Rakshyas
The ungreased chain clinking and clanking...
The father, with his whiskers bent upwards on both ends like the monstrous policemen with protruding eyes in films he watched on the Indian TV channel every evening, first licked his index finger before flipping the old notebook by its bottom right edge. He studied the numbers carved by pencils mostly blunt; jabbed on the clunky calculator with a trained, tenacious veracity; scribbled bigger numbers at the bottom of each page below the dated carvings; mumbled a few verses as a second check, not of accuracy but of authority; and flipped the sheet for the next round.
The fan overhead swung like a trapeze. However and whatever it buzzed commingled with the cry of grenade thrown in between bursts of bullets of machine guns. Fire in the hole, grenade! The son’s fingers moved jauntily, his tongue sticking out slightly towards the right, his eyes unblinking like the Gods.
A gaze from above the moustache, closer to the nose that slung cavernous nostrils, penetrated the third eye of the small boy – not the one in between his brown pupils – but one reserved only for children etched at a degree or two above his right ear. The whirring of bullets stopped, only the fan clanked from its rusty iron hook. The screen disappeared into blackness.
“Either do your homework, or help your mother,” came the cautious call.
“I’ll help you instead.” He placed the phone on the table.
“What help will you do if you fail your math class. Your teacher was telling me yesterday,” he mumbled from behind the sahuji desk.
“He doesn’t teach, what to do.”
“Don’t make excuses. He has a pee-yach-dee.”
“I also have pee-yach-dee.” The father stopped his count and looked at his son. “Pahelo haattiko daat!”
The father scratched his head, quarter confused for not comprehending what his son had just said and the remaining three parts attributed to the slow slippage of his dear desire to craft his son into what he could have never become.
Howling, like a rakshyas his dad had shown him on a different Indian TV channel a year or two before on a quiet Saturday night, he pulled the top corner of his upper lip towards his cheek to reveal a misaligned canine, browner than the yellow surrounding it.
“He has not brushed for five days,” approached a voice from the kitchen door. With the voice swayed a swanky aroma from a bottled achaar of lapsi.
The boy howled another rakshyas howl before he fled to his room upstairs, his phone smuggled in his pocket, veiled by the vocal clowning as a distractive device. He roared a final roar from above the staircase to close his act and all that the couple downstairs could hear was a trailing voice fading away somewhere inside the rickety fan.
“He is just like you when we married,” said the mother.
The father looked at her squinting eyes, emanating a hint of tease. He sighed.
“What have I become now?”
“A man clicking his days away on an old calculator,” she replied as she studied the ancient machine. “You should get a new one.”
He eyed his friend-of-years, friends for as long as time had arrived since holding the same baby boy on his palm for the very first time. “And will that change anything?”
“It won’t make your son an injiniyer, you know.”
She strode outside towards the afternoon sunlight and placed the bottle of savory swamp behind the rear wheel of a worn out mammoth bicycle – the same one on whose back she swung and swayed once-upon-a-time, hooking her fingers onto her lover’s shoulders as he sped away from the edge of the bazaar, her fingers digging in at the melody of his pace, the ungreased chain clinking and clanking, towards the emerald of a forest, with the laughter of merriment reserved in verses of Kishor Kumar and Rafi only for the bees, the butterflies, and they themselves.
Fictionalized based on events witnessed and stories heard at a budget hotel near Chandragadhi Airport. I miss the fan that held no purpose in swerving the humidity away.
