The Prodigal Son

Image by BSD on Unsplash

Dhananjay’s patchwork of random thoughts gently burst, as a plump finger poked him in his midriff, the unexplored fragments of his mind fluttering away into unlit corners of his consciousness. He turned to find Paresh’s round face, shiny with perspiration, smiling back at him.

“Where have you been, you old rascal? I haven’t seen you since the day you made me come to your office early to pick up that parcel…”

A younger version of Paresh’s face hovered above his shoulder, attached to a taller, leaner frame.

Dhananjay’s smile reflected his old friend’s. “Family outing, eh?” he asked, patting the younger face affectionately.

Paresh beamed. “I got him a trainee officer role in the company!”

“That is great news, good for you!” Dhananjay congratulated the young man, who looked as if he had things to say about being a trainee officer in a soulless insurance company that had enslaved his father for a lifetime, but did not know how to say them without hurting the man who had sired him.

Paresh glowed a moment in the spotlight before turning his head to ask, “Your boy has also been back for a few weeks, how has he settled back in? We are all so proud that he was the first one in any of our families to study abroad.”

Dhananjay’s shrug was lost on his companions as they battled through the jungle of arms and elbows which became denser as their train pulled into the platform. “There was a difficult situation when he came back, but it improved. And then the police over the past week suddenly made it worse…”

Paresh and his son both turned sharply at the mention of police, but a swirling tide of people separated them from Dhananjay as it eddied and flowed into their carriage, filling every corner until the passengers at the entrance could not be pushed in any further by those outside.

As Dhananjay’s wiry frame struggled out of the crush in front of them, nods and grunts of recognition exchanged with fellow daily passengers miraculously created an additional space into which Dhananjay collapsed gratefully.

“It’s a long story” sighed Dhananjay in answer to the unspoken question in Paresh’s discreetly raised eyebrows, as the train set off with a jolt.

“He came back from Canada with new ideas that we had to get used to – his traditional name Mrityunjay became Mitch for his office, he startled our servants by thanking them for every act, he pushed his mother to restart her career, he taught shopkeepers to use payment apps…”

Dhananjay smiled, not without pride. “I guess we learned to look at life anew from him…He also wanted us to eat together every night in the kitchen. He wanted all of us to converse over dinner — his younger siblings and his mother and me — rather than eat at separate times or in front of the TV. This was something our parents used to do, but we had somehow lost the habit. We genuinely enjoyed the warmth of our togetherness the first couple of nights.”

Dhananjay’s voice took on an opaque note. “The third night was… different.”

“We were halfway through dinner when we heard raised voices overhead, the high vents in our old kitchen walls allowed the sound from the floor above to be heard clearly by us. The male voice was slurred but malevolent, confrontational…with a few defensive sounds in a woman’s voice in between…”

“The rest of us looked up at each other in surprise. Only my wife averted her eyes in studied ignorance, her back rigid, as if it was not an unknown sound.”

“Then came another sound which darkened the room and set our maid off muttering prayers in the corner, a sound which we hear in playgrounds as we grow up but which we hope never to confront as adults – the flat, meaty sound of hands hitting skin. Hard. And repeatedly…”

The trickle of Dhananjay’s voice petered out into the dry sands of his troubled memories. There was a collective uncomfortable shifting of positions around them. Many of the men looked disapproving, but a few looked away – almost furtively – as if a guilty remembrance behind their eyes might betray them.

“We were just, you know, frozen in our place…” Dhananjay continued, his eyes looking out of the carriage window into his kitchen. “But my son, he pushed his chair back, leaped up, and rushed from the room. His mother shouted out his name, we heard the front door burst open, and then his sisters were crying out to me to bring him back, shaking my arm to stop him before he did something rash.

“I ran out of the room and up the stairs as Mrityunjay pounded angrily on their front door. I reached the landing just as our neighbour Shyam emerged in his ganji, a hulking, unshaven bear of a man with paan-stained teeth, silhouetted starkly against the unlit interior of the house.

“ 'What do you think you are you doing?’ I heard Mrityunjay spit out angrily. Shyam’s expression became more ominous as he took a step forward, but I managed to dart in quickly between them, ‘Shyam ji, we heard a noise, can we help you with anything?’ I panted out.”

A ripple of silence had spread outward from them in the compartment, punctuated only by the rhythmic thrumming of the wheels of the train, as the creeping tendrils of tension in the story touched the other passengers.

“Shyam was growling out a response when the darkness behind him shifted and took on a dim shape. His wife’s voice answered us calmly enough, maybe it was only my imagination that there was the hint of a sob buried in her throat. ‘It is fine, Dhananjay ji, we were shifting some furniture and it fell, that’s all. No cause for concern.’ She reassured us with her face half turned away.”

