Mysterical-E

He Said, She Says

PREY
by Fran Bannigan Cox

The brown rat snake in my pocket wriggled against my thigh, trying to get out of the bag I’d tied securely with a bit of twine. It was a small one, just a baby, I’d found that morning under the wooden benches by the public pool fed by the sulfur springs. I always took my bath early, before the lepers arrived for theirs. After that the women from the village crowded the place, at least the ones who weren’t working for the ashram down the road. Those women bathed after work and they most positively needed it, having carried baskets of dirt and rocks for the new temple all day. I liked to have the place to myself. Even though I was tall, my back was a little crooked and when the girls looked at it, I knew they mocked. I used to dive under water and stay as long as I could hold my breath. Their giggles were very childish. I didn’t ever want to have one of them for a wife. Now that I had a job at the ashram tending the snakes I had money and the silly women were sniffing around, flirting and making sly hints. I was not fooled.

I wished we could bathe in the river close by the village. But the ashram manager diverted the river to the ashram’s wells so the hordes of Westerners flocking to the guru could have showers and flush toilets. My mother said they were like locusts, eating snacks all day under the palms in the courtyard, drinking tea and swallowing salts because they sweated so much. They had so much money they could do what they liked. They adored the guru and he took their money to make them happy and enlightened. It was not surprising that I wished to be born under a luckier star than the poor, dim one that saw me emerge, without a father to guide me, in a village of jud, thick brained people. It was not hard to see that many of the Westerners were jud too, but with money you could get away with a lot

The grasses by the river were shriveled and brown. It was too shallow for me to lie in them and watch the women’s red and green saris fly like flags in the breeze. We had to go a mile upstream for cooking water. We were like the ravens sitting above us in the pipal trees, always on the look out for food. My hair was clean, black and shiny like their wings. I wished I had a beak to peck some of my neighbors. Ma said she was surprised I hadn’t cut the inside of my mouth. She liked my sharp tongue. Now I had my snakes too.

I heard the whistle of the commuter train. Bombay was an hour distant. I thought Indira Ghandi lived there and I would have liked to see her. Before the train it took three hours by car to reach the city. Since the train, our village had a name, Bahir Lal, printed on the station a year ago, in 1985. I could read it. A woman at the ashram, Sally, was teaching me English. She started hanging around my snake room during the Festival of Lights, Diwali, bringing me sweets from the feasts. I let her in because she was beautiful and I liked sweets, especially, ladoos. She said she was my friend. I didn’t know what she wanted. I liked to look at her. She was pale and fat, like a full moon, a charm for prosperity.

The station was empty, the train pulling away, loaded, people hanging out of the doorways and crowded on the roof. One fellow threw his clay tea cup onto the rails where it joined the hundreds of others crumbling there.

Only the chai wallah stood by his stand next to the stationmaster’s office. I showed him the snake. It was not poisonous. He let it curl around his finger and said a prayer to the snake god, naga baba, for prosperity. He was a good fellow. He had recently taken me to a cobra burrow near his home. I found a small male there and put it in the cage with the others at the ashram. He gave me a second cup of tea with lots of sugar and told me for the tenth time about the cobra that bit him when he was a boy. It couldn’t have been a cobra because he’d be dead but I humored him. The spices in his tea were just to my liking, not too much cardamom. He thought I could sell the venom to a laboratory that makes anti-venom in Bombay. His brother-in-law’s brother knew of one near the Victoria Arch. It was a good thought now I could read.

I had seen the effect of a real cobra bite. My friend, Arun, such bad karma, dying, screaming in pain, as his leg swelled up, turned black, split. Then death rose to his heart, leaving a bloody trail, raising a stink like dog droppings. When I caught the cobras now I told them they died for Arun.

Around noon, it was my job at the ashram to wheel the cobra’s gilded cages to the front of the goddess temple. The guru would slide the top off the cobras’ cages and watch as they reared up. He stared into their eyes, commanding them, then sang mantras until they swayed, hypnotized, and were willing to be picked up. The Westerners gathered around, catching their breath and hiding their eyes. A woman fainted last week. It was a very good show.

