They walked, hand in hand, like two lovers. It was uncharacteristically early for him, the sun had not yet reached its zenith in the sky. He had scarcely seen the environment at this time in the morning, and he found it lovely. The beach with its soft cool sand slipped beneath his legs and the early morning breeze rejuvenated him.
Poster of Her (Chapter 1 of 7)
Orson was a man who kept late nights. It wasn’t good for his profession as a photographer—since some of the best works are captured in the light of the day—but he just couldn’t attune himself to the routine of ‘early to bed, early to rise’. When the insomnia set in, which was often, he would just leave his one-room studio apartment and go jogging on uncharted territories.
It was while he was on one such nocturnal jogging trip that he came across a woman that changed his life.
He saw her crying in the dark, seated on a bench on the beach, looking forlornly at the waves.
She did not see him instantly as he was behind her. But even from where he was, he found himself attracted to her. He had been with women before, some of them actresses and models, but this was the kind of beauty that was beyond description.
In his photographer’s mind, he began to see her the ravishingly fair complexion. It was white, whiter than white, and shone in the darkness of the night. Her silvery blonde hair flew with the breeze that came from the sea. She wore a long blue gown, but he could mentally undress her and visualize the fantastic form that lay underneath.
He was still admiring her when she abruptly turned and looked right at him.
Her expression rooted him on the spot. Even from that distance, even in the darkness of the night, he could clearly see the tears beneath her eyes. There was a sorrow in her face that obtusely contradicted her unearthly beauty. The tears flowed soundlessly, glistening in the moonlight.
And even though it was unspoken, even though all that was shared between them was an expression of sorrow, he understood that she wanted to share her grief with him. He found something pulling him towards her.
He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t resist. He walked up to her.
Somewhere in the distance, a soulful melancholy began to play.
+ + +
When he came to his senses in the morning, he was on the uncomfortable bed of his studio apartment back again, but he knew something was different.
Snatches of memories cropped up in his head. He remembered walking into a beautiful place—smelling the pleasant fragrances that it bore, seeing the enticing sights that it displayed—and then returning to his reality. But it wasn’t the same reality anymore; he realized it had been changed.
He turned his head, telling himself sternly that it had been just a dream—
—but if only it had been.
She was still there. Her naked form was next to him, sleeping, and in the daylight he could see that she was much more beautiful than he had seen her the previous night. Her eyes were closed, and the tears had dried up on the cheeks, leaving dry streaks as they had run along. Her lips, of a very dark pink hue, were just partly open in her sleep; and the lower lip twitched as though there were unsaid words that were begging to come out. Her breasts heaved rhythmically and he stared at them.
Unavoidably attracted to her once again, he placed his arm over her milk-white skin and crept closer to her. She stirred in her sleep. Her eyes opened, and he saw they were blue and deep, and they still bore the expression of undiluted sorrow.
“Thanks,” she said. And her voice was a mellow whisper, almost as if she were singing.
“Thanks for what?”
“For bringing me in,” she said.
He caressed her silver locks. “Do not think about that,” he said, his mind on other things. In response, she began to touch him, causing ripples of pleasure wherever her fingers came in contact with his skin, and he forgot what he had meant to ask.
+ + +
It was afternoon and he had to get down to his work. He faintly remembered an assignment—some photo shoot for some commercial brand.
With a huge sigh, he separated himself from her.
“What happened?” she said in her singsong voice.
“I have to go,” he said.
“What about me?”
He got up. He moved about the room, pulling on his clothes haphazardly. “You may stay here,” he said. “It is not much, the room is in a mess, but… if you wish…”
He pointed generally towards his room. His windowpane was broken, and cobwebs hung from the ceiling. The only piece of décor in that ramshackle apartment was a pot of lilies, but the lilies had long since died and shriveled up.
“You gave me shelter; that’s enough,” she said.
“I will be back soon,” he said. “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Bessie.”
He went out, almost drooling over the slight seductive hiss she produced when she pronounced the esses in her name.
+ + +
Orson was back in a few hours, but he found that she hadn’t stirred. She was still on bed, laying in almost the same pose as he had left her. And yet, there was something different about his apartment. It seemed livelier somehow; it seemed as though it was affected by a warm healing touch that he hadn’t been able to give it thus far. He could sense it, but he could not spot it.
He did not care about the room anyway. He immediately dropped whatever he had in hand and clambered into bed next to the bewitching woman.
“What is your sorrow?” he asked her, when he noticed that her blue eyes still bore the dullness that he had seen them with the first time.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.”
“Where are you from?”
“A house. A green house with a big red roof.”
“If you know where this house is, I can take you there,” Orson offered.
