The Wicked One

Moonlight washed the wet earth of the empty garden. Bela’s feet soaked it in. There was nothing to do now that it was done. Now that she had said those wicked things. Her coral-pink lips, now dry of the venom she had spewed, were greying with the darkening clouds, dry and sealed shut like an aging wound. 

I pray that you die, blind man. And your world remains black. She felt regret, but more pain. No, hate. Anger. She had slapped him, then taken the cross from the table and knocked it on his balding head, muttering curses like a frenzied black witch. “I cannot wait for you to die!” she cried in glee. “I will be free from you, you son of a whore!”

Papa, her weak heart softly called. Not that it would help the shattered man. How could a daughter do such a thing? She did not know. All she knew was that he had long hurt her. And it was her turn to hurt him back. 

“You will never go far in life,” he would say. “You are too emotional.”

Maybe it was a bad report card. Or a call for help when no one was at home. The old man hated ‘negative’ emotions more than anything else in the world. 

“It’s your fault!” she would sob helplessly, closing the fresh cuts she made on her wrist, slurring from the sleeping pills she had taken. 

“It’s your karma.”

“My karma? I didn’t ask to be born, you bastard-”

“Don’t open your mouth,” he’d say off-handedly, “Such a stink in your mouth! Anyway keep talking if you wish, you do not exist for me.”

She would grow silent. Suddenly, she was empty. “Were you ever there for me?” she would say. 

“No. You enjoyed your life and allowed my mother to brutalize me!”

“Brutalize?” he’d laugh. “Your grandfather would strip me naked and whip me with his belt. Did we do that to you? DID WE?”

Arguments followed. The absent father could never imagine how her well-fed, private schooled daughter could have anything to complain about, compared to the torture he went through as a child. 

Bela couldn’t ever make him understand that her mother was no less than his father. The trauma of being woken with hard knocks on her teeth with her mother’s strong, fat, gemstone ringed knuckles was part of her being now. Not being allowed to cough, because she had “brought it upon herself”, being denied medicine if the mother felt it was her daughter’s “self-made sickness”. Silent treatment was her way of life, punches and slaps and teeth-gritting threats were her ‘love’. She was a mother who constantly cried to herself, and never once even patted her elder daughter’s head, let alone hold her close with love.

Bela got out of her aching trance. Once more, she felt the wetness of the grainy ground under her feet. The garden, which was gone moments ago, was back somehow but drenched in near darkness. The phone in her pocket was vibrating. She was about to throw the phone out into the bushes when she realized it was an SMS. She took it out with hurried ease and read it:

“You have an illness,” it said. “Which takes away your self-control in such situations. It is not you. It is the illness. Don’t worry. It's not your fault. All will be well.”

All will be well, her mind reiterated. Therapists. So happy in their own worlds. Did she think in black and white? Yes. But she took medication for it. What medication did her father take? For chiding her. Making fun of her in front of people she cared for. Cracking jokes at her expense at parties. For favoring her perfect sister? In his mind, she was the evil one. The black one. The useless spare. 

Sounds of dinner plates being kept away came from the kitchen. It must have been her sister, working by flickering candlelight, missing their cold, dead mother. Bela realized it was possible to miss such a person. She missed her too. She wished now that she could go and embrace her father and take back what she said. But I can’t. 

"Bela," her father had once said, "You have everything in you. You just need to be more stable."

The word angered her. But she tried not to prove his point. "Yes. And so do you."

"I am very stable," he'd say. "I know I have problems so I take medicine. Do you take yours everyday?"

"Yes," she'd lie.

"Good," he'd say. "We are a mad lot. A mad family. So we need to be more careful. More mindful of ourselves."

"I wish I wasn't born," Bela would say, "In this family. I have everything, but you have all taken it away."

"See? You're getting angry."

"I'm not!"

"You are!"

"Why does it anger you when I share my feelings? Why do negative things anger you so much? I am just sharing my feelings, what is your problem?"

"I have a problem."

"Then you are not taking your medicines!"

"I am taking them! You have a serious defect."

The only one in the household she could stand called her defective. Her sister was just born, and emotions ran strong. Hopes ran high. Maybe this will be the better daughter. The Good One. The one who makes it to Harvard and gets her MBA and lives a respectable life. Instead of ending up a poor, jobless 'freelancer'. A shame for the erudite family.

Bela wasn't a bad student. In fact, she was quite brilliant while in school. More brilliant, in many ways, than Leila, her sister born twelve years after her. But Bela's mind had long been tinkered with by guilt and anger and lovelessness.

Being the eldest, she should have been the one to be respected, at least, for her mind. She should have gone to Oxford, before her brain cracked in two halves. She should have saved her family by building a fortune and spending it all on its desperate members, so as to keep them happy. So as to stop little Leila from living in the same shadows she once had. But she had no merit anymore. Shame is all she had to offer.

Something whooshed past Bela’s feet and frightened her for a moment. But her body wouldn’t react. Was it a ghost? Then it should engulf her. Was it a snake? Then it should bite her to death. But she was scared. 

Damn survival instinct, she thought. Damn it to death. 

She strained her eyes to see what it was. Why was everything so difficult to see in the dark? Everything was dark. Darkness is the absence of light. So perhaps light was absent in her. The moon was now covered with rainclouds. But she was now calmer and could see the shadows of the blooming garden. Hope.

She craned her head to see if the lights had come back on in the house but they hadn’t. The powercut had lasted for six hours. Looks like it is here to stay. But when she looked within and felt forgiveness in her heart, she thought otherwise. It was like a feeble, flickering light, but full of redemption.

And for once, she let it flood the darkness.