Part 4 of 5 · 12 minThe Man Who Came to Bind It

Kiran had answered. That is the first thing you have to understand about what happened next. On the night after Ramesh died, at eleven o'clock, with the new battery wired in and the back bulb burning as bright as it had ever burned, a voice spoke the second line of a verse into his ear, and then asked him for the third, and he gave it. The words were in his mouth before he knew they were in his head. He said them the way you say your own name when somebody asks.

Then the voice was gone, and he was sitting on the ground with the spanner in his hand and the bulb burning over him, and nothing at the dhaba had changed.

He did not tell anyone. Not Sambaiah, who was awake inside and must have heard him talking. Not his mother. He went to bed and lay there till the lorries started at five.

The next night it asked him again.

This time it was not a verse. It was a question about a word, an old word, the kind that is in no dictionary a B.Com student has ever opened. The voice gave the word and asked what it meant. And Kiran, lying on his own bed inside the dhaba, with the door shut and the bulb burning outside and the shade of the tree nowhere near him, heard himself say the meaning. It was correct. He knew it was correct the way you know your hand is your hand. He did not know how he knew.

He stopped sleeping after that, because every time he shut his eyes the question was waiting there, and a new one behind it.

Padma saw it. By the fourth day his eyes had gone the colour of the dhaba's tea, and he was counting the takings wrong, and once at the counter she said his name three times before he turned. She asked him what was wrong. He said the heat. She looked at the tree and then at him and said nothing, and that night she put a lamp in front of her husband's photograph and left it burning till morning, which she had not done since the thirteenth day.

Mastan came on the fifth night. He had guessed. A man who has driven that road for thirty years can look at another man's face and know what has been talking to him. He parked past the stones, ate nothing, and called Kiran to the bench outside with two glasses of tea at one in the morning. He did not ask any questions. He said, "I am going to tell you about 1998. Then you decide."

Now listen carefully to what Mastan told him, because it is the only time anyone has tried.

In 1998 there was a lorry owner from Vijayawada, a man with eleven lorries, who lost two drivers at this dhaba in one year. One in March, one in October. Both found in the branches, both with their mouths open. The second one was his wife's brother. He was not a believing man, this owner, but he was a man who had lost money and a relative, and he did what men like that do. He paid for a swamy.

Swamy Bhairavananda. That was the name he gave. Mastan said he was a big man, bald, with a red cloth and three strings of beads and a voice you could hear across the highway. He came in a jeep with two assistants and a goat. He had iron nails, long ones, the kind they use for railway sleepers. He had a sack of lemons. He had a brass pot with something in it that he would not let anyone see.

The owner had sent word up and down the road, and forty drivers came. Mastan was one of them. He was thirty-three then. They parked past the stones in two rows and stood in the dark with their arms folded and watched.

The swamy walked around the tree three times. He told Veeraiah to switch off the back bulb. Veeraiah refused. Mastan said he had never seen Veeraiah refuse anyone anything, but he stood in front of that switch like a man standing in front of his own house, and said, "Not that. Do what you want. Not that." The swamy laughed at him and said a bulb was nothing to a man who had the mantras. Then he had his assistants drive the nails into the trunk. Seven nails. Each one went in with a sound like a bone breaking, and Mastan said the whole crowd of forty men stepped back together when the first one went in, without meaning to.

Then the lemons, cut and laid in a ring around the trunk. Then the brass pot at the roots. Then the mantras.

He sat on the cot under the tree, the same cot, cross-legged, and chanted. Loud. Mastan said it was the loudest thing he had ever heard a human mouth do, and it went on from eleven o'clock till past two with the swamy drinking water from a steel glass between verses. The drivers smoked and watched and a few of them started to believe, because the sound of it was something, and the nails were in, and nothing had happened.

At a quarter to three the swamy stopped and stood up and said, "Now I will take the question." He sent the assistants back past the stones. He told Veeraiah again to switch the bulb off, and this time, Mastan said, Veeraiah went inside without a word, and the drivers thought he had gone to do it, and he had not. He had gone to sit with his face in his hands.

The swamy sat down alone under the tree. The bulb was burning. He shut his eyes.

At 3:20 the voice came.

Mastan said he had been on that road for seven years by then and had never heard it, because he had never been foolish enough to be where it could be heard. But that night it carried. Dry. Exact. Not loud. A question, and he could not say now what the question was, only that it was in Telugu and that it was about a river, and that it was the kind of question a schoolteacher asks a boy who has not done his homework.

The swamy did not answer it. He started the mantras again. Loud, as loud as before, straight at the tree, the way a man shouts down a dog.

And the voice asked the question again.

Mastan stopped there, in the telling, and Kiran, who had been sitting very still, said, "It does not ask twice." Mastan nodded. He said, "That is what we all said afterwards. It does not ask twice. That night it asked twice."

The swamy's mantras went faster. The drivers could hear them going faster, the words running into each other, the voice going up. And the voice under the tree waited, the way a teacher waits. Then the mantras stopped. Not at the end of a verse. In the middle of a word.

Nobody went in. Not the owner, not the assistants, not one of forty grown men. They stood past the stones till it was light.

