Instruments of Torture

By Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal

Descend into the deepest, darkest torture chambers of the soul, where rapacious dreams dwell and nightmares are forged. In these pages, the mind's darkness lies revealed.

These stories are each named after a medieval torture device, and the true meaning - and impact - of every title bubbles up to the surface as the connection between the various instruments and their psychological counterparts are laid bare: whether it is an anguished man being drugged with hormones to 'cure' his dwarfism or a forbidden love affair that takes root in a place of worship.

Torn asunder, marginalized, existing at the edges of our peripheral vision, the people in these tales hold up to the reader the greatest instrument of torture yet: a mirror that looks directly into the subconscious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Feb 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9789356296732

Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal

Aparna Sanyal holds an MA from Kings College, London. Recipient of the 14th Beullah Rose Poetry Prize by Smartish Pace, she was shortlisted for the 2018 Third Coast Fiction Prize. This book is her first foray into fiction. Her debut book, Circus Folk & Village Freaks, released in October 2018 and was number one on the Amazon India Poetry Bestseller list. It is the first featured poetry recommendation on ‘Sonali's Book Club' and has stellar reviews in The Hindu, The Asian Age, The Indian Express, Midweek, et al. Aparna's publication credits include The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 20-21, The Hong Kong Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology 2020, The Penn Review, Smartish Pace, Dunes Review, SOFTBLOW, Vayavya, Typehouse Literary Magazine, et al.  Find her work at www.aparnasanyal.in  

Book preview

THE RACK

‘… The victim is tied down while some mechanical device, usually a crank or turning wheel, tightens the ropes, stretching the victim’s body until the joints are dislocated. Continued pressure could cause the limbs to be torn right off. Such torture was known as being broken on the rack, racked, or stretched on the rack. It could be combined with other forms of torture to make things even more painful …’

: https://theloveforhistory.wordpress.com

He was so tiny, this little red infant. All infuriated wails and clenched fists in a wrinkled old man face. Handed to the eager couple, wrapped in a threadbare yellow paisley blanket, his greeting was an immediate loosening of the bowels that spread all over the new mother’s chest as she tried to clumsily embrace him.

Inside the dilapidated, paan-stained building, on a rusting corner cot, the birth mother cried softly with pain and with relief. The heat and sun hit her directly through the dirt-speckled mesh-covered window, and for once, she welcomed their assault. After seeing the cavernous inside of the delivery room, where stray cats mewled outside the windows anticipating the treat of hastily thrown afterbirths and the nurses slut-shamed the mothers-to-be for opening their legs to bastard male-kind, she felt cold. So cold that a strong shiver went through her rhythmically every few seconds, not letting her rest. Finally, her family would take her back, now that her shame was gone. She would soon be repackaged as a shiny faced near-virgin and married to the highest bidder. The child was just a stain that would eventually scrub itself off the skirt of her youth. She would forget—already she had started forgetting—the lump in her womb. It was now just a phantom feeling of silky kicking limbs and hiccups. She was smooth-faced once more, no outward signs of this misadventure visible apart from the slightly loosened skin and parallel red marks on her belly and the old-woman look in her young-girl eyes. Her breasts would dry quickly, as surely as her tears would. The child had suckled just once and then been taken from her—handed out in a hasty bundle. The separation was instant and complete.

Outside, in the crumbling corridor, families wailed for their loved ones, half-fed children gawked at vendors selling old fruit covered with soggy newspaper and fruit flies, and bustling orderlies pushed steel-covered coffins on wheels past the harrowed crowds. The young, newly made father pulled away from the child, wrinkling his nose and refusing to hold the infant smeared in turmeric-yellow newborn poop. The mother tried to keep the mess off herself, finally squatting awkwardly on the floor to remove the sodden blanket from around the baby. This made the baby scream even louder. If you listened closely, you could sense the loss conveying itself in the baby’s full-throated blats. Longing for a safe warm place, for a familiar smell, for a heartbeat he could no longer feel, a tearing, wrenching feeling of bereavement and a visceral fear for its safety made the baby inconsolable.

