The Boxes

She is trying to find a pair of scissors in the kitchen. Where did she keep them? The dim tubelight, the chaos of half opened boxes. The man, her husband, is in the other room, waiting for her to get him the scissors. He wants to open the box that contains his hisaab diaries, a collection of ledgers where he records everyday transactions.

Someone told him to write down his expenses and income every day. Why? Because all successful businessmen are supposed to. It took him a few weeks to find some sense in this hobby. And now, he is obsessed.

Every day, he writes down the debts that have mounted. There is a madness to it. The numbers never go down. Only up. It is these rising numbers that eventually sum up to this moment.

The wife finally finds the scissors and passes them to him. Tearing through the tape, he finds his diaries. Looking at the familiar numbers he gets overwhelmed all over again. He manages to lie down on a dusty bed with half opened boxes scattered all around.

Meanwhile, the wife has a few tasks she has assigned to herself: setting up the house, cooking, and providing tea to visitors.

There have been a lot of visitors lately, arriving sombrely to extend their support. The couple lost their apartment to a bank seizure. He failed to pay some serious dues over the last months.

The family has been under debt for as long as she can remember. Ambition can be blinding. And crippling. For years, the husband and wife kept thinking it would pass – that one day, when the planets aligned in their favour, they would be able to repay the enormous debt he owed. Two decades later, what the couple never thought would happen, has happened. And now, they have had to find an apartment.

The man was defeated, but his ego wasn’t. It fumed.

Over the days that followed, the man hurled curses and the wife silenced her screams. One blamed destiny, the other questioned it. Relatives visited to offer their condolences. Shame felt more cruel than death itself.

It was too soon to hope but deep inside, she prayed that her son would reclaim the loss. But he was too young. And too arrogant to be present. He didn’t even come to help them move.

She did what she could do best. She tried to keep the house spotless. The walls were scuffed, the storage space was exposed with torn, ill-sized curtains. So she dusted every day.

They had so many things – she didn’t know what to do with them all. Her son’s annual magazine from his school days, books that he never read, notebooks brimming with possibilities, redundant electronic items, a bag of wires … and many more such items that one kept in the hope that they might be useful in times of need.

The man is oblivious to her efforts to make this new apartment look appealing. His absence defines his presence. He numbs himself with cheap vodka. They argue over cause and effect, vodka and the days. Which is which.

He thinks the consequences of his actions are limited to himself. He lost the house. His wife got another to live in. But the loss was solely his, he thinks. She thinks her individual steps will solve the problem someday. Praying, letting the maid go and doing all the work by herself, more praying and appeasing all the planets that had their hands in this misfortune.

She was mending a torn curtain when the doorbell rang. Two men confirmed the address from her. She froze. It had not been long since the day when white-collared men appeared at the door and asked for her husband. He arrived as soon as he could when she called him, and they took her phone to inform them that police officials were on the way. From her window she saw men putting auction posters on the walls of her house. By the time he arrived, the walls were covered with the claims of the bank.

These men who arrive at the rented apartment are not white-collared visitors. She asks what they need. They say they’ve come to deliver a package – a mini-truck idles downstairs, stacked with cartons.

Her husband has given them this address. But why would he? There isn’t an inch of space in this cramped two-bedroom to hold inventory.

She calls her husband. He says he is on the way and will explain.

The men start unloading the boxes inside the living room. There is no other place to keep these cartons. She pulls the couch away from the wall and gets the boxes stacked behind it, hoping the space will be enough. But the boxes keep coming in until the entire space in the living room is filled with boxes.

The husband arrives. He explains – a business he invested in, didn’t work out. All the items were to be returned to the manufacturers in three to four days.

But they were never sent anywhere. They became heftier as days passed. Dust settled on the boxes. The smell of cartons pervaded the apartment. The air in the room became heavier.

Space became a luxury to her.

On occasion, she visited her neighbours and come back with observations about their houses. Calling her son, she would talk about the kitchen cabinets, the spacious bedrooms, the automatic appliances as if these would solve her problems. She lost weight. It was as if her body mass was sucked into the boxes.

To the husband who was hardly home, it didn’t matter. He was never there when guests came to visit. Pretending to be superior to them, he tried to escape embarrassment. In addition, he was tired of his wife’s description of the houses she visited, or the things they possessed, or the things the neighbour’s daughter in the US possessed. She never asked for those things for herself. Never. Even when her son offered to buy a new washing machine. Not too fancy. Just a modest washing machine. She would say a stern NO. There was never an explanation beyond this rejection. It was as if she did not allow herself to desire things.

The husband went about his day, came back home in the evening for a meal. Then went to hang out with his old friends. Circumstances had tested his friendships, and everyone failed. But the inertia of small towns doesn’t let people get completely estranged. He needed his friends. He conveyed his suicidal thoughts to them, rather than to the family. Because in the family, he had to project strength, however hollow it seemed. With friends, he drank, and talked.

