The Tenacity of Darkness: Book # 2 of A Thorn for Miss R. Read online

  I knew the king had to (kind of) comply with every "request" that the Commanding Officer of the royal guards made concerning the king's safety.

  Sanjay turned back, showing his displeasure quite plainly, without uttering a single word. After about three minutes, the degree of the said displeasure increased one-thousand times. It happened when I cajoled/blackmailed him into getting out of his custom-made hunting clothes and donning (gasp!) a security officer’s uniform!!!

  Incredible as it sounds, I did it. Idiotic as it sounds, I did it. I achieved the impossible. I dared, and I did. I had to threaten to resign. The threat did have some effect, but it didn't go the entire mile. I then shrewdly invoked Rachna's name—telling the king that I would tell Rachna that he (the king) had not stopped killing animals for pleasure, whereas he had categorically told her years ago that he would never do so.

  He started unbuttoning his jacket before I had finished speaking. I then derived a considerable degree of sadistic pleasure in making Lt. Shakti wear the clothes the king had just taken off. It was an extremely tight fit across the shoulders (giving me as much comfort as it discomforted the lieutenant). The top hat made him look particularly clownish.

  Aside from the element of melodrama that this involved, I was exhibiting boldly and effectively that I, their new leader, was a force to reckon with—that even the king had to bend to my will and whimsies, so they, the lowly men under my command, were virtually nobodies to laugh at me.

  I was so, so far above them in sheer cunning that they would have to be professional contortionists to bend ninety degrees backward just to glimpse my mischievous countenance! And if they still dared to mock me, the spittle of their bitter laughter would fall back in stinking showers on their own upturned faces.

  "I am no longer a night watchman! I am your commander. Fear me! Respect me! Honor me!" I could have screamed all this at the top of my lungs continuously for a fortnight and still not made myself heard as clearly, as effectively, as permanently as I had done by executing this little trick.

  "Good boy, Neel," I patted myself on the back for yet another triumph.

  We issued forth once more. The king wore Shakti's uniform (the shirt at least two sizes too big; the waistband of the trousers bunched up under a tightly buckled belt). Shakti looked like a walking portrait of ridicule in the king's rather outlandish clothes. He sweated profusely under the top hat. I looked at his hands—not clenching, unclenching anymore. Hadn’t I thrashed him twice in just half an hour?

  "Good boy, Neel." I patted myself some more.

  Little of the moon-and-star light penetrated the softly murmuring canopy of the forest. A million faint shadows lay swaying and tossing on the underbrush. The king moved purposefully in the trees' maze, his head moving from side to side, searching for his potential prey so intently you would have thought he needed meat to feed starving children at home.

  And then, a few hundred meters in from the edge of the road, the trees drew back abruptly, as if making room for a thing of beauty. An oval mirror of water lay shimmering ahead, ringed in by hoary tree trunks of immense proportions. A deer herd quenched its collective thirst on the opposite shore of the watering hole.

  Sanjay stumbled, almost wading into the pond. He raised his shotgun even as he recovered his balance, and the dainty head of a doe exploded in a shower of blood and bones, marring the water's surface. The rest of the deer turned and ran for their lives, leaving their fallen comrade behind. Birds erupted from their nests in a dense cloud of frenzied wings, shrieking their protest at the brutal, violent sound.

  Unfazed, uncaring, the second barrel of the King's shotgun barked and claimed another prize—a young buck this time around, taken down in mid-spring. The settling avian cloud once more jerked upwards at this fresh offense.

  I didn't have wings, else I, too, would have risen with the birds in utter revulsion, shock, and fear. I strongly disapproved of this needless slaughter (the king didn't need to feed any starving children and he could easily find better pastimes than killing hapless living beings), but I kept my expression as smug and carefree as I could. There was no way I was going to dent my new-formed, hard-won reputation as a force to be reckoned with by grimacing like a sentimental woman.

  A disembodied, ghostly light flashed on the other side of the clearing. A third shot rang out. Sanjay looked around to see who had fired because he (Sanjay) himself had not.

