A story: Evil on the Inside

Evil on the Inside

The girl lay on the virgin white cloth of the hospital bed. Of all of her, the eyes expressed the most, most of which was resignation. The blank stare did not falter, nor did the dark eyes blink. She did not make a sound as long as her father stood across from her bed, struggling to brook the tingling in his eyes, and the pain of welling tears pulsing in his jowls. The father moved closer, took the girl’s hand in his, and softly said, “Suku?”

Sukomal, the daughter, promptly looked at her father and the latter set tears rolling freely down his cheeks.

Sukomal, my friend, said to her father, “I want to stay with you all.” At that, even I, who had come with my father to visit her before she could die from the cancer slowly nibbling at and devouring her insides, felt a lump in my throat. My ten-year-old instincts dared not let me say anything for fear of making the scene more awkward, or worse, hurting anyone, given how brittle emotions had grown there. “No one is taking you anywhere”, said Bimal Kaka, and I felt how hollow the reassurance was. “See, Satyajit has come to see you”, and he beckoned to me.

I left my father behind and stood beside the bed. The pallor on her young face, the baldness on her scalp and the tubes that entered her nostrils or pierced through the soft skin of the backs of her hands made my guts form knots. I was at a loss of words. “Hey, Sukomal”, uttered I, somehow, and waited for a reply. Sukomal lifted a small diary from her side, ever so slowly, and handed it to me. “Take this. I won’t write in it for a while. You do it instead, till I can write again”, she said in a tiny, hushed, pitiful voice; each word ostensibly taking all her effort. The forceful sniff of a sob that came from her father told me how devoid of hope he had grown. I mechanically took the article from her, and before the fully built sob could burst out of me, the nurse came in to escort us out. I could not bring myself to say words of farewell.

With the end of the visiting hours, my hopes of seeing my friend again too, ended.

*****

My parents’ house needed a repaint, I was thus told.

I had come back home from Bangalore. My original city, the City of Joy, also former capital of British India, had greeted me warmly a couple of days ago, along with my father and my sister, Nivedita, at the airport. Nivedita had asked me, “Do you know why Kolkata is called the City of Joy?” to which, I had replied “Because it is! Why else?” After a pause, she had said “That seems obvious, but before Dominique Lapierre wrote the novel, it wasn’t known as one.” That was more like the culture geek I knew she was.

I, once home and unloading my luggage bags, had my sister finding something. “Hey, Dada,” addressing me by the Bengali word for older brother, she asked, “This multimeter of yours looks different, doesn’t it?”

“Are you referring to a more customary model?” I asked without looking at her, enjoying her folly.

She did not reply, only examined it more keenly, I figured.

“It’s a Geiger counter”, I corrected her.

Nuclear physicists like me aren’t privileged to relish long holidays except at times, but in those times, sure as I am, they make the most of them. Coming home roused my bottommost sentiments, and if anything resided deeper in my subconscious, they were triggered by old memories attached to monetarily inexpensive things scattered all over the house, now being brought back out into the light of day due to the imminent paintjob, after ages of slumber in the dark of shelves, under coats of dust.

Behind some old books, I found, getting gnawed at by rust, a key. The keychain trailing behind it had a rectangular piece of orange, translucent plastic written on with a permanent marker, and I squinted to read the twisted yet smooth strokes of calligraphy. It said, ‘Owned by the Conqueror of Truth’. I chuckled in my mind, believing it to be my sister’s work. Why, that’s my name— Satyajit in Sanskrit does mean the Conqueror of Truth!

I enquired with my mother, and learned that the little thing was the key to things that I used to hold dear in my childhood, which were locked away in the trunk under my bed—and the writing was indeed my sister’s, written years ago. Later in the night, my urge to rediscover my past breached containment and, I dragged the heavy trunk out.

When I took it out, a rather large spider fled from over it. With a rag, I dusted off the cake of cobwebs and loose dirt, emptied my lungs in a gust to get rid of the remainders, sneezed mightily twice and skeptically put the key into the keyhole. When I turned it, the key obediently made a springy click and a satisfied “Ah!” escaped my throat. As I turned the big lid over, a queer, old, dusty smell filled the air, as my sight was filled by my childhood treasures. There was a cluster of broken toy cars, cheap articulated figurines of fictional characters, some tops, two comic books, a plastic bat and ball, rubber animals and a shyly peeping diary. Wait.