“I don’t remember. Only thing I know… lots of children. Playing around. Laughing.”
“Anything else?”
“It is night, I remember. There are fires everywhere. People are crying, yelling, shouting. I have my hands over my ears. My mother comes to me.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.”
Orson mulled for a while. “A green house with a red roof on the beach, you say? That shouldn’t be difficult to locate. Would you like to go there now?”
“I want to sleep now. Sleep… with you.”
“All right,” he said, “we’ll go there tomorrow morning. If you wish.”
And he turned off the lights.
He was slipping into the quagmire of seduction, and this seduction was lethal because it had no eyes. He could not see beyond the physical appearance of the woman, but then he had a young man’s heart—fanciful and footloose. A young man’s heart is not afraid of things it has not seen; mere conjecture of doom does not move it.
But even then, he had time to wrangle out of it. He should have kept the lights on. He should have looked around the room.
Then he would have seen—the cobwebs that had hung around his house had now all disappeared, its spiders lying dead in their vicious nets; and the shriveled lilies had sprung back up to life, resplendent in their white glory.
+ + +
Deliver Us From Evil (Part 4 of 5)
The room became deathly silent. Without any sound, not even the ubiquitous traffic noise that any city-dweller gets used to, she felt completely restless. Her back ached, her wrists hurt and her eyes burned. She wanted to lay down for a while, her throat was parched again and hunger pangs began gnawing at her innards. She knew she had to keep up her faith. Her faith was what would keep her alive.
Deliver Us From Evil (Part 3 of 5)
When she came to, the first thing that she realized was the movement. It was a sick movement; she was going forward quite speedily, and what she saw ahead of her made her quite dizzy. Then she moved her neck but something held her. It was a gag, some strip that rendered her completely mute. Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs were strapped to whatever she was sitting on. The only thing that was free were her eyes, and now she opened them wide.
Deliver Us From Evil (Part 1 of 5)
In her small Catholic neighborhood at Bandra, Jacinta Gomes was quite popular. Everyone had her number on speed dial. She was the go-to person for all occasions, happy or sad.
There’s a wedding coming up? Call Jacinta for the church booking, the emcee, the band, even the place from where to get wedding favors. There’s a funeral? Oh, Jacinta will know the undertakers. Get in touch with her; she’ll even get you a fantastic deal on the coffin. And what? You are not getting a woman? Jacinta knows all the eligible unmarried girls in the city, maybe even the country. We don’t want any matchmaker!
At 22, she had achieved what most other Mangalorean Christian women had not—an enviable position within the Catholic community. Heck, she even knew all the Konkani roce songs!
She was the pride of her parents, Francis and Merita, and why shouldn’t she be? She knew her Bible as well as her analytical chemistry. She could handle a rosary just as easily as she could handle the accounts of their family frozen foods shop. She gave freely to all charities but she could also bargain with the fisherwomen. She was as much at home teaching her Sunday School students as she was in making the elder folk around her feel at ease.
She was a gem. And that is why her parents proudly flaunted her wherever they went. They had begun to forget who some of their relatives were, but they could always depend on Jacinta to scoop them out of sticky situations. It would be a sad day when she would leave to make another house. Her mother Merita felt that often, but with whom could she share her worries?
It was a Saturday evening, the day when sorpotel was cooked in the house. Jacinta had now taken over that tradition from her mother. She commenced with the cooking as soon as she returned from her college at 4, removing the pork from the freezer first, cleaning all the vessels required, readying the spices in their right proportions and proceeding with the preparation. Merita chatted with the neighboring aunts outside their old cottage house and Francis was at their deli. Rolston, her tenth-grade brother, sat at his study desk waging his own little war with trigonometry.
Merita called Jacinta out once to ask her where they had purchased their sungtan balchao from, for the neighboring Aunt Martha wanted to know. Jacinta quickly obliged them and returned to her cooking. Rolston kept coming up to her whenever the LHS and RHS of his problems did not match. And there were several calls on the landline, which she answered. But, despite everything, she did not miss a beat in her cooking. The aroma of deliciously cooked sorpotel began wafting through the house, when the sun outside began to go down.
Leaving the pot to simmer for its stipulated time, she went into her room to dress up for her Saturday evening obligation. She was to lead the choir group today, and she needed to be on time. The Lenten season was just around the corner; everyone needed to be on the top of their game. When she saw her friend Frida hurry to the church from her kitchen window, she knew she had to leave too.
As she was leaving, her mother called out behind her, “Wai go Jessie, you have not taken your phone?”
“Let it be, mumma,” Jacinta replied from the doorstep. “It’s just a five-minute walk to the church, and I will have to keep the phone on silent there anyway. If anyone calls, just take the message. And put the gas off after twenty minutes.”
