THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM Read online

  ‘Was it, though? Was it really alive?’ His voice gained a notch in volume. He turned to Chotu and pointed at the house. ‘We grew up here.’ He waved his arm in a sweep to include the field, the lake, the guava trees. ‘We played here!’ He stared back at the house and his voice dropped. There was a little quiver on his lips. ‘We sat there, listening to Thatha’s stories…’

  Chanti followed his gaze and saw the swinging, empty bulb holder on the porch.

  ‘We used to drink water from that well.’

  Chanti looked at the well, once the pride of its owner, but now blackened with soot, grime and age. On the powdery earth next to it, a broken pail lay on its side, rope tied around its rusty handle.

  ‘We grew up here, Chanti,’ said Chotu. ‘Back then, we didn’t know anything else about the world. This was all we had. But now… now if I ask you to draw yourself a drink from that well, would you do it?’

  Chanti shook his head.

  ‘Heck, even I wouldn’t do it. Now we need our Bisleris and our filters, you see.’ He looked down at Chanti’s feet. ‘Look, you don’t even come out without your slippers.’

  Chanti said, ‘Thatha’s field used to be fertile. He used to grow peanuts. And chillies and pulses and wheat and corn.’

  ‘That was when he was strong enough to work on it, Chanti. Did you see the old man? Does he look like he has it in him to look after this?’

  The sun was out completely now and the crows were beginning to quiet down. The top of the telephone pole was empty. Chanti felt a little smarting of the left side of his face, the side that faced the sun.

  Chotu grinned at him. ‘He still eats Manikchand and Crane. That hasn’t changed.’

  Chanti smiled and nodded.

  ‘And you don’t speak much, even now. That hasn’t changed.’

  Chanti shrugged.

  ‘And Ramana came late. That hasn’t changed either.’

  Chanti looked up. Chotu’s face had hardened. His jaw muscles were taut and what played on his lips was not an easy-going grin but a sardonic smile of contempt.

  ‘Well,’ Chanti said uncomfortably, ‘Thatha did say she has come back. Maybe—’

  Maybe what, Chanti? She killed him, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But how, Chanti? If she killed him, how did she do it? And that too in broad daylight.’

  Chanti’s voice rose; not in the booming way Chotu’s had, but in a petulant whine. ‘I don’t know. Why are you asking me? I am not the one who knows everything about her.’

  ‘Are you saying I am?’

  ‘Well, you’re the one who—’

  ‘Enough! If I am the one that knows everything about her, she would have killed me first. Why didn’t she?’

  ‘I… I don’t know!’

  ‘I do.’ Chotu stepped closer to him and stared down at Chanti. ‘I do. Did you see how Sarayu looked at Ramana when we went to the school last night?’

  ‘Er, no, I didn’t… I didn’t look.’

  ‘Well,’ said Chotu. ‘I did. She looked like she enjoyed watching Ramana,’ and his face contorted in a pained expression, ‘like that!’

  ‘Hey…’ Chanti said.

  ‘The bitch!’

  ‘Hey!’

  Chotu grabbed Chanti’s shoulders with his massive hands. ‘Chanti, I’ve seen that look before. Way back when we were kids. She likes death. No, that’s not the look of liking. She loves it.’

  Chanti wriggled free of the bigger man’s grip and stepped further back. ‘How dare you,’ he said, in the same sulky voice. ‘How dare you…’

  ‘I know. I know you like her. But I am asking you—no, telling you—to be careful.’

  ‘I do not!’

  Chotu gave him a look that was part pity and part disgust. After making sure that Chanti’s face had sufficiently wilted, he continued, ‘I also know something about Aravind.’

  ‘Aravind?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chotu. ‘Come on, Chanti, stay clued in, man! People say men who don’t speak much think a lot. You don’t seem to do either.’

  The sun was a couple of inches above the horizon now. It was beginning to really smart the skin.

  ‘Tell me about Aravind,’ Chanti said irritably.

  ‘You remember how he said he was at the Shivalayam yesterday afternoon?’

  Chanti nodded. ‘Yes, yesterday when Avadhani Thatha asked him.’

