We meet, as appointed, in a park in the centre of the city. You survey our meeting point with a lifted eyebrow. I see your lip curl, and from the look on your face, I know that you don't think that this dry, brown strip of land, bounded by a low gate and roads on either side, could be called a ‘park.’ Buildings rise, blocking out the sun. The few plants that grow are stumpy, withered things.
But it is not this that I wish you to see. Look – here, this is the spot. Right under this desiccated stump of a tree, which looks like an ogre's fist, branch-like fingers rising from the earth.
Bend down with me, here.
Kneel.
Thrust your fingers into this dark barren earth, and dig.
You ask me why we dig.
I tell you that when we dig, we will find the answer to the question you asked, a year and a day ago, as we watched the silver hood of a Mercedes, glistening with blood, crumple as it smashed into a wall. There was a body, dead in a car, and another one, sprawled on the ground, blood leaking onto the tarred road.
You had shaken your head, as you snapped a picture (‘For tomorrow's newspaper,’ you told the policemen who pushed you away).
I watched you walk to the other side of the road. You bought a cigarette from the tiny kiosk on the corner of the pavement. As you lit your cigarette, you exchanged words with the kiosk owner. You both wondered at fate, at tragedy. You asked, as you watched those young, fragile bodies borne away, you asked whether a man's fate was ordained from the moment he was born, or whether it was something he made?
The kiosk owner had shaken his head. He didn't know. You didn't notice me, standing in the shadows by your shoulder, listening to you speak. Even then, I knew the answer to your question. I have dogged your steps for a year, even as you forgot the sight of those crumpled, bloody bodies, the answer on my lips. For a year and a day, I have waited to tell you.
And the time is now.
Yes, you've found it. That piece of plastic, torn, and that condom, dirty and brown after twenty-five years in the ground. It was this packet, this condom, that Ashok Lal carried in his pocket, as he drove past this park.
I see you frown. The name rings a bell. Who is Ashok Lal, you ponder, and why is he important?
Step with me into the past. The years swirl past us, and now we stand on green grass. The ogre's fist is hung with leaves. The park is green, bigger and wider. Couples stroll. The sun sets, a flare of orange in a sky that swiftly turns dark. The couples start to disappear into quiet, dark corners.
Walk with me to the edge. You see that woman? The one in the pink sari, with matching pink lipstick? Look at her closely. Memorise her face, her shape, her smile.
Careful, don't step on that bush. See, it shakes, in the twilight. There's a couple on the other side. You can hear them groan.
Aah. Here he comes. Ashok Lal, in his red Maruti 800, with a sputtering engine. He doesn't look like much, in his faded trousers and white-grey shirt. I see you start, as you stand next to me.
Yes, you've recognised him. He has changed his name, to the far more numerologically correct and astrologically favoured Kumar Ashok Lal Singh. He looks different in your time – the years have fattened him, lined his face, thinned his hair – the years have turned this diminutive looking young man into the stout, fat, khadi-garbed politician, with a following of thousands.
But right now, as he steers his Maruti 800 through the bylanes of the park, he is plain Ashok Lal, a sales manager in a tiny export office. His hard work will see him promoted. His cunning, miserly mind will help him plot his rise. Eventually, he will seduce his boss's nondescript, impressionable daughter. He will marry her and inherit his boss's small business. Under his leadership, the business will grow, lakhs will turn to crores, as he seeks shady, illegal means of making money. His belly begins to grow, keeping pace with his bank balance. When you finally see him, for the first time, he has completed his metamorphosis and turned into the politician you hate and revile, whose perfidy you seek to expose.
But now, watch him as he slows down his Maruti 800. Yes, he's looking at the women clustered by the pavement. He stops by the one in the pink sari. Her name is Rani – but that's not the name she was born with.
Ashok Lal stops his car. He gestures to Rani to get in. She shakes her head – only yesterday, her friend, Pinky, suffered a bad experience with a client in a car. Rani is wary today. Ashok Lal parks, puts on a steering-lock, and rolls up his window. When he's locked the car, Rani and he walk over to the tree, the one shaped like an ogre's fist.
