Even the periodic rattling of the train couldn’t lull him to sleep. Kishan was going back – back to the darkness. Kota – thinking about the place itself caused him a painful churn in his stomach. He tossed to the other side, facing the fan. It was blowing weak, hot air over his drenched face. His mom was hopeful, his dad proud. He was ashamed to disappoint them so.
It all came down to his extraordinary performance in 10th Boards. Miraculous, one could say. All his life, he hadn’t shown a slightest inclination towards academics. One would find him on the playground, practicing Virat Kohli’s cover-drive. Even frequent hidings from his dad couldn’t set him right, he barely eked out each academic year. He was mediocre, but happy. But 10th Boards changed everything. He couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out how he was so motivated to study that year. But he did, and he scored well. Giving rising to the pregnant expectations of his parents, hoping for an IIT berth.
That was a fluke year. He was still mediocre, but now depressed. Kota was bursting at seams with brilliant boys and girls. But he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t know how he was going to face JEE this year, having drained his parents’ hard-earned savings. He could barely understand Chemistry, Physics & Math were a complete bouncer. He was going to fail!
Sleep eluded him; the tea lay heavily in his stomach. Unable to lie still anymore, he acrobatically jumped down the upper berth through narrowly designed supports, without trodding on the feet of the old lady sleeping in the middle berth. Everyone was sleeping. There was an empty side seat. He sat and looked out of the window.
It was a dull afternoon. The train was slowly trundling through farms and fields, and occasional houses. To dull his chain of thoughts, he focused on the electric cables. The snake-like wires jumped from pole to pole, a parabolic decline and then lift-off, only to be bound by the next pole. It wasn’t exactly soothing, with people snoring all around him, but it did manage to take his mind off the depressing thought that he had now been having for a while.
The sun was still peeking out high in the sky, bathing him in a strong gust of loo. He had been thinking of ending his life.
Inexorable, impending death. He thought to quicken its pace, unable to bear the thought of living one more day in that dreary, friendless place. He had broken out in cold sweat when he first had that thought, but now he was certain.
The gentleman, sleeping opposite him, farted loudly. For a moment, it looked like he would wake up. Twitching his grey moustache, he went back to sleep, turning to a side. Despite himself, Kishan smiled. The world didn’t give a damn about his internal turmoil.
The sun went down and the sky outside became hazy pink. Evening brought the hawkers out as the other passengers woke up from their sleep – peanuts, buttermilk, off-tune qawwalis, locks & chains, chana zor garam, cutting chai and a lot many other things were on display.
His stomach complained against his utter disregard of its plight. Starving to death wasn’t a pretty proposal. He succumbed to the second chana zor hawker and bought a large portion size. The guy deposited his load in the seat opposite him, and then began to expertly chop the onions and tomatoes, sliding them down in an inverted cone made out of a newspaper with the back-edge of the knife. He then mixed the ‘chana zor’ in the onion / tomato mixture, sprinkled salt and spice over it, closed the newspaper flap and shook it well. He then opened the flap and squeezed a lemon on top of it, and mixed it again. He then sprinkled a few coriander leaves as garnishing, and then gave it to Kishan.
His mouth already watering, Kishan started eating unceremoniously as soon as he received it.
“Eat to your heart’s fill, saab. We would all get down at the next station, and there won’t be a hawker on the train till midnight.”
“Why, there is no stop in between?” Kishan said, with food in his mouth.
“No, saab. This train will not stop at any stations in between,” said the hawker, with a distant look in his eyes. He balanced the load back on his back, and moved on.
As evening advanced to night, Kishan found himself oblivious to his surroundings. The dark thoughts returned, a dull ache in his head set in. It was as if a cloud was hovering over his head, and there was no stopping the torrential rain of remembered ego-debilitating memories.
So lost he was in his thoughts, that he didn’t realize it when the train stopped abruptly in the middle of nowhere. It was only when one of the other passengers asked him a question, it shook him out of reverie.
