The Boring Girl

For Aleena

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Tonight, my beloved friend walks out of her hostel in the middle of the night. She doesn’t take her wallet. She doesn’t take her phone. It’s irresponsible and reckless, but she does have her hair, textured, thick, curly-wild, wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.

I watch her walk out of the building, her hands unconsciously grazing the salt-blanched palimpsest walls until they turn into the door. Now her hands are on the copper knob. She feels suffocated, but she knows her breath will return once she opens it.

A therapist would have described her as deregulated, dissociated, seized by a personal tempest. A manic burst of depressive symptoms gathered into a cyclone lodged in her lung. The force of it pushed her out of her room.

My friend does not self-diagnose, but she knows (with absolute clarity) that her bones would turn to ash if she walked too quickly, too harshly. So she whispers a prayer to her dead maternal grandmother, asking for a short-term spell, one that allows her legs to find a pace that matches the tide of the ocean: not too fast, not too slow, just a rhythm that won’t let her body dissipate into salted breeze.

Once, years ago, a woman walked out into the night in this same town by the sea. She had convinced herself to walk into the ocean. When she was nine, she was plagued by a relentless nausea no doctor could cure. This invisible suffering built an inarticulate grief that stuck to the roof of her mouth and eroded any joy she tried to breathe in.

She had walked with conviction toward the ocean, hurrying past colonnaded courtyards and rows of shuttered shops. All she wanted was for the pain to go. Her body felt as if it was on fire – and she sensed that the sea would extinguish it instantly. She was already imagining what the water gushing into her lungs would feel like, surely they would hurt less than the nausea she had carried for fifteen years. Then there would be oceanic absolution, a narcotic quiet, a weightless place to rest.

Perhaps she had not paced herself. Perhaps it was panic disguised as conviction that led her there. Because she did not reach the sea. The sky ate her up. As she walked, parts of her floated away until her body became one last, deep breath.

At least that’s how the story goes. Women who walk into the night have a habit of vanishing. Reports rarely clarify whether it was the sky or a man that took them. The universe itself seems unsettled by women who attempt authorship. Before she chooses the sea, the universe removes it; through what we, the lowly and literal, call the paranormal.

My friend knows the story well; she loves the sky but does not want to disappear into it. Remembering the woman who walked toward the sea, she stalls, meanders without direction. She is in no mood to provoke the insecurities of the universe. She moves toward a corner where a half-wall of a crumbled building offers company. She rests her lower back against the concrete and looks from side to side, slowly, conspicuously, as if searching for the best angle for a side selfie. (But if you remember, she did not bring her phone.)

My friend is not an animal lover like me, so she doesn’t notice the curled-up black dog sleeping a hundred metres away. What she doesn’t know is that her grandmother has whispered something into the dog’s ear, and in that exact moment, my friend looks up at the sky and finds a moment of relief. The dog wakes up and looks directly at her, taking her presence as a sign. Dogs are minor gods of thresholds, so he realises, in the same instant, that she stands between two worlds.

In one world, her body is rooted in this reality we share. In the other, she is about to crumble into gravel; the same sharp splinters of earth the dog will rub against in the morning to soothe his flea bites.

The dog looks up at the stars and casts a spell with a sniffle of his nose, the one her grandmother whispered into his ear. The spell ensures she stays fully in this reality, at least until dawn. After that, it is up to her. No god, no grandmother can help her forever. When you ask for help, you receive it – but like everything we receive, it is temporary.

‘Hello.’

The voice is neither gentle nor commanding. It reaches her ears before her eyes catch up to the man standing in front of her.

His body flickers, poorly rendered by night; she can almost see through his white shirt and blotchy brown legs, through his bones, back into the road behind him. But he is real, not a ghost, this much she knows. His hair is thick and matted with salt from the air, and his eyes glow, catching the moonlight.

Her nervous system debates whether to flood her body with adrenaline, choke her chest with terror, turn her palms into rubber … but it has not decided. She stands motionless, inches from him, the night silent except for the resting slant of tiled roofs. No one else is around. (Except the dog she still hasn’t noticed.)

He pulls a lock of her hair playfully. ‘Come. Do you want to go for a drink?’

The muscle memory of her tongue answers first. ‘I don’t drink,’ she replies calmly, shrugging his hand away.

