I Am an Executioner (8 page)

Only in retrospect do I realize that during all this uneventful interval, R. was required to perform little or no
writing
, and absolutely no dictation. It is also possible that I failed to notice further indications of eccentricity, for during that time my life was too full of distractions. Several months previously, a train had derailed at Maniyachchi, crushing some three dozens of people; and since that calamity, there were rumors of unannounced and random inspections at all the village stations. It some days caused me unbearable worry to be in charge of this station and this steam-powered juggernaut in which so many entrusted their lives. I was, after all, only twenty-four, and by nature susceptible to fretfulness and mental unease. Some days, I required Dhananjayan to reassure me four or five times in the space of an hour that he had thoroughly completed the “all-clear checklist for safe passage of trains through the station.” Consider that hundreds of people now passed through Rombachinnapattinam weekly. Strangers—at one time an occasional phenomenon—disembarked and entered our village every afternoon. (Our
town
, rather.) We were almost overnight connected with the whole of India. As much as I embraced progress, one sensed something unnatural about the arrangement. I had the ever-present and growing fear of disaster on my watch. And even as I worried over my small domain, people called on me through the day and into the evening, asking favors for themselves and their family members: discounted tickets, delayed departures, personal tours of the train. I was, indeed, a big man
in our town (better!), and it was an image I struggled to maintain. I did not care to disappoint my community.

I was to see the majority of that community at my engagement ceremony, mere weeks away, and in truth, this prospect caused me further strain, articulating itself as an unpleasant, simmering gurgle in my stomach and innards. What if I didn’t like the girl? What if she expected me to visit Madras and buy her saris, as I had seen some husbands doing, now that the train made such a journey conceivable? What if the girl demanded conversation and attention? I had resolved to impose strict limits on her behavior, but really, I hoped to have very little to do with her whatever, and that, like new household help, she would be the sole province and responsibility of my mother.

It was with all of these worries and pressures building up inside me and compounding themselves, and with my mind clouded in a kind of fog and gloom, that I thought to write again to my supervisor and formally request some days off, to give me time to attend to myself, to clear my mind and rest properly before and after my engagement ceremony.

Sufficient time had passed that R.’s previous lapse scarcely passed through my thoughts when I called to him to take down my words, and as per normal usage, I asked to review the document only after I had finished the dictation.

He put the paper in my hand and when I turned down to look at it, I felt something collapse inside me, as if a heavy stone had tumbled from a chamber in my heart, to land with a thud in my stomach. R. had not completed even one neat and elegant line when the page again became suddenly filled with the same … outrageous and unintelligible … the same inhuman scrawl and monstrous gibberish. Like a toddling child on his first day in classroom, I stared at the page and could make no sense of what I found there. How can I give you a picture? These were not the random markings of an animal or an imbecile, no; there seemed something purposeful about what he had
put down. It gave me pause. I fleetingly wondered: Were these dense markings a somehow accurate transcription of things I had unwittingly uttered? Did the garble on the page represent a garble that had come from my own mouth? Of course not, I quickly concluded. But what if the words were perfectly legible and English, and it was I who had turned idiot, and lost my ability to read them? On further study, I determined that this awful letter was written neither in English nor in any language. It was entirely inhuman, illogical, and unfamiliar, and it gave me a twisted feeling inside to look at it.

“R.!” I called, I bellowed. “R.!” I could scarcely speak. I only held the paper before me, hoping it might speak for itself.

He observed the letter meekly and in silence.

Finally, I was forced to ask, “What does it … what does it mean?”

“What does
what
mean, sir?”

Now I felt the first tickles of rage. This chap was taking me for a fool. I saw it clearly now: I was the butt of some elaborate joke. But I could not understand the joke, nor even articulate its scope and purpose, precisely, and this agitated me all the more. Certainly, whoever was behind this joke—whether R. himself, or some enemy I had unwittingly made here at the Railway, who was using R. as his agent, some secret inspector—whoever it was could not have found a more straight-faced jokester, for R. was not in the least perturbed by my alarm. The bold chap looked at me with a quizzical, altogether innocent expression.