“Mrityunjay cried out to her, but having said her piece she had already turned back into the shadows. We could feel Shyam’s angry, red-rimmed eyes following us as I half pulled, half pushed Mrityunjay back down the stairs.”

The carriage shuddered and clanked as the train pulled up with a furious hissing for the next station. Almost before it could ground to a halt, the crowd in the carriage stirred and weaved in the intricate patterns of a practiced dance and then settled back again, a handful of new faces replacing the old.

Paresh leaned closer. “This is the same neighbour who helped you raise the kids when you were both working? The one whose parents own the house and rented the ground floor to you when you were struggling?”

Dhananjay nodded. “Divya got married a few years ago. Then her father passed away, may Ganpati Bappa rest his soul, and immediately Shyam and she moved in with her mother.”

He continued sombrely. “And within a few sad months, Divya’s mother had withered away from a broken heart too.”

As the train pulled away from the station and gathered speed, the lazy sea breeze delicately cooling the travellers seemed to flutter also through Dhananjay’s mind, wafting the conversation gently out of it, leaving a blankness behind his eyes.

“What did you mean about the police?” Paresh probed quietly, after a few minutes.

“Ah, the police…” Dhananjay returned to the expectant faces surrounding him. “Mrityunjay went to the police that night, before we could dissuade him. I was away the next morning when an inspector visited, along with a constable, but my wife told me how they went up the stairs grimly by themselves and came down laughing and joking with Shyam. And how Shyam saw them off and deliberately walked back to our door and spat on it, in full view of all the neighbours who had gathered.

“None of us wanted to sit in the kitchen that day, even the maid.” Dhananjay leaned back tiredly, “But we kept Mrityunjay company with sporadic listless conversation, wrapped in dread. We heard the punishment Shyam meted out that evening, as if he knew we were all listening.

“The growling rage, the sound of a back smacking against the wall, the fleshy slaps, the mewling cries which were choked… my son flinched at every blow, his eyes slowly drowning, looking again like the child he had been not so long ago.”

Dhananjay paused. “How had we not heard this before? Are we defined as much by what we knowingly bury deep in our minds, as by what we do?”

The misgivings in his expression seemed to echo Dhananjay’s traitorous thoughts. Another uncomfortable silence spread, as the train hurried on toward the darkening horizon.

Paresh squeezed his friend’s shoulder.

Dhananjay continued “Mrityunjay started working from home, even though we knew he loved the office. My cheerful, noisy family subsided into hurt silence over the next few days, enveloped in a blanket of his dull despair.”

Dhananjay lifted his head and looked around.

“And then, a week later, we heard that Shyam was dead.”

Scattered grunts of surprise and questions greeted this twist. Co-passengers craned their necks to get a better look at Dhananjay.

“Well, first the police said he died in a motorcycle accident in a remote village on the outskirts of town. But apparently they found sedatives in his blood in the autopsy later and the forensic experts concluded that the fire had been deliberately lit when he was unconscious – to make it look like an accident.”

“The investigators believed he had been lured to that remote spot, given a spiked drink and then killed.”

The train commenced all the noisy melodrama of slowing down for another station. Amongst those who rose to disembark were Paresh and Dhananjay, but a chorus of voices demanded an end to the tale.

“Well of course, a man like that – he had many enemies. Amongst them, the police also interrogated my boy. But you see, the emotional, unhappy young boy had refused to step out of the house after the incident. We — his family, the servants, the neighbours and even his office computers — all confirmed that fact, and the police moved on quickly.” Dhananjay completed the tale before threading his way to the throng at the door. He raised his arm in a farewell salute to the questions and shouts of encouragement following him as the train halted and a homebound wave bore him out on to the station.

Paresh’s son had already advanced in the queue for auto rickshaws by the time his older companions joined him. In the cramped rear seat of the rickshaw, they talked of familiar things on their shared ride home – of cricket, of films and the price of petrol – as they had done for two decades along the same route. It was only as they drew up near Dhananjay’s home that Paresh asked, “so the police have no clue about Shyam’s killer?”

Dhananjay stepped out and turned. “They believe the encrypted WhatsApp messages in his mobile phone will point to the killer. But they cannot find it. They checked our phones of course, but obviously there was nothing there.”

He stepped back and waved as the auto rickshaw set off again.

Paresh’s son looked at him, wanting to ask about the newspaper wrapped, phone- shaped parcel his father had picked up from his old friend a fortnight ago. But as their eyes met, father and son silently reached an agreement to never speak of it to anyone, ever.

The auto rickshaw rattled on, passing a wedding band in full finery, belting out popular tunes at the head of a dancing marriage procession.