At dawn Swamy Bhairavananda was in the branches, about six feet up, with his own sacred thread around his neck. The thread had not broken. His lips were moving. No sound came out, but his lips were moving, and they went on moving while the Kodad police cut him down, and the constable who did it would not go near the tree again and asked for a transfer.

The seven nails were on the ground at the foot of the trunk. In a row. Straight, the way you lay out tools. The holes in the bark had closed. The lemons were where they had been put. The goat was tied to the jeep, chewing, untouched.

"The owner sold his lorries that year," Mastan said. "Nobody tried after that."

He finished his tea. It was cold. Then he gave the only advice he had, and he gave it the way a man gives you his last ten rupees.

"Stop answering."

Kiran said he could not. He said the answers came out of him by themselves.

"Then bite your tongue," Mastan said. "Put your hand over your mouth. Tie a cloth. I do not care. Say nothing. If it takes you, let it take you clean, like Ramesh, with your mouth open and nothing in it. That is bad. The other thing is worse. Do not let it teach you."

Kiran asked him what the other thing was. Mastan looked at him for a long time. He said, "Nobody knows, because nobody ever answered it twice. You have answered it four times." Then he drove to Vizag.

That night Kiran tried.

He did not go to bed. He sat inside the kitchen with his back against the rice sacks and the door open so that he could see the bulb, and he put a towel between his teeth. Sambaiah sat on the other side of the kitchen with the lamp and did not ask what the towel was for. Chanti slept on his cot by the stove.

It came at 2:30. Kiran knew the time because he was looking at his phone when the screen went dim by itself, the way it did every time.

The question was the hardest yet. He understood it. That was the horror of it. He understood a question that a man with two years of school Sanskrit should not have understood, and he knew the answer, and the answer rose up in him like water in a pump, and he bit down on the towel till he tasted blood and did not let it out.

The voice waited.

He had never heard it wait. It had always asked and gone. Now it waited, and the waiting had a shape, the way a man standing behind you in a queue has a shape. He could feel it standing. Sambaiah's lamp did not flicker. The bulb outside did not flicker. Nothing moved. The blood ran down his chin into the towel.

Then the voice said a second sentence.

It had never spoken twice. In fifty-nine years, in everything Narasimhulu and Mastan and Sambaiah had ever heard, it asked once, and it was done. Now, dry and exact and not loud, as if it were closing a book, it said, in Telugu, "Then tomorrow."

And it was gone.

Kiran took the towel out of his mouth. His hands would not stop shaking for an hour. Sambaiah got up, put the lamp down, and brought him water, and said, for the second time in his life at that dhaba, more than one word in a row. He said, "It never says two things. Never." Then he went and stood in the kitchen door and looked at the tree until it was light.

In the morning Kiran was alive. Remember that. He was alive and his tongue was cut and he had said nothing, and he thought, for about one hour, that Mastan had been right.

Then Padma came in from the counter and said, "Where is Chanti?"

Chanti was under the tree.

In daylight, at seven in the morning, when the lorries had gone and the sun was already on the tin roof, the boy was sitting on the cot under the branches with his feet not touching the ground, and he was holding something in both hands the way you hold a bird. Kiran went to the line of stones and stopped there, because his legs stopped there. He called the boy. Chanti looked up and came, and held out his hands, and in them was the slate pencil.

The same one. Worn, old, with the groove in it where a child's fingers had held it for years. The one Sambaiah had thrown in the kitchen fire in March.

"A man gave it to me," Chanti said. "In the night. I woke up and a man was sitting on the cot. He had a white dhoti. He said give this to anna."

Kiran asked him what man. Chanti said he did not know. He said the man was old and thin and sat very straight, and that he had not been afraid of him, which was strange, because he was afraid of the tree always, every night, and he had not been afraid of the man at all.

"He said your name," Chanti said. "He said it properly. Kiran Kumar Bellamkonda. Like that. All three."

Nobody at the dhaba said Kiran's name like that. Nobody anywhere said it like that. The drivers said Kiran, the village said Veeraiah's boy, his mother said Kannayya. The only place in the world where his name stood in those three words, in that order, was the ration card in the steel almirah inside.

Sambaiah came out of the kitchen and saw the pencil in the boy's hands and did not take it this time. He did not throw it in the fire. He looked at it, and then he looked at Kiran across the line of stones, and he went back inside and shut the kitchen door, and they heard the bolt go.

Kiran took the pencil. He did not mean to. His hand went out and took it the way it had given the answers.

He does not remember the rest of that morning. Padma does. At noon, with the sun straight overhead and the tree's shadow pulled in tight around its own trunk, she went out to the back to look for him.

He was standing on the line of stones. Exactly on it. His heels on the dhaba side, his toes on the tree side, the way a boy stands on a line in a game. He was looking up into the branches. He had the slate pencil in his hand.

She called him. "Kannayya."

He did not turn. She called him again, louder, the way she had called him in from the street when he was six.

He turned then, and looked at her, and answered her.

Padma has been asked many times since what he said, and she has never been able to say, because she did not know the words. She had never heard the language. It was not Telugu and it was not Hindi and it was not the English from his college. It was old, and it was exact, and it came out of her son's mouth in a dry, even voice that was not his, as if someone had taught him to say it and he was saying it correctly for the first time.