Three days later, the gardener came to work. I stared at him from behind the thick blue velvet drapes in the living room. Every now and then, he would glance up toward the house and I would jump back in fear. I knew it was him I had seen that night.
***
We were on our traditional summer journey to my mother’s childhood home. As the train chugged lazily into the station, 12 hours behind schedule, I peered out through the scratched and dusty double paned glass. The soot from the town’s coalmines encircled the neon light of the train station. Out of the gray cloud, I spotted my uncle and waved.
Visiting this small forgotten town in East India had come to be a ritual. As soon as school closed for the three-month summer, my mother would pack my brother’s bags and mine and off we would go to Asansol. My father would join us later.
***
Asansol? Not for me, thanks. The town has too few people, and is far too polluted. I didn’t mind visiting it for the summer, mostly because I missed my grandfather, uncle and aunt who lived there. Given the choice, I’d rather they visited me. My mother’s seven-room house was like the others. Large and secluded. Every sunset I would be reminded of our isolation, and my heart would sink as the house inside got brighter, and the world outside got darker. “What would we do,” I thought, “if ever something were to happen to us.”
***
As he drove his silent guests home from the train station, my uncle’s voice interrupted my muffled thoughts. “Asansol’s changing.” A new head of police was in town and he had clamped down on coal theft that had been rampant for years. Several local gangs would steal the coal as it came into the town from the neighboring city late every night and sell it elsewhere. Now , coal thefts had stopped and house burglaries had started.
“It happens all the time,” he said. “What would we do,” I thought, “if something were to happen.”
***
It was wonderful to see my grandfather again. And my aunt, by far one of my favorites. She had a gentle air and had numerous stories to tell anyone she met. This was despite her rarely leaving the house, bound to a wheelchair by Multiple Sclerosis.
This family reunion was different from previous ones. Fatigue stopped by and commanded us to bed. The family filled one another in on uneventful incidents and called it a night.
***
At 1 a.m. there was a loud banging at the door. The walls of the house shook and the heavy metal chain used to lock the door rattled violently against the wooden entranceway. I searched for the sound in my sleep. Realm after realm had nothing. I was snapped awake. This was real.
The banging continued. And then several things happened. My uncle jumped out of bed and ran to the door, my mother flung the bedcover over my head to cover me, my aunt wheeled herself into the restroom and locked herself in. My grandfather lumbered over to my room. But most significant of all an intruder, already inside our house, opened the door to seven men armed with knives and country rifles.
Just then my uncle reached the door. Someone struck him on the forehead with a knife and he fell back holding his bleeding head. As one man stood guard over him, the others rushed inside. They were headed for my room.
***
By now I was semi conscious of what was happening. Still covered, I could hear loud heavy voices. I peeked through a slit in the bedcover to put words to the sounds. In the darkness I saw distinct shadows around me, some decipherable, others not. My brother on the bed next to me was sitting up alert and my mother on the bed with me seemed eerily calm. My grandfather had entered our room from the other door and was pushed to my brother’s bed.
The noise was deafening. Three men pounded the steel cupboard with a large rock they had brought in, while two others rummaged through our bags shouting at us to tell us where the money was.
I shook now and couldn’t breathe. My mother held me down the whole time, making sure I didn’t throw off the covers.
Just then a man rushed to her and yelled at her to take off her jewelry. As she tried to get her gold bangles off, he grabbed hold of her hand and yanked at them. She screamed and my brother shouted loudly in Hindi, “What the hell are you doing?” A thug standing behind him picked up a large wooden rod holding up our mosquito nets and struck him on the neck with it. It broke in half and my brother collapsed. The net fell lightly on him. I began to cry as I fumbled with the netting, trying frantically to rip it apart and clutch on to him. In turn, all he said to me was, “sshh sshh sshh” as he did everything to move my hands away.
My family was bleeding and there was nothing I could do but hide under the covers terrified. In all my 15 years, I had never felt so small and so weak. And then all of a sudden I had my question answered: If something were to happen to us, nobody would know. There wasn’t a soul for miles. It was just us, hurting and helpless.
***
The men were monstrous and drunk. They smelled of cheap tobacco and sweat. They continued their raid, and in the midst of it all, someone, to alarm the assailants, shouted, “Police!” With that, the robbers fled. My uncle rushed to call the police but the phone lines had been cut.
***
The next morning, I relived every moment. I tried to reconstruct the night differently. The men had not hit my brother. They had not cut my grandfather. My uncle did not have a wounded forehead. Yet, the blood splattered across the room, the dented steel cupboard and the disarray everywhere showed otherwise.
By mid afternoon, strangers filled the house once more. Police officers asked us about our housekeepers and, over endless cups of tea, talked casually about similar cases. This was common and also rarely solved, they said.
With the help of our housekeepers, we pulled the house together again. My uncle went back to work and my mother spent hours with my grandfather. Only one person hadn’t shown up for work. My uncle said he would turn up eventually.
***
The third morning as I sat in the living room reading, from the corner of my eye I saw a figure walk through the unlocked gates. I knew I had seen him somewhere. I watched him head for the hosepipe, distractedly attach it to the waterspout and begin watering the plants. From the window, I stared suspiciously at his bruised eye and wondered why he had been missing for three days. All of a sudden, I knew who he was and where I had seen him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fear. The feeling shot to the pit of my stomach. It was heavy, like a mass of rock, anchored to the bottom of the lake having crushed all life that once existed there. Every now and again, it jerked up to my throat, and I swallowed it down.
I wasn’t ever going to let it leave.
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