Ranga and the Demon King
May 1 2007 | Views 1045 |
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Tags: life society value hard work poverty labor Demon King shashi krishna
Tags: life society value hard work poverty labor Demon King shashi krishna
Ranga and the Demon King
© 2007/ Short Fiction by Shashi Krishna
CIRCA 19-- AND THE WORLD was a ruthless meat mart. Fresh ones went for a higher price while the aging skins were left on the back burner. Dicey ones abandoned in the name of the Omnipresent while the smarter ones were found in a pool of their own blood. A gross and shameful dance of how meaningless and absolutely worthless a human life really was became more apparent with every breaking tabloid spill. Burning the soles of his lifeless feet was the common man, stuck somewhere between the moon and the rainbow, trying to scratch his back in peace. Ignored he sat, waiting in line for an unknown finale, just because others like him did too. Fanning themselves with the only other piece of clothing they had brought, they waited. And they hoped.
Thrown somewhere into this bizarre equation of fuming humanity – was Ranga. Burning the tips of his fingers with a beedi he had borrowed, he smoked in peace with a moist hand towel on his head. Strapped in a dirty dhoti that begged for a wash and an equally shabby cotton shirt, he sat enjoying his ten minute lunch break. His face was an image of eternal struggle laced with a dash of a discerning frown. Little was known about this middle aged, wrinkle-faced nobody who minded his own business and slaved at almost every road-construction, bridge building, apartment stone carrying, brick-laying and sign painting project the city would undertake. Sniffing till his mouth went dry in blistering heat, Ranga would start dripping sweat-falls as he toiled relentlessly each passing day to make the few rupaiyyah he got at the end of it. A quick wipe of the weary face and a deep drag of the foul tasting stick he sucked on was all he needed.
He ate when there was food available. He slept where there was room. His only possession was a hand-sown cotton bag that hung in desperation along his groin. He would flap up his dhoti with an air of uncouth proficiency and stuff his earnings into that atomic bank of fortunes. Many a time this rather frowned upon act of his would see orthodox feminine faces look away in utter disgust. With little care for anything around his own being, he would sneeze out a long one, adjust his crotch with practiced ease and move on. Nothing, as it seemed, could make the fellow blink an eyelid.
Not far away from the invisible shanty-town that was the city’s eyesore was the new project at hand. Ranga’s discovery about this high yielding job had borne fruit when he found himself tenth in the ant-hill that was forming for rapid occupation. A name exchange and nod of approval on the payment options and he was in. Zaveri Builders had taken it upon themselves to provide the already bejeweled headdress of the city yet another elite column of apartments with one bedroom and two bathrooms. Ranga overheard some chatty folk overreact about the owner being some major power player but being the way he was, he coughed and spat before resuming work. His reaction had created unrest among the ranks as he quickly got the repute of being a loner. He was, without a shred of doubt, a man of few words, but somehow the only salvation other Rangas with nastier coughing habits had was to know they were a community. This blatant disregard by Ranga of the working-ants brotherhood did not seem to gel well with the clan.
The meat market remained simmering with the heat of each passing sun. The women folk carried heaps of gravel and stones during the day while their bare bottomed toddlers watched in curious glee before returning to their sand play. At night these mothers and their children nestled next to each other with a kind-of-full stomach while the fathers drank themselves insane while yelling obscenities at the perfumed bedrooms of the snoring elite. Their make shift tents with a slow burning kitchen outside would be filled with badly sung lullabies and the occasional wail of a nightmare as the stars enveloped this part of the globe. Apart from this the entire area and all sixteen-floors of it, would be the city of the dead.
A little away from these refugee camps were the booze-hound men folk and the sober listeners. They would sit around exchanging dirty jokes about the owner of the building being an impotent with only one working testis. They would guffaw at various ill conceived rumors about the project’s money being generated by the mafia. Some of them would swear on their dead mothers (‘God rest her soul!’ they would add) that they had seen with their own living eyes covert exchanges at late night meetings. Initially they would call out to Ranga to come on over and join their verbal exploits. On his consistent reluctance to do so they had confidently declared even he was not a complete man either. Too bad, they said, that at least the owner had so much money! And they might as well have been right about Ranga’s manhood had it not been for the night when the Demon King came.
