Saturday 14 February 2015
Friday 13 February 2015
Friday the 13th Special: The Ghost In The Box
One of
the things that absolutely everyone
knew was that Nistha had a ghost of her very own, which lived in a box.
Nobody was sure how they knew it. They just
knew it, with a certainty so complete that nobody even thought of mentioning
it. It was like saying the air existed to say that Nistha had a ghost in a box.
In fact it was so well known that most people who knew it didn’t really believe
it.
It was perfectly true, though. Nistha had a
ghost in a box.
This box was of rough grey wood, only about
big enough to cover the palm of a hand, but with a lid that fit so tightly that
one could only with great difficulty make out the crack between it and the body
of the box. Everyone knew, too, what the box looked like, though very few of
them had actually ever seen it.
Nistha kept the box on the bottom shelf of
the cupboard in her bedroom, hidden way behind a pile of old books and several
stuffed toys which she had long since outgrown yet couldn’t bear to throw away.
This cupboard was always locked, and only Nistha had the key. Not even her
parents had one.
Nobody knew how Nistha had come by the
ghost in the box. Some said she’d been left it by an old relative who’d been a
witch or something like that. Others said she’d been born clutching it in one
tiny fist, and that this was a gift from an evil spirit. There were other
explanations, each more fanciful than the last. But nobody thought to ask
Nistha how she’d actually come across the ghost. Not even her parents did.
This was how it happened. One school
vacation, years ago, Nistha had been taken by her parents to visit what they
called their “native”, the small town the family had originally come from and
where a couple of grandparents still lived. The grandfather, who really didn’t
understand children very well, had given Nistha some money and told her to buy
herself some sweets. It wasn’t much money, but it was far more than Nistha had
ever had at any time in her life, and she didn’t much like sweets anyway.
There was a market in the town, where
people from all the villages around came once a week to buy and sell, trade and
barter, bicker and have their ailments healed. It was market day, so Nistha pedalled
off on her grandfather’s old black bicycle to visit the market and spend some
of her money.
It was a nice market. Nistha, who had never
seen anything like it before, was fascinated. All kinds of things which she’d
never seen in the city seemed to be there, from fans made of reeds to clothes
in colours so gaudy her mother would have blenched to look at them. And the people were even more interesting, tall men
in turbans with long moustaches, women with silver rings in their noses and tiny
glittering stones set in their front teeth.
She’d gone through most of the market, not
even considering buying anything – it was all too fascinating anyway, and far
too expensive – when she saw a man standing to one side. She couldn’t really see him very well, because he was in the
shadow of a tree, and the dappled light seemed to hide his face, but he was
quite tall and dressed differently from the others, as though he, too, was from
the city. And he wasn’t buying or selling anything.
Nistha had wheeled her bicycle past him
when he called to her. “I have something for you, Nistha,” he said.
She’d turned, slowly, astonished. “How do
you know my name?”
“Let’s just say I know.” The man had held
out his hand. On the palm was a small wooden box. “I think you should buy this,”
he said.
Nistha had looked at the object with
surprise. “Why? It’s just a box.”
“It’s not just a box.” The man’s voice had changed a little, and she could
almost see his face. Somehow, he looked familiar, sounded familiar, as though she’d known him a very long time,
though she was certain she’d never seen him before. “There is something inside
it that will change your life. But I can’t tell you what it is. You’ll have to
find out for yourself if you buy it.”
Nistha looked at the box. Though it was of
plain rough wood, there was something that drew her to it, just as the man
looked familiar. “How much is it?” she asked reluctantly, sure that it would be
too expensive anyway.
“How much do you have?”
“Twenty rupees,” Nistha confessed,
expecting him to laugh derisively.
The man had not laughed. He’d merely held
out his hand for the crumpled orange note. “Very well. Twenty rupees is the
price.”
When Nistha took the box from him, she felt
a shiver in her hand, a moment’s tingling that spread up her arm. It lasted
only a moment, and then disappeared. “How do I open it?” she asked.
