CounterFeit

A story by my alter-ego, Namratha Krishnaswamy

January 16, 2010
At the airport, they told me that I had already boarded the plane. The young man behind the counter stared at his computer screen, and then scratching his chin, examined my passport again.
"I'm sorry ma'am," he said, "but you've already boarded the plane."
I was incredulous. I protested that I couldn't have, that I was standing here, in front of him, with a valid photo ID.
He pursed his lips and stared at the print-out of my e-ticket again. He called over his manager, and they had a hurried, whispered conference.
The manager asked me to move to one side. He assured me that this confusion would be straightened out immediately.
I believed him.
Two minutes later, a pair of security guards reached the counter. I frowned, but handed over my passport when they asked for it.
They looked at my passport, flipped through the pages.
And then whisked me off to a holding cell.

When I tried to tell them - at first politely - that I was who I said I was, they ignored me.
Then, when I persisted, they scoffed.
Finally, when I lost my temper, and screamed, in the middle of the airport, they slapped a pair of handcuffs on me.

I made a frantic series of phone calls. I called my father, my uncle in the IAS, my grand mother's second cousin (also in the IAS), my aunt (a housewife), my aunt's neighbour's son (a police official), an old ex-boyfriend (a journalist, but he didn't take my call).

They took my phone away from me.

A sharply dressed man came into the little police cell at the airport, he signed a few papers and then after a sharp stare at me, left.

Moments later, I heard the loud glare of a police siren. A unit of troopers marched into the station, AK-47s held aloft.

They bound me. When I shouted, they gagged me and slipped a black bag over my head.
Stumbling, they led me out. I couldn't see where I was going, and I almost tripped.
Hands lifted me up - somewhere - a van, I think.

It occurred to me - sitting bound and trussed in that hot van, jolted by the bumps and potholes of the road, surrounded by a dozen men with guns - that someone, using my name, had flown on the ticket that I had bought for Delhi.
That person could be anyone. A terrorist. Using my identity.
I tried to speak, but I couldn't - cloth muffled my mouth.
When I tried to move, a gun prodded me in the side.
I sat still.

We arrived somewhere. I hustled out of the van, and pushed somewhere - up a series of steps I remember, and down a corridor with many twists and turns.
Finally, they pulled off the blindfold and the gag, but left the handcuffs on.
There was no light. No windows either - and the air was damp and musty.
I shouted, but they had locked the door.

January 16, 2010
Hours Later

An apologetic, plump man entered the room. His hair was thinning, and in the musty dampness of the cell, he had begun to perspire. Someone turned on a light, and the glare bounced off his bald pate.
He was my father's colleague's sister-in-law's uncle's junior officer, it turned out, and he was a minor official in the state administrative service. He had been sent to clear up the mess and get me out.
It took another hour to complete the formalities. I told the police officer in charge that someone else has used my identity to get on the plane.
"It could be a terrorist," I added.
The T-word had an effect. The police officer picked up his phone and called the airport.
"But the plane's already landed. It was a 45-minute flight." He said, puzzled. "Nothing happened. But they're checking the plane to be sure. But nothing happened. "
,
January 17, 2010
I called the editor I was supposed to meet in Delhi.
"Listen Marie," I said, "I'm really sorry that I wasn't able to make yesterday's meeting-"
"But you did. You even came early." She replied, genuinely surprised. "We met for lunch at Tuscan Sun. I thought your idea for your book was brilliant. I loved the sample chapters that you showed me. Very original, very different. We'd be thrilled for you to publish with Percourt Brown."
I tried to understand what she was saying. "Marie, you mean to say-"
"Listen, I got to go," Marie cut me off, in a breathless tone of voice. "But you're so funny! Calling me and telling me we didn't meet! I love your sense of humor. It's so esoteric! Bye!"
She cut the call.
I tried calling back, but her phone was engaged for the next hour. Later, in the evening, I tried again, but she didn't reply.

January 18, 2010
I got on a flight (without mishap) and went to Marie's office.
"She's in a meeting," the receptionist said. "Who should I tell her is here?"
I gave my name.
"You were here day before yesterday." The receptionist frowned and looked again at me. "But you look a little different. Did you get a haircut? I didn't recognize you at first."
I sat down, and she left for the inner office.
She returned a few minutes later. A slim young woman accompanied her out, dressed elegantly in slacks and a turtleneck. She stared at me. I had never met Marie, in person, but she looked like what I imagined Marie to be.
"You're not Namratha Krishnaswamy," she said. "She was here yesterday."
"You're Marie? Well, the most bizarre thing happened to me-" I tried to explain, but Marie -
"She told me that this would happen. I almost didn't believe it at first. A stalker, who pretends-"
"I'm not a stalker! I AM Namratha Krishnaswamy! You met somebody else! Someone who was pretending to be me-"
Marie's expression had changed from polite disapproval to outright contempt.
Desperate, I pulled out my passport.
"Look-"
She refused to. "Anyone can make those things, these days - make a copy and put your own photograph in it. You're sick. You're just really sick."
A small crowd had gathered now, watching from a safe distance.
With a sneer on her perfect lips, Marie turned to leave. I caught hold of her hand and yanked her back.
"Let go of me!" She screamed.
"Just listen-"
Marie shrieked. The receptionist must have called someone, because a security guard entered the office. Politely but firmly, an iron grip on my upper arm, he escorted me out.
The crowd parted, almost reverently before us. My ears and face were burning. I stared at the ground, not wanting to see those faces - but I couldn't help hearing the whispers -

"Just imagine the gall.
"Poor thing, I didn't believe it when she told us yesterday about the stalker."
"So strange, like a book, even."

January 27, 2010
I tried getting in touch with Marie, many times over the next week, but to no avail. I even sent her manuscript, the one that I was supposed to present to her that day, but it was returned, a week later, with a type-written, standard rejection slip, advising me to try another publishing house.

I tore up the slip.

January 28, 2010
How was this person pretending to me? What did she look like? What did she say that convinced others, so confidently, that she was me?

February 5, 2010
I sent my manuscript to another publishing house,

March 10, 2010
In the mail, a bulky envelope, with a note -

Dear Who ever you really are,

We initially contacted Percourt Brown, because your name appears on their author list, and it seemed to us that your behavior would be both unethical and inexplicable, if you were who you claimed to be. But Percourt Brown, after much deliberation, shared with us some sample chapters and an synopsis of Counterfeit, Ms Krishnaswamy's soon to be released novel. We appreciate their openness, and with this sample we realized that the style of your writing is derivative, and a poor imitation of the same writer whose name you claim to possess. We regard this as some sort of post-modernist joke, a play on the themes and ideas of Ms Krishnaswamy's novel. We would appreciate it if you refrain from such tasteless jests in the future, that end up taking so much of our time and effort and inconveniencing us to such a great degree.

Yours sincerely & etc

The Editors

March 12, 2010
How did this woman who pretended to be me write? What did she write about?
Was she, as everyone seemed to think, a better writer than me?

May 15, 2010
Advance reviews have came out, praising Counterfeit, Namritha Krishnaswamy's debut novel. One reviewer called it "refreshing," another reviewer praised "the elegant, lucid style."

And from another review -

"Counterfeit is the tale of the tragic, frustrated, incomplete rebellion of the individual against a society that prizes conformity, values mediocrity and stamps out individuality. In Counterfeit, debutante author Krishnaswamy offers a terrible, yet convincing reflection of the world we live in."

May 16, 2010
My mother called me. "You never told me your book had been accepted for publication," she admonished me over the phone.
I explained what had happened.
"That's stocking, Nam," my mother said. "It almost sounds like a story. But it's terrible! Really terrible. But seriously - what are you going to do?"

I didn't know. I hadn't the faintest clue of how to deal with this. File a law suit - against whom? I didn't know a thing about this woman who pretended to be me. I hadn't even seen her.
What was I supposed to do?

May 29, 2010
There was a notice announcing the book reading of Counterfeit in my local bookshop, on the sixth of June.

