The Ill-Fated Adonis

By Rishan Roy

I feel like I am drowning. I can make out the summer sky through the murky blues of water. I struggle to stay afloat, my hands desperate to hold on to something. The water reeks of seaweeds, the scent of prey waiting for salvation, fish oils and desperate thirst.

My auburn curls fall over my forehead obscuring my limited sight, and then rise up in the water again, flowing like tendrils. I could feel the burning pain in my leg, and I feel a strange desire to let go. 

A noose tightens its vice-like grip around my neck, unfolding in visceral circles, firmly gripping my shoulderblades, like fingers lulling me to the deep. Whispering in nudges to let go. 

I think I am naked, and my clothes swirl all around me like in a sea-storm. 

The cotton clouds drift in solace, their surface reflecting the shimmering rays of the rising sun. The sky has waves of colours splashed haphazardly, still in an unbreakable order. It seems strangely peaceful outside, yet the turbulence continues within the olive-tinted waters. 

I feel the noose around my neck tighten. I cannot breathe. Dark blotches appear out of nowhere, and my chest feels heavy. The weight of a thousand rocks. The saline water drains my nostrils, perforating the entirety of my being. Like strings of an instrument left to rot, the force of the sea engulfs my dreams. 

Another tentacle reaches my leg, surrounding it and plunging me into the abyss. 

It claws over my body. 

All of it. 

Devouring.

And I let go. I let go, and all I see is the warm yellow of the sunlight caught in the ripples of the chaotic water. 

----

2. 

Dreams. 

These are what I wake up to every day. 

Nightmares

A nightmare that doesn't stop even when you open your eyes. 

----

3.

It all started when I completed my fourteenth year. My voice deepened, and I grew by the length of a bamboo tree. Within days, I towered over almost every other boy in the village. Before I could adjust to looking down, I was looked at. Suddenly all I saw were yellow eyeballs, drifting and piercing, all around me. The eyeballs assumed life of its own, unbound by social inhibitions, marked by primal hunger.

At first, I dismissed them. But wherever I went, echoes and whispers followed in close range. The streets I walked, left behind many spectators.

"brown eyes, curly hair, full red lips. chiselled jaw and broad shoulders on a poor peasant, subsisting on mere rice and salt. an appearance only attained by witchcraft." they said. Speculations of the occult loomed over the street to my hut. The air, thick with hostility, felt like mountains of guilt perched on my back.

Sitting by the pond, I scrubbed myself with my eyes closed, refusing to even face my shadow. 

After a while, I stopped taking off shirts, while working on the farm. Even under the scorching sun smothered by the acrid sweat, I refused to shred my clothes. Shred the remaining part of my dignity. lest they devour me with those tainted stares.

At nights, when the cicadas hummed and all light turned mellow, the silhouette of the smirks chased me in my sleep. 

The faces, inching closer, the moment my eyes felt heavy– 

coming for me, reaching towards.

Sleep eluded me. 

I wondered why they only looked at me. But deep down, I knew the answer. Once, I caught a glimpse in the water I drank. I felt separate from the entity staring back in wide-eyed awe. It is not me, it is only lunacy to think so.

It hypnotised even me.

I stared and stared some more. The sudden thud of the claypot on the floor jerked me back to reality.

And I could again hear the insects, and see the sun overhead. I promised to never look at myself again.

But these were all speculations.

The real thing started only then.

----

4.

Once, I woke up with a burning fever. My mouth felt dry. The wooden cottage swam in and out of my vision. The world seemed to be swirling, like the deep waters I dream of. 

However, as the red scars deepened in my back, whips stretched taut, I forced myself to go to the farm. 

It was not until my legs gave away, and I fell, my body thumping against the earth, twisted in all the wrong joints, that I was rushed to the healer.

Villagers often whispered he had the healing abilities of Asclepius himself, and a curse so fierce, when befell upon the ill-fated, dragged him down to the throes of hell.

As I entered, his intent eyes watched me. Grey. Like a storm raging. 

His stare wavered all over my body. Like a hawk. He motioned for everyone else to leave, and moved closer to me. 

He looked young, but his face seemed ancient. With deep creases lining the forehead, and wrinkles accentuating his dark tone. 

The saggy skin of his finger touched my right jaw, and I flinched, yet, it travelled down to the clavicle. It stayed there, and very cautiously, retreated. 

He seemed to think. A diabolic satisfaction lit up his face. 

He, then, removed my clothes, his touch lingering wherever he met my skin. 

Soft as a feather.

I hated him. 

I kept quiet.

What if he dooms me with his infamous curse? Although, who was to say I wasn't cursed already. 

All that was underneath, was a piece of garment, where his gaze wavered longer than what was appropriate. 

He massaged hot oils on my muscles. Gave me a healing drink, and went over to close the blinds. 

--

5. 

After that encounter, he claimed to have witnessed the aura of "Adonis" inside me, the Greek God of youth and beauty. 

But all I did was lie in a corner of the darkness, between the pile of dust. And sobbed. Because that's where I belonged.

I wasn't the same. I knew it. 

I would never be.

---

6. 

Word about me spread everywhere. Around villages, acres of lands, and even towards small towns. People from foreign lands started visiting our village in search of eternal youth and to fulfil their lust.

Many that came claimed even the richest kingdoms couldn't produce heirs quite like me.

They bound me to chains. 

Kept a guard to watch over me.

The gold coins that filled their coffers pawned me to the wolves. 

They fed me expensive meat, and bathed me in saffron milk, like kings, if kings were to be gambled away.

But it wasn't always like this.

It started with that man.

That man who claimed to be a prince, though no one knows really. The man with the mad look, dishevelled dark hair and a scar from the right jaw to his nose. An old scar, in some war, by the looks of it.

