Blood Blossoms

There was no talking allowed in the library. But even outside it, the silence of the night hung heavy with words left unsaid. It was unusually warm for late June. Purple-grey clouds swirled above the three-storey public building. The smell of salt rose from the mangroves nearby. The distant bustle of trains chugging through Mira Road Station was absent. As was the constant buzz of Friday evening shoppers, swarming stores and street-vendors alike on Poonam Sagar Road. Amidst strict night curfew, the lively satellite suburb with its bulging populace had been rendered a ghost town.

Even the Mahatma Gandhi Public Library, the fluctuating neon signage of which I stood under, had been abandoned by the many students who had once filled up its halls, and sprawled across its compound. My eyes swept across it as my hands jiggled the latch on the main door (which we’d learned over time was more decorative than anything else).

The empty grey concrete of the courtyard stretched between me and the black wrought iron gate with its rusty padlock. The flickering lights of the tilted sign illuminated the place momentarily but plunging it back into darkness.

It looked so different. So abandoned. The only things that remained constant were the rich crimson hibiscus that bloomed in the corners of the compound, and were often found woven into the hair of the woman who ruled these grounds.

I had planted some of them with her — cutting off their stems, burying their amputated limbs into the soil, only to watch new life bloom.

I was just a boy then. But as I had grown, so had the shrubs we planted together. The acrid sweetness of their blossoms wafted into the room along with their planter, whenever she breezed through the library’s halls.

I hadn’t seen her in weeks, since the lockdown began and my trips to the library came to an end. But her flowers were all that remained of normalcy. Them, and the low buzzing drone of the mulching machine that began to rise from the empty lot behind the building.

It had to be eight o’clock if the gardener had started turning the day’s leftovers and fallen flora into mulch. I glanced at my watch, slipping through the door of the library. My guess was right. It was time. And I was late.

Fuck.

I ran up the dark stairwell — landing on the softest parts of my sneakers, leaping two steps at a time — until a lone light at the end of the second floor corridor came into view. The white tubelight of Chitnis Madam’s office was still on.

Sometimes I wondered if she lived in that 10 x 10 room of hers, with its teak chairs, rusting metal table and ancient ceiling-high filing cabinets.

It would have struck me as odd if she were any other government employee but I’d seen how organised the library had become since she had taken over a few years ago. Not one book, not one chair, not one single blade of grass had ever been out of place under her watch. She had been kind to me, letting me stay until much later in the night so I could study away from the chaos of three younger siblings at home. Kinder still when it came to the world outside of my Business Mathematics textbook.

The memory of that day made me smile and the soft white light that flowed out from her open office looked so inviting. I stepped towards it subconsciously before turning a sharp left away from it towards the study hall at the other end of the corridor. I was already late, hopefully the delay wasn’t going to get me kicked off the assignment.

And as I tiptoed down the granite floor hallway, to the study room, I wondered for the millionth time that night: What was a nice, normal boy like me doing sneaking into a government building under strict night curfew during a global pandemic that was surely going to kill us all?

The answer was on the other side of the white wooden door that had been left just a tad ajar. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the darkness of the room once I slipped in. Even in the absence of light, I could see her clearly in my mind.

Frieda.

Flowing, dark brown hair. A moonlike face that was permanently blotched pink around the cheeks. Imposing black glasses perched on a little button nose. And the dark eyes behind them that burned with an unspoken intensity.

The first time I had seen those eyes was from behind a newspaper. She was one of the few library-goers who showed up at six AM. But unlike the rest, who were students, there were no textbooks on her table.

Instead, she spent the first hour of her day reading freshly delivered newspapers in three different languages. I had been plenty distracted by the ruffling of the Lokmat Times in her small hands when the crime section folded away, cutting off an image of a blood-soaked street, and her face emerged for a few brief seconds. Before another paper engulfed it.

She hadn’t seen me, and perhaps she never would have if it hadn’t been for Chitnis Madam. What I was doing that night to help Frieda, seemed to be a betrayal of the middle-aged librarian. Well, to be fair, perhaps she wasn’t quite middle aged yet. I wasn’t sure if it was the hair-dye or just good genes, but Madam seemed to get younger every year. Frieda had even joked about it,

“I don't know what anti-aging cream that woman uses but a little more and she'll start looking like me. No wonder you have such a crush on her.”