June 6, 2010
A young woman walked into the bookshop. This it seemed, was my doppelganger - for she came in, striding purposefully, already surrounded by a swarm of shop assistants. They buzzed around her as she moved from the fiction section to the non fiction, from biography to psychology. As she swirled around, bags, scarves, sweaters and books trailing after her, sashaying up the stairs to yet more shelves. There was a list clutched in one, manicured hand and a cellphone in the other. She wore pink nail polish.
A shop assistant scurried forth with a book - the book she was looking for? She smiled, graciously, but shook her head. There was a haughtiness to her smile, visible in the tilt of her nose, her condescending attitude that was polite but brooked no encroaching/overstepping. The shop assistants, getting the message, retreated, still buzzing from a respectful distance.
She was attractive, just a notch above plain, but not - never - beautiful. She was glamourous - but not too glamourous. She was exactly the picture of what an author should be.

I didn't like her one bit.

The book launch started on time. She pushed her spectacles delicately back, and read a few pages from her book, in a delicate, feminine voice.

I seethed through her reading. The words, the ideas seemed to fly through me. But the audience listened, respectfully. An old man, sitting next to me, oohed and ached through the reading.
"What language," he whispered to me, "what command of the language."

I sneered.

A woman got up, in the second row, hand raised. "Ms Krishnaswamy, what was the inspiration behind your story?"

She smiled, simpering, and answered. "What an excellent question! The idea behind this story began when, in fact, there was an impostor - who was wandering around town, convinced that she was me! Some people were even convinced -

I stood up, my blood boiling. Pink spots danced in front of my eyes.

"and it was interesting….I tried to imagine what it would like to be someone pretending to be. That's how-"

"Stop!" I cried. I couldn't bear it anymore. "You're a liar. You're pretending to be. You've stolen my life, my publisher - even this -

I gestured to the people, sitting down in chairs, mouths agape, watching me -

"was supposed to be mine. But you're taking it all - I won't let you."

My double smiled, knowingly, as if to saw - see, this is her.
The woman asked, a little frightened - "Is she dangerous?"
The old man began to edge away from me.

It was too much. I screamed. I ran unto the podium, determined to wrap my hands around her neck and throttle the life out of her, force her to take back the lies - force to say that it was a sham…

But I didn't. The bookshop security guard, and a couple of audience members, got between me and the podium and wrestled me to the ground.

I was thrown out of the book reading and charged with assault. They held me down, until the police constable arrived. He smiled when he saw. "Why she's just a little thing," he said to the security guard. "Ease up on her, nothing she can do surrounded."
When he asked me for my name, I told him.
"But that isn't your name! Come on, tell me your real name!"
I bit him then.
He yelled, and dropped hold of my arm. I bared my teeth, tasting blood, and the security guards and bookshop assistants, backed away from me warily.
I pushed through the bookshop door and sprinted to freedom.

That evening, I rang up my mother. "Mom, there's this woman, this author - who is pretending to be me."
"I know sweetheart," my mother said, "I've been trying to get through to you all day. I can't believe this. I really can't.
I couldn't help it then - but I started crying. "I'm so scared that she'll convince you too-"
"I'm your mother! I'll always know how you are. Don't worry, my sweet, we'll do something, a court case. Your dad has contacts," she consoled me. "We'll figure away out of this. Come home tomorrow."

June 7, 2010
I made the news, and the next day the papers were full of the book launch.
One commentator called it a "publicity stunt" and opined that my double, the author of Counterfeit, had deliberately arranged it to boost sales.

I shook myself. I packed and got dressed. Then I took a train to the neighboring city, five hours away, where my parents lived.

I got in late evening. There seemed to be a party at my parent's - and then I remembered, it was my sister's - and her's husband's - wedding anniversary. I stared foolishly at the door, before rushing out again to buy a bouquet of roses.

When I got back, I rang the bell. No one answered the door, so I buzzed again.
A deathly silence. And then the beginnings of a horrible fear began to churn my stomach -

My mother opened the door. Her eyes were shadowed - she avoided looking at me.
She pushed back the door - and then I saw my family, and -
Her.
She was standing, there right next to my sister, her brown eyes boring into mine.

I turned to my mother, desperately.
But she shook her head, a little uncertainly.
My father filled the silence, "You're good I grant you-
"Satish-" my mother murmured.
He brushed her aside and went on. "You had us fooled us for a while."
"She's not well, Satish, don't you see?" My mother whispered. "She needs help."

How could they think she was me? How had she convinced them?

My father shook his head and growled. "Go now, before we call the police!"
When I didn't move, he shouted - "Go!"

June 8, 2010
In a dustbin, I found a magazine with a picture of her, and then another one in a newspaper.
In the window of a bookshop, I saw her face with my name on a poster.

I looked at my face, reflected in the bleary glass of the shop window.
I couldn't recognize myself any longer.

They found me on the street, hours later.

October 22, 2010
Here, the attendants tell me that out of sympathy, the author Namratha Krishnaswamy - the author I tried to impersonate, they add - is paying for my treatment. I have no relatives, no memory of a previous life nor any records of one, I am destitute - and Ms Krishnaswamy's act the doctor, who visits everyday, tells me, is one of great charity. At first, I used to ask him, resentfully, if she was a better me than I?
But I've stopped now. It's just an old joke, now.
Sometimes the other inmates pass by, and whisper, pointing at me, and I wonder if perhaps I'm wrong and she really is me and I - well then, whom am I?

Tony's House

A skeleton rises in the distance, a half-finished skyscraper, blocking the light of a dying, setting sun. The blood-red light of sunset drips down steel casings and pipes, pooling in grimy, glass windows. In the shadows, the grey rags of construction workers flutter, as they scurry across like maggots, figures black against the red and gold sky.
This city, once so familiar, has become a stranger. There are people here, breathing, sweating, stinking multitudes of people - engineers, doctors, housewives, children. But they move like zombies through the grey fog that clogs the air. They are surly when spoken to, wary when accosted by strangers.
At night I dream of ghosts. There is Tony, with his slow, shy smile, his large, ungainly hands, those pale knees that protruded from his shorts. There is my mother, her brows creased in a perpetual frown, her eyes bitter and unhappy. I see Ms D'Souza, with her watery smile. They do not speak, they are mute, but it's as if their hands are over my mouth, over my throat, stifling me. I wake up, I toss off the sheets, and my breath is still trapped in my chest. I struggle to breathe, and hte memories come, memories I have locked away, that I have tried to forget. And when morning comes, I still feel the clammy touch of their cold, dead hands.
In the afternoon, I find myself driving past the site of Tony's house. The beautiful, old villa has gone; rubble spills onto the street. A half-finished, empty shell of apartment complex rises up, where the house once stood. Construction workers, as small as ants, lean out of the top stories, trying to secure the pale, blue plastic sheeting that flaps in the wind.
Our house is still there, the solid, one-storey house I grew up in. An accountant and his family live there now - I see the accountant, in his vest and dhoti leaning against the gate as I walk past, a cigarette in hand. His wife hangs clothes on the terrace, and I can hear the shrieks of their children, as they race around the tiny front yard. They've repainted the gate a garish pink. There are other changes - a satellite dish poking out of the roof, the enclosed veranda. The coconut tree has been cut down.

