A passage led to the back yard, where a well and a lavatory under a large tamarind tree served the needs of the motley tenants of the ancient house in Vinayak Mudali Street; the owner of the property, by partitioning and fragmenting all the available space, had managed to create an illusion of shelter and privacy for his hapless tenants and squeezed the maximum rent out of everyone, himself occupying a narrow ledge abutting the street, where he had a shop selling, among other things, sweets, pencils and ribbons to children swarming from the municipal school across the street. When he locked up for the night, he slept across the doorway so that no intruder should pass without first stumbling on him; he also piled up cunningly four empty kerosene tins inside the dark shop so that at the slightest contact they should topple down with a clatter: for him a satisfactory burglar alarm.
Once at midnight a cat stalking a mouse amidst the grain bags in the shop noticed a brass jug in its way and thrust its head in out of curiosity. The mouth of the jug was not narrow enough to choke the cat or wide enough to allow it to withdraw its head. Suddenly feeling the weight of a crown and a blinker over its eyes at the same time, the cat was at first puzzled and then became desperate. It began to jump and run around, hitting its head with a clang on every wall. The shopkeeper, who had been asleep at his usual place, was awakened by the noise in the shop. He peered through a chink into the dark interior, quickly withdrew his head and cried into the night, ‘Thief! Thief! Help!’ He also seized a bamboo staff and started tapping it challengingly on the ground. Every time the staff came down, the jar-crowned cat jumped high and about and banged its hooded head against every possible object, losing its sanity completely. The shopman’s cry woke up his tenants and brought them crowding around him. They peered through the chink in the door and shuddered whenever they heard the metallic noise inside. They looked in again and again, trying vainly to make out in the darkness the shape of the phantom, and came to the conclusion, ‘Oh, some devilish creature, impossible to describe it.’ Someone ventured to suggest, ‘Wake up the exorcist.’ Among the motley crowd boxed in that tenement was also a professional exorcist. Now he was fast asleep, his living portion being at the farthest end.
He earned fifty rupees a day without leaving his cubicle; a circle of clients always waited at his door. His clients were said to come from even distant Pondicherry and Ceylon and Singapore. Some days they would be all over the place, and in order not to frighten the other tenants, he was asked to meet his clients in the back yard, where you would find assembled any day a dozen hysterical women and demented men, with their relatives holding them down. The exorcist never emerged from his habitation without the appropriate makeup for his role—his hair matted and coiled up high, his untrimmed beard combed down to flutter in the wind, his forehead splashed with sacred ash, vermilion and sandal paste, and a rosary of rare, plum-sized beads from the Himalayan slopes around his throat. He possessed an ancient palm-leaf book in which everyone’s life was supposed to be etched in mysterious couplets. After due ceremonials, he would sit on the ground in front of the clients with the book and open a particular page appropriate to each particular individual and read out in a singsong manner. No one except the exorcist could make out the meaning of the verse composed in antiquated Tamil of a thousand years ago. Presently he would explain: ‘In your last life you did certain acts which are recoiling on you now. How could it be otherwise? It is karma. This seizure will leave you on the twenty-seventh day and tenth hour after the next full moon, this karma will end . . . Were you at any time . . . ?’ He elicited much information from the parties themselves. ‘Was there an old woman in your life who was not well-disposed to you? Be frank.’ ‘True, true,’ some would say after thinking over it, and they would discuss it among themselves and say, ‘Yes, yes, must be that woman Kamu . . .’ The exorcist would then prescribe the course of action: ‘She has cast a spell. Dig under the big tree in your village and bring any bone you may find there, and I’ll throw it into the river. Then you will be safe for a while.’ Then he would thrash the victim with a margosa twig, crying, ‘Be gone at once, you evil spirit.’
On this night the shopman in his desperation pushed his door, calling, ‘Come out, I want your help . . . Strange things are going on; come on.’
The exorcist hurriedly slipped on his rosary and, picking up his bag, came out. Arriving at the trouble-spot he asked, ‘Now, tell me what is happening!’
‘A jug seems to have come to life and bobs up and down, hitting everything around it bang-bang.’
‘Oh, it’s the jug-spirit, is it! It always enters and animates an empty jug. That’s why our ancients have decreed that no empty vessel should be kept with its mouth open to the sky but always only upside down. These spirits try to panic you with frightening sounds. If you are afraid, it might hit your skull. But I can deal with it.’
The shopman wailed, ‘I have lived a clean and honest life, never harmed a soul, why should this happen to me?’
‘Very common, don’t worry about it. It’s karma, your past life . . . In your past life you must have done something.’
‘What sort of thing?’ asked the shopman with concern.
