“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One

He had quite a few sketches of the Shrine back home. He made them himself. His mind had never quite left the place and spilled on to copies worth of paper which spilled on to batches worth of scrap in waste paper basket. He carried this place with it wherever he went like a rotten skeleton in a briefcase. Today the skeleton ripped its way out and began dancing on its toes.

With every step, he felt his heart try to claw its way out of his ribs like a caged beast, tugging at his thoughts like an obstinate mule refusing to carry its load. His age was about as much on his side as the dense, creeping, smothering fog burning in his nose as he tried to breathe in. He felt his way through the trees down a familiar dreaded path he had hoped never to retrace his way through. This far out in the wilderness one can’t help but feel like a bait waiting to serve hidden hungry eyes silent, ever watchful, feasting on the sight of the intruder and prancing around the edge of his perceptions, tainting and gnawing at his senses, watching him stiffen from fear and basking in his apprehension.

When Ranjeet Acharya was made the Deputy Commisioner in Mumbai, his boss, the commissioner, while jovially clanking the wine glass with him told him stories. Exciting tales of notorious criminals. Stories of bravery. Stories about dealing with casualities. Career ending injuries. Deaths of comrades.

“Occupational hazard”. Said the older man.

There was one implicit aspect about the career both men knew and it was fear. The fear of all the agony.

“You keep yourself shrouded in its folds for long enough and you get used to it.” Said the commissioner. “But even the wisest of grips shake, and the truest of aims quiver.”

Sometimes not even years’ worth of sights, smells and encounters can make to and overshadow the burning self-inflicted gashes of sins. He felt them beckoning him as he trod, one small step at a time towards the Shrine. Amplifying pulses of dread weighed his every movement as he edged towards it, while he trembled eyeing the strange moss laden edifice of limestone. About ten steps away from the entrance, he heard an agonizingly familiar music of anklets of a woman running. He chose to disbelieve himself and shut his eyes ignoring the unwanted tears that drenched his contorted face. He could swear there was a laughter over that noise. I laughter of a woman he spent years willing his mind to forget.

“Focus…” He muttered.

Two

Ranjeet’s son Manmeet had been missing for a week and was last sighted by a brothels in a town by a lake nearby.

Worse, Manmeet was an obvious murder suspect. A gruesome dismembering of a prostitute with a butcher’s knife. Her body was found in one of the hotel rooms in halves and halves of halves with severed pieces where nailed to a wall, geometrically arranged in a vast, strange concentric circle. The ten toes and ten fingers marking the outermost periphery with bits and pieces of messily cut up arms and legs inside, followed by another complete circles made by folded intestines leading to the lungs with the severed head nailed to the wall by the forehead in the center. It was not as neatly done as one might think. It was horribly out of proportion, more a set of enclosed connected longitudinal waves than circles. Manish was seen by locals running into the woods with what appeared to be a still beating heart, which was the only thing said to be missing from the butchered corpse.

“Occupational hazard,” said one of the sex workers back at the brothel “One in a while you meet a girl and sooner or later you find her dead. Choked to death. Poisoned. Or sometimes they suffocate under their customers. Or this.” She swore under her breath.

We are nothing but vile refuse of the gods, left here for them to point and mock as we toil and bleed under their torment, one lifetime after another. As man, and as beast. We are nothing but a sick celestial joke sent for nothing but to live and live again with earnest tongues up less than fragrant arses of the jesters.

Ranjeet’s subordinates did all the talking, letting the commissioner sit back and let it all sink in. Their furtive glances at a mourning father went unnoticed. To Ranjeet, all sound was reduced to the buzz of flies hovering towards putrefaction. The world was a cruel haze of yellow and the stench of semen and rot. All he could then see was his son when the latter was a kid, barely thirteen. The Sickly and socially awkward sort. Frail and meek.

Three

One night Ranjeet came back from work having braved daylong onslaught by the press over a missing young husband accused of starving his wife to death leaving her locked up in the attic for over a month. He was still haunted by the look on his son’s face as he walked in on him. In one hand the boy held a picture of his beautiful dead mother. His other hand fidgeted and worked elsewhere. The boy glared into the picture, far too engrossed in his momentary elation as his left hand worked furiously, while his dead mother blissfully ignored him, still living inside that picture, contemplative, serene and awash by sunlight through a window. Ranjeet had spent the rest of his life trying to forget what the other hand did and what it made him do afterwards.

Then the young boy lay curled up in that bed as his father chastised him with his leather belt, one lash at a time with eyes burning holes through all the screaming and the pleading that tore asunder the damp monsoon air. The father was too blinded by rage to see the veins popping on the boy’s throat that vividly appeared in the light of the lightning laden sky outside the window as the boy screamed still holding on to the moistened picture of his mother. In his mind, all that rang was a taunting laughter, a spiteful laughter of ridicule. The laughter resonated through the empty spaces in what was left of his soul and drilled holes through time itself and haunted him here and today as he edged towards where he last heard it. Towards the accursed Shrine. A part of him willed it to go on flogging his soul like it had been for the last twenty two years.

