Death of a Robin

By Rajesh Dutta

Robins, in a carefully hidden nest, are not safe from the knowledge of serpents. Neither are they safe from falcons.

Whatever the case, we make the choice. Either the nest is made too low for serpents to reach, or the birds are high enough to be noticed by falcons.

Bonny, Yogesh, and Ray were the three robins in the City of Constantia. Bonny Deut died fourteen years later, in the back of the truck, trying to get back to the humble Province of Ignorance. His elder son, Yogesh, pined away in a mental institution in the City of Constantia. Ray got away.

Were Bonny and Yogesh responsible for their fates? How did Ray escape the falcons?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jul 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482834741

Rajesh Dutta

Rajesh Dutta published his first novel, “Death of a Robin,” in 2014, the true story of a family that just cannot be told in a single book. “Second Robin” continues the story of the three robins.

Book preview

1

B onny Deut was the first one to die and the circumstances of his death are as follows.

The night Victoria, Ray and he were about to leave the City of Constantia for good, he suddenly felt an urge to relieve himself but as the house had been locked up, he went to the front courtyard. With diminishing thoughts, he unzipped his trousers but instead of the water slanting out of him, he began to tilt until he was level with the rose bush roots and lay there for quite some time. Ray came looking for him and pulled him free from the thorny fingers that had clutched his face, hands and torso.

‘What happened?’ He held him firmly with one hand, dusting his clothes with the other.

But he only looked at him with his face and hands bleeding from little cuts.

Ray helped him up into the back of the truck. Zella peeped with concern at him from a little gap in the furniture and Victoria wiped his face clean.

Ray sat in the driver’s cabin and the truck’s headlights pinched the nameless darkness of the compound and its wheels snagged out of the long grass and the bushes onto the Private Road.

The well-lighted City road began to twist into eventual obscurity and deep darkness became more devious and indivisible. From this sequestered deep, a beguiling disingenuousness emerged and overtook the truck and by midnight, the driver, a slot captain of sleep, began to doze off at the wheel.

The oncoming traffic was not a panoply of splendor, a dip and bleep spectacle of light and sound but a snip line of quick obliteration. Some of the remarkably monstrous big league vehicles of exalted brilliance missed the little truck by a hair’s breadth.

A devouring blackout vision of annihilating destruction began to loom before Ray in the driver’s cabin and it was decided that the driver would be allowed to set himself up on the stage tableau of sleep while the rest of them could either join him or become the spectacle of local scenery.

Gradually, however, the shroud of sleep fell equally on the whole heap and in that hour a mythical effulgence knocked on the door of the house in the Province of Ignorance and Aru came out and opened the door but there was no one there. She went back to bed.

The moon threw a curve at the rattling train of empty stars, jarring the quiet night and knocking the props out of sweet dreams.

By morning Bonny was experiencing a white out, and as he breathed his last, Zella came out of the furniture and clutched his chest with her paws.

Victoria reached the Province of Ignorance with Bonny’s body in her lap on the morning of her wedding anniversary.

Constantia was the beginning of the end for Bonny.

2

T he year was 1977 when he moved to Constantia.

Yogesh, Aru and Ray were in the back of the truck and tried to stay awake for as long as possible. The road was narrow and bumpy and unlit like an unutterable confession but they began to doze off when it became smoother and wider and endless rows of street lights began to melt dimly into the bleached moon following the truck faithfully. Soon a pale galaxy spun out in parallel coordinates of glistening spinning spheres, in whose spiral haze they slept and woke, slept and woke, fitfully drifting, sometimes noiselessly and sometimes with the whine of orbital transit pulsating around them.

Around midnight, the city road ended and the Private Road began and they reached the white iron gate and the truck turned into it, headlights piercing the darkness like a creature from the Book of Revelation. After about two minutes of vegetation-crunching and twig-snapping, the truck stopped, its headlight snapping off. Bonny got down from truck’s cabin, able to bend only an ear into pitch black night. The driver unlocked the tailgate and one by one the three children stepped down on alien ground.