Literacy among these folk was minimal to say the least. Farming had been their main occupation before the land started to crack and worms began consummating on their crops. While some of them took rat poison for dessert, others fled the land to the city where the dreams bred. They left behind wailing wives and dead kin. Memories of a hard life were past them as the glitz and distraction of a disoriented metro consumed them with one gulp. The silence that engulfed their empty eyes would be filled with the reflections of the stars sequined on some teenager’s ripped jean. The masks they would wear as they built someone else’s aspiration during the day would burn off their faces as the liquor made way into their food-craving veins. With a stomach full of lost ambitions, they would disappear into a mirage of poison vials and humping ring worms before the irksome crow would croak each morning. Those few minutes of reconciliation was all they had. It was all they could afford.
What did not bother Ranga about this scene was the familiarity of it all. He too was a child of democratic abuse. A lowly farmer whose land had been lost in oceans of debt that would take at least three generations of buttock peeling to pay. As the heads of the administration looked the other way, his home burned. His brothers hung from banyan trees with letters of sorrow cold in their still palms. The elders cremated their mortal remains but the spirits still wandered around the old Banyan Tree, looking for a release. A proper one. And hopefully a happy one.
It seemed like the mixed emotions of the banyan tree dwellers fell on the wrong ears. Somewhere in the belly of an indigested sky slept the Demon King in peace. The cries soaked in flesh-scented fury, somehow, reached the pit of the evil that sang itself a lullaby of death. Not the silent kind, O! no reader. The noisy kind. The kind that makes your stomach churn and tongue dry. Somewhere someone somehow had managed to say those two words – magical concoctions of liberty – that would descend from the ill-bowelled skies. That unmistakable pair of pristine request – ‘Release Us’.
Ranga squatted for a quick late-nighter near the garbage mound when the signs appeared. Two sleepy drunks were discussing various ways of making love to the latest starlet when mixed with the wind came the scent of decaying souls. Ranga picked it up almost right away. His thoughts ran back to his village, to his family, to his wife, to his twin-daughters who still had not yet reached their tenth year of existence and to his land. The land that sat buried inside the shame of his family. The land that had made him as hard as itself. The mass of earth that sat choking on its own spit with no one to care for it.
As the silence broke with the Demon King’s flaming eyeballs, Ranga was on his feet - Alert. Aware. Ready. He stood all set to take the Demon King by his blazing horns and send him back to where he came from.
As if by instinct, Ranga pulled out the money sachet that held his privates in place and flung it onto the dried out gutter. He could not let Demon King see that on his person since it would disappear too. It was close to four am when the out of control four wheeled chariot was on its final ride. Loud and unfamiliar music radiated with absolute insanity from its foul mouth that spat out sparks of fire as it mercilessly banged itself on the sidewalk. Ranga’s math was as accurate as it had ever been. If he did not come in the way of the Demon King’s death-strewn path then twenty-five drunks and eight sobers would be trampled under the hot wheels of the chariot Demon King was riding. The refugee camps with the mothers and children would be next in line. If he did then there was no way to predict which route the dying chariot would take before fragmenting into a thousands pieces – taking Ranga along with it.
Without a second to spare, Ranga took one last look at the boiling lights from Hell and leapt onto the chariot’s view. The dark shades prevented him from seeing the Demon King in the eye but O! what a sight that was! A loud crescendo of unearthly noises came out of the metal chariot as Ranga lay still on it trying to force it out of its path of mayhem. A few yards away from the snoring half-dead, Ranga realized he had access to the charioteer’s hands. He quickly pulled out his muscled left arm and shoved it onto the dark square that was dimly lit by fading smoke and rich alcohol. He heard a cry behind him – an awake sober – who was shouting at the top of his undernourished lungs trying to pull out every sleeping worker away from that sidewalk. The following second the chariot was under Ranga’s control. At a speed unimaginable, Demon King sped onto the construction site, narrowly missing the snoozing booze-hounds and crashing violently into one of the weak pillars of the basement area.
