The Gingerbread Boy

I'm going to tell you a story, now. It's a nice story, filled with juicy twists and even one or two lines that you can play back in your head later and chuckle. It's a bildungsroman, I suppose. Or - if big words aren't your thing - an adventure. What this story really is is a tale with a moral. And if you sit tight and listen well we might even get to it, in the end.

Are you listening? Good.

It begins like this:


There was once a gingerbread boy. He was a normal child, very much like you or me, made of the same rosy skin and jet-black hair and razor blue eyes. The same slightly-pudgy arms and legs and the same sparkling teeth, the same self-conscious expression. A flesh and blood boy.

A normal child. Except deep at his heart - in some lonesome dank corner that lay at the end of too curved a path for even him to see - he was also a gingerbread boy.

Now the boy lived and worked and grew like normal children do. He went to classes, tried his hands at debating, worked like a heathen charm upon the ladies (for he excelled at athletics and had the broad shoulders to answer for it). He was respected by all, feared by none, admired by quite-a-few. People nudged each other to watch him pass in the corridors.

And then one day the dank thing lying at the end of the curve reared its head - and it was a head made of molasses and cinnamon and ginger and flour.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It must be the diluter, thought the gingerbread boy. All those fumes.
He was standing in class, trying to make sense out of the words in a file. The file was lying on the desk in front of him. It was filled with a brief assortment of rumpled papers. The words were on the papers.
They were in his own handwriting.

Not the diluter. It is the walls, thought the gingerbread boy. The walls are sneaking about when my back is turned.
He whipped his neck so fast there was a dry crack. The kid dozing behind him started.

"Are you ok?" the teacher's glasses had slipped a quarter inch. The fan periodically made a sound like somebody's face being slapped against sand.
Someone in the back sniggered.
They're in on it, thought the gingerbread boy. They're all in on it.

There was a dull clicking from the front of the class. People were beginning to turn away from the whiteboard, where a projector was shining the closing slides of a presentation on the mitotic cell division observed in carbide batteries. The kid conducting the slides (and now the verbal cues as well) was tapping  the screen with a Westwood School Wooden Chalkboard Pointer with Plastic Tip (36") in his desperate bid to regain the attention of the class (which was focused on his teammate) and the attention of his teammate (which had long since wandered away).

His teammate was the gingerbread boy.

"In conclusion, when a pseudonymous receptor and a shot of pure energy in the jugular love each other and wish to procreate-"
"They give birth to a gingerbread boy," said the gingerbread boy. Every eye in the room turned back to grab at his face. "I'm a gingerbread boy."

"This is highly irregular," said the teacher. "I demand an explanation, Mr-"
The walls are closing in, thought the gingerbread boy.

I better get out of here.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

And so the gingerbread boy ran. He ran to the window, first, out through the glass like it was a brittle sheet of water, and then he was off.

He ran and he ran until his cheeks puffed blue. He ran as the shadows darkened and grew.
That's the stuff, thought the gingerbread boy. I was born for this.

On the way he ran past a stalled DTC bus, a busted transformer. He ran past a couple fighting playfully in their car, a balloon seller trying to weed out a stray green balloon out of a host of red ones.
 This is a good high, thought the gingerbread boy. Better than eau de acetone, at least.

He wanted to keep running but there was a sharp smell from an alleyway. An overripe smell but an inviting smell, an enticing smell.
Maybe I'll stop a while, thought the gingerbread boy. Rest my legs a bit. 

He stopped and made his way inside.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

Somebody had set up shop there.
It was temporary shop, at best. A tent nailed up inside a dead-end alleyway. Row upon row of wooden planks nailed up inside the tent. Green glass bottles sealed up with pieces of cork and blobs of wax.

"What is this place?" asked the gingerbread boy.
"The Watering Hole," said a voice in the distance.
"Destination Unknown," said another.

A carrion bird flew up, up, up till it was nothing but the fading blue silhouette from an oversized pair of wings. It flew too close to the sun and was roasted alive.

This is where the animals drink, thought the gingerbread boy. I shall drink with them. 
Across the sky, the moon licked its lips in anticipation of a fried vulture dinner.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

There were six of them at one headcount. At another point they were four.

A friend of his stayed throughout. It wasn't necessarily the same person, but his friends all had refreshingly similar views on practically everything; he sat and basked in their conformity, their lack of lateral thinking.

I am different from them, he thought as he took another sip and the seats around him emptied and filled, emptied and filled. I am the gingerbread boy. It is my lot to run.

