The Guest

by Rochelle Potkar

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

I don’t want her thinking she could be my wife someday. My wife would be someone from the films, a heroine perhaps or a dancer.

Dinner should always be at eight, the old man would say in his hoarse, creepy voice. I always have dinner at eight even though I have no regard for him. I haven’t told Lakshmi about the old man or his wife. Why should she even know?

“Can I come and sleep with you, Jaggia?” she asks while clearing the leftovers. “It gets very scary here in the night.”

“And what did you do, you lousy woman, in the village when your husband slept with other women?”

She lets out a whimper and I end up feeling sorry for her.

The terrace is pleasant. The open space reminds me of the village where you could spread your thoughts like wings and fly from this tree to that.

In the morning my head aches with the remembrance of yet another dream in which amma calls out to me in a petrifying voice from far. “Run Jaggia! Run!” I can vaguely remember her tiny figure tottering over the edge of the vast river.

My mind suddenly wanders to the place beyond the storeroom — the basement. What if...? I shut out any additional thought, massage my temples and rush out without telling Lakshmi. It is getting difficult day by day to live in the house.

The morning lane is stirring up with construction workers who have slept over by the roadside. If they had been there even three months ago they would have seen the way I killed the bitch, Maya.

How the old lady lashed out at me when Maya was lost. I told her the gate was open and the little bitch ran away but she made me search for it the whole night. I had to look everywhere: by the bushes, at the ends of the street, under the trees; everywhere, expect where I could find her, by her grave.

I hated the bitch the moment I saw how much she ate. Her doctor’s and salon’s fees itself were nothing short of five thousand rupees. This when people were dying in the village.

So when I next took the bitch for a walk, I kicked her so hard that she yelped and turned around to bite. One day she actually bit me. I beat her with a branch I broke from a tree and then dragged her home. The Deshpandes were not in. The more the little bitch rebelled, the more I hit her till I smashed her head with a garden stone. Her face and neck spurted blood into black fur. When I came to my senses, I dug a grave for her.

Later when they couldn’t find her, they spoke of sending me away. I heard them complaining about my work, and honesty and almost everything.

Money is no good when it is in the hands of the rich and selfish like the Deshpandes. You should have seen what they did with it, frittering it away on parties and unnecessary things, instead of helping a young man from the village make it big in the city.

If it were not for their holiday trip, my miseries would have ended soon. I had resolved on looking so quiet and remorseful that they would eventually forgive me. But their month-long trip to Europe changed all that. They felt it was impossible to leave me behind in their huge home.

I knew that once they sent me back to the village they would never call for me again. My dreams were going to ruins. And because I didn’t tell them I went to the studios on Sundays to eventually become a superstar, they accused me of visiting whores.

Curse be upon them.

I have done nothing wrong.

Sleep comes to me in the wee hours of the morning with yet another dream. This is the middle of the night and I am in the basement. The Deshpandes are talking from their cement moulds, as gods would have.

“Now it’s your turn Jaggia.”

Then suddenly the basement door shuts and the room buouys like a capsized ship till all the lights are drowned.

I am gasping when I wake. They say dreams of the morning come true. It is time to get out. But before that I have to think of Lakshmi. Take her or leave her?

I stumble down for breakfast. “I cannot sleep at night, Jaggu,” she says as she lays out parathas on my plate. “My sleep is full of weird dreams — screaming, blood-curdling or drying on bed sheets or spreading and moving around in circles. You think something is wrong in the village, maybe with Munshi?”

I have half the heart to tell her the whole story. But no, it is too long, and chaos is raining in my head like bullets. I decide not to go to the studio but rather to sleep over this. I can never forget how it was sleep that bailed me out of the previous situation.

On the night, prior to the Deshpandes’ going to Europe, they gave me a ticket.

“You can leave for the village tomorrow,” they said. “The train is at eleven. We will call you back if we need you.”

I knew this would never happen. I slept over it and saw another way out.

Rat poison.

They themselves had sent me to buy some because of the rats scurrying in the storeroom, and now was the time to use it on them. I tried to keep my hand from shivering frantically the next evening as I mixed the dusty powder into their fruit juice and offered it to them as they were waiting for a hired car to take them to the airport.

The old man fell across the bathroom door frothing from his mouth. His left shoe came off.

The woman fell in her bedroom, a neatly folded sweater still in her hand.

I dragged their heavy bodies and tied them erect, one to each pillar in the basement.

One would have never guessed there was a basement in the bungalow if it wasn’t for the rats. They had shown it to me when I first ran after them with a broom, to kill them.

I tore open cement bags that were lying around and mixed sacks and sacks of it. I had learnt to mix well in the village while working on a dam construction project. Then I bathed the bodies in it. It was a tough job, and the ends of the old lady’s sari still stuck out from the cracks of the drying cement.

This is how they made gods, I thought.

When Chatterjee, the old man’s friend came that evening I told him the Deshpandes had changed their plans and arranged for an earlier flight. As an afterthought they had asked me to stay. He studied the torn train tickets in my hand and left nodding his head. To this day I don’t know what made him believe me.

That was two months ago. The telephone has been ringing incessantly. Some ask for the Deshpandes’ new email address (if any), some ask for a forwarding address or a telephone number. No one is actually ready to believe that they could have overstayed their holiday trip for another month. Why? Is Europe that bad a place?

I lie down with the exhaustion of all these thoughts.

I decide I would have to leave Lakshmi behind.

It is mid-afternoon and the terrace is hot. As I close my eyes I can see the sun like a red, angry ball blazing in the sky.

An army of white ants seem to be crawling all over my body as I fall into sleep.

Slowly an ungainly weight seems to pull me down. I want to squirm but this is like those dreams where you can’t move a thing, not even lift a hand or finger, no matter how much you try. I open my mouth to scream but my jaw is locked.

I can feel a nail driving through my chest.

No one sleeps on the terrace in mid-afternoon, I chide myself. No one!

I can feel my arms being pinned to the side. My face feels taut, hot.

A metallic screeching like pin on metal grows louder near my ear. The air is hard to breathe, just as in the bus. Am I in the bus, the crowded bus? No. I am at home on the terrace. I cannot open my eyes to see. Hot air licks my feet. There is no escape from this. A hot something crawls over my scalding skin as my skull feels numb. In one bright moment I can see it all: God, the hills by the studio, Lakshmi, the village, amma.

Help!

Lakshmi!!

Amma!!

Hot tears pour through my shut eyes over an almost frozen face. The feeling of hot, wet cement can be very cloying.

to Challenge 363...