A green-grey diary was buried beneath the pile of my treasures. Even as I stared at it, I knew that I had never owned a diary like that. I dug it up and held it before me, not remembering how it had made its way there, or who it belonged to. I stared at it for a while more, before realizing from the year on it that it was older than a decade and a half, and I opened it to the first page. There was a little photograph of a child attached, and in intricate, very pretty cursive, spewing a childlike immaturity, the name was penned. My reading of it was accompanied by a sudden, chaotic clangour from far, and though distant, I was startled all the same. I heard my mother’s call from the kitchen; she had dropped some stainless steel utensils, most possibly. Yet there I squatted down, the name on the diary itself having hollowed my chest out. The girl in the photo to whom the name had belonged was long deceased, I remembered with unease; she used to be a dear friend of mine. I answered to the call, “Coming, Ma!”

After I finished helping my mother, I asked her about the girl. “Sukomal Mitra? Why, ask your father; he’ll know quite a story. Her father used to work with him— Mr. Bimal Mitra was the name. You won’t remember him; you were so small when the poor girl died.” I listened quietly. “Her mother had descended into madness shortly after, forced into it by grief. Then Mr. Mitra too had resigned from your father’s office, if I’m not wrong.” She paused. “So, had the girl given that to you?” she asked, pointing at the diary.

My father’s narration was far more interesting. It shed light on the fateful day that I saw my little friend for the last time ever, and the fate of Bimal Kaka— that suffix added by most, as had I, to mean an elderly person in Bengali, while also literally meaning ‘uncle’. “He was obsessed with the idea that there was this… a doll— behind his daughter’s death,” my father said.

“A doll?” I doubted hearing right.

“Well, yes— this same doll also being behind his wife’s insanity—according to him, as superstitious as he was. This idea was consuming him, as was the brunt of caring for his wife. Then one day, without prior notice, he resigned downright. Even after retirement now, I still remember; on his last workday, he said the doll should never have been gifted to Sukomal. Poor soul, he severed all contacts, changed his landline and all.” I listened with unfazed attention, feeling sorry for the man. “But guess what, Jit? These days he has become something of a writer. He had always wanted to be one, though. You can find his articles published in the newspaper often, and he has some books to his credit too, given I’m right. I haven’t read any of the books, anyway.”

“Have you talked to him after?” I asked.

“No. No, but I had tried. Once I had visited him at his home, years ago, and was turned back right from the door. He had said it was dangerous for me to go in, the evil still lingered with the doll, and it was eating his wife away.” My father sighed. I never for once believed a suprarational entity to have been behind Bimal Kaka’s tragedy. “Where did this doll come from?” I asked. My father was unsure, but he hinted at some uncle of Sukomal’s to have been part of the story.

Till late at night, I read the diary, curious as I am. Poor Sukomal had mentioned my name much more than once, but there were other friends too. Soon, an intriguing account of the notoriety appeared on the pages.

In poorly constructed sentences, the doll’s origins were mentioned. How old was she? Eight, or ten, at most…? Her words showed how glad she was for her uncle, as she was for her doll. It was bought from Germany by the uncle when he had been there. What she had written could be reconstructed as, “Hilter is a fine soldier. He is just like a handsome, living man, with a belt with buckles, legs with a pair of white socks, shoes with buckles, pants with a little zip and a tucked in shirt with buttons and collars. He is as big as my arm and quite heavy too. He said hello to my other toy friends…”

It would not be a lie if I said that the name had made me smirk—what else could a silly sweet non-German child associate Deutschland with? But the swapping of the two letters appeared to have been more deliberate than mistaken. I read some more, and read something like this: “…Hilter’s socks glow in the dark, and I discovered it only last night!” Hah! Fluorescence! And then, “Have I told you? Hilter is really alive, and feels warm in my hands when I play with him, but Mother doesn’t believe me. She says that my hands are cold, or Hitler’s clothes have soaked up the Sun from the window, but Hilter is warm all the time.”

This made some difference in my perception of Hilter.