There was an exciting exchange at one point.
"We're currently escaping from reality," declared a sloshed friend in brown muttonchops and a dhoti. "We're wasting ourselves. Into oblivion."
"Probably," replied the gingerbread boy and took another swig.
"I'm s-serious, man." The dhoti was dishcloth green. The muttonchops were three weeks untrimmed. The level of sobriety was Not Even Slightly. "We're n-neglecting our duties. Well, not anymore, I say."
"What do you suggest?" asked the gingerbread boy and took another swig.
"I'm  turning over a new leaf. Starting today."
"Is that right?" The world kept floating in and out of focus.
"Yeah, man. No more smoking. No more betting on horses. No more hanging down at the arcade all the time. No more gali cricket in the afternoon."
"What about drinking?" The gingerbread boy could feel his head travelling down in a soft, loose arc to settle upon his forearm. He felt the same thing over and over at least a dozen times before his friend responded.
"You serious? Nothing is ever the booze's fault, man. In fact, I'd strongly recommend using it as a vacation for when things get really bad."
"Whatever you say, pardner," the gingerbread boy slurred, and then the ground was coming up to meet him.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

When he left it was late afternoon. The pylons all threw heat in squiggly waves that collected under the tin blanket that served as the roof of the world. There was an infernal screeching from the cosmic kittens as they  hotfooted their way across the metal, leaving pawprint indentations from the other side.

The gingerbread boy felt on top of the world, too. The world tilted inexplicably to either side on random intervals, but that was okay.
I feel boy, thought he. I am the gingerbread fine.

There was a clatter from somewhere down the road. The gingerbread boy cocked his ears in a passable imitation of a dog. Steady as she goes, he thought to himself. Then the clatter repeated itself and he was off again. "Just one foot after another," he called out to nobody in particular.

On the way he ran past an upturned car. The doors were open and a brief trail of blood and snot led off to where the passengers had managed to crawl before being picked up by somebody (he hoped it was the paramedics). The windscreen wipers lay crumpled below the spiky glass shards of the windscreen. The cumulative effect was like staring at some giant mechanical bug in the few seconds between its swatting and the last exhale of its oily breath.

The clattering came closer.
I will see the source of the noise for myself, thought the gingerbread boy. I can outrun trouble, should trouble find me. I am, after all, the gingerbread boy.
He turned a corner and came upon the manhole cover.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It was around thirty inches across at its widest, and then it tapered away to nothing in all directions. It was a round manhole cover, of the sort handed out quite freely by the Government on roadways.
The gingerbread boy had seen nothing like it in his life.

"Is there anybody out there?" he called out. The road pulsed in an intense burst of aquamarine light.
A merman poked his head out of the gap where the light was coming from.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

I will stop here, for a moment. You do know what a merman is, don't you?

Imagine a creature just over five feet tall, standing on hind legs that have webbed feet at the end. Imagine fins on the side of its knees, behind its elbows. Imagine spindly arms that would end in webbed hands, too, except the creature slit the membranes down the middle and wrapped each individual finger in a thin strip of cloth (the webs would grow back, given a chance). Now imagine a thin layer of scales on the whole thing.

Done? Good.
The key word here is imagine. There is no such thing as a merman, not really.

The merman who peeked out of the manhole that afternoon was called Fathead. He spoke on behalf of five other mermen, three merwomen (they'd stopped being maidens a long time ago) and a boy in a green shirt.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It was a breathtaking moment, history in the making, the landmark first interaction between two completely alien species (nobody remembered the first thing they'd said to the green shirt, and he wasn't even a part of the narrative yet). The gingerbread boy even stopped jogging in place for a while, leaned in closer to listen.

"You wanna come join our party, bro?" declaimed Fathead.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

Of course the gingerbread boy acquiesced - you haven't been listening at all, have you? He followed the merman all the way down the rickety ladder, past a bunch of grimy-looking pipes through which the river Yamuna flowed sometimes, through a revolving door that looked rusted shut (but wasn't), and through a secret door in the back of what seemed like a padded cell.

The gingerbread boy continued to walk, spellbound. There was a gigantic cavern under the sewage system (if that's where they still were - he found it harder to tell directions without the sun standing in the background hemming and hawing) and they seemed to be near one of its walls. The dull grey stone rose up in front of him and faded into black somewhere high above. Peering closely at the darkness, the gingerbread boy realized it was made up of clouds.