And that part was in a sick twisted way happy to see him back here today, circling the wide open space around the moss laden Shrine. The much fabled resting place of a lunatic priest who worshipped forgotten darker gods through mutilation and sadism. He and his devout band of followers terrorized nearby villages with murder and vandalism.

Helpless villagers would sit back silently behind locked doors trembling, and praying for their locked doors not to be the ones the lunatics choose to burn down. They’d hide their children under straw beds, in barns and come back to find them in ashes or frothing in the mouth from unexpected snakebites. Croplands would be burnt down alongside protesters. There would be no negotiation, nothing they would take but this. They would feed on the blood of the weak slowly enough to inhale their shallow breaths from squirming in fear. They would savour it and poke firecrackers through bleeding nostrils.

It wasn’t before the British Raj did the terror be met with, and it was met with swift and brutal precision. Twenty three disciples of the mad priest were chased down to this shrine and shot down as they resisted with stones killing quite a few Englishmen and blinding more.

According to lore, the priest eagerly awaited the Englishmen as they walked in to the Shrine and slit his own throat before they could take him.

According to lore, the face of the priest was always contorted in a silent laughter, his eyes always wide as if all he could see was monstrosity. They said his laughter was not out of humor but mere submission to his betrayed senses.

Children in the nearby villages were warned from ever coming here. There were numerous reports of a hairy naked man dancing on nights of the full moon once in a while and flinging excrement at passers by cursing in Sanskrit. An official search was never carried out. The first sighting was sometime in 1972 . The next around 1985 and the one after it in 1998.

“It’s 2011.” Said the village constable “There is a 13 year gap between every sighting. The reality horror shows will get a kick out of him being seen again.”

He laughed at the frowning Ranjeet.

Village elders would be terrified.

“It is obviously the wandering earthbound soul of the mad priest.” A villager croaked when inquired “ A soul as lost as a mind.”

“Occupational hazard.” A deputy told Ranjeet. “When you are in charge of a village, you have to spend much of your hours humoring closed minds riddled and encaged within folklore and mythology.”

Four

Ranjeet took it all in with a knot in his throat. Eyes would flicker onto the dark woods to the East with the Shrine somewhere in the heart of the forest, beating, pulsating, filling it with an ever consuming darkness that Ranjeet had once ventured into in his younger days. He came back haunted, with a piece of his soul gone the cockroach swarm color of the Mumbai night sky, a part of him dead and rigor mortified. And so much more was lost. As winds rustled leaves of that forest he heard familiar sounds of an anklet again beckoning him to the depths of his personal hell.

It was some minutes past 5 AM. He snuck out of the motel to get here, dreading what his instincts told him. It deepened as a familiar voice rang from within the dark interior of the shrine.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore….”

Ranjeet kept a wary distance from the entrance glaring apprehensively into the darkness. He flung the flashlight’s rays into the entrance, and in a trembling voice called out to his son.

“While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door….” Came as a reply

“Manmeet..” cried the father “Come out here right now.” His attempt at sounding stern had failed horribly.

“`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door –“ Manmeet went on

“Only this, and nothing more.’ “

Ranjeet walked forth into through the gate to the shrine, his gun pointed with the flashlight. Darkness hung like a cloud within the interior, overwhelming and claustrophobic. Ranjeet flung the flashlight rays through cobwebs wildly onto the walls, brown from a layer of dirt. He swung The cone of light madly till it landed on a bloody heap of brown flesh, a pair of eyes. A pair of scornful eyes he spent years of his life willing himself to forget but it was always there in front of him, growing like a poison tree.

“A raven made a nest here.” Said the boy in a dull tone. Ranjeet’s eyes narrowed as he watched his son. Naked and covered in blood running from his mouth trickling down to his groin. His eyes were no more than grapefruits. The boy was blind. Fingers had been pushed up those sockets. The boy was on his knees and between his legs there was a pool of blood.

Ranjeet wailed and covered his mouth. The castration had been clumsy and clearly self inflicted. The boy laughed weakly, wincing momentarily, clearly in agony.

“Who did this to you?” asked the trembling father on the verge of his tears.

“It flew away to gather food.” Said Manmeet. “While it was gone, I crushed the eggs. Because I wanted to see if it would weep.”

“Why” said the trembling father “did you do this….” Ranjeet knelt down onto the centre of the room, with his flashlight pointed at his son. He willed it to be a nightmare. The dark corners of the room swam before him and he heard the sound of anklets echoing all over.

“I have been here exactly forty one days, twenty three hours and forty two minutes. When I came here, I was lost.” Rambled Manmeet with blood spewing from his mouth “But are we ever truly found amidst our chaotic and wayward existences?”

Ocupational hazard of being a parent. Things were out of hand no matter how hard you tried. Children often bask in self destruction to rebel. To tip balance the weight of control in their favour just to see what it feels like. It kills a parent when such acts go overboard.