Cobras were sacred to the gods and king cobras were a symbol of the ruler. I milked the snakes once a week so they had little venom to hurt the guru. Nobody knew that. They all thought I just caught rats and mice to feed them. I did. That was easy compared to milking them. I learned from the mongoose. She was fast, biting the snake’s throat before it could get to her. I just held the fangs against a cloth covered glass, pressing down until there wasn’t any more milky venom coming out. I clasped their wriggling bodies under my arm until I dropped them straight down into the cage. That was always a tricky moment but, so far, falling had distracted them from trying to bite me. I had been bitten a few times but it never amounted to much trouble because I had so much anti venom in my blood. I was like the horses in the labs they inject venom into and then collect their blood for anti- venom. There was an old bottle of anti-venom in the small freezer in the snake room. If I am to have a business, I would have to find a way to get the venom I collected to Bombay without spoiling. Ice would melt and I didn’t have proper containers yet.

The guru, an old man with silver hair hanging down his back, was bitten once, nothing serious. I had just milked the snake. He said meditation and pure thoughts made him stronger than poison. Everyone sighed, longing for his spiritual strength. It was Malti who bit him. She was usually so stuffed with mice she was sluggish. But she was a big, bad tempered cobra and unpredictable. One of the men watching kissed the guru’s feet. The guru had a sore on his foot and another one on his neck and had begun to wear high collars. He was clean and didn’t smell like an old person. He patted my shoulder and gave me gifts, pieces of fruit and once, sari cloth for Ma.

I got to the snake room behind the gate guard’s billet early. The door was always locked. I was the only one who had keys except the manager. The snakes weren’t due at the temple until noon.

Sally was waiting for me. She sat on the bench in the shade of the firethorn bushes. Her skin was so pale and her hair so yellow, like the sun, it made my eyes hurt to look at her. She was taller than me and wonderfully fat. The fat part made my member swell. I turned to adjust my clothes.

“Your mustache is different.” She said whatever she pleased and went wherever she pleased. She was rude but I liked her anyway, especially since she brought me magazines with news of the world. My English was very fine and she said I was a fast learner.

I didn’t answer her. She was alone at the ashram. Her mother had gone to work for the guru in his London ashram. Sally was sixteen and she liked snakes. I let her teach me to read English so I could look at her beautiful self and watch her red lips slide over her perfect white teeth.

I kept the snake room very clean, the cages too. I made Sally sit on a stool in the corner unless she brought me crickets for Malti. Crickets were sweet and snakes liked them.

Malti was awake even though I had given her a big rat the night before. She watched me with hungry yellow eyes, sniffing the air with her black forked tongue. I thought she really might be pregnant from the small male, who had been eaten for his trouble. After that, I kept her in a cage by herself.

I emptied the little brown snake into Malti’s cage. She watched it try to slither under a rock. Her eyes glittered as she slid forward slowly, intent, hunting. She reared up, spread her hood, its dark swirl-like eye pattern mesmerizing, swaying, light dancing on her scales, diving and biting the brown snake’s back. She laid her head down, sniffed with her tongue, unhinged her jaw and gently took the head of the brown snake to her lips and began to swallow.

“That’s how big the guru’s thing is. His penis. Like that. Like the brown one,” Sally said, speaking from behind her hand.

I took her arm, so soft. “No. No. This is not what we are telling here.”

“Ok! Ok! Never mind.” She looked scared. “Do you want me to go?”

“No. But I want never to hear those words.” I was angry. “Why have you told me this?”

Her face was pinched. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. I’m scared. I don’t want to go to the guru again. I don’t care if it’s a tantric goddess thing he’s got going. I hate his table and his penis, but he is the guru and I can’t say no. Can I?”

It was all too much for me. His table? A goddess ritual? The old guru was with this beautiful woman who brushed her body against mine when we looked at the snakes?
“Sit down. Let me think.”