It was different, twenty years ago. There were only a few families in this street. I remember walking to school, for the first time after we moved into the house across the street, with my mother. I saw Tony then, for the first time, sitting in a wicker chair by the ancient house with the sloping, red-tiled roof. Even then, I knew there was something strange about him - it was visible in the way he cocked his head, the way his mouth hung open. He watched me as I walked past, I felt his eyes follow me as I headed down the street, and I held my mother's hand tighter, clinging to her pallu. She pushed me away, impatient.
"What is it now?" She asked, frowning. I could tell her mind was somewhere else, as it often was, thinking of money and prices and doing sums. I shook my head then, I knew she wouldn't take kindly to my fears. She wasn't like other mothers - the mothers in books and movies - the ones who wiped your tears when you cried with the edge of their sari pallu, and held you close. She was the kind of mother who pinched you when you made a mistake or said something wrong, or trod on your foot, if at dinner, you reached across for an extra helping. She loved me - of course - but it was a harsh, unrelenting, punishing love - a love that revealed itself in pinches, frowns and slaps.
She pinched me, the next day, when I refused to meet the neighbours with her. When I cried, she slapped me. I was forced into my 'good' dress - a gold-bordered red skirt and blouse - and marched across the street. There we waited on our neighbours, the D'souzas. He was there, of course, as Mrs D'Souza, a pale, tired-looking woman, ushered us into their faded, dilapidated drawing room. I remember being fascinated by their house - it was so different from my own. There were china figures of yellow-haired, blue-eyed shepheredesses and milkmaids on the side tables, Pictures of girls, with intricate hairstyles, in ankle-length dresses, on the walls, next to other photographs of young men, in three-piece suits.
Mrs D'Souza saw me looking at the photographs and smiled her vague, careless smile. "That's me" she said, in her tired voice, pointing at a black-and-white potrait of a young woman in a high-waisted dress, a veil falling around her face, a bouquet of flowers held in gloved hands. "On my wedding day," she added.
I looked closely at Mrs D'Souza then - it seemed to me that she must have always been old and tired - I couldn't ever imagine her young, and pretty. She was wearing a blue, polka-dotted dress that reached to her knees, and I could see her legs. I remember staring at her legs - it seemed like such a bizarre thing. My own mother's legs - and those of the women in our family - were always covered in cotton saris, and the sight of Mrs D'Souza's pale, slack flesh was a novelty.
Tony came forward, clutching a piece of paper. I shrank back, holding my mother's hand tightly. I was scared of him, and my fear must have showed because Mrs D'Souza said - "Go on, he won't hurt you, I promise." My mother pushed me forward then, a sharp prod in the back. I looked up at him, then, he was so much older than me - I think then he would have been in his early twenties. He smiled at me, a stupid, idiot smile, and pushed the sheet of paper at me.
It was drawing - a sketch, a few, scraggly lines - of a small girl, in a skirt and blouse, holding the hand of a woman in a bun. I stared at the paper for a few bewildered minutes, before I heard my mother, her tone rising say - "Tara..."
"Thank you," I burst out, before she could go on. "Thank you." As I spoke, the smile on his face melted, and for a moment - he looked terrified, before he turned and broke into a run.
Mrs. D'Souza sighed. "Don't worry, he's like that." She bent down and peered at the sheet of paper in my hands. "He likes you," she said kindly, smiling a little. "Look, that's you and your mother."
That evening, when we returned home, I looked closely at the picture he had given me. I saw that he had drawn my mouth in a thin, straight, unsmiling line - and that my mother's eyebrows slanted down and close, drawn together in a frown.

For years, he and I played together. I was always conscious that we were watched - the fat Bengali woman in the opposite house, would watch us from her balcony. Passers-by would turn, curiously, to watch the spectacle of a grown man, in his early twenties, play with a young girl less than half his age.
We would sprint across his front lawn, unmown grass growing high, playing tag. We would play hide and seek in the garden at the side of the house, with it's wild, overgrown trees with gnarled roots, provided innumerable hiding places for a girl my age.
And then - suddenly, puberty struck. It was the era of Michael Jackson and Madonna, and being fashionable had suddenly assumed an important place in my life. I became awkward and gawky, I hunched my back and let my hair fall over my face, to cover the rashes of acne that now sprouted across my cheeks. I slurred my speech, and answered in mono-syllables. And I refused to play with him.
My mother was upset, of course. She constantly admonished me to sit straight, and push the hair back from my face. She despaired of my clothes, my taste, my music and my friends. She told me that I was going 'bad.'
But I was past the age for pinching. When she slapped me, I mumbled words like 'child abuse' and 'harassment.'
"All of that rubbish doesn't work here," she scoffed at me. But something changed. She nagged me, almost always, but she never touched me.
Amidst all of this, my playmate was forgotten. He came by once, a picture in his hands - a drawing of two stick-children playing jump-rope. It must have been after a fight with my mother, for I took one look at the picture, and turned away.
"Go find some friends your age," I told him. I don't know if he understood my words, but he caught the malice in my tone, and a tear trickled down his face. My mother came out at that moment - saw him wipe the tear, and she turned to me.
"There was no need to-"
"Go to hell," I told her. "Why don't you play with him? I'm too old to play - I'm fourteen!"
"Don't talk to your mother like that."
"I can bloody well talk whatever way I like."
Neither of us noticed that he had already left. He never came back again.

Fourteen turned into fifteen and then sixteen. The acne diminished, and I stopped slouching forward. I had secreted supplies of eyeliner and lipstick into the house, and while my parents slept, I would experiment with these in the bathroom. In school, during lunch-breaks, my girldfriends and I would gawk over pictures of film stars in the school bathrooms, noting enviously the shortness of their skirts, their high-heeled shoes. We would save up pocket money to buy a pair of jeans.
That same year, Mrs D'Souza died. I think it must have been cancer - now that I think back, I must have been terribly callous not to notice. Mrs D'Souza's elder son, Lewis, living in America, came down for the funeral. Rumour had it that he had an american wife and children. But he came alone.
I came home from school one day to find him sitting, at the dining table. My mother was laughing - it was the first time in years that I had heard her laugh. She was smiling; the perpetual frown had vanished and she seemed like someone else. I watched her, stunned - it was a revelation. Then the laughter stopped - my mother caught my gaze, and the frown re-appeared. But for a moment - she had been transformed and I saw her as she must have been before she married my father - a pretty, laughing woman, with dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.
And I wonder what Lewis had said to make her laugh. It made me uncomfortable - that laugh - not only because it showed my mother in a different light, but that very act of transformation made me suspicious. There was something in that laugh and what had preceded it, that was not quite right. I couldn't help but notice the way she looked at him, and how he looked at her.

Maybe if I had said something to my mother - cutting and mean - it would have nipped it in the bud. She would have raged back at me - we would fought, things would have gone back to normal, and the future wouldn't have unfolded as it did. But I didn't say anything. I was silent - what could I say? My father strangely, didn't notice anything, even though my mother smiled more often, and fought less. These were things, selfishly, that I was grateful for. Was that wrong?
In my dreams, my mother blames me. She points a stiff finger at me.
"It was your fault. Everything was your fault. One word, one gesture, a hint, a fight - you could have prevented it. But you didn't."
I glare back at her, and I open my mouth, but in this dream I have no voice.
She smiles, triumphantly. "See, you can't talk back? Not here."
I wake up then, the sound of her words ringing in my ears. I have a thousand answers, a thousand explanations - but there is no one to hear me.

I remember on one day hearing my mother and Lewis whispering in the kitchen.
My mother spoke first - "What about your wife and family?"
"My wife's filed for divorce." Lewis turned away. "She wants the children, and alimony too."
My mother didn't say anything. The silence grew. I fidgeted outside the kitchen door, feeling like an intruder, scared that they would catch me, but compelled to listen.
Lewis finally broke the silence. "I lost my job, two months ago. I haven't told her. The house is mortgaged. Where's the money going to come from?"
I remember being suprised. I had imagined everyone abroad was rich and living well. Our NRI relatives, would return for holidays with suitcases filled with presents and chocolates. They would talk about the comfort and ease of life abroad, in their shiny, new accents and our cousins would talk familiarly, almost contemptously of the thing we lusted after - walkmans, jeans, NIKE trainers. But this new talk of mortgages and jobs and money was unsettling. It was the first time that I heard something against the 'foreign' dream.
My mother spoke, suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. "What about the house?" I was startled by her tone - there was something desperate in her voice, in her face - as if his house would be solution to her problems. Intrigued, curious, I peered at them through a hole in the lock.
Lewis shook his head. "My mother left it to my brother." He put a finger to his lips. "Don't tell anyone."
My mother's eyebrows arched in surprise. "But what can he do with it? What's going to happen to him? Are you going to take him back?" She added, as an after-thought.
"I can't. If I-" he stopped. "it's not easy. It's expensive - there so many laws. He would be happier here," he said the last pleadingly.
My mother nodded, slowly, encouragingly.
It was later that evening, that I asked my mother about what would happen to Tony. She had been humming a song - a strange thing for her to do. She stopped and the frown returned. "I don't know," she said at last, pondering over it. "I don't know."
My father looked up from his papers at that point - "I imagine he'll be put into an institution." He noticed my perturbed look. "It will be good for him," my father added, "don't worry. They'll be able to put him in a first-class, good place."
I lay wake that night. Thinking about him, and the kind of life he would lead now. I hadn't seen him from the day of the funeral, when he screamed as they pushed the coffin into the ground, and tried to jump in after it. His brother had held him back, but Tony's screams had rung through the air. He threw his head back and cried, mouth open, horrible, wrenching sobs. I had wondered earlier whether he understood what death was, and watching his sorrow, I felt guilty for even thinking he couldn't.
The next day, after school, I ventured across the street. It had been a long while since I had come to the house - and it was strange to think of Mrs D'Souza not being there, strange to think that I would never hear her tired voice again, to imagine that a new family would come and occupy this old house. As I ran up the stairs to the house, rain started to fall, and I was on the verge of pressing the doorbell when I heard a laugh.
I stopped.
It was an oddly familiar laugh - one that I heard before, and it came from the back of the house.
Softly, quietly, I stepped onto into the rain, and crept to the back of the house. The laughter sounded, louder and louder - and another voice joined it - a man's voice, warm, with a slight accent. The ground around the house had turned to mud, and crept into my shoes and stained my socks, but I hurried on regardless.
I should have turned back. But I persisted. Why? Why didn't I turn back?
Suddenly, the laughter stopped, and there was silence.
I reached a window. I looked in - and there was my mother, her mouth pressed against Lewis's mouth, his arms around her body
I was stunned, but not surprised. I was angry, and terrified of knowing what I knew. I think I must have guessed already - where this would lead to. But I hadn't wanted to know. And as I turned away, I was suddenly aware that there was someone else watching.
Tony.
I ran away, to the gate, crying, my tears mingling with the rain, my shirt drenched, mud squelching in my shoes. I was cold and shivering.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and Tony was there - pressing me against the gate, his hand on my face, pushing his mouth towards mine.
I pushed him away. Without looking back I ran across the street. I was angry, so angry - with him, my mother, his brother. I didn't look back.
I didn't see him running after me. I didn't see the car, that tried to brake, in the rain, but skidded.