Trees grew near the wall, at irregular intervals. The soil felt warm and crumbly in his palm - a little stale, but still more than potent enough to whelp trees that went up a good five-six storeys themselves.

They were all sitting with their backs to the wall, the mermen and the merwomen, a boy with a green shirt tucked away somewhere in the middle. They watched him with genuine curiosity as Fathead went up to one of them, took the gnarled and elongated wooden pipe they were smoking and handed it over to him.

"This is our peace pipe," said Fathead. "Would you like to share?"

The gingerbread boy looked carefully down the stem. He felt the roundness of the bowl against his thumb and forefinger. Then he dipped his finger into the bowl, scraped some of the powdery residue with his nail, and sniffed it.
He smiled.

"I am the gingerbread boy," he said to them all, as one. "Let's get baked."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

They sat there for a long, long time.
The walls turned purple for a while but nobody really noticed. Jagged forks of foliage bored through the ground and shot up towards the sky (The roof, Vermivore said it was the roof). Lightning flashed occasionally and by its light they could make out the gigantic tree painted upon the ceiling. The air was heavy with branches falling back to the ground utterly spent and the sound of rain.

"Is it safe to be sitting here?" the gingerbread boy said. He wanted to stand up to lend his statement weight but his legs were jammed against the ground.
"Yes," said one of the merwomen. "You sit where you are and you pull with everything you got. That's all."
"Shut up, Saffron," said Fathead. "You're a woman. Go fix us some worms or something."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The gingerbread boy followed the motions of the guy in the green shirt. He seemed to flow from one state to another - sitting leaned back against a rock, then neck craned to see where the pipe had gotten, then jutted forward like a monkey going after a jar of cookies as he received the pipe, then cross-legged, shoulders hunched slightly, the bowl of the pipe a smoldering orange against the greenness of his shirt.

"He makes me slightly uneasy," whispered the nearest merwoman to the gingerbread boy.
"Shut up, Saffron," said Fathead. "Didn't I ask you for something to eat? Get off your fat arse now!"

Saffron stood up.
Everyone stopped talking. The green shirt forgot to hold out the pipe to Fathead.

Saffron left.
Everyone slowly started talking again. Fathead snatched the pipe from the green shirt.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The green shirt waited for the pipe to go out before getting off his perch and going to sit with the gingerbread boy. "Got bored of crushin'," he said affably.
The gingerbread boy coughed a little and nodded. He had no opinion of the guy in the green shirt. He didn't need one. He could run whenever he felt like it.

The pipe was refilled.
"Good shit," said Fathead. A couple of mermen raised their index and little fingers at him.
In some cultures that is taken as a sign of respect.

This is perfect, thought the gingerbread boy. I have never felt more inclined to stay in one spot.
The rain came down harder now. It ran down his cheeks and his throat. It drenched his shirt in a matter of moments. Small bits of light snaked in through far corners of the cavern and the rain got at them, too. Great gobs of water smashed themselves up around them and depending on the light the pieces that fell were either a deep purple or a bright green.

The green shirt had to light the pipe again when it came his turn. The gingerbread boy leaned forward to hold the flame to the cup and saw that the other boy had an even set of clean, white teeth.

Halfway through the second round Saffron walked back into the circle, pulled a saucepan from somewhere in her dress, and smashed it upon the titular fat head of Fathead.

The green shirt watched the pipe sail over his head and smash against a tree. Then he turned to the gingerbread boy.
"Let's get out of here," he said.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

So this time the gingerbread boy didn't have to run alone. The guy in the green shirt did not offer any conversation beyond what was necessary. He just kept pace with the gingerbread boy as he made his way back to the rubber room and then out towards the surface.

They ran over the crest of a hill and then skirted down the smooth pavement on the other side.

The gingerbread boy squinted back in the direction he'd come from and saw the irresponsible fizzle of fireworks above a dead town. He thought he saw rainwater pulling on the sides of the road like some long-delayed shutter. Occasional forks of lightning framed them against the backdrop; the image of a green shirt squeezing between cars at an intersection burnt itself into the retinas of the gingerbread boy.

He's got some balls, thought the gingerbread boy, and Ow.

"Where do you live?" asked the green shirt.
"Nowhere," he replied. "I belong on the road. I am the gingerbread boy."
"Are you, now?" the green shirt grinned in the darkness. "What do you run towards, gingerbread boy?"