The exorcist was not prepared to elaborate his thesis. He hated his landlord as all the other tenants did, but needed more time to frame a charge and go into details. Now he said gently, ‘This is just a mischievous spirit, nothing more, but weak-minded persons are prone to get scared and may even vomit blood.’ All this conversation was carried on to the accompaniment of the clanging metal inside the shop. Someone in the crowd cried, ‘This is why you must have electricity. Every corner of this town has electric lights. We alone have to suffer in darkness.’
‘Why don’t you bring in a lantern?’
‘No kerosene for three days, and we have been eating by starlight.’
‘Be patient, be patient,’ said the house-owner, ‘I have applied for power. We will get it soon.’
‘If we had electric lights we could at least have switched them on and seen that creature, at least to know what it is.’
‘All in good time, all in good time, sir, this is no occasion for complaints.’ He led the exorcist to the shop entrance. Someone flourished a flashlight, but its battery was weak and the bulb glowed like embers, revealing nothing. Meanwhile, the cat, sensing the presence of a crowd, paused, but soon revived its activity with redoubled vigour and went bouncing against every wall and window bar. Every time the clanging sound came the shopman trembled and let out a wail, and the onlookers jumped back nervously. The exorcist was also visibly shaken. He peered into the dark shop at the door and sprang back adroitly every time the metallic noise approached. He whispered, ‘At least light a candle; what a man to have provided such darkness for yourself and your tenants, while the whole city is blazing with lights. What sort of a man are you!’
Someone in the crowd added, ‘Only a single well for twenty families, a single lavatory!’
A wag added, ‘When I lie in bed with my wife, the littlest whisper between us is heard on all sides.’
Another retorted, ‘But you are not married.’
‘What if? There are others with families.’
‘None of your business to become a champion for others. They can look after themselves.’
Bang! Bang!
‘It’s his sinfulness that has brought this haunting,’ someone said, pointing at the shopman.
‘Why don’t you all clear out if you are so unhappy?’ said the shopman. There could be no answer to that, as the town like all towns in the world suffered from a shortage of housing. The exorcist now assumed command. He gestured to others to keep quiet. ‘This is no time for complaints or demands. You must all go back to bed. This evil spirit inside has to be driven out. When it emerges there must be no one in its way, otherwise it’ll get under your skin.’
‘Never mind, it won’t be worse than our landlord. I’d love to take the devil under my skin if I can kick these walls and bring down this miserable ramshackle on the head of whoever owns it,’ said the wag. The exorcist said, ‘No, no, no harsh words, please . . . I’m also a tenant and suffer like others, but I won’t make my demands now. All in proper time. Get me a candle—’ He turned to the shopman, ‘Don’t you sell candles? What sort of a shopman are you without candles in your shop!’ No one lost his chance to crucify the shopman.
He said, ‘Candles are in a box on the right-hand side on a shelf as you step in—you can reach it if you just stretch your arm . . .’
‘You want me to go in and try? All right, but I charge a fee for approaching a spirit—otherwise I always work from a distance.’ The shopman agreed to the special fee and the exorcist cleared his throat, adjusted his coiffure and stood before the door of the shop proclaiming loudly, ‘Hey, spirit, I’m not afraid, I know your kind too well, you know me well, so . . .’ He slid open the shutter, stepped in gingerly; when he had advanced a few steps, the jug hit the ventilator glass and shattered it, which aggravated the cat’s panic, and it somersaulted in confusion and caused a variety of metallic pandemonium in the dark chamber; the exorcist’s legs faltered, and he did not know for a moment what his next step should be or what he had come in for. In this state he bumped into the piled-up kerosene tins and sent them clattering down, which further aggravated the cat’s hysteria. The exorcist rushed out unceremoniously. ‘Oh, oh, this is no ordinary affair. It seizes me like a tornado . . . it’ll tear down the walls soon.’
‘Aiyo!’ wailed the shopman.
‘I have to have special protection . . . I can’t go in . . . no candle, no light. We’ll have to manage in the dark. If I hadn’t been quick enough, you would not have seen me again.’
‘Aiyo! What’s to happen to my shop and property?’
‘We’ll see, we’ll see, we will do something,’ assured the other heroically; he himself looking eerie in the beam of light that fell on him from the street. The shopman was afraid to look at him, with his grisly face and rolling eyes, whose corners were touched with white sacred ash. He felt he had been caught between two devils—difficult to decide which one was going to prove more terrible, the one in the shop or the one outside. The exorcist sat upright in front of the closed door as if to emphasize, ‘I’m not afraid to sit here,’ and commanded, ‘Get me a copper pot, a copper tumbler and a copper spoon. It’s important.’