I couldn’t reason why Sukomal would have made that up, although in plain sight, it looked outright preposterous. Had she never shown the doll to me? Of all the times my father took me to visit her home before she fell to the illness, had I never seen the doll? She was a little too introverted, I could remember, and sometimes too childishly possessive about her toys even, but eventually she would let me touch them. My memories of her were coming back, bit by bit, and I suddenly grew melancholic. The latter part of the diary was painful to read, where she wrote about her chest pains, her vomiting blood, and her nosebleeds. I was both impressed and saddened by her tenacity of writing, even in her last plight. At one point, the entries ended. I had seen a little splatter of dry blood on the previous page.

With the reminiscence of my childhood materializing, I did not find the girl occupying much of it. Yet, an obscure neuron had been nudged, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how devastated her father would have been, or her mother who lost her mind, or her last excruciating days, and, most of all, the enigma that her doll was. Did Hilter still exist? Why does my gut tell me that the doll had more to it than what its accounts expressed? My scruples kept whispering that I owed Bimal Kaka a visit, spawning from some guilt of keeping with me one of the last relics of his daughter. The diary was still open to the page with the faded, reddish brown spot.

As soon as that, I was in his house, before Bimal Kaka himself. He cradled the girl’s corpse across his chest, his kurta stained red with the blood oozing from the limply open mouth of his daughter. A woman, wasted by heartache, maddened by utter sorrow, wreaked havoc upon herself by pounding on her chest, bashing her forehead against a slick, crimson floor and then she plucked out a doll from behind her, vehemently went on mutilating it and tearing its limbs apart, but the pieces kept crawling back together and reforming, all while glowing fluorescent. Amidst the woman’s incontrollable, frantic shrieks, the father half wailed and half sobbed and the daughter twitched in his embrace. Then she opened her eyes, which were milk white at first and then a red spot appeared in each, which grew and filled the whites with a gut-wrenching scarlet and then she opened her mouth in a horrible scream as a doll came crawling out, slathered in blood—

I was soaked in sweat when I jerked awake from the nightmare.

Sunshine beamed in through the window grills and the gently waving curtains, painting little, bright trapeziums on the wooden study-table and the white marble that inlayed the floor. I had no idea of when sleep had taken me, but I was sure that I had a deep one except towards the end. Beside the pillow that was cold with my perspiration, the diary lay open. I was suddenly cautioned when I saw a few pages had got crumpled by my extended arm in my sleep; and quickly I began to straighten them.

After noon, with the diary, I set out for Bimal Kaka’s house just because of the obligation I felt.

It wasn’t too hard getting the directions—after all, there were printed publications to his name. But then, it was difficult to reach his place, as I had next to no remembrance of how the roads looked like, even if at all he lived in the same place as he used to live in the age I knew him from, because my father didn’t clearly remember where. I rode a bus, used the metro and after I climbed the stairs back up to open air, I stood at a bustling crossroads. I had to ask two pedestrians and a shopkeeper to narrow down the street I wanted. It was a few hours shy of dusk when I walked past a children’s park, alive with shrill shouts of joy. After I left the park behind and the happy sounds faded, I heard the chirp of birds returning to their homes above my head, in the overhanging foliage. The sun’s mellow afternoon light was draped over the buildings, the trees and the road. Only then did I quaintly begin to feel the déjà vu.

A rusted iron gate guarded a well maintained lawn and a squat, yellow house, but one could easily tell its original colour to have been black. On the left wall, the name of the owner of the lawn and of the two storied house was impressed, which said that I had come to the right place. The gate made a somber, sonorous sound when I pushed it, and then I noticed a eucalyptus. It stood right behind the wall, though growing much, much higher than the wall itself.

 I walked down the little lawn and stood at the door. I hesitated, waited and glanced back at the eucalyptus for reasons unknown to me. I raised my index finger and kept it pointed at the doorbell button. Will he remember me? Will he remember my father? Has his wife been cured? Yet, somewhere, I knew he would recognize the diary— but of course the girl’s picture was there. I cursed under my breath. What if he isn’t home now? I lamented the thought, but pressed the button anyway. It triggered a prerecorded snippet of an old Bollywood song into playing. I stood listening to it.

Sixty seconds passed without any event. The music had stopped more than a half-minute ago. I waited. Is he sleeping, or is he not home?

I drove my index at the button again, and the music replayed. Then, I heard a faint panting, coming from afar and growing louder. It wasn’t human, it was too rapid and too— but of course, it was a dog’s. I heard slippers-clad footfalls approaching. Then a voice spoke, shaken yet heavy, still far from the door, “Who is it?”

