How my sister went off Shakespeare

It had rained in the evening.The eaves were still dripping. The narrow gully between the garage and the house was full of a slush of soggy dead mango leaves , odd scraps of paper with failed literary attempts, and mud.

Talking of literary, the house was forever full of books . Old masterpieces languishing in large wooden trunks , painted green, that served the dual purpose of settees.The paint would be cracking and peeling off , revealing its age .

 Large , inbuilt cupboards with ornate wooden facades, done up in gleaming varnish and glistening metal. These had more recent treasures, namely , magazines and books from this decade , perused by family members, who had moved on to other parts of country, and other phases of life , matrimony , and worse. But , unfortunately, these cupboards were padlocked. Like the treasures of yore.

Wheedling the matriarch for the key, required tremendous patience , and time to wade through inquisitional enquiries, not to mention the breathing-down -the -neck deadlines."I want the key back in five minutes, got it?And no reading dirty books." Dirty books , in the prohibitionist era I am talking about , meant mills and boons("too much kissing-shishing") , or film magazines with pictures of sultry sirens pouting on the covers.("Chhee! Dirty women")

So, an easy option was to lift the "gaddi" and the "Chadar" off the settee, take the help of a co-conspirator, lift the lid, and help oneself to Camus, Sartre, Shakespeare , George Orwell , or the Puranas ( for the religious minded). Easy.

So it came to pass that the girl, a teenager, was perched on the window sill, its rusty bars still wet from rain, overlooking the garage , absorbed in "Macbeth." The three witches were brewing their potion and singing their grisly song, when a swish and a thud sounded from the narrow gully.

In the failing light of the dusk, the reader, a teenaged girl of some what hysterical disposition,mind befuddled by witches' incantations, saw a bundle of white lift itself off the slush, cursing profusely in the vernacular, and  metamorphosing into a bent old woman , toothless except for two abnormally large incisors,  broken specs , held in place with a string, mud all over her wrinkled face , raising one gnarled hand ahead of her , through the wet window bars, calling "Beti, Beti"(daughter), with a mud-encrusted nail , coming, as she claimed later, within inches of her nose .

A blood curdling scream rent the air . Followed by several shorter screams calling on God and parents to save her.

Everyone froze. The matriarch froze in her stocktaking of supplies . The mother's hand froze in the kitchen , ladling the "dal".The patriarch  froze mid -weekly calculations , and the toddlers froze , mid play.

Next moment , pandemonium, total chaos . The matriarch roared , racing to the bed room , a broom in hand , mother screamed and stood in the verandah, dal ladle in hand , the toddlers , in a remnant of some primeval hunting memory, answered back in howls and screams of their own. No one answered the patriarch's confused "What ?what?where?"

So loud was the melee, that kindly neighbours barged in, armed with lathis ready to kill the intruder immaterial of its species, reptilian or not.

The old woman was dragged out from the gully, by the muscular arms of her own son , and was shouted into her hard of hearing ears , that she had strayed into the wrong house and that her daughter worked at the neighbouring house. The teenaged girl was given a infusion of honey with basil leaves , into which the matriarch had mumbled some chantings of fearlessness, (not unlike macbeth's witches ), all the kids were made to touch their foreheads at the feet of Hanuman's garish painting in the pooja room.Mother made a last round of cardamom tea and quietly wept for her high strung daughter.

The girl, however, slept in her mother's bed that night, clutching hanuman chalisa to her bosom and holding her mother's hand with the other.

She never read Macbeth or Shakespeare for that matter, ever again.