I waited till I heard my parents snore. It took a long time. They had spoken in whispers and I occasionally heard a familiar name.
I grabbed the small torch I had kept under my pillow
and slowly got off the mattress on the floor. I waited until my eyes got
accustomed to the dark and then switched on the torch in bursts to show me where the
door was and not wake my parents. I crawled forward until I reached the door
and opened it slowly. I had oiled the squeaky hinges and door handle a couple
of days ago and had been caught in the act by my grandfather.
“Good girl! I’ve never seen any of the other children
show so much interest in managing a house. The hinges of all the doors and
windows in my room are crying. Some days it is because of the wind moving the
windows and it almost gives me a fright. Come on, I will be your assistant.”
I was tongue tied at first, and then gave in to my
grandfather’s enthusiasm. Plus, he genuinely seemed to think I had a yen for
home improvements. That day I oiled the hinges of the door of his walk-in
cupboard, the hinges of his bedroom door and all the hinges in the windows.
Because he smiled at me so sweetly, I gave in and cleaned all the windows of
his room from the outside of the house. I wondered if I needed to avoid
Appachan (grandfather), but he had so many stories to tell that I forgot my
irritation soon enough.
At the back of my mind, I could hear my maternal great
grandmother telling me how doing something bad would come back to haunt me. The
more I thought of the photos and diary in the loft, I couldn’t figure out what
was evil about wanting to have a better look at them.
A few days ago, I had discovered (FC69)
photographs of my aunt Saroj with a man, who was not her husband, and a journal.
My paternal grandmother, who had commandeered my services to clear out the loft
in the storeroom, had emptied out a holdall that had belonged to Saroj Aunty and
asked me if there had been anything else in the bag. While I was in the loft I
had removed the photographs and diary and hidden them.
I shivered in the dark. My grandparents didn’t believe
in keeping a weak light switched on in the long corridor outside our room. I was somewhat of a
nocturnal being and didn’t need a light, but pitch dark in a rural household in
Kerala is an eerie, scary business. So I switched on and off the torch until I
reached the store room.
I opened the door and shut it. I didn’t switch on the light because the store room was opposite my grandparents’ room and there were opaque glass windows in the sides of the storeroom – you couldn’t see who was in the room, but you could make out outlines and see light. Earlier in the day I put an old plastic stool under the table. Once in the loft, I took out my stash from inside a holdall in a distant corner.
I shone the torch’s light over the faded colour photographs.
Saroj Aunty was beautiful. She didn’t look like a typical Malayali and my
grandmother had told me often that there had been many marriage proposals for
her. She had also been smart and ambitious, which was why my grandparents had
agreed to let her study in Delhi. My older aunt Sarayu, just as pretty as Saroj
Aunty, had been married off young.
All the photographs were either of the handsome Sardar,
or of Saroj Aunty or both. All the stories I had heard of people falling in
love or marrying, had ended badly. Either the girl or boy was found out and
dissuaded from marrying their loves, or the ones that married now couldn’t get
along.
While my cousins wanted to have boyfriends and love
marriages, having boyfriends was taboo and we only discussed them when we knew
there would be no adults around.
I reached for the holdall to remove the diary and a hand grabbed my wrist and tugged. I recoiled in fright, trying
to pull myself backward and out of the strong grip. I struggled to
free myself but the hand tightened like a deadly noose. A light flashed into
my face and I tried to shield my eyes with my free arm.
“What are you doing in the loft?” my cousin Bobby
said. He was Sarayu Aunty’s youngest child, around 18 years old. He tried to
pull me to the edge of the loft but I struggled to keep myself away. “Come down,
you idiot. What are you doing up there?”
“Let me go!”
“Why?”
“Er…”
Bobby was now standing on the desk and squinting at
the pictures with the help of the light of my torch, which had rolled to my
feet in my struggle. He let go of my hand and reached for the photos and I kicked
his hand away and moved further into the narrow loft. I grabbed and pushed the
photos out of his reach. “Fool! Give me that! It has to be something mischievous
if you need to look at it in the middle of the night!”
“NO!”
Bobby grabbed my arm, shook me angrily and tried to
drag me off the loft. I kicked him, catching him on the chin. He snarled and
grabbed my hair and neck and shook. After an eternity, my head stopped shaking
and I was free. But now his hand squeezed my
breast. With his other hand he tried to pin me down. I flailed and toppled some
of the things near me on to the ground.
“Shhh!” Bobby’s cold spit sprayed my cheek, his hands slamming me against the loft's wall.
Suddenly the light came on and I was blinded. Bobby let me go and jumped off the table. I
lay supine, hearing someone speak. The door opened and closed.
I cried silently, until I heard a throat clear.
My heart beats thundered in my ears, throat and chest. I reached for my torch, willing myself to beat Bobby if he looked into the loft again. I stayed flat, listening for noises, my breath escaping in shallow gasps.
“Come down, mol,” Appachan said.
I stilled, trying to stop crying.
“Come down. I don’t want anyone else to
come in and find us.”
I sat up and looked at my grim grandfather. My eyes
veered away. He held out one of his hands. My body trembled and
I sat and slowly moved to the edge and let my legs dangle on the side of the
loft. The life seemed to have gone out of my limbs.
Appachan stood under me and I caught
his outstretched hand and slid off the loft slowly.
Suddenly I felt stinging pain across my arms
and bare legs. I threw out my arms to fend off my grandfather’s attack, but he was
hitting me with a plastic flyswatter that had rested on the storeroom's dusty window ledge for years. I yelped in pain wherever the flyswatter struck
me and bits of it broke and flew about as it made contact with my skin.
“You… you…” Appachan choked. I pulled the flyswatter out of his hand and threw it into the loft and fled when he came rushing
towards me with a raised hand.
I ran down the hall, and into my father’s arms, both
of us falling backwards and onto the ground. I begged Appa to save me from
Appachan and Bobby. By now lights in the other rooms were being switched on, my
father immediately pushed me towards my mother and she pulled me into our room
and shut the door.
Doors opened and we could hear Mathan Uncle, Bobby’s
father, ask what was going on. But Appachan and Appa stayed silent. Later we
heard angry voices, but mostly Appachan’s voice. After an
eternity, my father returned to our room.
I burned with shame, unable to talk or make sense of
what had happened. So I buried my head in my mother’s lap and cried. She patted
and rubbed my back, begging me to tell her what had happened.
When I looked up, my father was lying on the bed his
eyes staring at a spot on the ceiling and his arms over his head – his face
unreadable. “Lock the door,” he told Amma. I was bundled into the bed, in
between them, my heart speeding and bumping insanely. I turned away from Appa and
curled desperately into Amma, afraid and unable to understand his silence.
Adrenaline rushed through my body. I relived Bobby’s hands on me and felt utterly humiliated and
betrayed by my grandfather’s beating.
Sometime in the night, my father’s arms came around me and he whispered and told me to calm down and that he loved me. We spent most of the night staring at the play of light and shadows of leaves on the wall caused by the moonlight streaming in through the parted curtains.
None of us slept.
(To be continued in the next episode.)
******
This is a fictional series about the 30-something narrator who is recalling an incident from her past. The first part can be found here (FC69). And the rest of the episodes here
71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91.
