“There you are. Go on now. Your father is waiting.”
Mother was sweeping the floor. She rearranged the newspapers spread open on the glass table top before her, and replaced the dry flowers from the china vase with the freshly plucked ones. She recovered a lonely torn blue sock from a web of dust; it had made home the dark corner under the sofa.
“I am wearing the purple trousers today” I informed as a matter of fact, and left the house to explore the paddy fields. The farmer had turned the motor pump on; it was time to frolic under the gush of the voluble hose.
When we moved into the new house, I was very happy. The new house was bigger than the previous one; its six rooms were furnished with deco art and they were nothing short of opulent. The great arch in the hall with its gilt beaded chandelier was an eye candy; the violet gauze curtains ruffled in the breeze throughout the day; our reflections on the impeccable polish of the cold marble floor followed us everywhere. Around the house were paddy fields; we were enclosed in the amorphous grasp of the fields that rasped melodiously as the breeze brushed its back on the pointed grass heads.
As I marched my way into the fields, I noticed that a fluffy puppy was tethered to a nose shaped hook beside the slanted thatch roof hut. The puppy was snacking on the cord rope to cut itself loose. My approach had distracted him, he lifted his gaze to meet mine; his ears flopped about him like a rabbit’s as he agitatedly got back to tugging at the rope. With the rope tightly drawn between his front paws, he bit the last strand and once released, he jumped about in a mad merriment.
“Who is there?” a voice from inside the thatched roof hut dragged the source; it was a bare chested farmer. His wide nostrils prepped up; his skin was thick like oxen, and his whiskers drowned in the charcoal colour of his skin. His forehead was long and rose above his undetectable eyebrows into the curly mess overhead. His ears were like that of an elephant; they stuck out beneath the cropped hair and visibly twitched every now and then.
“It’s only a boy” another voice dragged yet another creature. A lady stepped out of the hut. Her sari dishevelled and hair tangled; her deep set eyes were lined with mascara. Slight breeze was wafting the sari over her bosom, now baring the gilded skin of her midriff. Sun sloped through the shifting leaves overhead; a shaft of light now scrutinised the curve of her hip, now the tip of her pointed nose, and now the puffed up cheeks. With her thumb and index finger, she unconsciously tucked the ruffled sari into the waistband of her petticoat before slipping into the fields behind the hut.
Presently, the farmer held me by the scruff of my neck; with his other hand, he leaned to grab the rake. I seized the opportunity, whisked his grip away and ran into the fields. The field drowned me with its capacious frills. The paddy fields around me swayed harmoniously with a neat ruffling sound like a million bees silently fluttering their wings. My tiny feet sank into the mud knee-deep with every step I took, and I flopped into the mud just as an eagle alighted before me to feast on a baby snake. The snake had unfortunately stepped out of the marsh, perhaps for warmth. Its pale underbelly rose before my eyes; clawed between the eagle’s charred hooks, it acquired a golden glow as it ascended over the thin blades of the dew beaded grass tops.
I refrained from going into the fields for a long time since the day of the incident. However, two years later, on a sunny afternoon, I returned to the fields. This I did, for I noticed that the lady I remembered from the earlier episode seemed very distressed and panicky. I found to my astonishment, the woman from that morning was presently running helter-skelter in the fields; it looked like she had lost something valuable. Pleats of her sari were drawn from between her feet and tucked into the waist at the back; the admirable anatomical aesthetics of the woman had all but vanished, she was palpitating and out of breath. This is when I met her.
Ten minutes later, I was still dizzied and could not fathom the strangeness of her story. Apparently, she had conceived a baby that morning after I confronted them near the hut. The baby was unlike any other; the hapless mother explained “she grows like there is no end to it” she had a broken finger; the nub of it was infected with gangrene. A scar ran from the temple to meet the left ear; she had grown emaciated, weak, and thin sculpture-like.
“To feed her, I had to sell my cattle and land. Now I am working as a part time labourer in the land that I owned only two years ago” wiping the snot that ran down her nose with the sleeve of her blouse, she pressed me for help. Her daughter had run away; she needed feeding six times a day, and the poor mother was unable to source the voracious daughter any for over half a day.
In the evening, when the sun deservedly descended after a daylong work, we were still searching for the daughter. Then at nightfall, when we returned to the lady’s hut, we were greeted with a trail of blood that began from the fields and ended in the hut. I rushed to open the door but the mother warranted me; with the raised arm holding a stick, she cautiously opened the door, and with a thud, dropped to the floor.
