Mr. Biswas was not a
very imaginative man, a plain simpleton of hills, there is nothing significant
I can tell you about him except for the fact that he had a queer habit of
scaling distances up and down the hills through the ways that would cut the
paths short. It was not a deliberate and uncalled for habit, there were after
all shortcuts between his shop on the
mall road and his humble house in a locality up the hill. I was told that there
were only two of them one through a grove of oaks, which people generally
avoided partly owing to the jackals that prowled the woods in the night and
rest because of those eerie wails produced by the passing of cold wind of the
hills through the oaks. The less educated strata of the hill town called these
wails a warning from the old woods themselves, to ward off any passer by lest
the jackals turn man eaters, but excessive game hunting at the turn of the
century have rendered them as no more a threat to human beings. there were
other beliefs however that pertained to these hunted and misunderstood
predators " Sahib, who knows what secrets these woods contain in them,
they have been there long before us. What to talk of Jackals? Who can tell in
the darkness of the night as to which is the demon and which is the
beast?" Maqsood my khansama once told me. The educated strata of the town
had their own reasons to avoid the woods, their reasons were more pragmatic and
close to what we call real. It was the fear of maniacs or murders that haunted
them. It would not be difficult to infer therefore that people mostly avoided
the path, except our very own Mr. Biswas, who would consider the intimidating
possibilities as nothing but an eventuality for the unfortunate, which I believe
they were. For all those years he crossed the woods, he saw nothing but the
tall oaks, moaning with the winds and along with a few distant howls piercing
the breeze of the night. then there was another way to his home, the one took
by most and feared by none. it was a children's park, situated on a flatter
elevation the steps atop which would lead straight up the hill. it consists of
all sorts of swings, wheels and slides, a merry indulgence for the little ones.
A harmless and least threatening way home. Yet he saw nothing wrong in taking
to the woods, on being asked of this weird practice he would declare in the
most dispassionate manner, " A path is a path, if it is one. If it exists,
it exists for a reason. the reason if any for its existence which it is, should
be serving the people as a passage." In this way he would dispense with
the objections of the people.
It was on a cold night of midwinter, Mr.
Biswas had stayed back later than usual owing to a trying customer who paid a
visit to his shop. the shops both far and near did close down already, on the
mall road. the street lamps threw a few quanta of light around them, like
radiating circles in the darkness. Mr. Biswas in his usual easy manner locked
the main shutter and began to pace towards his home up the hill. Night was cold
very cold, he drew his coat closer to himself and slouched a little, an easy
way to walk up hill. A few stray dogs barked at him and a few followed him too,
but then they would not dare to come near, Mr. Biswas always carried a wooden
stick clenched in his fist. Hills appeared to be huge ominous shadows that
night and every dark alley between the shops seemed to conceal a silent
beholder from elsewhere, observing a man who made it late on his way back and
thus was left behind to the many strange eyes which can see but cannot be seen.
It is in these moments that even the most rational experience a gradual
depletion of all rationality, only to be replaced by what we know as fear. A
weak and crouching shadow in the blackest confines and reaches of our mind,
beaten to obscurity by the will and the logic, but then it never dies its death
not until its possessor and slave alike, which is a man, ceases to exist. Not
until a man is left to be a lifeless piece of flesh, a worm food, fear, the
dread of the dying and the living would just not leave, showing its sadist
loyalty to the soul infested human. On the contrary it waits, waits with a
terrifying patience, grows like a scourge in the weakest moments of heart and
the blood curdling instances of the mind, you never know when the courage of
beholding the unexplained would last, but when it would, a shadow battered yet
resilient engulfs and drowns in itself the man himself. Like a parasite feeding
and propelling on its host, which could even be someone as objective as Mr.
Biswas.
Yes, there was something uneasy about that
night and Mr. Biswas had known it right from the moment he crossed the second
street lamp and then all along thereafter. It is in such silent yet haunting
moments that a man who is deemed to be a social animal yearns the most for a
company of another like him. Our Mr. Biswas was not going to get any, not any
soon though. Something had been following him, but then he had not lost control
not yet, even when he was drenched in cold sweat. He stopped and turned around
as unexpectedly as he could have, to find nothing but the shadows of the
mountains and the trees casting meaningless shapes on the road flushed with the
moonlight and the distance which he by far have scaled almost to its
entirety. there was nothing but transparent air and the static street lamps.
After having examined the milieu he moved on, however a little less anxiously
but not any less frantically.
Mr. Biswas soon stood on a divergence in the
road, one which led to the oak woods and the other which went past the
children's park. He with no other thoughts to spare chose the latter. Any man
marred by fearsome anticipations is bound to take such a decision, Mr. Biswas
of course was in possession of such ordinary prudence. Rationality and
skepticism are the states of mind that could have been considerations put to rest
for some other time, for then all what he wanted was to reach his home and lock
himself up in a room with a blanket caving him entirely with its soothing
warmth. A comforting proposition indeed but a distant one anyway as home was
still a quarter of kilometer away. The fear of being followed did not abandon
him and he was constantly reminded of a presence from which for a certain
reason he wanted to get rid of. How can that not be? Unseen and unexplained are
the cornerstones of a man's fear after all. the path that cut through the
middle of the park had streetlamps like those on the road on either side. Mr.
Biswas walked swiftly, crossing the first pair of lamps, the second and then
the third. It was not before he reached the fourth lamp to his left that he
heard something behind his back. Everything assumed an eerie stillness, the
occasional barking of the stray dogs halted, the howling of jackals vanished
and the wind died down for no reason. The crickets in the bushes nearby went
silent. Everything was stiffened by the soundlessness except for a metallic
creak, of that of a swing that began to sway, someone but not Mr. Biswas had
administered motion to it, for it had
lain motionless all this time so convincingly that there was no reason as to
why it should move other than a deliberate push, required so essentially to make
it go back and forth.
the movement of the swing however was more
than a mere push, someone ought to have ridden it. Mr. Biswas
froze like an effigy of stone and a chill of horror relayed through his spine. He
could have made a sprint up the hill or he could have simply chosen to keep
moving but logic was discarded long back and his will to resist the fright had
lasted. So, like a man who succumbs to a nightmare, he turned, a gradual
foolhardy turn that was to spare certain tacit and event less hours to the night
at the end of it all. A final inevitable confrontation. Mr. Biswas's stood sans
any movement like a piece of timber, he was pale, though it cannot be said with
much conformity as to whether it was the moonlight or was it the hue of his
skin. the swing oscillated in the ether, it would be empty when it came forth
in the range of the street lamp and when it went back showered in the moonlight
it would have an occupier. It was occupied by a little girl, or so did the
thing manifested itself as. Her face was lifeless, morose and grayed owing to
timeless wandering, but she was not helpless, not helpless as Mr. Biswas at
least who was wood and stone for the time being. Her face though sad was
appalling or was turning the same, each time the swing moved back into the
moonlight. The other time it came in the moonlight the girl was wearing a weird
grin, broken yet strong, enough to strike sheer fright in the heart of
anyone. though the motives of this uncanny visitor remained unknown but Mr.
Biswas was certainly had nothing to gain out of them, except for insanity. He
was losing every form of composure, trying make sense of all this was out of
the faculties of his simple mind that could accept nothing but what can be
seen, but that night he saw and what he saw added on to his madness, which he
began to succumb to. The ways of the dead are least known to the living,
knowing is of little help at times though. Faint cries of fear began to escape
his throat and he felt tears as cold as ice trickled down his cheek, and it was
then he realized that it was not a nightmare, not at least a one where he could
wake up.
