The Light of Dead Fires Read online

  Little Lantern, Deep Darkness

  - A Novel

  by

  Sakiv Koch

  Book I

  The Light of Dead Fires

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Vikas Kochhar

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright ©️2019 by Vikas Kochhar

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author/publisher.

  The author/publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the author/publisher.

  Book Cover Design: MiblArt Design

  www.sakivkoch.com

  Dedication

  To my family. Your patience and support are my inextinguishable lanterns.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: The Death Defiers

  2: A Beast of Burden

  3: The Thieving Rat

  4: The Abandonment of Gods

  5: A Venomous Welcome

  6: Inside the Cobras’ Nest

  7: The Wolf Returns

  8: The Death of a Dimension

  9: Thorns and Bones

  10: Footsteps on Water

  11: The Curtain Falls

  12: A New Birth

  13: The Wish-granting Woman

  14: The Mysterious Sacrifice

  15: The Definition of a Home

  16: The Stranger in the Mirror

  17: Words Versus Deeds

  About Book II: THE GULLIBILITY OF DEMONS

  Excerpt: The Gullibility of Demons

  Chapter 1: The Hare and the Wolves

  Chapter 2: Love and Loathing

  Notes of Gratitude

  1: The Death Defiers

  Mid-altitude Himalayas, 1934

  A flame burst into life inside the glass womb of the fugitive’s lantern. The advancing swarms of darkness retreated to wait at the outer edge of the newborn, unsteady light. The lamp-bearer stood alone in the clearing that housed the remains of the wobbly wooden fence.

  The span of the fence was no more than six feet in length and three in height. The larger part of its body had vanished decades, perhaps centuries ago. What remained of it terminated at one bank of a mountain stream. There was no feature on either side of the fence to indicate as to what it might have fenced in once.

  The fugitive unwisely leant a considerable proportion of his weight upon this undependable structure. His lantern swayed gently in his hand, squeaking cheerily on its mildly-rusted hinges, bathing his figure in its yellow-orange glow.

  The fugitive’s face, though haggard and contorted with an old and deep pain, was that of a young boy. His cheeks and chin were hairless, but a long, bushy moustache obscured a part of his mouth. A dirtied bandage was wound around his head. His clothes were several sizes too large for his painfully thin frame, giving the impression of a scarecrow dressed in an obese man’s garments.

  A riot of colour and birdsong raged through the twilit skies as hundreds of thousands of birds flew back to their nests. Millions of crickets in the underbrush made their own music to join the avian chorus. Numberless leaves of the jungle’s trees rustled in a pleasant, breezy tune. The stream flowing through the clearing burbled soothingly.

  Not wanting to be left out of nature’s musical ensemble, the fugitive tilted his head back and began to sing. His voice was melodious, but weak and breathless, as though he were suffering from a prolonged bout of illness.

  Light, O little light

  Shine with all your might,

  For you have to fight

  the terror of the night

  by glowing strong and bright,

  glowing strong and —

  An explosive sneeze interrupted his song, shaking him powerfully enough to make the fence groan in protest. The lantern also jerked, giving rise to a cataclysm of shadows. The boy’s moustache came free from his face and floated to the ground like a bloated feather. He bent down with a groan, retrieved it, and stuck it back on his face.

  He opened his mouth to resume his song, but mayhem broke out overhead at that moment. A Golden Eagle ambushed a flock of parrots. Squawks and eerie screams rent the air. A shower of feathers rained down upon the boy and then something fell out of the sky with a piteous screech.

  The boy put his lantern on the ground and ran towards the fallen warrior. He moved with a heavy limp, moaning as he went. A parrot lay panting in the wild grass, so gravely injured it didn’t even fidget as the boy picked it up. A part of its left wing had been torn off, exposing a jagged wound in its flesh beneath the bloodied wing.

  The boy placed the bird in the crook of his left arm, next to his heart, and went back to the fence. He sat down cross-legged besides his lantern and tried to comfort the agonised, terrorised creature.

  “Keep heart, you brave little thing,” the boy crooned. “You defied sure death up there. You may survive, if you just keep heart. Who knows — you may even take wing again one day.”

  His free hand unconsciously crept first to the wounds in his right leg and then to his head injury.

  “I know what I am talking about. I, too, have been ravaged by beasts and monsters. Had you been a city bird, you would surely have heard about me — Smast, the dreaded murderer! I am supposed to have kidnapped a powerful princess and killed a legendary policeman. I would have been torn to pieces in the prison where they caged me, but I managed to escape. Those monsters are hunting me, hungering for me, getting closer ...”

  The parrot’s little body convulsed and then it lay still. The lantern’s flame diminished gradually until it winked out of existence. A shroud of deep darkness descended upon the clearing.

  2: A Beast of Burden

  Smastrus Anand was born in the year nineteen hundred and twenty, in a town a day’s journey by bus from the majestic Himalayas. His birth had caused happiness to exactly one person in the world: his mother. She was the sole breadwinner of their little family. The home she had literally built with her hands — a small hut with a thatched-straw roof— would remain dark even at noontime on sunny days. On rainy nights, it shed tears of helplessness onto its shivering inhabitants.