“Where is my daughter?” with those words, the mother woke up to find seven pairs of eyes drilling into her view. I had explained the situation to my parents and they agreed to put the poor mother and the strange daughter in our pent house. Strangeness of the daughter was two pronged – one, she was a voracious eater and would go to any lengths to acquire food; that afternoon, she had dragged her kill, a dog, into the hut and was munching heavily with the flesh scooped up between her legs and licking the fresh blood. Two, she was growing rapidly; she was only fifteen months old and now looked like a healthy fifteen year old.
We had locked the daughter in the store room adjoining the pent house. “I don’t recall my daughter crawling at all” the mother explained as I stood with my parents and two neighbouring ladies before the window of the store room. “Initially, I was overjoyed and euphoric. The baby was healthier than any other I had seen. She had a healthy appetite; she finished a meal before I could set the dinner table” a smile flickered through her face as she explained “I was so overwhelmed with joy, when she spoke her first words ‘hungry’. Only in the third month, she had grown into the size of a three year old and was already gulping down crab feet without chewing them properly”. Now she was audibly laughing “I was so happy; in her eighth month, she was feeding the hen, our cattle and was a lending hand to me.”
The daughter locked up inside the room, was licking her paws. Her pink frock had gathered crumbs of dry foliage on the pleats; she had tucked away leftovers of a rabbit on the hump of her waistband; an ill-tailored blouse that was not accommodated for her size, was torn and bared her bosom. The mother laughed and laughed until I pointed to the visceral habits of her daughter. Then she threw her head back and continued “by the thirteenth month, it had sunk into me that my daughter was unusual. In an attempt to quench her appetite which ranged from six to ten times a day, I had to sell my cattle and livestock.”
Now, she paused and began in an emphatic tone “around that time; the thirteenth month, my daughter entered puberty. And, she grew violent. It began with her yelling at me in case the food was not made ready in time. By now, she was almost all the time eating. When she was not eating, she was either sleeping or hiding in the bushes” a squeamish look surfaced on her face as she continued “she brought home rabbits, dogs and sometimes snakes. People from the neighbouring farms complained about a creature that was sneaking in the dark and feeding on their livestock. Some had spotted her drooling on thick viscous blood; some had seen her frolicking in the fields naked to the last strand; still some had tried to dissuade her from entering their fields only to find themselves bitten on the neck.”
“What could I do? For the last two weeks, I locked her up in the hut.” Tears rolled down her dry cheeks “I fed her by pushing a plateful of meat once in every three hours from under the door.”
Everyone around her was watching her like sedated rabbits. I inquired “how did she get out?”
To this, the poor thing replied “I was out in the sun, labouring, tilling the land. The rake was broken, but I hadn’t enough money to fix it. That money could have bought my daughter two more meals. So I tilled with my hand.” She was hiccupping pitifully, her sobs had melted any passing doubts the neighbours and my parents had in regards to helping the woman. “I don’t remember, but I think I had a sun stroke. By the time I woke up, my daughter had escaped. Two meals were delayed. Around the pillar which I tied her to, I found marks of her nails digging into the ground and raking the mud” with those words, an inconsolable cry left her. My mother and the neighbouring women broke into sobs themselves.
We let the mother and daughter live with us. A doctor was called; we fed her for three hours continuously until she fell asleep. Then I and the doctor entered the store room. As we approached her cautiously, it occurred to me that it was just a toddler that we were approaching. The fifteen months old toddler defied all logic and had grown into the size of a voluptuous teenager.
The thorough examinations that were performed after we sedated her with dishes full of meat, continued for over a month. It was not easy for us to handle the situation, the daughter was scathing, intolerant, violent and abusive.
Finally, the reports had arrived. And the doctor explained to my mother “your son is experiencing a strange defect of the mind. He seems to be schizophrenic” shifting between his many files and folders, he pulled out a long envelope with thick printed words. Pointing to an x-ray of my skull, he proceeded to explain “the brain spectrometry indicates….”
My mother quickly grabbed the doctor’s hand, whisked the folder full of x-rays and spectrometry papers away from him. “Please tell me plainly. What is the condition of my son?”
And he did “Yes. Your son cannot differentiate fact from fiction” I could see my mother’s face turn blood red as the doctor clarified “results indicate that the brain is showing unusually high activity in the area where it breeds imagination and an almost nought in the area where it processes the facts.”
I am an unreliable narrator.
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