. I noticed many pills stacked up in dust-rimmed

bottles inside their plastic caves.

Back in my room, in my pale brown saree, after my first visit,

I sat by the window that overlooked the vaulted gate and was chipping

away the lacquer of wood with my finger nail when a woman walked

up to me and said I had very pretty nails. We were not allowed to talk

when wardens were around but they seemed to leave us be during the

nights. I know what you are thinking. What are nights and what are

mornings? She said her name was Priyanka. I asked her if it was

wrong to be doing what we were doing. Priyanka had a nice little

pretty face and was about ten years younger than me. She was short


and had a blunt nose, which she clipped with a ring on the left nostril.

Her ear rings were rather too long and tapered; they caught the light of

the overhead bulb and silvered when she tossed her head about. She

had long hair and she wove them into pleats. She said it was

mechanized intercourse, not the desirous type, and so it was alright. I

thought about this for a while and said she was probably right about it.

Two nights later, Priyanka shifted to the bed where a woman

had killed herself fortnight ago. Here, we whispered to each other

throughout the night like two sisters who met after two decades and

had so many things to say to each other. We soon became good pals.

We even switched our sarees; hers had a white lace threading on the

hem which she patiently sat and knitted for over six months. Mine

was a plain saree and I had only just begun knitting but I had begun

the wring side up so when I wore it, the trim was lost in the folds of

the saree. I felt cheated. Priyanka laughed heartily. In fact, we both

laughed a lot more than I thought was possible in the facility.

Now, here, in the morning, Mrunalini and I were pretty much

biting our ears as I did with Priyanka. Funny how I make friends

everywhere I go. Mrunalini said she heard someone say something

about the queen being unhappy with the ghetto’s maintenance. Ghetto,

what ghetto? I asked. Why, this was the rebel’s ghetto, wasn’t it? Oh,

that made sense. So, all the women garrisoned their ghettos on a

regular basis and looked for any trespassing men. Men, as it turned

out paid dearly if they were seen anywhere near the women ghettos.

All this sounded pretty good to me. I plucked the puffed up

rim of the blanket and whisked it away. Mrunalini said there was still

time to wake up. We could feign sleep and no one would notice. She

pointed to other women around our bunk beds. Some of them were

sleeping on the ripped tarp of their jeeps, some on military style beds

like ours and one of them, looked soused in alcohol, for she was

sleeping on a bare square of ground. The last one must have flopped

to ground in her sleep I said. Yes, Mrunalini nodded and we both

feigned sleep for a little while longer.

We woke up to the sound of shuffling feet and noticed there

was a commotion. I fidgeted with my sheet which mangled about my

feet. Mrunalini was spryly lifting her left foot up with the aid of her

hands, for it had fallen asleep. Emerging from the gnarled up web of

Kranthi Askani 27

my blanket, I said quick, we have to go. She jumped to her feet and

kicked the heel of her foot down as if to activate it.

Equipped with a map, the queen was pouring over the details

of the shrinking life in women’s ghettos. She said it was time we

hitched our skirts up and get to the battlefield. It all sounded very fine

but I had my doubts. Mrunalini was absentmindedly twining a strand

of her hair and tucking it away behind her ear. The queen hunkered

down on the sprawled map; her teenage skin glowed charmingly in

the lamp light dawdling above her. We were about a couple of

hundred in this cavern. Two women pinned the map up on the wall

behind the queen and lanterns were lifted up to make it clear. The

queen replaced a thumbtack from one territory to other and said we

were losing it to the men.

Outside, under the soughing trees, the parked jeeps were

wheeled down to the entrance. Here, we stood on a craggy rock that

was slippery, for it had drizzled a little. The starry firmament above us

seemed calm and resting. Dogs were howling beyond the perimeter of

our ghetto. The moon was fuller tonight. And now, the queen leaned

down so a short woman could whisper in her ear. The queen

announced what the news was. Apparently, last night, one of the jeeps

that was on its way home found men loitering about in our ghetto.

There ensued a tussle between us and them. The men were

apprehended and they now laid strapped to the side chairs in the back

of a jeep. The queen sighed and picked up her machine gun.

I and Mrunalini were in the very back and could barely see

what was going on. The two men were dragged onto the rock where

the queen was standing with her machine gun slung on the shoulder.

One of the men had a severed chin; his shirt collar was caked with

blood and he seemed barely able to walk. The other one was fat and

he sported a straggle mustache; he had a smallish paunch and his

hands were very hairy, wolf-like. The men had their hands buckled

behind their backs; their jaws were dropped and their shirts slack.

They seemed to be beggaring for death. The queen issued a sibilant

cry, pointed her gun to the skies and drilled the air with a stutter. The

men looked scared and whining. The queen made a clutch of the fat

man’s hair that was curly. He gave out a low squeal as she thwacked


him with the butt of her gun on the cheek. Blood glistered in a minute,

impatiently oozed out and dribbled to the ground.

Mrunalini said the men deserved it. I am sure they did, I said.

The one with severed chin took a blow on his ear when he anticipated

the queen’s blow and leaned sideways. Of course blood sobbed out

around the ear. But this made queen angry and she disfigured his face

with two massive blows one from each side. Even from way in the

back, I think I heard his bones crunch and the soft low wail of his

cries. He slumped to the floor like blubber, his hands behind him and

face twisted as if it was a plastic mold chucked away, half way thru its

making. The queen now straddled on his back; he was whimpering

and she crooning like a witch. Even the moon hid over thick blankets

of greyish clouds, for the scene below was far too grotesque.

The man tried to crawl, cringe and curl up like an insect. But

the queen roused to her feet now, landed a sharp blow on the back of

his wrist. Sandwiched between rock and metal, his bones turned

powdery inside as if to remind us all we were only made of star dust. I

wondered how a nineteen year old could hoard up such violence in

her. Queen or no queen, she was only a girl of nineteen. Mrunalini

was chewing the ends of her scarf; wisps of her hair had freed from

behind her hair and were lolling about on the cheek.

Later that night, when we were alone in our beds, Mrunalini

hitched herself closer to me and drew the blankets above us. Under

the sheets, we held our hands as girls do when they have something to

say. She was warming up to what was bothering her.

She asked if I noticed there were no birds. I said yes, actually,

I did. She said it must have been the dark. Yes, it was the dark. Birds

were not nocturnal and suddenly all this marooning in dark must have

confused them. Some many have survived, surely, some should have,

I said. She said she had a dream last night. In it, she was following a

group of women who had sequined their foreheads and tinseled their

petticoats as they raised pitchers on their head, and swaggered into the

river. This river was serene and the fish seemed to plonk happily in

and out of water. The pitchers were unique insofar that their necks

were ornamented in a myriad of different designs. She said she was

following these women from a distance as though any misstep would

melt them away into molecules. One of the women however paused

Kranthi Askani 29

and looked over in the direction of the rock behind which Mrunalini

was cowering in the dark.

And then, the woman who paused left her pitcher in the

shingle by the banks and climbed up the rackety path toward

Mrunalini. Their eyes met and moon surfaced above them sweeping

the clouds away. Tremulously, Mrunalini patted the lapels of her

jacket and found the torch with which she lanced the dark. It was you,

she said. So, I was in her dream. I was the woman who left the pitcher

and strode up the uneven rocky hump. So, what happened next? I

asked. But Mrunalini said she forgot the rest. Ah, poor thing, I

thought.

Under the blankets, we clasped our hands like little girls. She

said the bleeding blubbering bodies would be left skewered to a

wooden plank and dropped on the periphery of our ghetto so the men

would know what they were up against. I imagined how this would be

done. The fat one would be difficult so I imagine it would take over

half a dozen women to finish this task. They would have to travel in

two different jeeps: one in which the men would be ferried and the

other a bustling hencoop of women. The jeeps would lumber through

the dark, the twin headlights spearing through before them glazing the

road ahead. One of the girls would probably pull out her hair pin and

prick the fat man’s lips with it, for now these men would be dead

anyway. Someone would draft a note and pin it to the fat man’s hairy

chest, for his chest would be long and accommodative.

The jeeps would crack twigs on their way, they would steer

up and down the road in the dark while dogs and cats run into their

way and sometimes come under the wheels, slathering the underside

with a thick varnish of red. Around them, the verdure would hiss and

sigh in the slight breeze. It would be cold outside so the women would

wear tight jackets strapped up all over. The queen or someone she

appointed would hunker into the map with a torch and give a shout

when they reach their destination. And now, the heavy women would

climb into the jeep while the rest would wait below for the bodies to

be kicked out. They would drag the bodies by a hand or a foot but it

won’t be easy so more hands would clamp on the men’s limbs to be

dragged as they leave scudded marks on the ground under them.


They would all clap their hands and probably dust their pants

after finishing the assigned task. The note would be verified again as

the paper lightly shivers in the nocturnal breeze. While returning, the

women would pop the pills that substitute for scotch and whiskey. In

the morning, they would wake up and feel crapulent…

Mrunalini said it was warm under the sheets. I said, it was

alright, she can sleep on my bed. So, there it was, we slept together,

half petrified and half befuddled at the way things turned out to us

since we escaped the government facility. In the morning, I woke up

to find Mrunalini’s arm slung about me like a child’s about a

mother’s. I peeled myself from the embrace and slipped out into the

open. There they were, all the stars, still intact like intransigent

children who had been admonished by their parents to leave in the

morning. But there they were, all of them, every single one of them.

And the moon was there too, of course it had traipsed the vaulted star-

mottled canopy from one end to other through the night.

Dogs were still howling but now the woods were stripped off

the cricket chirrs as if they somehow knew it was the morning, as if

they were equipped with mental alarm clocks. Here, we were left to

our own devices and it felt rather blissful. After a long half decade we

spent in the facility, cramped up, bolted in and denuded of self, this

was charming. Three women were busy repairing a jeep. One of them

held a spanner up and was wringing a screw behind the raised hood. It

was so cold that my breath issued a plume of white vapour before me.

Gathering my jacket about me, I launched into the compound picking

my way among the empty cans of diesel, scraps of cardboards,

scrunched up papers, shards of glass and splinters of wood. Discarded

tires were flanked against the jeep’s sides as if they expected the jeeps

to sail about in the seas and bank against the cement, mossed walls of

a port.

I wondered how it still drizzled every now and then. How do

you go about explaining that? The woman with spanner was wrestling

with a screw over the radiator grille. The crushed clamps and the

dented hood indicated vandalism. I hitched myself closer; one of them

met my gaze and continued to ignore me. I wanted to tell them I

wanted to work. I can’t go on living like this, without work, aimlessly

ambling about and insincerely showing affection to everyone around.

Kranthi Askani 31

It must have been the cold, for the one with spanner hurt her

hand, stubbed the thumb as her wrist landed on the exposed crack of

the radiator. She squealed in pain and the others went to rescue right

away. I freed my hands from the puffed up pockets of my jacket to

assist in bandaging the wound but they seemed to ignore me. I felt

like an abandoned baby in a crib. I wanted to jump out of the crib to

gain attention. I would do anything to be admitted into this inner

circle of women in the ghetto. They were like a pride of lions in the

wild, all pissing around the perimeters of their ghetto and keeping a

check on every trespasser.

I noticed the blood on the spanner and wondered if I could

wipe it with the sleeve of my jacket proving to them my worth. But as

I leaned to pick it up, the women left the hapless bandage-wrist in

mid-action of swabbing and swaddling to seize the spanner from my

hands. I was taken aback. I watched the wisps of their singed white

breath as they sighed. What was this hostility for? After all, they

saved us, didn’t they? I was only trying to help. I wanted to be

included… It was as though they mutely hated us for our presence.

They said nothing at all. I parted my lips as if I was going to launch

into a cry. I was thankful for the dark, for I knew my eyes had misted

over and I was reduced to a small girl who stamped her foot, for she

was not included in a game, for she was greeted with slouched backs

of other girls who had chained their hands together and drew together

to mimic the floral transformation from a bud…

I imagined the low sun and I imagined how I would have been

exposed with misting eyes. Now I was thankful for the dark. They say

you ought to cry in the rain if you seek to hide your tears. I wish they

said you ought to drown in an ocean if you seek to hide your tears, for

what good is it to live with tears; you might as well die. It was far too

cold here. Back in the facility, it was well lit and I think we felt

relatively calm under the lights that flickered intensely at times, and

then dimmed until someone killed them with the flick of a switch.

Here, it was far too cold. Here, the women were cold.

What would anyone do? I wrapped my hands round myself as

if to protect myself from dripping like a wax candle under the

dawdling flame of shame above me. What was this shame? I asked

myself. Climbing the scudded stairs to the cavern, I noticed the


women, with their backs to me, sharing a joke. It may not have been a

joke; it could have been just about anything that three women would

talk about. But it hardly mattered now.

Back under the slant of the rock in our cavern, I scribbled

with a sharp rock on the ground under me. Our cavern was long and

grooved into segments naturally rendering it easy for us to sleep

undisturbed in our own little sections. But the ceiling was low and the

stalactites seemed to be growing in length with every passing hour.

But of course that was pure nonsense. Anyone with the right mind

would know that it takes hundreds and thousands of years for

stalactites to form. Mrunalini woke up a little while later and said I

was there in her dream yet again. I smiled assuredly, as if I had a part

to play in infiltrating her dreams.

The cavern was unusually flat throughout, save for some

protrusions like the warts of knuckles. It had two openings and the

queen usually gathered up her troops to assemble them right next to

the entrances as if she expected an attack while she delivered her

prophesies. Our sleeping quarters were scattered around the cavern

where the natural vault met the ground. We leaned our cots against the

wall in the day. Funny how we still itemize our routines under day

and night… In the middle, there was one pool where water gathered

but we stayed away from it, for the water had a lot of calcium in it and

detrimental to health.

There were snakes, Mrunalini said. Yes, there were snakes in

the cavern. There were bats too. In fact, the cavern was everything

you thought you would find in an expedition except that we were in it

too. Over one large rock that looked like the back of a humpback

whale, dark, grimy, charred and sported a tracery of fine lines on the

surface. It was an unusual rock insofar that the cave had none of that

type inside. Largely, everyone thought it was an asteroid rock left in

the wake of a collision. But that left the question of how did it get into

the cavern. Perhaps aliens wheeled it inside…

Mrunalini asked why I was so moody this morning. I told her

what happened. She clutched my hand and said it could be because we

volunteered for the government operation. I thought about this. If she

was right, we were being alienated for our decision to save ourselves

in the ensued panic of the dark days. But if men had made such a

Kranthi Askani 33

choice, they would have probably not been impugned. But we were

women and our decision to subscribe to the government’s idea

included the repugnant deal we were proffered with, that of regular

intercourse with mendicants…

Mrunalini said we were the lowest of women in their eyes.

We sold ourselves, she said. I wanted to argue, I willed myself to

protest but all I could do was sit cowed up, for it was all in the open

now. I knew what every woman here felt about us. We were the

lowest form, the sort of women that ought to be trodden and squished

under feet like slugs on a rainy day. We were the untouchables; we

were to be ostracized. Why were we saved? Why did they bring us

here if we were so execrable to them? If they can’t accept our past,

what were they hoping to do with us? What good were we to them, if

not to be passed comments on…

I can almost hear the voices in my head: ‘See, that woman

over there, she is the worst type, she walked into that facility on her

own volition.’ Still someone would be saying, pointing to me

discreetly, ‘Keep away from Aastha and Mrunalini…’ These women,

here in the ghetto must think very highly of themselves for choosing

to stay in the dark and fight it out. We, on the other hand had given up

hope and scurried for shelter. But it was more than shelter we

bargained for. We bargained for shelter and were robbed of our self.

These women on the other hand, they fought, they saved other

women, and above all, they were taking the fight back into the men’s

ghettos. What could I do to gain their trust?

Later that night, the queen announced that the bodies were

bolted to the ground just over the perimeter and the mission was

successful. There was a huge uproar and hands clapped. But, this act

of provoking usually ensued in a fight between ghettos. It was

necessary to maintain caution and be alert all the time. Then she said

something that struck as music to my ears. She said any pair of hands

would be an addition to their troops. And I nudged Mrunalini at this.

She said yes, it was good for us. We waited for someone to drop by

and ask of us to participate. The plan was to wait for them to make a

move, to forgive our violations in the past and welcome us into their

guild. It was the longest night of my life. The shivering flame of


shame over my head seemed to be extinguished now. It won’t be long,

I thought.

But I was wrong, wasn’t I? No one came, no one asked and

no one seemed to care that we were there at all. Mrunalini said these

ghetto women could have at least made an exception for her. Why,

Mrunalini was a doctor at the facility, wasn’t she? A doctor but a

woman nonetheless and as the rules of the facility went, she said,

every woman had to traipse those stadium stairs at one point or

another. I asked her about the pills I noticed in the mendicant’s

bivouac. She said the pills were to ensure they didn’t sow their seeds

in the women. I asked her who was behind all this. She said she didn’t

know.

Of course, when you have spent a half decade in a place you

usually get to know a great deal about the place and the people in it.

But it was a large facility and it would only be fair to say that dorm-

women were far from acquainted with anyone else. Yes, dorm-women

stood for dormitory women and that is what they called us. We were

like the pigs they bred on pills, gave a bed each to sleep on and visit

the mendicants once in a while as scheduled. That was our life.

Priyanka always said she would have liked it if she was recruited as a

warden here. She thought wardens were ‘cool.’ But everyone hated

the wardens; they had this military gait, proud and straight-chinned.

Occasionally, that is, if we fell sick, we would go visit the doctor. But

this was a rarity and we often wondered what the doctors did or even

for that matter, how many of them were there?

And then, there were the administrative women. They were

the only women in the facility without a uniform; these women wore

colourful sarees every day. Doctors always came in white swaddles,

wardens in military beige-green, and we in pale chocolate brown

sarees. One question that nagged me in those early days was what was

all this for? Priyanka said she knew all about it. Apparently, the

mendicants were all meditating throughout the day, in sage-like

silence that we all associate with these men. The objective was to

appease a phallic deity of some sort, so the veil of dark would be

lifted from the planet and we would all go back to living our lives. I

was furious at this. How could the government commission such a

project? To this, Priyanka has an answer. She seemed to have an

Kranthi Askani 35

answer to everything by the way. She said almost all top officials in

the government were infinitely religious and when there was no

respite coming from the scientific community in lifting the veil of

darkness, they approached these peripatetic mendicants.

But what could the scientists do? After all, it was a massive

heavenly body as large as our own planet dawdling between the sun

and us. You can’t just move such a thing, I said. Priyanka nodded and

gingerly picked up her pillow and propped it behind her. Her hair was

freshly washed and still smelt of the shampoo. She said she could still

feel the soap suds delicately poised, covering her from sternum to

instep. She had just returned from the stadium. None of us spoke

about the act in itself. It was as though we wished it would go away if

we dared not talk about it. Instead, we talked about the wardens and

joked about them. This was a respite.

Priyanka said the whole facility was orchestrated in the

irrational hope of appeasing a phallic deity who would come on his jet

plane and devour the planet hovering above us. I smiled silently. She

said the mendicants believed that intercourse with women was a

ritual. Phallus worship…! In fact, she said, the mendicants believed

that their own phallus were part of this brilliant cosmic symphony of

energies. Like the fronds of a fern, every individual’s phallus,

shivered with eroticism and communicated the spent energy to the

deity through channels of orgasms. Just as the fronds are connected to

the stem of the plant, they believed they were all connected in an

assortment of divine dimensions unseen by the naked eye.

This irritated me then, it irritates me now. But how could

everyone be so incredibly beyond reason? Priyanka said her head

ached when she thought about it. This was still in those early days. I

think it was in the fourth month. Around this time, Priyanka and I

were talking in low feline sounds late into the night. On one of the

nights, she had a stomach ache and said she would have to visit the

toilet. Would I go with her? Of course, yes. But the warden found us

both slinking out of our dorm and the next thing I know was I heard

the muffled sound of whip being dragged on the floorboards. We

heard the clattering heels of wardens’ boots but persevered, for I was

by now prepared to take a blow or two for our friendship. I was no

going to leave her in this state, I thought.


I held her dithering drooping shoulder and began arguing with

the warden who waited patiently for me to complete and told me I

would have to mete out the punishment for even picking up an

argument in the first place. And so it was that I ended up scrubbing

the floorboards of the toilets, all seven of them, next morning... Oh

yes, and the bruised cheek for the blow that landed on it. And

Priyanka fell ill. I checked her temperature with the back of my hand

and hoped for her to recover. They gave her medication. Two days

later, two wardens came to pick her up. I asked where they were

taking her but the warden pointed to the burnished sheen of her stick

belted to the waist. But I had only Priyanka and no one else so I

demanded them for an explanation.

I was left with a fractured arm this time. And, I serviced a

mendicant even in that shape. Rules, bloody rules…! I could barely

hitch my saree up to my knees when the time came and that stinking

corpse-like man bent over me. I don’t want to talk about this. I hope I

will come to it later. It is too disturbing. I am not strong.

Anyway, Priyanka returned a month later and seemed

unusually calm. But she seemed to have taken pity on my fractured

situation, given I had gone to the trouble of getting beaten up for her

sake. She said it was an abortion. She said they performed an abortion

on her. At this, she crumpled the sheets above her and I could hear her

sobbing under. I planted a hand on her head but she whisked it away

and slept with her back to me all night long. I noticed how she looked

tired all the time. Next morning when I confronted her she said she

had stopped taking the pills. But why did she do that for? Priyanka’s

eyes misted over and her fat under lip slid out as she cupped her face

in her hands and curled up like an insect. She thought pregnancy was

the only way out of this life. But she was wrong, wasn’t she? Priyanka

said she lost a lot of blood in the process and nearly died.

What is with this bed, I thought, as I fixed my gaze on the bed

next to me? The last one committed suicide and the present one,

Priyanka, had taken a longer yet a certain route to suicide.

Perhaps I ought to grow my nails longer, I thought as they

scoured my body for the faintest hints of dirt. The water in the bathtub

joggled with every slap and scrub they gave me. I wondered why this

absolute astuteness for what would end in less than a minute. And the

Kranthi Askani 37

mendicants never really bathed anyway. Yes, they never did. What a

monstrosity my mind is to comply with these requests. But again,

what can I do? You tell me, what can I do? Nothing, so there it is.

In the stadium, there were changes to the architecture since

the last time I visited. A square of land in the middle of all those

bivouacs was cleared for a burial ground. In this, apparently, they

dumped the dead mendicants. It was the first time I ever got to see the

doctors. These women, swaddled in white, paddled about like

gorgeous ghosts in a land of deathly miasma. The mendicants that

were weak moved their bivouac closer to the square while the burly

ones stayed on the perimeter. I was fascinated with this filigree of

plastic caves. Beyond the square was a strip of land where some of the

mendicants were shouting hymns. One of them was drubbing a hide-

drum while the doctors watched in amusement. These mendicants

with their testicles varicose-veined and hurting them given the

perpetual nakedness, still denied the medication doctors gave them.

No, the rituals need them to stay pure, they said.

One of the doctors peeled her white coat, folded it neatly and

stuffed it in a bag before joining a mendicant in the adjoining bivouac

as I made my own journey inside. At least, they were keeping the

insides neat these days. I assumed the, ahem, doctor visitations had

something to do with all the cleanliness. Whatever the case may be, I

could see that the arrangement was not going to work. They can’t

have the dead and the living in the same place, I told myself as the

knotted strands of his hair lolled on my naked knees.

From the early days, again, here is another memory that

stands tall, utterly clear in my mind. It was a Sunday and we, dorm-

women, were all made to stand in attention for a prayer. Anyway, here

is what happened: There were about twenty large halls I think. There

could be more but I don’t know for sure. In fact, come to think of it, I

know very little of the topography of the institution. In one of the

halls, milling about, a little hurried by the prodding of sticks from

wardens, we filed up one behind the other in obedient calm and

torpor.

That day, they announced that we would all be henceforth

called angels. Yes, all the dorm-women were ‘angelised…’ Since

then, we were called angels (angels from the dorm…!). The ritualistic,


stertorous sob of the phallus, filling the folds of angels’ nether

corals… yes, this was part of their deity worship.

For the ceremony, all the angels were made to go up to the

domed stadium, one by one. Our own dorm, which was one of many

others, had over hundred angels and all of us, gripped with an

unknown fear, were twiddling the saree scrolls or pinching the insides

of our palms. Priyanka was not as frightful anymore. In fact she was

behaving as if she had returned from death, uncaring to whatever

happened next. We still talked silently at nights but it was never the

same again. She would go about her day wearing a smiling face and

greeting everyone as if she was thanking them. What was she

thanking them for?

The long passage that led to the metal door of the stadium was

slightly brighter than before. The shadows behind the rotund pillars on

either side still gave me the chills as if there were monsters lurking

behind them, the sort that would feed on our shadows for their

existence. It made me look over my shoulder as if to see if my shadow

was still intact. Who would want their shadows to be gnawed away? I

would not. I like my shadow; I like how it makes the slant when I am

a little away from an overhang bulb and how it gradually sinks under

me as I swagger into the light, finally making one small round,

groping me like a soppy mat under my feet.

The high ceiling seemed to sigh with every step we took.

Dorm by dorm, the angels were being sent into the stadium and

recalled an hour later. We stood outside the entrance that was sealed

shut. The warden close to me was scratching an itch under her arm

spryly. She looked about her and resumed scratching. I was staring at

her as if it was a spectacle of rarity that can’t be missed. She caught

me looking at her but said nothing. The metal door clicked open and

from the other side, queued up and waiting like school children, were

angels from our adjoining dorm. I knew a couple of faces in them but

had no acquaintance so our gazes met and we mutely acknowledged

but that was all.

We were like a train waiting for another to cross us near a

junction. Once the other train left, a warden in the front whistled and

the joggle of our hips cranked the train of angels forward. Our feet

shuffled and the wardens followed in our wake, the metal door

Kranthi Askani 39

clasping shut and now we were under the white dome. This was the

first time we had stepped into the stadium together. On all occasions

prior to now, we had only visited alone. This was different and it

almost felt embarrassing as if I was being judged by everyone around

me, as if I was being talked about behind my back. We crossed the

rocky phallus; the filigree of the fountain was in full bloom today,

slapping water on the pink-daubed tip of the phallus, wherefrom the

glistering beads descended after anointing the deity.

We crossed the plastic bivouacs and had reached the center of

their camp where over what was a burial ground of the dead they had

built a sort of sacrificial pulpit. The dead mendicants were under the

mud, I told myself. One mendicant, robed in a sheep’s hide craned his

neck forward and was swabbing his face with the sheep’s blood which

by the way was growing thick and paste-like with every passing

minute. He was the only robed one; rest of them were naked as

always. We were of course wearing our regular uniform: pale brown

sarees, matching blouse and naked feet. I noticed the tapered scrawls

every woman left under her as she dragged her feet under her,

unwillingly, tremulously… The naked mendicants were all lying in

the mud, lying in the wait, for each of us. The queue snaked forward

slowly while at the head of the queue one of us was peeled away like

a bead from a necklace. The robed mendicant dipped his hands in the

thick blood before him. The vat was dripping on all the sides as if it

was the vat that had been disgorged. The sheep was skinned and

skewered headless to a silver hook over the pulpit. Each of us climbed

the pulpit, kneeled before the man who had anointed himself in the

sheep’s blood, and awaited our turn.

The robed man plucked a tuft of sheep’s hair and pressed it in

the flat of my palm, wailing incomprehensible hymns all the time. He

then proceeded to ball up my fist with the tuft of hair inside, now

greased my knuckles with the thickened dab of blood and let me go.

Like a peeled bead, I felt flustered. With the loose hand, I hitched my

saree up as I climbed down. One of the naked men from the ones

lying in wait under the pulpit reached up for my hand, unscrewed the

fist and took the tuft of hair, made a knot of it in the waist band and

wore it proudly. I noticed his naked plumage caked with mud and now

slick with the sheep’s blood, worse than a sheep’s; it was as though he


was a creature that rubbed its back in the mud for fun. I thought he

was vulnerable. Whatever else he may be, he was not strong, for the

sack under him begged to be pitied, knobbed, warty, and bluish

even… Above this, slowly emerging from the depths of this sickening

cornucopia of hair was the phallus.

Once outside the plastic tent, I noticed a scrawny mendicant

regally dragging his royal angel, Priyanka, into his den. He looked

weak; he wore his ribs around him as if he had borrowed them for

today’s ceremony. Priyanka offered him her fist and he fidgeted with

his waist band’s knot, his grimy fingers unable to get rid of the knot.

She helped him with the knot like a true wife. If you forgot what we

were, you might as well believe it if I said they were a married couple.

Yes, you would.

Later in the day, I took my pills, rested my cheek on the

pillow and watched Priyanka gingerly press the folded blanket under

her head. She faced me and I her. Everyone around us was gaga, for

we were now called angels. I asked if she was doing fine. She smiled

her usual smile. I cleared my throat and shifted in my posture, now

my back to her. We slept without a word. There was so much to be

talked about and yet she seemed to be someone else, as if her memory

was erased.

One of those women from the top, the ones who did not wear

uniforms, came to meet us next day. She was a woman in her sixties

and wore her greyed hair into a bob over her neck. The undersides of

her eyes were swollen and the mouth slack. She wore a cream saree

with red border as if this was her wedding day. Her shoes were white,

clean beyond comprehension and the sleeves of her blouse ended

beyond the elbows. Her skin was pale and her brow furrowed. There

was a mole on her nose and it spilled a fleece of grey hair out of it as

if it was a volcano and spewing white fumes. She had the gait of

someone judging everyone around. She stood in the middle, the rank

of our dorm cots with crumpled sheets lying about on either side. She

lowered her neck as if tugging at the wisp of bale inside the throat.

She said we were all very lucky. She said we were angels. The deity is

watching our every move, she said.

Apparently, someone among us had reported a little

something. Whatever it was and whoever it was, this woman did not

Kranthi Askani 41

mention. But she said the facility was like a horse cart and we were all

the horses. One crippled horse would slow down the cart in its ascent

to divinity or some such thing. What was she talking about? Crippled

horse? Two days later, we noticed that our count had dropped. “Two

angels missing” is what the title would have read if there was a

newspaper in the facility. The ones close to these two said they were

not feeling very well. We put two and two together. But we didn’t

want to spell it out. It was best left unsaid.

Crippled horses! What was happening to us? If I recall, it was

our own choice to walk into this facility. We chose this over the

savage world outside. Did we forget that the world outside was

darkened beyond repair?


2

Mrunalini said we were angels. Yes, thank you very much

darling for reminding. The ghetto women did not think so. To them,

we were outsiders. To them, we were not angels, and in fact far from

it. Last week, the menagerie of shrieking, squealing women jumped

out of their jeeps howling and hugging each other. Apparently, the

men had retreated and the ghetto’s perimeters were for now secure. I

imagined a rope, a gnarled one being lifted and dropped a little way

into the men’s ghettos, reclaiming what was originally the women’s.

Women returned with some or the other news every day. And, we

were still excluded from this whole operation.

Yesterday was a sad day for all of us. Two of our women

died. They said the bodies were buried but who cared. In any case, it

was dark everywhere, in the grave and outside the grave… Outside

our cavern, in the arboreal dark that was mottled with fireflies

weaving beady coils of white in the dark, I and Mrunalini went for a

stroll. We had nothing else to do. Why did they save us? It felt as

though we were a pair of hibernated cuckoos on a spaceship that

would be dredged up sometime in the future for roasting when the

space mission was a success.

In my dream last night, I was back in the facility and there

were seven pairs of hands scrabbling all over my body for a grip of

my flesh. And then I woke up and I was here, in the ghetto. Angels,

they called us, angels!