How would you have stood up to it when your own son was a fugitive, a murder suspect, and a ranting, auto-castrated lunatic. It was as good as death to watch him beyond repair. It feels a lot worse to leave the world with helpless children than to watch them go before you do.

“Isn’t a purpose truly over rated? Isn’t meaning nothing but mere pretense? A deception to console us In our darkest moments?” Said Manmeet weakly and laughed.

“Was it you Manmeet?” He asked his son, trembling all over. “Was it you who killed that girl?”

Manmeet went on, “I came here seeking answers.” He laughed again. “This place has a long memory. It stretches back to days before man came. Before this world itself was where it is.” The boy laughed.

“The walls have eyes and ears, father…”

“Let me take you home.” Said Ranjeet, trying to hoist himself off the cold stone floor. “No one needs to find this out.”

The boy vomited a pound of blood onto the floor and beckoned his father to sit back.

He cackled. “Answers have a price, I am merely paying mine in blood only because I was much too cowardly to exact it from others..”

“Why did you kill the girl?” asked Ranjeet.

“Because I was afraid.” Said the boy “To do it myself. To free myself of segregation, of form. So I would be nothing. So I would be everything. So I would shed my skin or my burdens of a label and immerse into cosmic chaos of absolute and intangibility.”

“Do you even know what you are saying?” growled Ranjeet “How could this happen, where did I go so horribly wrong?”

Ranjeet felt his trachea caving in as his son went on. “She must have been eleven. I was to be her first. She flinched when I took my trousers off, unlike those before her who would laugh. She was gentle, and sweet. Did whatever I asked except complying except when I handed her the knife and asked her to liberate me of my manhood. She cowered. Called me crazy. So I freed her. She was too gentle to die every day inside that shithole. I sacrificed her off the captivity she would endure, and left a message for you there..” the boy grinned “I knew you would see it.”

The symbology was a nudge at a case Ranjeet had spent nearly two years trying to crack. There was evidence tying it to an infamous sect of worshippers of Kali in Calcutta. Ranjeet had been forced to step down due to pressure from above. Ranjeet had come home drunk that night and flogged the intrusively curious boy for going through his evidence files

“I have been a terrible father Manmeet,” cried Ranjeet. “But is this how you punish me? By spitting at my ideals? Killing and mutilating? All these just to get back at me? You are better than that Manmeet, Oh Lord what have you done……?”

“You are no father of mine.” The boy growled.

Ranjeet stared back in shock. He knows, but how? His son may have been blind at the moment, but he knew Manmeet was relishing it.

“That’s why you killed mother didn’t you?” The boy went on.

“Because I wasn’t yours? You brought her here to this hogwash of a village in pretense of a trip. Choked her to death in the car.”

Her laughter rang in Ranjeet’s ears again. Manmeet’s weak, tortured laughter rang in unison. And Ranjeet sat down and began laughing along and crying just as he had when he had all those years ago inside this very shrine, far away from home where no one would ever know in pretense of a long road trip after she had one late night in a drunken stupor let him know all the things she let his greatest friend do to her in their own bed while he was away. She let him know how the tiger at the work came to her a mere, broken powerless lamb, how his real face was everything she never loved him for. He wasn’t half the man she was promised when her family married her off to him in expense of her education, her future, her dreams of going abroad and she was living with it. Coping with her emptiness looking for fulfilment elsewhere.

Five

She had laughed weakly and drunk in bed when telling him all this while he lay with his back turned to her with his insides gone cold. He packed her bags the next day, left her son at a day care and took her on a long drive. She was quiet and unquestioning as she came along, just as she always had for everyone around her, just as she was brought up to be, unquestioning despite silent reluctance in a land where it was a virtue for a woman to be powerless to refuse.

After several hours of driving they stopped, Ranjeet asked her to get out of the car. His eyes were on her and she slowly returned the gaze. She was rigid and remorseless, and so was he. Although for a fraction of a second he felt a glimmer of despair behind those hazel eyes, and he saw them again all these years later back inside the place where he strangled her to death, he saw her in her son’s eyes as he laughed and laughed. His body shuddered as he bled with minutes dripping off his wounds. Ranjeet came back to his senses and lunged forward, he had to find help, take Manmeet home. His insides churned.

He was all Ranjeet had left of her.

As he edged towards his son, he saw how everyday Manmeet’s eyes killed him every day because they were his mothers’. He would never forget the look in her eyes when he lay her on this very floor and quietly strangled her. How those eyes trembled with submission and stifled inner turbulence. They cursed him even in death. They tormented him every time he laid his eyes upon her son, silently wounding him just the way she did with her quiet resentment.

Before he was close enough, Manmeet flung out a blood stained butcher’s blade, the one he had clearly used to mutilate the young girl and himself. He still laughed as he pointed the Blade at Ranjeet.

“I came here looking for answers, and found voices which took me onto paths unbeaten, and when I came back the world was different..” said Manmeet “Live. Keep on living and accepting your collective confinement like inbred slaves…I forgive you, father. Your plight far overshadows your crimes. I forgive you.”

With that said, Manmeet drove the raised the blade and slit his own throat.