The Trojan Mirror – C1-01

Avinash Shastri was sweating like a dog. His legs ached, his head swam and chest heaved like an abused bellow in a blacksmith’s ancient hollow. But he didn’t stop running.
He couldn’t. He was addicted to the pain. There was no rush of adrenaline, no ecstasy of endorphins, this was just the raw pain of his body crying out for mercy. It was the only way he could deaden the screams in his head. Images of his dying comrades flashed before his eyes and their screams silenced all other sensations in his mind as he pushed himself for another lap around the track. He fought for the promise of sanity a moment at a time like he had for the last five years.
‘Burn fcuker burn! just like your friends did. While you stood and watched!’ his tortured mind whispered to his remaining sanity.
‘Stop it!’ he cried out loud. ‘You kill me if you can, but I can’t, I can’t.’
‘They were your orders that killed your men you fcukin’ prick! They trusted you, their families trusted you… and you just watched and then ran like a coward.’
‘Nooo! I didn’t. There was nothing I could do. Stop it… PLEEEASE! For God’s sake.’
‘God won’t have you. You can’t stand your own self, why would He?’
He put his fingers in his ears and ran breathless for twenty more agonizing minutes before the sun rose again and brought his temporary relief for another day. He reached back to his empty dilapidated shack and went directly to the bottle under the bed he never slept in. Avinash allowed a drink to make himself forget. His body craved the soothing liquor as it gently flowed down his parched throat from the bottle. This was the only sustenance his body craved. The summers were the worst. Every smell, every sight forced him to relive the same nightmare over and over again. Of all the promises he had made in his life, he kept only one, he would not drink after the sun set.
This was the only promise he had made in the memory of his fallen men. He hated himself for making it and even more for keeping it. His hatred for himself had forced him to keep his word for the last five years. He punished himself out of habit in vain attempts to absolve his soul for sins he could not bring himself to forget. They had given their lives at his command, the least he could do was make himself suffer some more.
With a third of the bottle finished, his brain was numbed enough to start thinking again. There were two practical problems that needed solution soon. Just one more bottle remained and he was almost out of money. This was nothing new or surprising. He had managed like this for five years and sooner or later, he knew, his body would finally give up and he would be able to finally sleep forever. He was prepared for it. The gods, apparently, had something else in mind. They must be enjoying his misery, he was sure, like the kids who pull off the wings on butterflies just to get demonic pleasure from watching them crawl around and eventually die under their glaring scrutiny.
He would need to shave and scavenge a set of clean clothes. He hated these useless mundane activities even on a good day. Today didn’t promise to be anything special. He had a meeting with a prospective client in a few hours and a forever nagging part of him knew that he owed a lot of bills. His hatred for the world piled up again as a growing rage in the pit of his stomach. He had to clench his teeth to control being overwhelmed.
He turned his head towards the ceiling with his eyes closed and took a deep breath. The next hour was routine. Years of training left no margin for error. His eight by ten room consisted of four ancient walls with the plaster falling off almost uniformly over the entire area. A single grilled window next to the door was the only source of natural light or air. Similar rooms were occupied on all three sides around this room by like faring unfortunates nearly abandoned by the hand of progress their elected government harped on about endlessly. Technically India did not have a slum problem anymore but like most democracies, this too was only on paper for the politicians to feel good about.
One entire wall of his room was occupied by a special army-issue iron folding cot. The seven by three feet goliath dominated the entire living space Avinash called his home. There were several pegs on the wall near the foot of the bed where clothes were hung carelessly and without prejudice to their cleanliness. One of the remaining far corners was home to a near dilapidated almirah with a broken handle. A carelessly tied nylon rope served as the makeshift handle and its lock. Same kind of rope also ran across the length of the room in the middle for hanging out clothes to dry.
A cheap wooden table occupied the longer space next to the almirah. The drawers were missing along with the small cabinet usually supplied in such tables on the side. The top was piled with empty liquor bottles and cardboard boxes that once held food items but now lay abandoned gathering dust. The folding sheet-metal chair in front of the table was in better shape than the rest of his furniture mainly because he never used it.
A twenty year old table fan was kept on a small stool next to his bed. Though the air it supplied was minimal, the noise alone kept the bugs out from his room at night.
Avinash sat down by the bed and carefully slid out a steel trunk from below and opened the combination lock on the latch. His entire existence was in that dirty grey trunk with worn out army markings. The trunk was about three by two feet with a depth of about a foot and a half. At one time, it would have been a standard issue trunk but now it had become something the army had thrown out after keeping it in the rain a few years.