The man seemed to be looking at her, though
she couldn’t really tell, since she couldn’t see his face. “Take this,” he
said, and put a little key on top of the box. It was a strange-looking key,
very much like a tiny axe. “You can open the box with that key,” he said. “But
remember that you can only open it once.”
Nistha had frowned. “What does that mean –
I can only open it once?”
“Don’t open it until you really want to,” the man said. His voice
seemed to be fading, and Nistha had the queerest feeling that he was
disappearing slowly from view. “That’s all I can tell you – for now.”
And then he was gone.
Nistha blinked and looked around. On all
sides, the market ebbed and flowed, as if nobody had noticed what had just
happened. A man carrying a bundle almost bumped into her, blinked in confusion
as though she’d appeared out of nowhere, and pushed past. Someone else pushing
a cart angrily motioned her out of the way.
Suddenly she didn’t like the market much
anymore, and it was getting late. So she went home.
She’d been planning to open the box as soon
as she could, but her parents were waiting for her impatiently to go visit
relatives, and by the time they got back it was late in the evening, too late
to do anything much but brush her teeth – with aching cold well water – and drop
into bed. She’d put the box under her pillow, but fell asleep before she could
even think of opening it.
She woke sometime in the small hours of the
morning, feeling sure that there was something
in the room with her. For a while she lay with her eyes closed tight, trying to
convince herself that it was a dream, but she knew it was useless. And the thing,
whatever it was, knew that she was
awake and pretending to be asleep, and she knew that too.
So she opened her eyes, slowly, and for the
first time she saw the ghost.
It was a pale glimmer by her head, barely
visible in the darkness, an oval of whitish light that hung in the air. And yet
it seemed familiar, as though she’d seen it before, and she was reminded of the
man whom she’d seen in the market, who had sold her the box. It was the same
sense of familiarity, as though she was meeting someone she had always known.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
There was no direct reply. Instead, the
darkness was wiped away, and she saw a burning desert, lying flat and immense
to the horizon. In the middle distance, there was a city, of pink sandstone
spires and tall walls, high-arched gates from which camel caravans came forth,
laden with goods and led by black-eyed men with curved daggers at their belts
and veiled women riding on horses, their feet in jewelled slippers with
upturned toes. And things happened to the men and women, strange adventures
that she had never read or imagined. Giants and jinni, wizards and caliphs,
slave girls and princesses, met and fought and loved, quarrelled and made up,
and little by little the night wheeled towards dawn.
And when she woke up, she couldn’t decide
if she’d dreamt it all.
The next night the oval; of light was there
again, and this time she was on a mountain side deep in snow, on which young
soldiers fought each other and cried with homesickness and longing for the warm
embraces of their girls. And the next night it was something else – a ship
floating in the voids between stars, where strange tentacled beings led their
own, complex lives.
The nights fled by, and each time it was
there, to tell her tales of magic and mystery, of joy and sorrow, and all
things in between.
And many times she fingered the little
axe-like key, but she never used it, because she knew she could only open it
once.
***************************
Many,
many years passed. Nistha grew up and went to college, and the little box went
with her in her suitcase, and told her stories while she lay awake in her new
bed in the students’ hostel. And though she grew older and wiser in the ways of
the world, the box kept her young in the mind, feeding her wonder and pushing the
desolation of loneliness away.
One night she could not resist the
temptation to ask it, finally, “Who are you?”
For a long time nothing happened. And then
the scene changed abruptly, and she glimpsed distant ice cliffs across a frozen
sea, under an eggshell-blue sky. There was a tiny speck on a far cliff, waving,
waving, and she knew it was waving to her.
“How can I come to you?” she asked. “There
is all this distance between us.”
But the speck in the distance waved, and as
she watched, it faded further and further, and no matter how she cried out for
it not to go, it disappeared, and the icy sea vanished with it. And there was
only the darkness.
She woke with tears on her pillow, and
nearly used the key. Then she nearly threw the box away, but at the last
moment, holding it in her hand, she thought again and put it away in her
drawer. And the next night there was another story, as though the icy sea had
never been.
And so Nistha grew older, and she married a
man whom she did not love and who did not love her, and they had a daughter.
