Shared: Short Story

The Boy

Every morning he travelled by bus from his small, mould-covered apartment to the pickle-making factory. For six hours straight he stirred elephantine barrels of fruits inundated in spiced oils and salted vinegar. Then the lunch-bell rang with a birdsong squeak, and he strolled to the bareboned restaurant down the road for his first meal of the day. He would reach back with five minutes to spare before the foreman could cut a tenth of his per diem for taking a long break. For another four hours his wrists toiled away tirelessly, stirring with crackling joints as he prepared pickles to go into jars that would go on the shelves of every supermarket in the country. The alarm for day-end would sound and the factory would turn lifelessly dark in minutes. He would have tea at the same restaurant, get his dinner packed and catch a bus back home.

The Lady

The first task she carried out upon waking up was feeding her three cats, their affections ever evident in how they purringly caressed her shins. After a cup of coffee, she would rush her scooter down to the early morning farmer’s market and pick out the best produce she could find. She would stack it all on her frail two-wheeler, turning it into the tiniest cargo ship, and zoom back home. She lived with her cats on the first floor of her house and the floor below served as a simple eatery, where she cooked and sold breakfast, lunch and dinner with the help of a waiter-busboy and a dishwasher-janitor, all the while Carnatic music sounded out on her three-decade old cassette player. The factory just up the road provided most of her regular customers, though people scrambled from every nook in town to savour her cooking.

Her regulars called her Ammaji. And she knew what each of them liked for every meal of the day, so she cooked with relish and they ate as if from the hand of their own mothers. It was always a great ruckus at the restaurant around mealtimes albeit one jostling with jovial conversation, dosa-flavoured laughter, and the pleased burps and satisfied farts of full stomachs. One of her factory customers always stayed by himself in corner, eating two idlis, a vada with a bowl of sambhar and two tablespoons of coconut chutney soundlessly for every meal and would get the same meal soundlessly packed every evening. Each day, her glance witnessed some unconfessed grief in his eyes, hidden behind a facade of stoic solemnity.

Her Past

Ammaji, nicknamed Imli as a kid for her love of tamarind, had grown up deep in the south of the country, the third and youngest child of an effluent-plant managing father and a chess-tutoring mother. A simple, almost prudish Catholic family. Her elder brothers were twins and messed with her whenever they got bored with their usual antics. Father preferred teaching his two sons Latin in his spare time, while mother focused on building her daughter into a chess prodigy. Their lives were governed by the sermons of their church pastor on what it meant to be a good Christian family. Dutifulness was the code of conduct engendered by her parents and painstakingly was it followed by all members all the time, except for two hours after school every day where Ammaji was allowed in the kitchen to help her mother in preparing dinner.

Flavours became the colours of her playtime, the path of freedom from church-endorsed oversight she enjoyed with her mother. Exploring the depths of her south Indian cuisine, sniffing the spices, guessing the portions, churning and stirring and steaming and frying and frothing and fermenting became the soil on which her childhood’s joys grew.

Decades later, her parents long gone, her husband dead after an untragic marriage, her kids living far away tangled up in their own busyness, Ammaji, with the approval of her cats, decided to make her love for cooking public, to feed those working in loveless places, to nourish those breaking away their bodies to gather what little they can for their families. She cooked for all her customers as she would for her own children, came to learn their likes and dislikes as a mother does. Whoever sat in her humble restaurant and ate from the fires of her simple kitchen, became her child and she the mother of them all.

‘At least here they are taken care of,’ she always said.

His Past

His name was all he knew for certain from his past. Sumanta

He had been an orphan his whole life, or at least that’s how he felt. Such time had passed since the loss of his family that he knew not whether it was yesterday or millennia ago; maybe it was both. He trudged from town to town, job to job, staying at a place for some months before the reminders of loss around him got too heavy. Packing all his possessions in a pillow-cover, he would randomly hail buses and hitchhike till he arrived at some corner of the country he had never seen before and set domicile. Faint memories lingered of his childhood and family: a stern but concerned father with slivers of grey in his hair, a mother with a plump bosom who was always stuffing his mouth with candy, a wiry older sister who read poetry to him to calm his tantrums. He also had some unsure recollection of how everything changed, how all his toddler heart held dear was obliterated. There were blaring lights, noises of the sky crashing, the infinite weight of the world dropping on his family were the splices of his nightmarish recollections.