“Don’t test my patience, R. Tell me, what is the meaning of this? What are you up to? What is going on? I will not be made a fool in my own office.” Now he took the offered paper from my hand and began to read it, calmly and with interest. After waiting some moments in silence, I asked, “Do you still not see what I am referring to?”

R. did not answer—he seemed lost in the perusal of his creation, as if those bizarre markings held some deep, engrossing
significance, and although he had written them, he was being edified by them anew.

“Come on, R.,” I said. “You can pretend that you are reading something there, but I won’t be duped.” But he still did not look up from the page. I laughed, and in my unsteady laughter I heard my own uncertainty and growing terror.

In the ensuing silence, I knew I should throw him out on his ear, but he seemed so transported with his letter that I admit I somehow hesitated to disturb his profound reverie! This moment of foolish hesitation had the benefit of rewarding me with the idea that I should really corroborate this insanity, to reassure myself that R.’s equanimity was indeed an act—that it was he who was behaving outrageously, and not my own perceptions that had been shattered.

I went to the window and called to Dhananjayan. When he came inside, I politely asked R. to show Dhanu the letter, and R.—finished, apparently, with his reading—obliged.

“Dhananjayan,” I asked, in the calmest, most agreeable tone I could muster, as if nothing at all were amiss, “would you please tell us what you think of this letter that R. has transcribed on my behalf?”

Dhanu looked at R. and at me, with a bemused expression. Then he raised the letter to his eyes. I could not see his face behind the paper, but from the small clearings of his throat and mutterings of interest, I imagined him squinting and perusing, eager, as I had been, to find some meaning in what was clearly meaningless. He took a great deal of time in the perusal, and I must say, I was on tenterhooks, frightened lest he might have found some explanation for the madness on that page, some meaning that was plainly there, but that I, from some fundamental defect of intelligence, was unable to see.

Finally, he returned the letter to my hand, and gazing now with assurance at R. and then at me, rocking his head with satisfaction, he offered the following analysis:

“It’s a fine letter. Very fine, sir.”

“Very fine?” I could only repeat, in a voice that sounded, to myself, small and distant.

A horror was creeping into my soul, for here was sure evidence that I was mad, or that my eyes had lost reliable function. How many other things, I wondered, held meaning for everyone in the world but for me? Was it because I had been pampered by my parents, sheltered all my life in this hamlet, that the incapacity was not brought to my attention sooner?

Only slowly did the explanation come to me, and lift, like the iron lid of a government well, the anxiety that rested heavily on my heart. Why, Dhananjayan was perfectly illiterate! Letters in written English were no more recognizable to him than letters written in language of birds. In my agitation, I had allowed myself to forget it: the boy had no idea whether he was looking at straight gibberish or the sonnets of Shakespeare!

So again, I had reason to twist him up by the ear. “Talking out of your nose, Dhanu, eh? How many times have I told you not to speak when you don’t know what you are speaking about? I should be rid of the both of you now, should I not?”

I released Dhanu’s ear and turned to R., reaffirmed now in my conviction that there was no option but to fire him, chuck him, blast him, discard him on the spot, cashier him, expel him, and expunge him. A secretary who could not take dictation, and moreover, pretended to take dictation while instead perpetrating outrageous crimes and wastages of ink and paper, could not and would not stand in my office.

“Dhananjayan’s appraisal notwithstanding,” I told R., “can you tell me why I should not dismiss you here and now?”

R. did not answer, nor did he seem in the least discomfited by my tirade, and in the again growing silence, I realized I did not have quite the “fire in my belly” to proceed. For courage, I drew closer to Dhananjayan, who stared at this unfolding scene, rubbing his tender ear, in perfect amazement. I patted Dhanu’s
shoulder—no hard feelings—and said, “I’ve scolded Dhanu in good fun, but I’m sure even he would make a better secretary than you, R. What do you say, Dhananjayan Rajesupriyan? What would you do were you in my position?”

Seeing now which way the wind was blowing, Dhanu did not hesitate to offer his opinion. “I would twist
his
ear and make him howl. I would. Then I would thrash him cent per cent, and leave him crying at his door. Shall I do it for you?” Dhanu picked up his broom and held it aloft in a threatening manner.