When I did look back, a moment later - I couldn't imagine that it had happened so fast. I saw blood, blood staining the rain water, running into the gutters, I saw his body, lying in a impossible angle. I heard horns blare - I saw the driver of the car get out - his face schocked and ashen.
I saw my mother and Lewis come running to the gate.
And they saw me.

Lewis sold the house and returned to America, to the arms of his estranged wife. Money makes a difference, I discovered, it returns a father to his children, patches up a broken marriage, makes a wife realize the depth of her love for her erring spouse. We never saw him again, and my mother died last year, after a long struggle with cancer. In the intervening decade the house has changed many hands - for many times the original sum that Lewis sold it for.

I try to stop it, but I can't. I see that last moment over and over in my dreams and waking moments.
Tony is there, broken on the ground, and Lewis is leaning over him. My mother stares at me from across the street. There is shock, guilt and accusation in her stare. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. I wish...I wish... I know I shouldn't have been angry with him. He was only doing what he saw others do. What did he know?
I clench my hands into fists. I want to scream, I want to her scratch her face. This is your fault, I want to shout at my mother and Lewis. But I don't. I just stand there, in the rain, blood-stained water pooling around my feet, staining my clothes.

The accountant's wife sees me gazing up at the site of Tony's old house. She is a chatty woman and leans over the gate to tell me that cricketeers and local film producers have bought flats in the complex - it's going to be a block of luxury, high-end apartments. She points to a circular contraption emerging from the roof of a structure - "See, there's even going to be a helipad," she exclaims. Her seven year old son, peering shyly from her skirts, asks what use a helipad will be. She tells him that the sort of people who will live there will be rich, and that time means money to them.
He screws up his face - "So how much will a minute be worth? Or an hour?" She pushes him away, goodnaturedly, but he continues to pester her. "How much would a second be worth?"
I can imagine the new inhabitants of the building. The women will clutch designer-name handbags, and the men will drive foreign cars with silver-tinted screens. Will they ever pause to think about those who lived before them here? Will their children, rooting through the landscaped garden, find the little things Tony and I carefully buried, so many years ago - the faded picture of Tony's christening, the broken fragments of a china milkmaid from Ms D'Souza's collection?

I wish I could forget all those things. I wish I wouldn't remember. I wish the dead would stop haunting my dreams. But in my dreams,
my mother laughs, as she so rarely did. "But you can't forget us," she says. "Don't you see? Someone has to remember us."

Yesterday, when the world ended

The end of the world came, yesterday, one cool night in august. I was sitting at the top of Sandler's hill, watching the city spread out below me. It was a beautiful sight at night time, smoke colouring the sky red, the city a twinkling spiral of lights nestled between the hills, like a constellation of stars wrested from the heavens and dropped down on Earth. In the night, you could forget the ugliness - the roads, like ugly scars, that cut through the forests, the stumps of withered, dead trees that lined the sidewalk, the fat, obese, red-faced children who peddled their shiny plastic bicycles around yards lined with plastic bags filled with refuse.

In the night, there was wind too - a gentle breeze that caressed my cheek, like a woman's soft fingers. I think I cried that night. It's tragic, really, that in a city of millions, one can feel so alone, one can know nobody.

As the wind whipped the tears from my cheeks, I heard a scream. It came from the city below - and it seemed so strange, that it was so loud, that it pierced through the cacophony of the city, and rose to blast my ears, as I sat there, high above, on Sandler's hill. Almost immediately, the lights of the city began to flicker on and off. For a moment the city was plunged into darkness. I heard more screams then, moans that sounded eerily beautiful, echoing, rising, one after the other, clamouring towards the heavens.

What was happening? I think I made my first mistake then. In my surprise, I rushed towards my car, and headed down the hill, towards the city. I shouldn't have done that - I sometimes think if I hadn't ...if I hadn't...it might not have happened to me. But there are other times when I am glad that I have not escaped - and I feel it would have been impossible to escape this. If the world is ending, it is only human to want to end with it. There are many who have claimed that our basic instinct is to survive, but if you are the only one left - are you human when there are no other men around like you?

I do not have long to tell this tale. Even as I write, I feel my flesh erupting in boils, I feel my body change, shudders running up and down my skin, my muscles loosening, uncoiling, tentacles pushing through the skin of my arm. Pain, pain - so much of it! I scream, again and again, while the spasms rock my body. They come fast now. It is becoming harder to keep my grip on a pen, harder to keep my mind on the tale that I want to tell. All I want to do is eat.

Horror! What horror! The new things that stalk through the streets of the city, in their faces I see the women and men they once were, I see the remains of beautiful eyes, of noses and lips, now fringed with fronds of protruding flesh. Tentacles snake out from loose, rolling, limbs of flesh. These new men and women do not walk, they slither, like a worm, leaving a glistening trail of excretion behind them. What things they eat! With their tentacles they grab garbage pails and shake their contents into their mouths, large, moist orfices, lines with sharp, barbarous teeth. I see them pluck plastic bags, the rotted remains of dead trees, and eat these things. And yet they continue to move, eating constantly, oozing slime and feces. They do not think, they do not stop. In their eyes, there is madness. Sometimes you hear them speak, and they can say only one word - Eat...Eat...Eat.

When I came down to the city, last night, we were not so far gone. There were still men and women, scared, frightened, staring at the eruptions of flesh on hands, legs and faces. It seemed like a rash then, a terrible rash. But then some changed, and despair wracked the rest, as they saw in the changed ones, the change that would come to all.

In a park at the edge of the city, I met a woman. She had been running, I think, from fear. I first saw her shoes - a pair of delicate, high-heeled sandals, discarded on the grass. And then I heard her screams, punctuated by fits of sobbing. Cautiously, I ventured closer - and then I saw her. She had been wearing a purple cocktail dress and now the seams had split, as her changing flesh bulged out. It was ugly. I winced - she noticed, and started crying again.

"It's gonna get you too!" She shrieked, through her tears. I stared at my hands, as she spoke, and even then I saw the mottled red patches that would erupt in boils, heralding the change that would sweep over me. "I'm sorry," she said, a moment later. Her voice was soft, delicate. "I didn't mean that..."

"But, still," I sighed, replying, "it will happen."

I looked at her again, and noticed diamonds in her ears, a bracelet disappearing into the folds of flesh around her wrist. A wealthy and beautiful woman, I surmised, who had been on her way to a party.

"What's going to happen?" She asked, after a moment. "What do you think-...are we going to get better? Or is it going to get worse?"

I shrugged. There were no answers. "I wonder if the same thing is happening elsewhere," I said. "I suppose it must be."

"It is. It was on the news - just as it started with us....It must be everywhere."

"What is it? A virus?" She shook her head, she didn't know.

A moment went by, then another and another. She wiped her tears. "I was beautiful," she told me. "Before this happened. So beautiful." She gestures with one pudgy finger to a silken clutch bag, by her feet. "Open it."

