The Making of Kalki, Part-I

The making of Kalki-I

Circa 1953, Mussorie

It was real, it was cold and it felt wet to touch.

There was just one thing that that really meant.

Trouble.

Down there things weren’t going right. They were going downhill, and rapidly.

But how could that be?

‘Way too cold and wet to touch; no, it can’t really be real. Not this time. No, it can’t be. But what if it is? Oh no; oh God no; no, please don’t let it be real; just this time, God, just this one time’, the small boy pleaded.

He tossed around wildly in the middle birth of his bunk bed, causing its cheap mild steel frame to buckle and rattle wildly.

“Settle down, you little tit eating motherfucker”, the big boy on the lower birth cried out.

The big boy had been masturbating. He was trying a new method that night: positioning his penis between the hard board bed and his stomach and gyrating back and forth- this way he could keep both his hands free, one to hold the pencil torch with and the other to flip over the pages of the pornographic magazine he’d stolen from the warden, Father Costa’s desk earlier that evening. He had just whipped up a passable climax when the little pisspot on the upper bunk decided to start rattling his ass.

The passion had dissipated quicky and this made him really mad.

“Don’t you fuck with me, boy”, he warned the pisspot and planted a hard kick on his bed ply.

The small boy shot off towards the ceiling and then landed back on his bed with a little thud. He was oblivious of all the commotion he had caused down below; oblivious even to the kick that had sent him flying off. He continued wandering the dark, deserted streets of his nightmare zone, all alone. Now he felt thirsty. He felt confused and lonely too. He needed some reassurance. He looked around. There was no one there but an empty shanty town of dimly lit roads, barren pavements, open, overflowing corrugated iron garbage boxes and rats- lots of them, squealing, gnawing at each other’s tails, crawling by the rubbish bins, looking hungry. Finding reassurance there would be like discovering the next Saudi Arabia of oil. But that was impossible- wasn’t that what the teacher told them the other day? Of course, it was impossible, as impossible as ever knowing who’d given him birth or, for that matter, who his father was.

No, there won’t be any reassurances coming forth. He understood it now as he always did when awake. The nightmare zone was impenetrable and nothing more than a corrupted image of the horror that were his waking hours.

Instinctively, he thrust his thumb inside his mouth and started sucking hard on it, emitting slurpy, loud and desperate sounds.

The big boy in the bottom bunk twitched. The magazine was great and he’d found yet another expressive enough photograph in it to set his budding manhood on alert. He pressed his stomach hard on his penis and intensified his back and forth gyrations.

It was coming, it was coming….

At precisely that moment the small child found himself wandering back into the kingdom of wetness. He could feel it now, pulsing and shooting through the capillaries, gushing, roaring, and bubbling, as if on boil.

‘No God no; please, please don’t do that to me, help me this time- this one time; O Lord, how can you be so unkind?’ he continued tossing and turning and rattling the fickle woodwork of the bed.

The Lord wasn’t in a merciful mood that night.

When is he ever? Just keeps peering down from his couch up there, waiting for his folks to fuck things up.

A thick stream of urine screamed out of him and percolated down into the already saturated depths of the soiled mattress.

“You Bastarrrdd..”, the big boy was pissed off. The tossing and turning twat on the upper birth had fucked his climax once again.

He got up from his bed, grabbed a big flop of the small boy’s hair and banged his head into the metallic side railings. It made a loud clang. The sound woke up a number of other terrified boys on the adjoining bunk beds. But, the small boy seemed to be made of sterner stuff. He continued sleeping, tossing and turning. This set the big burly boy’s patience on a decisive, one way street out of the room. With a passion surpassing that which he had been trying to rub into his penis a little while earlier, he landed a heavy punch into the pit of the small boy’s stomach. He followed it with a jab to his kidney; and then he went for the bull’s eye- his crotch.

The little boy had at last begun to show some signs of being mortal; he was trying to stir back to awakening when the big boy landed the decisive blow between his legs. The impact blew the wind out of his little, heaving lungs, making his thighs go numb. The numbness soon assumed the contours of a full blown shock wave. It sped out from the epicenter of the blow in a spherical wave front to every nerve ending in his emaciated body.

The little boy passed out. Oblivious to this, the big boy looked disgustedly at his outstretched hand, still formed in the shape of a fist. It felt moist. He brought it to his nose to sniff- musky, saline smell. He knew in an instant what that meant. He smiled to himself and signaled the other distressed twats to quietly go back to sleep.

By the time the small boy came back to senses the next morning, the sun had risen high in the sky. Strong shafts of sunlight drifted in through the ventilators set high up by the sides of the ceiling. The boy looked down at the big moist marks on his pyjamas and the mattress and shivered in terror. He was ashamed of himself. Father Aneja, the housekeeping manager, would soon be there on his morning rounds. He would have one look at the mattress and then…

His heart filled with frustration. None of his twenty odd house mates had uttered a word when the House Head Boy was busy beating him senseless the previous night; nor had they bothered to wake him up in time to be ready for the morning assembly. His heart sank at the thought. To the seven cardinal sins of Christinity, the god fearing Fathers of the exclusive, boys only Mount Helena Catholic Missionary School had added two of their own: peeing in sleep and missing the morning assembly. They built leaders out of men and what sort of leaders went about wetting their pants and missing the morning drills? A stream of chilly morning mountain air drafted in through the open French windows. Far in the distance he could hear the concerted marching of well rehearsed foot steps to the tunes of a doleful bagpipe. The morning assembly had already begun and so had a new, miserable day.

