ISSUE 45

I am singing in the dark, something that I have been doing a lot lately. It is that time of the day (or night, I am not sure anymore) when I have completed all the necessary tasks for survival; eating and defecating, exercises for my body, exercises for my mind in remembering and forgetting.

Now, in my leisure time, I choose objects around me and make up stories about them. I pick characters from magazines. I build a city of folks from articles and advertisements; women wearing bright shades of lip paint and men in crisp suits and children sporting smiles as their snug bums sit in comfortable diapers. They come to life in my head, find love and jobs, build homes and communities. They are happy most of the time except when they are bored. Then I must then make them indulge in bad behaviour like lying, stealing, and vandalising. If I am feeling particularly wild, I make them attend orgies.

I wish I had been part of an orgy. No doubt it would have been alarming at first, but now I will never know what it feels like to be knotted up with other naked people and their skin. Now, it is too late. Now, I am alone in this house with these rooms. I cannot even remember how long I have been here.

The house has two rooms, a kitchen, and a living area. I dare you to open the rooms – you’d only get crushed by an avalanche of stuff.

In room one, you will find all my old furniture, dismantled into little pieces like the body parts of big plastic dolls that used to stand at shop windows: my wooden bed, a dressing table in which I once kept everything I thought I needed to make me look and feel better, a dining table where I ate cereal and dosas, a sofa that I sat on at the end of long days and read till I fell asleep, a television with a cracked screen. I broke them all up and pushed them into this room.

The second room has smaller things like my clothes, shoes, bags, ornamental teacups, a guitar, books, a phone, a laptop and paintings I had bought over the years from street artists. Here, there is slightly more order in the arrangement. In the early days, I used to wander in here and sit for hours but then, the flood would come, the images of past with people and laughter and smells. I was working hard every day to remember only what was necessary to survive but when nostalgia broke the wall, it hurt. So I tossed in a new set of mothballs and stopped going in.

There is a precise moment when I knew I had to quit the world. I have committed to recall this moment every day to avoid the temptation of going back.

For a long time, I had felt nauseous every time I woke up, a dreadful feeling of having to endure one more day. It began like a pinching in my gut and swelled all the way to my chest. People moved around me, saying and doing things, living like drones. Their charades pulled me in too.

The doctors hurled their diagnoses at me – depression, stress, anxiety. Some told me I needed to get busier, some said that I needed to get married and procreate and this vacuous feeling was just my womb demanding to be filled. They prescribed pills and I took them religiously. But I knew they wouldn’t help and that none of these chemical concoctions would work.

Then came the penguins. Some important person in the city had decided that the zoo needed new and exotic creatures. I took my niece and we stood outside the enclosure amidst people munching on popcorn and cotton candy. The penguins emerged from a small, darkened entrance and stood in a daze, staring at the people outside the glass, feeling the blast of the freezer, looking around at the blocks of ice arranged into a makeshift habitat. I recognised their blank and wary expressions, dulled by the absence of wildness, doomed to remain protected and fed for the rest of their years. They knew what lay ahead and did not want to belong.

Something inside me cracked then. You would not believe it, but I swear I heard it, like a twig snapping in a quiet forest, like my insides were giving up on all the mechanisms that held me together.

It was too much to bear; to function as an individual in a social setting, the onslaught of human failures and reflexive denial, the trees bearing nests and bees getting sliced into logs, the oceans filling up with waste, the people fighting to keep peace. I wanted to shrink the world and reduce the possibilities of disappointments. I wished I had been around before humankind became civilised and had lived with naked abandon in caves and jungles.

Nothing could be done anymore and so I resigned. I locked my door, disconnected the phone, and sealed the windows with thick plastic sheets. When my sister brought the fire department to break the door down, I told them quietly that I had a razor ready and it was either my world or death. They gave up and left and no one has troubled me since.

I got to know myself. Nothing can prepare you for the arduous task of walking in on what you really are. There were days I fought with the many selves within me. One craved companionship, one wanted to sit in a restaurant, one wanted to feel a man’s lips on her neck. They revolted in their own ways, and I had to silence them with movement. I spun like a crazed dervish to disorient them.

Food was a problem till I worked out how to grow vegetables from the I had. I made my own soil with mud and compost and turned the kitchen into a garden. I started off with herbs and green leaves and then moved on to tomatoes, beans, turnips. Mushrooms were my favourite but one time, the spores nearly destroyed my lungs, and I was sick for a week. So now I am careful about growing them. I cooked whatever I grew with rice and then when I ran out of grain, my body adapted to the produce available, starving for days at times as long as there was enough water. My tongue has forgotten the flavours I had once claimed to live for – schezwan, truffle, garam masala. Now it only enjoys the sensation of being used.

I haven’t bathed in a while. I like the way I smell, my scent makes me feel wild, like a primal creature whose only desire is survival. My skin is caked with a layer of dead cells that I sometimes scrape and watch fall into flakes. I used to devote a lot of time to the way I looked but now, my body is a vessel for itself.

Once I figured out a system, I started to get bored. I spent time wiping the surfaces around me with a cloth. I brewed saffron and nutmeg to help me sleep. Sometimes I peeled aside a patch of the plastic sheet and peeped out to stare at what I’d left behind; people walking and talking, the colours of the street, the sky which looked like painted wallpaper, the metal bins. I watch people with the wisdom of surrender, knowing that I have done what they could never do. They are all just ‘once upon a time’ folks who follow paths mapped out by evolution. They studied, grew up, encountered reality in phases, enough to keep the shock in check, like wading into the water slowly to acclimatise yourself to the temperature. Do they know they can choose to leave it all behind?

