Vanished in the rain

    The month of August has always meant rain for the villagers. Though it poured hard, it also meant relief to the dry soil, hope for the rich harvest and endless joy for restless children for whom playing in the mud was much of the fun.

    Men spent their time chatting outside the house under the palm-leaf-covered shelter. Women preferred to stay inside, preparing meals, mending old clothes and doing their long beautiful hair. Only a lone mule, was struggling in the field, stuck in a deep, muddy pit. With the first sign of sunset, the whole village was falling asleep.

    It was the twelfth rainy season of Priyanka’s life and, she really loved rain, but that night, in the darkness, there something was bothering her. She got off the bed trying not to disturb her little brother she shared her bed with, checked on her mother, where she lay sleeping peacefully, and went outside. Cool, fresh air of the night and the monotonous music of raindrops on the porch roof eased her worries. She was about to return back inside when she noticed some shadowy movements in the dark.

    "Strange," Priyankha wondered, "who could it be? So late, in the rain?"

    The two shadows were heading toward her house, toward her. As her eyes accustomed to the darkness, she could distinguish what those shadows were. A man was tying a horse to a pole two houses from hers. He looked around and, seen nobody, strolled toward her.

    Priyanka stood in the darkness not knowing whether to run away or welcome the stranger.

    He saw her and rushed up, kneeled, mostly fell into the mud, eyes downcast, his palms joined in front of his head as if he were praying.

    "Here, my rani, your humble servant is here," said the stranger.

    "Rani? Servant? What are you saying, babu? You must be mistaken," Priyanka stepped closer, intending to help the man. "I am just a poor girl, not a rani at all."

    "Forgive my misspeaking, my lady. My goddess! Please, forgive your most miserable among miserable slaves, Goddess Kali!" He was mumbling, swallowing the raindrops slipping from his forehead, afraid to raise his eyes after the mistake he just made.

    "Kali?" The name struck Priyanka as if somebody had mentioned death. A second ago, she was going to invite the lost stranger into the house. Now she was scared, scared and confused. Even though those times were long gone, the stories about Kali-worshipping thugs, a secret cult of killers, were well known and told from mouth to mouth for many generations.

    They were stranglers, religiously obsessed hunters who preyed on lost travelers for their sacrificial rituals to the Black Kali, goddess of destruction and the absolute evil. Mistakenly, you might take one of them for a beggar or a circus trooper, but such a mistake would be a deadly one. A handkerchief, an innocent piece of cloth that a simple man would use to wipe the sweat from his forehead, was thugs’ murder weapon. Hiding under the cover of darkness or deceivably friendly to a passerby, they killed. One strike just seconds long, a handkerchief tied around the victim’s neck with a coin in a nod cutting the throat, and the sacrifice was complete. Thugs or thuggees. It’s Hindi meaning for deceivers.

    With every new thought about what she knew Priyanka’s confusion grew even more. She was 12, old enough to understand that some tales could be true. Thugs killed, rarely abducted their victims for their gatherings. They don’t kneel. They don’t plead for forgiveness.   

    "Who are you?" she asked him in such a low voice that it could hardly be heard over the drumming rain. "Who are you, stranger, and why did you come here?" He called me rani, she thought, his lady-master. He called me his goddess, why?

    Shivering, he raised his face and answered&58;

    "I came from the south, from the heart of the jungle where deep rivers run their fast waters. My tribe lives there because Kali told us to. Nivari Dhurwei is my name. I came a long way, starving and freezing, hiding from people during the day and fighting wild animals at night. I killed many. Snakes were my sisters, but fever poisoned me. I heard the drums beat, police chased me, but I escaped. Three times already, the crescent has become the full moon."   

    The stranger stopped to draw his breath and Priyanka kept silent. 

    "Two elderly men saw the same omen in their dreams&58; a girl with coal-black hair staying under the rain. They heard a crow cawing on the left. They knew what it means. Our Kali decided to be born and live among us, mortal. It was you, my lady, they saw. You are Kali, the incarnation of our goddess."

    "Me?" That was all Priyanka could whisper. Her gaze became absent and opaque. Chained by fear, she couldn’t move.

    The horse, left unattended under the rain and wailing wind, snorted.

    The man, looked around, wiped the forehead with his palm. He was middle-aged, dark-eyed, taller than most men in her village, with a wiry build. A deep scar ran from the corner of his right eye down to his bristling moustache. It was a dark, menacing, down-to-the-flesh deep scar. The man was half naked, his skin and hair filthy with mud.