What his greatest suffering was not all he had lost, but that he had no clear memory of what he had lost. Deep in the middle of hard-earned sleep he would often wake, crying his eyes out for there was a heaviness in his chest, like a slab of iron on his lungs, but he knew not the disaster that had placed it there. He despised the gods for snatching from him what he loved, but far stronger was his rage that his remembrance was stolen too. To live a life of misery yet be kept cruelly in the dark over why he was consumed with anguish. He could imagine no greater punishment. Often, he pondered how simple it would be to walk into oncoming traffic, or lay down drunk on the railway tracks, or pour a bottle of sleeping pills down his gullet. But he didn’t possess the courage to do more than ponder. He was terrified that his attempt would fail, and he would be left disabled with no one to look after him; he resigned himself to cowardly waiting for a certain, inescapable demise.

The Incident

Ammaji was about her usual workday, humming along as she cooked the lunch orders, when she saw him come in: the one enigma who would not open himself up to the warmth of her maternal concern. He ordered and ate mechanically, got his dinner packed mechanically in the evenings. Never said more than the minimum required to get his order, paid mutely, conversed with no one else, ate alone with the intent to only fill his stomach, never to enjoy the flavours or to mingle with his colleagues or any of the employees. He was silently nibbling at his meal when Ammaji came up to him; he didn’t notice her but she placed a hand on his shoulder and he recoiled from her touch, jumping from his seat. He saw her and apologised, said he got scaredshockedsurprised.

‘Am I that scary-looking?’ she joked.

He could only manage a creaky laugh as he avoided her eyes. He paid and rushed out, leaving his half-eaten meal before anyone could ask if the taste wasn’t to his liking. Ammaji knew that it wasn’t the food: she did not know what troubled him, but she was certain that the food was not it.

He was shaking as he walked back. The warmth of her hand had stirred something in him, something so lost to him that he had to run from it, knowing full well the inability of his frail soul to handle anything which seemed to shake the plasters of repression he had contained himself in. Her smile, her voice, her demeanour, all of it was so unfamiliarly personal that he almost laid in her lap to weep out his grief, to complain about how unfair life had been to him, how lonely he had been as she caressed him to slumber. Almost.

He groggily entered a public park, swayed through it, found a tree with appropriate shade and fell beneath. He didn’t stretch with sighs of relaxation, for he slept not to recuperate, but to hide away from the facts of his life. He snoozed there, eerily unmoving, for hours and many park-goers checked to see if he was a corpse but finding no smell, assumed him to be a good-for-nothing. His dreams were nightmares, as usual; his fears did not leave in sleep, as usual. But the phantasms of his unconsciousness were still more palatable to him than the cold, bitter truths of his existence which had to be borne consciously.

Noon turned to dusk to night, and he remained asleep in his tree-covered corner. He would have preferred to stay there till hunger and bodily processes forced him to move, but a piercing shriek startled him awake. He first imagined it to be his own terrors, sending hallucinatory tremors to torment his waking hours, but when another scream rang through the air, he moved in its direction to the far end of the park. This late at night, the park was deserted, dark as an abyss and bugs creaked unmusically in the dense bushes. He came to a small flight of stairs leading down to an artificial pond, besides which geriatric groups stretched and laughed in daytime. Hearing faint rustling nearby, he descended with soundless steps. Aside from the gentle breeze swaying the water in the pond, he couldn’t make anything out in that utter blackness. And then he saw a dark mass of movement around the opposite embankment. He tiptoed closer and once he was close enough, he covered his mouth lest a gasp escape.

A ginormous man on top of a woman lying face-first on the ground. She was not moving, at all. He was struggling to remove her clothes whilst undoing it his belt-clasp.

Sumanta’s blood ran cold, and face turned white: the savage crime unfolding in front of him plunged panic down to his marrow. He wanted to run away from there as fast as he could, and forget he ever saw any of it. But how could he? He had lost most of himself, but not enough to be willingly blind to evil. He had nothing to lose anyway; no great possessions, no loving family, no iconic career, no life which demanded vehement preservation. Besides, a death for greater good was the best he could ask for.

