The Conveyor’s Wrath

My name is Arjun, and I am fifty-three. I was born in the sweltering city of Kolkata, in a neighborhood that smelled of rain, burnt diesel, and the tang of the Hooghly River. This is the story of the nightmare that has stalked me since I was a child, a memory that is as real as the scars on my hands, yet belongs to the realm of the impossible.

I was barely two when my mother, Malati, died. An accident, they said. A bus, a slick road, a moment of carelessness. I was too young to understand, yet I remember the absurd details: the crimson of her sari against the grey pavement, the way her bangles scattered like fallen stars, and the terrible stillness of her hand that had just been stroking my cheek. They told me it was impossible, that a child so young could not hold such memories. But I did.

A week after the funeral, when the monsoon had turned the city into a blurred watercolor, I had a dream. No, it was more than a dream. It was a visitation, a splinter of another reality. I was walking with my mother down a road that ran alongside our apartment block, a road I knew well. But it was wrong. The sky was a sickly yellow, the air thick and silent, and the usual bustling market was gone. Not a soul, not a single hawker or stray dog. The only sound was the whisper of our feet on the cracked asphalt.

Then I saw it. A bull, but not like any bull I had ever seen. It was massive, its hide a deep, mottled black like dried blood, and its muscles rippled beneath the skin like the surface of a stormy sea. Its eyes were not just red; they were twin pits of burning coals, and they fixed on us with a hunger that was not animal but something older, more malevolent. It pawed the ground, then rose on its hind legs, bellowing a sound that was less a roar and more a vibration that shook my very bones. My mother screamed, a sound I had never heard her make, and snatched me into her arms.

She ran. But the road betrayed us. It started to move beneath our feet, sliding backward like a conveyor belt in a nightmare, pulling us toward the beast no matter how fast she sprinted. I remember the wind whipping my hair, the frantic pound of her heart against my ear, and the growing heat of the bull’s breath as it loomed closer. My mother’s feet were bleeding, her sandals lost, but she never stopped. She looked down at me, and in her eyes I saw a fierce, desperate love, and then she did something impossible. She turned and faced the bull, shielding me with her body, and the bull’s horns, like curved swords, pierced her. I felt her jolt, and then her grip on me loosened. I fell, and the conveyor dragged me away, and I watched my mother disappear beneath the stamping hooves of the beast. I woke up screaming, my throat raw, my body drenched in sweat.

For years, I told no one. What could I say? That I had seen my mother die twice? The dream came again and again, always the same. I grew up, moved away, tried to bury it under work and routine. But the dream never left. It evolved. I started to see details I had missed: a broken signboard that read ‘Narayan’s Tea Stall,’ a banyan tree with a peculiar twist in its roots, a pothole shaped like a lotus. And in the dream, I began to feel the conveyor belt not just under my feet, but under my whole life, dragging me inevitably toward some unseen end.

Last year, my father passed away. I was going through his belongings, and I found a tattered photograph. It was of me as a baby, sitting on my mother’s lap, in front of a tea stall. The signboard read ‘Narayan’s Tea Stall.’ I almost dropped it. The banyan tree behind them had the same twisted roots. I showed it to my father’s old friend, a man from our old neighborhood. He grew pale. He told me that the day my mother died, there had been an accident on that very road involving a bull that had escaped from a nearby slaughterhouse. It had charged at my mother and me, and she had pushed me aside, but the bull had trampled her. The police had found her body by the banyan tree.

I felt the floor tilt. The dream, the memory, it was real. My mother hadn’t slipped and been hit by a bus; she had been killed by that monstrous bull. But the dream showed me something else, something the official report couldn’t explain: the road moving backward, the impossible chase. I knew then that I had to see the place again.

I returned to Kolkata, to the old neighborhood. The market was gone, replaced by a flyover. But the road was still there, and the banyan tree, now old and gnarled, stood at the corner. I walked along the road, and as I reached a particular spot, I felt a cold draft. The sounds of the city faded. The sky seemed to darken. I looked down, and the asphalt was beginning to ripple. I stumbled back, then forward, as the ground started to slide beneath me. The conveyor had returned, and it was pulling me toward the tree, where the shadows thickened, and a pair of red eyes opened in the gloom. I heard a bellow, and it was not a sound from the throat, but from the very fabric of that place. I ran, but the road dragged me back. I felt a horn graze my shoulder, and I screamed.

And then I woke up, lying on the pavement, my head bleeding. An auto driver was shaking me, asking if I was okay. I sat up, trembling. I had felt the beast, the real beast, beyond the dream. It was still there, tethered to that spot, waiting. And I understood that the dream was not a memory; it was a promise. The road had not finished with me. It was a conveyor, and I was still on it, moving slowly, inexorably, toward the same ending as my mother. I am not sure if I have escaped. Sometimes, as I go about my day, I feel the ground shift beneath me, just for a moment, and I know the bull is still there, and that one day, the conveyor will bring me back. And when it does, I will see her again, running with me in her arms, and this time, perhaps, we will find a way to stop running.

But I doubt it. I doubt it because the road taught me that some forces are older and stronger than love. And I am not running from a bull anymore. I am running from the road itself. And I am tired. So tired.