I opened it - and a lipstick rolled out. There was a driving license, money and a carefully folded newspaper clipping. She told me to unfold it - it was the society page - and in the center was a woman, head to one side. She was smiling at the camera. Her eyes were large, almond-shaped and fringed with black lashes. Brown ringlets cascaded down to her shoulders. Her skin was smooth, dewy, white. She wore a scarlet, off-the shoulder dress that outlined a perfect figure. She was beautiful.

"That's me," the woman-thing in front of me wept. (She had changed, as I read, there were tentacles extending from the remains of her arms and legs, long, floppy things, that writhed on the grass.)

"It wasn't enough," she told me after a while. "That's the sad part. I wanted to be even more beautiful. I wanted surgeries and treatments and things that would make me perfect. Now..."

I never learnt her name. A few minutes later, she changed completely. There was a blind, half-mad look on her face. She was chanting. "Eat...Eat...Eat..." I fled. I couldn't bear to watch.

I sit in an abandoned house now, writing. The people who lived here have disappeared, have changed into those fiendish things that wander through the streets. But I see bits and peices of their lives - there is a picture of a family, husband, wife and two boys. I see Tolstoy on their bookshelf, next to Dr. Seuss.

Outside their window now, I see the remains of a man battle a woman. They push and prod each other with tentacles, with tails, walls of flesh smashing into each other. The air fills with their screams - their brutish screams - and after a few minutes the woman-thing triumphs. She rips of the man's head...I shut the window then. They are eating each other. It has come to this. I push the blinds up once again, and I see another couple. I see blood and gore. Perhaps - perhaps this is not eating - perhaps this is a mating rite. Like the praying mantis and spiders. We have become no better than insects.

What new race will be born? What is this change? Is this the last stage in evolution? Is it a virus that has infected us all? Or is it a divine punishment? How did this happen?

There are many questions. But I do not have the time. Already the change is almost complete, my hunger mounts, my belly is on fire.

It won't be long, now.

Fate

Not so sure if this story really works. But here it is anyway. Comments much appreciated.

We meet, as appointed, in a park in the center of the city. You survey our meeting point with a lifted, quizzical eyebrow. I see your lip curl, from the look on your face I know that you don't think that this dry, brown strip of land, bounded by a low gate and roads on either side, could be called a "park." Buildings rise, blocking out the sun. The few plants that grow are stumpy, withered things, accustomed to noise, pollution and darkness.

But it is not this that I wish you to see. Look - here, this is the spot. Right under that dessicated stump of a tree, that looks like an ogre's fist, branch-like fingers rising from the earth. Bend with me, here. Kneel. Thrust your fingers into this dark barren ground, and dig.

You ask me why we dig. I tell you that when we dig, we will find the answer to the question you asked, a year and a day ago, as we watched the silver hood of a mercedes, glistening with blood, crumple as it smashed into a wall. There was a body, dead in a car, and another one, sprawled on the ground, innards spilling onto the tarred road.

You had shook your head, as you snapped a picture ("For tommorow's newspaper" -you told the policemen who pushed you away).

I watched you walk to the other side of the road. You had bought a cigarette from the tiny kiosk on the corner of the pavement. As you lit your cigarette, you exchanged words with the kiosk-owner. You both wondered at fate, at tragedy. You had asked, as you watched those young, fragile bodies borne away - strangely, bodies of the same age, faces, that despite the blood and the broken bones, looked distrubingly alike - you had asked whether a man's fate was ordained from the moment he was born, or whether it was something he made?

The kiosk-owner had shaken his head. He didn't know. You didn't notice me, standing in the shadows, by your shoulder, listening to you speak. Even then, I knew the answer to your question. I have dogged your steps for a year, even as you forgot the sight of those crumpled, bloody bodies, the answer on my lips. For a year and a day, I have waited to tell you.

And the time is now.

Yes, you've found it. That piece of plastic, torn - and that condom, dirty and brown, after twenty-five years in the ground. It was this packet, this condom, that Ashok Lal carried in his pocket, as he drove past this park.

I see you frown. The name rings a bell. Who is Ashok Lal, you ponder, and why is he important?

Step with me into the past. The years swirl past us, and now we stand on green, verdant grass. The ogre's fist is hung with leaves. The park is bigger and wider. Couples stroll. The sun is begginning to set, and the couples start to disappear into quiet, dark corners.

Walk with me to the edge. You see that woman? The one in the pink sari, with matching pink lipstick? Look at her closely. Memorise her face, her shape, her smile.

Careful, don't step on that bush. See, it shakes, in the twilight. There's a couple on the other side. You can hear them groan.

Aah. Here he comes. Ashok Lal, in his red maruti 800, with a sputtering engine. He doesn't look like much, in his faded trousers and white-grey shirt. I see you start, as you stand next to me.

Yes, you've recognized him. He has changed his name, to the far more numeralogically correct and astrologically favoured Kumar Ashok Lal Singh. He looks different in your time - the years have fattened him, lined his face, thinned his hair - the years have turned this diminutive looking young man into the stout, fat, khadi-garbed politician, with a following of thousands.

But right now, as he, steers his maruti 800 onto the bylanes of the park, he's plain Ashok Lal, a sales manager in a tiny export office. But his day will come. His cunning, miserly mind will help him plot his rise. His hard work will see him promoted. Eventually, he will seduce his boss's ugly, impressionable daughter. He will marry her and inherit his boss's small business. Under his leadership, the business will grow, lakhs will turn to crores, as he seeks shadier, illegal means of making money. His belly begins to grow, keeping pace with his bank balance. When you finally see him, for the first time, he has completed his metamorphosis and turned into the politician you hate and revile, whose perfidy you seek to expose.

But now, watch him as he slows his maruti 800. Yes, he's looking at the women clustered by the pavement. They are all whores. He stops by the one in the pink sari. Her name is Rani - but that's not the name she was born with.

Ashok Lal stops his car. He gestures to Rani to get in. She shakes her head - only yesterday, her friend, Pinky, suffered a bad experience with a client in a car. Rani is wary today. Ashok Lal parks, puts on a steering-lock, and rolls up his window. When he's locked the car, Rani and he walk over to the tree, the one shaped like an ogre's fist.

Yes, you lean forward, eager. You can here them whisper, fiercely. You wonder what they talk about. Nothing much, I can tell you. Ashok is trying to beat down Rani's price.

After some haggling, they disappear into the shadows by the tree.

I know you want to hear, you want to see. But the darkness is too thick, and the air too heavy with sound.

No matter. I will tell you what happens. Ashok lifts Rani's pick sari. He presses her against the rough tree trunk. As his breathing quickens, he reaches for the condom in his pocket and tears open the packet. But, in the darkness, Rani moves and the packet falls from Ashok's grasp. He curses. Rani curses. For a few moments they grope the ground, to no avail. They fail to find the packet, lying on the other side, tucked under a root - the same packet that you dug up.

Rani tries to move away, but Ashok has grabbed her shoulder. Rani shrugs. It's happened before. Why forgo good money, she thinks?

You can guess what happens next.

A moment later it's over. Rani holds her hands out for the money. Ashok refuses to give her the price agreed upon. They stand there, arguing, even as Ashok's sperm swims up Rani's womb.

Rani's voice rises. A moment later, Ashok is surrounded by a bevy of whores. They outnumber him. He looks around - only clients and whores, there's not a policeman in sight. He scowls and hands over the money. He walks away, hands thrust in his pocket, muttering curses under his breath.

Rani tucks the note into her pink blouse. She straightens her sari and returns to the pavement. Ashok is the only first of three clients that night.

By the time dawn comes, she's exhausted. She's no longer in the park - that's her 'freelance' work - she's in Number 8, G B Road, a brothel. By the end of the night,
she's forgotten Ashok and their altercation, even though his sperm has fused with an ovule, and a fertilized ovum now drifts through her fallopian tubes, towards her uterus. She forgets to take her 'medicine' - the nasty concotion Ronny, her pimp, has given her to take immediately after unprotected sex, to prevent pregnancies.

The next day she's in bed with a cold. Ronny, although disgruntled, knows a sick whore won't have any takers. She spends the rest of the week in bed. The ovum takes hold in her uterus and, by the end of the week, a tiny heart has begun to take shape.

