Vedpursad had had premonitions that stealing was a was a bad idea all along. Stealing the Bhairav Bone Relic from a gang of artefact smugglers had been his friend Ramesh’s idea. Ramesh, who had been more like a brother to Ved, was the mastermind of the heist, and Ved who didn’t have the tools to persuade Ramesh against this ill-thought-out adventure, had served as the getaway driver. They had used Ramesh’s hand me down 80’s Hero Honda motorcycle they’d used for the heist. The vehicle’s license plate, which unbeknownst to them had glowed in the cctv footage which the gangster thugs had reviewed. Vedpursad had thought of covering the license plate, but he didn’t mention it to Ramesh since both of them clearly knew Ramesh was definitely smarter than him. The glowing license plate had led the thugs directly to Ramesh. His hacked up body was found in his study — the thugs had somehow managed to pull of the grizzly murder without waking up his family who had been peacefully asleep in another part of the house. One doesn’t have to describe the terror they must have felt at discovering the dismembered corpse which had belonged to their son till dinner the night before. It hadn’t taken the thugs much longer to figure out that since Ramesh did not have the Relic, and since they too had bungled up by killing him before getting the relic, they must have figured out that the Relic must be with the other guy — Ved. After a few days of hide and seek, they had finally found him, at the end of the blind gulli (a narrow street akin to an alley) with his back against a wall. The eight thugs, who looked mighty pleased to have caught up to him, had congregated at the only open end of the gulli and were moving in on him with a miscellaneous assortment of medieval-looking bludgeoning, piercing, slicing and hacking implements. He was along and without any means of self defense.
Ved knew that this was the wrong time for reconsideration but his thoughts seemed to operate under their own volition. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone along with Ramesh to steal the stupid relic so brazenly from people he had no business stealing from. Maybe they should have taken better precautions and not acted like absolute morons. And maybe he should just pull out the key and hand it over to the eight people who were currently smiling at him and hope they didn’t turn him into worm food.
They were getting closer. The image of the deep gash on the right shoulder of Ramesh’s corpse flashed in Vedpursad’s consciousness. His sarcasm dissipated and a determined calm focus of survival set in. His mind went blank and his being switched to the same primal flow state that a prey animal taps into as she stares down a pack of predators with an evolutionary unwillingness to accept an impending death. Vedpursad let out crazed blood curdling scream communicating his resolve to fight till the end.
After Vedpursad had completed screaming what he thought would be his final statement to the world, something curious took place. A small door on the house to his right creaked open and sucked in a whiff of air. Ved, taking this opportunity, immediately leaped towards the door and almost flew through it to the other side. He fell onto the brick-paved floor and rolled on it until he was standing, then rushed back to the door and started pushing it shut. The thugs, who had just witnessed this unexpected event unfold, bolted forward lest their target escape before they could complete their task. The thugs got to the door before Ved got a chance to close it, and having outnumbered him, they managed to push the door open enough for the one holding the machete to put his machete wielding hand through the gap. The hand which was wildly swinging the machete was getting uncomfortably close to Ved’s face. Ved tried pushing harder, but his human strength was simply not enough. Then, for the same unknown reason that the door had opened for him, the door simply started closing again with the same amount of effort that Ved had been putting in. The gap of the doorway kept closing in and the door was now starting to crush the arm holding the machete. “Aaargh” came the unpleasant scream from the head of the owner of the hand from the other side of this strange door.
Vedpursad could feel the resistance of the assailant’s arm bone on the massive and ancient brass plated door. Ved could feel that if he was to push just a little harder, the poor fucker’s femur would certainly split in half, may even get pulverized. It could easily require and amputation. “What would a gangster do without his machete holding arm? Certainly, he would not be able to hack anyone else in the future for sure.” For all Ved knew, it could have been this same bastard who hacked up Ramesh. Vedpursad pushed on the door just a little harder till he could feel the bone flexing just a little. “Aaaaaargh” the assailant screamed in deep terror. A “clank” echoed in the room — the assailant seemed to have dropped his machete. Vedpursad considered pulverizing this bastard’s femur for just a second longer. The thought of the crunching noise it would make, like that of a cartilage in a pig’s mouth, was revolting. Ved released the pressure of his newly found superhuman strength for just long enough to let the arm slither out of the view before pushing on the door with a rapid thrust until it slammed shut with a heavy click- the noise of the ancient locking mechanism engaging- a sound which would not have been heard for at least a few centuries.