And there was less and less time to think of stories, though the box would try
and tell them every night. One night she took it in her hand and spoke into it.
“No more stories,” she said. “I don’t want
any more stories.”
There was a vast, hurt silence.
“I mean it,” she said, and put the box
away.
Then Nistha’s daughter grew up and moved
away, and her husband grew more abusive by the day. And one night he struck
her, and struck her again. Then he got ready to hit her a third time.
“You won’t touch me again,” Nistha said.
“Oh?” he sneered. “And who’s going to stop
me? That boxed ghost of yours?” He threw back his head and yelled laughter. “Hey,
ghost...come and stop me.”
Nistha never saw all of what happened next.
A shadow came into the room. It oozed out of the cupboard where she had kept
the box, and it grew between her and the man who was about to hit her for a
third time. The shadow grew and grew until it filled the room, blocked out the
light, and her husband screamed with terror and rushed away, slamming out
through the door.
She never saw him, or heard from him,
again.
So Nistha was all alone, with only the box.
But she never let it tell her stories again.
And so many more years went past, slow
years which ran into decades, and then one night Nistha woke and stared up into the darkness, and she
knew what she had to do. The time had come.
Rising slowly from her bed, she took the
box out from the place it lay inside her cupboard and held it in her hands for
the first time in many, many years. It seemed even smaller, more worn out, than
she remembered. And her fingers shook when she brought out the axe-key.
“Ghost,” she said, “I am going to open the
box now.”
There was no reply, but something grew in
the room, a tenseness, a feeling.
“I’m going to open the box, ghost,” she
said. “I’m going to set you free.”
And the axe-head found the key-hole, and
turned in the lock.
It opened easily, as though grateful for
the release.
********************************
The next evening,
Nistha’s neighbour, surprised at not having seen her all day, entered her house
with the spare key she had. To her astonishment, the house was empty. On the
crumpled bedspread, she found a little wooden box, lying open. Idly, she picked
it up.
Just for an instant, she seemed to see far
distant ice cliffs, on which two figures were walking away, hand in hand.
Then it was gone, and she was looking down
into an ordinary little box, in an ordinary little house, both of them empty but
for the dust of the days and the years.
Empty, that is, but for one thing. In one corner of the box, she found an old, crumpled-up twenty-rupee note.
Empty, that is, but for one thing. In one corner of the box, she found an old, crumpled-up twenty-rupee note.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2015
[Source] |
Tuesday 10 February 2015
Stone
I
wish I were a stone
Sometimes.
Unfeeling,
inert
Uncaring
if the stream
Of time wore me away
River-bottom-smooth,
Or broke
me
Jagged-sharp.
I
wish I could learn not to feel
Instead
of feeling too much
Caring
too much.
A stone does not care
If it's beautiful or ugly.
A stone does not cry
A stone does not grieve
For pasts that were
Presents that are
Or futures that will not be.
Life’s
too much a burden
For
someone who is not a stone
To
bear.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2015
Monday 9 February 2015
Nothing Heroic At All
Previous parts:
************************
“Dedushka,” his granddaughter says over her shoulder, as she turns in
towards the parking lot. “We’re here, dedushka.”
Alyosha says nothing. He’s looking through
the window at the object on the concrete plinth, the sun glinting off the
metal. He’s been looking at it ever since it came into view, when they’d turned
in to this street.
“Papa?” His daughter Zhenya gets out, comes
round the back of the car, and opens the door on his side, and holds out his
walking stick. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Alyosha struggles to get out of the enclosed
space of the back seat. Once upon a time, he would have twisted like an eel
inside the far more restrictive confines of the interior of the object on the
plinth. But those days are over. Hopefully, he thinks, days like that will
never come again.
“Those days –“ he begins to say, and stops,
embarrassed, though he doesn’t know what he has to be embarrassed for. “Nothing,” he temporises, turning
away stiffly from his daughter. “Forget it.”
“Papa,” Zhenya repeats, taking his arm. She’s
a big woman, taller than Alyosha ever was, and strong to go with it. “If you’re
not feeling all right...”