This was his daily ritual. Almost like a worship in the morning. Placed towards the bottom of the trunk was a almost-in-shreds oil cloth. He carefully laid it on the bed and unraveled the contents. Inside was a glistening berretta, once his service fire-arm. The matt finished barrel glistening in the light of the single incandescent bulb hanging over his head. The black body and the grips were spotless. He took care of this weapon. They had allowed him to keep it only because they still needed his services now and then. His services! He grunted to himself. Horrible unspeakable acts they could not bring themselves to do while still wearing an army uniform. Something they had unanimously voted to take away from him. He took out another item from his trunk, a rectangular wooden box a little bigger than children’s school geometry box and opened it. It was a worn-out gun cleaning kit. The oils had turned the once light colored wood into a deep mahogany texture. Its dovetailed joints had now become undistinguishable and the grain had blended together to give the appearance of a plastic body. He picked up the brush and began to clean his gun.
He was certain he could see his teeth marking on the barrel from his ritual dare to pull the trigger with the barrel in his mouth. It sounded absurd but he was sure persistence can move mountains. It was as possible as hard stones wearing out in ancient monasteries by penitent generations of naked feet with soft soles slowly walking over them.
‘Maybe today is your lucky day prick!’ his mind challenged his soul again, ‘try it, pull the trigger. All your shitty money problems would disappear in a second.’
Obediently, he put the barrel in his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. His whole body shook from the tension but his finger would not move that extra fraction to drop the pin. Seconds swam by as glistening pearls of sweat formed on his forehead and slid to the cracks of his eyes. Exhausted, he exhaled loudly and sat sobbing with clenched teeth and with the gun in his lap.
The ritual was over. He carefully placed the contents back in the box and slid the trunk back under his bed. Avinash got up and went to the farthest corner of his room where a makeshift bathroom awaited him. There were two walls of brick and two of a makeshift curtain like the ones used in hospitals for privacy of patients with no money and even less influence. A pipe ran from the two walls acting as a rail for the curtain with a channel cut out. He pulled the murky brown curtain open and picked up an old metal bucket from the corner. He walked back out of his shack and went to the centre of the compound.
Rooms similar to his surrounded the open compound on three sides. This was the promised land the government had provided to the losers of Janta Colony. Twenty rooms to a side and the fourth side was taken up by the community toilets and washing areas. In the middle of that side, separating the toilets from the washing area, was the entrance to his compound, numbered 17. Three floors to a compound and 35 compounds in all, that added up to 6,300 families of the downtrodden. It was a big compound, almost 12 acres of wasteland converted for community housing, all painted dirty yellow when the site was constructed almost ten years ago. Unlike him, most of the rooms were occupied by families, poor migrant workers, drug addicts and alcoholics. Most of the rooms had the added burden of an included makeshift kitchen for preparing the meals. A person had to really try to not earn enough money to move out of this hell-hole. Even the hard working illiterates masses who came from the villages to the city looking for a better life moved out within months of moving in here. The rent was cheap and the conditions pathetic. Normal people didn’t live here, they didn’t need to.
The only reason this entire colony was not bulldozed over for a new multiplex was the votes. The wealthy of Delhi, living in their palatial estates still only had one vote per head. And in here there were 6,300 families with almost 14,000 votes. And they were easy to buy. You could easily buy the votes for a whole family for five years with the equivalent of what their countrymen in their estates used up for drinking water in a day. It was simple economics. The politicians fought for that area like a bee for its honey. But they didn’t bother coming back for the next five years once the elections were over.
Avinash filled up his bucket under the hand-pump in the middle of the compound and returned to his room. It was still too early for the daily crowd of women to gather there.
He bathed quickly and methodically, like everything else he could control in his life. Today he had to shave. He knew the woman who was interested in hiring him would probably run out of his office if she saw him in his present state. This was what he was and he hated her already for making him go through this. He hated himself even more for being controlled by someone else for the sake of a few bucks, of the futility of living in a world full of hypocrites proclaiming liberty above all else and each of them succumbing against it a hundred times every day.
He shaved without a mirror and got dressed. He kept his hair short and never felt the need of services of a comb that his fingers could not emulate to his satisfaction. Before moving out, he took out his bottle and took another long swig for luck and walked out.