THE BODY IN THE ATTIC

Anand hated Aboo.

As much as a ten year old boy could hate a man in his twenties, that is.

It was not because Aboo had ever done anything to him. Far from it. It was just that Aboo just ignored him, except for gruffly asking him to get out of the way once in a while.

That did not happen usually to Anand. Everyone paid him a lot of attention. He was always ready and willing to help. If his mother wanted him to run down to the corner shop to get her some groceries, Anand was her man. His grandmother depended on Anand to smuggle tins of sweets into a dark corner of the Pooja room so that she could enjoy them in peace, with an occasional share of the booty to the smuggler. Procurer of Grandpa’s cigarettes (he could keep the change), gardener’s assistant to his father every alternate week (no wages here, but a chance of a nice trip to the beach later) – Anand virtually ran the place. Even Mini chechi needed him as an escort when going for her tuitions – Anand would strut by her side, glaring at all and sundry, daring them to even glance at his sister.

Of course, once in a while, he attracted the wrong kind of attention when he tried to repair the tap at the kitchen sink or light a bonfire to burn leaves from the badam tree in the backyard – leaves he had swept up, but in such situations, no one appreciated that.

But no one ever ignored him like Aboo did.

Aboo was the man Grandma called when there was heavy work to be done – when the storeroom needed cleaning, when the compound needed weeding, when the house needed to be whitewashed. Aboo was big and strong. When he took off his shirt, the muscles on his upper arms and shoulders stood out like those of Tarzan in Anand’s comic books. There was not an inch of spare fat on his dark, sturdy frame.

Aboo was the most exquisite man that Anand had ever seen. His physique matched any of the Greek hero sculptures that Anand had seen in the World Book Encyclopedia in his father’s shelves. If he closed his eyes, he could see Aboo in his mind, riding on a black horse at the forefront of his men, mowing down the enemy hordes – or at the prow of his battleship, turning boldly to meet the pirates and their grappling hooks.

The problem was that Aboo never smiled at him and rarely acknowledged him. When Anand offered to help Aboo with the garden tools or hold the whitewash brushes, he would make an impatient sound with his tongue and make it clear that Anand’s presence was not welcome. He would call out to the house for help if Anand became too persistent. Someone would then tell Anand to go away and stop making a nuisance of himself.

Anand just couldn’t figure out why.

But then he could never understand why grown up people behaved the way they did. They were never consistent. You could never figure out when they would be angry and when they would be nice. They changed so fast too. One moment they would be loving and friendly, giving him hugs and pats on the head – and the next moment they would be scolding and screaming about something he had done or forgotten to do.

Like Appu ettan. When he was at home, he was always shouting at Anand. Just because he was ten years older than Anand was. And until he started studying to become a doctor, he would even slap and pinch Anand if he got angry with him. That had stopped now and Anand felt a lot less terrified of Appu ettan these days. He was even proud of him these days, bragging about Appu ettan to his classmates. One day he would be big like Appu ettan and study to become a…no, not a doctor, he would become a pilot instead.

But then Appu ettan knew such a lot of things that Anand didn’t. Like how to make paper boats that wouldn’t sink while sailing down the muddy stream that began from the puddle near the shed and ran down to the road in Monsoon time. Anand’s efforts would turn soggy and drown halfway through, even before they reached the bed where the cannas grew, but Appu ettan’s flotilla would sail triumphantly down and beyond till the gutter, from where he said they would reach the Sea itself. Appu ettan had promised to teach him how to build boats like that, but hadn’t got down to it yet.

Anand still remembered the day the bones came home.

A week before Appu ettan joined Medical College. All packed in a wooden crate, with straw sticking out from the sides. His father used an iron lever to open it, while everyone else gathered around. When the lid cracked open with a loud ‘crrrch!’, his  mother gave a gasp of horror and stepped back. There was a skull, yellow and grinning, looking up at all of them. Beneath, through the straw lining the crate, Anand could see many more bones, just like in the picture of the skeleton that hung in his classroom. He couldn’t resist reaching into the box to get a better look, but withdrew when he got a good thump on the head from Appu ettan.

‘Don’t touch them, monu…Appu ettan needs them to study’ his grandmother said ‘They may break very fast – and it took a lot of trouble to get them too’

But they were not all that brittle. A year later, when Appu ettan no longer needed them and they had been lying unattended in a corner of the store room for about a month, Anand took them out to play with. It was like a big jigsaw puzzle, which you had to lay out in the shape of a human body. Nothing scary about them really, if you didn’t look too hard at the holes in the skull where the eyes and nose should have been and the cavities in the rotted teeth which still remained in the jaw. The jawbone was loose. Anand tried to tighten the wire that held it to the skull, but he couldn’t.