The guru was squeezing her fatness. I couldn’t picture it. Jealousy rose up in me like a snake, biting my insides. This must be a story. But no, she was crying. What to do?? Nothing to do. She was his to command. As I was. She had ruined my thoughts that life was sweet. No, the guru had ruined my thoughts.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I am troubled. Let me think.”

“Do you hate me now? If you don’t believe me see for yourself. Watch tonight. He came to the woman’s dorm this morning and gave my friend, Barbara, from Chicago, a beautiful gold bracelet. She will be called tonight.

She took my hand. How could I resist. The ashram was so quiet you could hear the magpies preening their wings in the leafy shade. The sun was very hot. We crossed the marble tiles in front of the meditation hall keeping to the shadowed edge of the colonnade. She led me to the back of the administration building. There was a window there but she showed me how it was really a very clever door that opened into a closed corridor. We went in and she showed me an alcove. “Come here tonight after the chant, if you dare. ‘

“To be sure!”

”You’ll see.” Her look measured me. She shrugged her shoulders and pointed to the door opposite the alcove. “It all happens in there on a special table the guru had the carpenter build. He stands up to….”

“No, no, I don’t want to hear. I will see for myself.”

She kissed my cheek. “I know you will help me.”

I did not know this.
*
I sought out my uncle, the shoe wallah, who had been at the ashram for many years. He was standing behind the rope that kept people from getting their own shoes from the enclosure. No one walked in the ashram in shoes. Sticks of incense in buckets of sand made the air fresh.

When I told him my problem, he shook his head. “Oh, God, no! No, no! Oh, God, no. All this rumoring is true, but you must not be getting involved. The guru makes the rules and breaks them too.” It was his best advice. He took my arm. “No snooping, no fat, beautiful woman, no losing your job.” He refused to let go of my arm until I promised to leave off being a hero. “That is what the gods are for. No?”

All day long I asked myself, do I dare? The guru’s power would crush me like a bug if I was caught. But Sally had to see me as a strong man. I was a strong man. I had so many feelings that my strength was eaten away, my courage wavering. This was worse than marrying a girl from the village, who would just ask for my wages.
*

I couldn’t help myself. I had to know. An owl hooted in the night. It was a very bad omen that almost made me turn back to the village. The shadows cast by the moon were long and deep, the palm fronds swaying, black, trembling in the cool breeze. I skirted the buildings, carrying my mouse traps in case someone challenged me. I could hear the dishwashers clanging pots in the dishroom in the dining pavilion. I avoided the light streaming from the back door of the kitchen. Most people were in the snack bar for coffee and sweets. No one was about as I slipped into the window/door in the back of the administration building. I went to that alcove, fitting myself next to the chairs stored there and watched. When the chant ended a light appeared at the outside door. The guru entered, leaving his body guards outside. He had Sally’s friend by the wrist. She was weeping and trying to give back the gold bracelet. They stopped in front of the alcove curtain, his old feet next to her pale ones.

“You are a goddess, dear one. Great grace will come to you and all your family when my member rests in your sacred place.” The guru opened the door opposite my alcove and I smelled incense, saw flowers and a table draped with a gold cloth. “Take your clothes off and lie on that table,” he commanded. Then the door closed.

I wanted to push the door to that room open and punch the guru hard. Thinking of him doing things to that poor girl hit my stomach with feelings I had never had and did not like for one minute. How could he use Sally’s body like that too? He was a monk who had promised to give up women. She trusted him. Even the snake just ate its prey without promising anything.

I was shaking with rage, and embarrassingly, desire. What kind of man was I? Was this what the snake felt when it paralyzed its victims? I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. I had to wait until the guru and the girl were finished because the two guards were outside the building. At last the door opened and I heard the guru warn the girl to tell no one. Then the guards took her back to her dorm. They teased her, calling her a real ashram princess.
*

When I finally got away from that place, the night was chilly and the moon was high, casting long shadows. As I walked, I burned with anger.