Then her mouth opens again, inexplicably.

‘But we can go for some tea.’

The man, who can’t be more than twenty-seven, raises his hands to the stars. He thanks the heavens above and acknowledges to himself that devotion to his secret god always bears sweet fruit. You might assume he has bad intentions. We are not sure. Perhaps he simply wants someone, anyone, to interrupt his somnambulistic nights.

Perhaps he thought my friend, graceful and beautiful as she was, could become his new girlfriend. Or perhaps, as most of us might suspect, he wants to take her home.

But it could also be that he made a bet with his younger sister six years ago – that he would one day find a girl who looked just like her in a town far south, with a slippery name. Once they arrived, he would present my friend and proclaim, ‘I told you I’d find her. Now pay up.’

Maybe his sister still owes him seven bananas, three mangoes, and six Dairy Milk bars.

We don’t know. But I know they are going for tea.

My friend, whose pituitary glands are still frozen, scoping the scene, unable to decide whether to flee or freeze, uses the muscle memory of her grandmother’s legs and keeps walking with the calmness of the trees around them. He takes her to a shack; a song is playing, but I don’t understand Malayalam and cannot tell you what it is. It might have been a Hindi song I knew, but I can’t hear this part of the story clearly. All I see now is my friend at the table marked with cigarette ash and a curry stain, with cheap paper napkins folded into perfect triangles. The seat is high, her legs dangle an inch over the ground.

She sips her juice and nods her head to the beat of the man’s speech. We can’t really hear what he is saying, but his voice is soothing. The waiter saunters to the table, looks at the man and nods, like he knows him from an endless night in the past.

‘You’re boring.’ He says it with sincere earnestness not to wound, but as if stating an objective fact. My friend, as vast as she is in her laughter and knowing, feels as limp as a French fry abandoned under a flickering tube light.

‘I’m sorry. I’m just feeling very tired,’ she says, her voice dragging, listless, aware of how foolish she sounds.

She prays for fear. She prays for an adrenaline rush, the safety of her reptilian brain, encoded with ancestral escapes. She begs for muscle memory to surface and propel her home. But her body betrays her; she feels nothing but the dead weight of her hair and the hum of numbness clinging to her skin. When she smiles at something he says, it feels as if her little brother has drawn on the smile with a marker.

See? You really are boring. But I got you to smile. If you stopped being so boring, I could tell you so many stories of this town.’

My friend knows all the stories. The myths, the histories, they have thickened inside her since childhood, sedimented into bone. But she doesn’t want to wound him. She says nothing sharp, though her ego flinches. After all, she has always been the storyteller.

And then something begins to stir.

She is suddenly furious with herself, for this numbness, this un-becoming. Furious that this man, with his half-lit bravado, cannot see the labyrinth of expressions she can summon, the reckless laughter she is capable of, the scintillating retorts she could have flung into his drifting monologue. She could have told him a story he would carry for years.

My beloved friend stands up as if plucked upright by invisible hands. It is not flee. It is not freeze. It is conviction, though most people cannot tell the difference. She herself is unsure. Perhaps she is tricking herself. Perhaps she is about to run and be consumed by the night.

Or perhaps she is walking toward the version of herself that survives.

Very few people can hold two realities at once. The shadow dimension is not cruel, but it is persuasive. It tempts you with the narcissistic urge to rehearse your own catastrophe.

The universe circles like a patient vulture, waiting for you to fall fully into the other world — where sorrow becomes prophecy, where grief becomes inevitability. But if you refuse to collapse, if you stand between worlds, the universe grows uneasy.

It cannot tolerate a woman who can hold two realities without flinching.

There is another version in which the man calls a friend to the shack, eager to parade the ‘boring girl’ he found at midnight. But that version dissolves when I reach for it. I was half-asleep, seven years later, when my beloved friend told me this story as we lay face to face. Her voice softened into something close to a lullaby.

I cannot swear to what truly happened. I remember only the bones. The rest I have dressed in language. She offered no grand moral, no cinematic ending. But in my telling, right before I drift to sleep, she whispers something to herself.

No one survives the threshold forever. You can’t hover between sea and sky for too long.

At some point, you have to let one of them hold you.