THE TURNING - Prologue

June 8, 1984.

The incessant rain, which normally aroused pleasurable emotions in her, today was an added source of annoyance for Nivedita.

Like everything else that was happening. Like her brother's casual attitude, his nonchalant shrugging of shoulders wherever she tried to raise that topic with him.

Like her father's sudden intransigence, which would not permit him to even disucss the matter with his hitherto beloved daughter.

Like her mother's air of martyrdom, resigning herself to what she considered was her fate.

Like the pattering of the rain outside on the mosaic-tiled terrace, flooding her precious pots of roses.

Irrelevantly Nivedita acknowledged, in some stratum of her consciousness, that the monsoon that year had caught her napping. That she had not taken the precaution of mixing sand in her rose pots in time.

Drainage, after all, was the important thing where roses were concerned. The excess water could not be allowed to collect, else it would putrefy the roots. Drainage. That was so important! How could she have forgotten?

"Day dreaming again, sis?" Vinod Shahane's voice roused her out of her abstraction.

"Bhaiyya ... do something ... talk to Papa ... don't let him go through with this!" Clutching at his hand and gripping it tight, almost convulsively.

"There's nothing you or I can do," said Vinod shortly, detaching his hand. "It's his life and he should be left free to do what he wants with it."

Resentful of the rejection she thought she sensed, Nivedita rose and started pacing about the room agitatedly, all arms and legs, her awkward adolescent figure almost ungainly in its agitation. Vinod watched her, strangely detached. Curious thing, hysteria ... he thought ... and the attendant compulsions that nourished it, nurtured it. As he watched, she put both her hands on the nape of her slender white neck and pushed up the heavy swathe of black hair in a gesture at once despairing and provocative.

Vinod's eyes narrowed. Probably for the first time, he really noiced her for what she was. An adolescent with a strangely potent sexual promise. Her uncontrolled agitation somehow enhanced the raw sensuality latent within her - the wide curve of the long lip cleaving towards the slash of the high cheekbones; the heavy lids dropping over the elongated slanting eyes veiling depths of passion within; the thin wiry body awakening to its own compulsions. His eyes roved over her young limbs, holding the promise of feline grace beneath their adolescent awkwardness.

Her voice intruded. Resentful. Petulant. "Is he so besotted with her that he can't think what this will do to us? All of us? To mother?" she demanded, the last a trifle belatedly.

"It happends, you know," Vinod ventured, trying to placate.

"What happends?" Nivedita's slanting eyes widened a ther brother's acceptance of the unacceptable. "What happens? This?" Her voice shrilled on the verge of hysteria, her words running into each other. "He must become a Muslim? Just beacuase Mama won't give him a divorce? What'll become of us? What'll we do? Where will we be? ... Hindu children of a Muslim father?!"

Vinod frowned. That aspect of the matter had not struck him. Then he shrugged. Hell, what did it matter? His thirteen-year old sister, a good twelve years younger than him, took things too much to heart.

"This business is going to be the death of her," he thought to himself, with sudden foreboding.

****




June 13, 1984.

At exactly 10.30 am, Prakash Shahane, born and bred a Hindu, married Dina Soneji, born and bred a Parsee, by a Nikah ceremony. After they had both converted into Islam and Prakash had changed his name to `Sattar' in an imagined compromise between the two faiths. That marriage was unusual in more ways than one: it contained within itself, the genesis of murder.

****

Prakash had done what he had to do, undeterred by his wife's sullen silences or his daughter's wan looks. He left early in the morning, before the rest of the family had risen.

Karuna, awakening in a bed bereft of her husband, remained closeted in the room she had shared with him till that tday, shutting the world out. Including her children. Especially her children! They reminded her of him.

Vinod went to the hospital as usual. Nivedita sat on the terrace and worked out in her mind what she wanted to do. What she had to do. Hatred for the unknown Dina had turned into an obsessin. The maid, Shantabai, came looking for her. To get her ready for school. Nivedita surprised her by getting into her uniform docilely and going off.

In the evening, Nivedita deliberately missed her school bus and took the publisc BEST bus home. She got off at the Church on her way back home and bought a wax figurine from the vendors outside.

She had always a fascination for the Church. She would listen avidly to her Catholic friends when they spoke of the mysterious `Box' into which they disappeared, to confess their misdemeanours and be absolved of their sins. Nivedita was seduced by this benign God who apaprently granted absolution for the mere confessing. As yet, she knew nothing of penitence.

Her simplistic perception was fostered by her particular friend, Shirley. Shirley had a deep rooted hatred for the Maths teacher who had once caned Shirley's bottom in front of the whole class as a punishment for cheating from her neighbour. Shirley had told Nivedita that Ms. Savant was soon going to die. Met with hesitant disbelief, Shirley triumphantly produced a smnall wax figurine, stuck with several pins.

"See, this is Ms. Savant. If you keep poking pins into her, she'll die!" she announced gleefully.

"But this is wax! It will melt after some time," objected Nivedita, anxious to find a pin-prick in her friend's plan for Ms. Savant's early demise.

"No, it won't, you dumbo," was the scornful answer. "And even if it does start to melt, I'll get another wax figure to stick pins into. You must keep on at it," she informed Nivedita ghoulishly.

Nivedita was more than receptive. Shirley's words not only took root, they germinated in her disordered mind. Fascinated as she was by the concept of guilt and its expiation, Nivedita was even more fascinated by the possibility of getting rid of the despised Dina by a process so innocuous as sticking pins into a wax figurine. The day her father left to get married to Dina, the idea flowered into a desire for experimentation.

Taht night in the privacy of her room, Nivedita set up the figurine on a crudely built pedestal of black pleistocene, mumbled some prayers and viciously stuck a pin into the figurine. Then she hid the figurine outside on the terrace, under some loose rocks in the rock garden she had so painstakingly made.

She followed this practice faithfully ever since, on the thirteenth of June every year. And the pins multiplied.

****


The year Nivedita turned fifteen, Vinod caught her at it. Foung her hiding the figurine in the rock garden. Outraged, he dragged her from the terrace into his room and locked the door. Then he stripped her of her skirt, pulled her over his knee and began thrashing her backside, causing her enough pain to drag out yelps of protest from time to time.

After a while, however, the pain gave way to a newer sensation in Nivedita, finding is echo in Vinod. The hard slaps of their own volition smoothed into a quite different touch ... and his desire to punish was overwhelmed by a more elemental desire, rising to fulfill the girl's awakening need ... his roving hand aroused her to a pitch beyond herself. Nivedita yielded to him, not fully realizing what she was doing, yet past caring of the consequences. Some of the ache inside her seemed to diminish, overwhelmed by the physical pain that Vinod was causing her ... a welcome pain, blinding her to all else but her initiation at the hands of her brother, her demi-God ... and the blood that spurted from her virgin hymen was symbolic to her disturbed mind ... like that from a sacrificial cockerel, at the altar of a heathen rite ...

This would now become part of her ritual with the figurine. and it would be their secret ... hers and Vinod's ... their very own secret!

Savouring this second delicious secret of her young life, Nivedita was prepared to share the first, with a suddenly approachable elder brother who seemed to accept her compulsive need to find a physical, tangible outlet for her feelings towards Dina.

Her ritual with the figurines continued. Her death-wish gained in strength, crystallizing into a tangible objective.


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