  Their hut was always either sweltering hot or freezing, depending upon the season. It had changed from the time of his earliest memory to the time he was dragged out of it by a posse of constables corrupt to the soles of their boots. It had not changed for the better. Things associated with him generally shunned betterment, improvement and development.

  His body, for instance, wasn’t developing like those of the other fourteen-year-olds he knew. Although he was tall, he was painfully underweight. He was thankful that he wasn’t overdeveloping like Pintu Anand — Pintu had a tendency to grow in all directions except for the vertical. His head was disproportionately small and his eyes bulged out so much they appeared keen to pop out and go see the world on their own.

  Pintu attributed Smast’s thinness and foolishness to Smast’s having no money, no home, no cows and no father. “Look here, Rat,” Pintu would command Smast, “look at these paranthas with stuffed cottage cheese, these gigantic laddoos, these mangoes and this jug of milk.”

  Smast would look obediently at the mountains of food heaped upon the bed of Pintu’s pony-cart. On these occasions, Smast’s stomach made more sounds in a minute than his tongue formed in a month. The hungry boy’s gaze would hover over so much temptation and in spite of his
best efforts, his mouth would begin to water of its own accord. He would try to look away, but Pintu closely watched him watching the delicacies. “Don’t look away, Rat!” Pintu would reiterate his command, and it was dangerous to make Pintu repeat things.

  Pintu would put the first laddoo in his cavernous mouth, follow it up with a cheese parantha, the parantha with a slice of mango, the slice of mango with a glass of flavoured milk, and the milk with a laddoo again. He would dispatch one ‘circle of goodies’ with a belief-defying speed. The goodies would vary, encompassing a wide range of indigenous and foreign dishes, sweets and fruits, but his speed remained more or less constant. It is no wonder you are becoming a circle yourself, Smast would think, the thought a weak consolation for all the torture the prosperous boy inflicted upon him through these feeding frenzies.

  “You know why you are so stick-thin and so dumb?” Pintu would ask with the last of the laddoos still in his mouth.

  “Because I don’t get to eat one millionth of the things that you do, Sir Pintu,” Smast would say, painfully tutored to address the fat boy at all times with his self-conferred title of ‘sir’.

  Sir Pintu: “And that is because —”

  Smast: “—because I don’t deserve to have any good things.”

  Sir Pintu: “And that is because—”

  Smast: “—because I have no money, no home, no cows, and no father.”

  Although Smast’s mother, Nina, consistently put in back-breaking labour day in, day out, her earnings were steadily decreasing with the passage of time. Her employers, Pintu’s parents, took special care to keep her as hard up, as destitute as they could without killing her altogether. Smast had begged her a hundred thousand times to allow him to start working, too, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Not until you are sixteen or I am dead, whichever takes place earlier,” she would say stubbornly, without giving him the opportunity to reason things out with her. It wasn’t as though his working would disrupt his school, for the simple reason that he didn’t go to any school. Nina taught him at home and Smast was more proficient at algebra, geography, history and literature than most boys his age who had attended regular schools from the correct early age. More of Nina’s paltry income went into procuring the second-, third-, sometimes tenth-hand materials for Smast’s education than into buying food and clothes for him.

  He had earned a small pittance once. Nina had reluctantly allowed the town sculptor to cast a mould of his face. “Your boy has classical features,” the sculptor had told Nina, handing over a single paisa to her, while Smast’s face was buried under a thick smattering of some substance that hardened uncomfortably over his skin. “My sculpture of the boy Krishna at the temple will have Smast’s face. What an everlasting joy it will give you!”

  The sculptor had come several times again in the subsequent years, but Nina had refused him entry into their home, even when he offered to pay double the fees he had paid on the first occasion.

  Smast had been careful to give no hint of the existence of this reservoir of learning to Pintu. He instinctively knew that the fat boy, who could gobble up rocks and assimilate them into his system, wouldn’t be able to digest this minor, unimportant accomplishment of Smast’s.

  “I don’t know which one of them is more illiterate,” Pintu once mused while watching a roadside performance by a pair of trained monkeys, “these monkeys or that rat,” he pointed a fat, chutney-smeared samosa first at the animals and then at Smast, who was watching the show with deep interest a little distance away.

  “What do you think, Cat?” Pintu asked his younger sister, Kaamini Anand, popularly known as Cat. Cat was very catlike in her grey eyes, the chubby roundness of her face, and the sharpness of her nails. Cat sat alongside Pintu in his pony-cart, her legs dangling in air, a large doll taking its leisure in her lap. The little girl, too, was engrossed in the talented primates’ exhibition of their tricks: the he-monkey, garbed in a gentleman’s clothes, was wooing the sari-clad, bangles-wearing she-monkey by dancing to a song that their handler, the madaari, sang in a rich voice.

  Pintu repeated his question, something he never liked to do: “…these stupid monkeys or that idiotic rat?”