We found an abandoned jeep and like two schoolgirls in

summer holidays, decided to crawl inside and lodge ourselves in the

front seat. I planted my hands on the wheel and motioned for her to

latch the seat belt on. The jeep had no seat belts but she obligingly

Kranthi Askani 43

made a clicking sound with her mouth. I prodded the vehicle into

motion and made wild turns behind the wheel that I knew would come

loose if I so much as twisted it. The jeep smelt of burnt rubber. The

rear of the jeep where the torn tarpaulin had flopped askance smelt of

spilled diesel. Mrunalini found a dead log in the rear. It had the warts

of dried something all over it. The light from inside the cavern made a

slant over the scuffed ground and the dry strip of grass beyond.

The console was rusted beyond repair. I drummed the root of

my wrist on it and noticed how a couple of knobs shed their dead

plastic skin. I kicked my shoes and felt the mat under my feet with

naked soles. The grate of iron rods above us rattled when I shook

myself in the seat violently. Mrunalini did the same and pretty soon,

we were shaking the vehicle so badly that nearly every part of it

rattled and slivers of this and that dropped on our laps. After a while,

it felt puerile to continue doing what we had been doing. So, we sat in

silence. She, with her arms in her lap and I with my arms on the

steering wheel…

I could hear her sighing in the dark like a warm mammal

coming to life from deep slumber. And then, we noticed our feline

friend. At first I only saw the tail, which in the dim light looked very

much like a shadow, not solid at all. But pretty soon, the whiskered

creature slinked away and reappeared, equipped with a rat in its

mouth. The cat, like a messenger, looked about the place as though it

were scanning the scene, and when it was satisfied with the

surroundings, it jumped down from the tree landing in the dry clutter

of leaves under. Drubbing of Mrunalini’s fingers may have attracted

the cat, for it weightlessly waddled across towards the jeep. How did

it get here? I wanted to ask Mrunalini but she had the look of fear on

her face, that micro second before you realize the fear and respond by

running away or jumping or kicking… But it was only the gathering

sneeze, for her nostrils flared and she made a whooping sound as her

hands caught an exposed crack of metal before her.

The cat was gone. When I told her, she said it can’t be the

same cat. How can it be? Yes, of course, how can it be? The moon

was fuller today. Mrunalini said we should take a stroll out. But here,

near the cavern, it was safe. Ghetto was not manned (or ‘womanned’,

to be precise) throughout. She pleaded with me, and so I relented in


the end. Under the full moon, as the stars tinkled above us, we

marched off into the soughing trees and they seemed to sigh greatly as

if to absorb us into them, as if to say, the angels were welcome here,

in the trees.

We reached a small pool where water was swirling from the

top, through the rocks. We had one troch with us and we fought over

which way the torch should be pointing. Every now and then we heard

the sound of scuttling on the floor and my body responded with

issuing a hide of goose bumps all over. Mrunalini went to take a

closer look at the spring and said maybe we ought to take a bath in it.

I was about to protest but she had already undid the broad pink-

trimmed sash of her dress. Her dress had large flowers but mine had

stripes like a giraffe’s. She said, after all, we were angels, weren’t we?

So, despite my own misgivings, I let my tremulous shanks to

wade in the pool which was mottled with many leaves on the surface.

Did she realize how dangerous it was, I asked. There could be so

many foreign creatures in the pool. She said she had been away from

this life for so long it did not matter anymore. The water was freezing;

it was so cold that I could barely breathe. My lungs felt like two

cramped pigeons in cages unable to whip their wings freely. The

pool’s water was shallow and it only came up to the waist so we had

to dip ourselves in the water, to souse and freeze our bodies. My teeth

chattered and I wrung my hands under me to cup them between my

thighs for warmth. But it wasn’t doing any good. In the end, we

climbed out of water and made a dash to the open stretch where we

slipped our dresses on. I dropped to my knees and cocked my chin

between the knees as if that was going to calm the chatter of teeth.

Mrunalini smiled. Our feet shuffled piteously as the hems of

our dresses dragged a lot of dirty weed and dead leaves under them.

The wet fabric, slicked and our gait was that of zombies. We had to

hitch our dress up and peel the wet clinging caress of fabric off the

shanks every now and then. By the time we returned to the cavern,

there was a brief commotion. What was going on? The women had

worried looks on them. It was not looking good at all. There was

another death today. The dead body of the woman was dragged down

from the rear of the jeep and I noticed the deep gash in her neck.

Three bullets had splintered her gullet as if it were wood. Her torn

Kranthi Askani 45

bodice revealed the pale breast which was surprisingly alive, I

thought. But her breast was blue-veined. She was dead…

We stood a little away, the guilt of frolicking in the pool

water when our comrades (if that’s the word) were butchered to death

as if they were dummies in car crash experiments… Mrunalini

sneezed and some of the women turned around to notice us. I knew

from the look on their faces that they did not care. I wanted to be

reprimanded. I wanted to be slapped on my cheeks, I wanted to be

punished. But the women ignored us. My dress still dripping and the

dribble turning scuffed entrance into a wet puddle, I thought enough

was enough. I decided then and there to confront the queen and

demand to be accepted into the ghetto, as one among them.

Mrunalini was weakly sobbing and I myself was nearly

heartbroken. But the others, the ones with snipers slung on their

shoulders and bullet-strips under them, were merely observant. They

did not shed a single tear. Death did not dampen their spirits. If

anything, deaths seemed to have provoked them, for the women were

climbing into the jeep, one leg still slung outside and the loose arm

holding the machine gun as they disappeared with a whoosh into the

dark.

I told Mrunalini what I thought. It was time for us to go talk

to the queen. She nodded obediently. I was the elder one, and so I

took that for a yes and was making my way to the queen’s chamber

when I noticed my dress, how it clung to me and revealed me… I felt

denuded, I felt ashamed at myself. I felt like a skinned pigeon with a

firm breast and spindly legs under the flutter of flattering wings. I felt

as though I had to hide my spindly legs, for that was what I was.

When we reached our bunker, I noticed the bed sheets were rumpled

up in the corner. I raised the leg of the cot and craned my neck to

retrieve the sheets. They were torn and tattered. I looked about me and

no one seemed to care, or rather, everyone seemed to care… They

were laughing at us behind our backs. Angels!

I told Mrunalini that I wanted to flee. Just pick up our torches,

pack up some pills and vamoose into the dark. She sighed and pointed

to something over my shoulder. I looked. It was a fire. Some of the

women were lighting up a fire over the square elevation of the cavern.

I noticed the embers, deeply red and lumpy, of variegated sizes. Fore


fanned out and was picking up momentum. It was not such a good

idea; the stalactites above could melt, cut loose and drop on our heads,

gouging us brutally so that if an archeologist were to find our corpses

later, they would wonder what may have happened here, all bodies

bolted to the ground in such painful contortions.

Unwilling, I made a grab of my dress and picked my way

among the many scraps of our blankets. The flame issued a crackle

every now and then. The ruby red embers fed their energy into

turquoise roots of flame above, which turned pale and yellow as it

ascended to the roof. One of the women, a flat chested one, sat herself

down a little way away from the fire and was picking lice in the hair

of another (a bosomy woman) who sat before the former. The wooden

comb worked like the lips of an accordion as the fingers twitched to

pluck lice away. The bosomy one gave a shriek and yelped but the flat

chested woman kicked her from behind. And the lice picking resumed

when I trudged up a craggy mound of rock purposefully but caught

my toe in the sprawled straw. Warm blood oozed out as if I was a

suppurated fruit and even the smallest of a pin prick were enough.

Two women were skinning a dog to my left. To the right, in a

vat, was the decanted blood, warm and caking. I noticed the silver of

knifes disappearing under the skin of the mammal and resurfacing

now exposing the pale epithelial. With one sharp blow, the head was

separated from the body and dropped into the fire. There, it burnt, the

skin peeling off and feeding itself to the skin issuing a pop and a

crackle. The rim of the mouth now burnt effusively as if there was a

pocket of oxygen hidden somewhere under the tongue. Now the faint

hiss died as a pair of hands pried the head out and replaced it on the

fringe where it was less hot. I watched how the flames licked each

other, shared their colours, comingled and coaxed more and more

from the material under them.

I asked the flat chested one what was going on. She said it

was celebration time. They were celebrating their fifth anniversary,

here at the ghetto. It is every day that you speak and the women reply

to you. So, I said thank you and I meant it. Mrunalini was still

standing by our bunker. She was teasing a scrap of blanket from under

the cot’s leg. I wanted to ask who did that. But if it was celebration

time, I did not want to be the one to spoil anything for them.

Kranthi Askani 47

Why were they celebrating when there were dead being

ferried across the dark every night (or every day! How does it matter

anyway)…

In any case, I needed the warmth. I was dying from the cold.

My teeth were not chattering much but I was very cold all the same…

So, I neatly huddled up and sat a little away from the fire. The flat

chested woman had done with picking lice and was now cracking her

knuckles. No one opposed to my sitting so I hitched myself a little

closer. Mrunalini was still in our bunker. Will the stalactites melt? I

wondered if it was even scientifically accurate, to think of melting

stalactites. The dog’s entrails were plucked out and running the

intestines through a tight fist, one of the women decanted whatever

scrap the creature had fed on at the time of killing. The chopping

block was swabbed clean with a cotton cloth and they were busily

chattering. A kiln was raised now in the middle, and with pitchers

they poured water into it. Now the kiln was set alight from under and

the water boiled. With a small knife, slivers of fat deposits were

cleared across the rims and finally the whole dropped into the boiling

water.

The kiln issued vapours of white smoke. I noticed a little

fluttering above me. It was the bats; they had sensed the smell of

meat, I thought. I imagined a lot of tribal dancing but that did not

happen. I imagined sequined women who slapped their hair with

spangles and rouged their cheeks with red blood would hitch their

petticoats and dance. But that did not happen. We simply relished the

meat and that was that.

Next morning (again! what is morning and what is night. I

know, I sound like a philosopher…), we went to meet the queen.

There were a bunch of serious looking women at the door; their rifles

cocked to a side, sometimes the burnished tip brushing their cheek as

if to show how unused to rifles they really were. My stare was

unremittingly met and held by every woman in this part of the cavern.

My throat was dry and my cartilage felt loose on its hinges inside me.

Who should I talk to? I thought of clearing my throat, which by the

way is the best you could do in a situation such as this one. I did.

Mrunalini shed her trepidation, crossed me, and with her fingers

clasped under the pink-rimmed hanky, her hands folded before her,


approached the woman who was seated before a dusty wooden table.

A map was spread-eagled on it, and this woman was scrawling lines

on it with a pencil the back of which she seemed to have chewed a lot.

The woman, narrow-faced, sharp-chinned and unusually

large-eared, furrowed her brow as she met Mrunalini’s gaze. I was

still standing by the craggy entrance where the rock was pounded

recently and the white powder mottled the ground under my feet. I

noticed some roaches in the cold crevices of the rock, their mandibles

panned out and thinly fluttering as if they were trying to flatter me

with what they had. I felt I could squish them under my feet; I

imagined the sound of their flesh oozing out of the ellipsoid husks,

their smallish eyes popping out and the web of their feet left tangled

under them.

Mrunalini was by my side. She said, we could go inside but

wait here for a while. I raised my head and looked about me: there

they were again meeting my maze midway. It was as though they had

been looking at me all the time. Even while the thoughts of squishing

the roach rose in the floor of my mind! The cavern’s top was smooth

here. No stalactites around here. Mrunalini asked if I knew what was

over the cavern. I nodded my head. No, I did not know. She said it

was a mountain, a really large one. And that explains why it was

always so calm in here, I said. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say

maybe but I don’t know. Her hanky was small and I noticed the

square fringes. In my memory, it was a hanky of scalloped fringes. I

was pursuing this thought when the curtain on the low rock entrance

was pulled apart and a fine young, long and creamy leg followed; the

shank was only slightly tapered indicating it belonged to a younger

woman, the kneecap small and adorable, the thighs glistering in the

yellow haze of the flickering lamps… It was the queen of course. And

she had a gauze robe on her that had the slits on the sides running all

the way above the knees and baring a lot. But what am I saying; it was

just women here alright!

Tying the sash tightly round her waist and rubbing her hands

together as if kneading invisible dough, she waddled towards us. She

had a long neck and slender arms. In fact, she was a lean teenager who

would have received whooping blows on her cheeks from her mother

for dieting when it was not required if this was ordinary world, if this

Kranthi Askani 49

was before everything just turned the way it was now. Her hair was

loose and it sprawled over her shoulders, a little slick from the sweat I

thought.

I was hoping she would ask us something, for there was a ball

of silence between us, desultorily expanding, stretching and feeding

on our apprehensions, and needed to be pierced. The women beyond

her shoulders were still staring at me. Mrunalini sighed and was about

to say something but the queen held up her hands and we obliged.

Like a good hostess, she dragged us into her den. The polished black

of the low roof under which we ducked to get through grazed my back

at one point. It was far too long, the entrance, like a tunnel expanded

for over ten feet so that we very nearly crawled, Mrunalini’s haunch

wriggling in my face. I smiled. I thought I will make a joke of this and

tease her later. But of course this was my imagination, for it was way

too dark in the tunnel-like entrance and like lost mariners we were

heading toward the ball of fire in general. We sought nothing more at

the moment, only to crawl toward the light. It must have been the

primal urges, I thought, to seek light when you can, when you see it.

Perhaps, there are other beings in fifth and sixth dimension that would

look at us in exclaim and wonder why we were always drawn towards

light just as we wonder about moths that go round and round the

flame before disappearing into it, leaving behind them the familiar

chirr sound.

Inside, as I jumped to my feet and was brushing the bald

patches on my dress, the sound of Clickety-clack and rattle of crumbs

of rock greeted us. The roof was again low, leaning to a side so that if

you were to walk from one side to another, you would have to

gradually bend your knees and at last duck. It was as large as an

auditorium, round too. It was a naturally formed cavern of course but

it looked surprisingly well made. In fact you could conduct a

boardroom meeting in here. But in the corner, the roof seemed to be

leaking small crumbs of rock which were of course rattling as they

rolled down the even floor. But this claustrophobic room was

dizzying. Something told me this was not an ordinary place. The low

roof’s incline when it hit your head as you sauntered leisurely,

scanning the place, from one side to another, made you cringe your

body, for the roof was too damn slippery, like a snake’s tongue. And


wet too; well, not dripping but wet enough to throw your mood into a

dizzying spiral.

The queen found herself a place near a crib made of jute. She

bit her lower lip as she gingerly dipped her hands into the crib and

recovered a harmless creature – a healthy baby. It took me a while to

notice that none of us had said a thing, not one word since we clapped

our eyes on the baby. How could it be? A baby in a crib, in this world

of death and savagery and masochistic sexual inferno… The baby

looked less than a year old and its small pink hands were groping for

the queen’s breasts which she spryly unhooked from her blouse and

raised her leg to press the baby to her. Equipped with the nipple, the

baby made a clicking sound as it sucked the warm milk hungrily.

By now, we were sitting in the corner with our backs against

the roof that met the floor on one side. Before us, the queen was lost

in thoughts, her baby now wide-eyed and intensely musing as it

locked its eyes on the mother’s nipple. What was wrong? I wanted to

ask. The baby’s spasms rocked her lap and a couple of muffled flows

landed on the bosom, and the baby’s hands finally caught a strand of

the mother’s crimped hair when the latter shook from her muse and

patted on the baby’s chest. She crooned very softly and put the baby

to bed as best as she could. She hooked her blouse and picked up the

robe’s sash. She said she was in the middle of it when they said we

were here to meet her. Before either of us could say something, the

queen shushed us up as if we were her babies.

Through a trap door, she led us into another deeper area

within this already claustrophobic slant and slippery roof. Here was

something that was to absolutely shock me, shock any woman for that

matter. Why, it would have shocked the men too. Inside, we found

many tattered rags pulled over diminutive bodies, alien looking skull

with gouged ribs under them. It looked as though spindly pitiable

bones were cluttered together into this low-roofed cave where even

the floor warped and bumbled under our shoes as we scrunched up a

rock or two on our way. On either side of this warp were about a

hundred small rags and babies on each of them, of course denuded of

skin, only skeletally present. Moths were going in and out of the

gaping ribs; fat moths, so fat and sluggish they were dozing, I thought.

Kranthi Askani 51

The queen had a torch in her hand and Mrunalini was carrying a

lantern.

It was such a sight Mrunalini snuffed the wick and dropped to

her knees, inconsolably crying. The rats had fled this part of the

cavern, for it no longer made any sense to forage in the dark, for

everything that they could have fed on, was already fed on. It was

over. Whatever life was there here, it was not there now. The smell of

death was somehow gotten rid of. The queen panned her torch to the

roof where there was a large hole about five feet in diameter. Flies

were buzzing about the hole; going out or flying in was difficult to

say.

I did not try to console Mrunalini, for there is nothing that can

console a woman. There is nothing that denudes a woman of her

existential purpose than the sight of hundreds of dead babies. Most of

them were less than a year old, I could tell, for they were too small

and looked as if they were unwillingly pulled out of their mothers’

wombs. The skulls had the look of smugness, I thought. I must be

imagining things again. Why would babies wear smug faces when

they were obviously dying? Now dead, then dying…

The queen marshaled us to the end of the room. Mrunalini ran

towards the entrance leaving us both in the warped passage like cave

with its skulls, moths and flies. I kneeled closer to a skeleton and

giving it a shake, picked up the limb that fit into my fist. So small, so

utterly, helplessly small…! We picked our way among the rubble into

the far end of the warp and here the babies shrunk in size. They were

even smaller. I knew what it meant. They were delivered even before

they were fully formed. I imagined how it would have been to the

mother, to watch how her baby gagged and spluttered blood all over

her legs as they pulled it out, half dead and dying. To hold the dying

baby in your arms while it slathered into blood and sieved through

your fingers, while it melted and disappeared into the air above,

leaving only a smudge on your loins. What would you do? I imagined

how the mothers would spend their days staring at the ripped

umbilical cord and saying to themselves that they were to blame for

all this, that they gagged their babies inside their wombs…

It looked like a crazed adaptation of a studio setting where the

monster feeding on babies has fled the scene, leaving behind this trail


of skeletons. The queen now lanced the dark with her torch’s light

lifting the miserable skeletons out of the dark for a fleeting moment as

we made our way back. There were cribs lying in the dark at the heads

of some of the babies; there were jam jars filled with pills and there

were pails patterned with stains of whatever sluiced through that clay

back in the day. I was oddly favouring to stay inside, here among the

skeletons of babies. I can’t explain it. Perhaps it was to do with the

fact that I was not accepted by these women out there. Perhaps, I

should find a bed for myself, and lean and let the gnarled mouths of

moths gnaw at my scuffed feet and my supple shanks and my scabbed

wounds of the knees and elbows… And leave me skinned.

The queen, as if sensing my incomprehensible urge to turn

into a skeleton and be rummaged through by a pair of hands in my

gouged skull, prodded me to move. It was as though the warped floor

was not just dizzying me but seeding these fantasies of suicide in me.

Suddenly, to die and be observed by a pair of investigative eyes such

as mine or by indifferent ones such as the queen’s seemed to fancy

me.

Outside, Mrunalini was sitting pale-faced, staring vacantly

into thin air. Mrunalini was a doctor back at the facility, one of those

white-clad women. Of course, even they had to commit themselves to

the cause of the facility. But what surprised me was that she found it

more painful than I did. Someone from the medical profession, I

would have thought, would be more resistant, tough-skinned, or say

stable. But she dithered back in there, like a drunken fool who had

suddenly found himself in a cave full of lions. Oh, dear me! How on

earth did I walk into this, he would think. Mrunalini had that look on

her face.

The queen now went over to the crib and regarded the baby in

it, fast asleep. With a look of satisfaction crossing her face, she

grabbed a hand towel and patted her face with it. I knew the long story

gathering like a storm inside her. She would have to tell us what

happened here. I knew she was vacillating, for it was a hard tale to

tell. Something very wrong happened here. What was it? From the

tunnel-entrance, a woman crawled inside, gazed at us as if we were

two snakes sitting on the coiled coops of our own tails in the corner,

defenseless and pointlessly obedient. The queen glowered when she

Kranthi Askani 53

heard what the woman had to say. What was it? What happened? Why

were we not part of it? Let us in, I wanted to shriek.

No words were exchanged. The queen turned around and

peeled the blouse off. And she scrabbled with the gown now. Did she

forget that we were in here still? Now she hunkered over the crib to

pick up a folded dress into which she climbed forthwith and fleetingly

met my gaze as we were being marshaled outside by this other

woman.

Back in the cavernous pit bunker of ours, I watched as

Mrunalini, with her back to me, sobbed weakly. She was like a

fledgling really. Despite her white robe past, I thought, as if this was

to mean something final, valedictory, in a mute mental game we were

playing. I felt stronger; I felt my strength rush back into me as if it

was only by relative comparison that I felt stronger. So, was there no

absolute strength in me at all?

I did not want to talk to anyone around me. Something told

me those dead babies belonged to each one of these women. I

imagined how the women must have felt when the babies were pulled

out unformed and unintelligible; I imagined how the mothers would

have reached down with their hands to lift the blubbered mess of their

babies as they spilled around, unformed and unmade. These mothers

were the potters who gingerly pressed their fingers on the wheel and

willed the slapped mud to take shape but their inexperienced hands

dug into the mud and gouged them. Such must be the feeling, I

thought. Such must be the impatience they hoard in their bosoms.

Something else was at work here. I recalled how in that

warped passage I noticed, as I traipsed past the queen to the far end,

the babies shrunk in size from what I estimated to be two years old to

that of unformed ones, semi-formed ones. There has to be a scientific

explanation and the only scientist (doctor to be precise) I knew was

sobbing by my side. I took my pills and went to sleep. When I woke

up, Mrunalini was beaming at me. What was it? I said and she smiled

and looked away. I had overslept, I realized. The roof above me,

peppered with sharp protruding stalactites was enough to sluice you

down a spiral of nightmares, one after another, one inside another…

But I seemed to have acquired a sort of solidity in my heart, the sort


that made me feel rigid, rock-like and incapable of having nightmares,

incapable of being afraid any more.

I slapped my face with some water, toweled myself and like a

pretty princess, sat cross-legged on my mat, hands in my lap, and

straining my ears to listen to my own breathing. Mrunalini was over

by the ledge where they had skinned the dog yesterday. I strode up to

meet her there. I wanted to be sure she was not having any funny

ideas of killing herself. This is the sort of thing that happens to

women when you expose them to misery of fellow women. Doesn’t

happen a lot with men; I think men share their mischief with other

men while we share our despair with other women. I noticed the ash

and soot deposits on the central ledge. There were all sorts of

geometrical shapes on it; an oblong here, an oval there, a near perfect

square of blackened crust, so on and so forth. She noticed my

presence and asked if I had a good sleep. Yes, of course I had. If you

had seen us there talking about how well we slept, you would mistake

us for two women in their prime of youth exchanging beauty tips. We

were masking our wretchedness; what else could we do? You tell me,

what else?

Mrunalini now unscrewed her fist to show me a saltcellar. It

was a crystal ball with steel cap sprinkled with tiny holes. She said

she found it in an upended basket over there. I followed her to the

other side where she knelt down by a jute bag. The contents of the bag

spilled under it and there was another saltcellar over there. This one

had a hinged wooden lid over a deep square bottom. I flicked the lid

open with my thumb to see if there was salt in it. No salt, I said. She

gave me her crystal saltcellar which had some in it. I ran my fingers

over the circumference of the crystal, its gnarled and knobbed body

gave me a certain thrill and I asked if I could have it. Funny how

despite everything that was happening around us, we talked about

saltcellars.

When I thought it was time to put a pause to all this mincing

of words, the saltcellars and so on so forth, I decided to talk to her

about the dead babies. I told her if we ask around we will learn what

may have happened with the babies, and given she was a doctor she

might know a thing or two. To this, she said, there were many doctors

in the ghetto. It is just that I haven’t met them. A fat woman came up

Kranthi Askani 55

to us from behind, her breathing a bit like accordion blows, slow and

short exhaling, rapid bursts of inhaling… She said the queen wanted

to meet us.

She said we would have to go out on a mission and thrust into

my hand a wad of papers, slightly torn and yellowed round the edges.

I tried to peel them off from each other and realized it was a map

which was unfortunately torn all over. Anyway, the fat woman

hunkered over the map heavily, still breathing in stertorous style as if

she were a child who was left behind in a burning house and nobody

was coming back to get her; poor thing was gasping like someone on

the verge of death. She pointed her fat index finger on the map where

she said we were. I noticed that we were very far from many things on

the map that looked like a flyblown ruin of an old temple with

scattered scalpel marks inside and graffiti outside, for the skirts of the

map were painted in a thick band of white.

Wisps of her hair loosed from a not very tight bun and now

limped about her brow. I noticed the parting in her hair which was not

very strict again; if this were a beauty salon, I would have scolded this

fat client of mine. There was a heat boil on her nose that had swollen

and grown pink. Not very long now I thought, the pink boil would

explode pretty soon, perhaps tonight while she is asleep or in the

morning when she washes her face and runs her finger, that fat index,

towards the bridge of her nose. I noticed how she sat astride on the

wooden stool as if it were a horse and she was too lazy to clap the

heels of her glinting shoes into its ribs so that the horse would gallop,

neigh and dart across a green field, the wind blowing into her hair…

But, this is absurd. You can’t imagine all of this from just the way she

sat on the wooden stool. In any case, it was a low stool, and let us face

it, she was not much of a warrior type.

I was turning cynical. No I was turning lyrical. In an imagined

world, this cavern and its roof would turn into a great hall with

pendant chandeliers that would chink every now and then. I would

leap through air, in arabesque fashion and dance merrily with my skirt

held up in one hand and fanning before me on a long swoop. And

there would be a fine gentleman, the sort who would shave his

grizzled beard. I would lean my cheek on his shoulder and he would

sling his arm about me pulling me closer. I would feel his warm


breath on my neck and his loose hand roping about the small of my

waist, perhaps even making a grab of my flank as he meets my eyes.

Later, he would take me to his palace where the slaves would be

readying his bed up. He would invite me onto it and I would lie supine

on it. He would lie beside me and his hand reaches up from the veil of

my bodice to feel the thud of my heart under it. I would look into his

eyes and I imagine the gargoyles on the bedstead would melt for

that’s how powerful a stare he would possess. Then we would breathe

as if we were two marionettes twined in threads to harmonize our

movements…

But here I was, under this stalactite-encrusted ceiling. The fat

woman seemed to have sensed my disillusion so she smiled and biting

her lower lip said the place we were going to was a good place after

all. Mrunalini climbed into her jeans, slipped her arms into the tweed

jacket and hooked a torch to her waist pocket. Mine was a better

looking jacket I thought. In any case, my boots were sturdy and better

suited for the woods. And something told me we were heading into

the woods.

Outside, the queen was limping across the strip of land where

only recently two dead bodies were scooped up from the ground.

What happened, I asked and she said it was nothing. It was just her

ankle, she twisted it. Two women climbed into the jeep alongside us

in the rear. The queen sat in the front. She was wearing a pair of

corduroy trousers, a sleeveless black blouse over it and a long sleeved

shirt under it. She and the woman behind the wheel soon began

discussing, or rather strategizing as to what should be done with the

ghetto perimeters.

Through the sighing woods, our jeep trudged and we in the

back, joggled like shapeless fluid with every wild turn the jeep made.

It was a harrowing journey particularly when you take into account

the silence that we were stunned into. And then, it began to drizzle a

little, rain shunting on the windshield and making hasty runnels along

the way down. Mrunalini and I did a bit of hush talk, for it was raining

and it was so magical to be out in the rain. On the seat before us, the

lanky woman who was oiling her machine gun said nothing. She

seemed to care less what we did, and so we talked a little more as if

Kranthi Askani 57

we were two rabbits that realized they were not for the kill but for

petting.

Two hours later, we reached there. It was a palace of some

sort. The perimeters were fenced with concertina barbed wire which

reminded me of our stay at the facility. The ones who were keeping

guard at the entrance peered into the jeep and catalogued us. We

climbed down and were frisked. Once permitted, we climbed the

rocky stairs to reach the twin pillars that were supporting an oblong

column. Through the filigree of chambers inside, two women

appeared to show us the way. Our queen and we followed suit. We

climbed another flight of stairs the side walls of which wore lacquer-

framed photographs, pinned beautifully once but limply hanging to a

side now as if the people photographed had lost interest in

maintaining their strict and obedient postures.

Here, we were introduced to a group of doctors in a cellar

floor. They had electricity here, not very much but enough to run this

small cellar of medical lab. In here, the women were not wearing

white robes but all the same you could tell they were very serious and

sincerely working towards something of great importance. One of the

doctors went over to the chest of drawers over a wooden table, pulled

out a fist sized crystal jar and rested it on the table before us. The

room smelt of hospitals and the women here were businesslike, no

fussing. The queen examined the contents of the jar and one of the

women with us talked to the doctor about the transaction. What about

the last one, the doctor asked a little furtively switching her gaze from

us to the queen. Noticing we were not welcome here, we went over to

a corner, out of earshot.

The queen waved at us when they were done and curling her

fist around the neck of the crystal, she leaned it into her other hand

and shook it. Now she held the flat of her palm to us. Two pills, pink

and white segmented rolled on their backs on her palm. We took them

one each and met the queen’s gaze as if to ask what they were. She

said it was alright. The pills were going to make us reproductive. She

said we would procreate without the aid of a man. When she said that

I could see the gleam in the doctors’ eyes; they had the multiplied

radiance of a thousand beacons. Poised to gulp, we looked at each

other, Mrunalini and I. We knew what this meant. We were in this


together, we said to each other with our eyes. She had washed off that

impervious look from her face and looked totally in control. After we

swallowed the pills and swabbed our mouths with the trims of her

jacket sleeves, she said she heard about this in the facility. She was

obviously not familiar with the inner workings of this radical notion

of women procreating all by themselves. But, she heard about it;

many doctors scowled and sniggered about this but she knew if

something could be done to get rid of the barbarians, the sex-maniacs,

and masochistic numbskulls… The creatures, she said, walked behind

their phalli as if they were mere vehicles that the phalli had created to

get from one woman to another…

I noticed how the thousand beacons beaming on the women in

that room just multiplied into a million as if all the ships of a naval

fleet disoriented in the storm had suddenly aligned like iron filings

under a close magnet. And I imagined how their beacons dropping

their cones of light, all of them together on one single strip of dry

grass on the banks nearly setting it alight with their lancinating

beams… She was a magnet alright. Mrunalini was a magnet. Yes. She

said she did not toss it away as a mere rebellious idea. She said she

knew it could be done. Now, she wore her professional demeanour

and smilingly approached the doctors on the other side of the table to

shake hands with them.

So, this is what it was. The ghetto women were planning to

turn self-sufficient. And that explained all the dead babies, the

unformed and the one or two year olds. I did not know what to feel.

Whereas Mrunalini’s professional curiosity led her to grab an

invisible white robe and pull it on as she bit ears with the other

doctors, I stood by the door with my hands wrapped under my breast

line where it hurt a little. Everything made sense now; the

disconcerting stares we were subjected to back in the cavern made

sense. We chose to voluntarily walk into the government facility to

make dolls of ourselves, dolls that would spread legs when a switch

was flicked, whereas these women, buried under the rubble of

civilization, were busy planning a self-sufficient method. A method

that eliminated the brutes, the men…

Kranthi Askani 59

3

The dilapidated palace was on the banks of a shore so that

throughout the day you would be drowned in the din of waves

shunting on the shingle, burbling and hissing back inside. High

ceiling, walls peeled of plaster, marble of floor stained with scuffed

marks of furniture dragged over it… The thing that impressed me the

most was the room under the slope of stairs. They had electricity here

but it was used sparingly nonetheless. And like a creature that has

been used to live in the dark, now I was always looking for dark

corners and the room under the stairs was one place that I could

always count on.