  ‘Good! At least you heard that! Now, I know for a certainty that Aravind was not at the Shivalayam yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I know—’

  ‘I know what you said! I am just thinking how… why…’

  I know because I was at the Shivalayam yesterday in the afternoon and I didn’t see him. That’s how I know he wasn’t there. As to why he is lying, I don’t know.’

  Chanti rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead and grimaced. ‘It’s getting hot. Do you remember Palem being this hot?’

  Chotu said, ‘But I can guess why he is lying. Because he was at the school at the time.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Why? The school is on the way—between the place where the cart stops and Thatha’s house. If Aravind did not take the round trip to the Shivalayam—like I did—then he was likely at the school.’

  ‘Killing Ramana?’

  Chotu held Chanti’s gaze simply, with no expression on his face.

  ‘Killing Ramana?’

  Chotu shrugged.

  ‘But… but…’ Chanti’s puzzled expression gradually changed as he stopped and stared into the distance, and his brow cleared.

  ‘You understand, don’t you?’

  Chanti did not answer. He kept staring, his tongue wedged in between his teeth.

  ‘Do you still think then, that it was she who killed Ramana?’

  The breeze from the north picked up and the smell of coconuts grew stronger. Unlike earlier, now there were no sounds other than the sound of the guava branches swaying in the background. Occasionally, a ripe fruit fell to the dust in silence.

  Simultaneously, both of them looked in the direction of the house. A hunched, topless figure stood in the doorway, shielding his eyes against the sun. His jaws, clenched tight, moved in a grinding, chewing motion. For a moment, the three of them stared at one another.

  Then the figure raised his hand and beckoned.

  ‘How did you sleep, kids?’ Avadhani asked, slapping a handful of gutkha into his mouth. The two cane chairs in the front room were taken by Aravind and Sarayu. Chanti and Chotu stood by the wall, using their hands to cushion their backs against the rough brick-and-cement surface.

  None of them said anything. Aravind thoughtfully nursed his arm with his thumb, and Sarayu blinked through darkened eyes.

  ‘Not very well, hain?’ Avadhani chuckled. ‘Had any dreams?’

  Sarayu looked away.

  Avadhani laughed again. ‘I know, kids, this is not a laughing matter. But I told you yesterday, she is back, and none of you believed me. Now Ramana is dead. Now do you believe me?’

  Aravind said in a low voice, ‘But we killed her.’

  ‘Who is this ‘her’, boy? Who is she? We call her ‘she’ and we talk of ‘her’ because we don’t know anything about her. Do we know what she is capable of? Do we even know what she is, where she is from, anything? How does one know the unknowable?’

  ‘But we killed her,’ Aravind said again.

  ‘How do we know we killed her? We may have killed one part of her while other parts may have been growing all this time around the village.’

  Chotu stirred.

  ‘What is it, Chotu?’

  ‘I… I don’t feel her, Thatha.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve lost the ability while growing up, boy. Maybe she has gotten more cunning. Maybe now she can hide her tracks better than she used to.’

  Sarayu asked, ‘But how, Thatha? You yourself said that day that we’d killed her.’

  ‘I thought
so, my girl. I hoped so. And after you left, nothing happened for a long, long time. Until a few months ago, in fact. Maybe she was growing up. Waiting for the right time to strike.’

  ‘What happened a few months ago?’

  Avadhani spat into his tin can. ‘People started to sleep more. I started to sleep more. Look at the village now. Back then, at this time of the morning, everyone would be up and about. Look at it now. Everybody’s sleeping.’

  Aravind said, ‘You woke up early. We all woke up early.’

  ‘I wind up my alarm every night and put it on the other side of the room to force myself to wake up, boy. And to keep myself awake, I chew my gutkha.’ He grinned, and his decaying teeth showed clearly. ‘If I stop chewing, I will go back to sleep. I know.’

  ‘And us?’

  ‘We all sleep,’ Avadhani went on in a dreamy voice, disregarding the question. ‘And when we wake up, the first thing we want to do is to go back to sleep again. Those people are dreaming right now, my boy. They’re dreaming of the future, and they’re controlling their dreams in ways that they cannot—will not—remember.’

  ‘But Thatha,’ Aravind said again. ‘What about us? Why isn’t she getting us?’

