Phil did not react at all. His head was in a strange position to the rest of him, a most unnatural angle. In fact, as Lex’s eyes adjusted, he saw that it wasn’t Phil at all but actually some kind of doll, for the head had been pulled right off. He rubbed his eyes as if it might change things, but no, the head wasn’t attached to the body at all.
A dark pool spread about the body. Phil’s chest and belly had been ripped open. The man by the corpse of his best friend was digging around in it, sawing off handfuls of flesh with a knife and lifting them to his mouth. The sight did not quite register, did not make any kind of sense at all. Lex did not think he was really seeing it.
The man’s head turned sideways and Lex could see the chewing motions of his jaw. Inarticulate sounds came from his chewing, gargling throat interspersed with “good…good”.
For Lex, everything span around again, very fast. His head fell back down on the long grass, making it rustle.
The eating sounds stopped. The man got to his feet. For a moment, his heavy excited breathing was the only sound. Heavy footsteps padded swish-swish through the grass. Lex felt and heard him coming but didn’t care because he couldn’t. He still didn’t understand.
The man stood, tall over him, stretching far above like a statue, legs that were concrete pillars. It was the man they’d seen ogling the magazines in the news agency. For a long time, the longest minute in Lex’s life, the man stared down at what the moonlight had revealed to him in the tall grass. His blood-smeared mouth hung open just as it had when he shambled out of the shop towards them.
A car swept past, swishing up puddles of water where the road dipped, then it was gone.
The man was trying, it seemed, to speak. Gibberish came out, a language of stuttering grunts, interspersed here and there with words. Lex discerned only, “Where we come from… makes us hungry.”
In the long years later, on therapists’ couches, in bed tearfully telling his wife about it for the first time after twenty-one years of marriage; after waking from every nightmare where he was, again, a kid lying in long grass next to the water…
All the while driving himself through business school, through board rooms, from success to success, ever higher and faster as though to get away from a shambling monster on the road behind him…
Through memories of the funeral, of the police interviews, the witness stand with the monster blankly watching him answer questions in the trial that eventually put the monster in a hospital, not in a prison…
From trying to work out why, why he hadn’t been taken as well; why he’d been spared after he’d passed out in the long grass, utterly at the monster’s mercy, only to wake later and find what was left of his friend spread across the dewy ground…
Till he was an old man, rich and lonely, fading from life in his last days, bitterly wishing that, of all the memories his mind so eagerly shed, good and bad, why those memories above all others must remain till his very last day…
He would, throughout all this, seek some secret meaning in those words his ears had barely discerned amongst the grunts and stutters that had burnt those words—with whatever secret things they meant—into his mind, into his life, as a never-fading scar.
Nira and I
Shweta Narayan
Nira and I are with Hemal on the day she dies. She is teaching us a clapping-song game, a remembering game. She is winning.
We call Hemal by name, though that breaks respect law because she is my mother’s younger sister. She says being called jal-amaa makes her feel old. She is sixteen, which is old; Nira and I are five.
My amaa opens the door screen and says, “Hemal, we must talk. Nira, go home; your amaa will worry.”
Hemal’s eyebrows pull together, scrunching up her caste marks, like maybe she ate all the butter or forgot to douse the cook-fire. She gets up and ruffles my hair. “I’ll be back soon, little ones.”
She ducks outside. Arms grab her. She fights. My father shouts, “Don’t try to lie. We saw you with that boy, that fisher-caste scum! And all this time you were living in my house, luring in the mist…”
Nira says, “Your ataa won’t beat her, will he, Shaya?” Her voice is small.
I say, “Shh,” and put my arms around her.
Voices pile on each other, words like “Law” and “Honour”, words like stones. Nira’s eldest brother says, “Fishers use children’s fingers for bait.” He is supposed to marry Hemal.
Amaa sobs, “Sister, little sister, how could you?” and Hemal says, “How could you?”
Then the half-bricks start, and cobblestones and broken bottles. Shadows huge and sudden against the door screen; the thud of Hemal falling; screams and wet breaking noises.
“This isn’t happening,” I say. Sounds blur outside. Shadows lighten.
Nira huddles closer to me. I put my arms around her. “It’s all right,” I whisper. “Remember, she said she would come back.”
Nira and I are six when her eldest brother loses his way in the mist. Three days later, his bones get home. An extra finger sprouts from the left hand, and the skull has no eye sockets. But his clothes dangle from the shoulder blades, and dry knuckles scratch at the door for two days before the King’s men come.
This happens, but not to us. We are rememberers. We know each corner, every cobblestone. The mist cannot tempt us into a street that never was, can never make us think that we are home, or that we are kittens or fish. We are the city’s traders, its messengers; we know it from wharf to hill. We roam through the dead market, piled high with bananas and seaweed but smelling only of age; we cross the tricky bridge, whose planks dissolve underfoot when we aren’t there to remember. We are not trapped, huddling in tiny neighbourhoods. We matter. Travellers pay us to lead them safely through the mist, and our families work even in the palace. Granted, we may have little changes—forked tongues or grey eyes and skin, or feathers for hair—but nothing to bring the King’s men. Our caste is pure. Till Nira’s brother is lost.
Nira’s amaa keeps her home after that, keeps her brothers home. All the mothers do, holding children closely and safely when we should be learning the city. And every day we grow more scared.
I am eight when I see Nira again. She appears out of thick curling twilight with her brother Abjit, who is ten, gripping her hand so hard it hurts me. I can see through their feet. I do not imagine what they might become. Nira says, “They’re lost. All lost. Amaa and Ataa, and Imar, and Garun. They’ve been gone a week, and we are so hungry, Shaya, so very hungry.”
I pull them in and shut out the mist. Wrap blankets around them, feed them spicy coconut rice to wake them up. Taking care of Nira again. A knot loosens in my heart.
Nira comes back fully, but I do not remember Abjit as well. One of his feet is grey, and clawed, and much too small. Mist-burnt. “How did you find us?” I say.
Nira says, “Hemal showed me the way.”
The next day Abjit will laugh at her for this, will taunt and tease and pinch. But now he stares around wide-eyed, and touches every wall and stool and bit of floor, and says nothing at all.