Mrunalini locked herself in the lab. We still shared the same

room. It was right next to the second floor landing. Our room’s door

hung limply on its hinges, a bit tattered too as if to indicate a certain

brute force applied on it. There were little over fifty doctors in this

palace. The palace was responsible for supplying pills to all the

women ghettos around. And in turn, the ghettos sent some of their

women to guard the palace. This was a shrine, if you ask me; this was

the heart that pumped fresh blood of vigor into the ghettos.

They let me stay behind because I was with Mrunalini. But I

was mostly alone, scuttling about like a wayward crab that had been

washed ashore by a largish wave. The palace’s pediments were

impressive, the arcane architecture never failed to amuse me. One day

I found a spatula and like a fox on a spoor, I followed what I thought

was a trail, through a narrow hallway, down two flights of stairs and

into a forgotten kitchen. This was a strange place. There was a large

table in the middle and on it I noticed paw marks of a cat on the

powdered dust. Again, that strange feeling of being followed came to


me. This was deep in the ground and consequently warm, so I

returned frequently to this room. This made me feel like a gut worm

living in the guts of this palace finding it very convenient. Here, the

sound of waves couldn’t reach me, here I was submerged in cement

and plaster; here I was like a corpse vacillating between life and

death, between up and down.

On the mantelpiece, I found a vase with broken neck. I liked

the flower pattern; it was comforting, as if a blast from the past. I

hugged it close to my bosom as if it was an amulet that would

someday suddenly reveal the invisible contents inside. Well, for now

it was only the chipped enamel, but soon there would be something

else. I imagined the mellifluous fumes rising up from inside the vase

and wispily making into my nose at night as I slept with its broken

neck in the curl of my fist. I met Mrunalini rarely. She had a distinct

smell of hospitals’ waiting room on her. She would slink at night to

climb under the fluted linen sheets and disappear in the morning

before I awoke. I found this sudden aloofness exciting as if I was a

housewife who had accidentally discovered two wads of notes tucked

in the back of her chest drawers.

When I woke up at night, I would find Mrunalini deep in

sleep, holding the folds of her blanket under her nose like a child and

then I would notice the cuticles of her fingers. It was as though this

distance between us stretched every day and made me feel like her

mother for I noticed her cuticles and thought I should remind her to

clean them.

I would at times leave the palace and take a stroll on the

beach. I paddled in the shallow waters with the torch always tucked in

the lapel of my jacket. I would go as far as the mossed boulder on

which like a sea creature that had risen up at night, like an undine, I

sat on it and showed my cheek to water so it would slap me with a

sprinkle every now and then. There were others who clawed their way

up to the boulder and disturbed me. For instance, there were crabs and

there were these bizarre aquatic life forms that I don’t think I ever

knew existed on the planet. But someone like Mrunalini would know,

I thought, I will peel one of these creatures from the rock where they

glued themselves to the fleece-like algae and thrust it into her hands.

She would know.

Kranthi Askani 61

On the rock, I would turn the torch on while it still sat in the

lapel of my jacket. It would glow inside the jacket as if I possessed a

heart that glowed in the night, as if this glow was feeding on the moon

for its light. And I imagined what I would look like to a distant

mariner charting the seas if he happened to fix the crosswire of his

binoculars on me. I had also fallen into the habit of collecting neat

pebbles from the shore. Some of them exquisitely smooth, so much so

that I had to have them. Some, I would pick up and chuck away. But

all this, I would have to do with the aid of my torch light and it

sometimes made me sad, for I would try and imagine how enchanting

it would have been if there was sun in the sky. But the pressing dark

around me was somehow more comforting, more than what I was

willing to admit. This pressing wool of black was always on the

periphery, as if this plenitude of dark, this specter was a teeming nest

of creatures with black beaks that whispered among themselves,

strategized, besieged me, always poised to gnaw at me when for

instance, I killed the torch. I imagined how these black-beaked

creatures of the dark would wheedle the torch into dying, which I

thought was a teeming nest of creatures with white plumes.

Sand crunched under my feet, stars spangled above me, crabs

scuttled around me, waves drummed in my ears, dark seethed in my

eyes, and the pills I took seemed to be swelling inside me. I took long

walks on the beach; I traipsed past the shingle beaches to the sandy

ones and also to the brief strips of beach where it was gravelly and

always made this sound of rattle. I liked the subtle variations in the

sound, and obviously this made me feel like an abnormally large bat.

Funny, I have been imaging myself as so many different creatures

these days, mostly nocturnal I must say.

Sometimes I would find my feet caught up in a tangle of

gathered sea weed and I would wonder if this web under me was some

other creature’s home. It would have never occurred to me if this was

just another sunny day. I think I have grown far too sensitive to life

around me; it is as though I have cleaned my ears off its wax, cleared

also the corners of my eyes off that twist of whites, and scoured my

nostrils clean off the green mucus, and grated the top of my tongue so

that now I was more receptive to the planet pullulated with this

amazing life.


It is amazing how the planet was still more or less the same.

Of course there were fewer birds now. I have noticed bones of many

dead birds within the rafters of the palace roof. Why, these creatures

needed light, didn’t they? And so, the skies are silent now, perpetually

blind to the beautiful arraying and dithering of birds at crepuscular

times. I think I have always been fascinated with the crepuscular. I

like the auburn chewed ends on the horizon and the swathe of petered

out orange until the sky grew greyish and dark beyond. That reminds

me of the clean wipe of blue on the clear days and again it makes me

nostalgic. How can anyone forget the pigeons that always made that

sound they make, a halfway sound between a purr and a drub…! And

when one accidentally throws the windows open, the pigeon would

make a frenzied whoosh away from the sill of your window leaving

behind it the sound of loud clap of its wings, some feathers even. A

cake of dropping too if you were lucky!

Mrunalini crinkled her smallish mouth and told me she was

busy. She didn’t notice. But there it was, my belly swelled and my

navel, like the mouth of a soft fruit seemed to ripen as a new life form

pressed from inside… But I was probably imagining. It was possible

that I was making it all up. Mrunalini did not feel anything move

inside her. Like a small girl who had been lectured by her parents, I

slipped into the kitchen downstairs where the din of waves could not

trundle down the two flights of stairs and where I was safe, away from

the reprimand of everyone else from above. If I opened the door and

climbed as far as the first landing, I heard the soft sound of scudding

of the feet upstairs.

The paw marks intrigued me for there seemed to be more of

them on the table, there seemed to be more dust and more pawing that

is. But I never found the cat. It had to be a cat. Was it the same cat

that followed us from under the tree where we settled on our way as

we escaped from the facility? Mrunalini would have said I was having

false delusions of importance. No, you are not important, she would

have said to my face. Why would the cat follow you? Here, she would

have stressed the ‘you’ to mean, of all the people, why me?

But there they were, the paw marks, hard to ignore. What do

you think? Do you think I am going mad, what with all this pressing

dark around me? It’s a convincing climax one would arrive at,

Kranthi Askani 63

plausible. I won’t deny it. I had thoughts to that effect myself. I

wonder what goes on inside the mind of a madman. Would he

comprehend it if you told him he was mad?

I wanted to collect flowers and replace the empty enamel pit

of the flower vase with green stalks. But there were no flowers

anymore. No sun, no flowers, and that was how it was. Yes of course

there were some wild flowers which put out fruits the sort we can’t

seem to digest at all, poisonous even. Oh, I even saw Mrunalini

carrying some lab grown flowers and I wondered what the world had

come to. If I were a grandmother from a different generation, I would

have thought this was too decadent, the whole thing, everything.

I have learned to live alone. The palace is lulling me into

solidity. Except for my stroll on the beach I can’t seem to go upstairs

at all. In the grating, I lit a fire and watched how it licked the insides

Clickety-clack. In this kitchen, I found the cupboards mostly empty.

Not that I needed any of them. In the attic above the cupboards, I

found a press of accordion lips alongside two pipes and two drums.

This was definitely the servant quarters. If there were any dresses

lying around, they weren’t there today. Me and my flower vase slept

by the mantelpiece on a patch of bare floor which I swept with a nice

bristled broom (I found this in the attic) and mopped the floor clean as

the slick skin of a sea lion. Here, I slept and challenged myself to stay

alone. I wanted to see how long I could take it, the loneliness. I

wanted to shroud myself in it, get lost in the natural state of mind one

can afford in the dark.

I worried about the head lice and there was itching all over

my body. I scratched my shanks up to the knee, raked also the length

of my forearms. Scabbed all over, cauterized as if my skin was a

zigzag of railway tracks, I spent my days in insatiable hunger for

loneliness. It was as though I was punishing myself for some deed in

the past. If a pair of lancing torch shafts of light hit me while I was

here under, waking me up, dredging me from my sleep and gave me a

serious thwack and told me I was deranged and needed to be shifted to

an asylum, I won’t be surprised. I am sure this is how they feel. They!

The mental…

I have assimilated my eyes in the dark here. And my stomach

is swelling now, like a soft fruit inside me. If I gave birth to a baby


and if I were to bring it up here in the dark, and if that baby had a

baby, so on and so forth… I think after a few generations, my kin

would grow blind like troglodytes; their skin would be pale and rid of

blood. So, if an alien ship were to descend on the planet half a million

years later they would find no traces of humans at all. The only

surviving ones would be lurking under the rubble, here under an attic

of a palace’s kitchen room for example. And these survivors would

have four sensory organs. Sight would be out of question.

Mrunalini said she was sensing the swell in her stomach too.

Yes, we were both conceiving alright. She said we would soon have

to take other pills, the new ones that were supposedly better than the

ones before. By before, she of course meant the remains of that

warped passage where we met the queen. How different was this from

the government facility? I thought. It did seem as though we were not

aspiring for freedom at all, I said. To this, she said the only way to

attain freedom from the creatures (she meant ‘men’) who discharged

their venom between our thighs was to discover the pill. Oh, yes, the

pill.

They say your hormones work up a lot of bizarre feelings in

you when you are pregnant. I was beginning to accept this, for I was

crowing and cawing for no reason. I was enfeebled with the weight

inside me. The cat still mocked my attempts to verify my theory as to

whether it was the cat I thought it was. The kitchen now smelt of my

presence. I walked into the kitchen this morning (what morning?

What night?) And it was as though the room hissed to let me in, the

door creaked, floorboards clacked under my feet and the dead cinders

installed themselves in the grate looking like a thousand red eyes of

yesteryears that had gone numb now, pallid and useless.

I imagined the weight of house over my head burdening me as

I whimpered like a coiled up spring here in the basement kitchen. I

imagined the women seriously hunched up before their equipment,

spryly lifting something from an ammonium washed bell jar with a

pair of tongs and resting it on a glass slate before gluing it with

another glass plate over it. Now, I imagined seven pairs of eyes

intently gazing at the thing through a microscopic lens and saying to

each other things like ‘we did it’, their eyelids twittering like bird

wings as they held each other’s stare. At a time like this, someone

Kranthi Askani 65

would make a parenthetic comment and they would all loosen up like

the umbrella struts that had been drawn together and cinched up

around the handle.

For no reason there is this episode that comes to my mind.

This must have been in the third year of my stay at the facility. It was

a tubby mendicant, a new one. Under the great dome of bluish white

(the dome had been renovated since the first year), he gesticulated for

me to stay a little while after our exercise. I looked about me and

found his plastic cave more or less the same as anyone else’s. He was

short legged and large faced; the stubble on his chest rasped against

my knees when he was above me and at the time I thought I hated the

smallish creature for his looks. His beard was stiff, matte and his

forehead mottled with acne. His nose was blunt as if someone had

given him a strong blow; it was a nose that looked like its nostrils

were strapped to the bones under it, unusually flat and really large,

covering a good portion of his face.

There was a new girl among our midst. Around this time it

was unlikely to find volunteers. Whatever choices had been made

were made and people in general were living with the choices they

made. But surprisingly, there was a new addition and this girl was

rather very attractive. She was installed in the bed next to Priyanka.

This new girl had an admirable bust for her age; she was tall and lean

around the waist; her nose was sharp and eyes radiated with all the

nubile energy that seemed to rise up from beneath her skin. She had

the habit of making a ticking sound with her tongue when she was

posted on her bed and she did nothing but sleep all day long. She was

shy and didn’t seem too equipped to handle the rigor of the life inside

our facility.

She returned from her first visit with a specter of death about

her. Priyanka talked to her the whole night. By the morning the tall

slender angel was dead between her sheets. A pool of blood smeared

the sheet over her just below the waist. Priyanka was the first to

notice. There was a murmur of hope around us but we all knew it was

over. The wardens came, their heels clicking on the linoleum floor.

We were shooed, the blanket wrapped around the body and hoisted

over a giantess shoulders. Priyanka was the worst affected of us all.

To her, this new girl was hope, someone from outside. But to the


facility, she was just another angel. There were the usual questions

thought how did she kill herself? Was it the orange pills beside her

bed? Who gave them to her?

That night, I sat by the window ledge nipping a bud-like tassel

of that dead angel’s scarf. We were in a different dormitory now; this

was on the second floor and from here you could see the pressing,

pulsing dark around the facility. Save for the occasional gargle of the

jeeps as they trundled over the incline to reach the entrance from

outside, there was no movement outside. This was a silent world;

above all, it was a silent world with people who cherished their

silence to everything else. It was as though we were all married to

each other and we had decided to stay away, not encroach on each

other’s silent domains…

The tubby mendicant had something to do with this. We had

been in the facility for over three years and knew who to approach for

information. It was Priyanka’s turn a week later. The overarching

spool of melancholy, like the metal spool of a rail track, unwound

before her and Priyanka steadily wheeled her train of thought on this

track.

This is how she described it later to me: Priyanka said the

tubby mendicant, emboldened by what he had achieved last week,

was cheered among his men. It was like a carnival out there. The men

were all thumping their chests together like seals on a wintry morning

under the wipe of blue sky. The tubby mendicant was seated on an

altar which was decorated as some sort of crude proscenium. It was

made of mud. Over it, this short man presided like an ugly oversized

worm. Under the proscenium, they had sprawled sarees, freshly

washed and smelling of detergent. In fact it was so utterly out of place

to smell detergent as if the corpses under the ground (for there were

real corpses buried there) were secreting it. Priyanka said her head

grew dizzy and resolve slyly melted away right when she needed it

the most.

In her mind, Priyanka said, she imagined the dome cracking

and the shattered glass flying apart, some of it crashing down on her

head. The mud under her feet suddenly seemed to breathe like a

creature, pulsed to twitch open and admit her feet so the shackles

could be drawn around her ankles. She felt like a gravedigger had

Kranthi Askani 67

been born in their midst for the tubby mendicant was wearing a wire

of fingers around his neck, fingers of corpses that were dredged up

just for this reason. The place around the altar looked like a very old

tree had been plucked out the roots of which shook the solid ground

off their tendril-fists now.

Apparently, the tubby mendicant claimed to have had an

epiphany. And the rest were sucking up to him for the message from

heavens. When was the pressing canopy of dark being lifted? They

had appeased the phallus for so long. The supplicants were radiating

erotic energy from their spent phalli to the heavens. Was heaven

satisfied? What was the message? It was madness, Priyanka said,

absolute madness. The tubby mendicant was telling the others it was

not very long now, not very long to wait. The erotic energy of all the

supplicants made heaven blissful and their deity would draw a spear

through the miasma of dark around them. The incantations had

reached a crescendo when the wire strung with skulls of supplicants

from ahem, six feet under, was tied between two staffs raised on the

proscenium.

A white cloth was draped around the tubby mendicant; the

cloth had a small gaping hole through which the short man could see

through. The cloth signified the light, Priyanka surmised. Seven other

mendicants, swathed in black with similar holes in the front to see

through now besieged the white one in the middle. Like a building’s

turret, they lowered to sit around him in a complete circle, incanting

(or gargling, for Priyanka said it was incomprehensible mostly) all the

time. One thing was clear, she said. This carnival was initiated after

the death of that pretty angel. For some very complex and insanely

irrational scriptural reasons, they figured the death of an angel

signified an acceptance of their supplication from the heavens. What

did it all mean? Who was this tubby man? That night, I could hardly

sleep and I noticed Priyanka was sleepless too. But we had nothing

else to say to each other. There was no comfort; we could not pretend

to comfort each other any longer. By whatever strange philosophical

reasoning, we had decided to accept our fate in the facility.

The bed next to us was empty. We wished it would stay that

way. Who would want to see another pretty darling little girl

volunteer to this charade, this volitional tryst with death…? This was


a memory I could not peel from my memory. It chafed and rasped

inside my mind; just when I thought the memory was old and cold, it

would writhe like a worm and rise, gnaw at the floor of my mind and

rear up like a cobra hood to bite its own neck, its own tail… Priyanka

was so disturbed with everything she began telling me her story. This

is how it began: she had a mother and she had a father. But this was

not an easy story, she said. I nodded. No one’s past is easy to slather

on the present.

Her father, Vicky, spent the whole of his middle age in an

asylum. Her mother, Priyambada, devotedly visited him at the asylum

for as long as she could. And then, she was born. At this, Priyanka

sucked the rising bale in her throat. I saw her nipping the bed sheet’s

hem under her moodily as if she was stroking her mother’s hair in her

memory. She said her mother died in childbirth. Her father couldn’t

care for her while in the asylum so naturally she was brought up in a

government facility. The word facility somehow made it all sound

rather gothic than gloomy. No, not like this one, she said, a sort of

facility where children are brought up. A nice one, she said.

Priyanka said she learnt about her father when she was still a

teenager. The nice lady at the facility summoned her one fine morning

when the planet still had a sun and the scuffed clouds sprawled all

over the blue sky, some small and some cumulus. Behind the lady, the

head of the facility was a glass stained with dust and pattered rain

trickles from outside. Leaves of a ferns were drumming against it

when the lady sat Priyanka down and told her everything she needed

to know. Why was she telling her all this now? Because, the lady said,

Vicky was being released from the asylum.

Priyanka said when she heard why her father went into the

asylum in the first place she pitied him. Why, her mother had loved

him a great deal, didn’t she? Yes, Priyambada in fact went to pay

visits at the asylum where Vicky was kept. Vicky’s condition was not

very clear to the doctors either. He had these bouts of nervousness

followed by intense rage, to vandalise things around him, to harm

people and to harm himself. They said it was aneurysm of the brain

but what did Priyanka know about brain and its aneurysms. But now,

Vicky was released and he went to stay in a remote village. Perhaps it

was his grandfather’s home but no one knew for sure. Priyanka said

Kranthi Askani 69

first she went to visit the asylum where he was kept. There, she met

the doctors who treated him for over a couple of decades. She asked

about her father’s condition and they told her there was a recurrence

of his violent behaviour throughout his stay in the asylum, on an

average, once in three months. How long did the condition persevere

before Vicky would be normal again? It could be anywhere between a

day and a year. Once, in his later forties, he had to be kept strapped

for little over a year and fed all the time through beady tubes while

under the influence of anesthetic.

And how did it manifest, the condition, the violence, she

asked? And the doctors told her it could be mild frustration or it could

be the sort of rage to willfully hurt everyone around him. There were

cases in the past when the doctors thought he was alright and left him

in the open but turned out his condition, like a sly worm, tricked the

doctors. Apparently, his father had marshaled a good twenty men with

some or the other condition to rear up to the roof of the asylum from

where they could jump into the adjacent building and harm the

women. In those days, the men and women were only separated by a

long compound wall which was not very hard to cross if you hit the

roof. Turned out that Vicky hoarded hatred for women; he had turned

into a masochistic beast, the doctors said.

The doctors said, although reticent in other areas, when it

came to hating women, he could muster up a lot of venom out of

nowhere. Priyanka said this was because he thought mother

abandoned him. So, Priyanka went to visit her father in the remote

village. She said it was, in the end, an easy choice to make. It was her

choice to make and she made it. The doctors told her he was a volatile

being. Although for the last three years he had not had an episode at

all, given his past, they were inclined to believe it was only a dormant

period and that there could be an episode any time soon, a

resurfacing… By now, she was sobbing into her bed sheets. She was

choking under the weight of her tears. I thought I would go up to her

and lay a hand on her shoulder, perhaps even tell her it was going to

be alright. But then, she said something that I could not fathom… She

said she visited her father that morning. He was one of the

mendicants. Priyanka said Vicky has had his frightful episode of

sadomasochism when one of the mendicants found him outside. He


told her he was alright now. He told her he was feigning his

masochistic rage for the benefit of all fellow mendicants but he

wished to atone for his behaviour, he wished to save his daughter. But

how can anyone help us…?

Of course we had to wait for another year until one of us

could meet him. The mendicants had their own round-robin system

and it would have been a mistake to volunteer, feeding suspicions into

the air around you. So, we waited. But as days went by, the bizarre

tale of a seventy year old mendicant was everywhere. It went like this:

the old man was found violating a woman outside the confines of the

facility. A mendicant who was on his way to the facility clapped his

eyes on the beast of a man; although scrawny and although he had a

putty phallus that was barely tumescent, the cathartic energy in him

alerted this peripatetic mendicant who dragged the scuff-kneed old

man into the facility. But turned out the seventy year old man was

granting favors to all the women who visited him in his plastic cave.

Turned out the seventy year old with varicose-veined sack of soft

under his wrinkled organ was incapable of intercourse. Turned out

this man made every woman promise to keep his lack of virility a

secret…

When I met him nearly a year later, he was sane and I was

thankful for that. I told Vicky (yes, that was his name) I knew his

daughter. He seemed preoccupied with something. He said it was

coming back to him. What, I asked. Insanity, he said. So, he knew?

He knew he had bouts of insanity? I asked. Yes, he said, but he won’t

be able to control the rage of sadistic indulgence. I was scared, I told

him as much. To this, he laughed and said he was scared too. It was a

long time since I had seen anyone laugh and it felt good, a primitive

urge seemed to seek my heart out and embolden it. He was an old man

and I protested when he tried to get to his knees. I reached for the

pitcher filled with water and leaned it to fill an earthen mug. We spent

our allotted time chatting like a father and daughter ought to. He said

his heart filled with envy for the normal. By that he meant his illness

of the mind was something he deplored despite what his doctors

thought about him.

I told him we walked into this facility on our own volition and

he should be careful; Priyanka was not hopeful of fleeing from here.

Kranthi Askani 71

He said he wished to atone for all the wrongdoings in the past. I felt

more and more like his daughter and imagined him speaking to me

directly, not addressing her through me which was the case however. I

envied her for having a father. His words soothed my aching taut

nerves as if an ointment was applied to the wounds of the skin. He

said he may have a plan. I told him the news of a gentleman

mendicant was already in the air; it was only a matter of time before

someone confronted him.

He said he was prepared to die but would like to free his

daughter first. He felt the weight on his shoulders, he said. He

shrugged, sighed and threw his hands up to indicate he was helpless,

just as helpless as we were. What a curious fate of luck that he had to

find himself in here with his daughter. There was hope and for that he

was happy. But when he thought about what they were doing to all the

women here, he said he thought he was the only sane man under the

bluish-white dome. Why, they thought he was insane but he was

certainly the sanest one, wasn’t he? Who in his right mind would

build a cathedral of plastic caves where erotic energy was produced,

women wailing under men, helpless and enduring with animal-like

stubbornness…?

When it was time to leave, I asked him if he had a plan. He

said he did. But it was to take another six months before the plan

could be executed. But it ended badly for him. He was like a

dragonfly that beat its head on a glass window to be let out. He was

blind to the glass. The plan never worked out. He tried to escape twice

in guise of some metaphysical need to go into the woods. He was

feigning his epiphanies. Luckily for him, some mendicants believed

him while others did not. The appeasing of phallus deity strictly

needed them all to stay under one roof and perform the act, day in day

out.

They harangued him when they found out he was granting

favors to the women. And he was tossed back into his plastic cave so

he could mutely perform his task and prove his allegiance to the deity

that was to dredge the world up from its darkness into the light of the

day. He tried to escape a third time and fractured his knee. But they

equipped him with a crutch and installed him back at the door of his

cave, to do what a creature with phallus ought to do.


Towards the end of our stay in the facility, Vicky grew weak

like the atrophied organ between his thighs, withered and cowering all

the time. Priyanka never got a chance to meet him again. By sheer

luck, we met again. He was a blubbered mess, his knees drawn closer

to his chest and the veined bald sack under him gnarled and putty-like.

He coughed a wheezing cough and lifted his palm that covered his

mouth to show me how he was bleeding to death. He had a perfectly

good mane on his forehead when he was initially brought to the

facility but now he had grown a bald patch that was peppered with

moles.

I told him everyone knew about his virility, or rather the lack

of it. He said he was happy that was so, at least they won’t prod him

in his ribs with a sharp stick like you do a dog so he can pour his

dilute self into a patiently waiting fleshy crucible under him. His cave

was untidy, littered with broken earthenware and wilting plants. On

the floor I found the muddied pills spilled out of broken bottles.

I was wearing a peachy saree with matching blouse; they had

scrubbed me clean, scoured the sweaty parts of me and perfumed

them; applied foundation on cheeks, eyeliner on the lashes and blood

red lipstick on my lips. If this was a normal day, Vicky said, he would

have complimented me on my fat lower lips that hung under the bow-

like upper lip as if it had been bitten by an insect, distended,

reddened… I said he had jug ears. He held them in his hands and

flapped his scrawny limbs. He said he was an overgrown insect, a

mutated thing. I said, for an insect, he looked quite handsome. We had

a hearty laugh. But when he laughed, I could see the joggling

hesitancy of his ribs under the flimsy skin. His arms were long but the

sockets of the shoulders looked as if they would come apart anytime

now. He said the only way to forget his old self was to hope for that

bout of insanity again. I knew this to be true. They said he was

suddenly virile, potent and radiant with masochism, like a vine rearing

up to reach for the skies.

I asked him if he knew he was misogynistic, that is, when he

was gripped by this revolting, feral disease of the mind. He said yes,

he knew it. It had to do with how he assumed that Priyambada

abandoned him. We sat in silence for a while, he with his pale hands

cupping the stubble of his beard, I with my creamy hands nestled in

Kranthi Askani 73

the lap, the peachy saree sprawled about me like fans of a flame. The

walls of his cave were caked with blood; mosquitoes swarmed about

the place with a healthy curiosity. I picked my way among the rubble

and cinching my saree folds by the waist, I said I will help him tidy up

the place a bit. He did not offer resistance; he didn’t offer his help

either. I was feeling more and more like his daughter running errands

for him, tidying the place up and sitting down to talk about his past as

if it was a past we shared, as if I was a part of his past.

There was a flower vase and I asked him what was a flower

vase doing in this place? He said it reminded him of Priyambada. He

said back in the day he worked as a TV host. In one of their first days

together, before they fell in love (the old man bloused at this) they

were working on a fantasy tale where Priyambada, pretty as a pearl,

played the girl with filament forearms. He, Vicky, played the role of a

TV host who would interview this incredible creature who wore a

white saree with silver threaded embroidery on the hem for the

occasion. In the show, Vicky said, Priyambada points at the flower

vase and says something like ‘I love the vase’. He said he can’t

remember what she said but just that he had kept the vase with him

for the rest of his life, even when his bouts of insanity told him

Priyambada abandoned him, even when he vandalized everything

around him including his own things, even hurt people, he had the

tiniest sense of keeping the vase safe.

It is all he had from his past, he said. That was not true, he

had Priyanka. He beamed at this. Yes, Priyanka…! He said he wished

to see her before he died of the sickness. I told him if there was any

way to arrange for it I would have done it. He was moody so I asked

him if he wanted to tell me more about Priyambada. I knew enough to

stray clear from his onset of insanity, how it happened or when did it

happen for the first time. Priyanka told me it would do no good to him

or to her if Vicky began recalling his insanity.

His eyes were dry and hooded; there was a gash that ran

across his left cheek. But the stitches seemed straggly, done in haste

as if the hands that did the stitching were inebriated at the time, or

worse, did not care at all. The left eye was pinched and gave him a

perpetual squint. There was no symmetry in him, even his left testicle

hung looser than the right one. He pretty much looked like a dog with


mange disease lying on the roadside licking its own sack under it,

heedless and pointless. His small paunch was vacuous and slackly

pendant to his frame as if it were the tulle of his bridal skin.

Pendant above him from the roof of his plastic cave was a

slug-like rope, greenish and looked new. I asked him what it was. He

said the doctors were going to install devices in all the tents. What

for? He did not know. I held the rope. It was nylon and I could not

think of any possible use of such a rope.

He cleared his throat and launched into a story. He didn’t wait

for me to join, his listener. It was as though he needed no listener. He

could go on without me. I imagined how he would be muttering tales

of fantasy to himself throughout the day, dipping his hands in the

bottle for pills every now and then but otherwise just telling stories.

He said Priyambada knew he had a penchant for fiction, for fantasy

and to tear away from realism. He said one of the reasons why

Priyambada and he met was his story writing skills. The TV show

about the girl with filament wrists was received so well, he said,

Priyambada met him more often and soon they were inseparable.

I nodded but I don’t think he even registered the nod. He went

on, his eyes now flooded with the vision of his past. His otherwise

nervous ticking of the dry tongue on the palate was now suffused with

slipstream of his nostalgic past. There were days, he said, when they

met in hotel rooms and would spend their time smoking cigarettes and

telling each other stories. Where did he work exactly? I asked. But he

was not listening. In any case, Priyanka already told me. It was a TV

studio and he was in the creative team. Priyambada joined as an

actress and that was how they met. Vicky was telling me one of the

stories Priyambada liked a lot.

He said it was about a man who visits a doctor. This is how it

went.

Doctor, I see words

Oh, I see…

No, doctor you don’t see.

Of course, I don’t see. It is you who is seeing words!

Kranthi Askani 75

Yes, it was interesting. So, what happened next? I asked but

Vicky was lost in thought as if scouring the floor of his mind for some

thought that evaded his every attempt. I watched him squint unevenly,

his left one puckered and the right one largely undisturbed under the

frown. Flesh under his arms flopped about loosely like the udders of a

diseased cow. When he began after a long time, it was with the click

of his tongue that I knew he was launching into the story again.

So, what seems to be the problem here?

Doctor, I see words everywhere around me. For instance, I

see a string of words around your head right now

What do you see on my face?

There is the word stubble under your beard lolling like a

string of beads. There is the word straggle over your mustache. These

are clear but others are not very clear. It’s a dense clutter of letters

strung together all over your face. Behind your shoulder I see scalpels

and scopes. Over the roof I see rafters and under my feet I see matte. I

spread my arms about and I see hairy, scrawny. The photo frame on

your table, I see slender and cheerful. The frame is spilling letters and

I don’t see a sensible word yet but I will get there.

Ok.

Oh, yes, now I see it. Its glint.

What glint?

The frame, I see the word glint on it.

Anything on the table yet?

No, the letters are swirling around, knocking into each other.

It should take a while. You see doctor! It is not one or two words but

hundreds of words I see around me. Mostly the words share letters.

There, for example, sheen, scalpel and shunt are sharing their first

letter so the words form three blades of a fan on the scalpel there on

the side table. Oh no! Now side table joined them and four words are

sharing the same first letter. It is as though these words are alive; they

are beating their heads into each other. There’s a lot of competition

among the words; they are like school kids begging for attention.

Whose attention?


Mine doctor.

Oh! Yes, of course.

What do you think I should do doctor?

What is the problem?

The words, doctor.

Yes, I see.

No you don’t see.

No, I mean I see you are seeing words. But I don’t see why it

should be a problem.

Because doctor, as more words join together, my visual arena

is teeming with words, words and more words… It is confusing me. I

think I am going mad. Do you think I am going mad?

May be.

It feels like the sockets of my eyes are filled with letters like

bees in hives. It is as though I have to wait patiently for the seething

angry bees to make smallish gaps as they fly or swoop down

momentarily. I am always waiting for those fleeting moments when

my vision is clear.

Ok. Tell me this. Are the words always there?

No doctor. My eyes are like nectar of the flowers and the

words are like bees. The more exposure time there is, the more bees

are attracted to the nectar of my eyes.

Stop talking in metaphors.

Sorry doctor.