  Avadhani shrugged. ‘You five are different, somehow. Remember how you had those first five dreams and you remembered all of them? You also remembered how you changed your dreams. I cannot. I don’t remember what dreams I get. And I don’t remember if or how I am controlling them. But you… you can.’

  Aravind rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and crossed one leg over the other. He looked at Sarayu, Chanti and Chotu, and said, ‘But why should we care? If there is a being here that is controlling the future of the village, why should we do anything to stop it? Why don’t we just pack up and leave?’

  Avadhani sighed and said, ‘Aravind, my boy, when she first came out—when you brought her out—how many people was she able to control?’

  Aravind looked around him.

  ‘Five. The five of you. No one else. Yes?’

  Aravind nodded.

  ‘And now? Now she has got the whole village under her and she is keeping them just barely alive. She is keeping them asleep for large portions of the day. Imagine how much of the future she is influencing through them.’

  ‘I am sure she is, Thatha,’ Aravind said. ‘But how is it any of my concern?’

  ‘It will be, my boy, when she spreads out of Palem. She will spread to Dhavaleshwaram. She will expand enough to be able to control events in a large enough area to suit her purposes.’

  ‘Her purposes?’ Chotu asked. ‘What are her purposes?’

  Avadhani stretched and grimaced. ‘This bloody body pain. I need some rest.’ He reached into his dhoti and brought out some more gutkha which promptly went into his mouth. ‘Ah, that’s better. What did you say, Chotu?’

  ‘What are her purposes?’

  Avadhani shrugged and said, ‘We can assume she is a life form—a life form we don’t know anything about, but a life form all the same—and all living beings, as far as we know, think of two things primarily.’ He looked out of the window. ‘Survival and reproduction.’

  ‘Do we know anything of how she reproduces?’

  ‘Well,’ said Avadhani cautiously, ‘we can guess. That day you first brought her out, all of you carried a part of her back to your houses. Maybe those parts left your person and entered the ground surrounding your houses and started growing there. Maybe because we killed the mother, the growth of these children has been slow, and they’ve matured only now.’

  A cloak of silence descended on the room. Outside, the sun was beating down on an empty street.

  ‘So there are five of them out there now?’ Sarayu asked.

  ‘Yes, my girl. That is my guess. And because there are five of them, they are able to control more people than one of them could have.’

  ‘How are we going to find them?’ Chanti asked.

  ‘And how are we going to kill them?’ Sarayu asked.

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ said Avadhani. ‘I don’t even know if it is possible. You see, she has had a lot of time to plan this, to plot this. If she could control events in the future, she will first ensure her own survival. She would first protect herself and then venture out towards her other ambitions.’ He cast a wan look at Chotu. ‘And it looks like these children are stronger than their mother, because Chotu cannot feel them. Maybe we killed the mother before she matured; maybe she was just beginning to discover her powers. I think the children are much more powerful.’

  Aravind closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He wound his fingers around his arm-rests and spoke to no one in particular. ‘But this is all a guess. We don’t know if they’re actually in this village.’

  ‘Look at the evidence, my boy,’ Avadhani said. ‘And do you know the most chilling aspect of it all? I do not remember writing those letters to you.’

  Aravind opened his eyes and lowered his head to level his gaze at Avadhani.

  Avadhani grinned in reply. ‘Yes, I don’t remember writing to any of you. Remember Sarayu’s dream? She made an aged version of her father write something in a letter. She did not see who it was. She only assumed it was her father—maybe she was meant to assume that. Because otherwise, why would she will the man in her dream to write?’

  Out came the can of gutkha again, the trembling hand popping some into his mouth.

  ‘Thatha…’

  Avadhani dusted his hands and leaned back in his armchair, raising his hands over his head. ‘Yes, my girl,’ he said. ‘It was me you saw in your dream.’

  ‘But how… how could… so early?’

  ‘Yes, so early on, she knew that she would want you to come back to Palem. She is the one who invited you back here. Not I.’

  ‘But it’s impossible. Why would she want us to come back?’

  Avadhani turned his head slowly to look at her. Smiling kindly at her, he said, ‘Ramana came back. What happened to Ramana?’

