By Mydhili R Varma
Karthika shuddered awake from a dream about their life before it had begun, before The Withering had graduated from an unlikely urban legend to the stark dystopian reality, grabbed the headlines and got itself a Wikipedia page. A lot had changed since then. Cities and borders crumbled and what now remained of the old, inhabitable world was nothing more than a bunch of walled up, shrunken cities. Karthika used to live in the erstwhile city of Chennai, but the maps everywhere had undergone sweeping vicissitudes since The Withering. She now lived in the outskirts of Zone-147, and it looked like a ghost of the original city.
A disorienting stream of sounds invaded her ears. The vibrating thrum of the overworked power generators, that had long turned into white noise, threw her now. Karthika pressed her temples as the distant wail of an ambulance boomed and then faded away.
Realising she had inadvertently slept off, her hands went straight under the bundle of clothes that doubled up as her makeshift pillow, bringing out an array of kitchen tools – knives, spatulas, ladles, bent skewers and a rusty machete. She didn’t use the kitchen tools anymore; she had barely any money for trivialities like buying vegetables and cooking food, when all her money went into repairing the crumbling house and keeping it Otherer-free.
The people outside the wall called these dreadful creatures Irakkathavar – the undead – because most of them were once their family and friends who were turned into putrid, medically dead carcasses that crawled and mauled and hunted for an ancient sinister creature that lived in the tunnels underground. They called it Tiyagal, the word ending in an ominous consonant cluster sound that had its dubious origins in the very sound the creature supposedly made when it gobbled up people. Gal came to be pronounced as gl over time. Some dropped off the gl in plain fright of what it stood for in the collective consciousness of people. Gl, in people’s minds stood for gulped right down. Gl for gone forever. The name, in essence, roughly translated to ‘evil’ in native tongue. Local rumours spoke of a monster covered in scales, so big it could devour cities, nations.
People had conflicting theories about when or from where Tiyagal came, but they all agreed on one thing, and it was that there wasn’t a more terrible historical event or dreadful lore to match their current state of affairs. In the beginning, it was a terrible sight, watching your loved ones get snatched in the dead of the night by vile undead creatures, only for them to transform into the same creatures with rotting flesh peeling off their bare, white bones. Women, children, men, young, old – the Otherers never differentiated. As the blight spread and people got used to the monstrosity of it, as people mostly do, they could only feel thankful it was someone other than themselves who was taken this time around. The Withering spread everywhere and killed everything, not sparing even the soil. The farmers eventually starved and died. Most were taken and turned. One of her neighbours became so broke she had to stay alive by eating the compound wall around her house, and when she died, her teeth were as cracked and broken down as her compound wall. Another neighbor died while he was relieving himself, losing his balance and falling into the community shitting pit, a deep ditch with a pole across to squat on.
Those who could afford it moved into the safety of the walled part of the city with its perimeter guarded round the clock by guards. Outsiders were called Others, and the infected, undead Others came to be called Otherers. That’s how everyone too poor and powerless to buy their way into the fortified city limits came to be called the Others for easy distinction. The guards made sure the Others did not sneak in just as much as they kept out Tiyagal and his army of Otherers and the long-tongued creatures in his army. They fired the Ash of Ahm to keep these fiends away. Some thought if the Tiyagal was to consume the ash, it would explode into a million fragments and die. After much deliberation and failed coercion and bribery, people came to the conclusion that nobody in their right mind could be forced or paid off to undertake the arduous task off feeding the Ash of Ahm to Tiyagal and its army. Karthika knew if her missing drunkard husband was still around, he would’ve jumped at the opportunity. He was always heard complaining he never had enough money to drink himself silly when he was around.
That’s probably how he got taken – walking straight into the vicinity of prowling creatures, drunk as a skunk and stinking just as badly.
Under the flickering light, Karthika felt herself for new wounds. None. Aside from the one time she got a gash from sleeping without the lights on and getting attacked by an Otherer, she hadn’t received any more lacerations. The light was the only thing keeping the creatures away, which was why Karthika made it her nightly ritual to bow towards the bare bulb and utter a short prayer that the power wouldn’t go off in the middle of the night while she was asleep. Waking up in the morning and not finding yourself mauled and bleeding to death was considered a triumph these days.
Karthika was named after the star cluster called Pleiades. As if her lacklustre life wasn't irony enough, her transformation into a full-fledged Otherer was even making her light-averse.
So much for having a starry name.