  Lt. Shakti answered the unasked question.

  He gasped, staggered, and toppled headlong into the pond.

  Chapter 2: Painful Exclusions and Strange Intrusions

  T he diminutive doe lay on the far shore. On our side of the pond, providing an asymmetrical point of symmetry, lay the gigantic body of Lieutenant Shakti—legs on the ground, trunk in the rippling water. All of us stood as still as though we, too, had been shot and killed instantaneously.

  And then instinct (for me) and training (for the rest of the guards) set in. We pushed the king prone on the ground. Three men lay on top of him, shielding his body with theirs. Three more started advancing cautiously in the general direction where the muzzle flash had come from. I took out my gun, pointed its barrel in the same general direction, and then put it back into its holster.

  I dragged Shakti out of the water and turned him on his back. A large chunk of his skull had blown out, forming a gory crater in the back of his head. The bullet's entry point was in the middle of the red band in the king's top hat. Underneath the hat, Shakti’s forehead had developed a neat, bindi-like hole.

  Even in that state of numbed brain function, I knew that I had saved Shakti from a non-lethal sting earlier in the evening only to put him in the way of an extremely lethal projectile. By the same token, I had (once more) saved king Sanjay's life. Had his top-hat been adorning his own head instead of Shakti’s, it’s the king who would have departed the world in company with the doe he had just killed.

  The same thoughts were obviously ricocheting around in the king's mind. He muttered something from beneath the mound of flesh lying on him. His voice issued out indistinctly from the soil and underbrush into which his face was pressed.

  "Must go back, must go back," he chanted. "Must thank her, must thank Rachna."

  Thank whom, my dear sir?! Anybody but Neel, of course. Sanjay had been outright reluctant to swap his clothes with Shakti (or anyone else). I had had to resort to blackmail to get him to do so. I had leveraged a promise he had made to Rachna several years ago when we were all children, a promise he had apparently never kept. I’d gotten him to agree to my outlandish demand by threatening to disclose this fact to Rachna. And Sanjay was now thinking of Rachna as his savior!

  My mind transitioned from a state of numbness to that of abstraction. I wondered at the callousness that the king exhibited by asking nothing, saying nothing about Shakti. I then wondered whether this resulted from an immeasurable self-love, a love before which everyone and everything seemed dispensable. But no, that was not the case. Love was at the heart of his crazy combination of thankfulness and indifference, but it was not a love for himself.

  It was for Rachna, of course. He wouldn’t have been as grateful for his narrow escape had he not attributed his being alive to Rachna. In his belief, this experience had added a new dimension to his experience. Simple. Complicated. Simultaneously. That’s love.

  The men who had advanced in the direction of the muzzle flash returned within the next two minutes. As expected, they had found no one around in that blinding darkness. We took the king back to the estate, leaving Shakti behind until we could come back to carry his remains away.

  The night, the mother night, was back. Pregnant with terror, tittering with insane glee. You fool, she said, you thought I had passed, that I had ended? Think again, baby boy.

  We didn't go back to Jalgarh. The king wanted to meet Rachna and thank her. I demurred. I put my commander-ly foot down. Now that we knew that Sanjay was an active target again, I wanted to take him to the safety of his palace-fort at Su
rajgarh as quickly as possible.

  This was the primary reason for my not complying with his command. There were other, equally powerful reasons:

  Lt. Shakti’s family deserved to learn, without any delay, about the tragedy that had befallen them, as also to receive his body for his last rites.

  I didn’t want the king to go down on his knees before Rachna, take her hands in his, and thank the poor, baffled girl fervently for saving his life, whereas the said girl wouldn’t have the slightest idea as to what the (mad?) man was raving about.

  Besides, the vision involving the holding (and possibly kissing) of hands wasn't particularly cheery to me either. But as soon as the king deigned to listen to me and revoke his earlier order of 'turning back,' I suddenly wanted to do nothing but turn back.