So, close your eyes.

But doctor, I can’t close my eyes. I will be blind then.

Yes, I guess you cannot.

Doctor, what can you suggest? Is there a pill I can take?

I am afraid not. I think you should stop reading for a while.

Just don’t read anything, that way you will limit your vocabulary and

let us hope the words will go away, dry away eventually. Every new

word you come across attaches itself to your mind with a string of

associations with past words and thereby bolting itself to the floor of

Kranthi Askani 77

your mind firmly. The less you read, print or electronic or whatever it

is you read on these days, less you read, less you feed your mind with

this fantasy. Eventually, your mind would give up.

Tire, wither, whimper and atrophy.

What?

Those words doctor, I just saw those four words snaking into

your mouth from outside. Over your head, a letter just surfaced. It is

struggling, like a new green stalk on the wet tropical forest.

I told you to stop talking in metaphors.

Sorry doctor. It is sinewy.

What?

The word on your head: sinewy.

Whatever.

Tell me about your memories.

Even my memories are plagued with the condition of my

mind. When I recall my earliest memories, I see the rooms with words

like peeled flakes and damp doors scrawled on them. Only last week

my mother was telling me how a sudden curfew was announced in the

city and she had to wad me in the tuck of her arm and go for a run

while the police picked up random men and women to lock them in

the back of vans, twenty to thirty dome-shaped vans. She said she was

running so blindly she was about to misstep on a slate of cinders lying

on the floor before a blacksmith’s shop.

Ok, so?

This memory in my dream played out with so many words.

Words like glistering on my mother’s forehead, the letters of which

were sliding down under the slippery beads of sweat that were

forming on her forehead. The word wisp on a loose strand of her hair

which she could not tuck away, for she was running madly…

So, you are telling me your memories are corrupted too?

Doctor, I think these words are not mere scattered ruins of my

vocabulary. I think they are associated. I mean, the root of the disease

of my mind is associations.

What associations?


For instance, on my way here, I saw a schoolboy kicking a

stone with his shoe and I saw the words taper and scrawl in the sand

where the stone made a line.

Ok. You are too poetic. That’s your problem. You should

think of a line as a line, and not a bloody tapered scrawl or whatever it

is you make of it.

A little while later, I saw the word scuff joining at the end of

taper giving it a shove as they snuggly fitted into the line the stone

made in the sand.

Ok, so your words readjust. Your letters readjust a lot.

Yes, doctor, it is like peering with a lens into the inner

workings of the cosmos. It is like looking inside the matter and energy

of cosmos with a lens. You see the peripheries of matter but I see the

quantum fluctuations of the utmost beauty the same matter exhibits.

You are saying I am a fool.

No doctor.

Then what do you mean you see quantum fluctuations of

letters inside words?

I mean doctor, where as you see them as rigid and unchanging

words, I see them always moving around. It is as if the world is in a

state of perpetual flux in my eyes.

Flux is it?

Yes, now I see the word joggling; now I see the word

jiggling.

Where?

Within my field of vision there are words that don’t

necessarily bolt themselves to objects. Some of them are mere

representations of my state of mind. The sounds I hear and the

feelings I feel.

What are your feelings now? What do you hear now?

I see the words susurrating, for I know the plastic sack inside

the dustbin would make that sound under the weight of emptied pills

box you threw in it a moment ago. Also, I don’t think what you

suggested would work at all. You see, even when I sleep, on the back

of my closed eyelids, I see words forming. I am never too far away

Kranthi Askani 79

from them. They are always around me, even inside my eyelids. How

can I rid myself off this pain, this affliction of the mind, the distended

miasma of my mind?

Again poetic! You are too damn poetic, that’s your problem.

Why can’t you just think of the world normally, with plane square

roofs and flat grounds?

Here, Vicky paused. It was a long time before his crackled

voice issued out of the dry throat of his. I asked him what happened

later. He mumbled under his breath. I asked again. He looked away as

if a hand was planted on his shoulder. I sighed. I thought he was too

old to be bothered by a curious mind like mine. Oh, but I loved the

story. I told him I liked it. But he was not listening. He was lost in his

thoughts again. I was absent in his mind. Then he said naked, sweat.

He looked at his knees and said mud, scuffed, wound. He looked at

the roof of his tent and said soupy green, amber dusk, hazy blue. He

stared at me and said nubile, busty, salacious… I gripped my hands

tight and made for the run.

He came after me and laughed at my attempts to flee the

place. In the end, we both had a hearty laugh. Of course he was

joking, of course he was feigning as if it was his affliction, his mental

condition…

I told Priyanka what happened. I told her everything. She said

her father was very poetic. In fact where she went to stay with him in

that lonely house in the woods, she found a clip of papers, a sort of

memoir he had been writing. She said the prose was not what you

would expect from a mad man; it was beautiful, filled with moods and

vicissitudes of an old man. He wrote well, she said. I told her the

doctor-patient story and she said yes, that was her father and that was

his condition. I was confused. I realised how perilously close I had

come to witnessing the transformation in Vicky. Of course he meant it

as a joke when he came after me saying things like nubile and fragile.

But it could have been the real thing…

What she could not comprehend at the time or even now was

the fact that someone who could write such lengthy novelistic

memoirs could go mad all of a sudden. It was as though the aneurysm


of his mind made it possible for him to be so creative and successful

back in the day when he met her mother for the first time. Here, she

was referring to that fantasy tale about the girl with filament wrists.

Priyanka meant that her father was successful because of his mental

condition. How else, she argued, could someone write such amazing

memoirs filled with poetic observations? She meant it as a question,

for now she held my gaze and glowered at me as if to seek an answer.

I sucked my lower lip and feigned being thoughtful. Then we looked

away and we dropped the subject altogether.

Among other things I remember of my days in the facility,

here is another thing that comes to my mind. This happened in the last

year of our stay there. This happened when I was seriously pursuing

the idea of an escape. They said we had visitors, higher officials.

About ten of us angels were picked up from our dormitory and

assigned to escort these higher officials. They rallied us up like hens

that were picked by their wings in one hand clutch of a butcher. The

wardens walked us up to the guest quarters where the overhead light

had a stately charm, as if to indicate that some things never change, be

it under a clean blue sky or in the death of the dark. These officials

were apparently very rich and were managing to somehow live

decently even now.

We were sent into a single room, each of us. The room I

walked into had a low ceiling and the walls were stuccoed. There was

a large bed in the middle and a writing table to its side. On the table

was an anglepoise lamp with ribbed green neck that wilted like a plant

in the pot. Under the table a dustbin, and beside the table two

switches, beside it a square patch of unusual white in the wall

indicating to a poster that was ripped from the wall recently. There

were no windows. Behind the door, I noticed a shoe stand, smallish

one. This shoe stand brought back a memory in which I saw a black

sock lazily sprawled by its side.

The white linen on the bed smelt of hotel freshness. The

pillows, two of them, when I planted my cheek on them, sucked me

into them as if they were white cumulus clouds and I, an angel lying

supine on them. The wooden cot seemed barley used. It was an old

divan styled cot, for it had tiger paws, four of them. The headrest was

a thick lacquered one, the carving in the shape of swags being lifted

Kranthi Askani 81

on a proscenium. I think it made one feel as if the cot was the stage

and whatever happened on the bed was a burlesque. Isn’t all life

burlesque though. Nothing else in the room…

We were all wearing our usual wan brown sarees, the

uniforms, when they summoned us for this exercise. I thought they

would scrub us clean and swaddle us in perfume scented sarees for

one of those communal orgies under the bluish white dome. It was a

respite to be sent into this room. I looked at the lamp on the table and

the diary under it. This diary, leather faced with sides spangled in

gold, beckoned me, teased me, to spoil it. It looked too clean, too

unused. For that matter, the whole room mocked me; to think that

someone could be living in here while we lumbered about with wet

gluey muck between our thighs discharged by the most repugnant

creatures… to think that life was going on as always for these people,

I could not fathom it.

I felt as if I was being twined by a jungle vine in its grip. My

whole body was set aquiver with the thought of vandalising this room.

The cleanliness, the warmth of it, the perfect linear setting of the table

and the cot, the white of the walls and the glazed marble of the floor,

the single light above me, the snowflake-soft pillowslips and the

starched linen under it… The feral tiger paws under me seemed to

notice this feeling inside me and I imagined the paws set into motion,

the metamorphosis of the cot into tiger occurring before my eye, the

pillowslips growing whiskers as they give the tiger the shape of its

cheeks and the headrest melting and reforming to crown the tiger’s

teeth. And now, the tiger looks behind its shoulder and beckons for

me to climb it. Like a little girl, I eagerly climb its back and the tiger

whinnies, the stripes of black on its back and flanks like wisps of

smoke curling and canoodling the beast.

And I imagine myself in the woods where the tiger, with me

on its back, strides down an escarpment where milling about us are

the dead leaves, yellow and rolling on their backs restlessly like

quivering quarks of an atom. The tiger takes its bride (I am the bride

of course) on its back to a place where the sand no longer crunches

under its paws, and where there is no wind. It’s a valley between two

great mountains; here, a river snakes through the valley and deposits

silt. Here, on the silt, the tiger lowers its largish neck so I can climb


down. Now, with only the sound of the river water swirling around a

mossed boulder and the touch of wet mud under the balls of my feet, I

hitch up my saree and run amok for a while, the sweat of my mane

cooling my head.

And now I am shank-deep in the river water that gargles

around me angrily for I am obstructing its routine. The water is cold

and the moon overhead is fuller, closer than it should be normally. I

drown myself in the water, un-cinch my saree, peel the blouse and

petticoat, and jump up and down like a wild bush that had been

thrown out of its pot into the woods where it is free again. When I am

done, I make a clutch of my under things and saree as I stride up, my

feet slippery in the wet mud of the bank. The two mountains on either

side seem far too tall than before. I hold the clothes in my hand before

me to cover my nakedness. The tiger has morphed back into the cot

now, equipped with the softest pillows ever. I lie down on it now,

wetting the linen with the beads of river water. Moon overhead is

lowering and now it looks a lot bigger, I can even see the craters from

this close… The valley rumbles as the moon is low enough to graze

the tips of the mountains. Now a rumble, now a jarring sound…

Now a creak and a crack, for the door opened and the dream

shattered instantaneously. I wondered how delicately poised the

dream was; it was only a soap bubble and I was willing it to show me

the rainbow colours in it. But it was only a soap bubble.

It was a man. He was surprisingly handsome, with a sharp

nose, clean chin, big eyes and hair parted to a side. He was taller than

me. He was wearing a pair of jeans, a crew cut shirt over it and was

holding a paper in his hand. As he came in, I jumped to my knees, the

mattress unbuckling under me. I left the soft pillow caress and now

felt exposed, for I had nothing to lean onto. He made to indication

towards acknowledging my presence in the room. For no reason I felt

a strange weakness in my knees and wanted to sit down. He still

didn’t notice me or my weak-kneed stance. He cleared his throat as he

reached for the chair which he bent toward him, dragged and settled

on it. He flattened the folds of the paper on the table before him and

turned the anglepoise lamp on. He dragged the ribbed neck close to

him. I noticed the cone of light making a blob of white around the

Kranthi Askani 83

spread-eagled paper. I noticed the crimps on the paper and the rasp his

shirt made when its collar touched the hair on the back of his head.

When he finally looked at me, the way he lifted his gaze up

from the paper and dropped it on me, I thought I was going to drop

like a noodle from a fork under the weight of his glance. He seemed to

be assessing me. He sighed and made some notes on the paper. I

wanted to ask if I could at least sit down. It was not as if he instructed

me to stand up, but it was too late; if I had to say anything I should

have said it a long time ago. Now, it was too late to say anything so I

waited.

He sneezed into the cups of his hands as he held them up to

his nose and mouth. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt and

now fiddled in his shirt pockets. He patted his trouser pockets and

produced a small flat tin box. He opened the tin and laid it out before

him, beside the paper. The outer rim of the lamp shade grazed the tin

box uneasily; one of the sides caught the light and gleamed, others

plunged in darkness as if to say, yes, you are on the dark side girl and

I (the man in the room) am on the gleaming bright side.

The tin box had pink and white pills. He gave me one. His

hand was hairy and the knuckles ridged perfectly. I met his extended

hand with the flat of my palm into which he dropped the pill, his

fingers brushing my palm. I looked at the pill. Aastha, I asked myself,

what is this? He spoke and it was like a torrent of words at once. I

wished to duck and dodge his words which didn’t mean very much.

What was the pill for? Thought I will ask him that but I continued to

stare at it in my hands. What was it for?

He slid the drawers of the table out and handed me a flask.

The tea will calm my nerves, he said. He may have noticed the tremor

of my hands, for he rose to his feet and strode away from my view.

Now, I felt more equal to him and more secure in his judgement from

so far away. He can’t will me into nervousness from so far, I thought.

I washed the pill down the gullet of my throat. Whatever it was for, it

was inside me now, probably scheming with the cells in my body to

grow a cancerous rage that rears up from inside me and chokes me,

kills me.


But two hours later nothing happened. Nothing moved. I was

lying on the bed, sleeping on a side with my rear to him. He was

writing something in his diary, the papery sound of paper peeled from

paper is all I could hear in the room. In the end, when he was done

writing, he wrung his hands and consulted his watch. It was over,

whatever it was; it was simply over for now.

This continued a second time two weeks later. I thought I will

confront him with my questions but I did not. He gave me the pill and

I washed it down with some tea as usual. I knew what the other angels

were going through. Two weeks was a long time and the wind carried

many a gossip to drop in my lap. Apparently, one of the angels was

instructed to count the ticks of a clock by the man who she was locked

with. The lucky ones were locked up with men who played guitar and

merely wanted to be admired or applauded. One man sang and yet

another was a wrestler who banged his fist on the table and broke it on

the third attempt. One of them was a school teacher before the dark

and he simply read out scribbled stuff from his notes to his woman.

The man I was locked with did nothing more than write in his diary.

This was an unusual and creepy setup. On the face of it, it is laughable

and ridiculous but we said nothing. After all, we were getting to spend

time with men who were not soused with the fever of phallus and its

tendency to will the person it is hooked to…

Our second interaction was much like the first one insofar that

we didn’t say much to each other. We shared furtive glances and

throat-clearing sounds though. But that was all. And I was no longer

worried about the pill.

However, in the third interaction, I was prepared to confront

him. During the last week, I keenly listened to the accounts of other

angels. Not a single one of them mentioned the pill and I was

outraged at this. How can it be so? Their men entertained them with

teaching, singing, prancing, hypnotising, mimicking, strumming a

guitar, reading a novel, so on and so forth. But mine was feeding me

pills, pink and white ones. I didn’t like it one bit. So I decided to

confront him with this knowledge, the new found knowledge of mine.

He entered as usual. I was seated as usual on the bed. I did not

stand. I didn’t acknowledge his entry into the room either. I had to be

strong if I had to win this mind game. As he walked past me I was

Kranthi Askani 85

able to notice the bald patches on his jeans. He slumped on his seat as

usual and uncaringly produced the pill. I blurted out. And that was

how it was. I had so many things to say and so many questions that

needed answering. I did not pause to see how he took all of this in. I

shocked him with my abruptness. He sat back and replaced the lid of

the tin box, the pill comfortably snuggling inside it now like the pod

in a pea. He sighed deeply. I thought I felt his singed breath on the

sleeve of my jacket. Well, that was how large and enveloping a sigh it

was.

He said he was a doctor. The others were school teachers,

artists, scientists, novelists and musicians but he was a doctor. I may

have smiled openly. I am not sure why but it lightened me, all my

anxieties vanished on their own accord. For a while we sat in silence

as if to regard the new establishment, this new relation between us. I

asked him what the pills were for. He said they were placebos,

dummy pills, they did nothing. Nothing at all, I asked. Nothing at all,

he said.

What was the point of this exercise? I asked and I meant only

what was between us but he began by explaining how they all lived in

underground bunkers of some sort. He said all the men formed ghettos

for themselves away from mutinous women. Did he mean mutinous?

How so? He said out there in the world, the survivors, men and

women, had formed ghettos and lived in perfect disharmony,

embracing perfect dystopian ideologies…

He said only last week, from his ghetto, two men who strayed

outside the boundaries were drilled with machine gun bullets, the

stutter roar of the gun still ringing in his ears. He said the women out

there had turned ruthless. Some women from the ghettos went so far

as to set themselves the goal of inventing a pill that would cure them

all of men. Yes, that is what their banner said ‘cure women off men.’ I

listened to all this patiently, secretly building up a desire to join hands

with the women in their tryst. This shilly-shallying in the facility was

useless, I might as well die, I thought. I wanted to go and live in a

ghetto with the other women, with the ribald and rebellious women. I

wanted to see their world, not the meek and persuasive world of ours.

Here, we were mechanised to produce erotic energy and feed an

irrational mindless imagination of naked mendicants. There, the


women were striving to achieve a platonic idea of a society, one that

is rid of men. Yes, cure us.

I asked the doctor why they were here. What was the point of

all this? To lock a man with a woman and spend a couple of hours

once in a week…! He said it was not an easy drive from their ghettos

to the facility here. He said they came dangerously close to the

borders of the women ghettos. I noticed how he winced when he said

that. He may not have winced, it may have been my imagination but

all the same I noticed how he said it. I tried to detect a hint of scorn

when he said it but there was none. He was truly scared and that was

one hell of an achievement that my sisters managed outside. Sisters

eh!

He said the men in ghettos had been living there for over four

years and frankly missed the company of women. I saw where this

was going. So, they needed sexual pleasure. No, he scowled. That was

anyway not permitted in the facility. Apparently, only mendicants

were allowed that privilege. He said, the men missed the company of

women, the way it used to be before the dark. I saw how this was

unfolding: I could literally see before my eyes a balance that was

shifting, a landscape of power divide between men and women in

flux. Women were gaining power; women were winning in the dark.

But was the trip worth it, to sit around and just talk to a woman? His

eyes were radiant with pleasing surmise. Yes, he said, when men lived

for as long as he did in the ghettos, in underground bunkers, without

women, even a glimpse of them was wonderful.

For the whole of that week I wondered why we were chosen

for this harmless exercise. I think a dozen of us were chosen from our

dorm, or was it ten, I can’t remember. It must have been a clerical

mistake, for I was sent to a different room. I was so looking forward

to meet my doctor man. Priyanka teased me back in the dorm. She

said I was falling in love with the man who gave pills. We had a

hearty laugh. Come to think of it, these days, I was having quite a bit

of a laugh, wasn’t I?

This man was tall, squiggly teeth, chiselled body and a barrel

chest. The room was much like the last one. The tall man purposefully

strode into the room with a wad of papers, an easel and a plastic

satchel. He asked if I could please close the door for him. He started

Kranthi Askani 87

talking to me the minute he entered. It was as though we were a team

here, equipped with our easels and cots, waiting for someone more

important to drop by later in the day. He upended his tucked arms as if

it was a tote bag and everything just thudded on the floor. He

apologised. He said he was aiming for the cot. I was still holding the

door open. Was I expecting somebody? What was I holding the door

open for?

He stood the easel to one side and bent down to pick up the

things he had dropped. I noticed the tautness in his spine, and the

grimace of his face as he leaned down. I paddled up to him, dropped

to my knees and helped him with his things: couple of small paint

brushes, three pencils, two sharpeners, a scuffed soap bar and a flask.

He thanked me and said if I would be kind enough to help him drag

the table closer to where the easel was. Yes, of course, I said. We

unplugged the anglepoise lamp and threw it on the cot before we

dragged the table to the middle of the room. The chair too, although

he said he won’t need it. Just in case.

Now, he installed himself behind the easel and proceeded to

sharpen his pencils. He arranged the paraphernalia of a painter on the

table with such precision it confounded me. He seemed satisfied; he

gave a small tap to the lead box that had the paint brushes inside,

moved it a little more to the left; now he picked up the ink pot and

swilled his paint brushes in it. He grunted when the brushes dripped

on the table. He swabbed them clean with a twist of cloth and set them

up, again, as if aligning everything to an order inside his head. His

world was a projection of that architectural integrity inside his head,

everything had its place not a tad to the left or right, up or down…

From the satchel, he pulled out a milky white drawing sheet

and unrolled it, clasped it to the board on the easel with paper clips

that looked more like clothespins to me, crocodile toothed and fish-

finned. I was wondering what my role was. It was then he said I

would have to clear up the mess on the bed and sprawl on it. Ok, I

said, as with a swish of my hand, smoothed the linen on the bed. I

glared at him questioningly. He said just lie down with my back to

him. So, I slept on my side, cheek pressed on the gulf between pillows

as if being sucked into depths of mellifluous white snow clouds. He

left his easel and came to me, kneeled before me and arranged my


hands as he saw fit to his painting. He took the loose end of my saree

and rolled it around the wrist of my left hand before resting it on the

rise of my haunch. He lowered the saree under the blouse so a lot of

the small of my back was bared. Now he reached for my head, picked

up strands of my hair and unfastened them from the bob above my

neck to lay them athwart on the nape. As he did this, I noticed how

removed he was from my person. To him, I was merely an atavistic

desire, a desert mirage that would only stay for the next two hours.

For this, he braved everything, even the women ghetto perimeters, just

so he could have his two hours with a woman.

Behind me, I heard the sound of a pencil nob chafing the thick

paper, rasping against the board behind it and the small ticks when he

paused and dropped the pencil on the table. I heard the slow unceasing

rhythm of sounds. I imagined my form taking shape on his drawing. I

imagined the curve of my haunch which I am sure looked ridiculously

overlarge, for I was sleeping on my side. And the fingers of my left

hand splayed as if they were treating themselves to a foreign delicacy,

tremulously placed. I thought the object of this painting would be to

show how a woman traced her own features as say, for example, a

man would, and wonder at the lavish curves, lush flesh and tender

bones… I thought this, for as time went by the hand was possessed

with erotic truism of some sort as if it had dissociated itself from me.

I heard the sashaying of his feet. I heard the painting itself;

the dithering of the pencil on the paper when the hand holding the

pencil was unsure and desultorily watchful. It was like hearing to the

din of an internal organ that had a rhythm of its own, calm, calculating

and creating something new. I tried to imagine myself in his eyes.

How would he see me? Just another angel in wan brown saree just

lounging on the bed so he could lift up the woman in me and translate

as best onto his paper. Why did he loosen those couple of strands

from my hair? Why did he for instance thrum the back of my blouse

with his limp fingers as if my bones were piano struts?

Now he was sharpening his pencils, one at a time. He said I

could loosen myself now. I asked if I could see it. No, he said there

was still work to be done. So, I pinched my face into the gulf between

the soft pillows whose pillowslips smelt of fresh detergent. I was

Kranthi Askani 89

asleep perhaps for far longer than I should have been. Why, when I

woke up, he was gone, wasn’t he?

The door was locked from outside. I scanned the room and

noticed the satchel leaned against the table leg. On the table, ink pot,

brushes and colours… The easel was missing, so was the painter and

his pencils. I took the liberty to examine his things. I picked up the

satchel and upended it on the cot. There were two other paintings in it.

One was the landscape littered with broken bottles, splinters of wood,

shards of glass and punctured cans. The squat-roofed chimneys issued

black bilious smoke and some of it grazed the broken sills of the

windows on their way up to the floors of a building which dominated

the landscape. Overhead was all brush strokes of unbending dark with

small blobs of white and grey here and there. No spangles, only white

blobs. The blurry strip of a crenelated cement structure ran up all the

way around the block. Was this his ghetto? I asked myself. There was

a small hand, unmistakably a woman’s, on the right bottom, only the

fingers, long, slightly grimy but pure and effeminate all the same.

This hand was holding a pencil in it. I tried to make sense of it but I

gave up. It was too much.

My mind kept going back to the seething dark from which the

houses and crenelated skirts showed poorly as if they were the organs

of this giant creature. The houses pulsed in the dark as if they were

feeding on the dark as organs do on blood.

The next one was just as smudged and overdrawn as the first

one. This one was again another landscape, another view perhaps of

the same ghetto. Upon closer scrutiny, I was able to make out the

uniformed men under two tiny white cones somewhere on the far right

corner. That should be the entrance, I thought. I noticed jeeps and

pairs of feet spilling out of them as the vehicles zipped past the

entrance dousing their rears in scuffed white as they nosed

unhesitatingly into the dark. In this, unlike the first one, the sky was

neatly mottled in white pin pricks. The low moon occupied a great

deal of space with Venus crowning it to the right. I tried to find a

pattern in the stars, and willed them to move around and arrange

themselves in a pattern.

I noticed that the trees had overgrown. In fact it looked as

though the ghetto did not belong there at all, a crude manmade


structure in the woods, left there by a civilisation of the past, only

ruins left behind now. The mossed walls looked like the tomb stones

of an earlier race with gravediggers and looters of corpses hiding

behind them. The fronds of drooping branches slathered on the low

roofs making it all look rather an ominous painting where monsters

were lurking in the shadows, caged under the fronds, their hands and

legs cuffed, still alive, desperately alive and watchful even as the

world around them crumbled with every passing day. There was

nothing pleasing about these paintings. It was all too dreadfully sad,

too sadistically sad, too capriciously sad… But I was unable to take

my eyes off them still.

The sound of shuffling feet announced the painter outside.

Like a true gentleman, he knocked twice before entering. He did not

wait for me to admit him but all the same I liked how he knocked and

I may have noticed a hint of hesitation in his stride if I had a telepathic

view of him outside the door, that is.

He said he was sorry he had to leave outside. I pursed my lips

tighter than before as if I thought he was going to knock me down and

straddle upon me and with a club and a hammer, pry open my mouth.

But of course he seemed like a genial man, a gentleman too. Anyway,

he said he had finished his painting. He asked me to face the wall so

he could set it up on the easel. I did that. I heard the sound of clips on

the paper, the scuff of easel on the floor and his foot accidentally

catching the cot’s paw-foot as he came over to my side and said I

could take a look now.

It was a giantess lying on her side on the horizon, her saree

billowing into the dark, coalescing into the dark, wispily giving form

to the dark of the horizon and the sky above. On her back, the strip of

buildings like grass that had been rucked out by stray dogs leaned

against each other or felled or mossed and mucked beyond

resemblance. Her back faced the viewer. The wispy strands of hair

that spilled out of the giantess’ topiary ran like two peels of something

dark in the surrounding halo of smeared white. It looked like all this

darkness around her was issuing from her topiary which by the way

was three times larger than my bun, feral and rearing up to produce

the sheath of black around her. The scrolled fleece-like strands of hair

under my bun had transformed into smoky curls of black. The nape

Kranthi Askani 91

was surprisingly small and the painter replaced my blouse with a

bird’s plume. This bird was readying up to fly and had its wings in

full arc, whipped out like twin umbrellas. The small of her back was

large enough to make the turrets under it so diminutive that the whole

strip looked more like uneven teeth of a gear wheel that had been

cracked open so the two halves were plated aside each other.

Her feet were immersed in the dark and there was nothing to

it but assume she was melting into the dark, deliquescing, becoming

the dark around her, while with her face to horizon, away from the

viewer, she seemed to devour the only shaft of light that emerged

from somewhere in the canopy to her right and ended just where her

mouth was. The giantess was evil, I thought. I did not wish to ask him

what the painting meant because it would obviously sadden him. It

would be the single most insufferable thing for any creator of art, to

be confronted by an inquisitive creature who inquired the meaning of

the art. What did it mean? What is all this, it doesn’t make any

sense…?

I told him it was wonderful. He seemed to notice the frank

questioning stare across my face, for he said it meant all those women

from ghettos bothered him. He said they were evils, for they were

killing men heedlessly, in fact they were zombies denuded of anything

civilised in their blood, he said. I bit my upper lip and sucked it in. I

listened to him but I was secretly admiring the work all my sisters had

managed to do out there. When can I go there? I knew there were

attempts to escape that were made in the past, in fact some of the

angels managed to slip into the dark too.

The painter thanked me. The day was over. I was back in the

dorm and Priyanka had some news. She said she had found a way to

escape. So, there it was, that was how we began making all

arrangements for a grand escape route. Our arrangements of course

were made possible by the doctor I had made friends with.

Unfortunately, they caught Priyanka on the night (what night, what

day!) we set out to execute our plan. The idea was to reach the

ghettos. We had no idea how to get there but we managed to procure a

map and torch lights. We packed some essential pills and like wildlife

photographers, wore hard soled shoes, which by the way we stole

from our wardens’ ward. The word was mum; nobody needed to


know. But who could have predicted that a doctor was escaping the

facility on the same day. And again, our plan was not fool proof by

any means so there was nothing to it but accept the possibility of a

vain attempt. It was not vain, no, for I escaped, for a doctor escaped

too. Yes, it was vain for Priyanka but that was not my fault.

Kranthi Askani 93

4

My pregnant girth was rumbling throughout the night. I met

Mrunalini. No, strike that; I confronted her. Yes, that sounds more

like it. She was never around when I needed her, always, flip-flopping

in that white shroud of hers. In any case, I wanted to ask her, why the

white coat. We were living in the darkest period of our planet and yet,

here we were, still glued to our past like babies covered in the thick

paste of their mother’s womb soon after, that is, before being wiped

by a towel.

I was in the sixth month and I can tell you, I already felt the

tremors, the little kicks and above all, the snuffled sneezes. What?

Mrunalini gasped when I told her my baby sneezed inside my womb.

She said I was being ridiculous. Babies don’t sneeze, she said. Mine

does, I said and she performed tests on me. She gave me pills and told

me work on the pill was coming to a close. It was only a matter of

time before we were all cleansed off the males. Yes, that was what she

said: cleansed. I don’t know why but I seem to have my doubts on this

asexual future of mankind (womankind!)…

Aside from the fact that it is evolutionarily insensible, I also

seem to think it could be quite boring. The cat left its paw marks there

again, on the centre of the table. The ghostlike presence of the cat

makes me shudder. I feel I am being watched all the time, from the

dark. It is as though all the pressing dark around me has formed

allegiance with the nocturnal creatures and I can no longer

differentiate between the presences of one from another. They seem to

be coming at me together. All the creatures seem to have colluded, I

hear them scheming all the time, from within the unalterable darkness

against me. I can hear their whispers in my dreams, I can hear the purr


of the cat that methodically rubs its back on the table when I am not

watching and slinks into the dark without so much as disturbing a

mote of dust.

About the rumbling in my swollen girth I asked Mrunalini

and she said it was nothing. She thumbed through a fat book and

flicked her eyes from left to right, sometimes rapidly and other times

slowly, as if following an arc of a shooting star. She was disinterested

in my ramblings and the rumblings of my stomach. She said she had

them too, her hands lying flat on the girth. My dithering life and its

obsessions with puerile fantasies of the hissing sea and the ghost cat

did not interest her. Clearly, she had bigger things to be worried

about. After all, she was part of the group that was going to rid us all

of the sperm-dust…

Before coming here, all I wanted to do was come here. Back

in the facility when I was planning the escape with Priyanka all I

thought about was to aid my sisters in their tryst with the future. The

future was the receding wave of the sea that deposits a squiggly line

of seaweed on the shore. And we were the kids playing in the sand

that marvel at the receding wave and run up to catch it before it

dissolves into the body of water. We were going to shape the future

with our will and desire. My sisters were doing it and I wanted to be a

part of it. Now of course I was having second thoughts, slight

misgivings. I think I liked the prospect of women being in control, the

driving seat so to speak.

Last week when I was on the shore and doing nothing as

always I am sure I heard a laughter at first unheeded and then

snuffled. Was I going mad? All the pills I had been taking, they were

making me drowsy and I thought I would screw my fist up like a ball

and thump it hard on the glass table in the lab. Then the doctors would

all pause in their mindless agitated state and realign themselves first to

the fist, and then to my face. I could then tell them how the loneliness

was killing me, maddening me… Why, I was even hearing laughter in

the dark, wasn’t’ I?