‘Why copper?’
‘Don’t ask questions . . . All right, I’ll tell you: because copper is a good conductor. Have you noticed electric wires of copper overhead?’
‘What is it going to conduct now?’
‘Don’t ask questions. All right, I’ll tell you. I want a medium which will lead my mantras to that horrible thing inside.’
Without further questioning, the shopman produced an aluminium pot from somewhere. ‘I don’t have copper, but only aluminium . . .’
‘In our country let him be the poorest man, but he’ll own a copper pot . . . But here you are calling yourself a sowcar, you keep nothing; no candle, no light, no copper . . .’ said the exorcist.
‘In my village home we have all the copper and silver . . .’
‘How does it help you now? It’s not your village house that is now being haunted, though I won’t guarantee this may not pass on there . . . Anyway, let me try.’ He raised the aluminium pot and hit the ground; immediately from inside came the sound of the jug hitting something again and again, ‘Don’t break the vessel, ’ cried the shopman. Ignoring his appeal the exorcist hit the ground again and again with the pot. ‘That’s a good sign. Now the spirits will speak. We have our own code.’ He tapped the aluminium pot with his knuckles in a sort of Morse code. He said to the landlord, ‘Don’t breathe hard or speak loudly. I’m getting a message: I’m asked to say it’s the spirit of someone who is seeking redress. Did you wrong anyone in your life?’
‘Oh, no, no,’ said the shopman in panic. ‘No, I’ve always been charitable . . .’
The exorcist cut him short. ‘Don’t tell me anything, but talk to yourself and to that spirit inside. Did you at any time handle . . . wait a minute, I’m getting the message . . .’ He held the pot’s mouth to his ear. ‘Did you at any time handle someone else’s wife or money?’
The shopman looked horrified, ‘Oh, no, never.’
‘Then what is it I hear about your holding a trust for a widow . . . ?’
He brooded while the cat inside was hitting the ventilator, trying to get out. The man was in a panic now. ‘What trust? May I perish if I have done anything of that kind. God has given me enough to live on . . .’
‘I’ve told you not to talk unnecessarily. Did you ever molest any helpless woman or keep her at your mercy? If you have done a wrong in your childhood, you could expiate . . .’
‘How?’
‘That I’ll explain, but first confess . . .’
‘Why?’
‘A true repentance on your part will emasculate the evil spirit.’ The jug was hitting again, and the shopman became very nervous and said, ‘Please stop that somehow, I can’t bear it.’ The exorcist lit a piece of camphor, his stock-in-trade, and circled the flame in all directions. ‘To propitiate the benign spirits around so that they may come to our aid . . .’ The shopman was equally scared of the benign spirits. He wished, at that pale starlit hour, that there were no spirits whatever, good or bad. Sitting on the pyol, and hearing the faint shrieking of a night bird flying across the sky and fading, he felt he had parted from the solid world of men and material and had drifted on to a world of unseen demons.
The exorcist now said, ‘Your conscience should be clear like the Manasaro Lake. So repeat after me whatever I say. If there is any cheating, your skull will burst. The spirit will not hesitate to dash your brains out.’
‘Alas, alas, what shall I do?’
‘Repeat after me these words: I have lived a good and honest life.’ The shopman had no difficulty in repeating it, in a sort of low murmur in order that it might not be overheard by his tenants. The exorcist said, ‘I have never cheated anyone.’
‘. . . cheated anyone,’ repeated the shopman.
‘Never appropriated anyone’s property . . .’
The shopman began to repeat, but suddenly stopped short to ask, ‘Which property do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the exorcist, applying the pot to his ear. ‘I hear of some irregularity.’
‘Oh, it’s not my mistake . . .’ the shopman wailed. ‘It was not my mistake. The property came into my hands, that’s all . . .’
‘Whom did it belong to?’
‘Honappa, my friend and neighbour, I was close to his family. We cultivated adjoining fields. He wrote a will and was never seen again in the village.’
‘In your favour?’
‘I didn’t ask for it; but he liked me . . .’
‘Was the body found?’
‘How should I know?’
‘What about the widow?’
down onto the street and trotted away. The exorcist and the shopman watched in silence, staring after it. The shopman said, ‘After all, it’s a cat.’
‘Yes, it may appear to be a cat. How do you know what is inside the cat?’
The shopman brooded and looked concerned. ‘Will it visit us again?’
‘Can’t say,’ said the exorcist. ‘Call me again if there is trouble, ’ and made for his cubicle, saying, ‘Don’t worry about my dakshina now. I can take it in the morning.’