The mother carried the baby over to the nearest tap, opened it full force, placed the baby’s bottom directly under the cold, stinging spray and let it do the cleaning that her soft hands should have done. No one had warned her that a baby’s poop was so smelly. Unprepared for the nasal assault and already wanting the infant to stop his wretched wailing, the mother brought the baby back to the father and asked him to fetch a new blanket. The father scampered away, more than eager to get away from the racket. Until he returned, the mother held the baby akimbo and at a distance from herself, unwilling to soil her sari further, averting her face from his wailing and from the miasma of poop and need that emanated from him. This was a harbinger for the days to come.

The baby found a home with the couple, but could never find their hearts. The three of them cohabited awkwardly, never really fitting in with each other, and at the best of times, only tolerating each other’s presence. The baby was all nervous limbs and shaky temperament, his feeling of displacement never quite seeming to leave him. The mother wished for a different life secretly. The father, now working two shifts to accommodate the needs of an infant, wished for a different life too—only not so secretly, but in a belligerent, drunken way. The only people who were happy with this strange and nervous sudden-family were both sets of grandparents, who sent their love and bits of money in twice-used envelopes. ‘Good’, they said to their progeny often, ‘at least the neighbours will stop gossiping about you two being childless.’

As the baby grew, a name had to be decided upon. In the six months since his birth, the couple had taken to calling the infant ‘it’, never really settling on a name. A name would, after all, bring with it full ownership, claiming the baby out of anonymity and firmly, finally, placing him into their fold. But once again the grandparents bore down, and loath as they were, the couple found an auspicious day on which to hold the child’s naming ceremony. On the day of the naam-karan, as the grandparents and several relatives gorged themselves on pedas and bananas and drank rose sharbat from steel tumblers in the outer hall, inside their cramped, shared bedroom, the mother struggled to dress the uncompliant baby in holy reds and yellows. Using liberal handfuls of coconut oil, she pasted down his stringy hair, then marked his chin with a dot from her kajal pencil. Using the same kajal pencil, she lined the undersides of his eyes, the rough act making the baby bawl his head off. Exasperated, the mother shook him until his crying subsided. Emerging into the hall, she handed him over hastily to the pundit, just as his blatting cries resumed. The pundit, unnerved by the child’s sheer bellicosity, strove to place the baby on his lap and hold him there, all the while chanting mantras and feeding the small holy fire that sputtered away in the cast iron trough in front of him with ghee, slivers of wood, wedges of kapur, flower petals and raw sugar in turns. As the ritual clumsily proceeded, the baby didn’t relent for a second. The pundit hurriedly completed the prayers, summarily dumped the baby on to his mother’s lap and receded into the crowd, gulping down a huge quantity of sharbat as he sought out the father for his fee. And thus it was. ‘It’ now had a name:

Raghu.

Raghu was not an easy child. Where his mother yearned for apple cheeks, chubby limbs and thick, straight hair, Raghu was spiny to the touch. His straggly locks clung to the nape of his neck in sweaty coils and his body reeked with a peculiar mixed musk of fear and need. By the age of one, his mother started giving him cow’s milk by the litre, convinced that this was the only way his temperament, and more importantly, his angry dark skin, could be soothed. He darkened each day, almost as if the glands in his body were overdosing on melanin, racing to keep up with the dark, angry clouds of his mind. He went almost purple when he cried, and his mother soon learnt to ignore him until he subsided into sobbing exhaustion. She could hardly bear to see his open mouth or his bruise-dark skin as he keened with perpetual and urgent desires she could not fathom. Never the sort to exhibit or even feel much affection, her marriage had long ago leached away any tender sentiment from her soul, and now this child demanded feelings that she did not possess. Raghu sought warmth where there was only winter, sought shade in a parched desert, and this left both mother and child constantly dissatisfied and suspicious of each other.

