DEATH OF A ROBIN

CHAPTER 2

The year was 1977 when he moved to Constantia.

Yogesh, Aru and Ray were in the back of the truck and tried to stay awake for as long as possible. The road was narrow and bumpy and unlit like an unutterable confession but they began to doze off when it became smoother and wider and endless rows of street lights began to melt dimly into the bleached moon following the truck faithfully. Soon a pale galaxy spun out in parallel coordinates of glistening spinning spheres, in whose spiral haze they slept and woke, slept and woke, fitfully drifting, sometimes noiselessly and sometimes with the whine of orbital transit pulsating around them.

Around midnight, the city road ended and the Private Road began and they reached the white iron gate and the truck turned into it, headlights piercing the darkness like a creature from the Book of Revelation. After about two minutes of vegetation-crunching and twig-snapping, the truck stopped, its headlight snapping off. Bonny got down from truck’s cabin, able to bend only an ear into pitch black night. The driver unlocked the tailgate and one by one the three children stepped down on alien ground. 

The air was dry as darkness and he poked it with a finger, ‘that is ours.’ The children strained to look but it was an exhibition of shadows, each one contesting to be darker than the other everywhere around them. In one of those, a door opened and closed. 

‘I’m going to get the key,’ Bonny said and he marched off through the thick undergrowth. 

‘Step forward into the light please,’ an invisible voice and a torch beamed down from a balcony. ‘Is it you Mr. Deut?’

‘Yes.’

‘Acchha!!’ The beam shot in an arc over the truck and the upturned faces of the men and the children.

‘You want the key?’

‘Yesss.’

The torchlight lingered on Bonny’s face.

‘Come, come,’ the voice spoke and convinced with the scrutiny, the light was withdrawn.

‘Stay here,’ Bonny told the children and climbed up into to the invisible abode of the voice with the light. After what seemed a very long wait in the dark, Bonny emerged unscathed.

‘Got the key?’

‘Yes, get our stuff out please.’ He told the driver and walked towards what seemed the sum total of all the shadows in the world. The children followed. Soon a key held ceremony with a slot, a lever shifted, a shaft moved and a rusty lock clicked open. Bonny unbolted the door and a portal creaked open into another shade of darkness. He crossed the room and switched on the light. Dark emptiness of many days gave in to the sudden and fresh invasion of flesh, blood, light and noise. The boys and the girl ran into the rooms.

The house suffered their curious and excited incursion into its solitude until the last of the rooms with the double beds and the restroom had been examined and the last of the doors and windows opened and the solitude of the house bled into the surrounding wilderness, seeping slowly into the darkness and grudgingly retreating into spaces that were known only to the countless denizens that inhabited them. The children peered into an expanse of undergrowth and a dense aerial vista of black leaves, branches and vines overhead.

‘The courtyard.’

The tall grass and the weeds rustled an introduction.

‘There must be snakes in it.’

‘I’ll kill any snake.’ Yogesh’s disregard for them was almost impulsive.

‘What’s this tree?’

Bunches of yellow flowers swung like grapes from the huge tree, long black sticks swaying.

‘Those are for monkeys.’

Light from the veranda fell on the stone slabs that made a path around the last bedroom and into the corridor that led to the back. They stood there understanding its mystery. The men finished unloading. There was stuff all over the house. Bonny paid them and saw them out through the back door till the truck. The children heard the truck roar, its powerful headlights bending the gloom fiercely as it reversed and turned. They rushed out.

‘Will they drive the whole night back to their home?’ The question peaked the experience of the children’s last twenty four hours.

‘I don’t think so,’ Bonny replied on a doleful whim as he turned to go in, ‘come inside, it’s very late.’

The truck thundered through the sleeping compound and out of the gate, turned left on the road and disappeared from view. A dog barked in the distance, picked up by a chorus. A screech owl descended on the open white gate and somewhere a lapwing cried to itself. They ran back. Bonny bolted the door.

 

It was a semi furnished house with a glossy dining table, study table, double beds, dressing table and a coffee table with two chairs.

‘Welcome to your new house,’ Bonny’s welcome and the children’s excitement mounted and surged in a wave against the advancing hours.

‘It’s very nice,’ Ray almost forgot that he feared his father who gave him an urgently warm smile and nodded.

‘It has so many doors leading out,’ Aru too had scrambled out of her despondency.

‘I am confused by so many doors,’ Yogesh slowed down the flux of emotion. He was yawning and Bonny got the hint.

‘Okay who is tired?’

And they proceeded to make their new unblemished beds.

‘Switch off the lights.’

In the darkness the trio, now together, took a last round of the unfamiliar rooms and stopped at the window of the drawing room. They stood there for long, arrested by the mystery of what lay outside.

‘What’s that?’ Aru pointed.

Across the undergrowth and hemmed in by the blackness, a yellow verandah now glowed dimly, the bulb suspended from an old fashioned conical shade.

‘It wasn’t there before.’ Ray commented with an unbroken sense of mystery.

The glowing navel of the dark square building was the still picture of certainty and not some vagueness of imagination.

‘There’s a spiral near it, look!’ Yogesh tagged from behind.

On the right side of the verandah a spiral staircase screwed up into seamless night. The sound of organic darkness reached their ears.

‘Can you hear it?’ Ray grossed a classic whisper.

 ‘The hum of Constantia!’ Bonny wedged his face between theirs. ‘Come away and sleep. It will be morning soon.’

They went to bed and slept the sleep of the tired and dreamt the dreams of the snatched. Snatched from their mother and plunged into Constantia’s world.