Fiction: A policeman who was once feared as the god of death suspects retribution is at his door

After installing cameras on all four sides of Shreedharan’s house and directing the video feed to his smartphone, Appu asked, “How do you feel now, uncle, when you see this?”

“Feels like I am peeping into my own home while sitting inside it.”

Appu could not decipher the expression on Shreedharan’s face when he said that. Appu left after showing him how to control the cameras. Shreedharan continued to watch the phone’s screen, bewildered like a nosey child who had peered at something forbidden. Later, he checked the address he had scribbled on the library book two days ago and rode out on his motorbike.

Once, when he was in class six, during the summer holidays, Shreedharan had sneaked into his neighbour’s compound to pick up windfall mangoes. Noticing that some of the fallen mangoes were starting to ripen, he aimed a stone at a bunch hanging at the tip of the tree. But he missed the target and the stone landed inside Devayaniamma’s house. A startled shout of “Aiyyo” from inside the house did not make him flee. Instead, he had an odd urge to go and check who had been hurt.

He opened the windowpane slightly and peeped inside. What he saw left him frozen. Devayaniamma and his father scrambled from the floor and, untangling their naked bodies, they frantically grabbed at their scattered clothes.

Although Shreedharan did not fully comprehend the scene, he stood there rooted, aware that something momentous had happened. After Padmanabhan Nair had left, Devayaniamma called him inside and fed him rice mixed with curd and salted mango. Once his stomach was full, he went home and slept. A short nap later, the memory of what he had seen and what had happened no longer niggled at him. However, for a long time, whenever Padmanabhan Nair and Devayaniamma saw him, they restrained themselves and put forward their best behaviour.

Even as a child, Shreedharan was aware that, as a motherless boy living with his father’s extended family, surviving on their charity, he did not have the freedom to speak his mind. When he turned older, Shreedharan came to understand that it was more than lust that drove his father to sneak into Devayaniamma’s house – it was the hunger of a man with a ravenous appetite, seeking a proper meal. By then, his father had given up participating in eating competitions.

To Shreedharan, his father – mocked by his own brothers and brothers-in-law as a bottomless pit, yet never responding except with a belch from his ever-growling stomach – had committed no great sin. After joining the police and even before he had moved out of the house following the family partition, Shreedharan never once mentioned what he had witnessed.

When he reached the house and rang the doorbell, Devayaniamma’s youngest son, Murali, opened the door. When they were children, Shreedharan had once saved Murali from being bitten by a serpent. In those days, their compound was full of snakes. The local boys took pride in beating them to death, boasting about and gloating over it. Whenever someone screamed, “Aiyyo, snake,” while others fled in fear or rushed towards the commotion, Shreedharan would run to the back of their house to break a branch off the mother of the cocoa tree. It made the perfect snake-killing stick; pliant yet firm, it would bend, stay parallel to the ground and strike with full contact. Common krait, Russell’s viper, green vine snake, rat snake, checkered keelback snake, Indian cobra, worm snakes – all had fallen prey to his snake extermination skills.

Once, he even had a King Cobra in his sights. But unnerved by its hiss and venomous spit, Shreedharan took a step back, enough for the well-digger, Kunjunni, to step into the breach and deliver the first blow, usurping both the bragging rights and the fame from Shreedharan. Back then, Shreedharan felt neither fear nor revulsion in killing snakes. It was only after marriage and fatherhood that he gave up snake bashing.

There was a reason for that. Once, after a night shift, Shreedharan had returned home, had lunch in the afternoon, and settled in front of the TV to watch a tense India-Pakistan One Day International match. By the time he got up to investigate why his daughter, just back from the morning shift at school, had rushed out of the bathroom in terror, a sizable common krait had already slipped into the kitchen of their rented house.

He forced it out by poking it with a stick and splashing liberal doses of kerosene, bludgeoned it to death and then flung it onto the concrete slab beside the washing stone. Saudamini kept asking him to bury it in the backyard, but Shreedharan was too engrossed in the match, and he ignored her. Chewing his fingernails, he stayed rooted to the sofa until Sachin, Sehwag, Ganguly and Yuvaraj hit the Pakistan attack out of the park and won the match for India. The dead snake lay in the blazing sun from 2 pm. until around 5.30 pm. By the time Shreedharan picked up a stick to try to move it, it had become stiff and crisp, much like sardines deep-fried in boiling oil.

Somehow, he managed to push the snake, now stiff as a stick, into a plastic bag. But the moment he buried it and began washing his hands, he threw up his entire lunch. From that day on, the sight of the glistening, slithery bodies of snakes filled him with revulsion, and he could not bear to watch them anymore.

Later, on another occasion, when a snake suddenly appeared at their home, Saudamini woke Shreedharan from his post-duty nap.