Yes, you lean forward, eager. You can hear them whisper, fiercely. You wonder what they talk about. Nothing much, I can tell you. Ashok is trying to beat down Rani's price.
They disappear into the shadows by the tree.
I know you want to hear, you want to see. But the air is too heavy with sound, the darkness is too thick.
No matter. I will tell you what happens. Ashok lifts Rani's pink sari. He presses her against the rough tree trunk. As his breathing quickens, he reaches for the condom in his pocket and tears open the packet. But the packet falls from Ashok’s grasp. He curses. Rani curses. For a few moments they grope around on the ground, to no avail. They fail to find the packet, lying on the other side, under a root, the same packet that you dug up.
Rani tries to move away, but Ashok has grabbed her shoulder. Rani shrugs. It's happened before. Why forgo good money, she thinks?
You can guess what happens next.
A moment later it's over. Rani holds her hands out for the money. Ashok refuses to give her the price agreed upon. They stand there, arguing, even as Ashok's sperm swims up Rani's womb.
Rani's voice rises. A moment later, Ashok is surrounded by a bevy of whores. They outnumber him. He looks around, there's not a policeman in sight. He scowls and hands over the money. He walks away, hands thrust in his pocket, muttering curses under his breath.
Rani tucks the note into her pink blouse. She straightens her sari and returns to the pavement. Ashok is only the first of three clients that night.
By the time dawn comes, she's exhausted. She's no longer in the park – that's her 'freelance' work – she's in a dilapidated house ten minutes away. By the end of the night, she's forgotten Ashok and their altercation, even though his sperm has fused with an ovum, and a fertilised embryo now drifts through her fallopian tubes, towards her uterus. She has forgotten to take her 'medicine', the nasty concoction Ronny, her pimp, has given her to take immediately after unprotected sex to prevent pregnancies.
The next day she's in bed with a cold. Ronny knows a sick whore won't have any takers. She spends the rest of the week in bed. The embryo takes hold in her uterus and, by the end of the week, a tiny heart has begun to take shape.
By the time she realises she's pregnant, two months have gone by. It is three months more before she works up the nerve to tell Ronny. A friend suggests she tries a concoction, made for her by the neighbourhood quack, that will definitely induce a miscarriage. Rani tries it. She gets a bad stomach ache and bleeds.
But the child inside her clings to life. It's only a month later that she realises that she hasn't miscarried. There's a bulge around her midriff. Ronny notices. He beats her that night, but not hard enough to dislodge the little life growing inside her.
See? Can you see? You can't. But I can see that heart, beating inside her, that tiny head, those veins and bones and muscles forming. I can see Rani's smile on that tiny face, I can see Ashok's clever, cunning eyes.
Ronny tells her that he will take her the following morning to Koki Bai, the woman who lives on the next street, who performs all manner of services for the residents of the brothel, services that involve, according to rumour, twisting one sharpened end of clothes-hanger into one's orifices.
Rani is terrified of this, terrified by the memory of Silky, the Nepalese girl with almond-shaped eyes, who bled for five days after the procedure was done to her, then disappeared. Ronny said she had gone home, but what Pinky and the others tell Rani is that Silky died.
Rani packs her clothes that night, and when Ronny is asleep, drunk, the other women sneak her out.
For a few months, she shelters with Aunty Lilavati, a former prostitute at Ronny's, who has now gone solo. Despite Lilavati's advice, Rani refuses to abort. The clothes hanger, with its twisted, pointed end, haunts her dreams. She is scared of dying, scared of pain.
But two months later, during her seventh month, her labour starts. She's taken to the hospital. Just as she's wheeled into the delivery room, a couple enters the hospital.
You stiffen beside me. You recognise the man leading the pregnant, sad-eyed woman inside the hospital. Your breathing quickens. I hear your heart beat a tattoo in your chest.
