The Catapult

Durlabh Singh

At the age of nine, he was reading short stories and poems from well-known authors and journals and was highly regarded by his. At the age of ten he began to show restlessness and boredom with his studies at the school. He happened to be too clever and super sensitive children who got bored easily by the studies and sought to find satisfaction within other non-school activities.

Romesh began to show such tendencies and began to skip school on certain afternoons firstly and soon he became a regular truant from the school. He hated physical training periods at the school where you had to dance to the tune of the physical instructor, twisting your arms, legs and other parts of the body. He hated his PT master and did not want to attend his sessions. When the other pupils went to their PT training in the yard outside, he gathered his books into his satchel and simply escaped to the fields surrounding the town.

One day he found some squirrels with their bushy tails and bright eyes, climbing onto a tree on which a bird had made a nest and he knew these were going to go for the eggs, which they would eventually eat for their food or simply destroy, sucking the juices inside and eat the shells outside. He chased these away but when he returned after few days the nest was empty and he suspected the squirrels have done their cruel deeds. He began to develop a grudge against those gray devils. He saw other kids using catapults in the streets and wanted to build one for himself. He found a tree branch forking into two, cut the suitable length and began to powder down its surface with a glass paper. He bought a strong rubber piece and tied it to the wooden piece and made himself a catapult with a central portion of leather, into which he placed a small stone. When he pulled it to its maximum length and released it, the stone catapulted like a bullet.

Slowly he extended his hours of truancy and brought it from early hours of schooling. He loved to watch the early morning dew and its effect on the countryside. There was a feeling of freshness in the air and when the new rays of the sun struck, it made everything glistened making that mirrored world a joy to watch and be alive. He watched the gossamer's web with all those dew drops, like a garland incrusted with jewels and a little sleepy spider inside just waking up and hoping for a nice meal of tasty flesh for its breakfast, in the shape of some poor wandering insect or a fly.

. He began to explore greater and greater circumference of the countryside around his town. One day he found an old abandoned house, which looked very dark and sinister and wanted to find out as to who it belonged to. His enquires yielded that it belonged to an old fellow who used to be an eccentric recluse and who liked to live in the wilderness, away from human habitation as he did not like the people around him very much.

One day he visited that place and smashed a windowpane with his catapult aiming from a distance and he thought he heard some growling voice from within the house and though he ran off but promised himself to come back for further investigations. He did visit the house each day and one by one smashed all the glass. One day when he went to the house to smash the last window, he thought that he saw a figure standing behind a tree in the vegetation surrounding the house. He tip-towed to the house and looked through the broken window but did not find any one inside. He was going to turn away but suddenly found himself in the grip of something. He realized that a cold clammy hand grabbed him. He could not turn around to see the thing, as its grip was too strong for him to turn around. Slowly the thing pushed him inside the house and where it became dark and icy. When his eyes became accustomed to darkness, he saw an old bed with torn sheets hanging over it and there was someone sleeping in the bed. Soon there was a movement beneath those sheets and he let out a scream.

He was pushed to the edge of the bed and instructed to touch the lying figure sleeping there. A gruffy voice told him to examine it properly. He tried to take the wrappings away but there were so many layered wraps like that of an Egyptian mummy. Suddenly the wrapped figure stirred and he fell down with a scream unable to face the forthcoming sight .He was grabbed gain by the same hand behind and was instructed to deal with the figure lying in the bed. With trembling hands and half closed eyes he touched the wrapped figure again and began to take it's wrapping. He felt in a grip of panic and thought he was going to pass out.

There were so many layers of wrapping and which he was forced to take away one by one. Liquid was oozing out of that body like pus and the smell was pungent, over-powering, rotten and extremely foul. Nausea came over him. He thought himself to be in a dominion of hell or in a house of death confronting all the corruptions of that world. When he took all the wrappings away, he found inside a withered figure with its half eaten face perhaps by the worms and very pulpy.

The deep gargling voice told him that he had to prepare it for its funeral rites but Romesh did not know anything for preparing a body for funeral. It was the first time that he had seen a dead body if you could call it a 'body'. He was told to wash the body first for its final cremation. He simply could not undertake such disgusting job and tried to run away but as he was near the exit, he was again grabbed and dragged all the way to the bedside of the corpse as to restart his task.

The sun had set outside and it was getting dark inside and imagine the horror he had to face alone in that house of death, at that tender age. He was given a bucket and a rag as to go outside and fill the bucket with water from the little stream flowing outside. He filled the bucket and with the rag as a sponge began to wash the body, each time he squeezed the sponge a blackish red liquid oozed out of it but he had to go one washing the body from toe to head or whatever was left of it and renewing the dirty water of the bucket each time with fresh supply.

He was instructed then to prepare for a funeral pyre for the cremation of the body. He went around to find pieces of wood, twigs, dry leaves or anything combustible and which he put underneath and around the bed. It was not enough and he had to take an axe from a dark corner of the building and to chop the walls of the old building with its rotting wooden structures. It was a hard physical task and even that in semi darkness and it took him ages to build up enough fuel to burn the foul lying thing. His heart was pounding and blood was rushing into his veins and brains but his mind became numb to save him from the disgust and horror of the task he was going through to perform.

Dawn was coming across the eastern horizon when he put the final torch to the pyre and it began to slurp and burn around the body with large tongues of flames, trying to lick everything into ashes. But whole of the body did not burn and he had to smash the skull and maneuver it with a pole and push it to the flames. He sat exhausted on the ground looking at the sight. Suddenly there was a big explosion and the whole house blew up and went into a volcano of fire and a column of billowing smoke rushed forth and he felt that the whole building had catapulted into the sky.

Romesh did not turn up at his home that evening and was missing from the school too. A search party was sent out and a last they found him in the fields lying unconscious. The surrounding ground was charred and burnt away as if by an explosion of some sort. He was held down by strong hands onto his bed as he was trying to run away screaming and kicking. He lay there into a coma unaware of his surroundings He regained consciousness after a few days but his nightmares continued.