Karthika scratched her wound and flicked the grey skin fragments that clung under her nails. She made quite a hobby of picking at the rotting wound when she was alone. Ignoring the itch, she closed up the wound with duct tape, bandaged it with a cloth and dabbed generous amount of talcum powder on it to mask the deathly odour coming out of it. If her employer inside the walled city knew she was infected, she would lose her job and get thrown into the abandoned well with no water that led straight into Otherer world. Karthika wasn’t afraid of Otherers anymore, but she had to stay undetected until her plan came to fruition. Those creatures were unpredictable. Nobody had concrete knowledge about where Tiyagal and its horde descended from, but everyone had their own theories. Karthika, in her own right, believed Tiyagal was born of all the swear words her drunk husband and his drinking buddies slung at their wives and children, words that bit, clawed and maimed. These words, she supposed, coalesced into a vile creature of malice and death, spines, fangs, claws and all.
She drank a glass of heavily chlorinated water from the tap and felt a sudden and urgent need to urinate. She didn’t have a toilet inside her house and had to go outside to relieve herself like most of the Others. One too many times, the night time relievers were snatched from their squatting positions and eaten alive by Otherers.
She opened the window a crack and saw prowling creatures tasting the air two houses down. They were blind, with tongues that rolled out of their mouths like carpets. They could be seen tasting the air for the living, ignoring the undead Otherers. Once they tasted the living in the air, they would follow the trail, tuck their tongue under the prey, reel them into the rolls of their tongue and take them to Tiyagal who made the first cut and squeezed the flesh into its mouth and left the rest for the Otherers. Not wanting to risk her life, she carefully shut the window.
Lying back down, she yawned loudly and something dislodged from her grinding tooth. It was a piece of oniony something she had had for lunch at the Iyer house where she worked as a housemaid. She ate her breakfast and lunch from there and saved up her meager salary for reinforcing security of her two-room house. She rolled the food remnant with her tongue and slowly chewed on it, savouring the taste. She half-swallowed it, brought it back up and then sucked on its savory content, and then swallowed it once more, calling it dinner in her head.
She thought of her son Kannan still stuck inside a bore well into which he had fallen two days back while playing in the dried up fields. It was an unused bore well nobody had thought of covering up. By the time Karthika found her son was missing, he had passed out and however hard they tried, nobody could pull him up with a rope. She couldn't even give him a proper funeral. Karthika had seen other children being brought out of bore wells, their hands loosened from their bodies like the useless rag doll in her husband’s trunk, and it devastated her to think of the state her son would be in at the moment.
My poor little Kannan… Would worms have gotten to him?
It didn’t matter if the worms got to him before her, because she wasn’t going to cremate his body. She wanted him back. Kani, the cook at the Iyer’s had told her all about the jeevi underground – the Tiyagal - with the maya and manthiram so strong it could grant you all your wishes. And Karthika knew what she was going to wish for. All she needed was a sacrifice, a token. With Kani gone tomorrow, it was going to be easy.
She tucked her hands between her legs and curled up in fetal position. But when the urge kept building up until it became unbearable, she gave in and urinated into a sooty kettle. Relieved, she fluffed up the cloth bundle pillow and closed her eyes in tranquil determination. She knew what she had to do, and even though it was the unthinkable, she was going to do it tomorrow.
***
Karthika shook the broken clock in frustration and threw it on the floor. Cursing herself for sleeping in, she rummaged through her husband’s rusty old trunk, looking for anything valuable enough to pass off as a bribe to the gatemen for letting her in after the entry hour. The thought of pleading with those ever-sneering scoundrels made her head pound.
The old trunk was bursting with knickknacks her husband had stolen from the houses he had worked for over the years. A pig-shaped pencil sharpener missing an eye and a skull cap with frayed edges fell from the top of the heap as she rummaged inside for something remotely useful. She examined a packet of sticky rubber covers that were too small to be used as gloves and too big as finger guards. She didn’t know what to do with these useless trinkets. Last time she had disposed of his junk thinking he had left them for good, he turned up a month later in the dead of the night, drunk, and started beating her with a roti rolling pin, demanding her to return his trunk of treasured junk.
He’s not coming back this time. I have a strong inkling he has become food to the Irakkathavar.
She put on the moth-eaten, hand-me-down sweater the Iyers had donated her, and pulled it as far down as it would go. She knew that if sunlight got in through her tattered clothes and reached the rotting wound on her navel, that would be the end of her. She would go up in flames like the Otherers stupid enough to come out of the caves and tunnels to hunt in broad daylight. She bolted the front door from outside and quickly slid her bony feet into the rubber slippers, nearly slipping from the soles smoothened and eaten away into gaping holes from overuse. The slipper had so many holes, it was one more short of completely disintegrating into pieces. She might as well have left the house open – she owned nothing worth stealing – but an open house might attract an Otherer on prowl. Although she knew she was turning into one of those hideous creatures bit by bit, she didn’t want to be in the house alone with one. Those creatures tended to be way too aggressive for her to handle.