“Uh, can I talk to Mr. Bimal Mitra? Am I talking to him?” The footsteps stopped behind the door, followed by a brief silence, except for the dog’s frothy panting. I heard the sharp, shrill sound of a door latch being pulled down, and the door opened inside.

“Can I help you? I am Bimal Mitra.” There was no dog anywhere near.

The man looked old and weary, with prominently veined sinews clinging to his thickly haired arms. He wore a pale blue kurta and a chequered, green lungi. Through the thick-rimmed spectacles nestled on the bridge of his nose, a pair of deep, knowing eyes peered, their blackness somewhat faded as of the gates guarding their bearer’s abode. Only the pointed nose, the big gap between it and his upper lip and the slit chin made me a bit aware that I knew the man. “Bimal Kaka, it’s me, Satyajit”, I tried to make myself understood, “Satyajit Chatterjee, son of Mangalmay Chatterjee? He used to work with you at the State Bank, remember?”

As his quizzically crunched up face made him seem more and more familiar to me, I could almost hear gears turning inside his skull, mechanically processing the information. Suddenly, his eyelids began to bloom open and he spoke in a drawn out whisper, “Mangalmay Chatterjee… Chatterjee… Mang—Oh, yes, yes yes! Satyajit, aren’t you?” He remembered me! But he wasn’t happy enough, I observed, to see me.

“Yes, yes, I am!”

“It’s been years. You were so small. You were so… small. Like my…” he trailed away. “What brings you, Satyajit?” He did not seem ready to let me in. I brought out the diary from my side bag. “Here, I have this. This belonged to Sukomal”. I held it before him, and it had his complete attention as I turned it to the first page. “She had given it to me when… when she… before—” I couldn’t express myself, but I held the diary open. He looked at it, and kept looking. Behind Bimal Kaka, a low statured, black figure suddenly scampered from one end of the doorway to the other—and my heart skipped a beat.

When the dog innocently whined and stuck its muzzle out beside the old man, I was relieved, and only then did Bimal Kaka say, “Why don’t you come in? You’ve come with time in your hand, no?”

He took me in and made me sit on a couch. He summoned a maid-servant, asked with displeasure why she wasn’t there to attend the door, told her to prepare two cups of tea and she hurried away. Soon, we began to talk, about my father, mother and when I thought that he had forgotten that I had a sister, he asked, and asked about my job, about my life, about when I was going to marry and then started on his writing career. Soon, as did I realize that he never for once mentioned the doll, I also did that he never mentioned his wife either. The diary was clutched in his hand. A deep seated agony was impressed on his face when I questioned about his wife, and he wearily pointed at the wall behind me. I turned back to notice, for the first time, garlanded with lilies shriveled to crisps, the framed photograph of a woman and a child in her arms.

Once again, I was bereft of words when I turned to face the old man. “Bimal Kaka, I… ” I struggled. “I… when…? I’m sorry, Kaka. When did she pass?”

“Years have passed—many, many years; more than a decade. She too had succumbed to the wretched thing’s evil.” The jet black dog which lay at the old man’s feet, wagging its tail and enjoying the scratches it received from its master, perked its ears up at that. The maid servant was plating the biscuits and the tea, and was visibly interested in the discussion, but tried hard enough to hide it.

“What… thing? What are you talking about, Kaka?” I readied myself for the absurdities about to fall out of the poor man’s mouth, which I had to make sense of. “I have read that diary. There was some doll that Sukomal was very fond o—”

“It was no doll. Inside those fine folds of cloth and rubber and leather, there was a vile thing; a sinister, abstract, intangible thing. It took my Sukomal away from me. Why should I want to talk about it? Tell me, should I?”

There was silence. The maid-servant had slipped away, sensing the awkwardness. Bimal Mitra sat, resting his chin on his chest, pinching his forehead between his index finger and thumb. I waited, not knowing how I could extract it from him—Hilter’s story was too intriguing to be left unknown. The dog had stopped wagging its tail and was looking at me.

“You are a good boy, Satyajit, I know you are. So many times you have come to my house and played with my daughter, and ate food cooked by your Aunt Maya and went back home happy, holding your father’s hand”, he was struggling to control himself from breaking down, and I felt very sorry for him. He took one glance at the diary and sighed. Then he began.