This was a new question. The gingerbread boy pondered and pondered.
"A place where things keep happening," said the gingerbread boy, finally. "A place that does not sleep."

"Great way of inviting yourself over," said the green shirt. "My house is not far from here. You can meet some of my friends. Sound all right?"
"Yes, it does."
"Unless you have somewhere to be getting to, I mean."
"Let's just shut up and sprint already."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The green shirt lived in a dilapidated old house halfway between the University and the Transit. The gingerbread boy had passed it often, back when he was a human child and had to go to distant corners of the city and make people listen to his speeches.

"Is it safe to live in there?"
"Better in there than the road, man," the green shirt grinned. Somebody finally opened the door on the third knock.
It was a girl.

"You should've told me there would be guests," she said to the green shirt, eyeing the gingerbread boy up and down. "Decent-looking ones at that."
"It's no use," said the green shirt to the girl as she followed them inside and surreptitiously sniffed the back of her guest's neck. "He's a runner."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

Once again, there were anywhere between four to six people in that room. Nobody got up and left but they all looked so damn similar it was difficult to say whether there were three girls and two boys or two girls and three boys or two girls and two boys and one incredibly gifted master of disguises.

The gingerbread boy looked for his friend but it was difficult to tell which of the two boys play-wrestling on the couch was the one who'd come in with him - was it the one on top twisting the other's ankle or the bottom bitch yelling in pain and reaching slowly for the cricket bat lying a few feet away from them?

There were no more shirts. The guys and girls all wore blue shorts and white vests. The guys all had chiseled physiques. The girls were all incredibly easy on the eyes. The gingerbread boy had taken off his own tattered school blazer when he entered the room but he felt self-conscious in the presence of what were obviously underwear models who'd gotten bored of hanging on the billboards.

"Wanna try something mindblowing?" the familiar clap on the back meant it was his friend formerly of the green shirt.
"Always," said the gingerbread boy.
A thrill of anticipation went through the gathering.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

"Like that?"
"Yeah. You managed not spill any. That's good."
"Does it usually come in droppers?"
"No, it has to be extracted and put there. Delicate process. Sorta."
"And what does it do?"
"It's a really intense high, man. Puts you right in touch with the other side."
"The other side of what?"
"Everything, man."
"Oh. What is it called?"
"Got a weird-sounding name. Biological shit, man. I'd tell you but your eyelids are getting red. It's hitting."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It was a strange sensation.

The gingerbread boy found himself floating, floating, detaching from the body splayed awkwardly on the couch, from the circle of spectators (definitively proven to be three girls and two guys apart from the green shirt - one or the other person was always in another room, hence the confusion), from the green shirt (whose turn it was in the other room), from the room itself, from that giant depressing bitch of a tether everybody likes to call the ground. He was...

... Not just a gingerbread boy. He was the gingerbread boy. And running was for retards, especially when one could fly...

...Back to the days before his trip to the condemned building, to the days when the fumes from the peace pipe went straight up his nozzle and into the slot machine that was his head...

...Back to the days when he first met the peace pipe, in a gathering of familiar faces who only surfaced when there were green stalks and murk in the sky and a clean surface to crush on...

...Back to the days when his world was populated by locked rooms and empty faces and liquid fire that you drank straight from the bottle to burn the demons scrabbling in the recesses of your soul...

...Back to the day years and years ago when he first saw that there was something damaged irreparably in the workings of his mind, some blighted short circuit that would light up a neon arrow if ever he got within a mile of an open road...

...All the way back to the day he was born, a few moments after all the blood and slime and bits of his mother's womb had been washed away, the moments of utter quiet when every eye in the disinfected white room stared at him, the moments when he could be anybody, any random miracle of chromosomal interaction and evolutionary progress...

This is who I am thought the gingerbread boy and I better tell them my name.
So he did.
He finally cried out his name.
And it resonated across all the disparate strands of his story, unifying them under a common umbrella that would grant them form and context and meaning and purpose and cohesion.

This was the gingerbread boy's finest hour.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

And this is where the story ends. No, seriously. It's a positive note, right? Everything turned out okay. The hero gets his moment in the sun, and there's always the vague promise of sex in the distance to spice things up for the more mature audience (subtext, folks, all about the subtext!). All is right with the world. Except..

Except there's no moral yet. I mean, come on! We don't want empty words like closure, do we?
We want a teaching. And we want it drilled into somebody's head (foreshadowing alert).

The gingerbread boy's story could be over.

