I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran

grace of my own actions. Carry on.)
    As it were, more than a year later, looking back on the episode with the dimness of memory and distortions of hindsight, Dhanu would insist, “I was not bluffing when I complimented his letter, sir. I never liked R., but his markings were beautiful. I don’t think I would find such strangely pleasing things even painted in the palace of Mysore Maharajah.”
    R. gave me no serious botherations in the days between that incident and my engagement ceremony. But I had little attention to spare for him in those times, with the headaches, entanglements, family demands, and organizational difficulties of the ceremony and subsequent wedding to concern me. The worries of being a groom, so it seemed at the time, far outweighed the pleasures. I looked forward to the transition to manhood that my betrothal signified, yet it caused me enormous stress. I had met my betrothed once or twice, so I was told, at family functions, but I scarcely could recall her face. Some days, I burned with curiosity about this woman with whom I would have to spend all my days. But in a way, it hardly mattered to me what she was like; I knew that regardless of the woman, I should recoil at having to accommodate a new and unknown presence in my life.
    These thoughts I carried with me as I rode to my fiancée’shome, the December afternoon of my engagement ceremony. Watching the people and houses pass behind our cart in the dappled sunlight, the weather almost alarmingly beautiful, these concerns seemed to grow inside me, until they achieved something like anger. This anger was completely unrelated to the figure of the little girl I was to marry, but as soon as I saw her—the heavy sari draped over her shoulder, the glint of her nose jewels—this anger attached itself to her figure.
    At the hall, a coterie of family members came to the cart, holding flower garlands and sandal paste and a vessel of rose water, and before I had even stepped out of the cart they began to sprinkle and anoint me. Inside the compound, young women peeked at me from behind their friends’ shoulders; children came to touch me and hold my hand until their mothers pulled them away. Indeed, silliness and horseplay were strictly prohibited in my general vicinity.
    “Like a rajah,” people whispered, admiring my appearance.
    A chair was offered, as others sat on the floor. Sweets on a tray appeared. Chips and savories. Coffee or lime juice? Coffee
and
lime juice. Because I didn’t finish my coffee, my bride’s father scolded his wife, the wife yelled at the cook, the cook berated the servants. I began to have an inkling of what was meant by the expression “to be treated like a bridegroom,” and when time came to leave for the temple and begin the ceremony itself, I had left behind entirely the gloom and anxiety, the anger, with which I had begun the day.
    We walked toward the temple on a route that took us within a few meters of the railroad station. I had left the station that day in Dhanu’s capable hands, with R. as his help. And while I had total confidence in Dhanu, I did have a small worry he might use the occasion to pick some quarrel with hapless R. I walked down the road with my parents flanking me, and the bride’s family all around. Behind me stood the very uncle-in-law who was my nominal supervisor in Madras, and alongside himwere my future brothers and cousins, everyone in a grand procession with me, resplendent, at the center.
    At what point did it become clear to me that something was amiss? In retrospect, there was a strange agitation in the street, an excited general chatter, but at the time, of course, I assumed this excitement was a result of my own presence on that street.
    When the railroad station came into view on our left, I noticed that there was an unusual crowd on the platform for so late in the day—why were they milling about? Only then, strange to say, did I notice the elephant, so to speak, on the horizon: the