He was wondering if he could light a candle on it and put it on his study table, like the Phantom’s room at the Skull Cave, when Mini chechi walked into the storeroom and started screaming.

The bones would have to go into the attic, Grandma decreed. You must show them respect. Who knows who they belonged to? Everyone agreed. Somehow it seemed disrespectful to leave them just lying around. Even though they were probably not all from the same body. While Appu ettan held the ladder steady, his father took them up into the attic, crate and all. There they had remained for the past year. Anand had never seen them since. The attic was out of bounds for him.

But they didn’t matter all that much to him anyway. There was too much going on around him, with a new cricket team being formed by his friends and his being assigned the burdensome position of opening bat and a new litter of kittens at Parvathy’s house down the road.

It was a quiet Sunday evening. Only his grandmother was in the house. The rest had gone for a cousin’s wedding and would return only in the evening. Anand would have liked to go too, but had been persuaded to stay back and be his grandma’s bodyguard.

He had lined up all his miniature animals (free with Binaca toothpaste) in two opposing rows, ready to begin the Battle for the World, when his grandmother called from downstairs.

‘Anand! Aboo is coming up. Get the ladder for him, he is going to clean the attic today’

Anand went to retrieve the ladder from the terrace as Aboo came up the stairs. He was dressed in his working clothes – a dirty grey sweatshirt, a faded green lungi. He looked down his nose at Anand as if insulted to be assisted by such a pipsqueak. He didn’t say a word to Anand.

Anand held the ladder steady for him as Aboo went up. Aboo’s calf muscles were thick and solid. They looked like iron, almost as big as Anand’s head.

After Aboo disappeared into the cobwebs, Anand went back to his animal warriors. The carnivores outnumbered the herbivores, but that was no matter. Some of the flesh eaters could fight on the side of the plant eaters and in any case, the anteaters were as big as the tigers. Anand worked out the battle strategies in his mind while his keen eye scouted the terrain like an ace General - Creator, Preserver and Destroyer all in one.

A loud cry and a resounding thud startled him from his reverie. For a moment he couldn’t figure out where it had come from, but then he found himself running towards the ladder. Had Aboo fallen down? The ladder was not all that strong and had been lying unused for quite some time.

He could hear only faint moans from the attic. He called out to Aboo, but other than a groan that sounded like a man being strangled, there was no other response.

Anand was now really scared. What could be happening up there? Had some monster killed Aboo? No way, not big, strong Aboo.

He wondered whether his grandmother had heard and would come up. Not likely. She was a bit hard of hearing these days and was in the kitchen, far away. He would have to do something himself.

Anand took a trembling step onto the first rung of the ladder. His mouth was suddenly dry and a voice in his mind kept telling him to run, go get help, there is nothing you can do here.

But before he knew it, he was at the top of the ladder and looking into the attic.

Dust swirled in the dim light coming through a glass tile in the roof. Dark shapes lurked in distant corners. A musty smell of civet cat urine pervaded the place. A sharp chirp, as a bat took wing and passed close to Anand’s head, making him flinch. It flew the length of the room and settled on a rafter at the far end. 

Anand could see that there was an entire thread of rooms in the attic replicating the rooms below, though the ceiling was much nearer and there were no doors, only openings between the rooms. The cobwebs on the eaves had been cleared where Aboo had worked. The rest of the floor was covered with pungent animal droppings and the feathers of small birds.

Aboo was lying motionless near an upturned crate, a skull and a thighbone next to him.

Anand quickly raised himself into the attic and knelt near Aboo’s side. Aboo was taking short heavy breaths. He was saying something faintly. Anand leant close to his lips.

‘Water, give me water’ he heard Aboo say.

Anand ran back to the ladder and got down to the room below. He ran to his parents’ bedroom and took the water jug he was sure would be there. Without a care for whether the ladder would hold up, he bounded back to the attic in double time.

After Aboo had gulped down a little water, he said in a more audible tone ‘There is a body in that crate. Someone has been killed and put in there. Looks like it was long, long ago. Only bones now’. The shock and horror in his eyes was still evident.

In a level voice, without any trace of mirth or scorn in it, Anand told Aboo the truth about the skeleton in his family’s closet – well, attic.

And they spent the rest of the morning cleaning the attic together, but not before putting the bones back in the crate first. Anand had a great time, exploring all the nooks and crannies of the ancient attic and learning about the possessions and beloved articles of those who lived in the old house before him – the rusted tricycles, a pair of deer antlers, dilapidated lamps, photographs of ancestors no one knew anything about..

And the best part of it was that Aboo recommended his work to his grandmother while they cleaned up.

The bones lie in the attic still, waiting for the next unwary visitor.