You watch him hustle her, tenderly, into a wheelchair. You watch her grunt in pain. You watch her in the delivery room, as she finally squeezes out a frail, tiny scrap of flesh. A baby, two months premature. A nurse rushes with an incubator. You watch the baby, gently lowered in. You watch as the sad woman, sweaty, tendrils of damp hair plastered to her forehead, cries. She turns her head to watch as the baby is wheeled away.
Come, tear yourself away. Come with me, to the ward next door where Rani is, her feet splayed, a head emerging between her thighs. A shriek, and the baby slips out. It's two months early, but it's a lusty, bawling thing. Rani sinks back onto the pillows, weakly. Her eyes close, as the baby cries.
A moment later, just as the nurse exits the ward, baby in hand, she is dead.
It's midnight now. The nurse on duty, watching over the premature infants, is the one who assisted at Rani's labour. She frequently glances at the baby in the right crib, a weak, fragile child, the one born to the sad-eyed woman.
A few minutes past midnight, and the machines begin to beep. The nurse darts across the room, leans over the crib, the one in which the frail infant lies.
There is nothing she can do. She sighs.
It’s then that she looks at the baby in the adjacent crib. Rani's baby.
She reaches towards the baby, and hesitates. She bites her lip and glances at the crucifix hanging over the door. It could be a fault of the flickering tube light – but it seems, in that moment, that the body nailed to the cross, moves, the head lifts, and the eyes stare at her directly.
She jumps back, startled. She looks, a second later, at the crucifix. It is still now, a piece of dead wood. Did she imagine the movement?
Her arms extend of their own accord. It is almost as if she’s in a dream. Within seconds, Rani's child has taken the place of the dead baby.
It's then that the nurse hears a gasp. Startled, she turns around and looks into the bespectacled, myopic eyes of the sad woman's husband.
The minutes tick by. Finally, the man turns to regard the squealing infant who has taken his son's place.
He nods, curt, brisk, and walks away.
The nurse exhales.
I feel you tremble beside me. You pull away. Your eyes are filled with pain, with hate. You tell me I lie, you accuse me of distorting the truth.
That's what they all say. But I look at you, and in the pain in your face, I see doubt.
Come, take my hand.
The walls shake, the lights flicker, the ground moves. The years tumble past, as we travel through time. Finally, we stop. The walls have been repainted, the floor is smooth marble instead of rough concrete. It is daytime now, people scurry past. The cries of newborn infants and women in labour fill the air.
We ascend the stairs. The floor above is filled with the scent of death, filled with wasting faces, inert bodies, beeping machines and IV drips.
You beg me to stop. You grip the bannister with one hand. You tell me that you can't continue. You try to wrench your hand from my grasp, you already begin to guess how this will end. You plead with me to desist.
I can't. You must know. I pull you to your feet, pull you past the dying. We stop in front of a door. I push it open.
Inside, your father lies on the hospital bed, thin and shrunken. His words are a whisper, his breath a rattle in his chest.
I see the tears stream down your face, hear sobs choke your throat. You stumble. I hold out my hand and you grab it. You turn your face to mine, tear-stained, stricken.
You see yourself, sitting by his bedside. He beckons you to come closer. His breath is hot on your cheek, as you lean over him.
He speaks, but you can't make out the words. He moves back, stares in your face. The machines start to beep. He still stares at you. It's only when the nurse rushes in, followed by the doctor, that you realise that he has died.
But even then, as you stumble out the room, tears blinding you, you feel his eyes following you, his glance burning your back.
What was he trying to say?
This gift I give you is his answer. His shade comes to us, stepping forth from the shadows, wearing his gaunt, withered face. He raises his bony hands to touch you. He speaks now, the words have lain waiting on his tongue for years, the words that he feared to speak, the words that came too late. He tells you now that you are not the son who was born to him.
