My family wanted to let the Man-eater out, even Ma, whose scars, dark red and wrinkled mountain ranges of horror, ran straight across her stomach like train tracks. I was back from the city, back after so many years I had not recognized Anamika when she emerged at the front door. The servants, they took away my bags but she only smiled and waited for me to speak up. I told her she had become beautiful. This, she laughed off.
Anamika was the daughter of our priest saheb. They both lived in the Mahal with us, along with many others. I remember growing up in the presence of hundreds of our citizenry, mostly servants and relatives and, on rare occasions, ghosts of long-lost mistresses of my forefathers, who kept me company when everyone else was too busy for a five-year-old and his demands to participate in elaborate pretend-games. I let Anamika participate. She was the only child my age around the house; we had been good friends. Now she seemed so shy she didn’t know what to say. She did want to say something. I could see her eyes search for something to compliment. In the end, she only nudged me inside where everyone else sat waiting for me and swiftly disappeared.
My mother ran up to embrace me. I tried identifying the others’ faces but failed, having better luck recognizing the furniture, which was all still in the same place. My grandfather lay sprawled on one of the sofas, the same way he used to before, before I left.
“Back at last!” Ma said and kissed me again. I was back forever. Twelve years was enough. I was now twenty.
Ma let me go and many others embraced me in turn. My uncle Romeo held me tight, telling me he had serious matters to talk about later. He had grown very short, my uncle, his tuberculous spine dragging his upper frame to a curve. He tapped me on the back and sent me off to my room, where momentarily I was left alone.
They had attached showerheads in the bathrooms now. They looked oddly out of place, mounted high on our old, steel-walled bathrooms. All this wasn’t here when I left. I remember washing myself with buckets and plastic bath mugs. The shower heads weren’t the only displays of modernization around the house, I later discovered. The kitchen had a toaster and there was, I’d been enthusiastically informed, a new washing machine that the servants swore talked sometimes.
“They are crazy,” Ma said, “They think everything in the house talks.”
I showered and came down looking for Anamika, hoping to catch up with her before going to bed. Perhaps, I thought, she could show me the many changes made in the Mahal during my absence.
Uncle Romeo cleared his throat. He said, “We are thinking of converting the entire third floor into a rest house for the tourists. We’d get some extra money, which helps a lot now since your grandfather has retired.”
“What does Ma have to say about this?” I asked them.
I could see her in the doorway. I should have asked her directly, but I wanted to know from him.
“She’s fine with it,” he said, slowly.
I got up.
“It’s okay, you know, we can let him out now. He won’t hurt anybody. He’s too old now. God knows he needs to be out of that filthy room. It’s been twenty years. He needs to be let out.”
“I’m going to bed.”
The warmth of my childhood bed felt tepid, as if it wasn’t sure if I could be called its own. My mind meandered toward Anamika, inaccessible somewhere in the Mahal, toward the city to which I’ll never go back, and, inevitably, toward the Man-eater still in his room on the third floor after all these years.
I gave up trying to sleep around 3AM, and made my way in the dark to the kitchen, in the hope of finding something to eat. Canned mushrooms and bottled water lined the otherwise empty refrigerator door, which had started to corrugate to a volcanic brown at the edges. Here, I ran into Anamika.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said, “It’s the screams.”
I hadn’t heard any screaming. But I knew what she was talking about. I had forgotten all about it.
“Let’s go up there,” I said.
She feigned shock.
“No,” she said.
“Come on,” I said and led the way. She didn’t protest much, following me up the stairs.
We talked very little. I could hear her breathing. She had an earthy smell to her, the sort of smell I associated with my mother and every other woman I knew back home. I always thought it to be some popular local perfume, though it never seemed something important enough for further investigation.
When we reached our floor, we heard the Man-eater’s growl again. Anamika jumped a little, but I assured her we were safe. I wasn’t sure myself. After all, it was my first time coming here in twelve years.
We walked on, amidst the orange and red paintings—portraits done by my mother, hanging on both sides of the corridor. The dust layered over the frames glistened in the low moonlight falling from an opening in the ceiling. We were both barefoot but she was wearing an anklet that jangled noisily as we moved toward the enormous door at the end of our carpeted path.
