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Malaka
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 2

"Can you move over a bit, girl," the fat old woman said. "I need some space to breathe."

 Malaka tried to oblige and pushed against the coughing man with the grizzled beard. He glared at her and pushed back at her with his bony shoulder. His eyes were red-rimmed and there was purulent matter caked at the corners. "Get away from me," he hissed and began coughing again, his body shaking. After that, Malaka sat very still.

Across from Malaka was a family she knew vaguely, the parents, wife and children of a colleague of her father’s at the mine. The old couple looked as though they were trying to sleep, while their daughter-in-law glared at Malaka across the aisle for some reason with concentrated hatred. Her lips moved, muttering something. Malaka tried not to look at her. Only once, as the bus drove away from her little town, did she wipe the tears away.

The road to Keke was bad, potholed in numerous places, with deep ruts where the tyres of hundreds of passing vehicles had worn the exposed earth away. On either side were sparse forests interrupted by scattered farms, the fields mostly lying fallow in this, the dry season. The heat was suffocating, and inside the bus, with the passengers crammed together, there was so little air that Malaka began to feel dizzy. She leaned her head as far back as she could in an effort to catch what little wind was coming in through the window behind her, and closed her eyes, swaying back and forth as the vehicle rattled and bounced.

Suddenly the bus stopped, so suddenly that Malaka fell forward into the aisle. For a moment she thought there had been an accident, as there had been once when she had been riding a truck and it had tipped over. Everyone seemed to be scrambling up from their seats at the same time, so that Malaka was almost trampled on the floor before she could somehow get to her feet. Someone outside was shouting, the voice all but drowned in the noise of the bus engine. Then there was a sudden loud banging noise and the bus engine stopped.

"Everybody out!" the person outside shouted, in heavily-accented Kudu, Malaka’s language, and then again in Sambar. "Everyone out. At once!"

Muttering and craning their necks, the passengers disembarked. As she followed the others, Malaka saw the driver still sitting behind the wheel, his hands held up by his ears. Then the people just in front of Malaka stopped. Some of them tried to push back into the bus.

"Out!" shouted the man outside again, his voice high and angry, and fired again into the air. "Out, quickly." The passengers fell silent at once. Slowly, one by one, they left the bus. Malaka was one of the last.

She felt hands grab her and push her to one side. "Here’s another." She was in a line of young people and children, both boys and girls. Older people had been pushed into a second and larger line. The driver was now getting down from the bus, in front of which the road had been blocked by a barrier made of old boxes, oil drums, the branches of trees and piles of rubber tyres. Around the bus and the barrier were a group of boys and young men, in shorts and dirty T shirts, most of them carrying guns. A few carried machetes with gleaming blades. One of these grabbed the driver by the scruff of the neck and threw him to the ground, saying something in a language Malaka didn’t recognise.

A thin, very tall man came round the back of the bus. He was dressed in a kind of military uniform, comprising dark green trousers with a khaki shirt and a cap with a blue and red cockade on it. He had a pistol in his hand and brandished it in the air and shouted. His voice was thin and high, almost like a woman’s.

"You lot," he was shouting, "were running away, were you? Enemies of the revolution." Malaka could understand enough Sambar to recognise how heavy his accent was. "You," the man shouted, kicking the driver, "you were helping them. Traitor!" He shouted something else and suddenly shot the driver, who shivered and lay flat on the ground. A dark red circle began to form round his head.

Malaka stared, fascinated with fear, at the driver’s body. One of the boys laughed uproariously and scooped up some of the blood on his fingers and licked them clean. Another pointed his gun at the line of older people and fired. A woman screamed, lying on the ground and kicking with her legs. It was Malaka’s father’s colleague’s wife, who had been glaring at her on the bus. The boys laughed and a couple of them clapped. There was almost a festive air. Then the man in the military uniform shouted and they fell silent, except for the woman, who was still moaning.

[ Continue to page 3 ]

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Information
Genre:General Horror
Type:Short story
Rating:6.75 / 10
Rated By:33 users
Comments: 3 users
Total Hits:30857

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