By the time she realizes she's pregnant, two months have gone by. Three months go by before she works up the nerve to tell Ronny. She knows he will be upset. A friend suggests she tries an concotion, made for her by the neighbourhood quack, that will definately induce a miscarriage. Rani tries it. She gets a bad stomachache and bleeds. That's the end of the matter - she thinks.

But it isn't it. The child inside her clings to life. It's only a month later that she realizes that she hasn't miscarried. There's a definfate bulge around her midriff. Ronny notices. He beats her that night, but not hard enough to dislodge that little life growing inside her.

See? Can you see? You can't. But I can see that heart, beating inside her, that tiny head, those veins and bones and muscles forming. I can see Rani's smile on that tiny face, I can see Ashok's clever, cunning eyes.

Ronny tells her that he will take her the following morning to Koki Bai, the woman who lives on the next street, who performs all manner of services for the residents of GB Road, services that involve, according to rumour, twisting one, sharpened end of clothes-hanger into one's orfices.

Rani is terrified of this, terrified by the memory of Silky, the nepalese girl with almond-shaped eyes, who bled for five days after this procedure was done to her, then disappeared. Ronny said she had gone home - but what Pinky and the others tell Rani is that Silky died.

Rani packs her clothes that night, and when Ronny is asleep, drunk, the other whores sneak her out.

Rani has some money, from her 'freelance' clients like Ashok Lal, stored away. For a few months, she shelters with Aunty Lilavati, a former prositute at Ronny's, who has now gone solo. Despite Lilavati's advice, Rani refuses to abort. The clothes hanger, with it's twisted, pointed end, haunts her dreams. She is scared of dying, scared of pain.

But two months later, during her seventh month, her labour pains start. She's taken to the hospital. Just as she's wheeled into the delivery room, another couple enter the hospital.

You stiffen beside me. You recognize the man leading the pregnant, sad-eyed woman inside the hospital. Your breathing quickens. I hear your heart beat a tattoo in your chest.

You watch him hustle her, tenderly, into a wheel chair. You watch her grunt, with pain, tears coursing down her face. You watch her in the delivery room, as she finally squeezes out a frail, tiny scrap of flesh. A baby, two months premature. A nurse rushes with an incubator. You watch the baby, gently lowered in. You watch as the sad woman, sweaty, tendrils of damp hair plastered to her forehead, cries. She turns her head to watch as the baby is wheeled away.

Come, tear yourself away. Come with me, to the ward next door - where Rani is, her feet splayed, a head emerging between her thighs. A shriek, and the baby slips out. It's two months early - but it's still a lusty, bawling thing. Rani sinks back onto the pillows, weakily. Her eyes close, as the baby cries.

A moment later, just as the nurse exits the ward, baby in hand, she is dead.

It's midnight now. The nurse on duty, watching over the premature infants, is the one who assisted at Rani's labour. She frequently glances at the the baby in the right crib, a weak, fragile child - the one born to the sad-eyed woman.

A few minutes past midnight, and the machines connected to the right crib begin to beep. The nurse darts across the room, leans over the crib. There is nothing she can do. She sighs.

It's then that she looks at the baby in the adjacent crib. Rani's baby.

A thought flickers.

Should she? She resists, for a moment.

She bites her lip and glances at the crucifix hanging over the door. It could be a fault of the flickering tube light - but it seems, in that moment, that the body nailed to the cross, moves, the head lifts, and the eyes stare at her directly.

She jumps back, startled. She looks, a second later, at the crucifix. It is still now, a piece of dead wood. Did she imagine the movement?

But her mind is made up. Her arms extend of their own accord. It is almost as if she in a dream, or a hallucination. In a minute her work is done - the infants have been exchanged, and Rani's child has taken the place of the dead baby.

It's then that nurse hears a gasp. Startled, she turns around - to look into the bespectacled, myopic eyes of the sad woman's husband, father of the dead child.

The minutes tick by. Finally, the man turns, to look at the squealing infant who has taken his son's place.

He nods - curt, brisk - and walks away.

The nurse exhales, finally, relieved.

I feel you tremble beside me. You pull away. Your eyes are filled with pain, with hate. You tell me I lie, you accuse me of distorting the truth.

That's what they all say. But I look at you, and in the pain in you face, I see doubt.

Come, take my hand.

The walls shake, the lights flicker, the ground moves. The years tumble past, as we travel through time. Finally, the movement stops. The walls have been repainted, the floor is smooth marble instead of rough concrete. It is day now, people scurry past. The cries of new born infants and women in labour fill the air.

We walk past rows of infants, and ascend the stairs. The floor above is filled with the scent of death, filled with wasting faces, inert bodies, beeping machines and IV drips.

You beg me to stop. You grip the bannister with one hand. You tell me that you can't continue. You try to wrench your hand from my grasp.You plead with me to desist.

I can't. You must know. I pull you to your feet, pull you past the dying. We stop in front of a door. I push it open.

Inside, your father lies on the hospital bed, thin and shrunken. His words are a whisper, his breath a rattle in his chest.

I see the tears stream down your face, hear sobs choke your throat. You stumble. I hold out my hand and you grab it. You turn your face to mine - and I see it, tear-stained, stricken.

You see yourself, sitting by his bedside. He beckons you to come closer. His breath is hot on your cheek, as you lean over him.

He speaks, but you can't make out the words. He moves back, stares in your face. The machines start to beep. He still stares at you. It's only when the nurse rushes in, followed by the doctor, that you realize that he has died.

But even then, as you stumble out the room, tears blinding you, you feel his eyes following you, his glance burning your back.

What was he trying to say?

This gift I give you - his answer. His shade comes to us, stepping forth from the shadows, wearing his gaunt, withered face. He raises his bony hands to touch you. He speaks now, the words have lain waiting on his tongue for years, the words that he feared to speak, the words that came too late. He tells you now that you are not the son who was born to him.

For years he believed, that this knowledge would not alter your fate. He loved you. Did the truth matter? But now, in the presence of death, he realizes differently. He realizes that you can not escape fate, that it will pursue you to your end. The fabric of his life is spread out before him, the things unknown and invisible revealed. He knows a man's life is shaped by his birth, and that your fate is impossible to escape. There is a neatness, a pattern, a shape to it. By with-holding the truth, he has condemned you to your fate.

Come, take my hand. Time flashes past. We return to the park, a few moments before we our appointment.

Look up. The sun dazzles your eyes. But do you see those figures, meeting on the rooftop of that building? Look closely. You see yourself and you see Kumar Ashok's henchman, Chand Lal.

And there - in the distance, do you see Kumar Ashok? His bulk seems to block the sun, throws a black, menacing shadow. His face is impassive, although sweat drips down his forehead. There is venom in the glances he darts at you, there is pure hate in the look you return.

He hates the pieces you've been writing about him. The ones that accuse him of corruption, of nepotism, of bribing the electorate. The pieces published in Indian newspapers and foreign publications. He pulled strings - he's got you removed from your job. He thought that would silence you. But it hasn't.

You revile him. He has come to symbolize everything you fight against. The way the 'system' works in favor of the plutocrat, victimizes the down-trodden and enriches the already rich.

But it's more than that. In fighting him, you feel you are avenging the ignominious death of your father - an honest man, a small man, who lost his job as an engineer in a factory due to Kumar Ashok's wheeling and dealings. You fought for him, you used your pen and your camera to evoke his voice, to capture his despair - the despair of the individual, lost in the larger scheme of things, of a small life destroyed by the whims of conglomerates and Big Business.

And yet, you both fail to see the similarities - the clever, cunning eyes. The persistence that characterizes every endeavor. The ambitious, ruthless streak. Father and son. It's genetics that causes you to confront each other, to battle for supremacy, that has equipped you with the skills to fight each other. But you don't know that.

And it's fate that has brought you here.

Chand Lal opens a briefcase. It is filled with wads of money. He pushes it toward you.

You take it. You turn, to the parapet, and shake the briefcase. The wads of cash fall out. You see an urchin, far down below, jump up as he tries to catch a note, as it flies past, borne by the wind.

Kumar Ashok grabs you from behind. He is furious. His veins bulge, his face is contorted in a grimace.

Your eyes are bloodshot. You're at the end of tether. You wrestle him to the parapet.

For a moment, you are lost from sight. Next to me, you squirm, impatient, eager to discover what happens next.