The explosion that occurred next had to be the loudest thing anyone had ever heard in their entire lives. The crack and thud of melting metal was so intense that almost a hundred meters worth of life woke up from its deep slumber. Within a few seconds scores of sleepy heads surrounded the smoking chariot of Demon King that was now engulfed in raging flames. Wailing children and their hysterical mothers appeared from their camps and did little to bring order to this chaos. Residents from the neighborhood rushed towards the accident spot with buckets of spilling water and blankets. Within minutes the fire was brought under control as the entire area was engulfed with a foggy layer of invisible sorrow.
A burly man, who identified himself as Yadav, began pushing curious onlookers aside to try and open the doors of the burning chariot. Using the water and the blankets as fire-safe gadgets, he pulled open the door to find two seriously injured individuals. One – a young woman who seemed to have cracked her head with a distinct stream of blood dripping down her face and two – a young man who was immediately identified as the one-working-testis’s only son and had a major lesion on his face. Someone’s presence of mind worked well that dreary night, as an ambulance and a police jeep arrived within the next few minutes. As Yadav took control of this unforeseen situation clad in an unbuttoned shirt and striped lungi, everyone got involved in trying to help the couple out.
The impact had been quite vexing. The front portion of the chariot had been completely damaged as the bodies of the unconscious occupants were awkwardly stuck inside. With great effort by the burly Yadav, they were finally pulled out and put on sanitized stretchers before being whisked away to safety. The police quickly cleared out the area so that the rescue operation would go smooth. Considering the owner’s son himself was involved in this grisly incident, they did not want delay. Not a minute. Not a second.
‘Hey!’ yelled out one of the young workers as the ambulances disappeared into the distance. The crowd turned its attention towards the lad only to realize that one more fatality had occurred. One of the local workers, whose name no one knew, lay in a pool of his own blood as the back of his head had pierced its way into one of the metal rods that stuck out of the concrete blocks of aspirations. They immediately pulled out the dead body of the stranger from its entanglement and laid him out in the open for everyone to take a peek.
‘Sorry son of a bastard,’ exclaimed one of the liquored workers, ‘we pleaded with this fellow to sleep with us. If he had then he would have been alive today. You see what happens if you act smart? I always knew he was not man enough!’ With this he violently spat on Ranga’s still and bloodied face before being shoved away by the others. Someone later called the local authorities and informed them about an unknown body that had been involved in the incident and needed cremation.
Ranga’s tryst with the Demon King remained undocumented.
..ShaKri..
© 2007/ Short Fiction by Shashi Krishna
CIRCA 19-- AND THE WORLD was a ruthless meat mart. Fresh ones went for a higher price while the aging skins were left on the back burner. Dicey ones abandoned in the name of the Omnipresent while the smarter ones were found in a pool of their own blood. A gross and shameful dance of how meaningless and absolutely worthless a human life really was became more apparent with every breaking tabloid spill. Burning the soles of his lifeless feet was the common man, stuck somewhere between the moon and the rainbow, trying to scratch his back in peace. Ignored he sat, waiting in line for an unknown finale, just because others like him did too. Fanning themselves with the only other piece of clothing they had brought, they waited. And they hoped.
Thrown somewhere into this bizarre equation of fuming humanity – was Ranga. Burning the tips of his fingers with a beedi he had borrowed, he smoked in peace with a moist hand towel on his head. Strapped in a dirty dhoti that begged for a wash and an equally shabby cotton shirt, he sat enjoying his ten minute lunch break. His face was an image of eternal struggle laced with a dash of a discerning frown. Little was known about this middle aged, wrinkle-faced nobody who minded his own business and slaved at almost every road-construction, bridge building, apartment stone carrying, brick-laying and sign painting project the city would undertake. Sniffing till his mouth went dry in blistering heat, Ranga would start dripping sweat-falls as he toiled relentlessly each passing day to make the few rupaiyyah he got at the end of it. A quick wipe of the weary face and a deep drag of the foul tasting stick he sucked on was all he needed.
He ate when there was food available. He slept where there was room. His only possession was a hand-sown cotton bag that hung in desperation along his groin. He would flap up his dhoti with an air of uncouth proficiency and stuff his earnings into that atomic bank of fortunes. Many a time this rather frowned upon act of his would see orthodox feminine faces look away in utter disgust. With little care for anything around his own being, he would sneeze out a long one, adjust his crotch with practiced ease and move on. Nothing, as it seemed, could make the fellow blink an eyelid.
