SHORT STORY
The Killing
by Salil Chaturvedi
It was only after I wiped the blood off my palm that I realised I’d been holding my breath. I don’t think anyone noticed the killing. The trucks droned by on the nearby highway, the high-pitched humming of the rubber tyres sounding as natural as the sound of crickets. A scooter horn trumpeted its tinny caution from the narrow lane behind the house. The mutts down the street howled at imaginary or, who knows, real demons, their hysterical outpourings sculpting the night, giving depth to the darkness and, well, there was one less life in the city of Margao.
I stared at the streak of blood on my palm and wondered if my life was less or more than the one I had just taken.
Nothing in the day had indicated that I would take a life before it was over. I’d started the day nervous, thinking about, of all things, the poetry recitation that I had been invited to judge at a local school.
“Mr Noronha?” the lady on the line had a deep voice. A contralto. For pleasure, I imagined her singing “You Can Leave Your Hat On”. I thought of her mouth.
“Yes…” I said.
“Hello, this is about the poetry recitation…remember?”
“Of course I remember. Listen, please call me Mario,” I said.
“Oh, OK…Mario sir, you can call me Laura.”
“OK, Laura,” I said. “And it’s Mario, without the sir, please.”
There was a distracted silence on the phone and then she said, “We’d like very much for you to recite some of your poems afterwards.”
“Well… all right, but you’ll have to face the consequences.”
She laughed politely.
“Thanks so much. I’m a big fan of yours,” she said and hung up.
I’m not all that great at poetry. Some of it gets published in the local newspaper from time to time and, what can I say, my fame has spread near and narrow. Sometimes people bring their poems to me and ask me if they are any good. Unless it’s a pretty girl, I don’t even give the poems a look.
Anyway, I hadn’t been able to sleep all night on account of the nervousness about judging the competition. It’s different when you just potter away on your own time in your own two-bedroom flat, sometimes for weeks, trying to get a line or a word right, but facing people is a different thing altogether, like being in the crocodile waters of the Cumbarjua canal.
At around four-thirty in the morning, I’d woken up, got out of bed and gone and sat in the balcony. The street was dripping yellow. I took a sip from the water bottle and some of the water spilled and flowed down my neck, over my chest, sending down a shudder of excitement. I watched a cat making an incredible climb from balcony to balcony up to the roof of our building. For no reason I thought about purpose in life. That’s not true, actually. The cat reminded me of my friend Zohravar, who has three cats—two males and a female. Zo had said, just the day before, that we were encouraged to ask all the wrong questions, example-wise: the real question was not Who am I? but Who am I not? He says these surprising things that make you pause and sort of look at the terrain you’re journeying over a little more closely. “Life is meant for doing two kinds of things,” he is fond of saying, “Groundy things and lofty things. The important thing is that you do the groundy things in a lofty way and the lofty things in a groundy way.” He is not very keen on poetry, though. “You can use the choicest of words and metaphors and you’re still nowhere close to what the world is really like,” he says. “Isn’t that the point?” I ask him. I don’t read my poems out to him.
Anyway, the cat was somewhere on the roof now and I couldn’t see it, though I could see its shadow on the road ahead and it seemed like a large leopard was out prowling the neighbourhood. I thought of writing a poem about a cat’s shadow and then that made me think of the poetry judging and the nervousness returned. I found myself thinking about the time I had participated in a recitation competition in school. Must’ve been, what, twenty-five years ago? I had been well prepared and everyone had expected me to win, or at least be in the top three. But when my turn came I had stood in the hall jam-packed with students, facing the judges, my mind a blank. The prompter had read out the first sentence from behind me and I had started but I couldn’t remember the next sentence. I remember the dryness of my mouth and the high-pitched whine in my ears as the shocked eyes in the hall swallowed me. Some just looked away in embarrassment or found something fascinating to stare at on the walls. I still remember the face of the student who had been prompting, though I can’t recall his name. It was Joel, I think. He used to be a fan of Hitler and would greet people with a spiky “Heil!” clicking his heels sharply. I remembered heiling him once near the water fountain just to make fun of him but, to my surprise, he had been pleased and had responded with an enthusiastic heil! and insisted I drink before he did.
The poetry judging turned out to be surprisingly easy. There were three judges, including me. They seated us in different parts of the hall. A teacher gave me a sheet that had the names of the students and the criteria for judging in neat columns—five points for memory, five for poise, ten for diction and ten for expression. “Nice, so it’s all figured out,” I thought, abandoning the judging system I had devised.
The poetry judging turned out to be surprisingly easy. There were three judges, including me. They seated us in different parts of the hall. A teacher gave me a sheet that had the names of the students and the criteria for judging in neat columns—five points for memory, five for poise, ten for diction and ten for expression. “Nice, so it’s all figured out,” I thought, abandoning the judging system I had devised.