I restrained the boy with another tug to his ear. “Not your place, Dhanu,” I reminded him. Then I turned to R. “R., you hear what we have said. Now what do you have to say for yourself?”

But R. said nothing. Instead, this Bartleby (this who?) only stared into my eyes, neither angry nor afraid, neither defensive nor beseeching. He seemed to be still afloat in the calm of having written and then read his nonsensical pages. With peaceful indifference he looked at me, lacking the slightest residue of malice, or any trace of awareness of the misdeeds he had committed. In the face of R.’s overwhelming tranquility, my will began to waver. Perhaps, I thought, he had not acted deliberately after all, and his mishandling of my letter stemmed from some blind, inward compulsion. This inner defect prevented him from performing his duties, to be sure. But here was the picture of absolute innocence. It is inherently difficult to act harshly against innocent characters, and I still hesitated to say the words I was determined to say.

I found my mind searching for some reason to avoid having to turn him out into the hot afternoon. Again, I remembered his poverty, his pathetic appearance when I first met him, the poor mother he cared for. Would the credit I had earned by giving gainful employment to a needy Brahmin be lost if I let him go? Would it be seen as bad luck, or bad manners, to turn him out so soon before my engagement?

And there was also something else R. had told me, something else which suggested, perhaps, a painful affinity between us. “Myself being recently engaged for marriage,” he had told me, that first day we met, “being recently engaged, good sir, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

I could not, of course, assume that R. shared my own hideous passions. But here was someone, clearly, like me, set apart from the common lot. Here was someone who found the regular world a little bit … confounding. And while I had found a way to function in it (the common world)—found a way, in fact, to thrive—R., like an inverted version of myself, remained on the outside looking in.

It soon seemed to me that any one of these reasons counseled against dismissing R.—at least until I could help him to find some other means of supporting himself and his small family.

“R.,” I told him, speaking gently now, “this letter you transcribed is not at all the same as the letter I related to you. Now, whether you can admit it or not, you know this is true. Can I have your assurance that you will endeavor henceforward to do as you are supposed to, and keep your mind focused to the task at hand?”

I saw his eyes responding to my words; I saw that he understood.

“I will, sir,” he told me.

“Now, there’s my man,” I said, beaming, proud that my measured tone, quick mind, and commanding presence had negotiated the shoals of this strange difficulty, and been rewarded with a concession. I had salvaged R.’s job despite himself. R. and Dhanu—such people relied on decisive and reasonable managers such as myself. How would our villagers eat, how would trains run, how would the world move without managers!

Now, even having gotten R.’s reassurance, I thought it best to keep him away from paper and ink. These commodities were dear and not to be squandered. I could manage to write my own
letters for a while until a more agreeable arrangement could be found.

“Dhananjayan,” I said, “from today and for the time being, R. will help you to execute the operations of the station. He’ll do my filing. But, R., I beg of you, don’t go near the pen.”

R., of course, received all this news with the same impassive face with which he had absorbed my previous admonishments.

(My dear fellow, allow me to say, you have written this part of the story quite passably! I find myself strangely moved by the scenario, and by the grace of my own actions. Carry on.)

As it were, more than a year later, looking back on the episode with the dimness of memory and distortions of hindsight, Dhanu would insist, “I was not bluffing when I complimented his letter, sir. I never liked R., but his markings were beautiful. I don’t think I would find such strangely pleasing things even painted in the palace of Mysore Maharajah.”

R. gave me no serious botherations in the days between that incident and my engagement ceremony. But I had little attention to spare for him in those times, with the headaches, entanglements, family demands, and organizational difficulties of the ceremony and subsequent wedding to concern me. The worries of being a groom, so it seemed at the time, far outweighed the pleasures. I looked forward to the transition to manhood that my betrothal signified, yet it caused me enormous stress. I had met my betrothed once or twice, so I was told, at family functions, but I scarcely could recall her face. Some days, I burned with curiosity about this woman with whom I would have to spend all my days. But in a way, it hardly mattered to me what she was like; I knew that regardless of the woman, I should recoil at having to accommodate a new and unknown presence in my life.