    "We must go, my lady," his big hand squeezed Priyanka’s tiny arm like a claw, but in a second the strength was released. "Forgive me, my lady, but we must go. The night is halfway passed. We have a long journey ahead. This fast-legged stallion," the man pointed toward the horse, "would take us to the secret place where you’d be worshipped. There is a valley, forbidden for others, where the sharp-thorn roses grow and palms bear ripe fruits all year around. All treasures of the world would be yours there and every night the blood would be spilled for you. Every night, somebody would die to make you live forever!"

    His voice became terrifying, his eyes - red. The stranger almost screamed his last words, but darkness and rain swallowed that scream.

    "Please, my lady," he whispered, suppressing his excitement.

    "I don’t want to go. I can’t. No," Priynaka tried to withdraw, leaned against the pole, and seized it. "It can’t be true. You are lying to me, man. Why are you trying to trick me, Nivari?"

    She thought about Ravan, the fat, naughty boy she was supposed to marry. Yesterday his father had come and talked to Priyanka’s mother behind the closed door. They had even agreed on a wedding day -- two weeks after Priyanka reached her thirteenth spring. That boy’s father was a crorepati, a wealthy man. He said he would give them money to hire a doctor for her mother. And her brother would, perhaps one day, go to school if Priyanka married Ravan.

    "I hate that stupid Ravan. He is even more childish than my little brother," she thought. " If I run away now, I won’t have to marry Ravan. I would never see him again. But my mother, she is so sick… And my brother… There is nobody else to take care of them…"

    Thoughts like wild deer were racing in her head.

    "I know, my lady, you are worried about your family. Come with me. You would eat the ghoor, the unrefined sugar. You would taste power. You would not need any family."

    But Priyanka wasn’t listening to him anymore. If she stayed, Ravan would become her husband, her master, whom she must obey.

    "Obey?" She almost uttered that. This thought made her smile.

    Taking that smile as a sign of her willingness to go, the stranger rose from his knees and went for the horse.

    He claimed to obey her every wish. Well, she would test him on the truth of this. Now Priyanka recalled her childhood games. One of the girls would play rani and order the others, who would bring her flowers, fruits, and candies. It was good to be "a rani", even for a time… Later on, they would make flower wreaths, sing and dance together. They still played this sometimes. 

    "Nivari!" called Priyanka. She would test Nivari, instead.

    "Yes, my lady!" He returned, carrying the hood to protect the girl from the bad weather. He kneeled in the mud, as he’d done the first time, his head bowing, his eyes looking down.

    "Nivari Dhurwei, you said I am your rani, am I not?"

    "You are my Kali," the man risked correcting her. He raised his eyes. Like an obedient dog, waiting for his master’s wish, he was waiting for her to say.

    "So you’ll do whatever I tell you to do?"

    Obediently, he nodded.

    "I tell you &45; go away and leave me alone," she pointed him back to the jungle.

    "I can’t, my lady," he shook his head, his voice trembled. "My mission &45; you are my mission &45; is sacred to fulfill. If I return without you I would be killed for failing it. We must go."

    "How dare you to disobey me, Niwari? Go away, I tell you, or kill yourself. That is my wish. That’s Kali’s wish." He could leave, she thought, go to another village and find another girl. She almost begged him to leave.

    "As you say," he said, and Priyanka sighed with ease.

    The man stood up, slowly turned around. With a swift motion he pulled a handkerchief from his shalwar’s pocket then twisted it around his own neck. It was the handkerchief everybody feared, a perfect murder weapon in the skilful hands. The strangler fell down, his body twitching. In the next moment, a knife appeared from nowhere and ran through its owner’s chest, its blade hilt-deep. Hot blood warmed the mud.

    Priyanka froze numb.

    "Oh, God! He killed himself."  There was no more fear, nor sorrow in her thoughts of what had happened. Like an unbeliever, who recently discovered the undeniable oddness of the truth, she felt curious and disturbed now. Even more, she felt giddy. "No, it was I who killed him. He really was what he said he was. And he really thought of me as the goddess. Why didn’t I believe him? Why…"

    Her legs weakened. Fainting, she fell against the steps-rail and her body slowly slipped down. Out there, in the darkness she saw, not even that, just felt another shadowy movement.

    "…me?" With the last sigh her question vanished in the rain.

"Priyanka!" A desperate and harrowing cry woke up the village next morning. She couldn’t be found anywhere, and there was no sign, no clue where she could disappear. Nothing besides for a small, washed spot of the blood on the porch’s wooden floor.