“I’m fine, dammit.” Alyosha shakes his
head, irritated with himself for swearing. He straightens, brushes his white
hair back from his forehead. “Right,” he says. “Let’s do this.”
“Dedushka.” His granddaughter, Masha,
twenty, tall, slim, heartbreakingly pretty despite the pierced eyebrow, the
hair that hardly reaches her collar, and her knee-length boots, comes round the
car, the bouquet in her hands. “There are some people here.”
“Huh?” For the first time Alyosha notices
the other cars, the small crowd around the base of the plinth. Some of them are
already pointing cameras in his direction. “Who are they?”
“Media people, mostly,” Masha says,
grinning. “You’re famous.”
“Hah,” Alyosha snorts. It sets him to
coughing. “They just want a story.”
“Well, you are a story.” Zhenya and Masha exchange smiles, as they walk side
by side towards the plinth. “A big
part of the story.”
“Mr Safonov?” It’s a young man with a round
face, hair carefully arranged to hang over one eyebrow. He’s got a small
microphone in his hand. “I’m Konstantin Fedorov.” He names the TV channel he’s
from, and steals a quick, appreciative glance at Masha. “Rad znakomitsya. It’s
good to meet you.”
Alyosha nods, hardly noticing him. He’s
staring up at the thing on the plinth. The new olive-green paint looks
incongruous on the metal. The last time he’d seen it, it had been covered with
brown dirt and black oil, and splashed with grey concrete dust. He’s sure it’ll
smell different, too, like a new car
perhaps. Back then it had smelt of hot metal, burned cordite, diesel exhaust
and the coppery tang of Tereshchenko’s blood, seeping down from the turret. He
can still smell that medley of odours. He dreams of it sometimes.
“Mr Safonov?” the journalist persists. “How
does it feel to see your old tank again? The one you went to war in?”
“How does it feel?” Alyosha looks at him,
at his fleshy features and soft hands. It’s impossible to imagine he’s ever
even touched a gun or felt the scratch of uniform cloth on his skin. Hardly any
of them do now, preferring to buy their way out of military service. “What sort
of question is that?”
“Um...” The young man, Fedorov, blinks. “You
know. You’re a hero, and this is a historic occasion, after all.”
Alyosha smiles, with no humour in the smile
at all. “What makes you imagine I’m a hero? All I did was sit in a seat, press
pedals and pull at levers. What’s heroic about that?”
“You helped take Berlin,” the journalist
persists, desperately. “How many can say they did?”
“I and a few hundred thousand others,”
Alyosha replies. “Why don’t you ask them?
Those of them who are left,” he amends. “Can’t be that many, I suppose.”
“Papa,” Zhenya says warningly. She smiles
at the journalist. “You’ll have to give my father a little time,” she tells
him. “He’s a bit excited – you understand.”
“I’m not excited,” Alyosha says. He looks at the cameras, then up at the
green metal object on the plinth. Masha takes his arm, the one not holding the
cane. “Help me up there, Koshka,” he tells her.
“Just a couple of photos,” someone calls.
“Later,” Masha smiles. She’s fiercely
protective of him, has been since she was a child. “Let my grandfather do what
he’s come here to do, please. What you’ve all come here to watch him do.”
They walk up towards the plinth. There’s a
plaque on it, with today’s date under the heading GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR MEMORIAL,
and below that – Alyosha has to squint to read it – a couple of lines saying
that this vehicle had fought from Ukraine to Berlin as part of Marshal Konev’s
army. Someone’s put a wreath under the plaque for some reason. It looks
ridiculous.
“Koshka,” he says to Masha, holding out his
arm. “Koshka.”
She takes hold of him again, her small hand
with their long fingers on his elbow, her high-heeled boots firm on the
concrete. “Here, dedushka,” she says. “There’s a step for you.”
Someone’s put a flight of wooden stairs
next to the plinth for him, broad enough so that he can climb to the top
without trouble. He looks down at his feet as he walks up, and once on top
turns round for a moment, looking down at the crowd. Zhenya is down there,
beside the reporter, everyone staring up at him and Masha, up on the plinth. He
can feel the sun-warmed metal at his back.