But I knew they would only ask me to leave. I am sure they

would ferry me down to the cavern with the queen in it, and stalactites

hanging from the roof. But I don’t like that place. It was a place where

I was not accepted, it was a place where my actions of the past were

Kranthi Askani 95

held up against me all the time. Who would want that? You may want

it. I was not going to like it. So, this loneliness was an obvious choice

over that persistent repudiation, that apocryphal sisterhood, that dour

militaristic way they do things there…

Today, the queen visited us. It was the first time she came to

visit the facility since the day we took our pills and she went to

manage her ghettos. She was looking very pleased with herself. The

news was that they found some weaklings in the men’s ghettos and

targeted them incessantly. Now the borders shifted and our progress

came at a very good time. The women ghettos needed some sort of an

affirmation from the queen, something to say, yes, we are making

progress.

I stood by, the sleeves of my hand cinched over the girth. The

queen asked me how the baby was coming along. I told her I heard the

baby sneeze. She gave a snort-like laugh. That was that. Nothing more

was said and we both understood the meeting had come to a close.

She was eager to know about the pill. Mrunalini updated her on the

progress. Mrunalini told the queen we were both taking it and the

results should be clear pretty soon. Of course by that she meant

another year, for we were sure we would both deliver the baby but

only time would tell if the babies would not end up in that warped

passage.

The days from the facility come back to my mind. This was in

those last months and Priyanka was always anxious to know what was

going on with her father. I was being a faithful adaptation of a wife or

a pretty little sister or a mother or an amazing lover or merely a

woman to all those men who came to visit us once in a week. This

happened after I met the doctor and the painter. The man that walked

into the floor had a bad leg. He leaned into it heavily with a hand

planted on the knee and the loose one dangling by its side drawing an

imaginary arc in the air around it. He planted himself on the bed so

abruptly I had to shift in my seat to admit him. He had the tired look

of an army man who returns from the front and finds the life away

from war pointlessly dramatized, unfamiliar, undisciplined and

vexatious. He seemed like a man who wished for a regimental routine.

I thought it would be discourteous to say anything to a man with such


tired look so I kept mum and observant, my ear cocked to his side,

hearing for hints such as the clearing of a throat.

But no hint was offered and in the end I took the initiative to

introduce myself. He pouted his lips as if to say, yes, so what? I

kicked my shoes to a side, folded my legs under me and dragged a

pillow to nestle in my lap. My elbows planted on the roof of the

pillow I decided to talk a little more. So, I told him I had seen a doctor

for a while, then a painter and now him. What was he? I asked and I

meant it as a question but he shrugged with a laid back expression. He

thought I said he was nothing and had no right to be here. I delicately

went ahead and corrected the remark. He was not very pleased. He

sucked at his lower lip again like a baby whose lips were swabbed

with honey.

When he said he was a lover I thought it was going to be a

long story. But he said nothing more for a while. When he opened his

mouth again it was only to close wordlessly. I prompted him for more.

He said there was not a whole lot to be told except that he jumped in

front of a speeding vehicle when he heard his lover married another

man. So that explained his limp. He reluctantly proceeded to tell me a

little more but it was not much and I was frankly irritated with all the

whining. It is rather obscene to see a man sob. It was claustrophobic

as if I was installed here in the room only to be choked with tears of a

vain man. The only way to console a person is to tell them your

stories of misery. It is never practical to console them by saying things

like ‘it is ok, don’t cry, everything will be alright…’ No, that won’t

help. You have to tell them how miserable your own life is so an

unconscious comparison can be drawn between the consoled and the

consoling… That works. It always works when miseries are

compared. But you have to be extra cautious in selecting your

miserable story because if it lacks the punch, then the consoled would

throw it back at you as if to say, is this what you got, is this it…?

Anyway, here is what I told him: The day I was married and

had to leave, my mother’s home came to my mind. It was an

unforgettable period of my life.

I can see myself now, choking under irrepressible angst. I

sobbed so convulsively and yet I had no memory of how it all started.

One minute I was calm and comfortable, the next minute I was

Kranthi Askani 97

sobbing endlessly as if my eyes were a pair of wet sponges that

dribbled with every beat of my heart. Through the shifting gauzy

world of my eyes I saw my mother’s cheeks stained with tears. My

aunts and grandmother said I would have to make three daubs of the

vermilion paste on the main door to signify my leaving, to say I was

leaving home for good. I writhed like a noodle; the sausage rolls of

my saree (I was not used to wearing a saree by then) cinched round

my waist constricted my movement. I rose on the toes of my feet still

in the grip of tears and raised my hand to smudge the door frame’s

top. I made the daubs, three of them, my limbs aching like strings of

violin under the strain of my sobbing.

Tears filled my eyes and I could see no more of myself, only a

reflection of the insides of my eyes: blank, inhospitable and utterly

void. And I thought, this was how it was going to be, my life, my new

life, away from home. I felt light and dissociated from myself. My

uncle was beside me, making a grab at my shoulder and stiffening me

up as my knees buckled under me. My brother was summoned before

me. I recall he dropped to his knees and in a supplicating gesture,

searched for my toes under the brocade of my new saree,

genuflecting…

The men on drums and the men with pipes went before me

announcing to the world of a sanction… What sanction, what was I

being sanctioned? Whatever it was I did not want to know. My mind

was reeling obstinately with flooding memories of past, of what I was

losing in return to the sanction of marriage and its litanies. I tried not

to sob but it was no good. The more I thought about it the more my

eyes turned into wet sponges. My heart loosed from its cavity when

my brother embraced me. I smudged my tears on his shirt, the one I

gifted. He wore it with such pride and the thought came to me that we

would no longer play like two pups rolling their backs in the mud

heedless to the world outside, heedless to cries of our mother and the

quaking groans of our father…

Dissociated, I watched myself as if lifted outside my body and

watching myself indifferently. I no longer cared if I was tripping

under the lounging folds of my saree or the fact that my mother was

now crying so loudly all the women in the apartment conjured out of

nowhere and everyone shared the grief. I never thought the aunt from


next door was so weak that she cried the minute she saw my mother’s

inflamed eyes. Now they were both crying with their slouched

shoulders locked in a maternal embrace. Every woman was another’s

mother for now. Even the aunt that braved three deaths in her family

was howling. It was as though all the women suddenly took the first

tear rolling down my cheek as a sanction to give vent to their own

private grief. Many looked away and tried not to show me their tear-

stained faces.

I tried to think of something else. I tried to think of the tailor

who spoiled my blouse. She stitched it all wrong. I was so unhappy

with her she had to redo the stitches on the sides which were now

coming apart in the seams. I thought how ridiculous I was to invest

my time in arguing with a tailor when I could have traded that time

for something to do with my parents. In the parking lot when the door

of the car was thrown open, the groom’s brothers and sisters inviting

me inside, a terrible feeling of loss, an ache of realisation came with

such shocking clarity to my mind that it shook me from inside and I

felt slack, rid of myself, bodily pulled out of myself.

When I came back to my senses it was only the weight of the

sponges in my eyes that I could feel. I felt utterly removed from

myself; the rest of me was not there. I tried to look at the rows of

bikes parked alongside the car; I noticed the gleam of silencers and

the burnish of the spokes, the small wet dust that clung to the wheels,

their immaculate design, and their sheer ability for perpetual

motion…

On the way to the groom’s home, I looked around and noticed

how the world just did not change, not one bit. My grief was

insignificant; the street dogs were still foraging for food, the driver of

the car was fiddling with radio buttons on the console, and behind me,

people were indulging in chivalrous festival glee. They said I might

have to try and stop crying. I tried that. I tried not crying but it did not

work. The failure to un-cry made me cry even more.

When I was done, this regimental lover boy with a bad leg

was no longer slouching. He was doing alright by the time I was done.

You see, it always works to share your grief. That to my mind is the

best consoling you can give to another person. We all have grief. It is

Kranthi Askani 99

something that life is bound to give. The more you yield grief the

more malleable it makes you.

He said he felt relieved after he managed to be run over by a

speeding vehicle. He said his physical bruises were nothing. They

meant nothing to him. I told him it was a self-imposed temple of

doom he was stationed in. He nodded his head but I could not tell if it

was in acquiescence or angst. I told Priyanka about this, ahem, lover-

boy and she said that sort of thing always happens. She asked me

about my marriage and I told her there was not much to be told. It was

all back in the days when the planet was normal. Nothing was the

same later. It grew dark and it just stayed dark. We were like the

butterflies that were captured in a net and dropped into a glass jar, a

laid capped on the top. First there is the nervous agitation, followed

by the knowing of capture and the knowing of helplessness. Finally,

the thoughts of suicide come to the butterfly. So, there it was, I told

Priyanka what happened with my husband. He simply killed himself.

Priyanka was going through a tough time. Some of the

women who had the occasion to confront the madman talked gaily

about him while others talked not so favourably. Priyanka said she

would have enjoyed meeting men for a change, men who talked to

you or drew your pictures or examined you or made you swallow

pills. Yes, of course we would all like that, won’t we?

Now of course, here in my pallor of dark, here in my

expanded-grave-like setting, I, with my pregnant girth ballooning

before me, I with my unimpeded thoughts of the past plaguing me, I

with my cat that was always evasive, I, spend my time worrying all

the time. Mrunalini said it must be the hormones. I was crying a lot

these days. The fact that I could never lay an eye on the cat also

troubled me and I broke into tears. Obviously, something was wrong

with me. It was the hormones, she said. And I believed her. Of course,

it was the hormones. What else could it be? Who cries over a ghost-

cat but a pregnant woman…!

The absolute primacy of men was going to be wiped,

Mrunalini said. Yes, of course. There was no arguing with her. She

was beyond arguments of the sort I would venture. For instance, I

would tell her it was maybe not such a good idea after all and she

would come at me like a bitch with its tail on fire. There was no way


out but nod. And I thought I knew her. I looked back on our journey

throughout. The day we escaped, the bridge we crossed, the mansion

we stayed, the cat we met, the people that abducted us, the queen that

saved us and now the lab where she joined the cohort to promise a pill

for the future of civilisation on the planet. You don’t need a man to

procreate; you don’t need a man for anything. We, women, were

going to take more and more pills, procreate and populate the dark

planet with primates that were no better than amphibians. Yes, what

future lay ahead for us? What was this terrible compulsion to outsmart

men? How did the women even join their heads into thinking this idea

through? Who did this occur to in the first place?

But of course none of this mattered. I knew it just made no

sense. The ghettos signified organised anarchy. The ghettos were

cancerous. And all I wanted to do was join hands with my sisters.

What was I thinking? First, I was ostracised and now I was bullied

into producing babies. Well, you might argue that no one was bullying

me. But they were doing it by not doing it. It meant I had no choice

but this. Either I willingly take the pills and accept the challenge of

bringing up the babies past those fragile one or two years post birth.

Perhaps I could become the first woman to be lucky enough to raise a

child that grew beyond the failed remnants of the past.

“I was a piece of black vinyl, my imagination curled up inside

me like the spiral grooves of a gramophone until you combed me with

the stylus of your heart and gave vent to my dreams.

I was a piece of discard on the shores of the sea, my

imagination clogged with angst like the mud inside a parched shell

until you picked me up and blew a merry trumpet, rendering

coherence to my pitted fantasies.”

That was what it said, the book I found in the rubble. I asked

Mrunalini for a good torch, like the ones they used in the lab. She

gave me her torch and I took it without a word. Downstairs, in my

ghost-cat-infested room, I hooked the torch to an elongated arm of a

chair and sat with the book nestled in my lap, flipping pages one by

one slowly and reading every word with a penetrating anxiety, for it

was a book. And books were precious. It had been over half a decade

since I read anything at all. Back in the facility all we ever read was

that form which we signed before admission and that was that.

Kranthi Askani 101

The book was a love story, not a particularly great one but it

was all I had and so took to devouring it nonetheless. The protagonist

was a woman who fell in love with a man. Given what was going on

in the white din of the lab upstairs, I thought this could be seen as a

particularly heretic book so I was extra cautious when I was reading

the book. I made sure the door to my room was sealed shut and I

heard for any muffled sounds of feet descending the stairs of the

cellar.

It took me a whole week to finish the book. I read a little, slid

the book under a cracked desk drawer before slipping onto the shore

to muse a little, pick a pitted shell or two, rub their grooved backs on

my sleeve and try to blow trumpets. I was amazed at how different it

was back then, when men loved women such as the writer of the

novel I was reading. But now, it was all different. Now, we were on a

cruising journey to inexplicable erasure of feelings, emotions and

love.

Last night I had a dream. In it, the baby inside me was

coughing. I told Mrunalini and she said dreams were wish-fulfillers.

But why would I wish for my baby to cough? I asked and she said it

was probably because I wished for the baby to be born, I willed for

the baby to be born soon. It made some sense, not a whole lot but yes,

a little sense.

What would Priyanka be doing now? They may have

punished her, killed her even. The relationship between Vicky and

Priyambada comes to my mind again. It must be debilitating to

possess such ability to poetry and writing in general but yet be unable

to use it a whole lot, for you were driven to insanity the more you

thought about words. And I thought about the time Priyanka spent

with Vicky in that two storeyed home with woods besieging it from

everywhere. I thought about the story where Priyambada was depicted

as that girl with filament arms. It was so bloody romantic. Vicky had

this irrepressible love for her. I recalled what Priyanka told me about

her father’s memoir which he was penning when she went to live with

him in those last days before the planet was pressed with black

plumes.

I tried to imagine how it would have been between them. I

can see them now: Priyambada visits Vicky when he is in the asylum.


It is a place away from the city, on the shores where the sea licks

mossy rocks and burbles in the crevices. It is a place where it rains all

the time and the walls are damp. It is a place where the inmates are

treated harshly and Vicky is strapped to his bed. Priyambada is

allowed to visit him once a month. She does this until she accidentally

dies at childbirth. Vicky doesn’t even acknowledge the pregnant girth

when she visits him, for he is insane. She sits on the other side of the

grilled cage beneath while he is knuckling his eyes and complaining

that he sees words behind his eyelids. He bangs his head on the

lacquered grill of the door; he produces his pink tongue to lick the

amber dust of the air where a beam of sun light sloping into the room

lets all the dust to joggle about in the amber of the beam.

He drops to his knees and rakes the hair on his scalp for he

thinks there is a word on his head he can’t see and would pluck it like

lice to examine it. She tells him about the baby she is carrying and he

mouths words like distended and ballooned. She tells him he should

rest for a while and try not to pick at his hair and he gives her a

strained look, a squint-eyed look. He mimics the motion of her arms

as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. He is wearing trousers

with frayed ends and bald knees. She is wearing a decent saree with a

brocade pin on her shoulder. His shirt is stained with sweat marks and

it lolls about his scrawny self. Her blouse is a wan blue like the sky,

her eyes moving about like a classical dancer’s. His hair is mouse

coloured and he has dry snot on the tip of his nose. The skirts of the

room behind him are scrawled with words as if the whole room had

invisible rows and columns lanced into it making it a three

dimensional crossword in brick and cement.

Now, he rummages through the quilts and stones and sticks

on the floor until he finds something suitably encouraging which he

takes with him and scrawls a message on the floor. She tries to read it

but can’t. He rubs the message with the base of his palm and rewrites

it. Now, it is a bit clear. It says ‘angst’ and she asks him what it

means. Now he begins scratching his chin, then looks desultorily

away, cocks his head to a side and regards her from an angle. He

sucks his lips, thumps his chest and goes back to picking his hair. She

is watching him with distaste, indifference and impatience, also love.

Kranthi Askani 103

Above all, she loves him and bears this monstrosity which she thinks

he can put a pause to if he puts his mind to it.

The trees outside are swaying and the leaves rustling, their

branches chafing against each other… It is a pleasant morning and the

sun is out there in the horizon, neatly ensconced above the surface of

the water. Rays of sun like the blades of a fan loll over the water that

is undulating and restlessly lapping at the shore. Vicky climbs a stool

to lever himself up a small ledge wherefrom he gains access to the

window that overlooks the sea that makes the hissing noise. The

leaves of a nearby branch by the wall thrum against the sill and this

makes Vicky happy. Priyambada can’t take it any longer. She has to

go back to her place where she has to clean up her kitchen and cook

for the night. She even has to deliver a baby, which she eventually

does and dies at childbirth.

I recall I once caught Priyanka plucking her hair

absentmindedly, pulling it by the roots. It occurred to me at the time

that she may have inherited her father’s disease of the mind. But I am

sure that was just my paranoia. The facility, its claustrophobic settings

and its glazed secure dome for mendicants, its militaristic wardens

and its smug-faced women and the raised walls with concertina wire

on the top. It affected your feelings, or rather the mind. It was an

inhospitable place for people. Mendicants could live, for all they

needed was their plastic caves, their bivouacs…

It must be the pregnancy, for I was being overly emotional

these days. The sea’s roar made me cry, the queen’s jeep when it hit

the gravel, it felt like something churned inside me and I began to cry;

when I noticed Mrunalini busily talking to other white-coated women

I felt alienated and I began crying; the thought of my cat foraging for

food out there in the dark when I could have provided for it here made

me cry…

When there was not much else to do I went to the sea at night

and perspired when the thought of someone behind me in the dark

came to me. There was no escaping the hormones and what they were

doing to me. It was no longer advisable to climb the stairs so I kept a

check on that. Mrunalini asked if I had chosen a name for the baby. I

told her I had but I hadn’t. So, I spent the next two days wondering

what I would call it if it was a boy. I already knew what I would call it


if it was a girl. Why, it was going to be Olive, wasn’t it. But the planet

was inhospitable and it may not be advisable to bring babies into the

midst of seething dark. What could I do? The girth was swelling

before me and the baby was kicking every now and then. I think it

was not involuntary spasms; I think the baby was aware of its kicking.

I imagine it to be a volitional kicking as if to ask – what on earth are

you conceiving me for? To what possible end…! What is out there for

me? You are doing this for your selfish reasons.

Kranthi Askani 105

Part Two

Kranthi Askani 107

1

The apartment was on a busy street where the city buses

honked their way through the din of the traffic. It was like living

alongside an ocean combed with plankton that made sounds. The

street side vendors were jabbering something to each other as I picked

my way among them towards the cement incline of the entrance. In

the cellar where the cars were parked, the kids were playing cricket,

hooting and howling at each other. I noticed a side view mirror broken

and two kids debating over the ruins. An old man shinnied up and

asked if I was here to see Olive. Yes, I nodded, confounded a little

that the watchman should be expecting me.

Olive, what a name, I thought. Yes, it was a beautiful name, I

won’t deny that. But again, it intrigued you. Yes, sorry, my name?

Arpitha, I said. He announced my name into the intercom and

replacing the receiver gestured for me to take the lift. A little girl in

smudged green frock was standing by the lift, picking her nose and

licking the picked mucus. I gave her an expression of incredulity and

she paused, her hand stilled in its motion by the lower lip. The

watchman adjusted the rim of his glasses, horn-rimmed, dark brown

and heavy.

The kid was picking her nose when I pressed the grill of the

lift into the greased indent of the metal frame. The lift croaked, hissed

and with a shudder came to life raising its hood slowly to the seventh

floor, its wiry, spindly body catching up beneath it. The watchman

called after me. It was the flat at the far end of the corridor to my

right, he said.

Locking the grill of the door from outside, I noticed how

silent it was on the seventh floor. The wind blew a pair of knickers


harshly along the floor; filigreed with dirt and hairy coils of web, the

knickers now groped at my feet. I lifted my white shoe to let the wind

carry it away from me. But they stayed at my feet. The flats to my left

and right were locked, empty dustbins planted by their doors. Behind

me, the lift shuddered again and it shook a little as it ascended, the

hood disappearing to the floor above and the wiry body now patiently

chugging along.

The shoe stand had a broken leg, nearly spilling its contents

that included seven pairs of white shoes just like the ones I was

wearing. Those were the instructions, to wear white shoes that shone

brilliantly, smugly, garishly… I cinched the handbag close to my

flank and lifted my hand to ring the bell, the white switch caked with

bird dropping. I heard the sound of the bell, a sparrow chirp. Two

pairs of feet neared the door and examined me from the other side, a

bellow escaped the creature and I was alert now.

After two minutes, the time during which I hesitated and

nearly vamoosed, the door opened and I was admitted inside, the dog

pulled to a side, its tether now locked to a sofa’s leg. Olive, the

woman I came to meet was nowhere to be seen. In the waiting room,

women waited, puffing their cheeks or patting the space beside them

as if beckoning imaginary beings to sit beside them. I sat where the

window drowned me in a pool of yellow light, my shadow steadily

bobbed about on the tea table before me. Over my shoulder, I looked

behind me and noticed the greenish awning with peeled exterior,

parched in the sun and turned more or less yellow.

There was incense burning somewhere inside, the pluming

curls of ash filigreed the wooden frame of the hallway arch drowning

us all in its sweet scent. I followed the amorphous spools of smoke as

they ascended to the roof and slowly disintegrated as they met the

scrollwork on the roof. Architecture always impressed me a lot. I like

looking at the sturdy squares and the lithe circles, I like the robust

mounds and the puny strands of design, I like just about everything. A

slant of sun filtered through the small opening in the awning and now

gave the tea table’s leg a glint, rendering solidity to it.

A housefly swooped down on the tempered glass of the tea

table where a round of coffee stain was the only thing steady in the

sea of leafy shadows that sloshed all over the place. The fly wrung its

Kranthi Askani 109

hands as it leaned on its rear, rubbed its chin with its hands (I

imagined this. Obviously, you can’t tell if flies have chins) and

regarded me for a while before dashing for my sleeve where it

dawdled for a while and vanished into the space behind me.

A willow chair with large rounds for arms and long arches for

legs was planted in the space between the sofa and the glass-encased

shelves of the wall. In the shelves were photographs of a couple. They

seemed like an ordinary couple. Someone sneezed loudly and

everyone else in the room was now searching with their eyes for the

source of the sneeze. The woman who sneezed looked small and

slender, very pale. Her face was long and she had a way of eagerly

looking at everything around her. She seemed incredulous with that

loud holler of a sneeze. She had the pages of a magazine flipped open

on her knees. It slithered down to the floor and she groped for it by

her feet. I noticed the bared waist and it was too small. She would

pass for a man, I thought, with those straight un-curvaceous features

she could easily pass for a man.

She sneezed again, the flopped magazine lolled about

helplessly at her feet, the pages faced down and licking the cold

marble under it. This time, some of the women chose not to look at

her. I twiddled with my saree and the brocade pattern for a while, the

rose pink frills wrapped in tinsel along the length of the fringe. I loved

my saree. I will be twenty three soon. Not yet, but I will be soon

enough. The fly returned.

In the room inside, I met Olive. She was older than me. In

fact, I think she was about fifty, nearing fifty I thought. But she was

pretty nonetheless; a little short of course but pretty. She was plum as

old women her age tend to be. She had a narrow nose and small

mouth, her hair was made into a bun and she was seated on a mat on

the floor. I went over and sat before her where another mat was laid

open. Between us was a void and I wondered why I could not sit a

little closer to her. It felt as though Olive was a sacrosanct figure not

to be smudged by closeness with ordinary beings…

She smiled encouragingly. I smiled back. Arpitha, she said

like a doctor who makes it a habit to call his patients by their names.

Olive must be a commercial name. Surely she must have a real name.

Nobody in this part of the world can live with that name. Surely, there


has to be another name. We sat in silence. She kept staring over my

shoulder to the entrance. When my eyes adjusted to the dim of the

light inside I noticed the previous client was still there in the room.

The woman was presently shinnying up her saree by the folds. Olive

waited for her to leave. I thought that was quite admirable, so

professional, to wait…

The advertisement in the paper said it would only take an

hour. Three sittings and you would have changed everything about

you…! Olive cleared her throat, the door now closed shut and we

were plunged into absorbing silence. It was as though I was hearing

the silence, as if I had suddenly acquired this ability to hear silence

and its quantum fluctuations.

The straw sticks of the mat were pressing against the ankles

under me. I shifted a little and with my fingers quested for the ankles

and noticed the grooves in the skin; the mat left deep indentations that

felt like the ribbed backs of a scallop. And that thought gave vent to

my imagination. I was now an aquatic creature, one among the great

plankton in the deep ocean where in the sand, creatures scuttle,

scrawl, and scrum and silently swim. Not a sound in the deep ocean.

And of course my feet are two giant scallops that bolt me to the

ground. The water above me joggled and I imagine how the fringes of

this blanket of greenish water slosh above me, the thing they call the

beach. And now a crab locks its mandibles on the scallop of my right

foot. I lift my left foot and squash it. But of course you can’t squash a

crab, for they have strong exoskeletons. And so, I am defeated and I

merely look away as the accordion lips of a sponge suck my blood.

Now I am light and I am lifted above the sand. Now I am weightless,

buoyant and the paddle of a raft catches me in the knee swishing me

up and down, propelling me to somewhere far away from this world.

A girl came in through the trap door from below and said the

operating table was ready. Olive sighed. It was perhaps a code

between them, for the girl shrugged, her shoulders lifted up to the

cheeks. I watched the two of them and wondered if they were mother

and daughter. Olive planted a plum hand on the ground beside her

small knee and rose to her feet. The effect was a bit of a scrabble and

it took a lot of effort. She was old, I thought, this is what happened to

you when you are old.

Kranthi Askani 111

Shunning a pillar with peeled plaster, we made our way

downstairs. The narrow winding staircase made a clacking sound as

the clamps moved in the hinges. One of the rungs was badly damaged

and could have simply sucked me in and dropped me to the floor from

that height if I had laid a single foot on it. Olive, despite being short,

stocky, tubby and I think even old, picked her way expertly over the

good rungs of the staircase and once below, waited for me patiently. I

released the grab of my saree folds as my feet found solid ground.

It was sort of a tunnel with caged lights ensconced up on

either side. I walked slowly, my eyes still adjusting to this immense

dark seething with flickering bulbs. There was grime and muck on the

walls, the sort that would nauseate any woman. But not me, I was

good, I was ok. The arched roof was lined with oil and it accumulated

enough dirt to clog your eyes if it dribbled one fat drib. So I

cautiously eyed away, and followed Olive who, like a lioness of her

den, stately walked on shunning one fat drop after another that were

dripping from the roof. How did she do it? Me, I think I had spoiled

my saree quite a bit what with all that dirt on the floor.

We reached the end of the tunnel, no, strike that, it was not

the end of the tunnel. It was just that there were no more lights beyond

this point. Olive produced a key and turned it in a keyhole to her left.

It was a round door large enough to accommodate a smallish elephant.

The girl and I stood each to one side while Olive gingerly pressed

seven keys on a small keyboard inside the door. Now, there was a

jarring sound and somewhere in the walls of the tunnel above us

something moved, something made a clicking sound and then the door

slid slowly open on its own accord. The heavy door rolled to a side to

admit the three of us.

Once inside, the girl made a pretty gesture with her hands as

if to say, finally, we are here… The door closed behind us. Olive was

fiddling with switches on a console. With a brief fluttering, the room

was lit up and now it hit me: this was the operation theatre, of course,

what else was I wading toward in the dark and the muck-encrusted

floor…! A sealed glass door slid open with a hiss and Olive entered,

beckoning me inside. The girl was behind me, nattily picking up the

apron from a cupboard. She handed the apron to me; it was like a


cross between a bib and roman toga. The girl picked an apron for

herself and thrust one into Olive’s hands.

In the changing room, I yanked the saree off and cursed

myself for all the dirt. I would have to give it for dry cleaning, I

thought. I peeled the blouse off and with a bit of disgust, watched the

dark smudge a dribble had left on my pale breast. A dribble of what?

It had to be something mechanical, oily even… I looked up to see if

there was something leaking from the roof. There was nothing there.

Slipping out of my clothes, I swabbed myself clean with a towel that

was on the hangar and wrapped the apron on. I regarded my image in

the mirror. This was going to be the last time…

Last time for what…! I tried not to think it out loud. There

was time for that. The operation would take little over a week if there

were no complications. I have to be absolutely sure about this. Who

am I kidding? If I was not sure I wouldn’t have been here in the first

place. I knew what I was doing and I was prepared for every

conceivable outcome. This is it, I thought, as we reconvened after

changing. Olive looked astoundingly tubby in the apron. The girl was

the best looking of us three. She said there was still time and would I

like a cup of coffee? Yes, sure, who denies coffee dearie? After all,

my nerves need a little relaxing, a little slacking. Why, they were taut,

weren’t they?

The glass cased rooms were probably vacuum sealed as they

are done in space shuttles. The concave doors hissed open and we

stoically, stupidly looked at one another. Olive must be the most

unassuming person I had ever seen. She cared little or none at all, very

formal, and not a woman of small talk. For no reason I thought about

the chrome panels of the car wheels I had seen in the parking lobby

downstairs. I should have one of those, I thought. The girl gave me a

pat on my shoulder, my gaze now followed hers and I was staring into

a line of three doors all sealed shut, and all, I thought, vacuumed. She

looked nattily dressed. Her bib looked more like a fanciful poncho.

She had this special way of rolling her eyes, slow moving as if

absorbing every little detail on their way as they met mine. Now we

held our stare, mine large and questioning, hers small and glazed. It

was such a silent place I thought I would just keep my mouth shut,

lest I annoy Olive, who by the way was drumming her fingers against

Kranthi Askani 113

the table where she leaned on and waited for the panel before her to

prompt the passcode.

A tinny sound issued from the panel and then I noticed Olive

punch in the passcode. It was three eights. But I don’t think I will

need that. She lifted her face suddenly and caught me watching. It was

an accusing gaze; I wrenched my stare away from hers and dropped it

on my feet. I watched my splayed toes and the girls; hers were aligned

together with no gaps, mine were splayed and looked ugly. She was

prim and I felt old beside her. She was probably seventeen and I was

twenty three but there was a hint of jealousy in how I saw her.

We were inside the second door. Before us was a clean

burnished metal ribbed glass door. I caught my reflection in the door

before me. I ought to be admiring myself. I have a great body, I

thought. But all of this was going to go away, I would grow old too.

With the tip of my index finger, I quelled an itch in the canthus of my

left eye. Then as if to compensate for the right eye, I knuckled it with

no need to do it. The doors slid shut behind us. A metallic din ringed

through the room, subsided and thrummed again over our head. I

widened my eyes and looked at the girl who smiled widely meaning it

was alright; whatever it was, it was just alright.

Beyond the third door, Olive pushed her fingers into a panel

and a chest full of drawers slid open like yapping tongues clamouring

for attention. Olive picked up a pair of gloves and slid her hands into

them. The girl was by her side, strapping the gloves for Olive. I was

seated on a lounging chair, creamy white in colour, the plastic not

very comfortable to sit on. After they were done talking whatever it

was they talked about, the girl came up to me and asked if I wanted

the tea. Oh, the tea, I totally forgot about that. The offer for drinking

tea (or coffee? I can’t really remember which) was made and

forgotten. No, it was alright, I was alright, I said. The girl smiled

widely again, her cheeks radiant with pinkish flush.

The innermost room had wires hooked to panels, to the table

and to the overhead roof. The wires were white, the roof was awash

with white, and the floor a mirage of white checker boxes. The walls

were encased in white plastic and the panels all doubly bolstered with

sturdy looking belts. I wondered what all the reinforcements were for.

After all, it took about an hour to cross all those doors and arrive here.


Who would go through all of that trouble to steal a bloody panel from

this room? Olive slumped into a chair, hunkered and threw a

hydraulic switch under her which filled the dented leather under her

with air, or fluid for it seemed like the seat wobbled a little when she

moved. The girl was arranging the table as if she was a waiter in a

posh restaurant, neatly swabbing the scalpels and other gleaming

silver paraphernalia with a cloth, no, not the dish cloth types, this one

looked rather garish, for it was made of cat’s skin. Did they skin a cat

to do that? Was it for real?