Except it wasn't.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The green shirt walked to the other room, the one where somebody had to be present at all times. It wasn't a hard and fast rule, of course, but it would be decidedly impolite to leave the other occupant of the room alone - especially since he was sponsoring their trip, so to speak, and also happened to be tied to the bed.

"P-please let me go home now," sobbed the man in the bed. He was hardly a man, what with crying in front of somebody out of sheer helplessness.
He also didn't have the required number of limbs.

"We'll be done soon," the green shirt reassured him. He checked on the swathe of tubes and cables attached to the base of the other's neck. He checked on the clear receptacle - half an inch of fluid remained, enough to fill in at least five more droppers. He finally checked on the man's body. The right leg and left arm both ended in bloody stumps, wrapped in rags that had barely stemmed the bleeding when first applied a couple weeks back.

"Please. It really hurts..." the man wasn't crying anymore. He'd tried everything already.

"I'm telling you, man. We're almost done with you." The green shirt checked to see if the scalpel was still on the tray where he'd placed it on his last shift.
It was.

"We've found a new lamb, you see," he said, and then he walked out of the room.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The gingerbread boy was still falling over the edge of the sofa.
He'd been falling for over twenty minutes.

"Human body. Beautiful thing, ain't it?" green shirt fondly stroked the boy's hair. "Creates hormones, regulates their presence, knows how to hold a party. Shall we get the last formality out of the way?"

The female on her way out mock-bowed. Green shirt grinned as he turned to their guest.

"It's getting really late," he said. "We're thinking of adjourning for dinner. You good?"
"Mmpff-fine," said the gingerbread boy. "S'really good stuff."
"I know. But," he asked casually, the third and final time, "don't you have to be getting home?"
"No home, nowhere to go. I am the gingerbread man," said the gingerbread boy.

"Good." green shirt stroked his hair again. "We've been having takeaway for ages so we decided to cook in. You're welcome to join us whenever you want."
The gingerbread boy lolled. Green shirt got up to leave.

"Just the one thing," he called back from the door. "I almost forgot. You don't have a problem with non-veg, do you?"
The gingerbread boy didn't hear, but that was OK.
Green shirt hadn't really waited for an answer.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

...And that's the real ending. The gingerbread boy is safe and sound, the butt of a few jokes perhaps but in good care. The lost boys and girls living at the condemned building look out for their own. Drug abuse aside, look at how beautifully they tended to their invalid friend until he succumbed to his injuries.

It is things like these that give me hope for humanity.
Anyway. You have made it this far, haven't you? And I promised you a moral.
I didn't think anyone would make it this far.

I guess I'll have to freewheel, then. Here's me casting a look about my room for inspiration: a grimy, boarded-up window, a hole in the wall where I can press my ear and hear the rambling of the stretcher-bed's current occupant (he's been babbling nonstop for the past ten hours. This story was restructured out of the more coherent parts of his soliloquy) and, right next to the cot I currently share with one of the girls (there are no restrictions here. There are six of us and five different partners is more than enough for anyone), a slightly-faded but crisp green shirt that I wear when I am outside.

To return to the issue at hand. The moral of this story is, always try to be like the gingerbread boy. Take chances and allow life to surprise you, every once in a while.
You never know where the culmination of your travels shall find you.

Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I left something in the oven.

Siren

It was a dream, of course. That much I knew long before the dash through the theater, long before leaving the party, long before things went from strange and interesting to all-out screamathon. It was a good-ol' fashioned dream... Except it was also one of those things that pop into your head and then refuse to leave - like an unbidden guest standing at your doorstep one fine midsummer morning, all set on gracing you with his presence until Diwali at least.

There were two ways to deal with it - either let it pick at the insides of my skull until it dissolved (which would take an inordinate amount of time, given the complexity of the factors involved), or get it down on paper so I could mutilate it into gibberish and give up on it.

I chose the latter.
So this is the story of my dream.


It began on the stairwell of a multi-storey. I was fifteen again, going for tuitions to the home of an old lady who would smell like cabbage and jasmines on the edge of decay, and offer to turn us over to our parents at the slightest indiscretion. I knew all this from the chattering crowd of children walking around me; in the real world I hadn't been to any tuition classes till I turned eighteen.

I happen to be tall, but those kids barely reached my elbow. I would've thought they were much younger if it weren't for the identical sky-blue mathematics textbook we were all carrying.