  He turned back to his earlier position and stared at the ceiling. None of them said anything. Only the dry, restless breathing of the old man punctuated the quietness.

  Finally, Aravind said, ‘I am going to pack my bags and leave.’

  ‘That is entirely up to you, my boy,’ said Avadhani, leaning to one side and scratching his belly. ‘But it will take us all to bring her down. Every pair of hands we can get, we must use.’

  ‘I think this is all an excuse for being lazy,’ Aravind said. ‘Yes, you heard me. All of you are lazy! Palem has always been full of lazy people who did not want to take responsibility. And such villages—well, they deserve to die.’

  ‘Aravind!’

  ‘Yes, you heard me,’ Aravind said. ‘Tell me, Sarayu. Do you seriously find all this believable? Do you think that seventeen years after we’ve killed her, she has now called us back so that she could take revenge on us?’

  Sarayu said, ‘I don’t know, but the man in that dream—it was my dream, Aravind. I remember, it was I who made him write. And it was she who sent us the dream.’ She paused and said, ‘Facts are facts.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate the pull of revenge, my boy,’ Avadhani said. ‘If it is a life form, it will be capable of revenge. And now she probably thinks she is capable of exacting revenge on all five of you.’

  ‘If what you say is true, Thatha,’ said Aravind, ‘she is too powerful for us. She has already killed Ramana. It will only be a matter of time before she gets all of us.’ He looked pointedly at the old man. ‘So isn’t that all the more reason for us to leave right now and escape her?’

  ‘Frankly, my boy, I don’t think you will be able to.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘She has everything planned out. She has managed to bring you all here. Do you think you have a choice to just pack up and leave? Do you honestly think she will let you?’

  Aravind laughed. ‘I’d like to see her try and stop me.’

  Avadhani smiled at the ceiling and his eyes grew dreamy.
‘She won’t just try, my boy. She will stop you.’

  Chanti broke into the conversation. ‘But Thatha, if we cannot run away, what choice do we have? What chance do we have?’

  ‘We can fight, kids. We have that choice. There are five of us and only one of her. We can, we might, still have enough in us to beat her.’

  ‘But how? Do you know where the children are in the village?’

  A smile started playing on Avadhani’s lips. ‘Yes, my boy. I know where at least one of them is.’

  Aravind stared at the old man. The rest of them traded glances.

  ‘Yes,’ Avadhani continued. ‘I know where they are. It is another trait of a life form, kids. Any life form on earth ought to be water-based. They need water to survive.’

  ‘How does that help?’

  ‘When they burrow underground, my boy, and they suck water out, what happens? The earth dries up, it cracks, it cannot support any crops.’ His head turned to the other side, facing the wall beyond which lay his parched field and his dried-up well.

  ‘They’re here?’ Chotu asked incredulously.

  ‘At least one of them is. Did you see how my field has become? No matter how much I water it, no matter how much I pump fertilizers into it, crops just do not grow. My well has dried up. It is almost as if,’ he snickered, ‘something was down there, sucking the ground dry.’

  Chanti said, looking at the others, ‘We can go there today. We can go there now and dig it out. We can…’

  ‘We need to stick together, the five of us.’ Avadhani scratched his buttock and sighed happily. ‘Yes and we need to be strong. Ignore any voices in your head, because they’re probably coming from her or from one of her puppets.’

  Sarayu asked Aravind, ‘Are you in or out?’

  Aravind started to shake his head, then looked at the wall and paused in thought.

  ‘She will try to break you up, kids,’ Avadhani said. ‘She will probably try to get the weakest among you, and get him to work against the others. Maybe she has already got one of you.’ He paused. ‘Yes, maybe she already has.’

  ‘What do you mean, Thatha?’ Chotu asked.

  ‘Nothing, my boy. I am just thinking out aloud. You need to stick together as a group, but you also need to be wary of one another. You need to ignore all voices in your head that are not yours, but ignore your own voice at your peril. When you notice something about one of the others that rouses your suspicion, follow it through. You need to trust each other, and yet you need to distrust each other.’ He stopped and sneezed loudly, twice. Rubbing his nose and wiping his hands on his dhoti, he said, ‘Yes, you need to do both.’