THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM Read online

  Now you might think why the five kids coming to Palem was important. It’s because they remembered these dreams. None of the other people we gave dreams to remembered them. These five did; which meant they were harder to control. If I could get them back to Palem and somehow make them fight on my side, that was my best chance—still a slim one, but there was a chance.

  He had Saidulu and Ramesh, whose minds were so malleable that the three of them worked like one mind, but even so, if I had the other five on my side, I thought I would have him yet.

  The arrival of the kids back in Palem must have caught him off-guard. When Ramana came, he wasted no time in pushing him off the mound. He used Saidulu for that. It caught me off-guard too; I was too busy at the time concentrating on Aravind…

  Aravind… oh, yes, Aravind. He was the oldest of the five when the incident happened, and consequently, I guess, he was the one most affected by it. His mind listened to me—not as Saidulu’s and Ramesh’s do now, but it was not as dead as the others. Chotu had some natural mental plasticity that helped me talk to him, but whoever I was able to access, Avadhani would be able to access too. So I had to keep my guard. My only chance of success lay in protecting the five as well as I could, until Avadhani was killed. And then, of course, kill the five myself. My revenge would not be complete until I killed them all.

  So I tried to protect them the best way I could, but all the while Avadhani used the advantage of being alive to make them fight among one another, making them suspect one another and slowly attack and kill each other. By playing Ramana’s death, he was able to turn Chotu on Aravind. When Aravind left Chotu hurt by the wall, he immediately commanded Ramesh and Saidulu to go and finish him off. By rousing Sarayu’s jealousy against Seetalu and by playing up the guilt Seetalu herself felt, he was able to get Seetalu to die. He spoke to Chanti about Sarayu’s undying love for Aravind and got him to slit her throat. And finally, when Chanti turned on Aravind, one of them was anyway going to die.

  I think his original plan had been for his minions to pick out whoever was left in the struggle, and if Chanti had prevailed, he would have succeeded. But fortunately for me, it was Aravind who survived, and Aravind had been listening to what I’d been giving him—though I suspect Avadhani had filtered most of it out. I kept him from thinking consciously about Avadhani. I filled him with a need to go to Avadhani and ask for his advice. I made him think of one thing and one thing only—that he was the being’s henchman that Avadhani had talked about. Until he was at the door of Avadhani’s hut, I made him believe it, because only if he believed it himself, would Avadhani believe that Aravind believed it, and he would allow him to come to him.

  When Aravind reached the house, I let go of him and allowed him to think on his own.

  He thought of it all, sometimes out loud, sometimes to himself. But Avadhani heard it all. He summoned his followers to the house to protect him. Would he be able to stall him long enough before they arrived?

  But then, Aravind started to respond to Avadhani’s words. He started to believe what Avadhani told him was true. I pushed back with all my might to keep him from believing in what the old man was telling him, but the more he believed, the easier it became for Avadhani to get a hold on him. He had almost dropped the knife. Avadhani signalled to his men to come to the house but to stay out of sight, because he might not need them after all. He would take the knife from Aravind, and then he himself would cut the boy’s throat after convincing him that he was the one that needed to be killed for the good of the village. Yes, that would be perfect.

  But then a breeze blew, and the smell of honey wafted into the room. Aravind’s mind snapped.

  I grabbed that little spark of suspicion in his mind and pulled at it as hard as I could. Before I knew it, Aravind had him by his throat, and was calling for the boys to come out. Yes, it was perfect. After all these years, I had the two men who would complete my revenge right there, out to kill one another. Aravind would kill Avadhani, and as soon as he died, his hold on the two boys would break, and then I would take over and command them to break Aravind’s skull. Yes, sweet, sweet revenge.

  Except they did not wait for me to command them. With the final gasp of his body, Avadhani raised in their mind such a sense of fury against Aravind that as soon as life left their master’s body, they bounded on him like a couple of hungry dogs and beat him to death. There was nothing but a surprised grunt from Aravind—yes, nothing but a surprised grunt, unlike his father…

  And now, I have a body and a brain. There is nothing about the reporter girl in this brain now. I wear her body, and I use her insides, but she is all me. She does not remember anything about herself any more. She doesn’t exist. Only I do.

  People—her people—will come asking questions, but it wouldn’t matter by then. I will have been long gone. Palem will have been long gone.

  I remember the night when this village branded me a mad woman and stoned me away. There is a gift I need to give them in return for that. Now that I have the power to control them all, and now that I have no competition, it should be rather easy.

  What do you think?

  Love,

  So—Lachi

  Chapter Thirty Three

  220 Die in Village Fire

  By our special correspondent

  AP Mirror

  |April 02, 2002|

  Nobody knows who or what started the fire. All that is clear is that the destruction is complete. Not one hut has been spared. Not one building has escaped. The bodies of all 220 inhabitants were found in their respective homes; most of them had died in their sleep. The police are now in the process of identifying the dead, and it is with great regret that we announce that the body of Miss Sonali Rao, one of Mirror’s most promising young journalists, was found in an old house that has reportedly been uninhabited for over a year.

  The police believe that the fire was most probably caused by accident. They say the hot and dry weather that Palem has been experiencing lately must have made it easier for the fire to spread.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  1970

  She lay on the cot watching the roof, legs parted, her sari pulled up over her thighs. She had only looked one of the four men directly in the eye. Mangayya and Sundarayya were dogs anyway, she was not surprised they had come. But Subbai? And Gopalam? She had spat in Subbai’s face and stared into Gopalam’s eyes. What sweet words did Avadhani tell those men to make them come here tonight, she wondered.

  She had expected him to come too. But he had not. After Gopalam had staggered away, he had peered in, looked at her, chuckled, tossed a fifty-paise coin at her and left, laughing.

  Sanga, her husband, was still out on the porch. She heard him count his money and sing to himself gleefully. What sweet words did Avadhani tell him? What sort of hold did the man have on all of them?

  But what was the need to place all blame on him? If there is no blackness in your heart, is it possible for anyone to exploit it? If Sanga had been talked into drinking, if he had been talked into doing this to her and to himself, did it not mean that his mind had been corruptible?

  The door opened, and he stumbled in.

  ‘Lachi,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Make me some fish curry. I am feeling hungry.’ He held his hands out to steady himself, but failed and collapsed on the floor. ‘Oh,’ he said when he hit the ground. ‘Make it nice and spicy.’ And then he started singing again.

  She adjusted her sari, got off the cot and went into the kitchen. Was this her father’s curse playing itself out? How she wished she could go back to her father right now… What she would give to hear him read out from the Gita for her one last time… How badly she wished the years would roll back and freeze on those summer evenings, when she slept on the porch and heard him tell her stories about the stars…

  She picked up the rolling stone and stared at it. A brahmin’s curse did have a lot of power, she thought. All you could do is bow down before it and give in
. What else could you do?

  Her fingers tightened around the stone. From somewhere deep in the recesses of her past, another voice broke out. That voice belonged to the girl that wanted to leave Palem and become a lawyer. She couldn’t hear what the voice was saying, but it was definitely not asking her to give in.

  She walked back to her husband and squatted next to him. He was snoring now. She held the stone in both her hands, then lifted it up over her head and brought it down on his forehead with all her strength behind it.

  All it took was one blow. He neither screamed nor stirred. He just hiccupped, and as the blood started to flow, his breathing stopped.

  She took his head in her lap and massaged the wound, spreading the blood all over his face. For the first time, she noticed that the moon was out that night. There was a song that her father used to sing when the moonlight was particularly beautiful. She cocked her head to one side and crooned, now and then bending down to kiss him on his cheek.

  Challani raja o Chandamama…