--

7.

I had wept and wept for days. All I dreamt of was the fingers across my skin. Those rich cold fingers, freezing my blood. All over and over and over and over my body. 

I would wake up screaming.

Then, I'd forget when I was actually sleeping, and when I wasn't. 

Everyone knew what happened. But they were all a bunch of cowards, and they feared the curse of the healer.

Then he came along. Although my nightmares had warned me of him. He crossed deserts, and miles of barren land, for the secret of youth. 

Looking into his eyes was like getting lost in a dark labyrinth.

He looked at me the way everyone does, but there was something different about him.

He claimed that he'd spread more word, send more people to this village, and the wealth would never dwindle, and the guards let him in my room without a word.

He carried a burning candle in his hand. The hot wax melted and slithered down, and landed on his hand. He didn't flinch. 

He stepped towards me. 

And then he was over me. With all the might of a warrior. 

And when I understood what he wanted to do with the molten wax, I screamed. That was the first of many nights I screamed.

---

8. 

"Salazar, wake up!" 

My eyes open. I could make out hazy details, as if I were looking through blotched plastic.

"Just let me sleep please." 

He kicks my leg. I hug myself, bringing my arms and knees closer to my body.

"SLEEP WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, SALAZAR. For now, you answer to me, you filthy handsome swine" 

"You- ", my voice comes out muffled in the middle of a huge yawn. My legs are asleep. As if I was only a floating mass of upper body. The lower half feels numb.

He kicks me hard again. 

“I don't think you want me to repeat myself bastard”

He tries to pull me up. I resist. Reality shifts out of focus. My punches are weak, which only amuses him further. I draw blood from my scratches, but I have no power. I know I have lost even before I had begun the fight.

Finally I give in.

I'm taken to another room. That room in which I spent the last fifty nights. 

A woman clad in black emerges from behind the curtain. Her dupatta filters in the moonlight. Her hair, jasmine scented, cascades down her back, lying just atop her curvaceous hips. Her kohl-tinted eyes look right at me. And for the first time, in fifty nights, someone smiles at me. 

--

9. 

In those nights, the village had gone through major changes. Dirt roads turned into cemented ones, the temporary huts manoeuvred in permanent houses. But not for everyone. Herds of cattle increased in number, and so did the coins. Those who protested this torture, were either thrown away or beheaded. 

The village was on the verge of becoming a kingdom of its own.  

Here I laid. I wasn't allowed to go out. But sometimes when the heavy winds rustled the large curtains, I would peek outside, trying to trace the routes leading away from this pit, this bottomless pit guarded by the best watchdogs of the king. The kings of bootlickers. The kings who sat on my wealth.

--

10. 

The woman sat beside me. Her mouth reeked of paan. I knew what was to come.

I closed my eyes, and started to pull down the robe, when her hand gently stopped me.

At first, I was shocked. I looked at her with wide eyes.

She had a sad smile, I noticed.

She gently mouthed "don't do it."

She held me in her arms. And tears started pouring out gently. And within seconds, I was shaking violently, sobbing hard into her choli. I sobbed for what felt like days, and months and years, and I felt free of all those miseries living inside of me.

She just sang a lullaby. It was from the far east. It was a song dedicated to a bird consoling it that though its wings had broken, it would soon fly, and roam the world, beaneath the clouds. 

It was the same lullaby my mother used to sing to me when I was younger. I wondered whether this woman knew my mother.

In a world of miseries, the miracles never cease. 

However, in the comfort of her bosom, she was more than a mother to me. She was a life-giver. The dawn that approached after dark. 

I fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of flying birds. 

----

11. 

She was here to free me. 

Usually when foreign people came for my body, the guards give privacy to us, and rested in a tent near ours.

She just wiped my tears on waking up.

And looking at her face was like looking at the full moon.

I wrapped a shawl over my head and sneaked off as soon as the darkness wore off a little, but enough to envelope me.

I waved her a last goodbye. 

She waved back. 

I didn't turn.

My feet bled, the gravely road as sharp as glass against my feet. I took small steps, tiptoeing around the pain.

When I was out of the village, I started running. I tore off all my clothes. Hysterically. I ran and ran and ran.

Until the lake came into view. I would escape, but a strange curiosity gripped me. Everything inside me plead me to once look at my face. 

I approached the waters carefully, afraid with each step, I would slip. Then I bent down. And what stared back at me scared me.

I was no longer the young boy, who was too beautiful. My face hard, the beauty hid under black clouds, cuts zigzagging across my face. 

My chest, littered with red, dried blood. My leg, and my entire body. 

Who have I become? 

I felt something break inside me. The fiddle of hope I was saving each day suddenly mellowed out, vanishing into thin air. And I felt so sad. I did not know if it was possible to feel more sadness than what had already touched me.

"Why mother? Why? Take me with you." I screamed at the sky, where dawn had just started peaking behind a few clouds, the vermillion hue spread across the horizon like on a newly-wed bride's forehead. 

In finding beauty, they sucked it out of me. Right out of me. O, heavens!

All wishes and hopes stumbled down the muddy waters, sucked into a whirlwind. 

I sobbed until I ran out of tears. Until I was extinguished. And I didn't want to run away. 

I only had this diary. My mother's diary. My only possession I've kept with myself throughout nights, where the last entry would sound something like this -

“I will bury my pages, where either the winds would tear them apart, or the currents would drown them. But as long as they are there, I won't cease to be, for my story will continue, even if in the midst of rotting carcasses. And I know what I'll do.

What I'll have to do. 

It is freezing when I touch the water, but I don't care.

I just hope, for the last time when I see, I only see the warm yellow sunlight caught in the ripples of the chaotic waters.”

--- 

By Rishan Roy