The door in question sported lavish circular spirals, but the wood had worn off after all these years. It was fastened in place, it seemed, by a tangled knot of red strings. Odd, since the absence of any locks was a poor way of keeping my father locked in a room for twenty years. I wondered if he knew. I wondered why I didn’t notice this as a child. It seemed obvious that one could easily break free of the door if one just kicked it hard enough.
“My father tied these himself,” she said of the strings, having noticed my staring at them, “You can never get out once they start to work.”
“Work?”
“Yes,” she said, “Baba’s spells keep the door locked.”
Anamika’s father lived with us at the Mahal. He kept the Man-eater inside his room.
She kept mindlessly examining the door, her hands moving slowly against the ridges of the circles. “I’ve heard your mother tell the stories so many times,” she said, “It never gets old.”
I could never understand why my mother would talk about these events again and again. She, like most girls I’d been reading about in French novels recently, usually trod down her garden of blues with the utmost stiltedness.
“Do you remember the stories?” Anamika asked, and for a second, she seemed to regret having done so, lest I should find those memories painful.
Every love story the crazies in the town market sing about have two teenagers on opposite sides of a narrow dying river. They meet and fall in love at first sight but as the day draws to an end they are left perplexed: how must they now cross the river and touch each other?
Ma saw the Man-eater one evening, while returning home from the local degree college (which she had been attending for two years). He wasn’t a Man-eater then, as my mother would say, “He was a prince. He sure looked like one!”
And he hailed from the other side of the narrow dying river, where no man from our town had ever ventured into. It was where, surrounded by heavy foliage, the Huuri Kingdom was situated.
Few men from there ever showed up in our town, and my uncle Romeo often said that those who did were strange and crazy, and that the Nawab who ruled over them was allegedly evil. “Downright evil!” my uncle Romeo would cry out the few times we children demanded information. Many a time, we were told that the provincial government would annex it, but they never did. They let the Huuri Nawabs stay on as Nawabs, and forgot all about them. I was told to forget them as well. To forget about the pesky little kingdom full of strange people on the other side of the narrow dying river, for we had better things to worry about. We had lives out here, and all this talk of our neighbors was a waste of our time. We should forget them. Unless we wanted to turn out like my mother.
At first, Ma had tried to ignore the prince every time she passed the place, but soon it seemed impossible to do so, for she kept seeing him everywhere. He would show up in the marketplace when she was sent to shop groceries for the family. In the town cinema when she went to ogle the travelling cinema-men putting up their grimy projectors. Even outside her college premises when she was done with her classes for the day. One time he followed her home and grabbed her waist, telling her he loved her. This, she laughed off.
“She did fall in love with him later, didn’t she, for real?” Anamika asked.
I shrugged.
We heard a big thumping noise. Anamika wanted to return to her room. I followed her downstairs and awkwardly said our goodbyes in the darkness. I saw her outline grow fainter and returned to my childhood bed, where I stayed imprisoned till the next morning.
*
It was a sunny day, and I wanted to see more of Anamika. There was going to be a whole “letting the Man-eater out” ceremony later in the evening and the Mahal seemed to be bustling with servants running here and there taking care of all the arrangements. A truck with a fresh supply of marigolds had arrived some hours earlier and I could see Uncle Romeo standing in front of the gates, shouting orders at everyone. Done with my morning coffee, I asked Ma if she had seen Anamika.
“She’s probably on the terrace, line-drying the clothes,” she said, “Why?”
“No reason.”
It is sad, now that I think about it, when the only person you ever had a chance to love is kept locked away in your own home for twenty years. Even then, as far as I can remember, my mother has never questioned her family’s decisions and, like the women I’d been reading about in French novels recently, kept her opinions to herself and let others decide. Now they all want to throw him out— “With dignity!” they say—and she still would not speak up, she would let it be.
