Read Online I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran - Free Book Online Page B

hard at the page, but it did not change. It was entirely unintelligible.
    I thrust the paper toward R. “What is the meaning of this?” I asked him.
    He stared blankly at the page for some seconds, as if not seeing what I meant to show. Then, slowly, his eyes resolved on those appalling marks, he nodded his head in acknowledgment, and calmly he told me, “Yes, I see. My mind must have wandered.”
    His explanation was so simple, unadorned, and unbothered that I began to doubt myself. Was my initial shock unwarranted? Perhaps this was a simple mistake, something like an inkblot. After all, up till this moment he had been, in all things, anxiously meticulous, somewhat in my own mold. Yes: It was his first day, after all, and didn’t I owe him some time to adjust? I decided to let the matter pass. He sat down again, and again I dictated the latter part of the letter, and indeed, this time his transcription was flawless.
    I put the strange incident out of my mind, and for the next several days R. was in fact an exemplary employee, early to arrive, late to leave, dressed now in a properly tailored shirt. I found myself drawing Dhananjayan’s attention to R.’s punctiliousness, his energy, his cool and alacritous demeanor in the face of all tasks and challenges. “Study him,” I told Dhanu. “You should strive to behave more like R.”
    “Am I not also a good help to you?” young Dhananjayan plaintively asked.
    “A good help? You? Ha!” I replied, with unwarranted irritation, unwilling, as I inexplicably found myself some days, to spare a compliment for this speck of a boy. “Dhananjayan Rajesupriyan, you are a bad help. You walk slowly, and your nose is always running. You remind me of a donkey.” (Pardon me, but need you paint me so rude? It is true, I was strict with this boy you’ve imagined, and I regret it; but he would have his revenge in time.)
    Only in retrospect do I realize that during all this uneventful interval, R. was required to perform little or no
writing
, and absolutely no dictation. It is also possible that I failed to notice further indications of eccentricity, for during that time my life was too full of distractions. Several months previously, a train had derailed at Maniyachchi, crushing some three dozens of people; and since that calamity, there were rumors of unannounced and random inspections at all the village stations. It some days caused me unbearable worry to be in charge of this station and this steam-powered juggernaut in which so many entrusted their lives. I was, after all, only twenty-four, and by nature susceptible to fretfulness and mental unease. Some days, I required Dhananjayan to reassure me four or five times in the space of an hour that he had thoroughly completed the “all-clear checklist for safe passage of trains through the station.” Consider that hundreds of people now passed through Rombachinnapattinam weekly. Strangers—at one time an occasional phenomenon—disembarked and entered our village every afternoon. (Our
town
, rather.) We were almost overnight connected with the whole of India. As much as I embraced progress, one sensed something unnatural about the arrangement. I had the ever-present and growing fear of disaster on my watch. And even as I worried over my small domain, people called on me through the day and into the evening, asking favors for themselves and their family members: discounted tickets, delayed departures, personal tours of the train. I was, indeed, a big manin our town (better!), and it was an image I struggled to maintain. I did not care to disappoint my community.
    I was to see the majority of that community at my engagement ceremony, mere weeks away, and in truth, this prospect caused me further strain, articulating itself as an unpleasant, simmering gurgle in my stomach and innards. What if I didn’t like the girl? What if she expected me to visit Madras and buy her saris, as I had seen some husbands doing, now that the train made