The Devil Speaks
Devarshi Sarogi
Aided by violent communal riots, a man plots the annihilation of all his family members in order to take sole possession of his enormous ancestral home.
Full Synopsis
Set against the backdrop of the communal riots that broke out across India following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, The Devil Speaks is the story of a middle-aged man who is convinced that life is utterly meaningless. In a world where death exists but God does not, he believes that absolute hedonism is the only way to make life bearable. He loves no one, nor does he want anyone to love him. Life seems to him ludicrous and purposeless because we all end up dead anyway. Yet death is the only force that delivers life from its absurd existence. He supports warfare because in the modern age only war can control the number of human beings who are as numerous as the meaningless stars in the sky. He is most happy when left alone with the few things that bring him pleasure: food, sex, and the philosophy of destruction. One night, while the riots are underway, he is suddenly consumed by a sinister thought: that if all the members of his family were to die in the riots, he would be the sole owner of the enormous house he lives in. His family is large, consisting of his grandparents, his parents, brothers, his father's widowed sister and her family. He wants all of them killed in the riots. Or they should kill each other. Or commit suicide. Or die in any other way. He decides to play an active role in all this. How? He won't touch anyone with his hands. But he will, like a political or a religious leader, influence them with his oratory, a gift bestowed upon him by the Devil himself. Urged on by his dreadful yet seemingly logical words, they would kill each other or themselves or leave the house forever. He succeeds. Orchestrated by him, every member of his family dies or leaves. The enormous house with its many rooms, running verandas, and wide courtyard is now totally empty — and he is its sole owner. As a hazy dawn breaks, the terrible silence of the house overwhelms him and he runs out.
Rights.aboutAuthorHeading
Devarshi Sarogi was born in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1955 and emigrated to West Bengal in India. In his long literary career, he has penned thirty novels and numerous short stories which flow seamlessly, blending the everyday with the surreal, leading to confusion towards seeking, which resonates through all the questions voiced or hinted at in his stories.
Excerpt
As therefore the state of man is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? ~Milton, Areopagitica I was thankful that the race riots broke out in the city. Otherwise, the thought that has been hammering my head for the last two days would never have occurred to me. The day before yesterday, at midnight, a thought suddenly raised its head like a hooded snake in my half-awake mind: that if all the members of our family died during these riots, I would become the sole owner of this enormous house. Once I felt that I had, in fact, been thinking in a dream, I turned on my side in an effort to sleep calmly. But the thought kept coming back, with increasing urgency. I got out of bed and wiped the sweat on my forehead even on that cold winter night. All this happened on the midnight of the day before yesterday. I have not slept since. Since then, as I walked or sat, ate or lay in bed. or paced up and down in the transparent darkness of the lantern for a whole night, I had been ceaseless] y playing with the snake swaying in my head. In the grip of this feverish frenzy, my tall heavy body lost all its vigor in just two days. Normally I am reserved by nature. The others in the family usually avoid conversations with me, and so do I, as far as possible. But now I have turned even more aloof. I cast strange and secret glances at them. No one, however, suspected anything, because they too had become silent after my elder brother’s eleven-year-old son was killed by the rioters under a nearby Krishnachura tree the day before yesterday. They could not even look at each other’s faces. The riots had started last Sunday, which meant five days ago, for today is Thursday. I tried to recall if it really was Thursday because time was getting mixed up in my mind. It seemed to me time had not moved an inch since that night. The sun had not risen. And I had been tossing in bed in the same way. wondering if it was all a dream. My large family lived in this house: my grandfather. grandmother. father. mother- elder brother. his wife and their five-year-old daughter, my younger brother (thirty- three and a bachelor), my father’s sister who is a widow, her son, his wife and I (my wife had died five years ago). The two-storey building is large, with two verandas running along its three sides both on the ground and the first floor, and a big courtyard in the centre. My great-grandfather had been an administrator on a rich zemindar’s estate. He had built the house. which still stands strong, though in some corners of the cornices and cracks in the walls banyan saplings have sprung up. It has thirteen rooms, two kitchens, and three bathrooms with separate toilets. On the terraced roof is an attic dumped with useless, worm-eaten things. No one entered it except me. At times I stepped into it and stared at the things unblinkingly, as if I were staring at a pile of burnt coal and ashes left over from the cremation of a body. And I heaved a sigh of relief. I would hardly have agreed to live on had there been no death. But it was equally true that life seemed to me ludicrous because there was death. Till now I had not been able to decide which of the two attitudes I should have towards death. I knew I would never be able to decide. Without doubt, this single inability had made my life permanently unhappy. An unhappy person cannot love others, so I could not love anyone in the family. They, however, loved me, or so it seemed, though they avoided coming too close because I disliked such closeness. They knew it. I sought happiness all the same (or how had spent forty-eight years of my life?) and also got it. I got the greatest pleasure from food, and then from sex with whores. I got it from snubbing my juniors in the office, or from riding in a taxi, or sleeping alone (l hated spending nights with whores), or pacing my room with doors and windows closed after completely stripping myself so I could watch, in the thin shadow of the room, the source of mankind. I got it from absolute loneliness. And from the news of wars and earthquakes, because in the modern age only these two things can quickly erase human beings, as disgusting as swarming insects. Once I had a strange dream about war. A terrifying war suddenly hit the earth. Our city. too. was ripped apart by bombs. It began in the morning and by evening almost everything was destroyed. I was among the few still living. In the evening I came out into the street, like an animal does from under a black tarpaulin. All around me the silence was deeper than in a crematorium. Only smoke still drifted along with the stench of charred human flesh. In the solitary sky a full moon was rising. Walking alone, I watched the city. Then I began going in and out of the houses that still stood. I went into them through broken doors and windows and even holes in the walls. The people inside all lay dead having inhaled poison gas. In the large hall of a house, I saw a big chandelier tinkling all by itself. I entered the erect houses one by one and, drawing the curtains, opened the windows to drive away the stench locked in them because, I thought, the houses were now mine. The whole city, I thought, was mine. I had the dream, I remember, in the daytime.