“Why do you think has the train stopped, bhai?” The old guy seated across him ask. Kishan looked up to him and gave a non-committal shrug. The guy was wearing a woolen sweater despite the heat, and cracks seemed to have appeared on his bifocal glasses. Kishan looked at the other passengers – there was a newly married couple who were sequestered in the corner, giggling to each other. The girl still had mehendi in her hands, and was wearing the chuddas. There was an old lady seated opposite the old man, sitting cross-legged with eyes closed with a praying bead in her hand. He had spent more than 8 hours in the train, yet till that moment – he never noticed them clearly, so lost in his thoughts he was? What was happening to him?
“This is a new route for the train, isn’t it? There shouldn’t be much traffic on the rails – for the signals to stop it!” Kishan asked the old guy, attempting to make a conversation.
“Right you are, has someone pulled the chain, kya?”
Kishan looked outside the window. The train’s light cast a shadow on few dark shrubs, beyond which nothing was visible. Who would want to get down or get up from here?
“We seem to be somewhere around Bhind, right?” The married guy joined the conversation.
“Yup, think so,” the old guy muttered. He seemed to be restless. Kishan wondered why, this wasn’t the first train journey he had, and they had often stopped in the middle of nowhere. This wasn’t the first time.
But they didn’t have to wait for long. They heard a loud bang.
“Somebody, please shut the doors!” Murmurs erupted across the aisle. The old guy looked at Kishan, frightened. An intruder had gotten onto their train.
A loud voice rang out as a man walked into their cabin, “EVERYONE, DIVEST YOURSELF OF YOUR VALUABLES AND GOLD. THIS IS A ROBBERY. ANYONE ATTEMPTING TO DO ANYTHING FOOLHARDY WILL GET A BITE FROM MY FANGS!”
The married girl gave a little shriek. Her husband’s swagger was lost. The old woman’s prayer abruptly came to an end. Kishan and the old guy stared at each other with open mouth.
Before either of them could respond, the source of the voice approached their bay. He was a tall, dark man with a hard face. A big bushy beard, his hair tied in a braid and kohl in his eyes – he looked real menacing up close. He had a dagger hanging at his waist and a big double-barreled rifle which he pointed at the old man, who had started sweating profusely.
“Unload yourself, budhiya.”
And that’s what he did. The old guy shook with terror, as the stench of piss filled the cabin.
“Tch..tch….that’s not what I meant! Give me your valuables,” the dacoit sneered. He had a wiry, lean frame with hard muscles packed under his shirt. Rugged and rough.
“I am an old guy, saab…I don’t have anything, I gave everything to my sons. Please let me – ”
Before he could finish his sentence, the dacoit hit him in the face with the butt of his rifle. The old man was taken in by the suddenness of the blow even as he moaned and tried to cup his nose in his hands as copious blood started to pour out in between the fingers. Kishan just started at the back of the dacoit, struck dumb. Even his dead wish of couple of moments ago couldn’t bring him to face up to the dacoit to intervene on the old guy’s behalf. Self-preservation kicked in.
Seeing her husband beaten so, the old lady swung into action. She dug into her luggage and offered a gold bracelet to the dacoit with shaking hands.
“Paah, just a bracelet? No shiny phones?” The dacoit spat on the floor.
The woman took out her phone and held it out for the dacoit.
He scrutinized the phone and then looked up in disgust, “What would I do with this piece of shit?”
Still, he took the bracelet and deposited it in the red sack that he had been carrying just for this purpose.
“Anyone else wants to be a hero?” He looked in the direction of the newly married couple.
They proved to be much more pliable and the dacoit got a richer bounty from them – wedding joodas, rings, mangalsutra, bracelets and a big fat wad of cash. Even as she was removing the ornaments, the dacoit started lasciviously at the bride and started flicking his tongue. She felt extremely uncomfortable and inched closer to her husband who was similarly tongue-tied as Kishan.
Kishan adopted the policy of moving as little as possible and barely breathing to escape notice. It was moments like this which defined the kind of person you were, and Kishan realized he was a coward. He knew that he had nothing to be afraid of – because if accosted, he absolutely had nothing of value to offer the bandit. The only fear he had was being assaulted – physically and mentally.
The dacoit shook the red bag which tinkled with gold, looked at the young bride once more and moved to the cabin on the right, without giving as much as a glance towards the side-seat in which Kishan was seated.
As much as his departure relieved him that he started breathing again, he was disappointed. The goon didn’t even have a moment to spare for him, was he so mediocre?