The air was dry as darkness and he poked it with a finger, ‘that is ours.’ The children strained to look but it was an exhibition of shadows, each one contesting to be darker than the other everywhere around them. In one of those, a door opened and closed.

‘I’m going to get the key,’ Bonny said and he marched off through the thick undergrowth.

‘Step forward into the light please,’ an invisible voice and a torch beamed down from a balcony. ‘Is it you Mr. Deut?’

‘Yes.’

‘Acchha!!’ The beam shot in an arc over the truck and the upturned faces of the men and the children.

‘You want the key?’

‘Yesss.’

The torchlight lingered on Bonny’s face.

‘Come, come,’ the voice spoke and convinced with the scrutiny, the light was withdrawn.

‘Stay here,’ Bonny told the children and climbed up into the invisible abode of the voice with the light. After what seemed a very long wait in the dark, Bonny emerged unscathed.

‘Got the key?’

‘Yes, get our stuff out please.’ He told the driver and walked towards what seemed the sum total of all the shadows in the world. The children followed. Soon a key held ceremony with a slot, a lever shifted, a shaft moved and a rusty lock clicked open. Bonny unbolted the door and a portal creaked open into another shade of darkness. He crossed the room and switched on the light. Dark emptiness of many days gave in to the sudden and fresh invasion of flesh, blood, light and noise. The boys and the girl ran into the rooms.

The house suffered their curious and excited incursion into its solitude until the last of the rooms with the double beds and the restroom had been examined and the last of the doors and windows opened and the solitude of the house bled into the surrounding wilderness, seeping slowly into the darkness and grudgingly retreating into spaces that were known only to the countless denizens that inhabited them. The children peered into an expanse of undergrowth and a dense aerial vista of black leaves, branches and vines overhead.

‘The courtyard.’

The tall grass and the weeds rustled an introduction.

‘There must be snakes in it.’

‘I’ll kill any snake.’ Yogesh’s disregard for them was almost impulsive.

‘What’s this tree?’

Bunches of yellow flowers swung like grapes from the huge tree, long black sticks swaying.

‘Those are for monkeys.’

Light from the veranda fell on the stone slabs that made a path around the last bedroom and into the corridor that led to the back. They stood there understanding its mystery. The men finished unloading. There was stuff all over the house. Bonny paid them and saw them out through the back door till the truck. The children heard the truck roar, its powerful headlights bending the gloom fiercely as it reversed and turned. They rushed out.

‘Will they drive the whole night back to their home?’ The question peaked the experience of the children’s last twenty four hours.

‘I don’t think so,’ Bonny replied on a doleful whim as he turned to go in, ‘come inside, it’s very late.’

The truck thundered through the sleeping compound and out of the gate, turned left on the road and disappeared from view. A dog barked in the distance, picked up by a chorus. A screech owl descended on the open white gate and somewhere a lapwing cried to itself. They ran back. Bonny bolted the door.

It was a semi furnished house with a glossy dining table, study table, double beds, dressing table and a coffee table with two chairs.

‘Welcome to your new house,’ Bonny’s welcome and the children’s excitement mounted and surged in a wave against the advancing hours.

‘It’s very nice,’ Ray almost forgot that he feared his father who gave him an urgently warm smile and nodded.

‘It has so many doors leading out,’ Aru too had scrambled out of her despondency.

‘I am confused by so many doors,’ Yogesh slowed down the flux of emotion. He was yawning and Bonny got the hint.

‘Okay who is tired?’

And they proceeded to make their new unblemished beds.

‘Switch off the lights.’

In the darkness the trio, now together, took a last round of the unfamiliar rooms and stopped at the window of the drawing room. They stood there for long, arrested by what lay outside.

‘What’s that?’ Aru pointed.

Across the undergrowth and hemmed in by the blackness, a yellow verandah now glowed dimly, the bulb suspended from an old fashioned conical shade.

‘It wasn’t there before.’ Ray commented with an unbroken sense of mystery.

The glowing navel of the dark square building was the still picture of certainty and not some vagueness of imagination.

‘There’s a spiral near it, look!’ Yogesh tagged from behind.

On the right side of the verandah a spiral staircase screwed up into seamless night. The sound of organic darkness reached their ears.