Olive asked me sit before her. I did that. She looked me up

and down, fished for a comb from the silver platter beside her and

handed it to me. It was a heavy comb. I looked at her but she was not

interested my questions, briskly going through her stuff, head cocked

away from me. Alright then, I thought, what do you do with a comb?

So, I released the rubber band from my hair, pulled out the hairpins

from the sides and loosed the crimps before combing. The sound of

electric rasping was unmistakable in the silence. Three of us were

aware of my combing. My hair made the sound of a really pleased

baboon upon scratching a terrific itch under its armpits.

Olive consulted her watch and said I would have to slip out of

the apron. The bib, you mean? I thought I would say that but decided

not to. Obviously! You don’t want to annoy the person who was

operating on you. Wrenching my hands behind my back, I reached for

the sash and pulled it loose. Even the under things, she said and I

hesitated briefly before peeling the silk things and now I stood in a

room of three women, all naked by myself, hands strategically planted

to obfuscate. I sat on the operating table all tensed and tremulous

while they, fully clothed, ran about the place in audible glee.

Olive peered closer and now I noticed the hair on her upper

lip, slight but evidently there… The girl was at my feet strapping belts

on the ankles and just over the knee. Olive said it was going to be

alright. I blinked and I think I smiled. Next thing I know I flinched. It

was as though the searing cut was made not inside me but in someone

else and I was merely watching the spectacle with distaste from a

distance. The cut was made just under my left breast where the rib

bones, like the grills of a cage protected the tender muscle under it. I

felt the blood oozing out as if the sanction was given and there was no

Kranthi Askani 115

time to be wasted, as if my blood corpuscles had been singing

rebellious songs for years inside me and only today been granted the

sanction. I felt the trickle of the blood reach my navel and I wondered

if there would be a stain left after. After what...!

The girl plunged needles into my rib and I thought the muscle

of my heart was cringing under the bone cage, for it was not the sort

that enjoyed intrusions into its cavernous pit. The silver of the needle

disappeared into my heart and I flinched again. This time, I think I

saw the seams of my eyes explode, splashing blood all around me.

The canthus of my eyes must have come apart with that excruciating

pain; the sternum under my neck should have cracked open, the tear

running all the way to the ankles.

I felt loosed from myself and I felt bodily slumping into the

table, moulding into the plastic and I sensed nothing anymore. I

noticed the scissors tearing me apart like I was the chiffon blouse

under the needle of a sewing machine, the bolts ricocheted somewhere

over me, somewhere in a plateau wherefrom I was ejected. Now I lay

under me and watched everything with sullen humour.

How long did it take, I wanted to ask but there was no one

around me. The room was not the room I was operated in. I was back

in the waiting room and the pale woman sneezed, the magazine

slithered. I watched the fly wring its hands, the light from behind me

made a dance on the glass of the table. There was the familiar rustle of

the leaves in my ears and the unfamiliar pulsing in my sternum as if

my heart had been dislocated. No, wait, I think I have two hearts, each

pulsing rhythmically, arithmetically, and together producing a sort of

effect you get with earphones plugged into your ears, the sound

feeling as if it hovers somewhere above your head, between the ears.

I noticed the white shoes on my feet. Now I was outside, in

the corridor listening to the scrabbling sounds from inside. What was

the sound of scrabbling? Yes, it must be the shaggy dog. There, beside

me are seven pairs of white shoes. And the corridor is calm,

unpeopled and the lift descends to meet me, its wires like placenta of

a baby in the womb always with it, never leaving… I am in the lift

now, the light inside the lift flickering. I am in the lobby now, the kids

are playing cricket, my hand is shivering and I don’t know why. I cup


my shivering right hand with the steady left one and I hope this will

do the trick but I don’t think it will.

And now the ball rolls over on the ground. I kick it with my

left foot, the white of the shoe gleaming smugly as always. I am in the

street and wondering why the building looked so commonplace. After

all, the thing I was going to do was anything but common; it was

uncommon, and yes that was what it was. My hand is shivering, my

dual hearts are pulsing rapidly, my head spins and the world seems

turning and there is a gluey thing inside me that is forming putty and

now it is rising to the surface. What is this humming in my head? Or

what was? For now, I am awake and I am rubbing my mouth with the

back of my hand, the vomit pool on my side looking rather obscenely

clean, like milk actually, with no pulverised remains. I blink for a

while as if that was the best thing to do post-regurgitation. Where was

everyone? Where were the girl and Olive? This was not the same

room. There was no blanket swaddling me. I thought they could have

at least wrapped me up in a shawl, what with all the nakedness. But I

felt small and I felt diminished for the bedcovers were there, only I

wasn’t under them. The pillow slip looked rather large and

overwhelmed my visual arena. I lifted my head and called out but my

mouth was dry and the tongue chafed against the top of the mouth,

tongue rasped against the throat and it hurt badly. The clever thing

now was to shut my eyes and reserve some of the strength for

whatever it was I was going to do.

I looked at the pool of vomit and I thought I will rub my

mouth again, who knows what dried spit dribble would have limply

hung from the corner of the lips. Here is what happened next: I looked

at my hand and I looked at myself, that is, I raised my head and

regarded myself. I was lithe and no wonder I felt diminished,

atrophied even. The two pairs of limbs: rear and fore, were fleece-

lined, no wait, I think they were fur-lined. My cheeks feel diminutive.

I always liked my cheeks and now this smallness made me sad. Oh,

what was that behind me, the wriggle of a rope-like extra?

I jumped to my feet and my spine hurt, the knobbed segments

were lithe, cracking with every small movement of the limbs. My feet,

I think the first thing I liked were my feet what with the toes now no

longer splayed. I lifted my fore limb and gave a shake to the curlicue

Kranthi Askani 117

of my ear, again so tender that the thought of plucking and chewing

my ear came to me. Absurd, weird and vertiginous…

The sternum was the heaviest of all. And why would a cat

have a sternum? Anyway, there it was, strong and unfailingly large I

thought, for it felt as though all my movements were emanating from

that heavy bone inside me, as if the instructions to move a limb or

twitch an ear were issued from that central thing. Now, the urge to

urinate came to me so I began my descent from the divan I was posted

to the ground where the vomit stains, like the veined lungs slathered

the floor. I scanned the place, it gave me no pleasure to be inside this

room where nobody cared what I did or for that matter what I was. I

needed someplace else to go to… But first I had to urinate so I let my

gaze wander about the place questing for a good place, an

encouraging place.

How about the corner over there I thought. But it was way too

clean and I thought it would silly for a feline creature to spoil

something clean and not be able to wipe it, or cover it for that matter.

I found an AC vent and skidded into it and purred for the first time. It

felt good to do that, to purr I mean. The cool air inside the duct kissed

my furry skin and made me shudder. I jogged into the cool swathe, as

if searching for the origin of the cold, my toes hitting the metal under

me and making a slight scrabble sound. I sneezed abruptly and my

involuntary ‘excuse me’ died inside my head. I was only purring now,

the human voice simply died inside my head as if the head was a

cavernous pit that caught snatches of anything human and sucked into

the walls. I imagined the inside of my head, large and still humanlike.

And then I thought there must be a conduit or something that connects

the human head to me, to the cat I was.

Through the slats of the vent, in one of the rooms, I saw the

girl. She was changing into the poncho, her breasts small, supple, pale

and cunningly pert; her haunches not yet curved for she was only a

teenager; the posture still manlike save for the breasts and a hint of

trimness in the waist. I envied her body but hey, I knew what I was

getting into, no point being all melodramatic now. In the next room, I

saw Olive. She waved at me as if we were both friends who ran into

each other in a shopping mall. She asked me if I was doing alright. I

said my sternum was worrying me, weighing me down, like a bloody


constriction. She slid her lower lip down and chewed the tongue

inside moodily. It was all bloody purring alright, not one word was

communicated.

Slinking outside, yes, I barely walked or dashed or darted

anymore. I slinked, or skidded or pawed or jumped. Anyway, outside,

I found a chute but it stank, the walls lined with muck. Onion peels,

apple rinds and slivers of cucumber spilled out like worms from the

rim of this square chute. I was careful to shun it. I may be feline but

not febrile; I would pass for a tamed one, not a wild one. I knew my

limitations.

The chute however offered a perfect place for me to urinate

which I did with my feet astride and a smug expression on my face,

after which I rucked up some of the dead twines of a vine and covered

up the leak puddle with mud. I smelled the urine and it was different

from before. I took the stairs, leaning my muzzle as I did but a

shocking wave of pain hit me in the base of my neck. I stumbled,

steadied and sat down on my rump like a dead thing. I rolled on my

back and waited for the pain to subside, my feet flailing above me

baring my nether.

It was the seventh floor and there was no way I could make it

to ground floor with the sort of sudden shots of pain I had

experienced. I sat down and wiped my mouth. I heard a meow and

scanned my surroundings with the sort of impatient agility that I never

thought I was in possession of. From the chute, a head emerged, its

whiskers jauntily nuzzling the muck-encrusted rim of the chute’s

mouth. My human mind was no good. I tried my feline sensibilities

but that was no good either. The whiskered prince gesticulated; it

could have been a genuflection even, the way he rested his nose on his

paws as he bowed. Whatever it was, I knew there was no other choice

but to follow him. I did as much. But something told me I was being

lured into this waste chute. Who knew what was on the other side?

And so much for all my preparations eh! I flopped to the

ground didn’t I? Of course I knocked the poor bugger down with me

as we both propelled, our four pairs of limbs flailed about scratching

and rucking the insides of the waste chute. I banged my head a good

ten times before I reached the ground where it turned out to be a

garbage heap. I bounced up as I landed on a discarded mattress which

Kranthi Askani 119

lay to a side on the heap. In the end, the agonising pain came back to

me, crippling me for a good ten minutes. Poor thing, the whiskered

prince waited for me to realign my flailed limbs and exposed rump

and its twin wet pink whorls. I think my whiskered prince would have

passed for a gentleman, for he waited with a painful expression on his

face, his eyes never leaving mine.

Later, he asked me what it was. Yes, that is what humans do.

But we were cats remember. In any case, the rules of reciprocation

must be more or less the same in cats, I thought. What else would

strike you if you had just come out whirling out of a bloody waste

chute and lay down constricted and crippled with pain for ten minutes.

Right, yes, that is what I thought. You ask the one in pain what the

pain was about. So, I assumed he did. But again, I purred weakly and

he meowed rather mannishly I think. That was it, he may have had

many degrees of meows but I had only one mind and that was human

mind with human sensibilities. I wonder why Olive failed to change

this one thing inside me. She managed to change everything else but

my mind.

So, there we were: me and my whiskered prince, going along

the road that was flanked with garbage heaps on the left and closed

shops to the right. The base of neck felt pretty good for now but it

could change any moment. The sky was amazing amber and the

asphalt felt very unfamiliar under my two pairs of limbs. The way my

shoulder blades jiggled over me made me feel like a mechanised

thing. We reached the end of the road and I thought yes, that was very

mature when I noticed my princess climb a wall to gain access to the

other side. He meowed again. By now I was growing very tired of all

this meowing. I mean come on! Can’t you say one sensible thing?

Give me a sign, at least use your fore limbs to show me what you

mean, wave at me if you can. But all I managed was gargling purr. So

there it was, we were, ahem, lost in translation! Yes, I still remember

Scarlet Johansson’s wan cream panties from that movie. It was the

opening of the movie of course, how can you forget? Her swollen

haunches wriggle inside the cotton of her panties and I think you can

even notice the slight pucker in the middle.

Posters on the high compound wall were peeled with all the

rain soaking them wet. The sky was frothing with clouds, grey, black


and groping the tips of tall buildings. Through the scrim of leaves, my

whiskered prince disappeared and I followed obediently.

Whiskered prince! I must stop calling him that. If only we

could talk. The skin on his flanks wobbled and I would have sat there

and counted the ribs inside for days. How so marvellous I thought

until I realised I could do that myself. I tried and there it was, the ribs

stirring under the furred skin. I counted the toes of my paws as I

dexterously avoided the glass shards on the wall. Through the leaves

that dropped an occasional rain drop, I emerged into an opening that

was teeming with insects and mosquitoes as large as my toe nail. He

had installed himself under a ledge where it was dry. He was waiting

there for me so I sauntered up and sat alongside him, our flanks

touching each other.

We waited for the rain to subside. We waited and we fell

asleep still waiting. His back was to mine when we dozed off; my

nose was on his paws and the beat of his heart ringed through my ears

when I woke up a while later. I disengaged from him cruelly giving

his paw a shake so that he had to wake up. He wore the face of

bemusement. He sought explanation for disregarding his sleep. I

needed time to think, I told him, in my gargling purr. He produced his

pink tongue to wet his nose, his whiskers twitching like cockroach’s

antennae. I thought the best thing was to pantomime. So, I sat on my

rear and flailed my forelimbs as best as I can to tell him that I needed

something to eat. He reproduced my pantomime in his own way and

turned around, his tail flicking from side to side like a frog’s tongue. I

waited for something more lucid and comprehensible to come my way

but there he was wagging his rear uncivilly.

When it stopped raining a brilliant rainbow fringed the sky, a

fresco of colours on the blue wipe of sky. Avoiding the pools of mud

and the litter of leaves, we went from tree to tree, crying weakly now

and then. A dragonfly hovered above my nose for a while, the trill of

its diaphanous wings charming me. There was the sound of kids

hollering coming in through the crack of a wall. I craned my neck and

found we were next to a cricket stadium. He was moving ahead, his

pace modest and his vigil deep. His ears always open to hearing

sounds around him, his paws prepared to lunge him any minute. He

Kranthi Askani 121

was the most faithful adaptation of a knight in one of those fairy tales

who braves all odds in bringing his lover to a safety place.

Extricating myself from his embrace I thought he had taken

advantage of my feline situation back there under the ledge. But turns

out he was a gentleman, a gentle cat, if you like. I was going to like

him, I told myself. He paused and made a sound which by whatever

stray cat instinct Olive had equipped me with, I knew to be danger. I

scanned the surroundings and it was not a great place if escape was

part of the routine. The walls were too tall and cemented with glass

shards. I would not attempt another climb. Something moved in the

bushes and a giantess appeared out of nowhere. It was Olive alright. If

I had my human voice, I would have screamed at the top of my voice

and flung my arms about her tubby body but I was what I was, the

furry small thing so I merely rubbed my flank against Olive’s foot.

She picked me up and now pressed me close to her breast

which was warm and throbbed lightly. The whiskered prince followed

at a leisurely pace. I watched him from the vantage point Olive

offered me. She ran her open palm over my head and said I was such a

lovely cat. I may have fell asleep on the way, what with the silent

rumble of Olive’s heart ringing in my ears and the determined slow

pacing of her gait. It was already dark when I woke up and found

myself on a wooden table in the middle of the room. It was a calm

place and I thought I would just skip dinner and go back to sleep. Skip

dinner! I was still thinking like a human, I must stop doing that.

I woke up a long time after and found it was still dark.

Something was not right, I told myself.


2

The baby was born alive, or should I say fetus was born

alive… The doctor performed a caesarean to peel the fetus out of the

mother’s womb. It could have been about seven months old. The

crude kitchen knife was lying beside the mother who was in obvious

distress, her fingers curled up and digging into the palms. Aastha, yes!

That was the woman’s name. And the doctor who performed the

caesarean was Mrunalini. Aastha was going to die. It doesn’t take a

doctor to figure that out, the pools of blood sloshing about her as if

she was a great bird with ripped wings, helplessly crying on the

ground.

Mrunalini was aghast herself. She was very near to tears

herself. But why did Aastha agree to all of this. I recall a great deal of

what went on upstairs in that palace near the shore. There, they were

working on a pill that was going to rid the women of men. I liked the

admirable idea which I would have preferred myself to

metamorphosing into cat. But, for now, this should do.

I would have imagined the fetus would be dead, given it was

dredged up from a well of blood like a meat puddle from boiling slop.

Mrunalini rubbed her hands on the apron and proceeded to calmly

pick up the sewing needle which had lost all its silver sheen and

looked very old. These were not the conditions in which one conducts

caesarean, she told Aastha who nodded in acknowledgement and

asked if there was more of that drug to kill the pain.

Mrunalini felt hurt and a look of extreme guilt crossed her

face. Aastha understood, she closed her eyes and the doctor took to

pulling the ends of the sliced skin to a taut before knitting the ends

together as if it were a rice bag. The patient’s hair was slick with

Kranthi Askani 123

sweat and strands stuck to her cheeks. I thought if I were a nurse and

had human hands, I would have helped these two women who badly

needed help. Yes, they could do with some help, feline or human…

I and my whiskered prince had been following Aastha for a

while now. He reflected on my need to be with humans, with

women… he knew I was not a total cat like he was. We followed

Aastha when she escaped from the facility to the mansion but missed

her later. Then, by sheer luck, we found her later in the cavern with

many other women and a queen. Yes, of course, the queen, one cannot

forget the queen. We followed her when she was ferried from the

caverns to the more recent beach side palace where she agreed to take

the pill for procreation.

But now I am alone in my pursuit. My whiskered prince died

of a wound under his neck which he had gashed in a farcical routine to

cheer me up on one of the days. But the small innocuous wound

pestered, gangrened and spread around his neck to kill him in the end.

Before dying, he pantomimed for me to follow the road that took me

to Aastha and the women. I did that. But ours was a strange

relationship. Whereas my whiskered prince let himself be picked up

and patted by Mrunalini while Aastha watched in surprising glee, I

was lurking somewhere in the dark. I followed them at a distance, I

never revealed myself to these women, always following at a

distance…

Aastha was asking for some water and Mrunalini got to her

feet, sighed deeply and halted for the crippling pain in her womb to

subside. She reached for the bottle of water and with a cupped hand,

offered two pills, one pink and one yellow. Aastha gulped them down

with great difficulty, her throat dry like a coarse scrim. She made a

clucking sound; water drooled down the edges of her lips. Mrunalini

rested the patient’s head on her lap and gingerly patted her. A light

wind was wafting in through the broken wedge of the door, startling

the light breathing thing on the floor by the blood pool.

This fetus was breathing alright. But it would have given

anything to crawl back inside. The legs were fused together in a

grotesque form, like a tail. The skull was larger than a normal fetus,

arms spindly and the mouth a contortion. A boy! Aastha asked and

Mrunalini looked away, her eyes seriously pursuing a thought outside


the peripheries, outside the onus on her… Why, the baby (should I

call it fetus or should I call it fetus?) had no genitals alright.

Absolutely none, the legs were fused into a tail and the genitals

missing in this parody of something ancient, something reptilian.

I wished my prince was alive so I could show him this. I

wanted to share this experience with someone but I am trapped in this

body. Aastha groaned in pain. She begged for Mrunalini to give her

some water but the latter denied. No, water did no good after an

operation such as this one, she said as she spread the flats of her palms

before her and regarded them.

What were they going to do with that fetus? I imagined they

would drown in a well where the fetus would start by flapping its

fused tail and make clucking sound of the tongue as it laps water for

breathing. What did it all mean? The pill was not a success?

Later than night when the cries of patient had subsided and

her doctor peeled the blood-soaked nightdress to climb into something

more appropriate, I licked a wound’s opening on my rear limb and

slipped into sleep myself. Olive was there in my dream. She made a

grab at my ear and twisted it. As if a switch had been thrown, I turned

into the woman I was. She dragged me by my ear and demanded for

an explanation. I did not remember what it was I was being

summoned for but I distinctly remembered Olive was just as tubby as

always. She pointed to the white shoes and she pointed to a magazine

on the floor. The women in the waiting room were all gone. The girl

who was there it he operation theatre with Olive was now beating her

fists on the glass door of a casket, the levers lowering it into a pit and

olive raising her leg to stamp on the mud.

The dream was horrible but it made me think. The day I was

found in the bushes by Olive when I and my prince were loitering

about doing nothing came to my mind. The peeled postures on the

walls around us, the sky a clean slate of blue after rain and Olive

emerging from the bushes as if she had been waiting there all along

only to step out when the time was ripe…

At home, after it grew dark, Olive fed me with tepid milk

which I slurped up without hesitation. My prince lodged himself on a

woollen scarf and went to sleep immediately but I was not feeling

Kranthi Askani 125

very sleepy so I went around the place eyeing everything curiously. It

was then that I found Olive in her lab, impatiently brandishing a

thermometer to the skies. Something was bothering her. I don’t think

she noticed my presence in the hall. Her lab was obviously sealed for

air and not even the faintest of sound could have slinked inside.

After a while, Olive hunkered on a table, her feet planted

rigidly to either side as if she was going to lift the table and bang it

against the glass of the door. Now she kneeled down on the floor and

wedged her head tight between her folded knees. I slinked my own

head and licked a wound on the paw; I think I have had wounds all the

time; it must be one of those feline things to be wounded all the time

so we can lick our wounds clean.

Olive was on the floor, her eyes glued to the roof and hands

awkwardly splayed with no obvious benefit, one flung as if thrown

away and the other cupping her breast as if it were a breastplate,

armour… This is how I remember that night. Olive devastated with

whatever it was that was troubling her. To my right, my prince snored

lightly, his chest rhythmically going up and down like a bobbing

sponge on a ripple of water. He must have been having a very good

dream of chasing rats, for I thought he was enjoying his dream. I

remember thinking all of this and not noticing the change in the

weather. How long has it been? Why was it all so bloody dark?

The pressing dark and Olive’s grief seemed to be connected.

But what was the connection exactly? Outside, the crickets chirred

and in the glass-cased room, olive was splayed on the floorboards in a

lifelike manner. My prince was obviously chewing rat tails in his

dream. That, I thought I would bet on. After all, I was a cat too and

was slowly coming to terms with all the cat ways of doing things. I

climbed a wad of blankets and tripped them all so they lay at my feet

in a heap.

For no apparent reason, I wondered if the fresco on the wall

was reminiscent of anything I knew at any point in my life. Through

the slats of the high raised back of the chair, I noticed the variegated

colours; the rough flaky blue tail of this mythic creature scrawled on

the wall, its green bulk like a swollen pigeon breast and its peacock

beak, sharp and crooked; the shingles on its clawed feet where it

curled them around a tree bough and the steady unwavering gaze with


which it affected the diminutive man before it. What did it all mean? I

thought as I settled my haunches on the soft of the heaped pillowslips

under me. The white of the wall smudged around the edges, its loopy

cracks spilling out from under the mythical creature.

I remember I spent a long time wondering what the creature

could be: its perfect mane, the dark of its eyes and the blinding white

of the irises. It was as though the creature dipped its head into the

stars and rubbed its plume in the white of the stars before swooping

down to the planet. I was amazed at how hopelessly real it looked. But

it was only a painting, I told myself.Only a painting, I smiled my lips

unmoved with the gathering smile inside me. Why, I was a cat, wasn’t

I? Have you ever seen a cat smile? Well, there it is then.

Olive washed the hurtful look off her face as she stepped out

of the lab, the white smock still draped about and the nylon of the

gloves making her look as if she had dipped her wrists in a creamy

plaster. I fixed my gaze on her and she opened her arms wide inviting

me to join the embrace which I was extricated from a while ago. But I

was not going to jump at every offered embrace. I stood my ground or

at least that was the thought anyways. But the pillows slid down and I

keeled, squealed and scurried about like a mad dog bit by a scorpion

as the rest of the pillows met my slim body pressing my ribs close to

the ground, limbs splayed in defiance.

I think Olive smiled. But I am not very sure. She disappeared

into the dark behind her, into the door that led to the spiral stairs and

to the lab where I was morphed into my present form. The sound of

sashaying feet must have awoken my prince who was twitching his

whiskers, the tip of his tongue extruding between his lips like a

reticent snake out of its cave. As if by impulse, I held my face up in

the cups of my forelimbs but this proved to be an impossible feat and

my cheek pressed to the ground. My prince smiled as if I were a

circus buffoon entertaining him with my incoherent mind.

In a different universe with different set of fundamental laws I

would have lanced my prince into two or read his thoughts or

screamed at the top of my voice, producing a human voice in cat

throat. But here I was what I was and pretty soon going to learn to live

with it. Get over it, I heard telling myself. There was a thud from

downstairs and a muffled cry. It was Olive. I was rubbing my flank on

Kranthi Askani 127

the leg of a wooden chair when I heard the sound. I darted to the door

and nudged it forwards with my nose, sneezing into it. It took me a

whileo get used to the dark of the spiral staircase. I keenly heard for

the source of the cry. It was on the landing somewhere below me. I

dashed from one star to another, leaping and missing footing in the

dark, sliding my toes, making a scratch on the marble until my feet

met the warm slick of something tangling at my paws. It was Olive;

she banged her head on the stair, blood oozing out of her

irremediably.

I asked if she was doing alright. A stupid question, I thought.

So I improvised and asked if she needed water. She would have

thumped my head, thwacked I think more appropriate, for all I said

came out as a horrible gargle purr. I called my prince but I don’t think

he heard. But what could two cats do? What could we do? Olive

stretched her hand and caught the rail of the balustrade. Can I at least

go ahead before her and find the way, make sure it had no more

pitfalls? I took her head nod to a yes. So, there we were, she

bandaging her head with the loose end of her saree and I surveying the

scene before me as we descended down the stairs. I only hope she

noticed the gleam in my eyes, if there is such a thing as a gleam. I

only hope she noticed the feverish angst in my heart if there is a way

to notice these things. I wish she put a cat mind in me, that way I

would not have felt so utterly miserable, so consciously impotent…

Olive nursed herself. A rope of blood trickled down her

cheek, the slick of her hair gluing to the gash. She peeled the hair and

felt for the tender cut with her fingers, searching for the wound in the

dense of her hair. She gave a yelp, a low moan, her toes curled when

the fingers of her open hand met the nib of the gash. I watched in

silence. By now I had come to appreciate the silence in the dark. In

the first place, why was it so dark? How long had it been, two days in

dark already?

Olive sighed and blew air into her fingers as if to get rid of the

loose hair which she plucked where the gash hummed her head. She

complained of a sort of throb in her head. I purred. She said it could

be a deep gash, I purred. She said she may have dented her head,

pressing a vital synaptic nerve inside. I purred. She said she might be

going mad and I purred. This is how it went for a good hearty hour. I


recall this very clearly. Her tubby profile was not something you can

forget; she rummaged in the dark for a torch light, she said so herself.

I obviously comprehended all of this, the crackle of human throat I

mean. But, I could not reply and she knew it. She said I should be able

to find the torch in the dark. She said I had heightened sense of touch

and smell. Yes, thank you very much for that.

So, I put my heightened senses to proper use, combing

through the floor, rifling through the bags and pawing this and that,

here and there. And in the end when my nose rubbed against the cold

of the steel I thought Olive could have done this herself, better than

me. Whatever senses I had, they were not heightened at all, if

anything they were dumb and blunt. Olive said it would take a while

for the cramps to go away. She rested the torch on a table, the shaft of

light plunging the room in a gallant flush of white. She found the

emergency medical kit and injected herself. Then she proceeded to

daub the wound with white cotton, blood rushed up to turn the patch

of soft white into damp red as if the cotton wad was a sea creature that

changed its colour and texture in microseconds time into that of the

surface it comes in contact with.

The cramps! Oh yes, the cramps. My spine hurt like it was a

bow that an archer was twisting under me. The sternum was perhaps

the most affected of all. I wish I could pull it out, give it a thorough

brushing and replace it. What it needs is a perfect scrub. What the

world and the planet needs is a perfect scrub too. Everyone needs a

good one. Come to think of it, who doesn’t?

Anyway, these days the world has become too cynical for my

taste. What is my taste? You ask me what my taste is; I will tell you

what my taste is… It is to chew a rat’s tail and that’s about it. You

give me a rat gnawing at whatever it is they gnaw at, and I will be

delighted, as pleased as the sky that rubs its belly before letting out a

fart, a thunder in the storm… Speaking of storm, I must tell you

something that my brother once told me. It was my wedding day

discussion and he was scanning through all the photo albums when he

found the one he liked the most and he said this to me:

He said his favourite photo was the one with the gorgeous

smile.... He said my smile was so wide and so satisfying that it made

him wonder if that smile had been gathering inside me like a storm for

Kranthi Askani 129

days until I decided to loosen the trap that bright afternoon, my hands

curled up under me, making a grab at my saree, as if to bolt myself to

the ground for the fear that this stormy smile, full of ravishing beauty

would lift me up with its gale and pin me to a fat white cloud, turning

me into an angel, leaving behind me only the memory of that smile.

For centuries after, mortals under the clean blue sky would talk about

my smile, they will be reminded of my smile, and they would call it

the angelic smile, the rarest of the smiles to ever cross the lips of a

girl…

He said one would find girls practicing the smile on the

roadside and secretly in their bedrooms seated before their posh

dressing tables. They would twist their lips and bare their teeth in just

the right angle earnestly hoping that a gathering storm would rear up

through their sternum, rubbing the wind pipe and rustling the atoms in

every cell of their body, setting every nerve aquiver and they would

lift their hands up in earnest behest to be wafted up in the wind, the

chord of a waltz tune ringing in their ears….Alas, but not one of them

would ever achieve that smile, for not one of them were pure. And so,

the angelic smile belonged only to one girl ever…. And that would be

the legend angels whisper in each other’s ears.

That was my brother. And this was before I read the

advertisement in the papers and decided to meet Olive. But of course,

now that I have picked your interest, you want to know more about

my brother. So, maybe I will begin from the very beginning. He loved

me a lot and that’s to say nothing about us; I loved him more, I think

or I at least assert this point. But it doesn’t matter. We were an

amazing bunch, me and my brother.

This one day comes to mind. I think I was about eight and he

was twelve at the time. We were heading to school. I was short and

chubby; he was lean as most boys of his age were. His school pants

were short and I noticed the sock on his left foot, flopped down like a

frond over his ankle, the rubber band eating into his shank above. My

own socks, both left and right, under the ballooning gown, had

deserted the reigns of bands and flopped down like twin tote bag

mouths. I noticed the corrugated marks the rubber band made on the

shank and compared with what my brother had on him. I thought I

bore the best marks and that made me stronger than him. My gown


was neatly ironed; the pleats folded stiffly across the length so that

when I opened up the creases on the gown I found the fabric inside

the creases cowering in the dark. The undersides of my school gown

pleats, each as wide as a quarter of my longest finger, were something

of a mystery, the colour of damp wood, deep brown. And I imagined a

doctor with a shining scalpel, brandishing it to the nurse next to him,

digging into my skin and wondering the way I did about my pleats.

He would think how damp and so full of colour the internal organs

are…

My brother always parted his hair on the left. He had a sharp

nose. It was the one thing I always thought he had the best of us two.

Our school bus was a yellow squat with windows stained from

exertion. Inside the bus, all window seats were occupied and my

brother gave me a quick glance before disappearing into the back

where the seventh graders were hooting, whistling and throwing paper

balls at the girls in the front. Mother gave my hair a thorough

combing and the braid was already single. No, not the pigtails

anymore; I was already feeling quite grown up by then.

I leaned into the gap between my feet to plant the lunch bag,

my head brushing the iron frame of the seat in the front. This is what

happened next: it must have been a bicycle rider who pedalled too

close to the bus’s front; some said it was a jeep that chafed its side to

our bus’s side and my brother said he was not paying attention.

Anyway, our driver stamped his foot on the brake with such

abruptness that my head, as I raised it after I installed the lunch box

between my feet, banged against the font seat’s rail. Blood dribbled

into my eyes like my head was a steel glass with tea filled to the brink

so that even a slight nudge sloshed the tea over.

I think I started crying either from the pain of throb in the

head or from the blood that blinded my eyes as it ran into them. The

girl next to me noticed and shrieked like a soprano so my brother

summoned himself, peeling away from his mates for the moment. The

teacher in the front, a cantankerous lady, swabbed the blood with her

kerchief. We were not very far from home so it was decided that I

should be taken home to my mother. The teacher asked if my brother

would do the honours. He obliged. We went back home to my mother

who ran up to us with a worried look on her face. She was in the

Kranthi Askani 131

kitchen, her arm holding the broomstick’s rear as she gave it a judder

against the wall outside. All I could see was that broom and hand

holding it. I caught her reflection in the kitchen window and she saw

that we were home. At first I think she thought we were ghosts or

projections of her daydream. A minute or so passed and she must have

thought ‘oh, they are real…’ She came yelling out of the house as if

the kitchen was lit on fire and dropped to her knees to inspect the tear

on my forehead.