You pull out a gun.

The sound of a gunshot rips through the air.

A moment later, a body falls from the rooftop, past eleven storeys, and lands, face down, in the park below, by a tree shaped like a fist.

Come, come with me. Help me turn this body over.

We turn over the body. Blood stains your hands and mine.

You start. You scream.

It's your face, squashed and broken, staring back at you.

You hit me. You scratch at my hands with your nails. You curse me.

I'm used to this. Your hands, your curses - they have no affect on me. Every one screams, at this point. Everyone curses.

Eleven stories above us, Chand Lal checks for a pulse on Kumar Ashok, and tries to staunch the blood flowing from the wound in his chest. Some one else calls for an ambulance. It's futile, I can tell you. I have an appointment with Kumar Ashok in a few moments.

You stare at your body on the ground, and then at the tree shaped like a fist, a few steps away from us. You finger the broken, brown packet in your pocket. You see the beginning and the end of your life, a few steps away from each other.

You asked, a year and a day ago, whether fate is ordained.

You have your answer.

Fate is cruel, you say. I call it a sense of humor.

You ask me who I am.

You don't need to ask. You've guessed - haven't you?

Luck

Arjun is a lucky boy, his father's chauffeur tells him every morning as they drive through Bangalore in a shiny new honda accord. Arjun looks out the window, as the chauffeur speaks, at the slums and the houses made of corrugated metal sheets that line the streets to his school.

He wishes the chauffeur would talk of something else.

At a red light, the car comes to a halt. A young boy, in a tattered shirt and a grimy pair of shorts, rests his grubby palms against the car window as he tries to peer in. The chauffeur rolls down his window and shouts at the urchin. The boy, smiling cheekily, disappears..

Arjun sighs, a little wistfully, as he stares at the handprint, smeared across the tinted glass.

At school, Arjun is slow getting to class. His backpack, filled with heavy textbooks, weighs him down as he climbs three flights of stairs. Arjun heaves a heavy sigh as he reaches his classroom. He doesn't like school much.

Arjun is diligent, his teachers inform his parents at the PTA meeting the next day, but not brilliant. No, not at all.

After the meeting, Arjun can't bear to look at the grim expression on his father's face. No one talks in the car, as they return home. In the spacious, four bedroom penthouse they live in, Arjun's father quickly hustles his mother into the master bedroom. The door is firmly shut. Soon, Arjun hears voices rising in argument. He presses a ear to the door.
"It's not his fault," he hears his mother saying. "You heard the teachers. He tries hard. He's diligent."
"It's not good enough," his father retorts. "I've given him the best education money can buy. The best of everything. If he needs tutors, we'll get him some."
"Ashok," Arjun's mother says gently. "I think..."
"He doesn't get it from my side of the family." Arjun's father speaks scathingly. "We're all brilliant. In fact, he probably gets it from your side of the family. That good-for-nothing brother of yours..."

Arjun knows that this is the time to step back from the door, to quickly rush into the living room. He opens a textbook just in time. A second later, the bedroom door bangs - his mothers strides out, tears streaming down her face.
Arjun can't help feeling guilty. He wishes he was smarter, like Orijit or Ashish or Prerna, who always top the class. Perhaps then his mother and father wouldn't fight so much.

"Eat up," his mother says later, at dinner. It's just the two of them tonight - it often is, as his father comes home late. Arjun looks at her face. The tears have disappeared, but the skin around her eyes is still puffy and swollen. She notices him looking and flinches. "Eat," she repeats, her tone rising.
"I'm not hungry," Arjun says, pushing the food around the plate - a roti roll filled with spinach sabji, some dal on the side. But Arjun has lost his appetite, after the PTA meeting and the argument. He is tired. He doesn't want to eat.
"Eat now," his mother says, a third time. When he looks glumly at her, her expression changes. "You better eat. Think of all the children who starve while you have all this on your plate. All those children in Africa- you've seen them, skinny, starving, just skin and bones. You're lucky to have food to eat!"
Arjun forces himself to finish eating, thinking of the starving Africans. He wants to tell his mother that he has seen children like that here in India, at the traffic lights - little girls and boys, with swollen bellies and thin faces. Hasn't she seen them? - he wants to ask. But he doesn't.

At night, he dreams of the Africans, children with enormous eyes, and stick-like limbs, women with long, drooping breasts that touch their navels. The women and children surround him in a circle. The sun is hot, relentless. Arjun feels frightened. There is menace in their eyes.
"Eat," they say, voices melding in a rhythmic chant, "Eat. Eat. Eat."
He wakes up screaming. His mother soon rushes into the bedroom, in a clinging nightgown, followed by his father. His mother clucks and fusses over him. His father procures a glass of hot milk.

Arjun falls back asleep soon, and dreams pleasant dreams.

The next day, Arjun wakes up early in the morning. It's saturday, and the chauffeur drives him first to math tuitions, and then to a science class. It's lunchtime when Arjun returns home. After lunch, his father promises him a treat.
"What would you like to do? Would you like to go for a movie?" His father bends down to ask. " Or for a swim?"
"The circus, please," Arjun replies, his face lighting up. He has seen the posters plastered all across town. Russian Circus, only for a month. Four shows daily. Acrobats, Disappearing Girls, Tightrope walkers, Bearded Women, and Lions! Entry Free for Children below Five. The posters are colourful, featuring an acrobat in mid-air, a large bear and a dwarf dressed in a sequined red suit.
"The circus!" His father repeats, astounded.
"Wouldn't you rather go to the movies?" His mother asks. "There are some good movies. Ice Age, Madagascar...lots of others as well." She looks for the movies page in the newspaper. "Wouldn't that be more fun?"
His father nods, looking relieved.
Arjun, suppressing his disappointment, agrees to go see the new Ice age film. As relief spreads his father's face, Arjun wonders why the circus is such a bad thing.
On the way to the cinema, they drive past the circus. Arjun notices the long line in front of ticket booth. He stares, in rapture, at the ferris wheel in the background, cotton candy machines, parents and children strolling across the circus grounds.
"Aren't you happy we didn't go?" His father turns, in the front seat, to look at Arjun in the back. "Absolutely garish! It's a real low-class kind of circus," he whispers to his wife, when Arjun fails to respond. "Not appropriate at all." His wife nods in agreement.
But Arjun isn't listening, he's transfixed by the sight of a man, in a faded blue suit and tophat, on a pair of stilts.

In the evening, his parents leave early for a dinner party. His mother breezes into the dining room, as he eats dinner, to say goodbye. She looks stunning in a silk saree, a diamond bracelet fastened on her wrist. She kisses him, carefully, so that she doesn't smear her lipstick. Arjun clings to her, breathing in the smell of her perfume.
When they leave, he stares outside, at the children playing in the park opposite. He wants to play, but doesn't ask. He knows what the cook, who has stayed back tonight to mind him, will say. "Chi!," she will scream. "You can't play with dirty children."
He continues to watch, even as the sun sets and the street lights flicker on. In the distance, he makes out the shimmering surface of a large puddle, a tiny lake, formed by the rains in a vacant site further down the street. His excitement quickens as he notices a tiny figure splash in the water. He grabs his expensive, new binoculars and notices that the figure is a little boy, his age, completely naked.
A minute later, something else attracts his attention. A fat woman, in a nylon sari, stands at the edge of the small lake. She wades in, splashing water and grabs the boy, who tries to wriggle out of her grasp. She thrashes him soundly, as she herds him home. Arjun winces, but he can't help notice the expression of glee on the little boy's face, despite the beating.
For a moment, Arjun wishes he was the little boy. Then, he remembers that he is lucky, as his father, mother, the chauffeur and the cook constantly remind him, luckier than that little, dirty boy. He should be thankful, he tells himself, to be so lucky.

But his luck is a heavy weight that bears down on his shoulders; a noose that coils tightly around his neck.

Stories About My Family 1: My great grand aunt

My great-grand Aunt Sita's name is written, in an elegant, firm hand on the fly-leaf of each of the gold-embossed, leather-bound volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica that occupy the lower two shelves of the book shelf in my grandmother's living room. Underneath Sita's name, I can decipher the remains of another name, carefully, precisely, scratched out. When I was young this perturbed me. Whose name was it? Why was it scratched out? Who had scratched it out?

