It was that time of the year — Diwali, or the festival of lights. The place where I used to stay in India, it was probably the most rowdy of all the festivals we like to celebrate. It was not that the festival has some inherent element of disruption to it — a sense of strangled chaos — it’s not really like that. From what I can tell, Diwali, like most festivals of the world, is a time of the year to celebrate life, a time to meet and spend with family — you know all that. But for the part of the country I lived in, the blackened swarths of the northern plains, it is a time for men to let loose, to let go of all the vexation that life and work afforded them, and for one day, nay, for one night — at least one night — become a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But suffice to say that even such men are aberrations. I mean what can you expect from men who toil year long to make ends meet, who work tirelessly in the fields or the construction sites pillaging rocks for a living? For these men, this Diwali night, beyond which lies the sterility of unending labor, there is no threat of reproach. Even wives who are regularly beaten up by their morbid husbands accept them to come home drunk, having gambled away the money, and force themselves on them while the children fidget in the dark. Not that their souls are not crushed each night lying next to their men, but on Diwali night, even they let the men turn into ungodly creatures of a severed planet. At least that way they won’t hurt anyone else.

But this was not to be my story because — as you will see — I was to get hurt.

For six years on Diwali evenings, I had witnessed my uncle drink on the portico while my aunt would sweep the courtyard, build a mud stove that would last just the one night, get some coal as a festive takeaway from the family where she worked as a domestic help — and cook littis and lamb curry for her husband and his friends. Tonight, she would also light a few diyas to supplement the pyre that would burn in my heart later that night.

To be sure, let me tell you why I lived with them. My mother had died while giving birth to me, because my father couldn’t afford to take her to a hospital. Considering I weighed a stone more than other malnourished kids that regularly crop up year round in my region, I would simply not sneak out of her cuddly womb. Maybe I knew about the hell that awaited me if I were to come out eventually, and for that reason decided to breathe my last in the snug surroundings of my mother’s insides. As it turned out, it was she who would breathe her last.

So my father, already a man broken down with the drudgery of poverty, was now without the one person that had allowed him to dream. My aunt, on the best of her days, would tell me stories of their courtship, of how my father — then a boy — would leave mangoes he had stolen from the orchards with my mother’s possessions in the fields. My father had once even taken a loan from a village strongman to help my mother escape her alcoholic father, and was promptly beaten up when the strongman turned out to be my grandfather’s cousin. It was a love affair of some fanfare when their marriage was attended by no less than three of the region’s best hunters, and this union had been earmarked to bring great fortune to the child of their love. But it did nothing of the sort.

Instead, my mother died while giving birth to me and my father, like my mother’s father before him, turned into a dreaded alcoholic. I was still only two years old when he beat me up so hard that a bone in my hand broke — as the coldness of the winter night gripped me with inexplicable pain, he watched me with eyes of resentment. I was only two, but I still remember his reddened, ferocious eyes, poising himself to break all the other bones in my body. But perhaps the ghost of my mother visited him that night and put him to sleep when he would otherwise go out and still beg for some more palm wine, and somehow I managed to survive. It wouldn’t be the same for him though, as three years later, the drinking caught up with him, and his bloated body was found floating in a local pond by some fishermen.

That’s how, when I was five, I came to live with my mother’s sister and her husband. For a while, it had seemed that this was a boon of some sort, as my childless aunt showered me with the love she had kept reserved for her children. At the time, my uncle was still working in the city and so the first year I hardly saw him. But then he met with an accident when his contractor made him hang from a roof-top without a safety harness and he fell head-long into the heap of dirt below him. He survived miraculously, but his legs were gone. Without paying him a penny for his broken limbs, he was swiftly sent back to the village, where he turned into a demonic drinker vaguely reminiscent of my family’s followed curse.

Which brings me back to that blighted Diwali night. I watched my uncle and three of his friends assemble on the portico with several bottles of palm wine. My aunt was still preparing the lamb curry because that’s how my uncle liked it — hot and dished out in small servings as he drank his brains out. All this while, my aunt, who had initially loved me like a lost son, began treating me with a disdain that sprang from her inability to give birth herself. I, a child, became the object of her childless bitterness. That night, she just left me to my own devices, and hungry though I was, I could not summon the courage to run to the courtyard and ask her for some littis, lest I be caught up in the drunken nastiness of my uncle, and become an object for his friends’ amusement.

They must have drank till one or two in the morning, because I remember falling asleep in the small parlor that was adjacent to the courtyard. There was no use for this room, except when some local bootleggers would need a space to safeguard their stolen goods, and my uncle would provide them with it to get whatever little money he could in return. When nothing was being stored here, as it was on that night, I would slip inside and lie on the cold mud floor, thinking of how beautiful it would be had my mother been lying next to me.

