There is a street in this city where the freaks and clowns and entertainers used to live. The dwarfs who pirouette and pratfall under the big top, the long tall ones who lurch and leer, the bearded ladies, the alligator men, others less obviously marked by nature, but just as indelibly set aside: the sword swallowers, the fire-breathers, the tightrope walkers, the bicycle riders from the Circle of Death, the animal tamers, the conjurers, the barkers.
It all started with the dwarfs. There are dwarfs in most big cities who hire themselves out to visiting circuses as clowns, and the ones in this city began moving into a run-down, inexpensive old boarding house on a street near the grounds where the circuses pitch their tents. A few retired acrobats moved in next door, directed by their diminutive associates. Acrobats run in families, and the street became a home base for the younger acrobats, off-season. Slowly, slowly, the whole sequin-wearing, glitter-faced gang began to move in. As the years passed, some families continued to contribute offspring to the circus trade. Others slowly settled into more bourgeois occupations over the generations – storekeepers, accountants, clerks, electricians…
Eventually, it became a street like any other, as it had once been. Not quite so run-down, but not very expensive to live in. Sometimes a circus pitched its tents nearby and a few of the dwarfs who still inhabited the old boarding house trotted along in their brightly-coloured pantaloons and smocks to parade once again in the spotlights, whack each other over the head with fake clubs and yell at each other in high, squeaky voices.
They were the exceptions; the other families had all found stable occupations now and wanted to distance themselves as much as they could from their carnival pasts. But nature has a way of asserting itself. Sometimes, in a crowded city street, an unremarkable clerk turns a series of cartwheels and lands on his head, holding the pose for just long enough to receive a round of applause, and then darts away, as bemused as the crowd around him. Or a shop girl in a supermarket grabs handfuls of oranges and apples and starts juggling them in increasingly complex patterns before dazed, fascinated housewives. Outside of these unpredictable moments of atavism, the carnival people have put their past behind them. It is a dying way of life, after all.
Mr. Belliappa and Mrs. Belliappa, who had recently had a second child, learned of this not-too expensive street, though not of its colourful past, and moved into a large but old and somewhat faded house nestled between a similar house on one side and a similarly faded block of flats on the other. They were quiet, unimaginative people who spent their days working – he in a bank office, she at home – and their evenings watching television or sedately conversing. Their older child, a boy in middle school, seemed set to be as placid and unassuming as his parents. The baby – well, she was a baby, like any other.
Once they moved in, that placidity was challenged by vivid, unaccustomed emotions. Their first nights in the house were serene, afloat in an atmosphere of great gentleness tinged with an ineffable sadness. Mr. Belliappa bought his wife flowers – for her hair, not just for the little altar they prayed at each morning. Mrs. Belliappa surprised her husband and son with home made sweets, usually only prepared during festivals. Even the baby seemed touched by the mood, more affectionate and even a little wistful.
Then came the dark days. None of them could do anything right in any of the others’ eyes. Mr. Belliappa snapped at his wife when his coffee was served too hot. Mrs. Belliappa complained when her serials were interrupted to catch a news update. The boy failed a test. The baby became tearful and given to tantrums.
As the months went by, their mood swings became more and more extreme, until finally, Mr. Belliappa had a vastu expert come over. The expert, a dessicated little man named Shastri, looked over the house with an increasingly woebegone air, clutching as if for protection to a cloth bag that bore the logo of a manufacturer of coconut oil. Finally, sitting down to a cup of coffee in the living room, he announced his verdict in a slow, careful tone: “The balance of elements is very bad. All the energies are trapped in the second floor, they’re fighting to get out. You have to completely break down all the rooms there and re-build in a totally different way…”
Shastri pulled a notebook out of his bag and started drawing out a new floor plan, marked with various esoteric symbols.
It was a huge expense, but the house had not been very expensive, because of its age and Mr. Belliappa still had a reasonable amount of his annual bonus and savings to drawn on. For the rest, the bank he worked at arranged a loan on reasonable terms. Within a fortnight, he had contacted a contractor and a gang of workers was at it on the second floor, bringing down walls with great yells and cries while the Belliappas made lived in close quarters on the first floor and the ground floor. On the second day, the crew struck work early and dispersed with unusual alacrity, refusing to explain themselves to Mrs. Belliappa. When Mr. Belliappa got back home, he called up the contractor, who came over at once along with a quiet, serious-looking man.
“So sorry, sir,” said the contractor, a genial man named Arunachalam who always gave the impression of being slightly hungover but determined to forge ahead regardless. “They are a superstitious lot, you know,” at this point he paused, remembering that this was a vastu-based house alteration. “They are a simple lot, easily scared,” he continued, “and they found something that disturbed them.”‘
“What did they find?” asked Mr. Belliappa. “Yes, you see, that’s what. That’s why I’ve brought Dr. Somnath with me,” gesturing to the serious-looking man beside him, “so we can first of all make sure there was no foul play before deciding what to tell the police…”
“Police? Mr. Arunachalam, what have you found in my house?”
“Sir, it is better if you ask your lady wife to stay here while the three of us go and attend to this matter…”
And so Mr. Belliappa climbed up the four flights of stairs to his partly-demolished second floor, his wife sitting in the kitchen and fretfully twisting the pallu of her sari. Arunachalam showed him to the place between the two bedrooms where they had found a hidden chamber, sealed shut all these years. A hidden chamber containing a few pots and pans and a cot on which lay, clad in filthy, ragged clothes, what looked like two human skeletons locked in an embrace…
Dr. Somnath had finished his examination now. Mr. and Mrs. Belliappa were sitting down on their living room sofa, where they had waited anxiously for his verdict while Arunachalam paced the floor, occasionally thinking of a joke to lighten the mood then thinking better of it.
“Conjoined twins,” the doctor said.
“What?” exclaimed Mr. Belliappa.
“Conjoined twins, people call them Siamese twins. Juvenile females. They were being given food through a small movable panel in a wall. Then, it seems, they stopped feeding them. There were some old newspaper scraps in the room. They’ve been in there for at least 30 years.”
Every street has its secrets; every family has its regrets. A now-respectable family, descended from carnival freaks, cruelly exhibited, forced to mate unnaturally for the titillation of wealthy, perverted customers. A random mutation, interpreted as a throwback to a shameful past, locked away, forgotten, skeletons in the closet to be left behind when the family moved to a more modern, uptown address. Two individuals, twinned in life and death, but unlike each other in temperament. One, a sweet tender girl, unable to hate anyone, even the ones who had locked her in here. Even her sister, a ready vessel for all the hate and rage that her life had bestowed upon her. Ariel and Caliban, locked together. In a room, in a body. Trapped in the increasingly foul air, starving, in pain, dying together, leaving behind a dual ghost.
Once the police and the media were through with them, the Belliappas sold the house at a loss and moved to a street with no history, or at least not enough to bother them. Time heals many things, and today they have put their brush with darkness behind them. The baby is a grown woman now, with a husband and a home of her own. She is pregnant, for the second time. She wonders if she will have twins.
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy lives in Bangalore. He writes various kinds of corporate content for a living. He also writes weird fiction, because he has to. He plays the bass guitar for Bevar Sea, a stoner/doom band and for Djinn & Miskatonic, his own doom/psychedelia project. He and his wife Yasmine support a horde of cats and dogs and each other’s many dreams. Jayaprakash also maintains a sporadic blog at http://aaahfooey.blogspot.com