‘Can you hear it?’ Ray grossed a classic whisper.

‘The hum of Constantia!’ Bonny wedged his face between theirs. ‘Come away and sleep. It will be morning soon.’

They went to bed and slept the sleep of the tired and dreamt the dreams of the snatched. Snatched from their mother and plunged into Constantia’s world.

Yogesh woke up when the air in his ears began to ring with phantom sounds and when he opened his eyes, a wall picture of excessively yellow flowers met his slanted vision. The panting of lions, screaming of peacocks and a sound he could not place, a kind of hoopoo, hoopoo, defined his first morning in Constantia.

It took him a moment to realize that he was actually awake and that this was not the old horse shoe house. The bright sunlight illuminated the faces of his still sleeping siblings. Where is father? He got out of bed, his shuffle sounded unfamiliar to him as he went through the rooms. Bonny was in the kitchen.

‘Good morning,’ he greeted Yogesh who mumbled a response and stood there watching him prepare breakfast out of the mess. The kitchen door was open.

‘There is a palm in our courtyard,’ the son observed.

‘Khajoor.’

Yogesh stepped out into the wilderness, walking on the wide flagstones bordering the front of the house and leading into the corridor. There were two doors in the verandah, opening into the drawing room and the bedroom. There was a similar house adjacent to theirs and a third one adjacent to the middle one. Neighbours without walls. Their courtyards were arranged in neat beds of flowers and vegetables. He went out through the corridor and stood at the back of the house. There were two doors at the back opening into the bathroom at the corner and the drawing room further down. Tall grass everywhere surrounded khajoors in all stages of growth. Across the green chaos stood a huge square structure. The verandah and the spiral, now divested of night, still retained an air of mystery. Their house was the last one on this side of the compound. A barb wire ran close to the dining room wall, a wicket gate close to the corner and near it a tap spouted water, profuse in sound and content and men and women, whom Yogesh assumed to be servants, ran the business of the morning with a greater din of metal, plastic and tongues. When he returned, breakfast was ready and the table laid for four.

New light shone on all varnished furniture of the house but inky sleep still brewed behind the eyelids of the two figures whose faces Bonny was gently caressing. They stirred and changed sides. This is a new man. But when they will hear his voice… He thought and went into the bathroom. There was a sink and a mirror. A shower too. A short door separated the toilet. He brushed his teeth and washed his face and went back to the dining room. The aroma of omelets and paranthas from the dining room was very inviting. He sat down at one end of the table, with his back to the window. It would become his permanent place for the next eleven years.

‘You can start,’ Bonny said to him.

‘God is love God is good. And we thank Him for this food,’ he sang the simple prayer.

He had almost finished when they came too. They looked bleary eyed but did not mind being awake in the new house now in daylight too. Bonny also joined them.

‘You are quite a good cook,’ Yogesh said.

Bonny laughed.

‘You never cooked there!’

‘Your mother taught me.’

‘Her food is something!’

‘You will miss it now.’

‘Too late for any regrets.’

‘No regrets now,’ Bonny looked at Aru and Ray, ‘Hmm?’

They hid their feelings in shy smiles. Inhibited, was how Bonny described them. Inseparable from the hem of their mother, they stuck to each other.

‘I am your mother and your father here.’ He said.

Yogesh did not think he meant it for him because he did not miss her so much. This was a new world, waiting to be explored.

‘We will unpack the things and set the house in order,’ he announced, ‘then in the evening we will go out.’

They got down to work with some enthusiasm. The What Not was propped up in a corner of the drawing room, its vacant shelves inviting occupancy. The loftiest one was filled up by the abysmally voluptuous semi-nude Venus, who immediately set about sending her vibes to her beholders, next, below it, Bonny and Victoria in their twin frame, complimented each other, quite incongruently in chrome youthfulness and beauty, and next, below, other equally disposable decorations, beginning to consider immediately their lot until time and tide would deal each one of them a blow.

The dressing table became available to Ray’s artistic altruism. Aru set about reconciling the crockery in the dining room crockery cupboard. Then the three of them turned into allies against the axis of clothes, there were not many, and a peace treaty was established with them too by late afternoon, the only opposition being offered by the windows whose bareness was an ally of prying eyes passing behind the house.