  I wanted to do nothing but get into my mother's lap and sleep a carefree sleep. I wanted to shed my rich clothes and put my ordinary watchman's uniform back on. Even Father's incessant disapproval and disdain felt preferable to this new life of power, opulence, and murder. I saw plainly, for the first time, that the prime reason for my being here among this elite corps was also murder.

  Barring that mother-night of carnage and the night I had witnessed the cat's slaughter, I had not had to live through a single hour of violence. I had had the good fortune to experience nothing worse than petty theft and drunken brawling in all my years of active duty as a night watchman.

  And here, in this lofty place, a man's blood appeared to carry no more value than a deer's (whereas, to me, even an animal's life was priceless, at least until the point in time when I turned into a beast myself).

  So, when this urge to go back home came upon me, it blew away the city-scape of my daydreams and fantasies about the faraway, magical land of Toronto.

  "I have to go home to Jalgarh," I told the pale and distracted king unequivocally, without any preamble, moments after I had dissuaded him from going there himself. He responded, equally clearly, by fixing his burning, unblinking gaze upon me. He didn't utter a single word. He didn't have to. My resolve began to smoke and smolder in that concentrated beam of royal will.

  "Right, your majesty, preparing to leave for Surajgarh right away," I blurted out in a small voice and backed out of the king's chamber.

  The police superintendent of that district sat waiting in the front garden of the estate.

  "I am sorry for your loss, sir," he said as I stepped up to meet him. "We haven’t found anything significant yet, but that will change once the night ends in a few hours. The shooter or shooters must have eradicated their footprints when they left. The only thing we can say with certainty at this point is that the killers knew about the king's movements or habits beforehand."

  My ears pricked up, and my heart sank at hearing this. Another traitor within the force?

  "Whenever his majesty camps here, he always goes hunting," the superintendent said. “The shooters knew that. More importantly, they certainly knew that he would stop here tonight. Also, the district administration has—," he cleared his throat and fidgeted a bit, "—granted your request for not performing an autopsy on Lt. Shakti’s body here. We won’t hold you here on that account, but please send us the postmortem report as soon as you get it in Surajgarh. I shall let you know in case we find anything of importance.” Fat chance of that, he implied with a shrug.

  With that, he finished his brief, useless update and left me basking in the glory of the "sir" he had addressed me with. I wondered if he’d have done the same had he known that I had been a municipal functionary of far less standing than his lowest-ranked sepoy only a week back.

  We packed up. Our baggage was loaded into the majestic cars before people took their seats: one less person, one more item of luggage than when we had left Jalgarh.

  The Phantom, hemmed in by its complement of Ghosts, started to eat up the second leg of the journey.

  ***

  Surajgarh was sunless. A cloud cover as thick, unbroken, and black as an infinite sheet of velvet roofed the city when we arrived there. The gigantic storm-cloud would groan every now and then with an earsplitting clap of thunder. Lightning flashed and frolicked naked in the brooding skies. The storm giant gathered a handful of miniature water-bombs and dropped them on our windshields. And then the barrage began—a furious assault of rain which overwhelmed the powerful wipers of our cars within minutes.

  Roads turned into shallow lakes. An old peepal flailed its limbs, as though desperate to retain its balance, before crashing to the ground in a leafy thunder of its own. Many other trees lost their lives, while slender saplings bent over in surrender and survived the storm’s attack.

  A gale-force wind agitated the dense curtains of rain. Visibility vanished like peace and happiness often do after brief interludes of a deceptive joy.

  Our convoy crept into the sprawling complex of the palace after sloshing through a mile of water-logged roads. A reception committee fit for a king stood enduring the fury of the elements. Bedraggled officers mounted on marvelous Arab horses escorted us from the gates to the porch, under which our mud-streaked cars came to rest.

  The king, who had traveled in absolute silence the entire way, alighted and entered his palace without as much as nodding to any of the two dozen courtiers, ministers, and other dignitaries who bowed to him with broad smiles, most of which turned sour with the speed of light as soon as the king disappeared from their view.