So, he charged like a maddened bull. But he simply bounced off that giant like a fly off a window. The oversized wretch turned to him, more bothered than surprised, and groaned in irritation at the inconvenience of having to deal with this witness. He leapt towards Sumanta, grabbed him by the throat, and with a growl slammed him on the ground. The giant tightened his hands around the flailing Sumanta, trying to choke the life out of him. While frail of body, working endless hours in the factory, stirring elephantine barrels with towering steel ladles had made Sumanta’s arms iron. With one hand, he began to peel off the giant’s hands off his throat while with the other he poked the panting savage’s eye who shrieked in pain and began punching, brimming with rage. While his face was being pummelled, Sumanta’s hand found a rock on the ground, and he swung it wildly at the giant. Something crunched, and the giant fell limp and fatly to the ground. Sumanta got up and saw a deep scarlet gash on the giant’s temple. His face bloodied, bruised and his chest heaving heavily, Sumanta roared and raised the blood-stained rock over his head and brought it down on the giant’s face with all his might. A sickening crunch. And again. Again. Again, and again. Till in place of the giant’s head there was a mush of blood, bone and brains.

Panting with his own face smeared with splashes of his victim’s blood, Sumanta turned to the unconscious woman. Her nose was bleeding, one of her eyes and side of her jaw were swollen blue. He shook her but she didn’t budge, so he cupped a handful of water from the pond and splashed it on her face. She gasped awake. Instantly, filled with terror, she began pushing him and wildly thrashing so he had to calmly shush her till she saw his face and turned to see the corpse of her violator. She adjusted her clothes, whispered her gratitude and scampered away to safety while he was frozen, staring at the body of the man he had murdered. On his hands, across his face, seeped into his clothes was the drying blood of the giant, the evidence of his violent outbreak painted across his body.

A frightening chill ran up from his toes to the top of his head and shot up into the skies. Suddenly, panic was all he knew. He got up to flee but immediately stumbled face-first into the corpse. All breath went out of him immediately, his lungs refused to pull any more air in no matter how hard he gasped. Hard slaps he laid across his own face, dug his nails deep into his own hide, hoping the pain and shock would refresh his respiratory capabilities but his lungs still didn’t wish to exchange gases. Then he remembered what he had felt hours and hours ago and so, in his moment of unabashed helplessness, decided to put faith in an inkling of an instinct still shrouded in fear.

The Change And The Confluence

He picked himself up, turning his attention away from his oxygen-deprived lungs and the growing burn in them, and ran. As fast as his limbs would carry him, he ran, letting the balls of his feet strike the ground with fervent force as if he was an Olympian sprinter. His arms swinging in perfect cadence with the stride of his legs. As his body grew more and more desirous of fresh air, the baser physical drive for survival shattered the grip of cerebral anxieties and air rushed into his lungs with such renewed force that he felt as if this was his first breath of life.

And he kept running, not stopping, for he was running with a destination in mind, with a face in mind. He ran for what felt like both hours and a single moment. He reached a door and, in the dead of night, with the streets devoid of all life except for snoring mongrels, he rapped his knuckles on the wood. A minute passed. Then another. He thought of knocking again. But he heard movement from the other side and the door creaked open to reveal Ammaji in her flowing nightgown, rubbing her eyes.

She saw him with considerable surprise, turned on a light and lost all color in her face when she saw his clothes and hands and face drenched in a thick red, still dripping.

‘Beta, are you alright?’ she asked, as her hands checked him all over with worry.

‘I am fine,’ he replied, gently brushing her hands aside as his eyes began to well up.

She saw the tears forming, and wondered again about what he carried inside. But it was the dead of night, and now was not the time for questioning. She brought him in, gave him a change of clothes from her deceased husband’s stores, made piping hot coffee for him. Her cats began rubbing on his legs, purring, asking to be petted, and for the first time ever she saw him break out into a gleaming smile as he scratched the cats’ backs.

He saw her and froze awkwardly. He scratched his arms and hung his head, for some reason, shamefully. Worry as her heart always did, she walked up to him. She put a hand on his cheek and felt a tear dribbling down.

‘Beta, what is the use of this misery? Tell me, just tell me.’

He shook his head. ‘I am not sad now. I just don’t know how to be happy, Amma.’

He broke down in a mess of sobs and whimpers. She pulled him in for a hug, patting his head, comforting him with her gentleness.

‘Let your Amma tell you that it’s okay, you are okay. All is fine.’

He crumpled to the floor in her embrace. She sat down with his head in her lap and lulled him through his quivering cries into a slumber so deep and dreamless the likes of which he had long forgotten were possible.

He needed a mother and her eyes only saw in him her own son, not one born from her, but one brought to her because of a void they shared. The incompleteness of life they both experienced each day, him in laboring desolation and her behind the work of her kitchen was the unseen force which had been pulling them closer and closer for months. In mind and in body, knowingly or unknowingly, they were both pieces of a puzzle who fit perfectly with each and for a while, everything was how it should be.