Time passed interminably for the family. Bits and spurts of joy came to them in the form of handouts from the grandparents—just enough to keep them grateful, grovelling and waiting for more. And then one day the father’s fortunes turned. He took up with the comely, just-widowed woman who lived a few doors away. She was not only generous with her charms, but with material gifts too, having inherited a sizeable amount from her suddenly deceased husband. The father now spent most evenings with his mistress and came home in an infinitely better temper, sometimes toting a large bottle of whisky, sometimes grinning widely at the small wad of notes tucked into his front pocket. In this situation he could almost tolerate his wife and even the boy. Sometimes, he would pat Raghu on the head and tickle his chin, until the sudden, alarmed cry of the toddler would drive him away. Unused to any affection, Raghu would mistake this tiny token of human caring as a threat and defend himself the only way he knew how—by crying his little lungs out.

The father’s mistress was a determined, resourceful woman and soon wangled a better job for her lover. The wife, by now knowing fully well about the husband’s affair through the hard-working neighbourhood grapevine, not only turned a blind eye towards it, but secretly welcomed it into their lives. In their loveless, arid marriage, the mistress was the only fecund one: the productive third that brought prosperity in her wake. The wife was happy in the way that she understood happiness—as being a tangible conversion into steady food on the table, and a husband who smiled sometimes and mostly left her alone.

When he was two, Raghu’s mother noticed an alarming trend. In other aspects, he was a normal boy—he ate well, babbled like other toddlers, even walked around their little home confidently when his father wasn’t there to chide him. His lungs were magnificent—beautifully developed for a child of his age, this being the only positive side-effect to come from the ferocious crying sessions that festooned his normal day. His skin was dark, but toughened and inured to the many smacks his mother laid on him daily, barely registering any red as her hand came down thwack-thwack square on it. He was a sturdy specimen overall, quiet when not crying and developing that preternatural awareness that comes early to children who realize that something seminal is missing from their lives. The problem lay in Raghu’s height. It remained stunted, refusing to budge upwards by even a centimetre. It was as if his system had used up all its energy in stubborn self-preservation and had nothing left to give. And so, Raghu did not grow.

By the age of five, Raghu was still at the height of an average two-year-old. But his wizened features and bushy brows made him look like a pygmy monkey. His eyes had grown apart from each other—warring factions seeking the opposite corners of his face to settle into. In these corners, little lines stood guard already, deep C-shaped grooves caused by the constant open-mouthed crying that dominated his life. His mother loathed introducing him as her son. She would tell visitors his name, and then hastily rush to add that he was adopted, her tone conveying an explanation and apology rolled into one for the travesty that was his looks. Apart from this, all went as it was meant to go—not good but not so bad either. Raghu had a home, went to school, was never unfed nor unclothed. The feeling of loss that dogged him every moment and that came out in his sudden bursts of anger and crying jags had a name too: his mother called it ‘ingratitude’, his father called it ‘the nature of a bastard child’.

By the time Raghu was seven, his height, or rather the lack thereof, had drawn more attention to him than he could bear. At school, he was taunted with names that combined in rife, colourful terms his shortness of height and unknown ancestry. ‘Bastard’ became a defanged adjective, one he grew almost fond of—brandished so regularly by his father and classmates that he took it to be a statement of fact rather than a slur. What really hurt, though, was not his classmates’ teasing, but the adults’ dismissal. Left out of games and sports, heckled in the school hallways and invisible to his teachers, he returned home daily to cringe at his mother’s indifference and his father’s sneering.

And then one day, when he came home from school, he was amazed to see a bright smile on his mother’s normally lacklustre face. She had just met with some ‘foreign-return’ cousins, and they had told her all about something called ‘growth hormones’. She was convinced that this was the magic potion they needed for Raghu. Since his father was doing quite well financially, there was no reason to delay, and off the three of them went to see a specialist—a doctor known for successfully treating patients with glandular deficiencies. The doctor examined Raghu, ordered blood tests and bone scans and then started to carefully explain the concept of dwarfism to the family seated in front of him, only to be summarily cut short by the father.

‘We want the medicine,’ he said firmly, ‘not a PhD talk on science.’

Plenty of money eased any moral qualms the doctor might have had, and Raghu started a rigorous course of growth hormones.

If she lacked in other motherly duties, Raghu’s mother made up for it by faithfully timetabling his medication. Thrice a day, she would force him to swallow the huge tablets that made him sick and vomit at the