At first, I waited for the students to finish their pieces before marking them, but after the first few I marked them mid-way. It was easy to tell who was good and who wasn’t. When there were about eight students remaining I began to feel uneasy. It was a struggle to survive the last half-hour. As soon as the students finished, I excused myself saying that I had an urgent appointment to keep. It was true, but only partly. I had to go to a studio in Panjim to record voiceovers with some children for an educational CD, but I did have time. I just couldn’t bring myself to recite my poetry in front of a hall full of students.
Laura accompanied me out of the hall. I wanted to go to the restroom and she showed me the way. Before I knew it she was inside the restroom with me.
“I really wanted to hear some of your poetry,” she said. “Could you recite the one that’s on the T-shirt, please?”
I was surprised by that. A garment boutique had screen-printed a poem of mine on T-shirts along with an image of a tiger painted by a local artist, but I hadn’t known they had sold any.
“Please,” she said, her voice reverberating in the empty restroom.
“Okay,” I said, hoping I’d be able to remember the poem. “It’s called ‘Lost in a Stream’.”
“I know what it’s called,” Laura said, grabbing my elbow.
“No, no. I need to say that before I recite it,” I said. And then I started over:
Lost in a stream
There is something intriguing
prowling in language
Words are casting long shadows
twitching their tales.
This is not me.
This is the stream of language
that flows down an old hill
and enters a deep forest.
From time to time
a tiger comes and sits in it.
“That’s so lovely,” Laura said, opening her eyes as I finished. “You know, I love to wear that T-shirt. I love to have your poem right here, touching me here,” she said, and before I knew it she had taken a step forward and had pulled my head into her soft, perfumed bosom. My temples were burning with excitement and the heat flowed from them into her ample softness. She recited another poem of mine. The words came out of her mouth and entered my ears, sliding off the edges of her breasts.
Then she suddenly released me and walked right out of the washroom.
It was pretty late when I got back home. It rained heavily and there were huge traffic snarls on the highway. I didn’t realise how tired I was till I lay down. The pain spread out from my back to the rest of my body as all the nerves blotted it up hungrily, pain being food for the nerves.
When I awoke it was pitch dark and I could hear the trucks going by on the highway. I sensed something near my face. I kept still. Very slowly, holding my breath, I slid my hand towards the lamp switch and turned the lamp on. I spotted the thing in the lamplight and brought my hand down in a flash, like a whiplash. As I wiped the blood off my palm, I wondered what kind of day the mosquito had had. I looked for it on my palm but there was no trace of it.
Suddenly I wanted to say something to the mosquito. I wanted to tell it my big secret about time and space, and about the fact that there is no past and future—it’s just a single moment, always has been, and always will be—that same moment being stretched endlessly like rubber, its elasticity coming from all the causes we pile up on it. Anyway, right now, I wanted to talk to the mosquito, but he was gone forever.
“Heil Hitler!” I said and went back to sleep, burying my head deep, deep, deep into the rounded softness that was calling me.
This short story was published in the April-June 2018 issue of The Indian Quarterly magazine.
Illustration by Priya Sebastian
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About the author:
Salil Chaturvedi lives on the island of Chorao. He writes short fiction and poetry. His stories have appeared in Himal, Indian Quarterly, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Out of Print, Raiot, etc. His poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Guftugu, Indian Cultural Forum, The Sunflower Collective, The Alipore Post, etc. Comics and haiku are old loves. His haiku has been featured in various international journals such as Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, Frogpond, Acorn, Hedgerow, etc.
Salil was the Asia region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, 2008, and the Unisun/British Council Short Story Competition 2007. He was instrumental in bringing out the first Konkani audio book, titled Shabduli, for visually impaired Konkani speakers. His books of poetry, In The Sanctuary of a Poem, and Ya Ra La Va Sha Sa Ha, are available at Amazon.
Salil was the Asia region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, 2008, and the Unisun/British Council Short Story Competition 2007. He was instrumental in bringing out the first Konkani audio book, titled Shabduli, for visually impaired Konkani speakers. His books of poetry, In The Sanctuary of a Poem, and Ya Ra La Va Sha Sa Ha, are available at Amazon.
Some of his writings can be read here:
i. The Flow, haibun in Haibun Today http://www.haibuntoday.
ii. Sundari, haibun in Contemporary Haibun Online
iii. UP Number in Goa, poem at Indian Cultural Forum
iv. Nina Awaits Mrs Kamath's Decision, short story in Joao Roque Literary Journal
v. Haiku at Living Haiku Anthology
His two books of poems are available here:
i. In The Sanctuary of a Poem
ii. Ya Ra La Va Sha Sa Ha
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