There was no altercation in the next cabin and the passengers seemed prompt in parting with their valuables to avoid being hit and the dacoit silently moved on to the next. In his own cabin, the old guy was moaning softly with his wife nursing the wound with the pallu of her saree, the young bride was crying softly in the corner at having to part with her wedding jewelry so soon, her husband seemed to have come out of his shock and now was fuming quietly at his own inability to retaliate. Kishan was in an odd spot of mind – he had been mulling death for last many days but when he came face-to-face with even the briefest possibility of dying, he just lost it. He realized that he would be unable to take his own life – that actually sucked, because he was unable to bear the life he was living…
He surreptitiously looked at the right. For the dacoit, the loot was proceeding smoothly and his red bag was getting bulkier by the minute. He was raking in a good haul. Looking at him, stirred his soul, and not in a good way. There was something about him that he couldn’t pinpoint, but the fear he felt on encountering him was much rawer. Of course, there was the adrenaline rush of being at a gunpoint – but the fear he felt was much more visceral. That which a prey feels when encountering an apex predator. The man smelled of gunpowder and damp blood.
After a point, he could no longer see the goon. The knot around his chest loosened. He breathed a deep sign of relief, till that point – it was as if his breathing had been constricted. The vacuum of silence gave way to angry murmurs in their bogey. Indignant voices rose everywhere.
“Where is the railway police when you need them?”
“I am tweeting about this to the railway minister. He needs to reimburse us for our losses.”
Women were sobbing hysterically. Men were stamping their feet with righteous anger.
Back in his cabin, the married man in the corner asked Kishan, “Is the rascal alone?”
For a moment, Kishan couldn’t comprehend what he meant by that question. Then comprehension dawned on him. He said wearily, “Not sure. There must be others in other bogeys. A single man can’t loot an entire train.”
“Didn’t look like it,” the man said emphatically. “He just went into the other bogey, right, to rob other people? He is alone, I tell you. There are so many of us, we can definitely take him down.”
Kishan wanted to scream: Don’t be a fool, but ever the diplomatic, he said, “I don’t think that would be a right move.”
“Don’t be a puss. Where is your fighting spirit?”
“Leave it darling, the goon didn’t take anything from him. Why would he want to fight?”
Kishan blushed, it was not every day that he was told off by a girl. But before he could think of a reply, the old guy replied, “You are a fool if you want to go after that ruffian. Don’t you know what area we are in – Chambal? Don’t you remember the stories of Verappan and his ilk?”
“That’s quite old news,” the man brushed it off. “If you guys won’t help me, there are bound to be more enterprising gentlemen in this bogey who would want to help we.”
Before he could get up, the dacoit silently slid into their cabin, from the left. The guy shrank back in his corner. The old man started wheezing. The two women shrieked. The angry murmurs in the rest of the bogey quickly subsided.
Kishan, on the other hand was confused. Theirs was the first cabin in the sleeper bogey they were in. The dacoit had certainly gone to the right of the train, stealing from the next cabin before moving on to the next bogey, on the right. Had he gone down the door of the train and come back again. But he didn’t hear anyone else getting on the train now.
The guy was the same – tall, mean, rough, with hairs tried in a braid and big bushy beard. Same gun and dagger. Except that he was somehow, paler. And his eyes were bloodshot. The red bag was missing as well. Somehow that made him more afraid than anything else.
He breathed heavily, like an animal. He crouched and turned around to look at each one of them, even Kishan – each one of them shrank back from the stare. There was something hypnotic in those bloodshot eyes, difficult to pull away from. But from years of evading staring contests and avoiding conflicts, Kishan quickly looked down – wanting to crawl back further in his skin. The dacoit went back staring at others, crouching and standing on the balls of his feet – as if, ready to pounce!
Kishan surreptitiously looked at the others. They looked dull and, in a daze – only the newly married guy was twitching uneasily, he too had avoided looking in the dacoit’s eyes for long. He seemed to be in a quandary, and Kishan understood what it was – the fool was going to speak up. Kishan nodded in negation at guy, wishing with every fiber in his body that he would see reason. But…
“Now, look here mister,” the guy began. And that was enough. The dacoit growled, and then jumped at him. Kishan couldn’t believe his eyes – it happened so fast. One minute the dacoit was standing in the aisle and the next he was at the guy’s throat. For the first time, Kishan noticed the dacoit’s hands – they had sharp claws. With two quick swipes at the man’s chest, the dacoit tore through the man’s clothes and the upper layers of his skin.