It was not a very big wound but the doctor puckered the skin

around it and sewed the tear with three fine stitches which I bore for

the rest of my life, that is, until, I decided to undergo the

transmogrification operation. What I recall from this incident was the

fact that mother blamed my brother for the whole incident. I think she

even planted a couple of thwacks on his head. I don’t quite know if it

was an act to pacify my angst but this was how it has always been. I

landed into troubles and poor thing, my brother, took the blame for

me, always.

We liked raising our blanket homes in our bedroom, on stilts,

and knotting the tassel end of sheets into window grill… It was the

light inside the blankets that always excited me, dark and lit at the

same time. Under these blanket homes, we pantomimed cooking with

our toy dinner sets. We made partitions inside and called one the

dining room and the other kitchen. I asked him to steal some tomatoes

from the kitchen, the real one where mother swan through the

vaporous oily air, the pressure cooker whistling and the water filter

candles dipped in hot water for cleaning. He did as I said and then I

squished all tomatoes into our toy plates which were of course too

small to hold all the tomato paste and naturally smudged the sheets

under which we laid. I liked to stir the paste with some sugar so I

would order for him to get sugar which he duly did.

In the end, mother would crow at him and even whack him

with a stick, for the sheets were all too crumpled and the red paste

ruinously deposited everywhere. Who would do the washing now,

your father? She would cry not as a question but a vain incantation,

for in the end, it was mother who did all the washing.

One other incident comes to my mind. Our parents were not

home, I think they went to a dinner party or something. Anyway, we


were alone at home and playing hide and seek. I smuggled myself

under the broken slat of our sofa chair. I was so small I neatly fitted

under it like the calyx of a flower, my hands splayed open and holding

the sofa from below. My brother was on the other side of the kitchen

wall, counting numbers from one to twenty five. When he was done,

he gave a shout that he was coming. I noticed the scrawny shanks and

the flats of his feet patrolling the hallways before sauntering into the

bedroom. His feet climbed our parents’ bed and his head now

appeared upside down as he surveyed the space under the bed. He

climbed down, vacantly pursued his search for a while as he

rummaged like a blind man in the dark through our toy compartment

and behind the bedroom door. Then, something struck him, an idea;

perhaps I snuck behind his back and lodged myself under the kitchen

table. Did he think I was so clever, I thought as I eased under my

cramped sofa. He waded through the hallway into the kitchen; I stuck

my head out to see the expectant look on his face but as I did this, he

caught me off-guard. He yelped as his head lowered like a giraffe’s,

swaying from the height of his neck. Our eyes met and I shirked,

shrank, cringed… It was so sudden that my head banged into the

wood of the sofa above me and I took to crying.

I, under the sofa, giving vent to my private tears and he

outside, blabbering for me to come out of there, for the fear that

neighbours might overhear my crying and complain to mother who

would lose her patience and punish him for this, for that, and for every

damn thing under the sun… I remember how I cried endlessly,

massaging the bump in my head as my fingers traced the outline of

the swell, separating the strands of hair around it. The skin on the

bump felt like a thing that was not mine; it was as though I had

acquired this integument from somewhere else for the time being. I

was ululating like a fox under the full moon and he genuflected

outside the sofa, begged for me to calm down, waving a bottle of

bournvita in his hands to satiate me. He spooned up a full from the

bottle and reached for my hand inside, tremulously, for he knew I

would squawk like a cock with its wings pressed close in a butcher’s

hands, if I found his entreaties not worthy of my consideration.

My sobbing went on and on for over an hour. By now I was

only crying as a corollary to the crying I had been doing since the

Kranthi Askani 133

beginning. There was no longer the impulse to cry, only a follow

through. My crying had subsided and took a sort of staccato form with

a furious sob followed by restraining coughs. He was still there with

the bottle in his hand. He offered me another spoon full and this time;

I obliged for want of something to do, for I was bored with my crying

myself. I wanted to see mother, I wanted to go to bed, and I wanted it

to be a normal day. I no longer liked the freedom that was thrust upon

us.

Of course, mother came home, found the dried stains of

bournvita powder on the floor next morning and twisted my brother’s

ear to a full circle. I think he cried then. We were too young at the

time and I think he was at the age when it was alright for boys to cry.

I found him with his head planted between his knees inside our

blanket home. Parting the drapes of our home, I crawled up to him

and I said I was sorry, nipping the frills of my pretty white gown for it

was not easy to say sorry to someone, not even to my brother who I

loved enormously. I tried to extricate his head from the clamp of his

knees but he held it tight like a wedge in the lathe machine. I ran my

fingers through his head but he shuddered and pushed me away,

bringing a wall of our blanket home to a crumble. I made a wad of the

blanket, my back to him. I told him I was sorry, a second time, and

this time I thought he had to give in, I willed for him to accept my

apology… But he was unmoved with this, his head still in his knees.

And now the sun light flooded our blanket home. I kicked one of the

stilts and the linen roof dropped athwart on our heads. He made no

move to either stop me or admonish me so I continued pulling all the

blankets down.

So, there it was, our blankets untethered from the stilts,

unknotted from the window grill made a messy heap. All in all, we

had three blankets: two for the sides (we chose a corner with two real

solid walls, you could say we improvised) and one for the roof. I

crawled from under the heap, knuckling my misted eyes, and went

into the hallway. I felt he owed me an explanation… How could he

behave that way?

Here is another incident that comes to my mind. It is

impossible to tell how old I was accurately in all these incidents but I

can tell you I was young, six or seven years old I think. Anyway, it


was my brother’s birthday and some of his classmates had come to

our home for the treat. There was no cake, or at least I don’t

remember there being a cake. Anyway, it was dinner time and all his

mates sat on the floor (yes, in those days, we all sat on the floor for

dining) in two rows, their backs against the L of the wall. They were

all having a laugh about something, a private joke obviously, and I

imagined it involved their class teacher and his bald head. I waited at

the doorstep to be let in but there was no room to wade from the main

door to the kitchen so my mother said I would have to wait for a while

outside, until they all dined. But I took this as an affront and picked

my way over the leaning small backs of the guests. It was cramped up

and I had to concentrate, so I won’t misstep on one of their shirts

smudging them or even on the wrapped gifts between them. I was so

focused in swimming across this line of backs that I missed the low

window door whipped open for clean air. It was a blow I had some

difficulty forgetting, for I crashed into the gap between two of my

brother’s mates, my screwed fist thumping the contents in the one’s

plate and my hair braid snaking into another’s plate.

Father rushed up to lift me in his arms while mother

scrambled up the mess I left in my wake. I held back my crying for as

long as I could; the strain of holding my crying back flushed my face

with a deep red so much so that mother created a commotion for me;

all neighbours gathered around and inspected my head. Funny how

many times in my childhood I subjected my head to these thumps. I

remember I was awestruck with my ability to hold back my tears. It

was not until the first of neighbouring aunts who cried for some

turmeric to be brought that I started whining. At first, the sobs came in

like the clacking of metal balls in a tin box as you lowered it from a

height, irregular and incoherent, but soon I upped the fever of my

crying, fully in control from inside. I gave them all my full face

cracked with swirls of tears. By the time all my tears were soaked into

the cotton ends of many sarees of the many aunts in the compound,

my brother’s mates had returned to their homes. No one asked if they

finished their dinner. Even father, the wisest of all forgot to ask my

brother if the modest celebrations of my brother’s birthday were

satisfying.

Kranthi Askani 135

And that was then. So, what is now? Now, it is too dark.

Now, Mrunalini held the baby with the tail in her hands, towel dried

the mucus from its head and laid it down beside the mother. Baby! I

think I will call it fetus, its legs glued into a grotesque tail. I don’t

know what my feelings are for this baby. But I feel quite sad for the

mother, Aastha, who bled a vat full from the cavernous inside, the

caesarean not a great deal helpful I think. But again, what do you

expect the doctor to do with kitchen knives and sewing needles.

Nothing better than what she did; in fact, I am willing to give credit to

how she improvised, given the dingy set up and all. It was a bad

enough place for a cat to deliver a baby, let alone a real woman. I

meowed and Mrunalini regarded me with sad eyes as if to say she

needed a real woman to talk to, not a cat. A cat was no good to her

right now. The fetus was making weak snuffling sounds. Any attempt

to placate it, let it be said, were very vain. Why, the fetus had ears but

who knows if they were properly wired at all? Who knows if all the

internal topography was double checked and the circuitry triple

checked? Who knows if the synaptic passages to and from brain were

properly scoured by whatever chemical agent that our body produced.

Personally, if you ask my opinion, I will tell you what, I don’t think

the fetus had enough time inside the womb, I think these women

miscalculated the timing. It was all wrong. What did they expect?

How does such a fetus with bleeding muscles and half-baked neurons

survive? I wonder if it feels pain. I should try this. Maybe I will dig

my teeth into its tail and see if it squeals.

I can’t see this anymore. Aastha looks horrible. She is dying

alright. I can guarantee she is dying. Look at her face, so pale and

tired. And in the last two hours since she delivered this mythic

amalgam from between her thighs, she has acquired a sort of

unhappy-ending look. You know the look! The one that means, oh!

What a pitiful climax my life has come to. How did I not see this

coming? Where was my mind all these years? What was I thinking?

To think that I envisaged a different future…! That look troubled me

the most, her eyes fixed on the roof and the fetus lying by her side

making a lapping sound every now and then as its tongue licked its

nose. I think the fetus is hungry. But I am not sure if the mother likes

it. Is it very important for a mother to like her fetus? Won’t the


mothers feed their babies if they don’t like them? I know, I know,

these are philosophical questions and not a great deal helpful, just

musings of a cat that lost its very best friend recently, its brother…

Yes, there it is, I have said it. The mewling cat I had been

talking to you about, the cat I called my whiskered prince was my

brother. He had undergone the transmogrification ten years ago and

by the time I met him, he was totally transformed. He was a total cat

when I met him. For whatever incomprehensible reasons, which I am

sure Olive knew but won’t tell me, my mind stayed human while the

rest of me turned into you-know-what.

Anyway, last night I had a dream. In it, my brother was

chasing me around. We were adults in this dream. He had a beard,

unshaved and his face large. I was quite a pretty thing myself, in a

lemon green churidar that swirled around me when I hopped

staggeringly to avoid my brother’s quenching hands. We were back in

our childhood home which was small and its roof squatted, the

shingles making a rasping sound as a cat prowled above. The

bedroom where we played with our toy dinner set was small and we

were big, burly even so that when I tried to run away, I found myself

kneading my elbows that rasped against the flaking, peeling walls.

The wooden lintels on the roof were crumbling and poured their dust

on us as I climbed up the cot and evaded his hands. Our small home

was like a matchbox set. I wondered how we spent our whole

childhood there and never really noticed how small it really was. Even

in the confined space I was evading my brother pretty well who was

twitching his fingers and wringing his hands to tickle me, which is

what we did when we were kids. There are times when I thought I

could not take the tickling anymore, gasping for breath, his fingers

making a merry dance on the soles of my feet or digging into my ribs

or playing a waltz under my arms…

And then he caught me and dragged me towards him, the

small of my waist twined with the long of his left arm. He proved that

his trawl was large enough to trap me, the proof was enough. He let

me go. We sat on the cot, our breathing stertorous and our bodies

perspiring from all the chasing around. And then he asked me if we

should fling our skins away and turn into kittens. The mention of

kittens was enough. I felt my body warping around me like a robot,

Kranthi Askani 137

my skin loosening, crimping, folding, squishing and kneading until I

was packed up densely into the sternum inside my cat coat. The

sternum was like an umbrella tautly puckered together which would

pop open into the thing I was, the human I was. Or rather, my sternum

was like the boot of a car that you could pop open from under your

seat whenever you felt like doing it.

The dream was over. And here we are again, the blood soaked

towel under the fetus’ head, Mrunalini disengaged from her doctor

duties and now disinterestedly staring at the thing before her, as if to

assess it. She swiped an arm over it to get rid of the mosquitoes; yes,

there are a lot of them in here.

The thing about mosquitoes is, it brings back a certain

memory. Again, I am not sure how old I was at the time, I may have

been in class fourth I think, but I can’t be very sure. We had moved

into a new home, leaving our childhood den behind us, into what can

be called the woods. I will tell you why, this new home was in the

middle of nowhere. Around us, only green verdure beyond which, in

the distance, that is, if you strained your eyes real well, you could see

white and yellow structures. To reach the nearest residential area, you

would have to walk for a good quarter of an hour. Street dogs were

the first ones to greet us; they were everywhere, grossly fornicating all

over the place as if the woods had apportioned them a freedom that

couldn’t be taken away from them, as if they were very sure of

themselves. They had that look in their eyes; one dog in particular, a

mouse-brown dog with white fluff on the neck and three white stripes

on its flanks, always dawdled around our home. This dog had an

annoying habit of staring at us all the time through the small gaps

between the painted slats of the iron gate of our compound.

Perhaps, I should focus here on my brother. Yes, what was I

saying? The mosquitoes… Yes, around this time, he fell sick to

malaria and had to stay at home for over two weeks. It was not a very

enjoyable moment for him. Very boring, he told me. I went to school

in the morning and returned home in the evening and he would still be

there, laying in his bed, the sheets tucked under him neatly, the pillow

cinched into the gap between the wall and his back, his hair raggedy

and his forehead burning. It was his hands I remember mostly, very

slender and long. He folded them under him as he laid down with his


face down, shielding the light of the day from pouring into his pupils.

He said in his dreams the house was on fire and he was running away

from it, the dog outside panting and jumping at his feet. I wore an

expression of clarity on my face, perhaps even rested my chin on the

edge of his bed, my legs folded under me on the chafing cement floor.

I can’t remember very clearly but he told me he stopped and retraced

his steps. He said he ran around our home gasping for words which

evaded him. He said it was as if he had forgotten something or

someone inside (it could have been me he was talking about) but the

cry forming in his mind never rolled out of his tongue…

It must have been a horrible dream, to choke for words or

expressions in one’s dream. I have had a dream once, a lucid dream I

suppose. In it, I found myself in the woods, tall trees swaying above

me, the tips lit up like the neon fibres of a fancy bedside lamp. The

ground under my feet was dry and cracked. I found it odd, for how

can the ground crack where tall trees are soughing all the time,

catching wind that slips down the Himalayas. But it was a lucid dream

where I was the observer and the doer. I was the pretty little thing

with white frock around my chubby body, my cheeks flushed red, hair

parted so severely that I could feel the tightness in my head. I

sauntered through the woods with no apparent destination but I willed

the ground to glue together and form one unified whole. The view I

had of me was interspersed with tree trunks as if I was watching

myself from beneath the row of tall trees, creepily crawling along with

myself, outside me. And then, there he was, my brother, he waved at

me with his open hands and I darted in his direction as if tugged by a

rope.

As I approached him, I noticed the buzz of flies over his head

as if they were feeding on him. Mosquitoes were all over the woods, I

had failed to notice them before but now they were everywhere, they

were inside my eyes, swarming like the photons of light, lancing my

eyes to be let in. I was observing myself and I realised I could make

this go away with one swipe of my hand. And I did that. Clever,

simple and very well done…! Now it was serene and the topography

could just as well indicate to a different planet. My brother had a

shaved head like Voldemort, his eyebrows too. And I told him he was

scary. He said it was malaria. But I can’t be right. Malaria doesn’t do

Kranthi Askani 139

that to people. If anything, they feed you with glucose and plunge

silver needles into the soft fruit-like flesh of your bottom. But no harm

done, you will be yourself in a week or two. He shrugged. I pursed my

lips and smiled a tight-lipped smile. He stepped forward but now,

there was no volition anymore, the will to decree the dream

evaporated and I was back in a dream that took its own course. I

stayed in the dream, locked, trapped inside it and allowed it to

influence my thoughts, to wrap its arms around me.

Throughout his malarial days, I came home to watch my

brother snuggle in the cot, his long fingers pinching the new

videogame console father bought him. I was not particularly

interested in the videogames. I wondered why not. Perhaps it had

something to do with the boy-girl divide. But, this meant I found my

interest blossoming in something else, anything else… But, rack as I

might my brain, I found nothing at all to my interest. I don’t want to

give a wrong impression here. It was not that I was disinterested in

life, but I dithered, I was irresolute, and most of all, I liked to observe

my brother and his impossible passions. I could draw clear lines,

distinguish and delineate the period of my brother’s life when say he

was deeply moved by music, or when he was into movies, or when he

moved on to books, or when he chucked everything for food, and

when he talked a lot about love, or when he talked a lot about his

growing old. I don’t know why I bother with all this. Oh, wait, but I

do know. Here is what I bother: my own life had no tacit rules; I

allowed myself to be wafted in air and buoyed and carried like pollen

on any light breeze. But my brother was reticent to small breeze, he

needed a passionate wind to carry him, to take him into its warm

vortex embrace, fling him, rip him to pieces and leave him all dried

up, vertiginous. And then there would be a period of drowsiness

during which he would do nothing at all but lie and wait for a strong

passionate gale to carry him again. But it won’t be long before a wind

rears up and my brother dredges up passion from the floor of his mind

to swim in it like an expert in no time.

His life had always been this succession of one thing after

another: food, life, books, movies, food, blood, novels, science, life,

philosophy, then food, then novels, then music and something else. I

followed in his wake like a hyena on the spoor of discards, picking


my way among the rubble of passions he had swum through. At first, I

willed myself to this routine which was taxing and I felt I could just as

well find my own way through the woods of life like in my dream.

But as in my dreams, in the waking life, my brother was like that

malarial victim with flies buzzing over his head lurking somewhere in

the dark, lying await like a predator for his prey. He knew I was

coming. He knew I was following him. It was as though he left traps

that would alert him of my traipsing and tracing his path. And then,

without knowing when or how, my life acquired the same succession

routine of one thing after another just as my brother’s. And I found

myself watching as I did in my lucid dream: from behind a row of

trees so that there were moments of clarity and rectitude interspersed

with moments of uncaring numbness, as if my life was the

interference pattern of a double slit experiment, light and dark, light

and dark, light and dark…

And sooner than I expected, I was challenging my brother in

his own realm. We watched movies together, read the same books,

and listened to the same music. There was this constant dialogue

between us, of everything new; it was as though we were standing on

the edge of what we knew and peering into a blank ocean of what we

did not know, itching to lift up my skirts (and he would roll his

trousers) to paddle those waters of not-yet-known. There was so much

to know, always so much to explore…

And then, this happened. He simply packed up and left home

one night and never returned. No note, nothing. It was spooky as if a

hole opened up under his bed and sucked him clean. But he was

prepared; he had packed, I told myself as if it meant he was living out

there, somewhere, like a king, with a car and a home. But of course it

can’t be true. There were lacunae in my theories of him. He could

have told me; I was his sister. More than anything, we were doing so

well together. Did I miss something? What did I miss? Did he take a

path that led him back into the woods where silence and dark pressed

around him like water in a well, filling all the voids in him and he just

could not extricate himself from it later for the fear that the bruises

would show as an indication to the place where he returned from.

Where did he go? For days, weeks and months, later for years,

I wondered where he went without me. He always told me where he

Kranthi Askani 141

was going. Was this part of growing up, to say nothing about where

one went? But we were not like this; we were not like everyone else.

Surely, there was something I was missing here. Surely, he was not

abducted by aliens? Or was he? Of course, father did everything that a

father does when his son disappears into thin air. The police, the

neighbours, teachers, friends, near and dear… But it was over. No, he

was not found, or his body was not found for that matter. We could

not rule out the possibility of a body, the police said. Of course, we

understood.

Here is where it gets interesting. You remember the funny

dog that always patrolled our home, the one who sat outside our

compound and peered through the unbending iron lattice of the gate…

Yes, the strange thing is, a cat joined this dog. And you would think

dogs and cats never went well together. But this was a bizarre

friendship. They may not have adored each other but a passive

agreement was established between them. It was as though they

decided to dissolve into the quivering cells of their individual bodies

and said to each other, ‘see, we are made up of the same stuff, why

fight…’

This cat was lanky and he was awkward on the compound

walls. Not that he plonked into the bucket of water down below or

that he skidded off the surface of the wall he tried to climb. No, none

of that. He managed to climb safe and clean alright. But something

about him was not right. The cat always looked as though he would

fling the feline coat away and turn into something else. It was as if the

cat was only enacting some role, as if the compound wall was a stage

and the coconut fronds the proscenium. Was it the way it sat with its

nose on its spread-eagled paws or was it the way it looked at me with

those longing eyes as if it wanted me to be there, to exist and live a

life so it can watch me through the three windows of our home. It

would be there, yawning and gazing through the kitchen window

when I slipped into the kitchen for a glass of water. It would be there

in the bedroom where I went to read a novel slumped on the bed and

snuggled in a pair of wool rugs (for it was winter at the time), and it

would be there in the hall where I sat with parents to watch TV or

simply sit, because that is what people do sometimes: simply sit.


The compound wall was separated from the windows by a

very narrow gap; two people could not walk side by side in it. So, all

the cat ever did was sit with his nose on its paws and shift its theatre

five feet to the left or five to the right, window to window, following

me everywhere. I think this whiskered cat followed me everywhere,

ahem, excepting the bathroom. If it was any other girl, she would have

felt all this spooky enough to bolt the windows and lock herself in the

house. But I was not any other girl so I went ahead and fed the cat

warm milk which it slurped peacefully, eyeing me endearingly and

licking its whiskers in the end with the long pink tongue. And I led

him into our home. Since then, the cat lived with us. Mother glowered

at me when she caught me stealing milk, father grumbled when he

saw me nestling the cat in my lap and playing with it when I could

just as well be studying for my exams…

The dog as if taking this as an affirmation, seeing that I and

the cat were now good friends disappeared into the woods. It was a

sunny day and I recall how it wagged its tail one last time, flicked its

head and bared its set of fine teeth before sneezing strongly, peeing on

the freshly painted varnish of our compound gate, the runnel of

yellow urine flowing from under the gate one last time… and that was

that. The dog went into the woods and never returned. For days

together, my eyes were drawn to that smear on the gate where the dog

peed. Was it marking its territory? Was it waiting for someone to be

accepted? Was it keeping vigil? Why were dogs and cats keeping a

vigil on me?

Kranthi Askani 143

3

You see, memory is a funny thing. It doesn’t occur linearly.

At least it doesn’t in my case. To me, my memory bank is like a

beehive and I feel with my bee pincers the surface of the hive as I

trudge through one translucent cavity into another discovering my

honeyed memory in some and vacant nothingness in others.

So naturally, I would be looking at that alien fetus with its

legs morphed into a tail one minute and I would be thinking about my

childhood home the next minute, then without pause or mention I

would be off telling you some incident that may have occurred when I

and my brother, the feline creatures, were traipsing through the woods

after dark (I mean, after the planet was plunged into dark).

Simultaneously, I might tell you about the time when my brother died

and how I furtively slinked into the cellar floor that Aastha occupied

while Mrunalini was busy working on that pill upstairs.

How do you make sense of all this? Well, if you ask me, I am

presently seated on the window sill watching the fetus make that

clucking sound. And every incident I tell you about, obviously, was in

the past. That is all you need to know. Now, let me tell you this other

incident with Olive. This must have happened around the time she

hurt herself. Remember the gash she took on the staircase soon after it

grew dark. But I could be wrong; I can’t place this memory of mine

accurately in the stretch of time. It could have been before the gash or

it could be after the gash. She was rather moody the whole time as if a

microcosm of her own insides, dark and weary, had sieved out and

flooded the planet. It was as though she blamed herself for the dark.

We were back in that dingy operation theatre where you-

know-what happened to me. I was genuflecting before a scalpel in the


tray, my image magnified in the convexity of stainless steel. Olive

primed up the spare generator which crackled and made a jarring

sound as if the metal gears inside were chafing at each other without

purchase. A rattle emanated and there was a flurry of sparks flying out

of the top, red and white. Then something broke and the machine

growled, the rattle died and there was smoke inside the theatre, dark

and confusingly oily. It made my insides retch. Olive ran out with the

hand held against her nose. I followed her outside.

She coughed violently as she ran out. I caught up with her,

meowing all the time for her to keep calm. She dropped her tubby

haunches to the floor where my brother was. Her thud made him

wince in pain and I thought the worst had happened: the tail, I thought

Olive sat on my brother’s tail. But of course it was only the tip of the

tail and soon he extricated it from under her with a bit of difficulty.

Now Olive mopped her sweaty forehead. No wait, I think her head

was bandaged by then, or was it? This is tricky, isn’t it? I don’t

remember very clearly. But I don’t think it matters now. Bandage is

inconsequential to this incident. So, let’s just move on.

She had that what-happens-now look on her face. I sat beside

her and I wanted to ask her if there was a painkiller or something, for

my sternum was still hurting. How much more hurt could I take? I

wondered like a naïve philosopher taking the reins of his subject in

both hands for the first time. I think it is pain we all start analysing

first. It is pain, sorrow, death, compunction, morbidity and devastation

that we start by analysing first. What is this obsession with pain? I

thought, now feeding the train of thought with more of my mind’s

activity.

Olive looked up to the sky seeking an earnest reply to

everything. She seemed like a woman who had many questions

hoarded up in her bosom that needed answering. The sky that night

was cloudy, the moon a bright white round traipsing through the

cancerous growth of clouds, the blue tissue a distant background,

clear yet indifferent to the drama before it. Here a set of twin stars

twinkled and there a clump of stars shone brilliantly.

I was transfixed myself. I am not the type to get transfixed on

anything, let alone the sky and stars and clouds. But the way Olive

looked up to the sky, soulful and full of meaning, deriving some

Kranthi Askani 145

crumpled truth from a dimension that may have curled up endlessly

inside the obvious three dimensions… She did this for a while. I don’t

know when she switched her dreamy look to that of worry but it

happened and there was nothing to it but feel sorry.

When I woke up, her face was pasted with a blue tinge, the

nostrils flared and rigid with all the uselessness. Yes, she died and no,

I did not bury her. How would you have two cats dig a grave? Have

you seen anything like that before? Cats digging graves… Anyway,

there she was, frozen in the cold, her head planted to the frame of the

door and hands nestled in the lap, eyes adamantly open. My brother

and I moaned for a while. She was a good person, he said, or I thought

that was what he meant from the muffled mewl as he dug his nose

into the pleats of her saree, the tubby frame beneath the saree now

evoking no feeling in me. We sat like twin guardians to keep watch

while her body froze in the cold outside and ants crawled above her.

A week or so before she died, she told me how she performed

transmogrification on my brother; she said my brother visited her one

fine morning (oh yes! Then we had mornings, back then we even had

the sun), all devastated, burdened with loss. Loss, what loss! But I

could not ask, I could only purr. Olive conveniently told only those

bits of the story that she thought I should know. She left out a great

deal that I had no way of asking her, or my brother. Once a cat,

always a cat!

Anyway, she said my brother underwent the operation

immediately. But the process of transmogrification was not very fine

tuned and there were obvious difficulties for my brother soon after.

For instance, he had difficulty in breathing and his spine had three

dislocated bones and he looked unusually scrawny in the cat skin.

Above all, he had no way of telling Olive what his difficulties were.

She had to make her observations, jot them down and assess the

movements of this whiskered creature, interpose them with what

platonic idea of cats she had in her mind, see where the gaps were and

try to put the cat out of his misery. She said it took over two years to

get this right. When she said that I made a mental note of it and

observed later that the time period was the same between when my

brother left home and when he turned up as a cat on my window

sill….


She said it was only later that she perfected the whole art of

morphing humans into cats. A year later she recruited a girl. She was

of course referring to that girl who was there in the theatre at the time

of my operation. When she had perfected the whole art and science

and whatever else there was to perfect, she said, her clients felt not a

twinge of pain in their limbs. Bloody hell! I wanted to tell her of the

constriction I felt in my sternum. It was like the weight of a thousand

bricks in my sternum. Not at the time when we had this discussion but

soon after operation. It lasted for little over a month. Whatever

observations she was making, Olive, totally missed my pain.

Obviously, she was not making a good job at observing.

Now she had frozen to death; that gash she had taken on the

head was bad. It reeked of damp phlegm and there were many hair-

thin trickles of clotted blood around it. The wound looked like a

suppurated fruit found at the bottom of a garbage bin, dark tissue

mottled with cotton-white specks. Slivers of the skin around the

wound peeled and curled up like the calyx of a mysterious wild

flower, the gangrenous black inside it looking all the more painful to

the eye as skin around it puckered, taut and twisted.

My brother left ahead of me, his tail swaying to the left and

right as if following an internal movement of his vacillating heart. For

I thought Olive was an important person in his life. Whatever loss he

needed to sail away from, Olive helped him deal with it, in an

unconventional manner but nonetheless it seemed to have worked.

And now she was dead. The smallish bulk of his body shivered in the

cold and I could see the rippling movement of his ribs across the inert

skin of his flanks.

This is too morbid. Let us switch gears here. Let me tell you

about something else. Let us fast forward a little, a month or so. No,

let us fast forward a couple of years…

The filigree of washed weed flounced the river, a perfect

place to pee in, I thought. I did what I had to, and I scrambled up,

raking damp mud behind me to cover the smear and stench. I rolled

on my back, rubbing the gnarled spine on the damp bank. My

whiskered brother was coming down with a cold, his sneezing loud

and at once peremptory as if to say there were more sneezes brewing

in the gullet of his throat. I wondered if his thoughts were human too.

Kranthi Askani 147

Did he think as I did? Or did Olive turn him into a total cat, whatever

that meant…

Gates of the dam were thrown open and in my mind, I

imagined how water made those familiar crooked-finger shapes as it

swilled through the narrow openings in the gates. You can’t see very

much in the dark so naturally you have to start supplanting images

from your past, from the memory banks if you will. I trotted off to

where my brother was resting cosily on the crag of a rock, scratching

his chin with the long slender fore limb. His movements were not very

graceful; he still looked like someone who does not belong in a cat

skin. I was good though, or at least I would like to think I am good.

Sky was moonless and the stars shone brilliantly like kids

alone at home, their parents out of station attending a wedding or

some such thing. This form of star gazing excited us both but I must

confess it was not a good sight to sprawl on our backs exposing our

genitals to the sky. It could have been gracious if we were humans

and fully clothed but given what we were, it was bloody ridiculous. It

has been over two years since it grew dark but we still fix up our

stares at head level stupidly as if to avert our gaze from what’s under

us.

Why, only last night, when we were gazing at the stars and he

lifted his greyish fur limb at a clump of stars in some general

direction, I followed the line of his foot, irresistibly, to the cleft of his

rear limbs where a diminutive sack lay. I laughed out loud in my mind

as if to say ‘hey, hey, look at you…!’ But of course it came out as a

gargling purr and my brother was immediately conscious and

withdrew his foot to cover his pale belly and the wispy strands of hair

under it. Following this, he chased me around, through the woods and

back into the back of the river, our nostrils flaring with loud panting.

We rolled in the mud and he tickled me as he always did when we

were kids in that childhood home of ours.

But there were times when he grew moody and extricated

from my company, wandered into the woods and didn’t return for a

while. I understood that he needed his soulful strolling of the woods

and did not pursue. There was this one time when he left me for over

a month. I was mad at him when he returned. He left me because I

teased him? Thin-skinned creature, I called him. But of course he


heard my purrs and responded in a snuffled mewl accompanied by a

masculine stare, a blank one that probably meant something like what

are we doing here? Why are we even alive? What is the purpose of

life? And a whole lot of other things which I did not care to think…

Now, I struggled with a tuft of grass on the gorge as if I was

an infant that needed something to chew, his milk teeth peeling open

the gums and surfacing for the first time. But I was no infant. He was

quite a chum today so he followed suit, tearing up the tufts of grass,

swaying his head to the left and to the right, smearing his stubble with

green slime. Of course this is all my imagination, for there was little

to see under starlit sky, the stream of photons not full enough on the

concave pupil of my cat eye.