It was a glorious day.

Father Theodora, the school headmaster, stood on his customary high platform overlooking the big school playground and the mountains beyond. He had turned out finely, decked up in a big, cream colored robe. A big silver cross supported on thick red rosary beads dangled down his chest. He also wore a big cream colored cap with another silver cross embroidered on it. A bevy of visiting dignitaries in the best of their formal dresses farmed out on both the sides of the Father, looking serious and attentive in their ceremonial chairs. That day seemed to be a special day and that caused even more consternation to the already palpitating boy who was now trying to look for an opportunity to slip into his house line unobserved. Father Theodora closely inspected the gathered morning assembly. The students had turned out fine. They stood in attention, distributed in fifteen neat files, in front of him. He nodded his approval and began,

“My dear students, today is the one hundred and seventh founding day of this veritable institution that we call both a school and our home. I joined this institution many years ago as a humble teacher; over the years I rose through the ranks and have had the pleasure of leading this institution to yet newer heights of success and achievement under my watch. However, today that I stand in front of you, its not to talk to you about myself; it is to talk to you and share with you the achievement of many of your predecessors who came to this cradle of leadership as raw, un-cut diamonds just like you and left as intelligent, motivated and worthy leaders of human beings, fully justifying our motto of, ‘Discipline, Leadership and Excellence’.”

The little boy was still at it, trying to sneek in on the sly. The entire assembly including the teachers, the deans and the warden stood in rapt attention, listening to the oratorical magic Father Theodora was weaving in the air.  

“Many of our alumnis went on to become successful businessmen, some became scientists and many others went on to govern the milling millions of this nation as magistrates and IAS officers. We have had the distinction of giving this nation a Prime Minister, two Chief Ministers and many other ministers in the central and state legislatures. How do you think we did that? Good education- of course, good values- absolutely, but most of all, good discipline. Discipline…”

The boy fancied his chances. Theodora had rached his favorite topic and would no doubt turn his real magic on from here. This was his chance. Alas, it, just like most other days, wasn’t his day. Still thinking about the ignominy he had left behind in the dorms for Father Aneja to find, he had just sneaked behind the towering figure of Father Damien D’Souza into his house line when the House Head Boy brought him down to the ground with a sly tackle of his left foot. The little terrified boy shrieked down with an audible thud, enough of Father Theodora to stop in his steps and for the entire assembly to turn their eyes around onto him.

“Oh no, not you again”, Father D’souza said and bent over to pick him up.

“Boy, you will have to pay dearly for that”, he whispered in his ears and pinched him in his arm pit. The boy howled out in pain.

“Shut up, you idiot. Haven’t you already done enough damage?” Father D’Souza said. He gave Father Theodora an askance look who signaled him to take the boy away from the assembly.

Father D’Souza dragged the boy away even as Father Theodora resumed, “Attention! Boys, what you just saw is precisely the kind of behavior that is wholly unbecoming of the future leaders and statesmen that we are trying to groom here. Discipline is the key to…”

“You disappoint me, boy”, Father Theodora said as he entered his chambers. His face bore a beatific picture of poise and outwardly calm. Every step that he took was measured, every syllable he uttered, well thought out and apt. As he approached his huge mahogany desk, he removed his ceremonial robe and hung it on a beautifully warnished coat stand.

“What is the matter, Father D’Souza? Where are we going wrong with this unfortunate son of the Lord?” he asked.

“The boy’s a mystery, Holy Father”, Father D’Souza replied. “Honestly, we’re at our wits’ end.”

“That’s not good enough, D’Souza”, the Holy Father said. “We might never know who funds the trust that pays his yearly dues but that doesn’t absolve us of our duty towards him; and the one duty towards him that we absolutely have to fulfil is to try our best to make him the leader that he deserves to be by virtue of being a student of this institution.”

“Now listen boy, I don’t know who your secret benefactor is. I’m not supposed to know that; nor are you and that’s perfectly fine with me. But, I want you to know one thing loud and clear: leadership and indiscipline never go hand in hand. You’ve got to choose between the two and as long as you’re a part of this institution, that choice isn’t yours to make.

“What you did this morning in your bed and later at the assembly has pained me a lot. I want to share that pain with you. I want you to understand what it feels like. I want you to come here, to my lap, up close.”

The little boy hesitated at the suggestion. The head master had sounded calm and composed. For a moment he’d even sounded gentle and humane. But, there was something about his eyes that disturbed the boy. They crawled up and down his body, as if sizing him up; sizing him up or making him naked. He knew instantly where he had seen that look before- in the eyes of Father Costa, the warden.

He started shaking like an autumn twig about to be detached from a withering branch.

The little child wondered what had hurt him more- the searing fury of the thin buggy whip that had rained down his back side like hell fire or the soft, moaning sound the head master had emitted everytime he had brought it down on him. He didn’t think much of the physical abuse. The bullies that called themselves his ‘house-mates’ had made him impervious to that. No, it were those other things- the hunger in those lustful eyes; those slow, disgusting grunts; that debasing feeling of something hardening between the head master’s legs as he lay across them. Act one of that day’s two part tragedy had just ended for him. This play however had no intervals. Father D’Souza dragged him out of the head master’s chambers and started climbing the steps leding to the warden’s office.

Kalki stirred in his bed. So many years had gone by since the events of that long gone, beautiful, mid-winter morning. It felt however as if he was still wondering the same deserted streets of the nightmare zone, looking for that elusive idea called reassurance.