Shades of Paradise

The muffled screams and thumping sounds from the room across the hall were getting louder, like the ever-growing appetite of a horrendous monster. And it was advancing towards the pale, thin boy crouched between the nightstand and the wardrobe. Only the crown of his head was visible, the scalp gleaming through the pitifully thin strands of whatever hair remained on the well-shaped head, like a ridiculously transparent smokescreen disdainful of its function.

Another thump sounded, followed by a few weak cries, and his head bobbed down with fear, voiceless tears streaming down his skeletal face, adding a ghastly sheen to the dark circles beneath his eyes. The pain in his head mounted, throbbing more with each reverberating sound, the room, in the darkness, was tilting slightly. He stifled a cough, swallowing the fluid collecting in his throat, and tried to clear the dizziness. Wiping a skinny, unsteady hand across his face, he gulped in a mouthful of air. His eyes darted to the open window and back to the closed door of his room.

“No, please no. Don’t hurt Mum. Please.”

“Get out of the way. OUT of the way, you…!” A meaty hand tugged at him, almost effortlessly dislodging him from tight hold he had on his mother. As he fell back, he watched it descend ruthlessly on the cowering woman he was trying to shield.

He jumped. Fear was galloping through his body. The sounds had stopped. There was a deathly stillness of heaving, panting breath, but the screams within the boy were just starting to emerge. Despite being the only one in the room, he could smell it. The reeling odour of drunken brutality, choking and smothering him until he could no longer breathe, the scorching touch of those violating hands, the rhythmically shifting weight on his back as he lay on the bed face down, the excruciating pain…

“Neel? Where are you, Neel?”

A slurry crooning voice came as the doorway creaked open slowly. The cooing man from outside peered into the room in avid anticipation.

“Da…!”

The lights flared, as the boy staggered to his feet. Large eyes of a hunted animal stared back at the tall, stout man in the doorway, the rancid repugnance of his intrusion assaulting the twelve-year-old boy with numbing blows.

“Dad, please…”

Words failed Neel as he tried to scramble back out of his father’s reach, shaking his head in a frantic refusal of what his father had always unquestioningly accepted as consent. There was a metallic tang in the air, but he took no notice of it.

In a moment of desperation, he jerked back, knocking the half-empty dinner plate off the nightstand. With a crash, the nibbled pieces of bread strewed on the floor. Raghav Saxena’s playful mood evaporated at the sight of his son’s non-compliance. The slit-like eyes narrowed coldly in mounting fury, as he blinked rapidly to clear the liquor-induced confusion in his eyes. With a growl, he lunged towards the boy. But in his inebriated state, he missed aim. Neel slipped through, clambered over the windowsill and leapt off the edge.

The hedges at the bottom broke his fall. With a cry, he rolled off the prickly branches and landed on the dusty ground. Gathering what little strength remained in his limbs, he got to his feet and walked off into the night.

________________________________________

Providing for a child was not on Raghav Saxena’s agenda when he married. Among other things on it, there was an unlimited supply of money following a heavy dowry. But as the cash inflow staunched, his true colours began to show. All his hollow professions of love perished in the froth of alcohol and unending savagery.

As a young boy, Neel often wondered why his parents named him such. The other boys at the school were not named after colours; they had sensible names that held meaning. He had asked his father once long ago, in one of his rare moments of sobriety. But the childish intrigue was soon extinguished by his derision. So he asked his mother. Asha Saxena loved lucid blue skies. The sight of it gave her peace, tranquillity. And when in her turbulent nuptial she was blessed with the tiny flicker of life that always soothed her feverish, rushing heart, she named it after the azure tints of heaven she grew up gazing at.

When he was little, she would take him by the hand and walk to the open fields and clearings a little away from the neighbourhood. Standing still in the infant twilight, gently grasping one little hand, Asha would point at the sky and say dreamily, “Look up there Neel. When you feel the colours of the sky in your heart, you’ll know you’re truly happy.” Neel would listen enraptured.

“What does it feel like, Mummy?”

“I imagine it would be… like holding a little bit of paradise in your hands.”

“What’s paradise?”

“It is a place. Full of trees and little flowers swaying in the breeze. A place where everything is pretty shades of blue, and everyone is happy.”

“Blue? Like my name?”

“Yes, sweetheart. Just like your name.” She would smile down at him, take him in her arms and swing him high up in the air before cuddling him close. And just for those few minutes Neel would feel a little closer to the blue paradise up there that made his mother so happy.

Tonight as he trundled listlessly along the cold, desolate streets, gasping and panting slightly, Neel looked up at the merciless, inky sky above him, searching unconsciously… for harmony, for love, for a home… and perhaps, for an absolving dash of blue.

