Read THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM Online
Authors: Sharath Komarraju
THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM (18 page)
Chapter Twenty Five
1984
A
vadhani’s torch threw out a wide, steady beam that lit their path. Chotu walked in front of them, paying no heed to the light or the darkness that extended beyond. His steps were firm and his direction decisive. Walking to the side and keeping slightly to the back of the group, Avadhani flashed his torch directly in front of Chotu so that the rest of them could see where they were going.
When they reached the Shivalayam compound, Chotu stopped. ‘She’s near the lingam,’ he raised his arm and pointed.
It was like any other summer night—moonless, starry and humid. Aravind carried a digger over his shoulder and the rest of them followed him to the lingam. In the shadow of the big banyan, they saw another figure, pacing hurriedly on all fours. When she saw them, she bared her teeth and growled.
‘Sarama,’ Avadhani said.
It was a low, drawn-out growl. When Avadhani flashed the torch at her, she took one quick backward step, then suddenly froze and raised her head, staring into the light. The five of them moved closer to the lingam, Chotu bringing up the rear at some distance. As the group drew closer together, the bitch backed up farther, her growls getting louder and more hurried.
‘What do we do?’ Aravind said, lowering his digger and glancing at Avadhani. Froth dropped from the animal’s jaws. All of them had their eyes locked on her, ready to react in case she attacked.
‘Move forward slowly, in a circle. No quick movements.’
They moved as directed. Whimpering, growling and snorting, Sarama kept backing away until she stopped a few feet to the left of the lingam. There she bent down, bucked her knees and showed them her canines.
‘We didn’t need Chotu after all,’ Aravind said. He lifted the digger with both hands and waved it at the dog. She stared at it with savage concentration, ducked, and barked at it as it moved away. But she did not budge.
‘Hit her.’
Aravind, who was in the process of pulling the digger back towards himself, stopped, and in one quick motion, lifted it and brought it down full on Sarama’s head. She yelped and snarled at the weapon, but Aravind was quick to pull it back. She turned her head and looked at Sarayu, who gasped and moved closer to Aravind. Then she looked at Chanti, who was holding a white can of kerosene. He took a step back. Then, slowly, her eyes narrowed on Avadhani.
‘Hit her again,’ he said.
Sarama didn’t wait for Aravind to make his move. She bounded towards Avadhani and leaped at his flailing arm. When her teeth sunk into his forearm, he screamed and hit at the beast’s torso with the stem of the torch. But it did not budge. He did it again and again. ‘Take that, you bitch! That! That! Ah!’
Sarayu screamed and Aravind jumped forward with his digger raised so that he could rescue Avadhani. But one of the old man’s blows had disengaged the animal. Now it was crouching in front of them again on all fours, lying low and looking up at them with her teeth bared.
Avadhani dropped the torch and nursed his arm. ‘That does it,’ he said, panting. ‘Burn her.’
‘What?’ Aravind asked.
‘No!’ said Sarayu.
‘Burn her.’ Avadhani stood up tall and looked down at the bitch. ‘Just burn her. She won’t let us dig it up otherwise.’
Chanti and Ramana held up their cans of kerosene. ‘Yes,’ Chanti said, his eyes blazing. ‘Let’s burn her.’
Aravind nodded, his brows coming together in a puzzled frown. ‘Yes. Let’s.’
Sarayu took out a box of matches and lit one.
From the shade of the banyan, Chotu looked on.
Avadhani stepped back and allowed Sarama to follow him. The remaining four circled her. Just when she was about to leap at Avadhani for a second time, Ramana sloshed her with kerosene. At the same time, Sarayu stepped forward and tossed a lighted match at her.
And she lit up.
‘Yes!’ Avadhani said. ‘Good, kids! Very good!’
A series of grunts and growls came from Sarama, but the fire ate into her flesh quickly enough. She took a couple of final steps in the direction of the lingam, as though in a final bid to protect it, and then collapsed. Her groans turned hoarse, sounding almost human, and then died down in desperate pants, each one growing more lifeless than the last. The smell of her burning flesh rose into the air.
Around her, the children gathered and watched in fascination, mesmerized.
Slowly, Sarama descended into silence, and the fire dimmed, having charred all of her. A thin, lonely flame persisted between the legs and clawed its way inward smokily, reaching out for the torso.
‘Good, kids,’ Avadhani whispered. ‘Good!’ He gathered the children together and pointed them to the place where Sarama had stood. ‘Now, come! Let’s dig.’
Chotu came running from under the banyan and stood next to Avadhani, staring down at the burnt mass of flesh by the lingam. ‘Thatha,’ he said, tugging at Avadhani’s shirt. ‘Thatha!’
Avadhani held the boy’s head and pulled him away. ‘Don’t look at it, boy. There is work we need to do. Come!’
Aravind lifted his digger and hit the ground. On the very first stroke, the earth gave way, and a growing spot of moisture covered the ground in a rough circle. Aravind looked up at Avadhani.
Avadhani smiled. ‘Yes. She is here.’
Aravind dug around the blot of moisture and shovelled the loose earth away in heaps, leaving a hole in the ground. ‘I hit something,’ he said.
‘Wait, boy!’ Avadhani went for his torch.
Aravind threw his digger away and felt around with his hands. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I found it.’ With a belch of disgust, he stood up on his feet with his hands held out in front of him.