Vedpursad slumped forward leaning against the door with his hands trying furiously to catch his breath. He closed his eyes for a few moments — streaks of neuron-flashes lighting up in his vision against the absolute darkness of his shut eyelids. He opened his eyes to the same depth of darkness in the room. There was not a single photon to be registered anywhere in the room. The room had a smell about it though. It smelled like one of the locked off antechambers in one of those fresh excavations of the ancient palaces that Ramesh had taken him to. Vedpursad didn’t really care much for them, but it was interesting hearing Ramesh’s take on what may have happened in these rooms hundreds of years ago. It was like the time, he found his grandfather’s glasses in a box, and noticed his fountain pen in there with the ink all dried up and his notebook now all faded and yellowed. They still had the essence of the smell, enough to take Ved back to the time he thought he had overlooked, a vision in faded sepia from deep within his memory, of the time when the now long dead ancestor was seated on his wooden chair at his desk wrapped in a blanket and wearing his lopsided woollen hat, and that same pen was furiously moving rightwards on that same exact notebook as the now yellowed glasses sat on his face. He couldn’t remember the features of that face even if he really tried to recall but he remembered feeling the warmth and safety which he felt even as the old man shooed Ved out of the study. The box, the glasses, the notebook, the fountain pen, and the dried-up ink now smelt of a distant death — which he remembered was crushingly painful at the time, but now could only remember as a time of dull sadness coloured in the all-pervasive faded sepia. The body must have burnt on the cremation pyre, he had not been there to see it. They had not let him go to the funeral but that never stopped nightmares from showing Ved exactly how it must have taken place. The way he stood a few feet from the pyre, the cold naked dead body covered with an orange-coloured sheet of thin cloth from the neck down to ankles, a frozen face which he knew existed but never knew what it looked like because the nightmares never revealed it to him. He did remember the hand though, which, now that he thought about it, bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the blue faced god Krishna in a painting featuring the deity holding a green parrot. The painting had hung on the wall of another ancestor- a great aunt who was very nice to Ved and gave him oranges whenever he went to see her. He didn’t remember the exact time he learnt of the great aunt’s death, but he remembered the dull sadness he felt every time he thought of the pock holed mud plaster in her room behind the painting of the blue faced god, and the rush mat on which he sat in the warm sunlight of some Kathmandu winter day and ate the small sweet oranges she had given him. She always had oranges. The rush mat, the plaster behind the painting, and the room had the same smell of stale death from bygone eras as grandpa’s box.
Ramesh’s corpse had been different- the wounds had been raw, and it had smelled of freshly dried blood. The smell had reminded Ved of a butcher’s shop. The expression on Ramesh’s dead face was haunting, and so was the way his corpse wriggled and twisted as the cremation-fire blazed around it. The knot which had formed in Vedpursad’s stomach at the first time he saw Ramesh’s corpse tightened every single time the memory of the wriggling burning body flashed across his consciousness. The knot tightened again.
Instinctively, Vedpursad reached into his pocket to get his phone out, turn on the flashlight and find a way out of this situation. It wasn’t there in the front right pocket of his jeans where it was always stashed. He checked the remaining three pockets with no luck, he must have dropped the phone somewhere in the ordeal. Ved did find a lighter and the box of Surya Luxury Kings. He had quit smoking almost a decade ago but had bought the pack from the Paan store, at the corner of his gulli, after the strong urge to smoke had followed him back from Ramesh’s funeral. He should quit again, he thought, as he pulled out a cigarette, and put it in between his lips. Now just the lighter had to work — cheap lighters had a way of giving up exactly when you needed them the most. He cupped the lighter with his palm, protecting the unborn flame from any wayward drafts, and pressed the firing mechanism. Click! A tiny flame danced atop Vedpurad’s thumb, roasting the edge of the cigarette and he puffed hurriedly to ensure that it caught fire. As Ved repurposed his lighter-cupping hand to pull the cigarette out of his mouth and take a breath of air, the warm orange glow of the lighter lit up the empty room. That’s when Vedpursad noticed the grinning face of a tiny old little man staring directly at him from about an arm’s length in front of his right elbow.
Vedpursad grimaced, tightened up and leapt backwards letting out a little shriek. The lighter went out turning the room back to pitch darkness. Vedpursad noticed a strong smell of foul alcoholic breath whiff past his nose. He recoiled a little more.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you”, came a nasal obviously drunk slurred deep but strangely melodic voice from the darkness. The sentence was spoken like a poem, almost as though it was being orchestrated for an audience. It continued, almost dramatically, “do you happen to have an extra smoke by any chance?”,
Vedpursad was stunned. He really couldn’t be sure if all of this was really happening. The face, which he had seen only for a brief moment, was definitely real. The features though, were a little peculiar. There was a mustache and a full beard, and Ved could tell that the facial hair was mostly grey. The person was little, about four feet and a few inches, give or take, but that wasn’t really unusual for the old people of Kathmandu. He had a hat on, like a normal round black hat, and his unkempt hair stuck out on all sides. There was something off about this man’s eyes though ; it seemed to have otherworldly twinkle about it. It wasn’t evil — not that Ved was really familiar with any monsters before, but he knew what evil eyes looked like and these did not fit that description. He didn’t feel cold or fear having seen those eyes, just the feeling of having been pranked, and looking like a jackass in the process. It quite didn’t add up.
“Umm…sorry?”, responded Ved.
“Hahahahahahahha”, chuckled the creature from darkness. “It’s okay. You’re safe. I’m not going to eat you.” He paused for a short while before following it up with “but only if you let me take a drag of your smoke! Haha.”, he uttered with a loud laughter.
“ A smoke? Umm sure…umm, who are you?”