“Dedushka,” Masha says, but he barely
hears, because he can hear a different now, an older voice, wordless, made up
of grinding gears, roaring engine and clattering caterpillar tracks. An old and
familiar voice, dear as a lover’s. And he turns, he turns at last.
And, yes, now he can think of it as the
tank, not as a thing, an object, now he’s beside it and it’s the tank again. He
reaches out, touches the edge of the track, and walks slowly around the hull
towards the front. Masha follows, hesitantly, unwilling to intrude and yet
unwilling to leave him alone.
Now he’s standing by the glacis plate, and
he bends slowly and runs his hand along the lower slope of the armour, feeling
the rough metal where it had been repaired, and now at last he knows her, knows
she’s the same tank, that it’s her
despite the paint and the new smell. And the tears come to his eyes,
remembering.
“Dedushka,” Masha says urgently. “What is
it?”
“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head, and
it is nothing, just a tear or two. “A Panzerfaust hit right here, do you know?
A Hitler Youth boy fired it. I was sitting just inside, there.”
“What happened?”
Alyosha shrugs. “We survived, of course. If
the boy had taken a moment to aim better, we probably wouldn’t have.” He leans
over the glacis to peer at the forward hatch. It’s open for the occasion, and
he can see the driver’s seat inside, still the same old seat, with the familiar
nick on the backrest. A sniper bullet had done that, before he’d joined the
crew, the same bullet which had killed Misha, the previous driver. “I used to
be able to climb inside through this hatch,” he says.
Masha laughs, looks at him and at the
hatch. “I can’t imagine a...cat going in through that.”
“I did, though. Each time.” He looks up at
the turret, and debates trying to climb up there to look in through the
hatches. But he’s afraid that if he does, even supposing he can still get up
there at all, what he’ll see is what he saw the last time, Tereshchenko’s blood,
dry but still splashed over the commander’s cupola and seat. It’s absurd, but
he can’t get rid of the feeling.
“The Starshina was killed there,” he says,
pointing. “It was just a few days before the end of the war.”
“How?” Masha asks, though she surely knows,
he’s certainly told her all this before. “What happened to him, dedushka?”
“A German sniper got him.” He can still remember
the moment, the shot lost in the noise of the tank engine, but he heard
Tereshchenko gasp suddenly over the intercom, and Sasha the gunner cried out
that the sergeant had been hit. And there was the coppery smell of the blood. “He
didn’t suffer.”
Then the entire section had poured in fire
into the building from which the shot had come, machine gun bullets and shells
crashing into the walls, and the German had fallen limply out of a top floor
window, dropping like a rag doll down to the street, and when they’d gone to
look at the blasted corpse they’d found it was a teenage girl with flaxen
braids hanging out from under her helmet. He squeezes his eyes to get rid of
the memory. “We never did get the blood out.” He doesn’t know whose blood he
means.
“It’s all right, dedushka.”
He wishes he could stay with the tank,
crawl inside her and curl up in his old seat, but his legs are growing tired. “Help
me, Koshka,” he says.
She knows what he means, and takes his arm
and helps him around the tank to the stairs. He takes the bouquet from her,
kneels, puts it down next to the track. He remains like that a while. The
cameras are busy. Then she helps him down.
“Let’s get to the car,” he says.
The journalist, Fedorov, is back, though. “Can
you tell us about at least one battle you were in?” he asks.
Alyosha looks at him, and has a sudden
memory, the damaged Panther tank backed into a wrecked building, firing at them
from inside, Sasha pumping shell after shell back at the poor doomed German
crew. That had been a good tank crew, even though they had been Germans, brave fighters,
who’d not given up, even at the end. He suddenly feels much closer kinship to
that long dead Nazi tank crew than to the fresh-faced boy holding the
microphone and the others behind him, faces behind cameras, people who have
never seen any kind of combat and hopefully never will, who think war is what
they see on movie screens. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“But –“
“No.” He holds up a hand. “There’s nothing
to tell, I said. We did nothing heroic at all.” He turns away, to his daughter.