In one of his soulful wanderings, my brother found a small tin

can and took me there. It was lodged under what looked like the stray

remains of a jute bag. We prised it open with our teeth; mind you, that

is not an easy thing to do. Inside it, we found a clump of marbles. My

favourite one was a cat’s eye. My brother’s favourite was the marble

with a wisp of cobalt blue that ran like a strand of smoke in a sea of

emerald green. I showed mine to him and he smirked, that is, the cat’s

version of a smirk. We swallowed our favourite marbles as we

lurched to our gorge. I felt the cold of the marble under my tongue,

running the tip over the smooth round. But of course, I stepped on a

thorn (you would think cats would never step on a thorn, won’t you?).

Anyway, my fruit-like soft foot stomped on the tough, sharp needle of

the thorn which pierced in quite easily as if it was surprised itself on

finding this soft flesh over it. Anyway, I winced in pain and

swallowed my cat’s eye and that was that. I think for days on end,

after this incident, I wondered if my stomach was growing huge; did it

rumble more? Oh, and I even tried to feel the marble which I had

reason to believe, made home in the left side of my belly, for it felt

relatively heavier than the right side.

You see what two prowling cats can get up to when there is

nothing else to do… I could have composed a new religion based on

the cat’s eye marble inside my stomach. I ruminated for long hours

into the night (night? what farcical irony really!) and wondered how

like a periscope, the marble inside me would shoot up a glassy twig

Kranthi Askani 149

up my throat, part my lips from inside, and peer at the world until I

gave a slurp with my tongue in my sleep as I dreamed of chasing rats.

My brother on the other hand enjoyed his new found

enthusiasm. For a while, I entertained the idea of death, a sudden

gagging death in my sleep as the marble cracked open and filled my

blood stream with something toxic. I imagined how I would drool in

my sleep, the white dribble of a rabid dog issuing from my mouth as I

dreamed as I always did. But my white blood cells would be quick to

action, building fortresses around the main organs. And this made me

flinch with inward questioning. Which one would I chose? Brain over

heart, or heart over brain… I think I would chose brain over heart; I

would rather glare with my mind’s eye at the knowledge of a dying,

petering heart beat than not knowing. To know, you need the brain

and so I thought it was only natural the way I thought.

During these days when I watched my poop for smears of a

leak, a glass shard or whatever it was marbles were made of. But I

found nothing and I thought the left side of my stomach was gaining

weight. But none of this made any sense to my brother. He was

pleased as punch twisting his lips and twitching his whiskers at my

purloined sprits. He sauntered in the dark away from me, for I needed

time on my own, spending my time nibbling the grass or a twig. Then

one day, he lodged his paw before me and stood there for a long time.

If this was a normal day and if there was a sun, you would have seen

his elongated shadow shorten into a blob under him and stretch on the

other side as night pressed around us. But of course nothing was

normal anymore… He just stood there like a statue, his marble under

him. In the end, he licked his cobalt-blue-wisped marble before

swallowing it on the whole. I rose to my feet, shocked and wordless

(mewl-less!)…

And that was that. We were back to normal, attending to our

daily chores that involved foraging for food, ripping raw flesh of

anything edible and trudging back to the gorge when we were done.

There were times when we carried some food back to our place but he

did not approve of this. There was one incident when a rabid dog

followed the bloody spoor to our gorge and made a ruckus. So, we

kept our sleeping place separate from the woods.


On one other occasion, there was this large mouthed mammal,

sort of a hound, which trespassed into our gorge. The cliffs on either

side rendered our home a sort of silence that you just don’t want to

leave. Even the running water stilled or made little sound as it ran its

sluiced back on the top of a rock or as it warmed its hands around the

sides of a mossed boulder. The ravine was not deep at all, and we

were having such a good time in here, reminiscing our past (in our

individual minds obviously for there was no proper way to

communicate thoughts, only bloody purring all the time), and

frolicking in the shallow water. The slow pacing of water suited our

small, spindly legs. We waddled through the water up and down a

hundred times in a day without fear of getting our feet caught in the

mud. Of course, at times it felt a little claustrophobic but it was

alright for I had my brother to lean on. As long as he was there, no

harm would come to me. I knew that. He knew that too. He feigned

indifference but I saw how he flinched in pain when I stamped my

foot on the thorn. He would have given anything to transfer that thorn

to his paw… On his paw, he would have concealed the glistering drips

of blood, swabbed his paw with the pink tongue that chased him all

over his body. On him, the thorn would have looked alright. On me, it

was a cause of concern, it bothered him, and every plonk of my blood

on the dry back of a leaf ringed in his ears, reminding him of his

mistake. After all, it was his idea, wasn’t it, to go on a soulful

mooning walk for days and return with the news of a tin that chinked

and clinked when disturbed.

About the hound, yes, I must tell you about the hound before I

forget. It was a big one, a really big one with the mouth that felt loose

and flopped open to bare all its teeth, the jagged line creamed with the

white foamy spit. This mythic size creature strained its neck and

lowered its front half, the rear legs gaining purchase as it did so. It

was preparing for a lunge and I was not going to flick my head, for I

knew the risks involved in that. My soft neck would remind the

creature of all those soft integuments it might have chewed in the past.

Anyway, I fixed up my gaze never even beating an eyelid. Where was

my brother? Naturally, I imagined he was spending his time tapping

the back of a cockroach with his paws or sneezing like a clogged

Kranthi Askani 151

shower coming to life as he lowered his nose to graze the squelched

roach. Yes, we ate roaches. And there, I have said it. Happy now…?

But enough of the dithering; let us talk about the hound. It

was preparing for the lunge, its reflection undulating in the water

before me (actually, come to think of it, can you see reflections in the

dark?). Obviously, my mind enjoys encapsulating memories in

shrouds of imagination. This hound has since plagued me in my

nightmares; I am getting a hell of a lot of them to be honest. The

gorge, I thought, hissed and sighed as blood behind my eyes pulsed

rhythmically. I may have held my breath as if that was going to deter

the mythic monster before me, as if that was going to deceive the

hound into thinking I was dead. What a funny thought really…

Miracles don’t happen in real life, I thought. In those brief moments I

had clicked the thermometer of my misanthropy, I flicked the switch

of pessimism in my mind. It was like a knob I turned inside my head.

No wait; it was not a knob, for the transformation was not gradual at

all. It had to be a switch: one minute I was happy like the misty pollen

wafting in the air and in the next minute I was the same pollen trapped

in the nostrils of this generously large nosed mammal.

The hound wore a shocked look on its face as my brother

made a splashing sound to its right. That was enough. That tiniest

crack in space-time was enough for me to slink into the dark; it was so

negligible that the hound was confounded. It could not believe its

eyes. Hell, I could not believe my own eyes either. It was so quick, so

rapid that if you had tapped on my shoulder and said to me that my

whole life was a dream, I would have believed it. I would have

believed in anything anyone said to me right then. I was open to every

damn thing. I was free; the gorge was slowly shrugged back, easing

its cliffs like the shoulder blades of a vulture on the end of the swoop.

Water gurgled, the hound yapped like a hopeless gibbering housewife

about her dirtied mat, and my brother was rustling a low hanging

branch. I followed the sweep of his twin eyes twinkling like a set of

mirrored white dwarfs in the sky. He pointed me to a dead bough the

slant of which made for an easy climb. Getting there was easy, for the

hound was nearly ripping its throat with all the ululation, the din of

which maddened the crickets and frogs and other benign creatures of

our gorge.


Enfeebled though I was, I think in some deeper subconscious

level (do cats have subconscious minds? I think they do, or should I

say, we do. Yes, let me assert: we do) I may have known that my

brother was somewhere around, not prancing around with a bloody

cockroach, but around me, devising a strategy to save me. I told you,

didn’t I? He would always be there to save me. I know by now my

tale sounds like a deceptively simple weepie cleverly told to make

people cry. So what? I am tempted to say, so fucking what…? But

let’s not get too dramatic here, shall we?

What happened to the hound later? I don’t know. Who cares?

That part of my memory is missing as if the whole thing was just a

dream. Wait, I have a better theory. I think the sudden euphoria of

finding my life again by its tail after confrontation with sharp-incisor-

rimmed jaws of death, my mind may have entered into the penumbra

of life where making memories took a back seat. The thing that my

mind needed to do was enjoy the moment, suffuse in energy of life

and forget the rest. That explains why I don’t recall anything else of

that incident, for instance, how is it that my brother developed a limp

since then. He may have flopped to the ground doing an arabesque on

hind legs for all I care. It did not matter; nothing mattered. Next day

when we climbed down to begin our daily routine of foraging for food

I was so emboldened I was practically somersaulting and gleefully

appraising my limbs, splayed before me as if in supplication to the

heavens. My brother eyed me curiously, his lips pursed shut as if to

say, I am the elder one of us and I get to walk in a swagger while you

keel and peel yourself off decorum and rub your back in the brownest

of mud.

There was no way in hell he could have said anything. All he

ever did was mewl like a snuffled kitten. I told you that already. We

found felled trees in the woods and knew what it meant. It meant we

were groping the boundaries of that evil government facility about

which you can’t ask me anymore, for I chose not to tell you. I just

don’t want to talk about it. It is evil and that is all you need to know.

Here, by the boundary of this facility, we picked our way

among the rubble of discard: glass shards, spent stubs of candles,

empty tin containers, rust-fringed caps of torch lights, and torn sarees.

Above all, there were many sarees, chocolate brown for the uniforms.

Kranthi Askani 153

Let me stop at that. Let us say no more about the government facility.

My brother’s limp disappeared two weeks later. We were by now

cheering the chirring of crickets in our gorge. There were monkeys

these days. A lot of them on the trees… It was as though these

creatures had been hopping away from a forest fire, lobbing

themselves at this branch and that as they gradually spread ground

between the advancing fire and themselves.

The strip of land close to the facility was something that you

can’t miss even under the pressing sheet of darkness. The stench of

life and the whole drama of divination was something you could hear

even from outside, that is, on a clear night. Sometimes the wind

carried snatches of their incantations and if I was sleeping at the time,

the projections in my dreams would be that of apocalypse, of horrific

death, the sort that spreads like a plague and gnaws at every foot that

treads on this planet (oh yes, add every fin that flaps, etc.) leaving in

its wake only the crumbs of life for alien archaeologists to find

between two slates of a rock in the future. And how can that happen? I

think our planet would eventually grow quite bored with all this

repetitive rotations and revolutions. I think that planet earth would

eventually (about time, eh!) extricate itself from the solar system and

hurtle into the nearest black hole (in the centre of our milky way last I

checked) shredding into pieces of mass and energy in the process.

Yes, I am sure that will happen. And I am sure I won’t be there that

long.

A smile crossed my brother’s lips (do cats smile?). Yes,

whatever, when I say I discerned a smile on my whiskered brother’s

lips then I bloody well mean it. He knew what I was up to. Why, I was

ruminating, wasn’t I? Come on, what would you have me do. I am

bored. I can’t talk to anyone. I can only purr. Fat load of good that

is… I would have easily gone bonkers if my brother was not around.

We are located comfortably away from the dam which we visit once

in a while. The din of water slathering on the mud before it has a

calming effect on us as if to say some things don’t change. Water still

acts the way it ought to. I know I sound like a sentimental fool but

hey, this is how I feel and there is not much you can do about it.

Sometimes I think this is good, to live like this, two cats in a gorge,

me and my brother, one who I love the most of all… This is good. But


there are times when I think about the past, the human past and

wonder if I could give myself a firm shake and whip out a word or

two from my throat. Just like the old days.

This dam, that facility and this un-peopled land always made

me nervous. But I had my brother, a nitwit for sure (I smile, I laugh, I

pride… what a chum I got in my life, to be loved by your brother the

way I am… this is like being tied to a chum from early on in your

life); he kept me company through the most trying misfortune times of

life. I can live with that. With him around, I can live, even if it meant

to live in the pressing, oppressing dark… Yes, I can do that.

But this was all in the past and you know that just as well as I

do. I may have confused you a little with my use of tenses. Yes, I

have a way of ruminating; most people you come across in your life

ruminate in past tense, me, I do it in the present tense, or past perfect.

It may have something to do with the irrepressible angst of my

brother’s death. I can’t seem to accept it yet and I have taken to moon

over the good times we had as if to preserve his memories or his

essence if you will. But don’t let me turn this into an emotional

weepie tale. Next up, I will tell you about the day we met these two

women. Which two women? You know who I am talking about don’t

you: Mrunalini and Aastha of course.

We were locked up in our gorge as always. My brother was

dipping his nose in the clear stream of water, the sound of swirls and

eddies forming a sweet halo around our ears. It sort of reminded me of

one of those outings we went on when we were kids. It was around

the time when he was thirteen. So, that works out to about eight and

half in my case. Anyway, it was a long and winding road with steep

curves and when our jeep turned around the bends, we crammed

together and later breathed a sigh as the vehicle straightened. One left

and one right. My brother was sitting next to mother and they were

making fun of me seeing as I was sandwiched between two bulky

aunts. When they pressed close around the bend, my brother glared at

me and contorted his face to mimic the situation I was in. I tried to be

calm; I wanted to show him I was strong so I kept my calm through

and through.

And then the jeep came to a halt on a strip of gravel. The

driver jumped to his feet and straightening himself, reached for the

Kranthi Askani 155

dented metal door’s lock from outside. He twisted the rabbit-ear

shaped lever which gave a sharp crackle on the twist; pulverised rust

from the keyhole sieved along the inside and spangled my toes. He

rubbed his hands together as the long door swung open, his eyes

unblinkingly set on my fat aunt’s back as she lowered herself

uncertainly. The sun was still there in the horizon, not a glaring

presence but soupy amber and I liked the sun best in that state. My

brother was the last to climb out and he gave me a quick clap on my

shoulder. The back-clap was strong enough to stagger me and gave

my feet an additional jump beyond my own calculated pacing. He

smiled and I slapped with my naked palm on his forearm. It was the

difference in heights that did it really, or, I am sure I would have

slapped him in the cheek. A good one, tight and enough to redden the

smirk on his face… Don’t get me wrong. This is how we were,

always. There was no constitution to our blathering; yes, we fought

and tore our dresses like other siblings and yes, we cried (or I cried

and he avoided me) and made amends later. We were like any other

siblings, and a little more. I always believed we were a tad too close

than any other siblings we had come across in our lives.

The crenelated face of the dam was smeared with dry patches

of water that sluiced through in the past. The long length of the many

cement tongues into which the gates opened bore dark brown stains,

parched in the sun and illumined now in the shimmer of evening sun.

I imagined how in the afternoon, vapours of water would have

escaped into the air above, rippling like thousand translucent snakes

as you looked at the surface of water from a distance. It was an

amazing place, not crammed with people as is the case (father told

me) on festival days. But on the day we climbed down from our old

jeep it was a fine day with not many people around.

Father was our swimming trainer; he taught us swimming. In

those days we did not have the plastic tubes to sit inside or on top of.

Then, we just had a log of wood which we twined with a twist of rope

and slung it on our shoulders. The wood won’t drown you but you

would naturally see no point in flapping your arms, for you don’t have

to. The wooden log was a round one, its width longer than my slender

self. To train us in swimming, father took us to an old well where the


water was a wee greenish and even smelled like damp wood. But we

liked the well, for it was as safe as a place to swim can get.

I would stay afloat in the water for hours on end while my

brother learned to flap his legs to the rhythm of his long lean hands.

With the bulk of the log over me, I could safely dip my head inside

the surface of the water and peer into the silent depths of the well. I

felt like an insect that lays its sticky eggs on water, never to submerge,

always buoyant. The force of wood on my back always pulling me

away as I squirmed and struggled to dive inside made me look

ridiculous and my brother always teased me for this. He said if I really

wanted to feel the press of water on my ears, I might want to wriggle

free of that log and see for myself. But of course I would do no such

thing. That would be a stupid thing to do. Who would want to do

that…?

The well was deep and the walls around it so tall that sun

never really warmed it. Yes, the sprightly sun might have made its

way into the well in the afternoons but when we went there, usually in

the dawn and the dusk (we were the crepuscular swimmers, weren’t

we), there was no sun and it was the way I wanted it. The desultory

periods during which I lay sprawled on the water like a frog, my log

lolling above my back, my thoughts usually went round to the

singular question of ‘how does it feel to be inside the skin of another

creature?’ of course now I know all about it. But back then, it was a

mystery and you have to understand I was too young and all I ever did

was fight with my brother all the time.

On this occasion though, it was a river where water swirled

around at a delicate pace, not a well where water stayed still and dead.

Father and brother went ahead to test the waters. I had secretly lodged

my log of wood under the foldable seat in the rear of the jeep. Father

and brother were wading through the waters, knickered and their

hands wrapped about them, for the weather was cold and water chilly.

They did not invite me. Obviously, it was time to surprise them with

my careful and meticulous planning. I dragged the log through the

gravelly ground leaving scuff marks behind me as I slipped into the

shade of the jeep; away from assessing and piercing eyes of the jeep

driver who was smoking his cigarette, I climbed out of my frock and

wrapped the log behind me. My underwear was slack and I was afraid

Kranthi Askani 157

that the elastic might simply come loose. It would be so embarrassing.

I should have worn the new one mother bought me last week. But

again, the new one was laced with milky silk which I adored but it

also had flower pattern all over it and I did not want to give my

brother another chance to tease me. So I stuck to the old underwear,

slightly slack but it should do, I thought.

And this is what happened next: the swill of water carried me

away the minute I waded into its depths as if the runnel of water was a

monstrous lying in await, awake all the time, to gobble me up and

transfer me to the end of whatever was there in the far end. The dry

log was light and when I realised I was being smoothly carried away

as if lifted on the clouds, away from father and away from the jeep, I

knew not what to do so I merely curled up my small puny body and it

only improved the sweeping pace at which I drifted afloat on the

water. I think it was the pursuing eyes of the fat driver that caught me

first. He may have hollered up at me but I was too far and the runnel

of water had joined the main stream which burbled under me as if all

the molecules of water were chattering and whispering at the great

accomplishment, as if I was a fairy princess and this was their way of

carrying me away into their world. Ground stretched between me and

my parents as if it was only a bluish chewing gum discard that I and

my brother dragged with our thumb and finger, he on one side and I

on the other side…

I may have whipped up my body in the middle once or twice

just to see if that would put a brake to the unfailing speed with which

the log traversed the surface of water. But that gave the log a rocking

and keeled me to a side so that I lost my balance and half swung into

the water like a marionette cut loose from its tethers. I gathered up my

limbs together and curled up tighter and tighter wishing I was under

water back in the well where I dipped my eyes inside and peered at

the still green under me. Here, the water was clear and the wind was

chafing my head so I cowered neatly into myself like the evening

flower in my grandma’s garden.

I felt a constriction in my lungs at one point, for the wind was

buffeting me as if to set me adrift above water, into the wind. This

was a battle of two mediums: water and wind were cracking each

other’s backs with whipping force for the lonely mass cinched


between them. When I came to my senses it was father who was

slapping my cheeks gently. Mother’s eyes were swollen and red. The

driver’s forehead was glistening with perspiration (I later thanked him

for saving me). The fat aunts said they would pray for the driver’s

family, for he had done a great service to us and that we owed him our

gratitude. After all this was done, I sauntered cheerfully to catch up

with my brother who was staring into the low sun, the ring of ochre

slathered in the horizon now mottled with flocks of birds returning to

their homes. The funny thing is, he looked moodily away, his hands

locked around the scabs of his knees which he had peeled newly, and

turned to me, wore a serious look and said ‘shame, shame, puppy

shame…!’ and my heart went pit-a-pat…

That did it really. I had no recollection of how I was saved

and in what state. He teased me for days and months after that. I was

nicely wrapped in a towel like a sober offering to a deity, neatly

packed in folds of cotton when I came to my senses. It was too

embarrassing and I didn’t want to stir it up. It made perfect sense to

bury that event and never mention it again. But my brother teased me

over and over again. Even when we were old enough, that is, when I

was old enough and my womanly clockwork had begun, he still

mentioned it, oddly, once or twice. When there was nothing else he

could use against me, he would say, remember that day in the river…

I mean, I was eight and a half alright, I exploded once and that made it

even worse. Since that fist-curling stand I had taken against it, he

mentioned remember-that-river-day and followed it up with and

‘remember the day you went all ballistic with rage and denied any

memory of it…’

That was how we were. Anyway, now, I must tell you how

we left the gorge we were living in. Don’t be confused. This is the

recent past, in our feline state, that is. That river and that jeep and that

life- it was in the distant past, that is before the morphing.

Yes, the gorge and the day we left it. It was like any other

day: dark and cold. The sky was pimpled with white acne with a large

sliver of a mole somewhere above us, not directly overhead but

somewhere over there, above us. My brother was in a cheerful mood

when he came back carrying the news of… He could not tell,

obviously, he yapped and it came out as a mewl cry, a cry of anguish

Kranthi Askani 159

like that poet who said his mouth was filled with stars or some such

thing. He wanted very badly to tell me something but could not. I told

him to relax (I purred). And so it was that we followed these two

women into the woods, over the embankment and through the

escarpment. I scratched my brother’s flank when I grew mad at this

infatuation. Why were we following them? And why were we leaving

the absolute (well, discount the hound episode) safety, ridding

ourselves of all the comfort (of the river and the tall cliffs around) to

these women…

I never trusted them. I always slinked into the dark and stayed

away from the reach of these women. They patted my brother who

seemed to have taken a liking to Mrunalini. He did not allow himself

to be patted by Aastha who seemed perfectly healthy and normal to

me. What was it? I wish he could speak. It wished badly that he would

explain it to me. What was Mrunalini to him? Did they have a past

together? What past was it?

After days and days of chasing around, we followed them into

that cavernous pit where they had a queen and the ghetto women were

killing men to display their ascendancy… We followed them into the

doctor’s lab in that palace by the sea but my brother died of a damn

disease and with nothing else to do I have been following these

women, foolishly knowing no reason to follow them, uncertain at

times, and obedient at other times, following, following an

following….

Perhaps they reminded me of my brother; it was as if a ghost

presence lingered around these women like the residual glow of

foundation on your cheeks even after you wash it with soap. It was a

blind pursuit, a mock pursuit of no reason and rationale. What were

these women to him? Maybe they were nothing at all, maybe he knew

he was dying and could not bear the thought of leaving me alone in

the dark world, and so feigned a stupid allegiance to the women. In

that case it could have been anybody. It just happened to be these two

women when he was on one of his soulful strolls. These women were

not special. They just happened to be there when my brother decided

to blindly follow them. The corollaries are easy to draw from this

premise.


But again, there could have been a reason. What if Mrunalini

was the girl he fell in love with. Or what if Aastha reminded him of

his dead wife… It could have been a million things. So many

possibilities really… Why did he leave our home in the first place and

why did he turn up at my window sill morphed into a cat, his paws

rubbing his cheeks. I had to turn into a feline thing myself right? What

would you have done? What would any other sibling do? I don’t want

to know what any other sibling would have done. I had to go through

transmogrification. There was Olive’s advertisement and there was

my brother cat hissing and sighing in his dream, curled up on a sofa

cushion in my bedroom. I knew what had to be done and I underwent

the operation. No qualms…

When will this end? When will my blind pursuit end? It feels

as though I am the tongue that is going back to licking the lost tooth,

the void in the jawline where once a precious tooth was. I am slowly

losing the memory of my brother like one old tooth after another, the

inflamed rim no longer pink but black and deeply charred. When will

the darkness lift? I don’t want it to lift. It is good like this, it is

suitable for me. The world can’t be repaired now. It is over, all is

over.

Even the fetus with tail is dying. Mrunalini picks up the baby

in the fold of her arms and gives it a shake but I don’t think the

shudder passed through the fetus’ bones. It is over now. When you

perform a caesarean with kitchen knives, wipe the mother with a mat

and sew her skin back with a rice-bag needle, you ought not to expect

miracles. And rightly so, there was no miracle here. Aastha was dying

and that was that. All that moping won’t help! I wanted to tell

Mrunalini who seemed unpredictable lately. You could never tell if

she was going to be good to you or not. For instance the night before,

when she noticed me gazing into the depths of blankness with my

small rump planted sweetly on the window sill, she came out of

nowhere to shoo me away. At first I was confounded but later I

detected a possibility, which was that she knew my brother was dead

and I was not him. Well, of course, you can’t confuse one with the

other. Come to think of it, I was un-whiskered, so I think she figured

that out easily enough.

Kranthi Askani 161

Aastha’s breathing grew stertorous in the last few hours. A

faint crackle of her tongue and a large dry sigh alternated to produce a

sort of requiem. Even the hum of the dark and its nocturnal

accoutrement outside was closing in on us like a miasma of death. I

breathed hard. Mrunalini won’t pat me anymore, for she thinks I am

an evil thing that replaced her feline pal.

When I confronted Aastha for the first time after slinking in

and out of that cellar room all those days, leaving my paw marks on

the dusty kitchen table, she was enraptured. She shared the news with

Mrunalini who regarded me with searching eyes as if she was able to

see a ghostly mist above me, or beyond me. She has this ability to

remind me of my loss. She is the primer, the actuated mechanism

behind the tongue that quests for the lost tooth. How long can I live

like this? This petering dull life is so boring. I would have preferred it

a million times over to just die once and for all.

The pallor of death is upon us now. Like the slathering paste

on a canvas, with every stroke of an invisible brush, the dark bristling

stripes of death are upon us now. Aastha takes one last deep breath,

her head lifted and arms in an arrogant behest to the skies. Now the

head drops back, limp with all the pain of a life lived in secret hope,

like a little girl who twiddles the tassel of her frock and nibbles a silk

strand from the clump to seal it in the creases of her naked palms,

stealing a glance every now and then, always hoping that it would be

there when she opens her palm. But in the end, she opens her palm

and the silk is missing, she dropped it somewhere behind her. And

with this revelation, the trees around her whisper among themselves

and stir in rhapsody as if they were waiting for just this moment; the

rustling bough of a tree wilts and twines round the little girl’s back to

suck the poor thing into the dense arboreal death. And she feels

deceived, her mouth agape at her woeful fortunes…

Kranthi Askani

About APK Publishers

APK Publishers is a new but upcoming publishing

house based in Pune, India. It was founded in July 2008 by

Prashant Karhade and Anagha Karhade. APK Publishers is the

only “truly English” publishing house based in Pune, and one of

the very few publishing houses with a mission of helping first-time

writers.

Prashant is a writer himself with 1 fiction book (Memory

Remains: Journey Of An Indian To The U.S. & Back), 1 non-fiction

book (Making It On My Own: Ten Inspiring Storie Of Your Entrepreneur-

Next-Door) and 4 children’s story books (Jumbo The Aeroplane, Kiki

and Meeka, The Dinosaur Cloud, and The Hungry Python) to his credit.

He wrote Memory Remains in 2007 and sent out the proposal to big

publishing houses in India. One of them responded saying that,

“The editorial feedback on your book is positive. Please send us 3

lakhs so that we can get started on your book.” Responses from

some of the other publishers were similar except the fact that the

amount varied slightly. Prashant didn’t give them the money that

they were asking for of course and started APK Publishers

instead! The mission is simple: to help first-time writers get their

work published. The essence of what APK Publishers does is

captured in its tagline: By Writers. For Writers.

So if you have an idea for a book, please send it to

[email protected] or [email protected]. If it

is worthy of publishing, it will get published. That doesn’t

necessarily mean that APK Publishers will finance the cost of

production. Even if we ask you to pay the cost of production of

the book, you can rest assured that it will be in the lowest cost

possible; it certainly won’t be anywhere close to the outrageous

amounts that some other publishing houses demand!



Angels of Dystopia

APK Publishers has good working relationships with

pretty much all the online book stores, but it has excellent working

relationships with flipkart.com, indiaplaza.com, HomeShop18.com,

the three leading ones. These online distributors help us with not

just the logistics but also with the promotion of our books, which

is why we see a good chunk of our sales from these online book

stores. APK Publishers also has tie-ups with distributors (who

send our books to brick-n-mortar stores), small book stores, people

who do door-to-door marketing of books. Additionally, APK

Publishers also sells books to Indian as well as international

buyers through its own fully-functiional, CCAvenue and PayPal

integrated website http://www.apkpublishers.com.

For more and the latest information about APK

Publishers, please visit http://www.apkpublishers.com.



Kranthi Askani

APK Publishers Book Catalogue

Fiction Novels

Title Author Price

Memory Remains:

Journey of an Indian to

the U.S. & Back

Prashant Karhade Rs.99/-

The Bracelet: A novel

(perfect for young adults)

Ishaan Lalit Rs.150/-

I Love You Period Shekhar Singh Rs.150/-

Inscribed To My Dreams

(...ink, keyboard, thoughts,

lingo...the inspirational

journey from a passion to

print...)

Projesh Kar Rs.150/-

Alice: The Netherworld Megha Rao Rs.150/-

The Age of Hiblisk: A

Story With a Soul

Sumukh Naik Rs.295/-

Destiny’s Missed Call Prathemesh Apte Rs.175/-

Fractured Legend Kranthi Askani Rs.195/-

Certainly Uncertain Ramakant Kapatral Rs.195/-

Angels of Dystopia Kranthi Askani Rs.195/-

Angels of Dystopia

Fiction – Short Stories

Title Author Price

In Their Shoes Dipen Ambalia Rs.120/-

We, the Bachelors Satyajit Deshmukh Rs.99/-

Ripples: Short Stories by

Indian Women Writers

Various writers,

compiled by

Prashant Karhade

Rs.195/-

Cocktail: Short Stories

about Relationships

Vikram Karve Rs.150/-

Stories From The Heart

Of A Dreamer

Armaan Farid Rs.175/-

Shades of Sin: Behind the

Mask

Various writers Rs.195/-

Children’s Stories

Title Author Price

Jumbo The Aeroplane Prashant Karhade,

Milind Deshpande

Rs.30/-

Kiki & Meeka Prashant Karhade,

Milind Deshpande

Rs.30/-

The Dinosaur Cloud Prashant Karhade,

Milind Deshpande

Rs.30/-

The Hungry Python Prashant Karhade,

Milind Deshpande

Rs.30/-

Kranthi Askani

Non-Fiction

Title Author Category Price

Making It On My

Own: Ten

Inspiring Stories

of Your

Entrepreneur-

Next-Door

Prashant

Karhade

Business,

Entrepreneurship

Rs.125/-

Salmons of

Narmada: Nest

Returned Indians

Various

writers,

edited by

Bhooshan

Kelkar

Real-life Stories

of NRIs who

returned to India

Rs.195/-

Diet & Lifestyle

for Health in the

21st Century: A

Self-

Empowerment

Guide

Dr.

Shantaram

Kane

Health, Diet,

General Fitness

Rs.300/-

Wrangler Paranjpe

Reassessed

Dr. Jitu Shah Biography Rs.99/-

Go...Get It Kanchan

Gogate

Self-Help Rs.195/-

Diet & Lifestyle

for Health in the

21st Century

(Marathi edition)

Dr.

Shantaram

Kane

Health, Diet,

General Fitness

Rs.400/-

The Asian

Haversack

Jayant

Manerkar

Travel, Asia Rs.200/-

Mumbai to

Stockholm via

New York:

Dan Mayur Collection of

Essays on India,

U.S., and

Rs.295/-

Angels of Dystopia

People, Places,

and Politics –

Reflections of a

Globetrotter

Scandinavia

Back to Pavilion Poonam

Mulherkar

An NRI’s 1st

Year Back in

India

Rs.175/-

Angels of Dystopia - Goodreads

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