The married guy screamed in pain. The others in the compartment – the old guy, his wife, even his own wife – stared dumbly at the spectacle. The people in the other cabins, even in the cabin next to his – sat rooted in their spots. Nobody spoke, there was utter silence as the dacoit slashed his way through the guy’s belly and pulled the guts out.
Blood was pouring everywhere, on the pale blue seats, dripping all the way down to the floor where it mixed with the dirt, making a brown pool – slowly crawling all the way across aisle in amoebaic motion to the side compartment, touching Kishan’s shoes. He jerked back his shoes – furiously brushing off the blood from the tip of the shoes with the back of his sleeves, he wanted nothing to do with it. The dacoit was hunched over married guy, who had stopped screaming. Kishan heard loud slurping noises, as if one were drinking tea. To his horror, Kishan realized – the dacoit was drinking the man’s blood!
The chana zor that he had eaten, rose up as a tangy bile in the back of his throat. He couldn’t for the life of him understand what was going on! Besides the dead man, the other three were quite placid and zoned out, numbed like cattle before the hammer. People in the next cabin were huddled around in the corner, they didn’t exactly know what was going on – but their afraid eyes informed that they were aware about the morbidity of the situation.
The dacoit rose up from the seat. Kishan wanted to close his eyes, but despite himself – looked on at the dead man. Blood had stopped oozing out. Did he drink it all?
There was no face. Red claw marks had slashed across the top half of body so much so that only shredded, noodled skin and spilled guts was all he could see. He could see something white sticking out from where his forehead should have been. It was the man’s skull.
Kishan could no longer control himself – he puked there and then, on top of the dead man’s blood that had pooled on the floor near him. The dacoit sharply looked back at him.
Kishan shrank back in his seat mid-puke. What had looked back at him was no man!
Blood had splattered on his khakhi-green outfit. The bushy beard had turned red beneath the mouth like spilled Beetlejuice of the pan-chewing ilk. But the most striking feature was a row of immaculately sharp and jagged teeth that burst out of the man’s mouth. They were dripping red!
The dacoit of Chambal was a vampire!
The hypnotizing pull of his eyes again tried to numb Kishan into placidity. But he averted the gaze. All he heard was the low growl of a feral cat, and an awareness that an apex predator was boring holes in him with his gaze.
But then, the dacoit apparently lost interest in him. Through his peripheral gaze, he saw that he turned back and moved towards the bride. The beautiful, newly married bride in her wedding chudas and mehendi who sat placidly besides her dead husband. The dacoit approached her slowly, as if relishing the prospect of devouring his delicious prey. The girl was lost in his gaze, she didn’t feet an iota of fear. The vampire put both his paws on her delicate shoulders and gently slipped the dress off her shoulder exposing her milky, white neck. Then he sank his teeth into it…
Kishan couldn’t see it anymore. Sensing a chance, he bolted. His legs suddenly jerked in motion. Leaving behind his belongings, but not forgetting his phone – he swung out of his cabin and jumped down the train.
Except for the cables and the rails, there was no sign of civilization. Warm night greeted Kishan as he dashed past overgrown shrubs, not knowing where he was going. Yet at some distances from the train, he stopped, and looked back. His heart pumping, brain screaming at him to go as far as possible – yet he had to know, yet he had to see.
The windows were open, the lights were on. And it seemed as if the different bodies of the train were intermittently screaming in agony and pain. The scenes of carnage were visible through multiple windows. Torn libs, severed necks, screaming aunties or placid uncles watching on – it was as if he was watching snatches of different horror shows playing simultaneously together from a small window that obscured more than it revealed. Yet it wasn’t even the most morbid thing about it all.
It was one single dacoit, one single vampire at the helm of carnage across the train. He caught only the glimpses, in some case his back, in some his gun or his face. But it seemed to be everywhere. It was unnatural. It was as if the dacoit was stuck in an infinity mirror – countless apparitions carrying out horrific executions.
