by Prashila Naik
Mohan patted his wife’s waist the very instant his mother turned around; the young woman whimpered in a tantalising manner reserved solely for such impromptu occurrences of their generally non-existent intimacy. But as he followed up the pat with a loud thump on her back, she whimpered with discomfort.
“How many times have I told you not to interrupt me when I am talking?”
She turned around, disappointed, angry; this was one of those deliberate and cruel displays of his unpleasant disposition which she was unequipped to deal with, even after six months of their marriage.
“I was just telling you to not get into a fight with Shantaram. He is a goonda.”
“You think I am scared of him,” he scowled, daring her to challenge his assertion of his own fearlessness, ready to pounce on the remotest sign of her resistance. But she only stood there, a weak smile on her lips, as if she was unsure of whether the question was meant to be rhetorical or not.
That silence pleased him, as did her conceding smile.
“You should listen to me when I tell you something,” he said, resisting an urge to thump her back for a second time, if only to drive home the point he was trying to make.“Mother never interrupted father. He would have beaten her to death,” he added, an element of unmistakable pride in his voice, as he touched her hunched shoulder. She nodded in response and lowered her eyes to look down at his fingers, as if she had just become aware of their presence on his body that had now extended onto her own body, an extension that even in all its reality was nothing more than a vague realisation.
“Now go, help mother with the cooking.”
“The jackfruit. You said you will bring jackfruit from the forest today,” she said, as if she had just recollected this important fact.
“I know. You don’t have to remind me. Now stop staring at me like a fool and go to the kitchen.”
He watched her turn around to go to the little room where she would join his mother, in her elaborate preparations for that day’s lunch. He had nothing to do with these domesticities; they all constituted a woman’s world, a world he had been effortlessly shielded from all through his existence. The only time overlaps occurred were the times he made a demand that the women could not satisfy without his assistance. One such demand for jackfruit patoli led to him offering to head to the adjacent forest and pick out a ripe jackfruit from what was considered to be the ‘best’ jackfruit tree in the whole village. He had forgotten about that offer, his mind still reeling on the possible ways in which he could initiate an argument with his obnoxious neighbour Shantaram so that he could get that opportunity he was eagerly waiting for to push the man down on the ground and punch him right in the middle of his ugly face.
He tightened the knot of his lungi, hitched it up against his waist and picked up the rusted but cunningly sharp sickle and headed towards the forest as if he were just headed to the well to draw a pitcher of water for the morning prayers.
He took pride in his familiarity with the forest and fondly reminisced all those evenings he had spent there as a child, hunting for wild berries, shrieking with terrified delight every time a snake slid past them. Unlike his friends, the vast expanse of that forest that extended well into the neighbouring state of Karnataka had never stopped him from venturing out into the allegedly dangerous parts of it, where one could possibly come face to face with some wild animal or another.
As he made his way through the familiar trails leading to the tree, he flexed his arms in a display of blatant self–appreciation, still dreaming of how he could employ their prowess in destroying Shantaram’s pride and if possible all his bones.
The statuesque tree stood in all its glory, decked in jackfruits of all sizes, shapes and ripeness.
“Son of a bitch tree getting so fat and having so few fruits,” he muttered to himself and hitched the already folded lungi higher up against his thighs in preparation for the climb. He put his right foot on a branch and held onto the tree’s trunk to put the left foot on another one. He touched the jackfruit nearest to him in an attempt to gauge if it was ripe enough to be hacked down. And it was somewhere through the second tap on the jackfruit that he first heard the distinctive sound of a rustle that could only be attributed to some form of movement caused by one or more pairs of limbs trampling on it . He looked around, waiting for the human form to emerge – it sounded like it came from close by – and almost lost his grip on the branch he was holding onto for support. The rustle stopped with a suddenness so unexpected that he could feel his heartbeat shoot up in yet-to-be-acknowledged dread. Holding on to his breath, he craned his head to look beyond the tree in an attempt to ascribe some source to the strange movement. He could only see the bushes, cluttered, unorganised, settled into their mundane existence. Their chaotic presence calmed him, almost made him think that he was over analyzing the situation; but just when he was about to look away, he spotted the patterns, strangely camouflaged by all the foliage surrounding them . For a few seconds, he was certain he had lost his mind. The rustle, the patterns, their obvious owner, none of it made any sense to him. It had to be one of his mind tricks. But just then the patterns moved.
