Why We Don’t Talk

Are we what they call the hi-bye types? Because this is it, I guess. Can’t believe you are not someone I used to know and doesn’t look like we’ll bump into each other again. This pebble in my hand … wish I could send it skimming over the pond near your childhood home. Where you played all by yourself because your mother died when you were two and your grandmother was busy in the kitchen.

You spoke to imaginary friends – perhaps you sensed me even then, though I was born ten years after you – and were excited by most things they said in return. You shared your secrets with the pillow, into which you sobbed when your father did not come to school the day you won a prize for topping your class. You soon lost interest in academics but achieved success in what was just a hobby – keeping fit. Your fear of death was there from the beginning and, like most people, you knew you’d die someday. So you ran marathons and swam and joined karate classes and opened a gym of your own. You are thin, yes, but jam-packed with muscles. A wiry body and a ready laugh – men called you ‘son’ and women called you home when no one was around.

Everything about you became tight-fitting – jeans, wallet, days, nights, your whole solar system. You worked, you played, backpacked through Leh, picked up a guitar and followed G minor.

I was born by then, and living a doll’s life. My parents had tried to conceive for years; I happened on their third IVF, which mutilated my dad’s bank balance and my mother’s sense of humour. They overreacted to me from the moment I was made.

I never wore a frock twice. Feeding me and entertaining me was all my mother ever wanted to do. I was watched keenly for any talent, and every picture I sketched and clay monstrosity I sculpted will live on in my mother’s showcase forever. That is how she will grow old – before she forgets her bearings and existence, before dementia takes its toll and turns her memories into papier-mâché – staring unblinkingly at all my early arts and crafts.

The first milk tooth I lost is set amidst diamonds in my father’s ring, shifted from finger to finger as he swelled over the years. He says the happiness of having me has given him a potbelly all over. Rubies cup my milk teeth in marmalade chandeliers mother wears in her ears on grand occasions.

Remember when you, with a heart beating fast, agreed to meet Sharu’s mom alone? That was the first time you touched a woman and you wanted to lick her all over although you couldn’t stop calling her Aunty. She was, after all, Sharada’s mom, and when you visited her home, Aunty made tea for you until the day she rested, deliberately, her foot on yours, and you met her eye in a new way.

You were useless in the back of her SUV, though your body – the body you believe in so implicitly to obey commands and do what you want it to do and be what you want it to be – went away all on its own, surprising you with its mind, will and total lack of morals. It will take you a while to go back to that excitement, after me I mean, but life’s little madnesses will get you again…

Verse will approach at night

Urgent, in a mood to fight

You must pretend to give in

To paranormal bits of djinn 

How proud you were when you bought your first car, this after having fought so hard with your dad for the scooter he gave you when you grumbled about bus rides being tedious.

‘Buy it with your own money,’ he had snapped, and fury frizzed your hair.

You got this second-hand Santro two weeks ago. You lived in it, dreamt of it at night and baby-talked to it.

When you met me that first time, we did not look at each other. We are a circumspect pair, cosy in our own orbits, and perhaps schoolgirls are not eye-catching enough for you. But the second time our eyes did meet. You screeched your car to a halt and glared at me.

I had glared right back, as daddy calls me Shehzadi and I can do no wrong.

Then you made a sound, a disgusted sound, which rarely (rarely!) comes my way, and reversed and drove away. I stared at the back of your car, happy with its dent and dust. You didn’t deserve any better, I thought smugly and went my way, never to think of you again until now. Until this minute.

I had finished talking to a friend, come to the road and then charged into the bus stop again to tell her something I’d just remembered. My feet slowly backed into the road and, because my eyes were still on her, I saw my friend’s face change from sweetness to slow and sticky panic. It filled her face to the full, this panic, but before the meaning of such dread could communicate itself to me, I began to arc.

I saw my shoes walk the sky. Something warm splashed on my face and turned cold in an instant. A question fluted within, vanished. My fingers were the last thing I felt; they crawled out like flies from under me and clawed at mud. One hand clenched around this pebble while the other fluttered once, twice, and then lay down quietly.

Now our hands are touching for the first time. Your hand is red with my blood. A flat and opaque blood, still clumsy from travelling my veins, too surprised to clot. You know, even as you scream, that I am no more, that my breath, my being, my life and laugh are all things of the past. You remember yesterday. You remember making that disgusted face and feel more ashamed of that than this. For this is senseless and will not make sense to you or anybody else for a long while.

My parents will arrive before the police or medical personnel as they live nearby, within walking distance. Before that my friend will reach my home shaking, and ring my doorbell with all the suppressed fear I saw on her face, and finish none of her sentences. She will need sleeping pills well into adulthood. But she will also seduce many men with her post-me vulnerability. I am the anecdote of her lifetime, that which blows up her eyes, hares off her heartbeat and trembles her alphabets. Two marriages later she will forget me somewhat.

My parents, waiting to have lunch with me, will leave the tv on to come here, dishevelled and disbelieving, almost amused in their utter contempt of such a happening and a hundred percent confident of my immortality, and sit to my left and right and interfere with anybody who wants to move my body. Love will make such a nuisance of them. People who make you suffer from a unique arrogance – they presume they will go before you.

And they will ask me over and over again, ‘Why are you lying here on the road, beta?’

My bed at home has roseate ruffles and a Barbie theme my mother saw in a foreign magazine. When the stretcher shifts me, they will demand small heart-shaped cushions for my head and ankles. They will say loudly that that is how I sleep, always. My mother will ask dad to run home and get the cushions, but he won’t be able to take his eyes off my face and from then on, quite simply, their moments of fact and fiction will never coincide. Barred entry into the ambulance, they will shove violently at those around and finally be sedated.

Surrounded by policemen and the family-friend lawyer your father has rushed to the spot, you stand at a distance, still unspeaking, still not guilty, still dazed about the why and where and who of me.