  “You,” Cat answered, absentmindedly but truthfully—Pintu had been gracing the same classroom for the last seven years, and although Cat was his junior by six years in age, she was already a grade ahead of her big brother. “Oh, sorry—, that would be the rat, of course,” she rectified her error as soon as she understood, by the sharp intake of her brother’s breath, that she had made one.

  “Hey, Rat,” he called to Smast, “come here!”

  Smast came, reluctant but obedient, as always.

  “Are you familiar with this object?” Pintu asked, picking out a book from a small trunk containing a few other books. There was another, much larger trunk full of edibles and toys.

  Smast watched the book with the same hungry fascination that he watched the food with, but he feigned ignorance. “No, Sir Pintu,” he mumbled.

  “Speak up!” said Sir Pintu.

  “I am not familiar with the object you are holding in your noble hands, Sir Pintu,” Smast said, while devouring the title of the book with his eyes and twisting his neck to get a look at the back cover as well.

  “Liar,” Cat said, watching Smast narrowly.

  “No, Miss Cat,” Smast said in a subdued voice, pulling his greedy gaze away from the attractions of Premchand’s Gaban.

  “No Miss Cat,” Pintu produced a whiny imitation of Smast’s words. “What do you mean by ‘no miss cat’?”

  “That I am not a liar, Sir Pintu.”

  “Is my sister a liar then?” Pintu asked in a shout loud enough to distract the monkeys and their audience.

  “No, Sir Pintu.”

  “Who’s the liar then?”

  “I, Sir Pintu.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Smast the Rat, Sir Pintu.”

  A careless flourish of the book again. “So, have you ever handled any book in your entire life?”

  “No, Sir Pintu.”

  “Liar!”

  “Yes, Sir Pintu.”

  “You have defiled these lofty things with your abominable touch, haven’t you?”

  Smast made his admission in a low, lifeless whisper. “Yes, Sir Pintu,” he said. He was afraid of Pintu’s next logical question, but Pintu and logic were antithetical to each other. Pintu didn’t ask it and the matter ended. Or so Smast thought.

  ◆◆◆

  “My pony is sick today,” Pintu said to Smast one summer evening a few weeks later.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Sir Pintu,” Smast said, his heartbeat quickening in apprehension that he was indeed going to be very sorry pretty soon.

  “So, what would you prefer?” Pintu asked, rubbing his hands in glee.

  Smast couldn’t find any words to answer the dreadful question.

  “Gone deaf, Rat? Tell me, would you prefer to pull the cart or just carry my trunks?”

  “I-, I am sick, too,” Smast hazarded an excuse. “I’ve a severe stomach ache —”

  “Of course, you do,” Pintu said, “what with your having no money, no home, no cows and no father. Go get some rest, Rat. I’ll ask Darshan Singh to fetch your mother from the fields to pull my cart.”

  Smast became a beast of burden without a second thought. When he came to the spot where the cart stood waiting to become the instrument of his ultimate degradation, he saw the pony grazing happily in a small corral, looking as free from sickness of any sort as Smast was of any ache (except for heartache).

  The vehicle, a simple, flat-bed cart, was parked at the mouth of a dirt road that sloped at a rather sharp gradient down to the sandy shores of a pond. Pintu clambered up onto the cart and sat majestically on the throne of his large trunk (containing edible treasures) and placed his feet on the small trunk (containing readable treasures), which he carried everywhere with him to boast of his (non-existent) literary tastes.

/>   Smast went in between the drawbars and pulled forward with all his might, his shoulders hunched up and his head bent down, so that the tears of his humiliation fell unobserved into the dirt at his feet.

  The cart mocked the application of all of Smast’s might by not budging an inch. The delighted Pintu picked up his whip and started injuring the air with small slashes, preparatory to administering a big one to Smast’s straining back. The pony lifted its head from its solitary feast and neighed in empathy.

  Smast reversed the direction of his endeavour and pushed back for an instant before pulling forward again. He followed this sequence a number of times, managing to coax the stubborn wheels into moving a quarter of an inch. He soon had the little cart in motion. His relief at having avoided a lash lasted half a minute, as the vehicle started to gain more momentum than Smast could handle.

  The dumb-sadistic owner of the cart started to panic, too. “Stop, stop,” he yelled, now brandishing the whip to make Smast brake the hurtling vehicle. Both the boys screamed in terror. Their cries rose in pitch as the left wheel of the cart encountered a rock half-embedded in the dirt of the road.

  The wooden wheel shattered and the cart overturned on its side. It catapulted Pintu, along with both his trunks, more than ten feet away. On their involuntary aerial journey, the fat boy and his most prized possessions met with trunks of eucalyptus trees. Fortunately (for the fat boy), the trees were themselves boys, in terms of their age, and their boles were thin and somewhat elastic. Although Pintu lay on the ground shrieking loudly and vehemently enough to give the impression that half-a-dozen fat boys were in the throes of death from grievous injuries, his wounds were shallow and superficial.

  Smast, who had been holding onto the cart’s drawbars, didn’t take off like his tormentor had, but the ankle of Smast’s left foot twisted viciously and he hit the earth very hard with the side of his head. He suffered a concussion and grazed the skin of his temple rather badly.