I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran Page A

massive
Madras Mail
sat idling on the tracks, one full hour past the time it should have departed!
    “What is this?” my new uncle asked me, in surprise.
    I began to make abject and nonsensical explanations, all the time puzzling through in my mind what might be going on. I spotted Dhanu through the crowd, and called to him, and when he came running toward me, he was in actual tears of agitation.
    “I flew the green flag, sir. I promise you. I cleared the tracks.”
    “Tell me plainly, what happened?” I grabbed him and shook him by the arm, to calm him. “Why is the train standing here? What have you done? What are all these people looking at?”
    We were tacking toward the platform now, somehow redirecting the entire engagement procession, pushing our way around the loitering mob, who turned but briefly to acknowledge us. And then I heard Dhananjayan confirm what my eyes were only then showing me.
    “It’s R., sir!” Dhanu said. “It’s R., it’s R. who’s done this!”
    R., you see, was doing what he had always done: he was writing. He had broken off a piece of white brick from the outhouse wall, it must have been, and was using it as a chalk to scrawl all over the dun walls of the station. His abhorrent scratches covered the doors, the windowpanes, the very floor of the platform. Running out of space on the building, he was writing now on the fat trunk of a neem tree and even the unpaved ground, andwould soon begin on the train itself. We had denied him pen and paper, and he had made the whole earth his canvas.
    The same obscure, convoluted designs that had been shown only to me were now scrawled in the open, writ large for everyone to see. It was as if all that was private and awful had been drawn into sunlight, grandly revealing its horror.
    Passengers had disembarked to smoke and chat and watch the spectacle, and laugh at our own variety of village idiot. The dawdlers ignored poor Dhananjayan’s entreaties that they return to the train. The train conductor himself leaned leisurely out of the window of his engine. He shook his head at the marks, observing to those assembled, “He must be a learned fellow, to be able to write so many interesting things. Myself, I have never learned Sanskrit.” In response, one listener spat, “Sanskrit—how ridiculous! That fellow is clearly from Calcutta, and he is writing in Bengali. A very ugly language, as you can see. My uncle has visited Calcutta, so I should know.” And to this, another laughed. “You’re both mad. The Britishers have ordered improvements to all our village stations. Hadn’t you heard? This man is just a simple housepainter, painting in the British style.” And from within my own engagement party came the reply: “Housepainter? ‘Vandal’ is more like it. And we should beat him about the head if he were not a Brahmin.”
    Oblivious to their attentions, R. hopped about from place to place. He had tied his vaishti high and tight to afford ease of movement, and it slipped looser and lower as now he squatted and now he stood, and wrote and wrote. Thus, for all to see, was the eminently qualified fellow I had hired as my own personal secretary! Some passengers could not contain their mirth: the maddening, haphazard scratches seemed to tickle them deep inside, so that even their eyes showed surprise that they could not control their giddy giggles. “It is so pretty,” one small child squealed foolishly to his mother—and perhaps this is where Dhanu got his idea, much later, that those horrific marks werepleasing to look at. Meanwhile, the train conductor revised his original appraisal: “It is not Sanskrit, it’s English. Just look how carefully that foreign gentleman over there is reading.” The foreign passenger in question was indeed monitoring the scene gravely. He turned, finally, to his also British companion and explained, with sage dispassion, “It is best not to interrupt him,” indicating R. “You see, the superstitious