I had blushed a deep shade of red and explained (perhaps over-explained) that I was only grateful for how supportive Madam had been through my college years. Education was the only way I was ever going to move up in the world, and she had given me a sanctuary to study in by keeping the library open after hours whenever I had needed it. But then why was I helping Frieda collect evidence against her? It made my stomach churn. Had we gone too far in our suspicions?

The aluminium frames of the tall bookcases felt cold against my spine every time I flattened my back against them, just in case Madam came into the room. What would she think of me? Would she regret that evening when she had caught me looking over the edge of my textbook at Frieda?

Would she regret breaking her own rule of not talking in the library when she leaned over my shoulder and whispered to me, “You’re such a nice, young man. So strong and full of life. Why don’t you talk to her?” I could still feel her bony hand give my newly minted bicep an encouraging squeeze before she had floated away to administer another portion of the building.

It had been just the two of us in the room then — the same room that I was sneaking through — and I had drawn every ounce of courage in me to walk up to Frieda’s table. She had been chewing on her plump lower lip unconsciously and scribbling notes in a frenzy, pouring over Missing Persons sections of the day’s papers. She hadn’t even noticed me until I sat down. She hadn’t wanted to invest time in me until I had offered to be of help.

I stopped momentarily as I turned the corner of the Physics section and came upon the table next to the window, where I had spoken to her for the first time.

The white street lights outside cast a soft glow on it, like faux moonlight. As if an invisible projector were running an old film, my memory played a ghostly vision of her leaning back in her chair and sizing me up.

I don’t know what she had seen in me. But for the next nine months she let me follow her everywhere. Every day after filing her piece, she would come down to the library to work on her notes. Every morning before work, she would be making new ones. She never told me what she was working on. But I wasn’t an idiot. Or, at least, I was an idiot with an 11-year-old silver Santro who drove her to addresses that often matched those of the families who had had children disappear.

For weeks and months, I had longed to be a part of her world. To somehow circumvent my destiny as a number cruncher in an AC office and jump into the maddening adventure that she was living.

I had no name for what I was to her. She had never sought to clarify. But apart from driving her around, and procuring her mint cigarettes (which had become scarce post lockdown), I had graduated to only one other function in Frieda’s life. Occasionally, she buried her face in my shoulder to hide tears of anger and helplessness — often after we had spoken to parents of particularly young children who had gone missing.

She never gave me the details. Never asked to speak to me more than was needed. Never asked me upstairs when I dropped her off. I did everything she wanted. But I had never felt so consistently unwanted, the way I did around her. Then, last night, something had changed. An air of urgency had enveloped Mira Road. A call had come in post midnight, the vibrations of my phone stirring me from a restless slumber.

“Next to the history section,” her raspy voice had whispered in my ear, and then, over the static and the white noise of the rain, invisible network lines had carried her words from a dark bedroom in Srishti to my narrow, drenched balcony on Station Road. Words that made something strange burn in the pits of my stomach,

“I need you, Kush.”

Less than 24 hours later, albeit 10 mins late, there I was. Right where she wanted me. But there was no sign of Frieda anywhere. Not near her beloved newspapers. Not on our table. Not anywhere near the history section.

If she were anyone else, I would have waited. But not Frieda. She, who took pride at never having been late in her life (“Not even for my own birth”), could not possibly be late for what she wanted to do that day.

Somehow, Frieda had come to the conclusion that every kid on her list had visited the library. And so it had to be the common thread between all of them. I had tried to talk her out of it. But once Frieda got something into her head, it was impossible to change her mind. The only trouble was, I realised, she was seldom wrong.

The silence of the dark library became deafening, only to be broken by the gurgling of the mulching machine outside, as if it were trying to grind through material much bigger than it had originally been intended for — like a series of knuckles being cracked.

The sound unnerved me.

Too restless to maintain my cover, I dialled her number. But all three bars on top of my device had disappeared. There was no network. No Frieda. Nothing in the history section except books on colonial India, the fall of the Mughal empire, the odd misplaced botany hardbound on regenerative gardening…

…and, as I stepped towards the shelf, a squish. My foot hadn’t even completely hit the ground when I felt something delicate press under it. I groaned internally, raising the sole of my sneaker to find the pulp of what had once been a hibiscus under it.

