Secrets Hidden In Time (Time #1)

11 | The Brochure At The Villa & The Bite At Night

Back then, when I was in university, there was a small tiffin center just twenty meters away from the main gate of my university.

The owner of the tiffin center was Banu, a sunny-faced middle-aged fellow. Banu had a wife named Aasha and two daughters; the older one was fifteen, while the younger one was ten. Though they had a proletarian background, together the family of four looked perfect. In other words, flawlessly ideal.

 Just behind the tiffin center, Banu had a small wooden cabin where he lived along with his picture-perfect happy family.

The world would go haywire, the sun would cease its revolutions and blast on its own axis, but Banu's smile would still remain intact, and all thirty-two of his betel nut-stained teeth would still be on full display. His ear-to-ear grins, saccharine words, warm, nitid eyes, and the free cups of tea and coffee, along with a twenty-rupee plate of two Vadas and hot and spicy sambhar from his humble little food abode, were a classic favorite of the college-going student mass, especially the hostelers and the professors. A source of relief from the watery rasam, rice and barely cooked potato fry that was termed and served as 'food' in the hostel mess.

My university was located in the thick forest-covered foothills of the Agasthyamalai hills in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, always covered in dense mist all year round. So, the hot cups of beverages made by Banu were the only potions of relaxation that students had access to, considering the site of the university, where no food delivery apps operated and no restaurants or eateries existed at all. Hence making the ever-smiling Banu the sole culinary god of the university town.

I was never a fan, though. For some reason, his Cheshire cat-like beams always irked me.

Lamentably, my wariness turned out to be absolutely within reason. In the sophomore year of university, one foggy morning, a herd of professors and students, including myself, witnessed the police dragging Banu from his humble wooden accommodation to the police jeep in a half-naked state, his pants dangling around his waist.

Outside his log house, on their toes were six female figures, three of them being policewomen. The other three were Banu's wife, Aasha, and his two daughters. 

Aasha's lips were slit, and her bloody left n*pple was jutting out from her torn blouse, while crimson gore dribbled down her legs. Her body was brutally battered and bruised. Her daughters, on the other hand, were in an even more abominable condition: completely naked from head to toe, beaten up to a near-death state like their mother, animal-like bite marks littering their bodies, and blood flowing down from the region between their contused legs.

The policewomen were on a spree to cover up the remaining little honor and modesty of the three feminine figures beside them.

Yet I saw it.

Despite the barbaric shape those three were in, in that moment, Aasha and her daughters had a sense of relief flaring like infernos in their eyes. I saw it—the solace, the peace they were robbed of, finally returning to them.

Banu was a man with facades. In the mornings, he was the sunny-faced man selling food and beverages to a mass of hungry young bloods. In the nights, he would turn into a behemoth who would sexually violate his wife and daughters in turns and then torture them. Their painful wails were a source of euphoria for him, and their sufferings his only tangible dose of happiness.

In the end, people have always had a way to reveal who they were.

Just that the rest of the population surrounding them had to provide them with the required space and time to do so.

And although facades have always been a part of human civilization, there was another truth prevailing over all the realities of the world that no facade or mask could actually be worn forever.