There were cries of help at every window. No one else got off the train. No one else escaped. He now knew why – the vampire was nowhere and everywhere at once. The guy just knew where to appear – he didn’t allow anyone to escape.
One guy nearly made it to the door. There he was, eyes wide open, screaming at the top of his lungs, with a severed hand, spouting blood. Kishan immediately stepped behind a tree, looking on surreptitiously but not moving in to help just then.
And he felt validated in his decision, as not a moment later – the vampire apparated just behind the injured man, dug his claws in his back and dragged him back inside the train, shutting the door behind.
His feet paralyzed, Kishan looked on, awestruck.
He didn’t know how long he stood there. It was a vision of hell he didn’t want to participate but couldn’t stop watching. Was it the blood and gore or the supernatural? Or was it watching an apex predator at play?
Suddenly, he realized that he had a phone, one which he hadn’t looked at for the last hour or so. He also realized his potential of no longer being a mute spectator, he could report this to higher authorities. They had to know what was happing here.
He swiftly unlocked the phone, only to see that there wasn’t a single network bar. Shit! There was no way he could communicate with the outside world.
But he could definitely document what was happening right in front of him. He flicked on the camera in the phone and started recording. It was dark, but the phone camera had a decent night vision. He ensured that he didn’t turn on the flash and alarm the predator within.
It was a grainy video with blurry images. Kishan felt frustrated – why couldn’t there be a phone that could capture exactly what the eyes could see! Nobody who saw the video would ever connect it to what he saw. He tried different angles to capture the best view.
The screams seemed to have died inside the train. It was ghostly silent. He lowered the camera, it was then he started feeling fear again.
From his place he could see 2-3 coaches at a stretch. And each coach had two doors, so he had a visibility of a total 6 doors. At each door, stood the dacoit. Each, the copy of other. And each, so blood-sodden, that from head to toe – the vampire was completely covered in various shades of red. Freakishly he was reminded of Holi, with the Vampire covered in gulaal. But then, the vampire had indeed played Holi, only of a different kind. Some of the replicas also carried a large red cloth bag filled with loot. Some, not all.
The replicas got down from the train. Kishan observed that their movements were not synchronized – each of them acted as independent actors – as if they were self-acting clones with free-will. He could now see more of them, as they deboarded from the train. As far as eyes could stretch in both directions, he could see more of them. He focused his camera on the replica-vampires and panned his phone in either direction – to capture more of them.
Then a curious thing happened. Shimmery light took hold of each replica, and they all coalesced into one shiny ball of light. It was so bright, he had to shield his eyes. It lasted for exactly an instant as all the vampires became one.
One directly in front of him, with a ginormous red bag on his shoulder, looking right at him. He put his phone away.
Fear came in tsunamic spasms, rocking his entire body. So absorbed he was in the horrifying spectacle, that he didn’t realize the immediate mortal danger approaching him. The dacoit was approaching him in a casual saunter, like he had all the time in the world.
Belatedly, Kishan turned around and started running. But before he could put in any meaningful distance between them, he was hit by a strong force that propelled him down on the ground. His head throbbed with sudden pain. His phone scattered away at some distance.
Panic left his body as the imminence of his death became a solid reality. He looked up to the vampire towering over him. Rotten, rusty smell pervaded his nose. Soon his reality would be reduced to the same scent and a splotch of red. This was what he wanted, death. His life had no meaning, he was an utter failure. This way at least, his mom & dad won’t feel guilty. Better an unexplained, accidental death than a suicide. He closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable, the bite of death.
But the inevitable never came. He felt the stench fading away. Then a thwack which came along with the sound of broken plastic. Kishan realized that the broken plastic was his phone. Then the footsteps began to fade away.
He opened his eyes and looked at the fading figure of the dacoit cum vampire. Despite himself, he shouted at him, “Why not kill me?”
The vampire looked back at him and smiled. The jagged claws were coated red, it was horrible. His eyes no longer pulled at him.
“You are poor and sickly,” he said in a low hiss. “Your blood would cause me indigestion.” He pointed at his bulging belly.
“You just ate an entire train!” Kishan’s voice was indignant.
The vampire shrugged, looking back at the train.
“You are not my type.” The vampire winked at him and walked away with his loot.
Kishan stared at the receding silhouette. He didn’t get up for some time…
Alienman 