Abhishek Shukla

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Word Count: 2,589

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This story contains themes that in author's understanding can be deeply distressing. Please read at your own discretion. If you or someone you know is struggling with the issues that these themes relate to, please seek help from professionals. Please prioritize your well-being over everything else.

He collected the casserole and moved back towards his home. The home was only a hundred meters away, but his young age—only seven years old, the dogs, and the darkness made it feel like a hundred kilometres. He never liked going out alone after sunset, but his mother was in the habit of forgetting casseroles at nearby aunties’ homes. The moment he left for the house, three dogs started following him. He never understood what made them chase him; was it the smell of casserole or did they know he could be easily teased?

The dirt road was usually flooded by water drains from nearby houses and had all sorts of reptiles living over it. Once a python was located on it; now a small temple stands at the same point, right in the middle of the road. It was only a diya [1]–left at the temple’s Tulsi plant after the evening prayers—that kept the lane somewhat illuminated. It made it possible for him to locate the potholes and the sleeping dogs and prevented him from stepping on either of them.

He was almost halfway through when a gust of wind extinguished the diya and left the lane pitch dark. He closed his eyes in fear—which made no difference—and stood frozen at the spot. He badly wanted to call someone to rescue him but couldn’t. The last time he had called his father in a similar situation, and he is still mocked over that. He gathered all the courage he could and started taking small calculated steps. He lifted a foot only when the other one was firmly placed and placed the lifted foot only after patting the ground a couple of times.

The dogs continued to follow him, and their occasional unexpected growls made him shudder with terror. He somehow covered almost half of the remaining distance with caution. He still was not able to see a thing but had gotten a bit comfortable after taking a few steps. He continued with the same caution, but only a few more steps later, felt something crawling above his ankle. It could’ve been anything, but for him, it was the python. He screamed, threw away the casserole, and jerked his feet with the ferocity of a Motocross racer kickstarting his dead bike in the middle of a race.

The ‘thing’ still didn’t get off; he ran as fast as he could, screaming ‘Snake! Snake!’. The dogs followed him, barking and growling all the while. He was about to reach the home when he slipped off a puddle and fell with his headfirst to the ground. He woke up the next day with stitches on his forehead and a room full of people ready to tease him for the rest of his life, as stuck to his feet that night was not a python, but a harmless little toad.

Years went past, but the teasing for that night continued. There wasn’t one family function where this incident was not mentioned. All his attempts at explaining that he doesn’t enjoy jokes on the incident, as it revives all the associated dark memories for him failed miserably. They went further ahead and teased him for those attempts also. Some directly—and almost everyone indirectly—called him less of a man for fearing the dark. That incident was one of the many—but certainly the most significant—that shaped his perception of darkness and reptiles.

He feared going out on empty roads at night. At times, he took the longer route, as the shorter one had a dark patch and pack of dogs to cross. He skipped the reptile zone in zoos with as much surety as one skips the ads on a YouTube video. He never went out on a night trek. Never took midnight romantic strolls. He missed the episodes of Fear Factor where participants were challenged to dance with snakes or eat lizards. He even slept with a small lightbulb on.

Though all these ways worked for him in the city, one territory remained as haunting as it was the night that incident had happened with him: his paternal village’s home. The place was as close to visiting hell as he could imagine. The place was nice in general; there were open fields, the air was pure, no traffic, no noise, limited people, and all eatables organic and fresh; just what one would expect from a usual small village. All the cousins loved to visit the place; it reminded them of the good old times. But for him, it remained the most powerful trigger to his existential fear.

The place was prone to constant power cuts. At nighttime, when the power went off, the place remained pitch dark until illuminated by feeble candles. The road approaching the home was paved now, but still got occasionally stalled by passing pythons. The old-styled architecture added further to the troubles; the two bathrooms were located at the end of the backyard, right before the sprawling wilderness. The way to the washrooms was a narrow concrete trail going through a maintained lawn. The walls were five decades old, and even after multiple renovative efforts, remained damp, and attracted all sorts of insects and pests.

Each time he visited the place, he counted to the day he could go back to the city. The place instilled such paranoia in him that he felt pests crawling on him while sleeping at night. He feared a snake biting him on his way to the washroom. He never leaned to a wall as that risked him of getting an earthworm over him. He checked the water for insects before taking a sip. To sum it, his life became a series of cautionary steps, moving from one to another.

The days he stayed there, his life came to a halt, he remained almost non-functional. He visited professionals to get help on this. The best they could suggest were therapies with unproven results and ways to familiarize himself with these potential dangers. He was supposed to visit the home again this year in August, so on New Year’s Day, he took a resolution to try out all possible ways of familiarizing himself with the challenges that troubled every holiday of his to date.

He started sitting in known regular spaces—his room, office, hall—with lights off. Once comfortable, he moved to confined spaces—bathrooms, storerooms, basements. He managed to sit through the former, but the latter turned out to be a hard row to hoe. He spent merely 2 minutes sitting on the commode when gloomy ideas started seeping in, such as a snake appearing out of the drain and biting him, or the bulb from the ceiling falling at his head, or someone entering the house, killing everyone, and robbing everything.

He kept trying regardless. He read as much as he could about the reptiles, watched documentaries, stared at the most menacing images for minutes at stretch, memorized the names of the species, and even visited the zoo to see them in action. The zoo ride turned out to be a traumatic one as before he could even see the snakes, he panicked over an earthworm stuck in his pants.

The next few months turned out to be fruitful. He managed to sit in the bathroom for 15 minutes at stretch—he finished the entire business with lights off. He held an earthworm at his palm, and though he panicked, he didn’t throw it away. He managed to go to bed without the small bulb on and maneuvered his way to the water dispenser without hitting anywhere or getting scared out of his wits.