I scanned the crowds for familiar faces. There weren't any. To make matters worse the kids all insisted on pushing me to the front; I found myself at the door of a house on the seventh floor, a crowd of tiny kids behind me, the whole tableau uncannily similar to the Pied Piper coming home after a long day at work.
I pressed the door bell.

A deep bass note reverberated through the floor. The kids stopped chattering and were still. I looked back and saw them all gazing up at me, tiny eyes reddish in the late evening.
The first pang of unease hit me then.
I tried to cut back through them but the door opened and a pair of hands dragged me in.


The lighting inside was no better than outside - strobe patterns lit up the walls at random intervals. I barely had a moment to wonder how they'd fitted a discotheque inside a 3BHK on the wrong side of the Yamuna - then the door banged shut behind me, and the bassline enveloped me completely.

The hands on my shoulders let off the pressure but did not let go. I waited for my eyes to adjust and then hazarded a look.

It was a girl.
The second pang of unease hit when my brain did a complete critical appraisal of her (the sort that I wouldn't dare try in daylight because I'd inevitably end up getting slapped) and still couldn't decide whether she was good-looking or not. She had pixie hair that actually reached her shoulders but looked much shorter. Her neck was long and slender, her height considerably more than that of the pipsqueaks who'd pushed me into the flat. She was wearing a little blue dress, and her features seemed vaguely familiar.

-Who are you? I mouthed the words but wasn't sure she'd heard.
-Does it matter? Her own voice was no more prominent. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I could read lips as well. She had a nice mouth.
-Where is this place?
She shrugged. One hand remained on my shoulder, the grip firm but comfortable. She motioned for me to follow her deeper into the house.

-I'm dreaming, aren't I?
I had just seen a couch set up in front of a flat screen with half a dozen guys crammed on top of each other, watching some sporting event or the other.
The entire party (along with assorted paraphernalia) was situated inside a single shower cubicle.

She grinned. It was a nice grin, but slightly wide. She made me a little nervous.
Her expression didn't change as she started to say something funny, but then her face suddenly went blank.

-What is it?
-We have to leave. Now.
-What? Why?
-Siren, she mouthed. I felt a slight chill. Not at the word, but the doomed expression that flitted across her face.
-Excuse me?
-Listen. Can't you hear it?
I stared at her for a moment and then realized I could. There was a faint wailing somewhere in the background.
-We have to leave, she repeated. Now.
-But we aren't exactly felons, are we?

In reply she gestured into the next bedroom down the line.
I peeked in.
A bunch of kids were sitting around an empty flower-vase, uttering weird incantations and making even weirder gestures. Just before I could burst out laughing, however, the vase... Glowed.

I continued to stare as a thin tendril of green fume emanated from the mouth of the vase and burrowed its way into the nose of the nearest kid. He fell back as if physically pushed; his eyes rolled up into his head.

The other kids continued their incantations; the vase was filled with green fumes now. I imagined I saw a spark of electricity somewhere in its depths.

-I don't want to be anywhere near them when the cops arrive, I admitted.
-Thought so. Come with me.
-Where are we going?

She came to a door that was, by my reckoning, the other bathroom.
-I'm not a big fan of sports!
-Shut up and get in.

She opened the door and pushed me


the smell of freshly cut grass
-What the hell was that?
-What?
-With the door and... Wait, where the hell are we?
-Could you stop emphasizing random words? It sounds kinda weird.

-Sorry.
We were on the streets of Connaught Place. It was long past midnight by the looks of it - the roads were all deserted, the stalls shut, not even a single smackhead dozing on the pavement. I looked down Janpath and noted how much it appeared like the setting for some post-apocalyptic movie.

-How did we get here?
-That's a good question.
-So are we safe here?
-Not really.
The sound of a car alarm from the other side of the circle. Red and blue lights reflected upon the pockmarked white pillars.

-Let's go.
She picked up a half-brick and hefted it through the glass shopfront of the nearest sportswear showroom.
Klaxons went off almost immediately.
-Wow. So you have a mad impulse and you Just Do It, huh?
-Save your product placements for the real world.

Her hand upon my forearm this time. Propelling me after her into the shop.
-Hey! There's glass and stuff here!
-Crybaby.
The door of a changing room with some actress in a sports-bra on it
-Do you think we could go to her place and
-Shut up!

The slightly stale smell of room freshener


-What the hell is that stench?
-We're in a public restroom.
-Ugh! And where exactly is
-See for yourself.