I remember being woken up by the heavy thuds of someone’s footsteps. Still sleepy, I watched my uncle move around in circles and ramble incoherently in the courtyard through a crack in the parlor door. It was late, because the moon was visible at an angle through the foliage of the peepul tree where my aunt had set up the one-night stove. The stove itself had been quashed into fine mud by now — I assume by my uncle and his friends — but I could see a few littis left by my aunt — presumably for me. I was waiting for my uncle to finish his mid-night drunken ritual and go inside so that I could have some of the food, but he would simply not cease from channeling whatever it was that had possessed him that night.

At one moment, despite my best attempt to duck, he caught me leering at the food. He went tentatively towards the peepul, picked up two littis in his hand, and made way towards the parlor. For some reason, even though I knew he was bringing the food to me, a sense of impending doom shackled me into temporary paralysis. I could not move, and even when his thinned-out drunk frame stood right in front of me blocking everything I could see, I could not for the life of me make my limbs follow my mind’s commands.

Now let me tell you something about my uncle, or at least what I thought of him before that night. Although he was not far removed from the scores of half-dead men who had been impaired and had thus lost any chance at self-sustenance; although he had turned to drinking like it was a wormhole into some other, more glorious existence; although he would beat up his wife when she would talk back at him while he was in a drunken stupor; and although I — myself — had been at the receiving end of his sometimes frenzied hits with his wooden stick, he had never laid his hands on me in a manner suggestive of some other — more depraved — predilection.

In short, I didn’t think he was in any way a pervert — until that night.

I couldn’t move as he stood before me, bent slightly backwards. The dislocation in his limbs gave him an awkward — even funny — gait, and as I watched him uneasily, a demented frown broke on his lips. He turned, moved towards the door, and whimpered it shut. I was shaking like an autumn leaf by now.

He came back and spread out his left palm. He took one of the littis and quashed it on the palm and put it on a banana leaf he found in the parlor. He added some curry and mixed it with the tip of his finger and gave it to me.

“That’s how you like it, no?”

My hunger had vanished. All I wanted to do was to go and lie next to my aunt, as loveless as that simple act of intimacy had become. I told my uncle as much.

“Why do you want to bother your aunt? She is tired and sleeping. You eat what I am giving you,” he said.

“I am not hungry, uncle.”

“You haven’t eaten anything, have you? Now a child like you, there’s much you can do. You will grow up and become a strong man, not like your disabled uncle. But you must eat.”

I took the banana leaf and set it on the floor.

“I will eat, uncle, you can go.”

“No,” he said, “I want to watch you eat.”

So I ate. I ate like I had never eaten before. All I wanted to do was finish the spread and escape out of this parlor. The impending sense of doom which had paralyzed me earlier was now giving way to outright fear — I was in full-flight mode. I would have ran through the door and into the fields that night never to see this man’s face again, but I could not reach the lock on the door, so I put all my fleeing instincts into finishing the food that was in front of me.

“You like it,” he asked. I nodded.

“Uncle, I need to wash my hands,” I said as I got up after finishing the food in silence, all the while feeling his eyes on me. “Please open the door.”

“Why, don’t you want to sleep?”

“I do, but I need to wash my hands first.”

“Just use a banana leaf. See, there are so many of them here. Then we can both lie down here only. You always sleep with your aunt, you must sleep with me too.”

Risking the anger of my uncle, and the subsequent beating I would almost certainly receive, I dashed for the door and began banging on it. But somehow, this man, who had until yesterday not possessed the power even to carry out the simplest house chores, had suddenly summoned superhuman strength from some unknown corner of his dark being. Even as I continued to bang on the door with the faintest hope that my aunt would come to my rescue, he held me back from behind and pulled me with so much vehemence that I soon found myself spread-eagled on the floor.

What happened during the next half hour keeps me awake at night even today, twenty years after the incident. My uncle, the drunkard, the disabled middle-aged man of lost causes, had me pinned to the floor as he tore my pants with a fiendish pleasure. He was possessed — yes, that man was acting on an impulse that has forever wrecked my faith in anything remotely human. I began to scream, which is when he took the remnant of my pants and thrust into my mouth, leaving me gasping for air. I remember a slithery creature that reared its face from my uncle’s body. It was dark, this creature, and it moved like a snake which had been trapped for an echelon — it was the Devil himself.

I must have passed out at that moment with the pain and asphyxiation because the next memory I have is not even a memory, but a shard of broken nightmare. The smell of blood, banana leaves and lamb curry filled the air in that godforsaken parlor. My cheeks felt the coldness of the mud floor as I saw my uncle’s walking stick, not unlike his gait, leaning at at awkward angle from the corner of my eyes. The stomping was so intense it shattered my insides.

And then the words: “That’s how you like it, no?”