“My older brother had a wonderful job of event management, which needed him to go places. One week he would be in Dubai, the next, the United States, and another, in some part of Europe. The number of places he toured was proportional to the money he got paid, and, most of all, he was a free soul, with no family as such to be tied to. So, this once, he was in Germany, and he attended an auction. A not very well known scientist had died, who, like my brother, had no family or heir, to put it in that way. So, sold by his butler to an auctioneer’s organisation, some of his valued articles made their way to an auction—the same one which my brother had decided to visit, which was also the first one of his life. When his articles were being introduced, my brother learned that the scientist had made a discovery but had died before he could make it public, his butler having been told that the discovery was hidden in someplace secret. He was a bit cranky for a scientist too, I’d like to think.

“Of all those articles, the doll was there. God, Satyajit! How its memory scares me! This horrid thing was liked by him, and he bought it right there, on that very accursed day. He had brought it back here on ship; I am surprised how the ship did not sink—”

“But Bimal Kaka,” I couldn’t keep quiet, “Why in the world do you blame the lifeless bit of a doll to have… I mean… you know?”

“Why, you ask? Why? Well, the scientist had died a horrible death, twisting in agony, I might say, from cancer. My brother, who had carried the doll with him, died from cancer, after he had presented the doll to his niece with all his love. The German’s ghost had all along possessed the doll, don’t you see? And poor, poor Sukomal! Was there anything more innocent than she? She loved the doll with all her heart—took it to school, came back and played with it and slept with it—it was the most favourite of all of her toys. This went on for months. She had mentioned more than once to her mother that the doll was warm, as if alive. Then began the nosebleeds, the vomiting of blood… Oh, poor, sweet daughter of mine! After her, her mother went mad with grief. She used to miss our daughter so very much, and curse herself for not having listened to her. Then she began to believe that the doll had to be tamed, the evil of the spirit had to be curbed by love, and she would never let go of the doll, always keeping it close wherever she sat, or slept, or ate, though never together at the table with me, ever. At one point, she turned violent toward the doll, and drunk with vengeance, she had tried to tear the doll apart, even with her teeth. Then the same symptoms began to appear in her. Her hair started falling off, her gums bled”, I dared not comment, but at that, something connected inside my head. “She too passed away, one evening like this, in a hospital, away from the doll just for the last three days of her life…”

When he ended, his eyes appeared on the brink of bursting with tears, as were they red. His gaze burned through me. Was the doll really evil? Was Hilter as ominous as his name wanted to sound? Those doubts never crossed my mind, I knew that it was either coincidental, or if at all Hilter had to do something with the deaths, it was blatantly much more natural than what was being implied, the second possibility the more possible. Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, some connections screamed to be made. Nosebleeds… bloody gums… scientist… cancer…

“Do you know what the scientist was working on?” I risked offending him with all my audacity, as desperate I was.

Bimal Kaka wiped the welling tears away, blinked at me and said, “What?”

“The scientist, Bimal Kaka—what was he working on? Did your brother tell you?”

“Is that important, dear Satyajit?” He clearly looked upset.

“I’m sorry, Kaka, but if you know, you could tell me.”

There was a pause in the conversation again. By now, the dog had sat up and was looking away from us, out of the window. Bimal Kaka appeared to have no mind to even try to remember. The maid-servant came back and asked for the old man’s permission to leave for home, after she had assured him that the chores were done with. The dog followed her to the door, and after she left, I got up to close the door, and he told me that it was better left open. “The scientist, well…” he suddenly spoke, “Dada said there were some kind of radio… he used to work on radios or something…”

Like a spark, it clicked in my mind. “Where is the doll?” I blurted out. “Where is the doll now, Kaka?” Even as I made known how intent I was on knowing the whereabouts of the doll, I didn’t know if I was thinking straight. Could it be…? How could it be?

“I never got rid of it completely, lest someone found it and the curse followed. I got it buried beside the eucalyptus tree—it lies inside a small iron box.” Lead would have been better, I thought. “Great grandma of God…!” I exclaimed under my breath. “Bimal Kaka, I think I need the doll.”