It was chilly. Neel shivered a little as he walked towards no fixed destination, the cold air weighing in his lungs, making his chest feel heavy. His bare feet lead him to a little clearing. In the darkness, it took him a while to realise that he had reached one of those spots his mother used to take him for evening strolls when he was little. The sparse grass was wet with moisture, glistening slightly in the light of a distant street lamp. Neel rubbed his feet on the ground, burrowing into moist earth. His old childhood companions were weeping for him, and in the vicarious embrace of the night, he knelt down on the grass, pressed a palm on the wet blades and felt their tears while sobs wracked his body.

Sometime during the night, it began to drizzle. The pinpricks of cold rain seeped through Neel's thin t-shirt. He huddled up under a lone tree, closed his eyes and tried to ease his breathing, but the paroxysm of coughs that hit left him breathless. He wiped a hand across his mouth, with a cursory glance at the moist, rusty smears that came off on his sleeve. A thin fork of electric blue streaked across the sky.

His thoughts drifted, churning over old hopes, wishing that he could be like the other children, who were not burdensome to their parents. He knew what it cost his mother, although she always soothed his fears when he broached the topic, regaling him with stories of happy days to come after his recovery. For a while, he had dwelt innocently in those flimsy fantasies. But the night he came back from the hospital, much against the doctor’s advice, he found her in her bedroom, weeping bitterly. His father had just stormed out of the room after a vitriolic diatribe about ungrateful wives and pathetic sons. Chemotherapy was expensive, and after the first few weeks of medication, resources had dwindled. The nightly tribulations were no stranger in the Saxena household, but they were increasing now. The first tinge of happiness Neel felt in returning home to his mother was slowly being smudged into darkness.

Fear and rage rivalled each other in the withering boy until the raw, oozing wounds morphed into a smouldering pile of embers. He tried to swallow but there was something accumulating at the base of his throat. He scrunched up his eyes, willing to keep the pain and nausea at bay.

________________________________________

Heavy eyelids flickered open at the sound of distant traffic. He could barely lift himself off the ground. There was an unbearable weight on his chest. With a herculean effort, he drew in a shuddering breath. The vice-like grip of years of accumulated misery was tugging at him from beneath the deluge, like a cruel current, making his wasted lungs gasp in tremulous anxiety.

The memories of the past night came back with a jolt. Pain tore through him. He needed to see his mother, to assure her… of what? He did not know.

It was considerably cooler than before. The rain had stopped, the dust had settled. The film of clouds in the sky was thinning. The empty streets through which Neel had made his way to the clearing the previous night were bustling in morning activity. The rush hour cacophony made him wince. He started walking back home.

Neel kept his head bowed. But, somehow, things seemed larger than life in peripheral vision. The blare of the horns jarred his senses, fuelling his agitation. The solemn somnolence of uniformed little children trudging off to school with harried parents was ensnaring his heart, prying open doors he had learnt to keep shut.

The usual morning crowd was gathered at a crossing. Fisted hands stuffed in the pockets of his pyjamas, he darted forth to cross.

“LOOK OUT!”

The alarmed voice startled him to his senses as a hand snatched him out of the way of a speeding bus. He shot a perfunctory glance at his rescuer. A middle-aged man with a child.

“Careful, son. The lights are there for a reason. What were you thinking shooting off like that?”

Instead of calming down, however, the tone of fatherly reprimand only unleashed an upheaval of restrained emotions mingled with repressed rage at what his own father took from him. With an apologetic look, he sidled over to the other side of the crowd. The lights changed. He hurried across, turned left and into the bustling bazaar.

Neel's bare feet slipped slightly on the slithery ground. People jostled against him. The blaring self-advertisement of vendors, coarse gestures of the sellers, the bestially graphic line of butcher-shops, the intermittent thud of cleavers, the filthy drains carrying eternal testimony of all-consuming human hunger…

“IDIOTS! Do you want to kill me?”

Startled, Neel looked up. A man up on a ladder, holding on to the connection wires of a spasmodically coruscating light bulb, was screaming at two little boys. By the looks of it, a simple game of splashing water at each other had gotten out of hand and drenched the man. He got off the ladder, picked up a stick and charged, but the boys took sprinted off. Cursing and muttering under his breath, the vendor got back to work. The dark inner recesses of his shabby stall fell back to flashing again, like amber lightning.

The momentary distraction had stalled him. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw two men walking by, neighbours from across the street where he lived. Having been subjected to their complacent patronization more than once, he tried to hurry past. Shreds of their conversation reached him as he tried to walk ahead.

“… would have expected better of him, don’t you think? But no…”

“Like father, like son. The Kumar boy was always a chip off the old block. Remember when…”

A grocery-laden woman jostled past, shoving him inadvertently. The men fell back, their words drowned in a sea of voices. But to Neel it was a deluge of new fears and burgeoning self doubt that deafened him to anything else. An otherwise innocuous reference settled like a stone on his heart, the breeding seed of a prophetic accusation.

The door was ajar. Neel slipped in quietly. Attracting needless attention had cost him before. The hall was empty, and silent. But he could hear the faint whirring of something from the floor above. Neel padded up the stairs, staggering slightly, feeling lightheaded. A slant of amber light spilled onto the dark landing from his left. The daylight seeping in through the closed windowpanes on the other side of the landing was faint at best; the light from the bathroom lay like a bright golden machete on the dark red carpet.