Avadhani flashed the light on his hands, and they all saw her. She had six tentacles in all, each of them wound tightly around Aravind’s fingers. The body, which appeared to plaster itself to his palms, was translucent and filled with a viscous fluid, blue granules floating within it. When they moved closer, they saw that the body throbbed lightly every few seconds. All of them reached out to touch it.
‘It’s… it’s wet,’ Sarayu said.
Venkataramana ran a finger along the length of the creature’s body and stared at his fingertip. ‘What do we do with it?’
Avadhani grinned and said, ‘Why, burn her of course.’ And he signalled to Chanti to open the remaining can of kerosene.
Chapter Twenty Six
Diary of Sonali Rao
March 21, 2002
Dear Shilpi,
I don’t know why I write you these letters, Shilpi. There is no postal service in Palem—there hasn’t been any for a long time—and the most I can hope to do is keep them with me and deliver them to you in person. But Shilpi, writing to you makes me feel good. It feels like you’re right here in this room, sitting on that black trunk over there, with your hands wrapped around your knees and your head thrown back in laughter, chiding me for being such a sentimentalist, quoting some long-dead poet who perfectly described my situation…
I miss you, Shilpi. Today more than any other time. I would give anything to see you right now, even if it is to hear you scolding me.
There have been some changes here since the last time I wrote. Avva has disappeared. It happened two or three days ago. When I wake up, she usually comes to the doorstep and tells me that the boys have cleaned the bathroom for me and that breakfast is ready. But there was no sign of her yesterday. I didn’t see her all day. I thought she had gone to one of the nearby villages and would come back by nightfall, but she did not.
I asked the boys. They looked at me with strange, expressionless faces and did not answer. People in the village behaved as if they didn’t know who I was talking about. ‘The old woman who comes with me every morning to buy vegetables,’ I told them. ‘The old woman I walked around with during the last week.’ But they just looked at me blankly and shrugged their shoulders. One of them even said that he had never seen an old woman with me. I always went everywhere alone, he said.
I have also been sleeping a lot these last few days, Shilpi. Well, I should not say ‘sleeping’, because I have no memory of going to sleep or of waking up. I suppose a more appropriate term is ‘black out’. I would be sitting somewhere or walking someplace or doing something, and suddenly I… I ‘go out’ and ‘come back’ sometime later, in a different place, with no memory of how I got there or how much time had elapsed. This happened for a few minutes at a time initially, but now, I spend more of my day blacked out than in consciousness. Today, for instance, this is only the second hour I have a conscious memory of, and it’s already seven in the evening.
When I do go to sleep, I wake up tired. No,
fatigued
. It’s strange, because I am sleeping better than I ever have in my life. You know what a fitful sleeper I have always been, Shilpi. I remember you used to complain to Mother about how I used to kick you in my sleep. I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, and I only got just enough sleep to get by. Here, it’s the opposite. From the time I close my eyes to the time I open them, I feel nothing. I am out like a log. Yet, the first thing I want to do on waking up is to go back to sleep! I feel so exhausted. I know I told you about this before, but it has become so much worse in the last few days.
Shilpi, I feel something is closing in on me. My waking hours reducing bit by bit like this
—it feels as if I am in a closed room and the walls are closing in on me from all sides, inch by inch. I’ve always been an outdoors person,
you’re
the resident family introvert. Maybe I’ve always been a bit claustrophobic. Or maybe that is what is really happening to me. Life is being squeezed out of me, one drop at a time.
Yes, yes, I know. I can leave any time I want. It is just a matter of packing my bag and leaving, right? You know, I’ve packed my bag every evening since the day I arrived. Every evening, I resolve to leave and never come back. But there is something very addictive about Palem, Shilpi. The thought of leaving makes me happy, but when I lift my bag and put on my sandals, my legs feel heavy. My mind becomes misty. I am unable to move much. I find myself looking forward to night time, when the moon is up and the stars are sparkling, so that I can drift off to sleep and wake up to another day, exhausted and wishing to sleep some more.
Something is keeping me here. Probably the same thing that is making the walls close in around me. Can you make it stop, Shilpi?
Now I understand why the village sleeps as much as it does. Now I understand why they all have those horrible black circles around their eyes. I walked to Ellamma Cheruvu the other day and looked down at my reflection. I looked exactly like one of them, Shilpi. And I cannot do a thing to stop it—whatever ‘it’ is.
I will give you one piece of advice, though, as a big sister. If these letters ever reach you, and if I don’t come back from Palem, don’t come after me. There is something here that sucks you in. Remember the island of the lotuses that we read about in
The
Odyssey
(Grandma had presented it to us on our birthday)? Sailors that landed on the island never left, wanting nothing more than to just laze about in the grass, stare into the distance and eat the lotus-petals. Palem is something similar. People who come here don’t leave. Whether they don’t want to leave or whether they want to but cannot—well, that’s not important, is it? The point is they don’t.
So take my advice and don’t come after me. Now all of this could be my delusion and I might wake up tomorrow feeling all fine and dandy, but somehow I doubt it. Somehow, I think my waking time is drawing to a close. You’ve always called me a drama queen. You’ve always said I dramatized my life too much, that I was not realistic enough, that I lived my life as if it were a movie. And I’ve always hotly denied it. But today, I
wish
I am only being too dramatic, that all you say about me is true. I wish all of what I said about Palem is a childish, exaggerated fancy of mine. That this were just a movie that would end, so I could walk out of the exit, get on my moped and drive home—to you and Amma and Nanna.
I want to come home, Shilpi. Take me away from here, please.
Love,
Sonali