Not far away from the invisible shanty-town that was the city’s eyesore was the new project at hand. Ranga’s discovery about this high yielding job had borne fruit when he found himself tenth in the ant-hill that was forming for rapid occupation. A name exchange and nod of approval on the payment options and he was in. Zaveri Builders had taken it upon themselves to provide the already bejeweled headdress of the city yet another elite column of apartments with one bedroom and two bathrooms. Ranga overheard some chatty folk overreact about the owner being some major power player but being the way he was, he coughed and spat before resuming work. His reaction had created unrest among the ranks as he quickly got the repute of being a loner. He was, without a shred of doubt, a man of few words, but somehow the only salvation other Rangas with nastier coughing habits had was to know they were a community. This blatant disregard by Ranga of the working-ants brotherhood did not seem to gel well with the clan.
The meat market remained simmering with the heat of each passing sun. The women folk carried heaps of gravel and stones during the day while their bare bottomed toddlers watched in curious glee before returning to their sand play. At night these mothers and their children nestled next to each other with a kind-of-full stomach while the fathers drank themselves insane while yelling obscenities at the perfumed bedrooms of the snoring elite. Their make shift tents with a slow burning kitchen outside would be filled with badly sung lullabies and the occasional wail of a nightmare as the stars enveloped this part of the globe. Apart from this the entire area and all sixteen-floors of it, would be the city of the dead.
A little away from these refugee camps were the booze-hound men folk and the sober listeners. They would sit around exchanging dirty jokes about the owner of the building being an impotent with only one working testis. They would guffaw at various ill conceived rumors about the project’s money being generated by the mafia. Some of them would swear on their dead mothers (‘God rest her soul!’ they would add) that they had seen with their own living eyes covert exchanges at late night meetings. Initially they would call out to Ranga to come on over and join their verbal exploits. On his consistent reluctance to do so they had confidently declared even he was not a complete man either. Too bad, they said, that at least the owner had so much money! And they might as well have been right about Ranga’s manhood had it not been for the night when the Demon King came.
Literacy among these folk was minimal to say the least. Farming had been their main occupation before the land started to crack and worms began consummating on their crops. While some of them took rat poison for dessert, others fled the land to the city where the dreams bred. They left behind wailing wives and dead kin. Memories of a hard life were past them as the glitz and distraction of a disoriented metro consumed them with one gulp. The silence that engulfed their empty eyes would be filled with the reflections of the stars sequined on some teenager’s ripped jean. The masks they would wear as they built someone else’s aspiration during the day would burn off their faces as the liquor made way into their food-craving veins. With a stomach full of lost ambitions, they would disappear into a mirage of poison vials and humping ring worms before the irksome crow would croak each morning. Those few minutes of reconciliation was all they had. It was all they could afford.
What did not bother Ranga about this scene was the familiarity of it all. He too was a child of democratic abuse. A lowly farmer whose land had been lost in oceans of debt that would take at least three generations of buttock peeling to pay. As the heads of the administration looked the other way, his home burned. His brothers hung from banyan trees with letters of sorrow cold in their still palms. The elders cremated their mortal remains but the spirits still wandered around the old Banyan Tree, looking for a release. A proper one. And hopefully a happy one.
It seemed like the mixed emotions of the banyan tree dwellers fell on the wrong ears. Somewhere in the belly of an indigested sky slept the Demon King in peace. The cries soaked in flesh-scented fury, somehow, reached the pit of the evil that sang itself a lullaby of death. Not the silent kind, O! no reader. The noisy kind. The kind that makes your stomach churn and tongue dry. Somewhere someone somehow had managed to say those two words – magical concoctions of liberty – that would descend from the ill-bowelled skies. That unmistakable pair of pristine request – ‘Release Us’.
Ranga squatted for a quick late-nighter near the garbage mound when the signs appeared. Two sleepy drunks were discussing various ways of making love to the latest starlet when mixed with the wind came the scent of decaying souls. Ranga picked it up almost right away. His thoughts ran back to his village, to his family, to his wife, to his twin-daughters who still had not yet reached their tenth year of existence and to his land. The land that sat buried inside the shame of his family. The land that had made him as hard as itself. The mass of earth that sat choking on its own spit with no one to care for it.