Where was Frieda? Had she stood me up? Had she already been here? Had Chitnis Madam caught her? Is that why the lights in her office were still on? Was she going to report Frieda to the police?

A thousand questions swirled in my mind. The drone of the mulching machine outside was almost hypnotic. My mind zoned out for a moment. However, the thought of her all alone when she’d reached out to me last night brought me back.

“I need you Kush.”

I rushed out into the dark corridor and towards the white light at the end of it. My sneakers squeaked against the stone but something told me there was no one to hear it. When I finally stood still in front of Madam’s open office door, no one was in the room. Only the librarian’s black purse sat on the desk, signalling that she was still somewhere in the building.

But the heat of the night, the absence of the usual Friday commotion outside and the empty office made me feel as if I were the only one left alive in the world. If there were any other people out there, they certainly weren’t hanging out at the municipal library after hours.

Turning towards the dark stairwell once again, I whipped out my phone and typed furiously as I walked,

‘Frieda. Where. Are. You!?!’

The drone in the background came to a halt as I began to descend two floors. The stairs seemed steeper somehow, my head heavier. I did not anticipate the presence of another soul as I opened the front door without fear.

A putrid, rotting stench hit my olfactory senses as soon as I stepped out into the compound and saw the khaki-clad gardener in one corner, laying down something mushy on the soil. No sooner did I exit the building than a barrage of messages from Frieda appeared on my lock screen,

‘Bad day, couldn’t go.’

‘Tired, missing you.’

‘Come home.’

And the last one,

‘Come home, I need you.’

The constant pinging of my phone attracted the attention of the gardener, who turned around in an agonisingly slow movement. Large, sullen black eyes fixated their blank stare on me. I noticed his green rubber gloves held a deep red pulpy substance that leaked droplets of crimson down his arms and elbows, onto the light grey concrete below.

The man had been spreading mulch on the soil in the flower beds and somehow the hibiscus looked redder than it had before.

My feet froze in fear as my mind tried to wrap itself around what had just happened. I didn't know what or who was in the mulch. But as the gardener took a step towards me, I knew I wasn't going to wait around to find out. The pinging of another WhatsApp message seemed to startle him mid-step. 

'Come no?’ it read. 

The clouds collided above, thunder reverberated and a single drop of water hit the screen of my phone.

I looked up, the gardener was advancing with slow but sure strides, like a zombie marching towards his prey. Leaping to my feet, I sprang over the low walls of the compound — going out the same way I came in. There was someone waiting for me and, after the night I had had, I didn’t want to see anyone else.

I had been summoned to the one place I had never thought I'd enter, by the only one who I wanted to share my bizarre night with. 



‘Come home, I need you.’

It was like a siren’s call from across oceans. The pull was too strong to resist. If the gardener was following me, I did not know. I only saw the road ahead, fuzzy as it was through the rain, and her building in the distance. A yellow light burned on the third floor, like it was burning for me, and a black silhouette danced in the window.

I ran over the bridge on the rivulet, turning left for Srishti Complex. My legs did not stop until I reached Sector 5.

‘Jatayu’

Read the silver letters on the old, washed-out red building with grey cemented-in fault lines. “B-31,” I barked at the guard sitting below, before brushing past him and rushing up through the narrow staircase to her door. But it was already open and she was waiting there, towel in hand,

“Do you have my cigarettes?”

“I have news,” I panted, crossing her threshold, taking her in with me. But I did not take the towel from her. And she did not take any notes. Instead, the door closed behind her and so did the distance between us.

I did not know what was happening or why it was happening then all nights. But I did not question it. I had prayed for this, replayed it in my head over and over, and her warm bare skin felt like the very definition of comfort under my hands. But its scent had shifted from a musky apple to a tart sweetness — like an overripe pomegranate.

I reached out to undo her high bun, sending a red petalled flower tumbling through her dark locks. And as she climbed into my lap, her hands digging into the muscles of my shoulders, she whispered to me, “You’re such a nice, young man. So strong and full of life.”