The animal was way too real to be attributed to be the creation of even the worst form of insanity. His grip on the branch tightened as he struggled to hold in his breath, worried that even that faint sound would make him all the more conspicuous to the animal which by now was clearly moving, as indicated by the rustles that had resumed.
Terrified beyond any measurable amount, he then recollected the fleeting rumour he had heard from his friend a few days back. The rumour’s originator, a tailor from Uttar Pradesh – or was it Bihar? he could never quite differentiate one state from another – had sighted a tiger near one of the small ponds in the forest. He had laughed at his friend’s terrified face and his refusal to enter the forest, instantly concluding that the tailor must have been sloshed, and was an out-of-his-head donkey who could barely distinguish between a tiger and a cat in his drunken haze. But now with the impending danger barely at a distance of forty feet from where he was, he could clearly apprehend his friend’s terror.
The rustles got louder and he was certain, getting increasingly closer to where he was. He bit both his lips in a desperate attempt to contain the dread, even as he hopelessly let out that long-held breath. Would the tiger spot him? Had the tiger already spotted him? But since he was perched on the tree; the tiger couldn’t possibly reach him. Had his grandmother not told him that wild animals like tigers and lions are not capable of such manouevres? That long lost childhood memory made him want to weep with relief, but only till he made up his mind that there was nothing he could do if the tiger did manage to get to him. He closed his eyes, not wanting to witness his own death, leaving himself at the mercy of factors that were completely out of his control.
He let himself breathe in a muted form of terror, focusing on the rustles which fluctuated with startling unpredictability before eventually fading out. This time his heart skipped a long line of beats, certain that the animal had finally found him. Any second from now he would hear that blood curdling growl and then… he opened his eyes as if waking up from a bad dream. He was all alone in that vast expanse. The wind blew harmlessly and the sun rays were steadily making their presence felt stronger. Unconvinced, he looked towards the bushes, trying hard to spot the dreaded patterns, but they seemed to elude him altogether. Maybe he was safe after all. He looked around again, there were still no signs of the animal’s presence. He decided he had two alternatives, he could continue to be perched on the tree for an indefinite amount of time or he could climb down and run away to safety. The latter option had an element of risk that he was not willing to take. He decided he would stay on the tree for a little longer. The animal would get bored and eventually leave him alone. Convinced that this would be the sanest thing he could do at that point of time, he closed his eyes and let his head rest on the gorge between the two branches.
His father and some of his neighbours, Shantaram included, found him much later in the afternoon, asleep, with his face pressed against the branch’s bark, his lungi half open and one of his legs dangling down the branch. It took him a few seconds to register their frantic calls and recall the whole scene and when he did that, the words tumbled out, embarrassed, slurred, hurried words that he soon realised would do more damage than any repair. Trying not to think of the haughty smirk on Shantaram’s face, he let go of the branch that now seemed to have become a part of his palm, and climbed down the tree.
”You scared us all so much,” his wife said to him the minute he stepped inside his house. “Everyone was telling me I should have not allowed you to go that forest in the first place. Come now, have food, you must be hungry,” she added.
“I am not hungry and I did not get the jackfruit,” he responded, refusing to look at her face.
Don’t worry about the jackfruit. I already made the patolis.”
“You made the patolis?”
“Yes. You were getting late, so I asked father to go to the market and buy some jackfruit. He got it really quickly because Shantaram offered him a lift on his bicycle. He was heading to the market himself.”
He pulled his fingers into a fist. How nice would it be if he could lock Shantaram in a cage with a tiger?
Prashila Naik dreams of retiring into the idyllic landscapes of Ladakh and longs for a day when every child in India will have two full meals to eat and a permanent school to attend to. When not dreaming or longing, she continues to extend her repertoire as a veteran IT professional who loves to dabble with words and discover new genres of music. Prashila is a community member of the Bangalore Writers Workshop, an unique, effective, and interactive method of bringing a group of writers together and allowing them to study the craft of writing while receiving constructive feedback on their own work.