She didn’t understand it. She wanted him to come to her, to confide in her. He thought he was protecting her. Decades in a marriage doesn’t guarantee communication.

She tried arranging the boxes in different permutations to make the room look appealing: some boxes beneath the bed, some behind the bed, some behind the couch. But nothing improved the room.

To not be able to do something that you wanted to get done – to see that debts are not decreasing; to write the same numbers every day; to realise your act of writing expenses down doesn’t change anything; to feel the world sings songs of the fruit of hard work while you feel helpless under the grip of destiny – that can eat at you

She is told to practice gratitude. She is told that god gives to those who are thankful. So she begs thankfully. Every day, the first thing in the morning, she sits up straight in bed and thanks the higher power with open hands. Trying to be clever with god – thankful but with open hands. Is she trying to confuse him?

You are clear on who your god is, when god agrees with you. When HE doesn’t, you aren’t really sure who it is you are praying to. She prays to the planets, to Shiva, to Ganesha, to Lakshmi, to Nanak. And then some more. She bows down in front of soothsayers, she attends weekly satsangs that preach meditation. The reward of meditation she thinks is financial bounty. She meets healers to understand what is wrong with the energy in her family. Why her son is not finding success. Why the husband has struggled for years. Because it doesn’t make sense, this suffering. As if suffering follows the logic of the world she lives in.

Her son might say that it’s just one part of life that is wrong with them. That they are in good health at least. She doesn’t understand that concept. She doesn’t say anything more. But she is not thankful for good health. She wants to be thankful for good money. If only god allowed one to choose what to be happy about. She is thankful for the apartment, despite the boxes. Or she tries to be. There is a little space in her head where she entertains the thought that things could be much worse.

Over time, the boxes begin to occupy more than just the physical space. They start living and breathing inside her too. She hears sounds. Maybe of the world inside the boxes. Maybe they contain all the possibilities of the life that she could lead. Every box filled with what ifs. What if her brother had not slapped her when she was singing a film song at the age of twelve. She believes it was that slap that threw her off from becoming a singer. What if she had not married this guy? Deep inside she knows there lives this thought. The marriage was approved of by her father. What if she was given the right to choose. That’s the slap she avoided.

It wasn’t like he chose her either. This was equality in a twisted way. Neither of them chose each other. The love of his life married someone else for financial security. He was meant to be alone but his mother was on her deathbed and needed someone to attend to her. So he told his sisters, ‘Find me a girl. I will marry her.’ And with that, both of them sealed their fate. She wonders which box contains the right choice.

One night when her husband came home sober, she asked him to tell her when the boxes would go. He didn’t have any answer and he didn’t have the energy to give false hope. So he said plainly that he had a lot to figure out in addition to getting rid of the boxes. She knew then that she would have to get used to them.

She wondered if they were multiplying or the flat was getting smaller. They seem to be occupying more space. She felt suffocated. As if the boxes were using up the air in the room. In the dead of the night when she was fast asleep, she heard a rustling sound. An insectile rasp that stopped as soon as she noticed it. The thought froze her. She now had the image in her head – a cockroach.

She switched on the lights of the room with the boxes. Her husband snored in the bedroom. His snores made it difficult to track the roach. She stood still looking around. And then she saw it getting inside a box. A big brown roach. She picked up one of her sandals and opened the box. Took out the packets inside one by one until she saw the floor of the carton. No sign of a roach. It must have slipped to one of the other boxes.

Her husband stirred at the crinkling of plastic packets. ‘What are you up to?’ he asked, eyes still half-closed.

She paused before answering – a beat in which she considered pretending she hadn’t heard him but in the stark quiet of the room, that excuse wouldn’t hold.

She told him about the cockroach which was lost while opening the boxes.

He warns her that the boxes would be difficult to get rid of if she unpacked them. Her obsession cools down at the thought of never getting rid of the boxes.

She is back on the bed, shutting her eyes and ears. But her mind lingers on her husband’s words. ‘Difficult to get rid of’.

She hears a gnawing sound. A dry scritching sound. She gets up again. Her steps alert the rat. It’s definitely a rat, trying to eat through the cardboard. She doesn’t want to leave it till the morning. This had to be solved now.

She drags one box after another across the floor, slices them open, peers inside – always a second too late. Whatever she’s chasing slips past her each time.

At last, only one box remains.

She freezes. She knows it’s inside this one. She can feel it the faint vibration, the gnawing from within.

Should she just throw the whole thing out?

Or does she need to see it – to confirm it’s real?

What if it springs at her the moment she lifts the flap?

The gnawing sounds multiply. Are there more rats than one? She opens to find that box is empty except in the corner. It’s not a rat, but a rodent-like creature with frantic, hungry eyes.

And then she sees. It’s her. Curled into herself, chewing through cardboard.

The sound surrounds her now. She looks up – the walls are no longer walls. Corrugated brown rises on all sides. The room has become a giant cardboard box, closing in.

Kuldeep Badlanii is a writer and documentary film maker based in Mumbai.