For years he believed that this knowledge would not alter your fate. He loved you. Did the truth matter? But now, in the presence of death, he realises differently. He realises that you cannot escape fate, that it will pursue you to your end. The fabric of his life is spread out before him, the things unknown and invisible revealed. He knows a man's life is shaped by his birth, and that your fate is impossible to escape. There is a neatness, a pattern, a shape to it. By with-holding the truth, he has condemned you to your fate.
Come, take my hand. Time flashes past. We return to the park, a few moments before our appointment.
Look up. The sun dazzles your eyes. But do you see those figures, meeting on the rooftop of that building? Look closely. You see yourself and you see Kumar Ashok's henchman, Chand Lal.
And there, in the distance, do you see Kumar Ashok? His bulk seems to block the sun, throwing a black, menacing shadow. His face is impassive, although sweat drips down his forehead. There is venom in the glances he darts at you, there is pure hate in the look you return.
He hates the pieces you've been writing about him. The ones that accuse him of corruption, of nepotism, of bribing the electorate. The pieces published in Indian newspapers and foreign publications. He pulled strings, he got you removed from your job. He thought that would silence you. But it hasn't.
You revile him. He has come to symbolise everything you fight against.
But it's more than that. In fighting him, you feel you are avenging the ignominious death of your father – an honest man, a small man, who lost his job as an engineer in a factory due to Kumar Ashok's wheeling and dealings. You fought for him, you used your pen and your camera to evoke his voice, to capture his despair, the despair of the individual, lost in the larger scheme of things, of a small life destroyed by the whims of conglomerates and Big Business.
And yet, you both fail to see the similarities, the clever, cunning eyes. The persistence that characterises every endeavour. The ambitious, ruthless streak. Father and son. It's genetics that causes you to confront each other, to battle for supremacy, that has equipped you with the skills to fight each other. But you don't know that.
And it is fate that has brought you here.
Chand Lal opens a briefcase. It is filled with wads of money. He pushes it toward you.
You take it. You turn, to the parapet, and shake the briefcase. The wads of cash fall out. You see an urchin, far down below, jump up as he tries to catch a note, as it flies past, borne by the wind.
Kumar Ashok grabs you from behind. He is furious. His veins bulge, his face is contorted in a grimace.
Your eyes are bloodshot. You're at the end of your tether. You wrestle him to the parapet.
For a moment, you are lost from sight. Next to me, you squirm, impatient, eager to discover what happens next.
You pull out a gun.
The sound of a gunshot rips through the air.
A moment later, a body falls from the rooftop, past eleven storeys, and lands, face down, in the park below, by a tree shaped like a fist.
Come, walk with me to the tree. Help me turn this body over.
We turn over the body. Blood stains your hands and mine.
You start. You scream.
It's your face, squashed and broken, staring back at you.
You hit me. You scratch at my hands with your nails. You curse me.
I'm used to this. Your hands, your curses, they have no effect on me. Everyone screams, at this point. Everyone curses.
Eleven stories above us, Chand Lal checks for a pulse on Kumar Ashok, and tries to staunch the blood flowing from the wound in his chest. Someone calls for an ambulance. It's futile, I can tell you. I have an appointment with Kumar Ashok in a few moments.
You stare at your body on the ground, and then at the tree shaped like a fist, a few steps away from us. You finger the broken, brown packet in your pocket. You see the beginning and the end of your life, a few steps away from each other.
You asked, a year and a day ago, whether fate is ordained.
You have your answer.
Fate is cruel, you say. I beg to differ. I prefer to call it a sense of humour.
You ask me who I am.
You don't need to ask. You've guessed – haven't you?
*
Samhita Arni is the Bangalore-based writer of four books, including The Mahabharata - A Child’s View and The Missing Queen. Sita’s Ramayana, a collaboration with artist Moyna Chitrakar, was a New York Times Bestseller. Her latest book, The Prince, is the winner of the 2020 Neev Book Award. She is a former editor of Out of Print and was a co-editor of the issue on Gender and Sexual Violence.