Ma had left me snacks. The tea was cold but the crisps were salty. I could not sleep so I sorted through the bits of newspaper, magazine and book fragments Ma scrounged off the ashram trash dump. She went there every day with the old women and children to pick through the mountain of things the Westerners had left behind. Medicines, half empty tubes of ointments, sunblock, toothpaste, broken backpacks, cassettes, soiled clothes that were as good as new when they were washed, and, sometimes, toys. The best finds were broken gold chains. I asked her to find bottles with tops I could use for the venom business.

I looked at a Life magazine article about new diseases. It listed the signs of AIDS, a new disease, as if there weren’t enough in this sorry world. I studied the stained pictures of sores that looked like the ones the guru was hiding behind his collars. This was too much. The sores, signs of deadly infection, were pictured in an old Newsweek also. Sexy business was giving this sickness to people. Did the guru know he was giving this infection to these beautiful girls? Of course he must know. He was always talking, talking about consciousness. This knowledge made me sick. Surely someone else knew of this. Maybe meditation was making them soft and blind. I wouldn’t be soft or blind. I took the pictures of the guru Ma had placed near her shrine and tore them into shreds. I took them outside and pissed on them.
*

The next day didn’t go too well. My head was in a turmoil. First off, I didn’t lock the door to the snake room. When I returned from emptying my rat traps, Sally was standing by Malti’s cage. I kept that bad tempered snake by herself since she was eating the other snakes. Sally had her hand inside the glass, dangling a cricket that wiggled, struggling to get away. Malti was stirring, lifting her head out of a tight coil, flicking her tongue to get Sally’s smell, eyes focused on the bug.

“Oh, my god! What are you thinking?” I pushed her away. “Are you wanting to die?”

I shook her and her eyes came back from a very distant place to focus on me.

“Sometimes, yes! I think about it. So what?” She glared at me. But her lip was trembling and that meant that tears would soon follow.

Oh my god, my quiet life had flown away. I dropped two crickets into Malti’s cage and replaced the cover. Sally watched me, twisting the guru’s damned bracelet tight as if screwing it into her flesh. I made her sit and drink some tea. What was I going to do with this crazy beautiful woman?

I told Sally I believed her. I insisted she must contact her mother about the danger the guru was putting her in.

“She won’t believe me. The guru is her saint. I can’t tell anyone or I will get in trouble.”

“Am I no one?”

“You are my friend,” she said.

“OK,” I said. “But you must leave this place.” I told her I would take her to Bombay on the train and she could go to the American Embassy. When she had calmed down and thanked me with a sweet kiss, I asked her if she had seen the sores.

“No. I keep my eyes closed when I am with the guru.” She cried. Her beautiful eyes grew red and her pale skin spotted like a bruised rose.

Oh, my god! I must take care of her. I fetched more tea. I was angry at her mother. What kind of a mother would leave her daughter in a far away country while she traveled? Sadly, she trusted the guru, poor woman. I had stopped trusting him when his manager moved the river away from my village. Now I was clear what I must do.

“Sally, you must meet me at the station tomorrow and we will take the morning train out of here. I will think of something to tell Ma. I will get my friend to move the snakes that day. No one will miss me.”

“I can’t go. I don’t have my passport. It’s in the travel office.”

“Never mind that. You are American. Yes? You go to your embassy and they will take care of you.”

“They have to. Don’t they?” She took my hand. “This is our secret.” Her hand was shaking.
“Yes. It is our secret."