There's a picture of my great grand aunt, tucked away in a moth-eaten photograph album in my grandmother's antique side-board. At a first glance, Sita doesn't deserve notice. She is featureless, indistinct - could be any one of the hordes of blank-faced young girls, wearing silk saris with elaborate folds, hair dressed in a demure, boring style that was popular in the early decades of the last century. But then, with a closer look, one can distinguish a pair of distant, dreamy eyes. Sly eyes, that belie the innocence of that otherwise unremarkable face.

Sita was also brilliant, which was a difficult thing to be for a girl born in 1910. Her birth was good. Her parents, themselves, were nothing more than middle-class, but they counted amongst their blood relations members of the most influential patrician families. They enjoyed a comfortable, respected place in society. A middling place, a suffocating place for Sita, who was brought up amidst a tribe of other girl-children (there were no boys), gently reared and bred for marriage. But even then, that seemed a state Sita was ill-suited for. No one could deny there was something - something a little different about Sita. Was it the strange dreamy eyes? The gawky gestures? The glasses perched on the end of her snub nose? Her mother, my grandmother tells me, despaired. Her fortune wasn't good enough to attract suitors, and her studious, dreamy air repellent to those who wanted a housekeeper for a wife.

When a suitor finally came calling, Sita, for the first time, asserted herself.

He was an ambitious young man, from an impoverished family, who hankered after a post in the civil services and thought that marriage to Sita, a daughter of a respectable but well-connected family, would improve his chances.

The conclusion was already foregone, by her mother. There were two other daughters to dispose off, a heavy burden in that time. And Sita's father, a tired, mild-mannered man, lacked the strength and will to oppose his domineering wife, and often disappeared into his well-stocked library.

I hold one of his books in my hands. It is over a hundred years old, published in 1908, but the binding is still in good condition. It has a red cloth cover, and I dimly discern the book's title, in faded gold letters. The second Volume of Plutarch's lives. There are holes in the pages - tiny black holes. I see my great-great grand father's name inscribed in slanting, cursive handwriting on the fly leaf in watery blue ink. I have other books of his - a copy of Cicero's orations - with curious pencil markings in the text - words heavily underlined, a few annotations in the margins - and a threadbare set of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A curious man my grandfather must have been - a timid Indian tax official, a strictly orthodox brahmin, with a taste for Roman history and oratory.

These same books adorned the shelves of my great-grand father's sanctum sanctorum, his library. It was to this same room, that his wife descended, to demand that her husband assert his paternal rights over his recalcitrant daughter.

And so, Sita was summoned.

Under the sternorian scrutiny of her mother, and the weak, bespectacled gaze of her father - Sita blurted out "I want to study."

Her mother stared, goggled. Who ever heard of a girl studying? Studying? What use was this to a girl? No! It was her duty to get married!

But it was the myopic tax official who turned to his wife and, in his mild fashion, inquired "Why not?"

This isn't the end of the story. It's quite long, so I refrained from posting it all here. If you'd like to read the rest of it, let me know, and I will send it to you.

The Monster

There used to be a monster under my bed. He was made up of pieces of nightmares, dreams and parts of old toys. He was a strange and special creature, his veins were filled with magic, not blood.

He told me that once, a beautiful djinni princess, who lives in the palace of clouds, pricked her little finger with a needle. A drop of blood trickled down her finger, dropped down through the light, fluffy clouds and spilled onto the peak of a snow-topped mountain. There, buried under snow and ice, the drop of djinni blood froze into a single, sparkling ruby. That ruby was the right eye of the monster under my bed - it's his special, magic eye, the eye through which he sees the shape of a person's thoughts.

"I know what you're thinking," he whispered to me one night, as I lay in my bed, warm under my thick comforter.

I was a little scared, I was always afraid when I lay in bed alone at night. At night, it was only me and the monster, and he scared me.

"You needn't be scared, really," the monster told me. "I can't come out from under the bed. So you're safe from me."

I was curious now. "Why can't you come out?"

"I can't come out," he said shamefacedly, "because I can't do much. I can't eat you or do anything nasty to you. I can only live under your bed." The monster coughed, then. It was a dry, wheezing cough, and it was then that I realized he had a bad cold.

"Do you have a cold?" I asked him.

"Yes. It's cold at night, and it isn't very warm under your bed, especially with the windows open." He sneezed again.

The next night, I closed the windows before I went to bed. It was stuffy in my little room, and I threw off the bedcovers, as I became hot in my bed. I was about to climb out of bed and open the windows, when the monster spoke.

"Thank you for closing the windows," he whispered to me. "That was very kind of you. And thank you for the scarf you left under your bed. It's really handy, now that I have a sorethroat."

I tossed and turned, I couldn't go to sleep. "Can you tell me a story?" I asked the monster.

So the monster began to tell me a story.

He told me how the moon's youngest daughter, the brightest star, fell sick. She twinkled less and less, fading as the nights wore by. One night, as the moon rose into the sky, she was saddened to find a patch of darkness where her youngest daughter had sparkled. A single tear dripped down the moon's pockmarked face and fell down to earth.

An egyptian queen caught it, as it fell to earth, and she made it into a pendant and fixed onto a gold necklace. She wore it always, and for every day she wore it, she became more beautiful than the day before. Many wars were fought, many kingdoms fell because of her beauty. But one day, as she swam in the waters of the Nile, the clasp of the necklace came undone. The pendant swirled away in the waters, and even as the queen tried to reach for it, it floated out off her grasp and was borne away by the current. The pendant drifted down the river, until it was swallowed by a fish. A fisherman caught the fish, and slicing it open, found the tear. It was a beautiful, sparkling thing and he gave it to his baby daughter to play with.

"And then what happened?" I asked. "What happened to the tear?"

"I found the tear," the monster told me, "under the fisherman's daughter's bed, as she slept. Now I wear it on a chain wrapped around my heart."

I was impressed. "I want to see the tear," I said.

"Shush," the monster whispered, "not now. Morning is coming, and I'll go away soon. Perhaps tommorow or the night after."

The next night I asked him - "Where did you live before, before me?"

"I've always lived here, under your bed," he said. "Even before you were a boy, I've been here, waiting for you. This is my home, my only home."

"Can I see you?"

"But I could eat you, or scare you, or turn you into a radish," the monster argued. He started to cough, his cold still hadn't gone away. "Aren't you scared of that?"

But I wasn't. "I'm going away," I told him. "I'm going to visit my grandparents in another city."

"Will you be gone for long?" The monster sounded worried.

"Just for a short while. I'll be back."

"Will you get me something?" He asked. "Just a bottle of cough syrup, because my cold doesn't seem to go away."

I nodded, and pulled my comforter closer, and closed my eyes.

The monster sighed, a tired sigh. "Oh, all right," he said, just a bit grumpy. "You might as well see me before you go. But you'll have to come down here, under the bed. I can't come up there."

So, I leapt off my bed, rolled onto my belly, and like a snake, slithered under my bed.

The monster was there, under the bed. He was made of darkness and shadow, dreams and nightmares and broken things. I looked at his right eye - the ruby eye, from the blood of his djinni. And his left eye, taken from my oldest teddy bear, given to me on my first birthday. His heart was made from cotton candy, and his lips were fashioned from the first kiss my mother had given me. His right hand was the broken arm of a tin solider I used to play with, and on his left wrist he wore my old wristwatch. And around his heart, on a golden chain, I saw the moon's tear.

As I watched him, a tear rolled from the corner of his teddy-bear eye, down his cheek.

"Why do you cry?" I wanted to know.

"Because you will grow up and forget me...and I will disappear."

"No!" I cried, "I'll never forget you."

"But you will still grow up," the monster said, sadly, "and I will still disappear."

The next day I went to spend the summer with my grandparents. At night, I peeked under my bed, but there was no monster waiting for me. I missed the monster, but many things happened that summer, I grew older, I had many adventures, I learnt many things. A week grew into two weeks, and finally into a month, before I returned home. When I came back, I could hardly wait for it to be night, so that I could tell the monster about all the things that happened to me.

"Monster!" I said, "I have so much to tell you. I missed you very much! Did you miss me?"

There was no answer.

"Look!" I said to the monster, "I brought you a bottle of cough syrup. It will make you feel better."

But still the monster didn't say anything.

I pulled off the bedcovers and raced under the bed.

"Monster, monster!" I cried out, worried now. "Where are you?"

But there was only darkness under my bed.