“I am the great smoke spirit of these lands! Now, hand me the smoke!”
The little red blob of light of the lit cigarette moved a few inches forward as Vedpursad hesitatingly stretched out his arm offering his cigarette. In the darkness of the room, Vedpursad could see the lit cigarette leave the grip of his fingers and travel to the spot which he assumed was the man’s mouth, before lighting up in intensity as the man must have inhaled a really deep puff. He drew in the smoke deeply and let out a long exhale.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah! This smoke is exquisite!” said the drunk, before proceeding to take a subsequent drag. And then another, and another, his exhalations sounding more relaxed each time. As the drunk smoked, Vedpursad brought up his lighter and considered lighting it, but hesitated in case he wasn’t sure if he’d see something he couldn’t handle.
“Man…wow… this smoke… it’s… really” the voice paused for just a second, “otherworldly”, it chuckled.
“Do you have another one ?” the drunk voice continued in a leisurely tone.
Overcoming his initial hesitation, Vedpursad flicked his lighter on to look for the box of cigarettes, he seemed to have dropped in his hesitation. The orange glow of the tiny flame was more than adequate light for Vedpursad’s dimness adjusted eyes to see that creature was indeed around four feet tall, proportionally sized and dressed up impeccably in the traditional Nepali bedtime garb of a set of plain bhoto surwal. Vedpursad then noticed thick full hair sticking out of the drunk’s sleeves and on the back of his hands. Even his neck and the back of his fingers were hairy. The hairiness seemed to be the only unusual feature about this character, well, other than his appearance in this empty dark room, and his use of the term ‘otherworldly.’
“Didn’t they teach you not to stare at people?” the drunk grinned showing his completely unremarkable teeth. Ved got caught off-guard, felt like an asshole for a second, then quietly made his way over to the golden box of cigarettes, lying on the dusty brick floor a few feet away. As Vedpursad flipped open the box to get the drunk a cigarette, there was a deafening high intensity “Thump” on the ancient door he’d just come in through. Vedpursad, having experienced the recent earthquake, instinctively ducked is head in between his arms and popped down into an Asian squat letting go of the lighter switch. The dark room vibrated vigorously and the ceiling plaster dropped all around and over Vedpursad.
“Fuuuuck! we ought to get out of here,” yelled Vedpursad flicking the lighter on.
“Relax, it’s probably just another earthquake!”, the drunk snickered.
“No…no no no, I think they’re breaking down that door, we have to move!”
“That door? There’s no way that door is going to budge. It’s been sealed with the ancient magic of the Kirats. Even the great Matsyendranath with all his 84 tantric attainments could not”, the drunk rambled, “even if tried, open that door, my dear stranger. Do you have a name? What is your name anyway?”
Thump! There was an even louder impact on the door. The room rattled even harder this time, and even larger chunks of plaster fell on their faces. The impact left a narrow vertical crack up and down the centre of the door through which a narrow beam of light leaked into the dark room.
“Damn! Maybe you’re right!”, the drunk rattled off, “but how is that possible? …this door has the Vasuki seal…designed by the great naga of Vishnu — Vasuki himself. It couldn’t just … “
Another Thump! The crack on the door opened a few inches wide.
“We are coming for you…you stealing bastard…you stole from the wrong guy!” A voice yelled from the other side of the gap.
“Fuck! We need to go, dude”, Vedpursad yelled at the drunk, “do you know a way out of here?”
“Shit! This way…” the drunk yelled in response , and shuffled to the back wall towards an inconspicuous piece of rope which stuck out of the floor. Vedpursad followed closely. The drunk pulled methodically on the rope and a trapdoor opened underneath. “Quick, follow me” said the drunk before disappearing down the trapdoor.
“We are coming for you asshole! Its going to be fun teaching you a lesson …”, the voice at the broken door exclaimed.
Vedpursad looked down into the absolute darkness of the tunnel, sat hesitatingly on the edge, took a deep breath, and holding on to the edge of the hole slid into it expecting a solid drop. His feet hit the ground much sooner than he’d expected — the ditch was only about hip deep and his head was still in the room. He looked at the door — there were two goons trying to pry open the bent metal to make the gash wide enough to get through.
Vedpursad flipped the lid of the trapdoor closed as he got on his fours in the tunnel and followed foul smell and the low mumbling singing of the drunk through this narrow tunnel. The tunnel seemed long but not very deep underground — he could hear the jingle of Nepal TV’s National 8 o’clock news as he passed under what he assumed to be someone’s living room. The living room, as it turns out was next to a kitchen, where he could hear the clanking of dishes which assumed was being prepared for dinner. Further along, as they turned a corner, he could hear a girl, arguing loudly by herself — she was probably on the phone, he figured. They turned another corner and passed under a room where they could hear rhythmic squeaking furniture. The drunk snickered audibly. Having crawled a fairly long way and turned quite a few corners, Vedpursad thought that he may have just successfully escaped the gangsters when his ears popped from a sudden drop in pressure and a draft wafted past his face. It was the opening of the trap door through which they had entered this tunnel. The thugs weren’t too far behind.
