THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM (25 page)

Diary of Sonali Rao

March 30, 2002

It is
loud
.

I thought it was loud when it first hit me, the day the boys dug that thing up at the Shiva lingam. One moment everything was quiet as death around me, and then suddenly, I was bombarded with sounds—with whispers, like a thousand people speaking at the same time; with buzzes, like someone had thrown a hundred stones at the hives up the road; with drones, like all the mosquitoes in Ellamma Cheruvu taking wing at once. It was a
lot
of noise. I almost thought I was going to die a second time.

But slowly, the incoherent sounds died down to a thin, background whine, and the whispers got louder. I thought they were random at first, but it didn’t take long for patterns to emerge.

And I started to see things too. It’s hard to explain to ‘normal’ humans exactly what I see. The only way I can explain is to use the example of television. It is as if I see a scene from a movie being played out in front of my eyes, over and over again, by people I know, people in Palem. And somehow, I know that these incidents have not happened yet. In short, yes, I see the future.

But I can also give these future incidents as dreams to other people, and allow them to change them as they see fit. Some of them do, some of them don’t. But once a dream is planted, and once the person I’ve given it to has seen it and changed it, it will come to pass. Yes, I could give it to another man and
he
would change it in some other way. I could give it to a third man and he would tinker with it differently. I could keep giving the same dream to as many people as I could so that eventually, one of them would change it the way
I
wanted it to unfold. So in a sense, you could say the people of Palem are puppet-masters of their own futures, and I, the master of the puppeteers.

It took me a few days to realize all this, you know, and only then I knew how much power I had in my hands. I could only
see
two or three minds at a time, but that was enough to change the future of Palem however I wanted it. But power did not interest me. What I wanted—what I
craved
for—was revenge.

Over the next few days, it was not hard to arrange for Aravind’s father to smash his head against the lingam and bleed to death. It was only a matter of two or three dreams to convince Chotu’s father that suicide—and the killing of his wife—was the only way out of his guilt. I had something special in mind for Ramana’s brother, because by now you see I was beginning to enjoy myself… So I had his legs bitten off by that langur that they used to hunt down the monkeys (monkeys have very vivid dreams too, I found out). Well, he was no more than a monkey. And Sarayu’s father, well, I didn’t have to touch him. He saw these three deaths and hung himself before I could get my hands on him.

All this time I was too busy—too taken up with the delight of revenge, I should say—to notice that the villagers had begun to sleep for a little longer than usual. It was only after Sarayu’s father’s death and when I set my sights on the last piece on my meal—yes, the juiciest, the most delicious part of my meal—that it struck me. Someone else had the same powers as I did. Someone else was doing the same thing as I was doing, but he was doing it on a bigger scale, to more people than I could. And soon as I thought that, he sprang up in my consciousness, arms splayed apart like the devil, that same smile that had played on his lips that night, when he peeked in through the door.

I tried getting at him, but he was always one step ahead of me. Every time I tried sending out a dream, I would find the subject already taken. He seemed to have more control over a larger number of people than I did. I could see the dreams he sent to people, dreams that effectively blocked me out of his future. I had no chance with him watching my every move, and with him in control of the whole village. But I lay in wait all the same, patiently. He was human. He had to sleep sometime.

He did, and I pounced at the opportunity to make him write a letter to the five kids asking them to come back to Palem. I gave the dream to Sarayu and made it seem to her that it was her illiterate father who was writing the letter, knowing that she would will him to write. You see, by then, I had gotten the hang of what sort of dreams I should give to whom. If
I
had so much expertise, you could imagine how good
he
was. But this one dream had got by
—he had not noticed it.

Now you might think why the five kids coming to Palem was important. It’s because they
remembered
these dreams. None of the other people we gave dreams to remembered them. These five did; which meant they were harder to control. If I could get them back to Palem and somehow make them fight on
my
side, that was my best chance—still a slim one, but there was a chance.

He had Saidulu and Ramesh, whose minds were so malleable that the three of them worked like one mind, but even so, if I had the other five on my side, I thought I would have him yet.