The consistency of work and passing time produced tiredness and hunger and Bonny’s new affinity for kitchen work produced timely lunch.

‘You have a wonderful mother,’ he said as in one accord they engaged themselves in eating, ‘she never let any of you do any kitchen work.’

‘It is quite an achievement.’ Yogesh could not remember the last time he had worked.

‘Cooking is actually easy,’ Bonny, always a creature of the real world, said, ‘with a pressure cooker I mean.’

Ray and Aru’s reality was their mother but now they were in the grip of Bonny’s reality. Victoria was only an abstract sketch while to Yogesh, the esoteric was beginning to unfold.

The urging of an ambition surrounded them. A force of eager longing lurked in every corner. The trap of the dramatic waited at every turn.

‘Come, I’ll show you around,’ Bonny said in the evening.

‘That is Mr. BB,’ he pointed to a man hanging in the balcony of his house atop the transcendental veranda. Mr. BB waved to them.

‘Going out?’ He hollered.

Bonny made them wish him.

Below him, a little boy sat on a cot, his head to one side, a hypothetical look on the face heightened by his large eyes and the open mouth from which emanated an enigmatic sound; his ayah fanned him abstrusely.

‘Whose house is that?’

‘That is the Sheffield house.’

‘And the little boy?’

‘He is their son.’

‘What’s with him?’

Bonny named an obscure condition.

‘This is a huge building.’

‘It is called Park House. It houses four families.’ He pointed. ‘The Biglais on the first floor like Mr. BB and by Mr. Dilman on the ground floor like the Sheffields.’

They went past another boxlike but a bit more mossy building, the Bachelor’s Mess and crossed the road. The gate to Constantia’s compound was flanked on its left by a white grave and a mausoleum behind it.

‘Hudson’s, a British officer and that mausoleum belongs to the Gori Bibi of Constantia’s owner.’

They came across an opaque section of twilight surrounding a dense bungalow, occult ivy suspended from its walls all around

‘This is Mr. Reiner’s house. His hobby is summoning spirits.’

They stood immobilized in confidential closeness to study it a little longer. Drawn by an unfriendly feeling behind him, Ray turned around but there was nothing, just a nondescript wall that seemed to draw his attention for no apparent reason. The top of Constantia was visible from this angle.

Bonny took them through a short cut through a colonnaded corridor to the façade. They walked to a central position on the road below.

‘The owner was a French soldier of fortune, who left the French and joined the British.’

Bonny’s broadcast imparted more magic to the slowly unfolding view.

‘The soldier acquired a huge fortune in no time. See what is written up there?’

‘Labore et Constantia. It is not English. What does it mean?’ Yogesh read out.

‘It’s in French. It is the motto. Work and Constancy, meaning faithful, loyal, though, it is said that Constance was his first love.’

‘The Gori Bibi?’

‘No. Gori Bibi was a woman in his harem. He never married and had no heirs and provided for the establishment of three schools in his will.’

‘There are three schools?’

‘Actually six, for boys and girls, two here, two at Calcutta and at Lyon in France. It is here, however, that his body lies in a vault beneath Constantia that discouraged the Nawab from acquiring the chateau after his death.’

‘What’s a chateau?’

‘In French, a castle or a large country house.’

‘Chateau.’ Ray repeated admiringly.

‘It is the only school in the world with British battle honours.’

‘What battle?’

‘Fifty students defended the Residency during the Mutiny of 1857.’

Sweetheart of history, transported from across a cultural chasm! Her Gothic gargoyles looked down on them from Corinthian columns and over them Georgian colonnades rose up with loopholes and medieval turrets and above them Palladian arcades decorated the sky line with Mughal copulas but it was the central tower with its bridge links and the statues with huge rampant lions with flaming eyes that took their breath away.

‘Look at the lions!’ Ray nudged his confidant, Aru.

‘Those eyes were lit by red lanterns at night.’ Bonny added that bit as the last ray of the sun slipped down from Constantia’s crown.

‘The