*****

I alone knew how despondently I had begun to persuade Bimal Mitra. As aback as I was taken by the superstitious idiocy of the stupid, old man at first, my stubborn annoyance was eventually worn down by the thought of how tragic his past had been, though I wouldn’t hesitate to confess that I myself wasn’t sure of whether my comprehension of the scenario was right. In short, I somehow managed to convince him to let me dig the box out, even offering money for it—which offended him so much as to bend him to my requests. So, I brought the box with me, intact with the doll, keeping in mind all along how great the risk was. When I left, the Sun had set behind the silhouette of buildings on the other side of the Ganges, and a rare kind of dusk that had coloured everything orange, was making way for nightfall. 

I reached home to find myself searching for a belonging of mine. “Where is the counter, Ma?” I yelled into the air, with a frantic edge to my voice, which I was aware of. “MA?!” She had no idea what a Geiger counter was, so I tried asking “Perhaps you know of a multimeter that I brought with me from Bangalore?” That did the trick—she showed me where it was in plain sight, called me stupid and paying no heed to her questions of what I did at Bimal Kaka’s home, I rushed upstairs to my room with my lead lined gloves, a makeshift mask of folded cloth, the prized counter of mine and helplessly clutched in my gloved hand, the infamous doll that Hilter was.

Hilter was a fine doll, there was no doubt about it. The proof of its intricate craftsmanship was leaking out from every pore of its cloth, and so was some other thing, if only I was not wrong. I found the lower segment of its arm ripped open, and guess what! It was hollow inside, with little, grey, powdery smudges. I had held it with bare hands before, upon Bimal Kaka’s lawn, but hadn’t felt much of any unusualness. Just for once, I held it again and maybe only because I anticipated it so much, it felt—so slightly—warm.

No sooner had I turned the counter on than it started clicking. Clickclick click Clickclickclick… and I let out a deep “Hmm” in agreement. As I brought the instrument close, its sound immediately morphed into a krrrrrrrrrr… and closer: there was the high pitched beeeeeeeeeeeeeep… The numbers on the display startled me. It appeared impossible to me, a substance so small in amount to be so extremely rad— Wait. I scrapped the previous idea that the doll’s fabric itself might have been interwoven with some exotic material, when I felt some particles sliding against each other inside the textile shell as I squeezed the doll’s torso between my fingers. Impulsively, I sprang up to go find a sharp tool, got a paper cutter close by enough, and placing the doll in the iron box, I slit the cloth back open.

Packed tightly inside Hilter’s cavity, little, dull metallic granules snuggled together, as if hiding from the tube-light’s light. The Geiger-Muller counter went mad before the granules, and just when I couldn’t be surer of its nature, I turned the light off, and the German scientist’s great discovery glowed with a dull fluorescent blue, inside the body cavity and the hollow of the torn arm segment. I gasped when I saw the glow coming through the thin, white cloth of the socks too, just as Sukomal had written.

 I turned the light back on, and slumped on the floor, my mind racing too fast for its own health. My eyes never moved from over the rent torso of the masterfully crafted doll, even as the counter went on chirping.

 The sheer fact that a German’s discovery had ended up with me was unbelievable.

A child’s handful of such grains as those, probably the only sample of some undocumented radioactive isotope on Earth, beginning at some laboratory of a scientist in far away Germany, had come to land in none but my possession!  I wondered whether the scientist had artificially produced the granules or if they were naturally occurring but then— I realised that it couldn’t be the latter, as no naturally occurring substance on Earth could be as devilishly radioactive as those things. But, if he had really produced them, how had he? How had he achieved nuclear reaction without blowing himself and the neighbourhood to smithereens? Dangerous though the substance was in that it caused horrible ends to whoever were exposed to it, it held immense potential for research and—God knows if—being put to revolutionary use.

Also, no matter even if not exposed as long as his wife and his daughter, how come had Bimal Kaka remained totally unharmed by the radiation? Maybe a cancer was already growing inside him, while he still remained oblivious to it, I thought sadly. I reached into the torn body of Hilter, pinched up a few granules and held them before my masked face, neglecting the rules about handling radioactive substances. The demon had all along been deep inside the atoms of Hilter’s innards, I thought, and now after devastating a man and his family, it was going to be used for the world’s good. Though I didn’t know how, I promised in my mind to trace back its inventor and get him his well deserved credits, posthumous nonetheless. The counter replied to my thoughts with the sound of fish frying in boiling hot oil. 

On the little pinch between my fingers a littler reflective surface caught the light of the tube-light and twinkled with two spikes of sharp white.