Snakepit Read Online Free PDF Page B

her to be, in the hope that she would supplant the first wife, whom she imagined to be old and worn out. What she did not know was that there was no competition. Wife Number One was unassailable. Queen to all latecomers, she got first priority in everything.
    For a time they lived in a senior army quarter. On weekends they would go out to drink, as he enjoyed showing her off. During the week she kept house, which she did badly due to lack of experience. The food got burned and she cut her fingers and she did not know how long to cook the meat or how to wash clothes properly. He realized that violence would not achieve anything and he hired help.
    He had a plan worked out for her. If she conceived, he would keep her as a second wife to bear him children with some southern blood in them. If she remained barren, he would enroll her in the State Research Bureau and use her as a decoy. He would only have to anger her to unleash the beast inside. A beautiful decoy would do wonders trapping rampant southern subversives.
    To start with, he began to reveal to her what he did. He told her about army operations to curb robbery. He told her the number of people he had killed, how interrogation and extraction of information proceeded. He frightened the hell out of her because till then she had a black-and-white picture of good and evil wherein she believed deep down that bad people were totally bad and good people totally good.
    After a year without her conceiving, his patience ran out. He had risen higher and was now in charge of the South-western Region, and his sense of power had reached mammoth proportions. He took her to different towns, and she saw how both civilians and soldiers respected and feared him. There was something mesmerizing about his demeanour. He was like a god, an apparition, a natural phenomenon. He enjoyed the adulation, and in his good moments he said that she had brought him good luck. In his bad moments, however, he accused her of being barren. He asked her if she was doing it intentionally so as not to have a child with a northerner.
    â€œI need a child before I die. I have many enemies. I want to make sure that when the moment comes, I have a successor. There are big plans ahead with very bad odds. I don’t want them to proceed before you are pregnant.”
    The gynaecologist found nothing wrong with her. The Colonel started having violent outbursts, wearing her down to a frazzle. He made her confess to earlier affairs and said that her earlier looseness made her barren. He started using military tactics to intimidate and control her. He would ask for tea and then smash the cup against the wall saying it had been dirty. He tinkered with guns, putting the barrel in his mouth and firing empty chambers. She would plead and cry and beg, but he would ignore her and continue firing away. When she was almost out of her mind, he would open the clip and drop the only bullet on the floor. Sometimes he asked her to pull the trigger when the gun was in his mouth.
    â€œDo you mean to say that you have never thought of killing me?” he would roar. He would go on till he had forced a confession out of her and then say, “If you kill me, my soldiers will burn the whole town to the ground.”
    He would take a rifle and start shooting in the back garden till the whole place smelled of gunpowder and was filled with smoke. He would enter the house and spit on the barrel to show how hot it had become. He pressured her till she reached snapping point, ready to do anything to improve the situation. Then he announced his plans to her, saying: “I saw the killer instinct in you the first time I saw you. You are going to make a perfect decoy. You are going to rise to the top of the Bureau. Everybody is going to bow down to you. The Bureau needs beauties like you. It is too full of ugly men and unsightly women. Hold your position and they will eat your shit. If you show them fear, they will make you eat theirs, and