And I did.
We were at the one place in the city I'd sworn to never visit again. The river Yamuna flowed a few dozen yards down, oily with ghee and incense and practically carpeted by rotting flower petals. And in the marginal distance of a few dozen yards, five funeral pyres at different stages in the process of incineration.

-Nigambodh Ghaat.
-It's the last place they'd look for you.
-Who are they anyway?
-You'll probably find out soon enough.

The heat from the fires bathed my face. I found myself perilously close to a flashback that I desperately wanted to avoid. Except-
-Yep, they're aware of reverse psychology.

I hadn't seen or heard the sirens but I knew she wasn't lying. We ran down to the doors of the electric crematorium, which she kicked twice or thrice before the lock began to give way.
-Right now I'm actually kinda glad that my mind is blacking out the actual period of transit.
-Is that right?
-Yeah. I don't want to see the insides of this place. Can we please go somewhere a little less... Uninhabited?

-Are you sure?
The door finally fell open.
-I think so. I mean, what could possibly go


the inside of a theater blood red carpet pounding underfoot something black and white on the gigantic screen to our left and everybody to the right lit up by reflected blue light her hand warm but rough in mine pulling me to the side trying to block out the audience but too late to begin with
much too late

reptiles
all of them reptiles

lizards and snakes and iguanas somehow bundled into human clothing tongues lapping black in the semi darkness screeching and hissing and baring stained fangs and the stench of decay and offal in the air

-Over here, her voice right next to my ear the fear in it genuine but somehow disconnected from her person, and then a towering neon EXIT sign glowing red red red flicker red
only spot of colour in the room

the sound of her hands fumbling with the doorknob
one last look back into the theater
and the reptiles all of the slithery slimy reptiles wearing human clothes rising up in their seats
plastic toys and bleached balloons and windup animals in their hands
(claws not hands reptiles don't have hands)
shiny in the dim lighting somehow emitting light on their own and then

at the same moment as the door falling open

a hungry despicable babble of voices unruly chorus saying different words but the same thing all the same thing
-come here boy we have candy
-let me show you a magic trick
-ice cream trucks do you want ice cream jangling bells
-come a little closer and we can make this pencil disappear would you like that boy would you

and then out through the door with the neon EXIT sign and complete silence like unplugging a radio


-How long will this go on?
She looked like she hadn't heard. Then she cut me off halfway through asking again.
-Until we can outrun the sirens.
I strained my ears. She was right - there was still a mechanical screaming somewhere in the distance behind her. We were standing at a busy intersection five minutes from my own doorstep. I had no idea how we'd gotten here from the theater.

-We have to cross.
I took her hand, unbidden. She smiled a tight smile. Trucks blared past before us, burning rubber in both directions, glowing acid green and fire red in the sodium lighting. Her complexion looked orange. It suited her, somehow. The dress from the discotheque had been replaced by a plain shirt and skirt combination.

I let her lead me to the divider. I pretty much trusted her blindly by now. There was a paanwalla on the other side of the intersection. The roof of his stall smoldered, unseen and unnoticed. The air was heavy with the sweet scent of tobacco.

We crossed again. We were stepping past the tobacconist when the screaming in the distance turned into a continuous wail. Blue and red lights reappeared in the distance, a sense of inevitability embedded in the ruckus they were kicking up.

-Run, she said.
So we ran again - off the open road, into the half a mile stretch of barren fields and muddy paths that separated my locality from the nearest metro station.
I somehow knew we would never make it to the station.

Halfway down the empty stretch she suddenly turned right, towards the gate of a tiny enclosure marking off some faceless man's miserable holdings from the rest of the wasteland.

-Why are we
But I needn't have bothered
A gate is another type of door, after all


one of the narrow by-lanes on campus. Once again within walking distance of my college but on slightly unfamiliar territory.
-I am starting to detect a pattern here, I said.
She said nothing for the moment. Her breathing was becoming slightly ragged.
-We can stop for a bit, I suggested, although I knew we couldn't. I could hear a chorus of wails from the main road. We hadn't got a headstart.

There were doors all around us but they looked like they'd been bolted for decades.
-We're headed towards a
-Yes. Yes, I know.
Right on cue we turned the corner and came upon the brick wall we both knew about.

-Now what?
She said nothing. The catch in her breathing was more prominent.
The sirens came closer and closer. In a moment they'd turn the corner and light up the dead-end street.
She thrust something into my hand in the semi-dark.