She walked out in a hurry. She took the shortcut to reach the church, which meant that she had to walk through hens and ducks and geese and other forms of poultry outside people’s homes, smelling the gutter water, and slow down when the stray dogs stared at her. She did not want to trouble the animals unnecessarily. When the narrow lane opened out to the larger road, she saw her father at the Astin’s Wine Shop buying his weekend fix.
But she hurried on. She was getting late. The wine shop owner, Uncle Maurice, saw her hurrying along and told Francis, who turned and waved to his daughter. She waved back.
They were already waiting at the church when she reached. It was a huge church with a larger East Indian Christian crowd, but right now the Saturday mass had ended and people were walking out. She walked through the Saturday crowd of churchgoers buying their homemade chicken and mutton goodies from the stalls outside the church and talking animatedly with each other and entered the church. Dipping her fingers cursorily into the holy water, she made the sign of the cross as she entered.
The choir boys and girls sat noiselessly on the front two pews near the mike-stand accompanied by a group of adults. As soon as they spotted her, there was a flurry of action.
Once the choir practice began, she was in her element. She could become engrossed in her singing and conducting, but at the same time, she could be quite alert to any slipup in her little coterie. With merry composure, she checked all the goofs, and the organ-player Harry who had started playing when he was 12 and now was the father of a 12 year old, kept nodding at her appreciatively.
Choir practice got over on dot at 7:30. She had to hurry home and finish the cooking. But she could not do that without first sharing polite acknowledgements with the people around her. She went up and spoke to Frida, asking her about her bedridden grandfather, and commiserated with his paralytic stroke, and she went up to Harry as he was packing up his Casio and asked him about his son’s problems with studies and suggested a tutor, and then she went up to the smart middle-aged man seated at the last pew who had been staring unabashedly at her all the time.
She went and sat right next to him, and he immediately placed his arm around her slender waist.
“Not now, Uncle Soares,” she admonished him. “We are in a church.”
“Oh, Jesus knows about us!” he said.
“Do not take his name in vain!” Jacinta looked at him with such a glare that he slowly retreated his arm. But he kept smiling through his bushy mustache and adjusted his spectacles to look better at her.
“Why do you still call me Uncle?” he said.
She chose not to answer that. “How is Aunt Ellie?” she asked, mostly to change the topic.
“She is fine,” he said. “She is already off to bed, Jess. That’s how my life is. I am just 35, for God’s sake.”
She again glared at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “But you know. When will we be really happy, Jess?”
She looked down. The choir people had all dispersed; she was now alone in the church with this man.
“You have made up your mind, right?” he asked.
Jacinta nodded. The nod was slight. It indicated her affirmation but not her confirmation.
“Please Jess,” he urged. “Let’s do it. Tomorrow. After mass. As we decided. I will be waiting for you at the cemetery.”
She nodded again. “Where will we go?” she asked.
“Somewhere far from here. I have a friend’s house in Vasai. We will stay there for a few days. I have already started looking for a rental apartment there.”
“What about your job?”
“I will just stop going. It’s not like they had a contract or anything. Don’t worry about the money. I have a lot saved up, even a bank account that no one else knows about.”
He held her hands in his.
“I have been saving for this day, Jess.” There seemed to be true meaning in his eyes. “I only want you to be with me, nothing else matters. But I’ll keep you happy; I really will. You just come along. Leave everything and come.”
The sacristy door opened. The altar boys would come out soon to prepare the church for the next day’s Sunday mass.
“I am leaving now,” he said urgently. “But tomorrow after the 8 o’clock mass. We will do it.”
Jacinta smiled at him. He hurried out of the pew and out of the church. She kept sitting there, looking at the big crucifix above the altar.
The Cursed Letter (Part 5 of 5)
I see Betty stirring in bed. She will soon wake up. I see her slightly moving form and am aroused again. She is beautiful, the most beautiful thing I have ever touched, and soon I will have enough money to make the next big move in our relationship. I am sitting by the bed, waiting for her to wake up, envisioning what I will do with the money I will get.
But my fanciful mind is arrested by the doorbell.
The Cursed Letter (Part 3 of 5)
Back in the present, I recall that I am to meet Betty Whitman. It is funny how one tragedy sometimes cements other relationships. With my brother languishing in state prison, my relationship with him had weakened to almost nothingness. But my relationship with my neighbor has improved. Out of all the riffraff that surrounds me, Betty is a ray of sunshine. The cigarette-smoking, blonde, next-door bimbo is the one standing with me in my hour of need. I can see right through her, and what I see makes me happy.