***
‘Late again, uh?’ chided the pot-bellied guard at the wall, extending his hand, demanding bribe. ‘It better be worth my trouble.’
Karthika fished inside her cloth bag and brought out the only thing from her husband’s trunk that hadn’t seemed to her to be worn out– the packet of sticky rubber covers that were too small to be used as gloves and too big as finger guards.
When she gave it to the guard, he frowned at the packet, then looked at her and began howling in laughter. Karthika was shocked at his sudden reaction. She feared that the guard was going to deny her passage through the gate, ruining her well-laid plans. Surprisingly, the guard had found her offer so hilarious, he began calling the other guards and showing them the packet. She looked at them impassively, consciously stopping herself from rolling her eyes. When his laughter subsided, the guard pocketed her token, nodded and stuck his tongue out and rolled it in his mouth, leaning towards her. Karthika turned away to leave when the guard slapped her buttock hard. Shocked and insulted, she instinctively turned around and glared, to which he laughed along with the rest of the guards. She did her best not to swear at the uncouth men and marched on, grinding her teeth.
***
Karthika was so preoccupied at the Iyer’s, she managed to burn her hands twice from touching the turmeric powder lining the window sills to keep the Otherers out. Her navel itched and her bottom still stung from the guard’s slap.
‘Have some lunch, no?’ said Kani when she saw Karthika hadn’t touched her plate.
Karthika smiled and shook her head. She had no appetite for living-people-food anymore. Besides, the smell of turmeric was driving her mad.
Kani mixed a spoonful of what looked like milk powder into the baby’s milk bottle and stirred it with the other end of a spoon. ‘You haven’t been eating properly lately. Are you alright?’
Karthika nodded.
‘I feel your pain, Karthika,’ said Kani, stirring the milk. ‘I have lost my family to these monsters too. You know, the Ash of Ahm can turn Tiyagal into ash. Killing it will turn its horrid creature army into ash too. Imagine them crumbling into dust. It's a sight I want to see with my own eyes someday...'
‘You said it can grant wishes?’ asked Karthika.
Kani stopped stirring and shushed her. Then she came closer and whispered, ‘Don’t you go around talking about these vishus-dishus theories, got it? If a guard so much as hears about it, you’ll find yourself behind bars for treason. Or worse, thrown into that wretched well as food for the Irakkathavar.’
‘But it’s true?’ asked Karthika.
‘People believe it’s true,’ whispered Kani. ‘There are stories of wishes granted and miracles happening. Everything hinges upon the sacrifice you’re ready to make.’ She gave Karthika the milk bottle. ‘Now you stop tying yourself up in a knot over this, silly. Go feed the baby and fold these clothes, okay? I’m leaving early today. I told you yesterday, no?’ Karthika nodded, barely containing her excitement at the opportunity that was presented to her on a platter. ‘My paati has fallen sick and won’t eat a morsel without me by her side. God save that stubborn, old woman. What are you smiling at me for? Go check on the baby.’
***
The navy blue velvet sky was Karthika’s cue to begin her perilous mission.
When she left by the backdoor, Karthika had a picnic basket tightly held in one hand. Inside it was the Iyer baby, properly fed and sound asleep, snug as a bug in a towel wrapped around him. Next to the baby was his milk bottle and pacifier.
On her way, Karthika grabbed a tiny white kitten from the roadside and stuffed it inside her blouse. Something to distract the creatures.
Everything had gone according to her plan, but that didn’t mean Karthika was entirely happy. Guilt lay heavily on her. Although she couldn’t justify her actions, she knew she had no other way to get back her son.
She had done everything to remain in the good books of her employers, hoping to get her son an entry into their walled world of privilege and protection. She had even gulped down her self-respect and smiled stupidly at their jokes about her kind. The disposables – almost-people living alongside the Otherers.
A life for a life.
A life for a life.
A life for a life…
She uttered the words in her mind until she convinced herself it was the right thing under the circumstances.
The cacophony of honking, sirens, and rumble of traffic slowly faded into a low undercurrent as Karthika reached the outskirts of the city that had taken off its glasses and second-hand work suit, and was ready to slump into restless sleep.
With the kitten peeping out of her blouse, carrying the picnic basket with the Iyer baby in one hand, and wiping her face with the end of her saree with her other hand, she quietly made her way to the old, unused well. The pottakinar. The gaping hole where things went to die. She climbed down the spiral steps into the putrid-smelling well. The dizzying labyrinth of steps took her round and round along the side of the well until she lost track of time and the sensation in her feet. By the time she reached underground she was shaking all over from exertion.