As the silence broke with the Demon King’s flaming eyeballs, Ranga was on his feet - Alert. Aware. Ready. He stood all set to take the Demon King by his blazing horns and send him back to where he came from.
As if by instinct, Ranga pulled out the money sachet that held his privates in place and flung it onto the dried out gutter. He could not let Demon King see that on his person since it would disappear too. It was close to four am when the out of control four wheeled chariot was on its final ride. Loud and unfamiliar music radiated with absolute insanity from its foul mouth that spat out sparks of fire as it mercilessly banged itself on the sidewalk. Ranga’s math was as accurate as it had ever been. If he did not come in the way of the Demon King’s death-strewn path then twenty-five drunks and eight sobers would be trampled under the hot wheels of the chariot Demon King was riding. The refugee camps with the mothers and children would be next in line. If he did then there was no way to predict which route the dying chariot would take before fragmenting into a thousands pieces – taking Ranga along with it.
Without a second to spare, Ranga took one last look at the boiling lights from Hell and leapt onto the chariot’s view. The dark shades prevented him from seeing the Demon King in the eye but O! what a sight that was! A loud crescendo of unearthly noises came out of the metal chariot as Ranga lay still on it trying to force it out of its path of mayhem. A few yards away from the snoring half-dead, Ranga realized he had access to the charioteer’s hands. He quickly pulled out his muscled left arm and shoved it onto the dark square that was dimly lit by fading smoke and rich alcohol. He heard a cry behind him – an awake sober – who was shouting at the top of his undernourished lungs trying to pull out every sleeping worker away from that sidewalk. The following second the chariot was under Ranga’s control. At a speed unimaginable, Demon King sped onto the construction site, narrowly missing the snoozing booze-hounds and crashing violently into one of the weak pillars of the basement area.
The explosion that occurred next had to be the loudest thing anyone had ever heard in their entire lives. The crack and thud of melting metal was so intense that almost a hundred meters worth of life woke up from its deep slumber. Within a few seconds scores of sleepy heads surrounded the smoking chariot of Demon King that was now engulfed in raging flames. Wailing children and their hysterical mothers appeared from their camps and did little to bring order to this chaos. Residents from the neighborhood rushed towards the accident spot with buckets of spilling water and blankets. Within minutes the fire was brought under control as the entire area was engulfed with a foggy layer of invisible sorrow.
A burly man, who identified himself as Yadav, began pushing curious onlookers aside to try and open the doors of the burning chariot. Using the water and the blankets as fire-safe gadgets, he pulled open the door to find two seriously injured individuals. One – a young woman who seemed to have cracked her head with a distinct stream of blood dripping down her face and two – a young man who was immediately identified as the one-working-testis’s only son and had a major lesion on his face. Someone’s presence of mind worked well that dreary night, as an ambulance and a police jeep arrived within the next few minutes. As Yadav took control of this unforeseen situation clad in an unbuttoned shirt and striped lungi, everyone got involved in trying to help the couple out.
The impact had been quite vexing. The front portion of the chariot had been completely damaged as the bodies of the unconscious occupants were awkwardly stuck inside. With great effort by the burly Yadav, they were finally pulled out and put on sanitized stretchers before being whisked away to safety. The police quickly cleared out the area so that the rescue operation would go smooth. Considering the owner’s son himself was involved in this grisly incident, they did not want delay. Not a minute. Not a second.
‘Hey!’ yelled out one of the young workers as the ambulances disappeared into the distance. The crowd turned its attention towards the lad only to realize that one more fatality had occurred. One of the local workers, whose name no one knew, lay in a pool of his own blood as the back of his head had pierced its way into one of the metal rods that stuck out of the concrete blocks of aspirations. They immediately pulled out the dead body of the stranger from its entanglement and laid him out in the open for everyone to take a peek.
‘Sorry son of a bastard,’ exclaimed one of the liquored workers, ‘we pleaded with this fellow to sleep with us. If he had then he would have been alive today. You see what happens if you act smart? I always knew he was not man enough!’ With this he violently spat on Ranga’s still and bloodied face before being shoved away by the others. Someone later called the local authorities and informed them about an unknown body that had been involved in the incident and needed cremation.
Ranga’s tryst with the Demon King remained undocumented.
..ShaKri..
© Shashi Krishna., all rights reserved.
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