He couldn’t decide if he really had overcome his fear to some degree or gotten so used to it that it didn’t scare him anymore. Whatever be the case, he knew all of this could only prepare him for the predictable, after all, as deep down he always knew that there couldn’t be a snake in his 12th-floor apartment, and it is impossible for a robber to break the security and get to his place. Even in dark, the house was still his, and he knew each inch of it like the back of his hand. The real challenge would be the unpredictable village house.

Though he had been visiting the place regularly for more than two decades, he never really got familiarized with it. Each step there was a journey on its own. There was nothing he could be sure about. And when there are a dozen things that can go wrong, the chances of something going wrong are 12 out of 10 times. He dreamt every night of walking again on that dark road and successfully making it to his house with the casserole in his hand. And every night, he slept with the mocking laughter echoing through his memories.

Finally, August arrived, and he found all his preparation going down the drain the moment he passed through the lane leading to the house. He entered the house and immediately found the damped walls repulsive. He wished to visit the washroom, but a part of him pushed him to postpone it. He had to remind himself of the need to overcome this. And as he worked on overcoming it, that evening, the entire family had a great laugh reminiscing the events of the night that scarred him the most. He sat through it with a smile equivalent to a poster covering a cracked wall.

The next two days went past as if he prepared nothing over the past few months. He followed the same routine that he was used to in this place—he changed his bedsheet each time before going to sleep, he went to the washroom before sunset and held his pee at night to the limits where his bladder would blast—and even went overboard with measures to counter any dangerous situation—he kept a fully charged torch (and one set of candles and a matchbox as a backup) at a secret spot on the way to the toilet and tried keeping his phone fully charged at all times. Each day, he waited for opportunities to get out of the home and reach a place with neatly painted walls, dry floors, and well-lit spaces.

The next morning, he visited the nearby village to attend his cousin’s Griha Pravesh ceremony. The house was newly built, but the architecture belonged to the previous century. The toilet was Indian style, located outside the house, with the size of a shoebox. The doors were small enough to damage the heads of men of average height. The drains were open and narrow, and waited to flood the entry points of the house during the rainy season. Filled with despair, he planned to return by afternoon, but one formality lead to another, and by the time he returned, it was already past sunset.

The first thing he wanted to do after reaching home was to pee, but the moment he entered the house, the power went off. He controlled the urge for the next hour; didn’t drink water even after his throat became dry as dust. He dreaded walking on the way to the toilet, and the idea of using the Indian style toilet in dark terrified him to the core. But how long can one delay the inevitable?

Each moment demanded from him a crucial decision: either to fight the demon head-on or suffer the embarrassment of peeing in the pants. The decision was already made; he postponed the action as long as he could, but finally, moved towards the backyard. The moment he opened the gate to the lawn, a cold breeze whispered caution in his ears. He couldn’t see anything clearly beyond a few footsteps.

He turned to the secret spot where he had kept the torch; a small box near the exit door. He picked the torch, turned it on, and gained some confidence as it allowed him to see the toilet across the lawn. He knew the journey to the toilet was going to be a step at a time. After each step, he scanned the way ahead. He was halfway through when he turned around to check the path behind. As he turned, he saw a brown-shaded thing sliding towards him. He took a few steps back hurriedly and fell to the ground. The torch slipped from his hand and went into the lawn’s bushes.

The terror didn’t allow him to move and the fear of mockery didn’t allow him to scream. He patted his hands to feel the ground beneath. He scanned through his pockets for his phone, pulled it out, and switched on the flashlight. The moving thing was a huge dry leaf; the wind must have given it the momentum. He breathed heavily for a few seconds and allowed himself time to digest the information.

He felt silly that a leaf took the best out of him. He picked the leaf and crushed it with minimum effort. He couldn’t help but smile at his weird imagination. He looked around; it was silent and dark, the breeze was lovely, the weather pleasant, the sky clear. Crickets chirped in different rhythms and the feeble sound of manjeera from the evening prayers attempted to mingle with one of the rhythms. He closed his eyes and breathed the surroundings. In a flash, everything that troubled him to this moment didn’t disturb him anymore.

He got up and walked to the toilet with ease. The flashlight was still on, but the burden of being a defending guardian was replaced by the fun of being a guiding companion. He opened the toilet door, lifted the bucket, and filled it from the adjoining tank. The tank had earthworms all over it, but they couldn’t stop him from filling the bucket. He threw some water in the pot and kept the bucket down. He felt a strong urge to scan the toilet around before starting with the business.

The next moment, as if to take himself by surprise, he turned the phone’s flashlight off. The next few moments made him uneasy in a known way, but also gave him a strange sense of freedom, something he had never felt before. He came to comfort with the darkness and wondered at the divineness of the moment. When he was stepping out of the door, if someone would’ve told him the possibility of this moment, he might have gotten offended assuming it to be mockery. And here he was now, free, living, happy.

As he prepared to pee, he planned to play a prank on everyone. He shouted, ‘Papa! Ajju! Kaka!’, with all his might. They were all sitting in the front hall and his shouts filled the hall with laughter. They assembled and moved towards the toilet to rescue their sissy boy from one of his imagined attacks. He smiled as he pissed and waited for them to arrive and be surprised. Just when he was about to be done, a creature climbed one of his legs and bit it hard enough for him to scream out of his wits.

When everyone arrived, they found him dead on the floor, with a snake lying around his body. The doctor discovered that he died due to cardiac arrest and the snake was non-venomous.

Note by Author:

#WTP #fear