The moment she set foot in the underground lair, Karthika felt a tingling cold from the ground through the holes in her slippers. The lair reeked of malice and suffering so ancient it taunted her in an unknown tongue she could grasp without even knowing how. Every breath of the putrid air suffocated her, and her nose and throat itched from its potency. The baby started gurgling and grunting, as it squirmed inside the picnic basket. Hungry growls, hissing, sounds of shuffling feet and grunting emanated from the shadows on her sides and she realised she was walking among a swarm of Otherers and Tiyagal’s long-tongued creatures ready to strike. The only thing stopping them was probably her scent that now faintly matched the undead. Nevertheless, she didn’t want to be shredded into pieces before she did what she came all the way for, and she pulled out the kitten from inside her blouse and threw it in the direction where the growls were the loudest. Blood-curdling cries and scampering and scrambling followed as creatures emerged from the shadows in a mad rush to get their treat. Amidst the pandemonium, one of them got hold of the kitten, and holding the mewling animal in its eye level, dug its claw into it in a straight slit and devoured the kitten like squeezing cream out of a piping bag. Karthika’s stomach lurched at the sight.
A shove from behind sent her stumbling deeper into the lair. The baby squirmed in the basket and coughed. As she inched closer to the dark interior, she noticed that the ground was covered in slimy, scaly black wriggling tentacles that upon touching the soles of her feet, clung to her skin and crawled around to find a lesion, a gash or a broken blister to sink its spiny appendages into. The tentacles slowly merged into a thick throbbing black mass that steeped all the way to the ceiling of the tunnel.
Karthika waited tentatively for a cue but nothing came. The baby started crying and she opened the basket and fed him milk from the bottle.
The glistening, scaly black mass before her swirled into a human form that sat down on a pedestal of the same black mass like an eerie man made of black, scaly tentacles sculpted from and still attached to the same material the whole tunnel was covered in. It looked like someone had carved a figure and forgotten to detach it from the rest of the material. Seeing Tiyagal in the flesh was mesmerising and not the least bit frightening as encountering one of its creatures. To her, it looked like a God people had long forgotten to worship, a power so ancient you could feel its might in your bones. Karthika was stumped in its presence and couldn’t find her voice to utter her request.
Tiyagal gestured to her to come closer. And then, in a voice antediluvian and unlike any language she had heard, it spoke inside her mind, instructing her to place the basket on the ground and approach it.
She did as she was instructed. Tentacles from Tiyagal’s feet crept up the basket and slid into it, hissing. Tiyagal beckoned her towards it. When she thought she had gone too close, she moved sideways but it sat her on its lap and ran its rough tongue up the side of her face, salivating. Its clawed hand removed her saree, took her breast in its hand and wiggled it, as if in assessment. Satisfied, it asked her to make her wish. She wasn’t sure, but she tried to reply in her mind, through her thoughts.
I want my son back. I want him back from the dead…
As she made her wish to Tiyagal, its head swayed as if to some inaudible music and its hand roamed all over her sagging breast. Its fingertips clamped on the skin tag on her chest and pulled at it. Then it demanded her to leave the baby there and go to the mouth of bore well to find her son. It sent her off with an invitation to come and live underground in the undead colony under its protection.
Karthika hitched up her saree and fled past the growling creatures and up the spiral stairs.
I’m so close…
So close…
He’d be ecstatic to see me!
She ran so fast her slippers flew off her feet and dust blew up from under her feet. Even as she neared the wretched bore well that had swallowed her Kannan, she could see a tiny form crawl out of the hole and look around. Choking with love, all Karthika wanted to say was lost in a loud cry.
Kannan, caked in dust and dirt, turned towards her as she fell on her knees and hugged him and sobbed violently. She took his face in her hands - his perfect face – and wiped the dust off his skin, crying and laughing alternatively.
They walked home, hand in hand, Kannan repeating the tune Karthika was humming.
Suddenly, he stopped and clutched his neck as if he was choking. Before Karthika had an inkling what was going on, her undead son turned into ash and flew up with the wind. Screaming an ear-splitting cry, Karthika ran madly after the flying ash that was her son, making a grab for the flakes.
When she opened her palm, the flakes had crumbled into ash. That was when she stopped and looked closely at her outstretched hand. She noticed the spreading grey on her skin, and before she could bring herself to resist the transformation, a ravenous urge surged through her body, lighting a fire inside her. Her insides twisted and turned like a snake and her skin broke into a million scales. She blinked and saw her grey, scaly hand and the rest of her crack into bits that crumbled and was gone with the wind in a blink.
Her last thought was her memory of Kani mixing something in the baby's milk bottle.
Ash of Ahm!
Karthika imagined Tiyagal devouring the poisoned baby like squeezing cream out of a piping bag. She wanted to curse Kani all the way to hell, but by then she had followed the wind in a plume of flakes.
By Mydhili R Varma