Neel stood there, gazing at the light, for some reason transfixed. The misty fogginess outside was dissipating; a light breeze was stirring up making the thin branches scrape lazily against the windowpanes. He walked slowly to his mother’s room. The curtains were drawn. A glorious day was blooming outside but it made no way into this musty prison-like bedroom of Asha Saxena. Except for the barely discernible lump on top of the bedcovers, Neel could not make anything out. He hesitated in the doorway, leaning on the knob for a while, head bowed, a brooding look on his grim face.

A thin crackle made him look up and glance towards the bathroom. The golden light flashed once, then went out, drawing a muffled curse from the man within. It came back on. Blotting out the stuttering light in the doorway, he approached and with a painstakingly slow hand, pushed open the door.

The animal eyes flashed on him.

“Back, are we?” A leer in his voice. A lopsided grin on his mouth, baring crooked yellow teeth. He licked his lips with a relish and raised one wet knee to rest against the side of the bathtub.

“They didn’t feed you where you went? No? That’s what you need Daddy for, eh? To feed you.”

The bulb flickered again.

Raghav glanced at it once and snarled, “Damn thing. What are you doing standing there like a ghost? Fix it! And lose that look.”

Neel went in, dragged up the high stool standing at the corner and placed it at close against the edge of the tub. The bulb was hanging a little off the centre, dangling from a frayed wire. Raghav had leant his head back against the tiled wall, humming softly to himself, one finger tapping convulsively on the ceramic edge.

Neel climbed up and looked down at his father. He was jingling a foot amidst the frothy soapsuds, but the change of physical perspective transformed him in Neel’s eyes. The towering figure of bottled up violence and vindictiveness, the keeper of the abyss of endless nights, was no less paltry than a rat, weak and cowardly. One hand slowly took the still lit bulb off the wire hook. Raghav’s head lolled to one side, in tune with the music in his head. Neel almost pitied him.

Dislodged and now feebly connected, the bulb started flashing again, frantic little pulses of light in Neel’s thin, yet steady fingers. A group of boisterous bicyclers went past their house, laughing and cheering. A dog barked somewhere. Next door, the twins were screaming shrilly. A lone truck rumbled past. Then there was silence, the deadly stillness of an awaited missile, a rush of fury. The thin cord slithered unresisted through Neel’s fingers and into the tub.

It was a bright, sunny spectre.

________________________________________

“Mum?” he whispered into the dark.

“Mum?” he called again, a little louder.

Neel turned on the lamp on the nightstand, not wanting to jar his mother awake with the bright tube lights. She was sprawled at an odd angle. He shook her shoulder gingerly, calling out in a voice of hushed triumph. But then he saw it. The mottled patches of dark red on the sheets, her nightdress. It was still slightly moist to touch. Neel pulled back his red tinged fingers. He could now make out the purple bruises on his mother’s skin, the swollen black eye, the dried blood on the lower lip. The silence was deafening.

The tub was swimming before his eyes, the soft splash as the bulb met the water sounding in his ears. Seizing the stray opportunity had infused him with a furtive thrill. But the burgeoning futility of his actions overrode everything else.

“MUM?” he called again, voice urgent, this time with an unsuppressed quiver in it.

He climbed onto the bed, took her head in his hands, shook her and called until the tears clogged his voice, until the increasingly hoarse coughs left a trail of red in their wake, until all he could do was clutch her close to his breast and promise a thousand dreams of hope and love.

A low keening sound came to his ears, bleeding grief in steady, cathartic flow.

Neel snuggled close to his mother’s stiff, cold body. He felt an odd warmth, clinging to the lifeless body. The tears were dissolving in the exertion of heavy, strenuous breaths. He clawed feebly at the smothering darkness encroaching upon his vision, reaching for the last vestiges of receding light.

Over the years, especially when he was younger, Neel had exercised his ability to muster hope in his perpetually overcast life. He would hide in his room trying to imagine away the barbarities raging just a few yards from him and hope that the morrow would be better and brighter. When his father had begun his nocturnal ritual of visiting him in bed, he would desperately hope that his pleas did not go unanswered. While the nurse inserted the channel into his white forearm, he could not help praying that this would be the last time.

But all those times, hope had been elusive. It bore him no fruit. Now when he was no longer in want, it showered him with overwhelming abundance. From beneath the rubble of ravaged emotions and a myriad of crushed and trodden upon sensibilities, it rose. First a thin needle of light, then an evolving, voluptuous beam, growing until it surpassed the senses and lay over them in its all-embracing magnanimity.

Neel reached out to touch it, like he used to do at the skies when his mother would toss his little self up in the air before catching him. He tried to say something to his mother beside him, say that they might have lost the race but they made it to the finishing line, that he tried to avenge her suffering, and that she was right about the colour of paradise.

It was blue.