Once I saw a pretty girl with her hair in thick braids. She was walking steadily, like she had someone to meet. I stared at her till she disappeared and filed away her features in my mind to use in my stories.

My mother used to braid my hair. She would sit patiently behind me while I watched cartoons on the television, and tug at my head to make sleek and tight loops. But now, I cannot remember her face. This is good, I am doing well by forgetting the important tethers. The distance between my past and present is growing. My only duties are to function and stave off boredom.

I don’t know if it is the saffron that I have been putting in my system for so long or biological instinct, but I have been having urges. All day long, I feel a moistness between my legs. I feel warm and dizzy, and my own touch surprises me. I dream of lovers and satisfaction achieved together but wake up saddened to discover that it is just me, lying alone on a rug. My fingers offer momentary relief, and pleasure bursts in me. I am all breath and body, trying new things. The crescendos bring light and I curl into myself, wondering why I never had the courage to make these demands to the people in the other world. Would better sex have made me stay?

Sometimes I think about the ‘could have beens’. I wonder how the me out there would be if she’d gone on living beyond the door. Would she have travelled to Curacao? Would she still be working at the same job? Would there be love and cats in her life? Would she finally have learnt how to change a tire? Would she be with someone who made life tolerable?

Each moment holds so many trajectories. I had perfectly ripened tomatoes to eat today because I planted them three weeks ago when the soil felt right. We are the sum of what we choose … but what happens to the sum of the alternatives?

I wonder … What if I had never seen the penguins?

There has been a substantial increase in the number of visiting bugs. I think they are cockroaches. I hear them scurrying around. At first, they stuck to the kitchen but now they have got comfortable roaming all about the house. They’re big, brown, and shiny. Sometimes I stay so still that they go right past me. If I reached out, I could squash them, and this power shames me.

I name the biggest one Napoleon. He has long antennae and a calculated approach in his movements. He is very aware of me and at times, I can sense that he is observing me. On one of the afternoons when I was playing Ludo with myself, he stayed a few feet away from me the entire time, and the minute I shut the board, he darted off.

When the cockroaches disappear, it is quiet again and I wait to hear other sounds; footsteps of people from above and outside the door, the wind beating against the window, distant rumbles of jets, drilling from construction sites nearby, vehicles honking. I pretend to be irritated by these disturbances but really, I like them.

The stories of the magazine people have become more fun. A house got robbed, an acrobat from a traveling circus fell in love with a married teacher and they eloped, an archaeologist found a bone in the cemetery – neither human nor of any known animal.

I teach myself how to make animals and things out of paper from the bundles I saved from silverfish. It brings me joy when I glide my thumbs along the edges to make creases at the exact angles required. I like watching the folds of squares and triangles come together to make cranes, boats, foxes, frogs. Time is here, with me, at my disposal. No deadlines, expiry dates, age lines, calendars. I can fold and dream.

The pain started like a delicate pinching in my jaw. If I held my face at a particular angle, there was some relief, so I managed it like this, twisting my head left and right like I was trying to catch a radio signal. Then for a while it went away but returned fiercer. It was as if hordes of red ants were clawing inside my mouth…

I cannot eat or sleep. All I can think of is the pain, sucking into the roots of my teeth.

Finally, after days of contemplating, I take the pair of pliers from the toolbox and remove the culprit tooth. Deciding is the hardest part but once you have, it’s easy-peasy. Rusted metal grazes soft pink flesh and blood gushes into my mouth. I swirl it like mouthwash and spit it out. Red, so red it is.

The pain doesn’t go away and instead mutates into an all-consuming agony. A few days later, infection. My entire face hurts as cheeks swell up and drool spills from the corners of my mouth. Fevers come and go. I have visions of my body being boiled, of being in a cave and foraging, of running down a street with a kite in my hands.

I no longer have the energy to purify water and I drink it straight from the tap. Hunger evades me and the periodic rumbling in my belly comes and goes, a physical demand that never reaches my palate. I do not need food anymore.

Lying on the hard floor, I see beautiful scenes, not of the magazine people but from the other side of the door. Penguins are free and floating, forests filled with ancient species that I had thought to be extinct, people sitting around fireplaces without their phones and laughing together. I am a child again, then a woman. I have a family and we live together on a mountain where we watch the sunset every day,

My ribs are sticking out like a xylophone beneath my skin and I stroke them all day, trying to make music. I move my arms and legs slowly, but they hurt, and I know I am losing the battle. The cockroaches are out. Napoleon is leading them fearlessly and they are conquering terrain.

I crawl towards the nearest window and reach up for the pieces of tape holding down the sheet that cover it. I feel like a thread pulling a bulldozer. The sound of the tearing plastic brings me joy. When enough of the lower half of the tape strips have been removed, I hold the edges with both hands and pull with all my might. The sheet comes undone and falls into a rolled heap.

I sit on a pile of clothes and look out. It is night. In the darkness I see streetlights, cars, pavements, litter, cyclists with reflective headgear. A boy is walking around with bags of food in his hands and I wave to him. He looks down at his phone and enters another building. There is no moon in the sky.

I think about my sister. Why didn’t she come again for me? Why didn’t she try harder to open the door, just a slab of wood separating us? I think about the penguins and my niece asking me if she could touch them.

The hunger has grown into a beast ravaging the mind now that there is little left in the body. Colours swirl before me. Panic ebbs and flows. I hear voices – mine and others. I am floating through scenes from another life. Is that me, in the park, sleeping under the tree? What happened to this library? When did I dance with these friends? Did I really see Mona Lisa smiling in front of me? Which of these came from the past and which from the stories – I cannot tell.

It is getting quieter, time is slipping into darkness.

I need to sing.