-What is this? She didn't answer. It was too late.
The blue and red lights turned the corner. They threw her features into sharp relief. I realized with a jolt that she really was beautiful. All she'd needed to do was tie back her hair and change into a salwar-kameez.

A car door clanged open behind me. Somebody stepped out.
I didn't really care. I continued staring at her.
Something fluttered in my hand. I looked down.

It was a single black feather, the sort you'd see on a crow or a raven.
I looked back at her and saw that she was crying.

A fat red drop gathered at the corner of her eye and trickled down, leaving a shiny trail that was too bright and viscous to be anything but blood.
I let go of the feather. I turned to face the coppers
(pigs they call 'em pigs)
the front grills of the cars suspiciously like chrome-plated jaws
(they steal eggs and suck goats dry)
and then, at long last, a chance to look at my tormentors proper


I awoke screaming.

"Baby! What is it?"
I turned to the right. She lay in the bed beside me, on the soft downy mattress that was the most comfortable surface I'd ever slept on (even though I seemed to have nightmares with a sickly regularity whenever I slept on it).
My parents' old bedroom. My parents' old bed.

The only light came from a dim green zero-watt nightbulb, but I could see the silhouette of her nightgown, the way her hair was falling across her forehead.
I knew her, in this light. It seemed impossible not to. My struggle to identify her in the dreamworld felt strangely disconcerting now - this was the woman I loved.

I spoke her name out loud.
She said mine, the pronunciation flawless but slightly muffled. I ran my fingers though her hair, tucking rogue strands behind her ear.
She pulled me closer.

I didn't need to tell her what was wrong. She didn't really care. Her sole interest was getting my breathing back in check, to calm me down so we could go back to sleep. I felt the smoothness of her skin against mine, slightly cool compared to my own feverish pallor, and on an impulse I reached out and kissed her.

She was motionless for a moment before she reciprocated. Her mouth opened, soft and pliant.
I finally knew why she'd been having difficulties pronouncing my name.
She had the wrong number of teeth.

Too many, in fact. Too many teeth to fit into a human mouth. Fifty, a hundred, two thousand, serrated needles
(hypodermic)
crammed into that impossibly lovely mouth. She gave me a moment to explore, her tongue thin and scaly against mine, and then the teeth clenched shut on my tongue.

There was no pain. Some sort of toxin in the venom, I guessed.
Besides, she'd only done it so she could establish her grip proper. She wouldn't hurt me unneccessarily.

Things finally made sense. The word siren had multiple connotations, didn't it?
She pinned me upon the bed, her mouth now grey and elongated upon mine, and the zero-watt bulb was hidden as she finally stretched her wings, the ones she'd been hiding all along.
They were the jet black wings of a raven.

Feathers flew away in torrents around her. She raised her hands and I saw her nails, long and luminous and sharp enough for the tips to taper off into nothing.
The glow vanished as she plunged both her hands into my chest - and this time there was pain, tremendous and horrible and unimaginable. I tried to scream before remembering my mouth was otherwise occupied.

Her rough cheeks squirmed against mine. I realized she was smiling. There was a wrenching as her mouth left mine, and I could finally feel the inside of my head again.
Whatever was left of it, anyway.

She spat something fleshy and rubbery off the bed. Then the hands widened the gap between each other, like an excited kid opening a window on the first day of his holidays, and she cackled in triumph as she saw what she wanted.

There was another wrenching but this one was too big to respond to.
My senses began to fade away, and the last thing I saw was the creature sitting on my chest, wingspan almost as big as the width of the room, holding my heart up so it could be the last thing I saw.


I woke up for real and counted to ten to keep from screaming. I needn't have bothered - the urge was too halfhearted to be a problem. I'd already had my chance to test my lungs. And I'd taken it.

After the counting I lay back, the sole occupant of my own bed - slightly harder than the floor and (hitherto) nightmare-free.
There were earphone wires wrapped around my head and neck like some geek's bondage fetish. I untangled them and tossed them onto the table across the room.

I felt fine. Slightly shaken by the bizarre sequence of dreams, yes (the details were fading but the sense of unreality persisted). I couldn't recall the occupants of the police-car, or the face of the siren. I had a feeling she'd look like nobody I knew; the note of recognition in  the last dream had been the only false note in an otherwise-flawless night of terror.

The clock on my phone said it was barely past 3AM.
I cursed myself for turning in at midnight.

Then I lay back down to wait for sleep - pausing only to fall out of bed when a firetruck passed on the road outside.