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Story: Nabarun Moitra

A Day to Celebrate
It was ten in the morning and an air of inevitability had settled on the school-grounds.

Jadu and Madhu Basfore, the twin sweepers of the Dunghill Municipality, were muttering
under their breath as they wiped sweat from grimy foreheads with crooked forefingers. It
was thirsty work, this wielding of shovels and spades under the hot sun, cleansing the field
of the last traces of the decimated children. The blood had soaked deep into the parched
ground and every time they thought they are through, a tiny finger or the remnant of a foot
would be waiting behind a clump of grass or under a discarded paper plate. For the last
hour and a half they had followed instructions to the letter – head and torsos in one sack,
limbs in another, unidentifiable scraps in either – and now they ached for the drink Jadu’s
wife had brewed the previous night.

Later (much later) a hapless Government Doctor would be given the job of stitching the
parts together. He would work through half the night and yet produce very indifferent
results: a thirteen year old girl’s head would have a five year old boy’s torso, for example,
and the bodies would fall far short of the requisite number of four limbs apiece. This so-
called ‘limb-scam’ would have a disastrous effect on the electoral prospects of the present
dispensation two years later.

All Rules, Codes, Statutes and Constitutions are unanimous on one point: blood-soaked
grounds and sundry scattered limbs must have a Flag to lend them credibility. It hung like a
broad-striped rag overhead, an irresolute mascot of liberty, unsure of whether to flutter a
little in the occasional zephyr or to wait for the next strident song from untrained throats.
The hands that had unfurled it a few hours back, saluted it and then left it to its own devices
were nowhere to be seen. All around it the air curdled with the moisture of a Dunghill
August churning in the morning sun. The heat of the explosion had temporarily soaked up
the sultriness but now it was back with a vengeance.

Men, women, children lounged silently at the periphery of the field in the leech infested
undergrowth, oblivious to the moisture on their faces – sweat, tears, the colorless blood of
the citizenry. They were waiting for something to happen. Even after sixty years of
relentless education that had robbed the very redness off their blood, they were confident
that today, of all the days, something would happen.

In the school office two persons sat facing each other glumly across a cluttered desk. They,
too, are waiting. They had their sixth cups of tea cooling in front of them as they nibbled on
stale, souring samosas. Baidya, the Headmaster and Khakmari, the Officer in Charge of the
local police station.

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Behind them, on the crumbling wall, hung a likeness of the Birthday Boy. Or, rather,
Birthday Girl-Woman-Mother-Goddess, actually. A huge, multicolored, spread-eagled bat
of a Girl-Mother-Woman-Goddess with her head turned despondently to the west and her
tail dipping into the dirty blue of a vast ocean where she seemed to have laid a tear-shaped
emerald green egg. Her right wing had been chopped off and the left mutilated into a
hideous stump. Her left wing was where no wing had any right to be; it had been carved out
of her torso on the day of her birth to give some symmetry to her form. Her ears had been
nibbled away by greedy interlopers long ago, but no one had apparently informed the
portrait-painter about that episode. Or, then again, he may have been under strict orders
not to mutilate the portrait any further.

On the opposite wall, in a frame of polished wood and bedecked with a garland of fresh
marigold, hung the stern visage of The Lady of The Catacombs.

Through the centuries that Sanctified Land that extended its munificent, spaghetti-like toe
from the Continent of Enlightenment to the Continent of Darkness gave of itself to the
nations of the earth. Organized Religion at first, so that the heathens of the twin
hemispheres could slake their thirst for salvation. Organized Crime next for the children
of the True Light, so that their stay in this penurious world remained free of unwarranted
heartache. The Country Like a Mutant Bat had accepted the largesse rather tardily, had
been less than effusive in its show of gratitude, and therefore, just so that there may be no
hard feelings, the Spaghetti Matriarch delved deep into the bowels of its oldest habitation,
its Eternal City of the Saints, and came up with the Lady of The Catacombs and united her
with the recalcitrant Land of Heathens in Holy Matrimony.

That was how it stood this sweltering mid-August morning, with the offspring of the distant
vault facing her mutant paramour across a room full of portentous echoes and the children
of this unnatural union brooding across curdled cups of tea and half-eaten tidbits. Outside,
a light breeze sprang up and carried the smells of cordite and adolescent blood-flesh to
other youthful lands.

A commotion at the gate. A hustle and bustle, a swirl of starched designer khadi, a whiff of
imported deodorant and Sir was standing at the door of the school office. Looking
belligerent, in-command and benign in turn as he turned successively towards the
occupants of the room, his minions and his electors who had crowded behind him.
“How did this happen, you son of a bitch?” he hissed at Khaklari who wilted obligingly.
Then turning to the masses with his most penitent expression, “A dastardly act… The
perpetrators will be caught and dealt with severely! I am sorry to be so late, dear brothers
and sisters, but the… er… fruit distribution ceremony at the hospital you know.... Subodh!
(his secretary jumped, “Yes Saar!”) make a list of the dead and the injured. I will personally
ask the C.M. to issue adequate compensations to the families. At least one lakh rupees
each.” He beamed at his electors. They tried to smile back, after all a Legislator is a
Legislator, but the flood of colorless fluids on their faces seemed to have glued their
expressions into masks furrowed apathy.

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Sir removed his boat-shaped cap for a moment, scratched his pink scalp, put the cap back
on and made a slight signal to his minions. They trooped out of the school building.

The slight breeze outside was freshening, moisture laden, promising rain later in the
afternoon. This was the season of alternating rains and sunshine in Dunghill. After all, the
fickle month of Bhadra was just a few days away and the pie-dogs were already keeping the
Dunghillians awake at nights with their joyful, expectant howls.

A few weeks and the streets of Dunghill will be alive with frolicsome, newborn puppies.

Author’s Disclaimer: All incidents and individuals described here are the products of my own crude imagination. If
any reader reads more into this piece than is intended, his brain needs immediate cooling. May I suggest a Coke or
a Pepsi; they are doing an admirable job of utilizing our groundwater as it was meant to be utilized.

A resident of Lumding in the Nagaon District of Assam, Dr. Nabarun

Moitra is a medical practitioner, engaged in private practice in the
semi-urban, railway township of Lumding. He likes to write in his
spare time, and his musings are often reflective of the fact that
Lumding has its fair share of idiocies and idiosyncrasies, much like
every other secluded pocket of people engaged in more or less
similar professions. Dr. Moitra’s writings focus on those traits
which make living in Lumding a unique experience.

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