When she left I got busy feeding the other snakes so I didn’t have to wonder what would become of me because of my rash acts. In the cage by herself Malti had built a nest so I guessed maybe twenty or more eggs would soon come. She was ravenous. I would keep the baby snakes and milk them for money. While I was in Bombay I would go to Victoria Arch and meet these research people the tea wallah had told me about. Maybe they could hire me to bring them venom and show me how to pack it for the trip to town. I could keep Malti’s babies and quit my job at the ashram. I could make more money.
*

The day went by very quickly for me, filled as I was with worry and excitement. Next morning, when I got to the station it was jammed with people shoving to get near the front of the platform. The chai wallah told me his brother-in-law worked in a dry goods shop two streets from Victoria Station in Bombay. He assured me the shop was easy to find and his relative would help me locate the laboratory for selling venom. I had a tea and heard the whistle of the train. Where was Sally? I ran outside to see if she was coming down the road. I had paid a burly fellow to push for us to a place in the second class carriage. The train stopped, steam hissing, water dripping from the wheels onto the track. The conductor blew his whistle. The fellow hopped on board and kept my rupees. No Sally. This made me very angry. I stood with my fists clenched for many minutes in the silence of the platform. She didn’t want to be free. She didn’t care enough about me to take a chance. She let me take all the chances. All her softness was wrapped around an empty place, like a bun without a filling.

Then, it occurred to me she might be a prisoner. Perhaps she had told someone about our plan. I hurried back to the ashram. It was quiet. The gate guard greeted me as always with a curt nod and a dark jet of paan, tobacco juice, into the bushes. I did my rat rounds. No one paid any attention to me. When the little kid, Hari, arrived I told him to only push Malti’s cage to the temple.

“Do not take the cover off Malti’s cage whatever you do. She is just looking for someone to bite.”

Then I went to hide in the bushes by the side of the temple, a good spot to watch the guru’s show with a very bad-tempered Malti.

A crowd was gathering in front of the goddess temple, the women’s silk saris blowing like hibiscus flowers in the breeze, everyone waiting for the guru to come and charm the snakes. I watched Sally join the group. She stood near my hiding place, gnawing her fingernails. She had another gold bracelet on her wrist. When the guru approached she shrank back behind an old woman in a purple sari.

I wanted to shout at her and at the same time I wanted to take her in my arms and make her stop chewing her fingers. Instead, I watched Malti, who was swaying, eyeing the crowd with a cold, baleful stare. I poured all my hatred of the guru into her powerful body, feeling it fill her, pushing out against her gleaming black scales. I prayed his arrogant smile would soon drop from his face.

He pushed the lid off her cage. He was carefree, intent on controlling the snake, demonstrating his power, his eyes bright, excited by the challenge, playing with the onlookers’ fear. He raised his hands palm upward as if to pray.

Malti swayed in the jerky way she did when she was hungry. I hadn’t fed her for days. Her black tongue tasted the guru. She lifted higher, arched her back, spread her hood, its swirling eyes staring out at the gasping crowd.

The guru smiled and chanted a special mantra to the goddess.

Malti shot out like an arrow, digging her fangs into the guru’s eye. She pulled back to watch her prey as people ran and screamed.

Sally stared, rooted to the spot.

The guru dropped to his knees, screaming in pain, clawing at his face.

His attendants were panic stricken, one wringing his hands, another pushing the wrong buttons on his walkie-talkie, another jabbering and running to get the manager.

Two women attempted to lift the guru. But he snarled in pain and fell back into the dust.

I ran forward and grabbed Sally’s hand. She pulled away from me and stepped in front of the guru, pulling the bracelets off her arm and flinging them at his twisted face. She lifted her face to mine and her eyes shone.

I heard someone shouting for me. Sally and I turned away from the chaos. I grabbed Malti from behind and dropped her into a burlap bag where a mouse was waiting for her. We ran toward the station and with any luck my friend the chai wallah would hide us until the afternoon train. I hadn’t milked Malti in days and her poison would be strong and plentiful in the guru’s body. They would give him the anti-venom from the freezer, but I had exposed it to sunlight before putting it back into the cold. It wouldn’t work; the sunlight had made it inert, but innocent looking. He would take a long time to die and holiness wouldn’t help him one little bit.

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Bio

I am a writer and a visual artist, involved with creativity for thirty five years. I published a book, A Conscious Life in ’98 with Conari press. Two short stories have appeared in the Murder New York Style Anthology 1 & 11 respectively. Thank you for your consideration, Fran Cox