“Let’s go home, Zhenya.”
They make their way towards the parking
lot. Masha has walked away a little distance, speaking into her mobile phone,
and she returns now, holding it out, smiling. “Dedushka, someone wants to talk
to you.”
“Who?” Frowning, Alyosha takes the
rectangle of plastic, and holds it awkwardly to his ear. “Hello?”
“Fishling?” The voice is so familiar,
despite the old man’s quaver, and so unexpected that he almost drops the cell. “Hey,
fishling.”
“Nurik?” Alyosha’s mouth falls open in
astonishment. “Eto ti? Nurik, you old drunkard.”
“Not a drunkard any more.” Akhmetov’s
voice, from far Almaty, echoes in Alyosha’s ear as though he’d heard it only
yesterday. “Gave up drinking, these three years now.”
“Why on earth?” Alyosha laughs. “I can’t
imagine you not drinking. Don’t tell me you got religion in your old age.”
“No, what I got was liver cancer. Thought,
fine, I’ll just die and get it over with. After all, I’m over ninety, what do I
want to live longer for? But the bloody doctor, a Russian just like you, he cut
most of my liver out. And now he says I’m good for years more, and I can’t even
drink any longer. You Russians,”
Akhmetov adds gloomily. “I always knew you’d do for me in the end.”
“I’m at the old tank, Nurik,” Alyosha says.
“It’s a war memorial now, can you imagine?”
“I know, your granddaughter told me. She
tracked me down online, she said. I don’t know how these young ones do it,
Facebook and things. You’re coming to see me this year, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Of course you are. Ask your granddaughter
if you don’t believe me.” Alyosha can imagine Akhmetov’s expression, the narrow
Kazakh eyes almost disappearing in glee. “It’s all arranged, old fish, so you
might as well just sit back and let it happen.”
“And you won’t stop me from drinking?”
“Shut
up about drinking, will you. Or I’m going to make you get drunk, in front of
your granddaughter, too. And I’m going to tell her about the time you...”
They laugh together, until Akhmetov begins
coughing, and has to end the conversation. They’re at the car now, and someone’s
waiting for them, a woman, small and stout, with grey hair. She steps
forward, diffidently.
“Alexei Safonov?”
“Yes?”
“I think you knew my father. He was Fyodor Novikov.”
The woman looks shyly at Zhenya and Masha. “He always talked about you.”
“Well...” Alyosha smiles at the woman. She’s
got tired eyes, and her dumpy body is covered in clothes that look a little threadbare.
“What’s your name?”
“Anastasia,” she says, embarrassed by the
name itself, a name too grand for most people these days. But so is Fyodor. “My
father told me many times, you were the best tank driver he’d ever met. He said
–“ she pauses, blushing.
“What?”
“He said that if it hadn’t been for you,
none of the crew would ever have got back alive from the war. And he said, if
ever I had a chance to meet you, I should. So when I heard about this memorial,
and that you’d been invited as a guest, I thought I’d just see if you could
spare a moment.”
“I’m so glad you came,” Alyosha says, and
means it. “I’d love to get to know you better.”
“Come to a cafe with us for tea,” Zhenya offers.
“I’d like to,” the woman replies, “but I don’t
have the time.” She looks hurriedly at her watch. “Oh, I have to go. I’ve got
to be getting back to work.”
“Come and see us.” Alyosha scrabbles in his
pocket, finds a card, and hands it to her. “Come and see us, please.”
She nods, her head moving in abrupt jerks
like a bird’s, takes the card and walks quickly away. They watch her go.
Alyosha sighs. For some reason, he feels
very tired. “Let’s go home, Koshka,” he says.
As they drive away, he looks back one last
time at the tank on the plinth. And suddenly, he sees five men standing in
front of it, dressed in tankers’ uniforms and helmets, waving and smiling.
Young faces, so very young, and so long ago.
He blinks, and they are gone. It must have
been a trick of the light anyway.
Then the car turns the corner, and the tank
is lost to view.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2015
[The Old Vet And His Tank] |
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