News that my mother was secretly seeing an outsider had soon reached my grandfather’s ears. He had a reputation he was intent to protect, though he often struggled to play the role of the powerful patriarch. This was a scandal. And it had to be dealt with fast. College was forbidden. So was any housework that involved going out. My mother, shocked that such terrible decisions could be taken so fast and without prior notice, confined herself to her room. There were moments, we’d been told much later, when she wanted to forget everything and start anew and be the good girl like she’d always been, but it had become suffocating, all this pretense of obedience, and she was adamant in her newfound stubbornness. My grandfather was a stubborn man as well. There was no way in Jahannam that he would let his daughter anywhere near some illiterate Huuri—until he learned that the boy was a prince. The only son of the old Nawab of the Huuri kingdom.
The air on the terrace was already heavy with the scent of marigolds. Anamika was in a white and red sari, busy wringing the water out of a few colorful shirts, then offering them to the sun up above on taut polyester ropes.
The pools of dark water on the terrace floor reflected a silvery screen of the crows flying above us, screeching indiscriminately through the otherwise peaceful morning. The folds of Anamika’s sari kept sliding off as she stretched and squeezed the wet clothes. One could easily see her tapered waist and its burnished complexion.
I went over to her and stood with my back against the railing. A mild wind kept ruffling our hair southward.
“I Suppose if I hadn’t left,” I asked, “We’d be victims of a child marriage already, don’t you think?”
“Thank god you left,” she said, smiling, “It wouldn’t have lasted long. They all think I’m possessed with spirits.”
I had almost forgotten about her father’s illustrious attempts to rid us of ill-spirits. When Ma was in her self-imprisonment phase, Anamika’s father had only just been hired as the family priest. He was a young man then, I’d heard, and he had instantly declared that the problem wasn’t that she was pining for a supposed prince, but that ill-spirits (whom he claimed to be in personal contact with) were taking over her sanity. No one believed him, busy as they were figuring out how understanding the Nawab might be of this relationship and how rich he really was.
Invitations were sent. Gifts exchanged. Uncle Romeo was the first person to set foot in the Huuri kingdom, bringing back with him news of the Nawab’s consent. Things were being finalized. Even Ma had come out of her room, happy at last that things seemed to be going her way for a change. And how proud they were! My Grandfather had even cajoled the mayor into bestowing the Nawab with an honorary degree from the local college.
The fact that the Huuri were part-time beasts only became apparent to everyone when three months into a happy life, my father transformed into a Man-eater right in the middle of the living room of this Mahal and attacked everyone in sight. The vermilion that signaled my mother’s marriage was wrought, then, with blood and not cosmetic powder.
They were here on holiday. My father had never thought this would be where he’d live for the next twenty years, hauled into a room on the third floor and locked in from the outside with magic threads.
We didn’t talk much after Anamika was done with the clothes. She was called downstairs to the kitchen while I was left alone to waltz around the Mahal. When evening came, I left the French novels I’d been reading on the study table and went downstairs to look at the procession. I had often wondered whether I would ever turn into a Man-eater myself, like the father I had never set my eyes on—yet. I had undergone numerous tests under the watchful eyes of our priest (with Grandfather and my uncle Romeo by my side) during adolescence. In the end, everyone else seemed assured that I wouldn’t. I had my doubts nevertheless.
Before long, I could hear the trumpets of the Huuri walking down our road toward the Mahal. They looked like us. Except their clothes were striped and shiny and their skin tone, darker. They wore jewels on their necks, hands, and feet, and spoke our language differently.
I couldn’t see Ma anywhere. By now, the noise had died down. Anamika’s father and my grandfather went upstairs to snip off the strings on the door to my father’s room and escort the Man-eater out of the Mahal. I was invited to accompany them, but I said I wanted to wait out at the front. All this to open the Mahal up for tourists! The door opened with a loud thump; I could hear it from where I was standing. Soon, we saw a man with a scruffy beard and thinning hair ushered out. The travelling party put down their palanquin, painted on the outside with scenes of wars waged by past Nawabs.
The Man-eater kept his eyes fixed on the ground at all times, perhaps out of shame, but he did look up once at the balcony, where I now saw my mother standing, longingly, sharing a last look before he went away forever.
Illustration : Trina Basak