“Get some sand or gravel from the yard and throw it at the snake. It’s better to fling things from a distance at venomous creatures than go near and beat them to death,” he mumbled, then turned to his side and pretended to go back to sleep.

A flabbergasted Saudamini stood there for some time, facepalming and wondering what had happened to this man who once charged forward, a stick or lathi in hand, whether it was a hissing serpent or a raging mob.

“Your mother doesn’t have any serious complaints, does she?” seated by the bedside and holding Devayaniamma’s hands, Shreedharan asked Murali.

“She doesn’t have any major ailment. She recently had a throat operation. Now she speaks only in whispers. We have to lean in close to catch what she is saying. You two talk, I’ll make some tea.” By the time Murali, in his wife’s absence, figured out where tea, sugar, saucepan, etc., were kept in the kitchen, made tea and returned with it, Shreedharan had already unburdened himself before Devayaniamma. After listening in silence, she beckoned him closer. Realising she wanted to say something, he leaned in, bowed his head close to her mouth and cocked his ear.

‘Shreedhara, if we have committed a sin, let it end with this one body and soul. Do you know the story behind the birthmark on Thacholi Othenan’s flank? Shreedharan shook his head to indicate he did not.

“Othenan’s mother Uppatti’s common-law husband was a grandee from Puthuppanam. Although he was a local chieftain and patrician, Uppatti and her children received no benefits. He never cared for them. She managed her household by letting sharecroppers cultivate coconut and areca nut on her land. One day, when she was carrying Othenan, she had a craving for roasted coconut chutney to go with her congee.

“Just as she was grinding a windfall coconut, the sharecropper, Kannakurup, happened to arrive. The sight of her using what he considered his property infuriated him. Without any consideration for the fact that she was near her term, he flung whatever came to hand; it hit her belly. Kurup fled when he saw Uppatti double over in pain, stifling a scream and holding her swollen belly. Although the baby escaped serious injury, when he was born, he had a mark on his ribs.

“Therefore, Shreedhara, don’t take the stone pelting lightly. If there’s something that you have done, don’t leave it to end up as a scab or a scar on the bodies of our future generations. Our actions, whether spiritual or physical, must end with us. Does this make sense to you?”

When she said this, the image of his grandchild rose in Shreedharan’s mind. He smiled at Devayaniamma as if he had grasped it all.

“When you cannot fell your enemy in open combat, you can hurl something at him – that is the tradition. You have heard the tale of the broken sword, haven’t you?”

Despite the effort it took Devayaniamma to speak, Shreedharan realised that even at 92, her fire hadn’t dimmed.

“Even at this age, you are such a peachy treasure!”

“Eda, Kaalan Shreedhara, don’t cast your evil eye on me and dispatch me to my maker. The Queen of England, who once ruled us all, is a year older than me. And yet, there she is on TV, hopping and prancing about. What do you say about that?”

Murali entered the room just in time to hear this and let out a hearty chuckle. After sipping some of the tea he had brought in and bidding goodbye to Devayaniamma, Shreedharan left with a light heart. However, the mood did not last long. That very night, the roof tile above his bedroom was shattered.

He was in the toilet when it happened – he heard the sharp crack and the crash of the tile hitting the floor. Shreedharan did not rush out to investigate and continued to sit and heave sighs of relief as three days’ constipation showed encouraging signs of easing out. It was only after he had strained and grunted to push out the last reluctant turd that he rose from the seat. But when he looked down into the commode before using the health faucet, he froze – the water was red. He had never suffered from dysentery or haemorrhoids, so his first thought was whether, on top of Chaththaneru, someone had poisoned him to make him shit blood and bleed to death.

He resisted the impulse to beat his breast, keen, ululate, and curse the perpetrator, whoever it was, and remained seated for a few minutes. Then it struck him – on his way back from the town the previous evening, he was famished and had consumed four vegetable cutlets, almost entirely made of beetroot, at the Indian Coffee House. Relieved, he washed up, wrapped his mundu around his waist and stepped out of the toilet.

The stone had hit the dead centre of the bedroom. After picking up the pieces of the roof tile from the bed and dropping them on the floor, he flopped onto the bed. As he lay on his back and looked up, he could see a slice of the sky through the breach in the roof – a thin crescent moon with a tiny twinkling star by its side. Bathed in the faint moonlight that seeped in, he smiled at the thought: if the entire roof were blown off, how would someone pelt stones at it? The sight of the star adjacent to the crescent suddenly brought Hassainar to his mind. But just as a passing cloud put a veil on the moon, the smile faded from his face.

Excerpted with permission from Backlash, Devadas VM, translated from the Malayalam by Nandakumar K, Westland.