  There were exceptions—men whose expressions of fealty and love didn't alter. These few stood in the least protected spaces and they were dressed a shade or two less richly than their more mercurial fellow-courtiers.

  I didn't linger long to look upon these stalwarts of Surajgarh. Particularly because Lt. Shakti's body was being brought out from one of the cars. His poor, poor father and broken, broken mother threw themselves upon their dead son with heart-rending wails. A young woman, plainly his sister, cried and screamed with the intensity of the mad storm raging in the heavens.

  A guilt-laden sorrow formed a lump in my throat; a drop or two of a private rain fell out of my eyes. I had made Shakti wear Sanjay's clothes out of pure spite, thereby making him the target of the assassin’s bullet, thereby causing this unbearable loss to his family.

  At that time, I couldn't grasp (and console myself with) the point that I had unknowingly, unintentionally, done nothing but my duty, that I had achieved its greatest aim: that of protecting the king at all costs. And so had Shakti. Equally unknowingly, equally unintentionally, he had laid down his life in the line of duty.

  At that time, I felt as though I had killed him with my own hands. A tingle started in my skin with the fear that someone would grab me by the back of my neck and accuse me of murder. I ran in after the king. He had once again demonstrated a monstrous insensitivity by not meeting and consoling the bereaved family. But then, he might have felt the same compulsions for running away as I did.

  ***

  I was in a new world, a world the entire planet constantly worked hard to give its very best to. The palace was unspeakably rich. The ceiling was forty feet high, supported on fluted columns of the whitest marble imaginable. Huge chandeliers hung suspended by chains that glittered like gold.

  A dozen villages could live comfortably for a dozen years just by selling off the tapestries, carpets, paintings, and ornaments strewn about in just one hall of the palace. Miles and miles of jungles of mahogany, teak, rosewood, and oak must have been cut down to manufacture all the exquisitely carved paneling the walls wore and all the furniture that adorned the floors. All the deer, tigers, panthers, and cheetahs that had lived in those massacred jungles appeared to have been shot, decapitated, and hung on the proud, paneled walls.

  This world felt strange in another respect as well: for all its splendor and wealth, it was remarkably cold. It didn't have a fraction of the warmth I had experienced even in the poorest of hamlets nestled in the deep, remote valleys of the Himalayas. The Palace of Surajgarh wasn't altogether dead, but it was definitely co
matose.

  A large number of people lived and served there, but the palace's principal occupant was Miss Loneliness. She ruled the ruler (King Sanjay). He spoke little and laughed not at all, barring a few occasions when he talked to Rachna over the telephone. At those times, he would start smiling to himself as soon as he booked the trunk call, which generally took quite a long time to connect.

  She would talk to him for a few minutes, her voice spilling out of the earpiece and transforming both Sanjay and his palace into a lively person and a lively home, respectively. It did something to me as well, that voice, something monumental. It wrapped itself around me and tugged me homeward so powerfully that it always broke me in two.

  She would very casually (so casually that it came out to be extremely deliberate) ask, "and how's Neel doing? Is he around?"

  Those two or three little queries, sometimes made with a small-but-perceptible tremor in the magical sound of her voice, would glaze the king's eyes to the extent they matched the glassy eyes of the tiger observing everything from its lofty perch in the telephone hall.

  A small grimace would mar Sanjay's smile from that point until the end of the telephonic conversation. He would grunt out a non-committal answer to her questions about me, never allowing me to speak with her. He acted as though she were his property. I grudged him this sense of proprietorship, particularly because I possessed an identical notion of ownership over everything related to Rachna.

  Once again, you get an intimate and enlightening peek into my inimitable character: I had clean forgotten that I hadn't cared enough for the selfsame Rachna just a few days back even to say a proper goodbye to her. It never occurred to me that I had been callous, even cruel, in my attitude towards her in a past so recent it was practically the backside of the present.

  I was convinced that the king was being tyrannical. I headed on a collision course with him. Like a tiny tricycle rushing to smash a diesel locomotive moving at its top speed.