The arrival of the kids back in Palem must have caught him off-guard. When Ramana came, he wasted no time in pushing him off the mound. He used Saidulu for that. It caught me off-guard too; I was too busy at the time concentrating on Aravind…

Aravind… oh, yes, Aravind. He was the oldest of the five when the incident happened, and consequently, I guess, he was the one most affected by it. His mind listened to me—not as Saidulu’s and Ramesh’s do now, but it was not as dead as the others. Chotu had some natural mental plasticity that helped me talk to him, but whoever I was able to access, Avadhani would be able to access too. So I had to keep my guard. My only chance of success lay in protecting the five as well as I could, until Avadhani was killed. And then, of course, kill the five myself. My revenge would not be complete until I killed them all.

So I tried to protect them the best way I could, but all the while Avadhani used the advantage of being alive to make them fight among one another, making them suspect one another and slowly attack and kill each other. By playing Ramana’s death, he was able to turn Chotu on Aravind. When Aravind left Chotu hurt by the wall, he immediately commanded Ramesh and Saidulu to go and finish him off. By rousing Sarayu’s jealousy against Seetalu and by playing up the guilt Seetalu herself felt, he was able to get Seetalu to die. He spoke to Chanti about Sarayu’s undying love for Aravind and got him to slit her throat. And finally, when Chanti turned on Aravind, one of them was anyway going to die.

I think his original plan had been for his minions to pick out whoever was left in the struggle, and if Chanti had prevailed, he would have succeeded. But fortunately for me, it was Aravind who survived, and Aravind had been listening to what I’d been giving him—though I suspect Avadhani had filtered most of it out. I kept him from thinking consciously about Avadhani. I filled him with a need to go to Avadhani and ask for his advice. I made him think of one thing and one thing only—that
he
was the being’s henchman that Avadhani had talked about. Until he was at the door of Avadhani’s hut, I made him believe it, because only if he believed it himself, would Avadhani believe that Aravind believed it, and he would allow him to come to him.

When Aravind reached the house, I let go of him and allowed him to think on his own.

He thought of it all, sometimes out loud, sometimes to himself. But Avadhani heard it all. He summoned his followers to the house to protect him. Would he be able to stall him long enough before they arrived?

But then, Aravind started to respond to Avadhani’s words. He started to believe what Avadhani told him was true. I pushed back with all my might to keep him from believing in what the old man was telling him, but the more he believed, the easier it became for Avadhani to get a hold on him. He had almost dropped the knife. Avadhani signalled to his men to come to the house but to stay out of sight, because he might not need them after all. He would take the knife from Aravind, and then he himself would cut the boy’s throat after convincing him that he was the one that needed to be killed for the good of the village. Yes, that would be perfect.

But then a breeze blew, and the smell of honey wafted into the room. Aravind’s mind snapped.

I grabbed that little spark of suspicion in his mind and pulled at it as hard as I could. Before I knew it, Aravind had him by his throat, and was calling for the boys to come out. Yes, it was perfect. After all these years, I had the two men who would complete my revenge right there, out to kill one another. Aravind would kill Avadhani, and as soon as he died, his hold on the two boys would break, and then I would take over and command them to break Aravind’s skull. Yes, sweet, sweet revenge.

Except they did not wait for me to command them. With the final gasp of his body, Avadhani raised in their mind such a sense of fury against Aravind that as soon as life left their master’s body, they bounded on him like a couple of hungry dogs and beat him to death. There was nothing but a surprised grunt from Aravind—yes, nothing but a surprised grunt, unlike his father…

And now, I have a body
and
a brain. There is nothing about the reporter girl in this brain now. I wear her body, and I use her insides, but she is all me. She does not remember anything about herself any more. She doesn’t exist. Only I do.

People
—her people—will come asking questions, but it wouldn’t matter by then. I will have been long gone. Palem will have been long gone.

I remember the night when this village branded me a mad woman and stoned me away. There is a gift I need to give them in return for that. Now that I have the power to control them all, and now that I have no competition, it should be rather easy.

What do you think?

Love,

So—Lachi