Lessons in Conversation

Chapter Six

A Note to the Reader

The previous five chapters are inside a hard drive somewhere; the remaining are scribbled on notebooks with yellow jackets. Maybe not think about all that and read this with a little patience, for this one is long. I mean, this is really long, my lazy ass doesn’t write like this very often. So, save this for a train journey or a boring lecture? I don’t have someone who would proofread this and point out the mistakes before I put it here, so maybe excuse some mistakes if they occur, I’m bailing myself out in advance. And if you like this, don’t tell me, share it with a loved one maybe. Summertime brings forth the hope of new beginnings, and I wish you nothing but love.

1

Padma inherited many things from her family. In fact, hers would go down as a peculiar case in the history of all known lineages, where she finds her name inscribed on all the papers, paintings and furniture, down to the very last utensil even. Part of it, like all the tales of succession, would point to the inescapable hopes of the individual that she would grow into. Her father would see to all this before he’d left this world, still sticking around the family living room now and then, though there wasn’t any remaining photograph of himself on these walls. The other reason was her brother’s unshakeable nature. Nobody in the household would realize his relinquishment of all earthly delicacies owed to a certain pang in his chest, a secret he would quietly guard throughout his heydays. He knew that he was the latest casualty of the most unnatural of maladies that had visited the household. Ever since he was fumbling over the names of everyday objects, he wished he could disown this endowment. His reign would become mostly limited to his dingy room and the kitchen, left with only a straight road and spared of fretting over navigation; his worries would be nested elsewhere. And like that, at fourteen years of age, Padma would find herself in a whirlpool, with her ailing family tugging onto her. Padma would close her eyes and pretend to sleep as she had done all those years ago on the summer afternoons. But as her mother once narrated, to live like them was like living near an ocean. She would narrate stories of her childhood with great intensity and cautious nostalghia. Sounds of a bigger splash would bring about a fear of a killer wave that might come unannounced onto the sandy patio. Much like the men of the house, her mother would have a say in her daughter’s life through her stories. But unlike them, she only intended to show her a world that had already been moulded and baked, only to crack it open in front of her so that Padma could make one of her own. Fears and worries of her kin were gospel, but it wasn’t to let her drown inside these walls. If not, it would be her repeating a generational pattern that was romanticized by everyone under this run-down establishment. At times, she scans through all the lifeless portraits drawn by her father, of faces unknown, wishing he hadn’t left them so soon in life. The grim drawings that her father had hung on these walls somehow alerted Padma not to bother with the fallacies of the mind, and she knew that the one to rescue her from all this was herself. As girlhood had to end abruptly, Padma had assumed charge of the tiny house, and ever since, she had grown deaf to the noise of the world around her. With the slow years of youth passing through her rather uneventfully, the rumble inside her heartbeat had calmed, and the family would slowly drift away from the seas of despair. The young woman in her would soon realize she had inherited more than just possessions from her family.

It was around her second year at university that she would realize how she’d want to be around classrooms forever. Her brother would help her set up a makeshift classroom inside the old shed where they’d previously housed all the cattle. Both of them had agreed to sell off all animals with a heavy heart, since they couldn’t bear the struggles of rearing these mute creatures on their own. During his time, their father used to be around them always; he’d be a different man altogether at the cow stead. Both the siblings would observe him from the windows of their rooms, that their father had a double life of his own. The sun would beam in from the rails that ran from the half walls up until the tin roofs that were placed unusually high. The little fire he created from burning all the dry leaves he had raked into a huddle would give out clouds of white smog that masked him from the rest of the world. The kids could only see a silhouette of a man humming to the tunes on this portable radio during those early Sunday mornings when even the sun was reluctant to dawn on their lives. After all these years, now the cattle reminded of him, and it was agreed upon to sell what was left of him rather than to take a gamble on this abandoned dairy business. A few more trees in the compound had to be felled and pieced together to make long tables and benches. The arrangement of it all was the most unusual, for it was like any other classroom but housed inside a zoo of sorts. Soon in the evenings, one could observe this zoo coming to life through the grills, when the children of the neighbourhood would be roaring inside, with Padma orchestrating them with a chalk stick and a blackboard. This is how she would start earning to support her household.

Padma seldom looked around the house where she grew up all her life. This house has been standing for the past century. She’d look for bits and pieces of her family through the black and white photographs in the family albums and all the dusty memorabilia stowed away inside the living room showcase. She’d look up all the toys that had aged with their masters and piles of clothes that were reduced to rags in the basement. Sitting at the balcony, she’d spent hours looking inwards rather than out, scanning rooms for previous owners and how the furniture would’ve been shuffled around. In summers, the grass would go dry, and she’d see a solitary krait wriggle across towards the old cowshed and beyond. Padma ran across trying semblances that matched the bloodline in every wedding she went to. She’d opened her ears to the music they played in the hopes of finding herself buried deep within those lines. Padma searched for love everywhere.

When she was a kid, Padma would remember one Sunday her father would check up on the old family bookshelf, only to see it come apart into bits and pieces. Initially the he’d see the frame come off entirely so that he has to keep it aside. Soon, he’d discover that the termites had been gnawing away word by word, with only the hardbound jackets remaining. The rest of which had miraculously avoided the great revels of the insect army had been left to the test of time. As the walls quenched their thirst over the years with the downpour that came thrashing it, the bookshelf would house what was left of the monsoon long after it was gone. Over the years, the pages drew weary from the moisty suffocation inside and had started to shrivel. This eternal rondo with the seasons kicking them around would soon turn each page as delicate as a butterfly. Padma remembers how much ever careful they were, pages crumble and fall off like the leaves of autumn. Her father would later realize that this would be the first, and perhaps the last time he got to read these books with his children. It was too soon for her brother to be around books, as he could barely leave his cradle. Yet he cooed as he heard his father and sister scourge the heaps of dust and mold that filled the old house with a panging smell that reminded one of lost monsoons and unspoken words of love. Her father would pick up a book, now and then and give Padma a gist of it, if his memory permitted it. Since not all these books were his contributions, he would also pick up the titles that piqued his interest and open the front page to know who owned it. At times, he would find his name there and try remembering how this book could’ve made the trip home with him. Padma, too, would hold out a book and poke her father’s shoulders with little fingers, asking her father what the book had inside. She wondered why so many of the colours in these books didn’t look as vibrant as her crayon set. Each book possibly was seemed to be dipped in the most sombre shade of that particular colour, for a reason unknown. Muddy beige instead of her favourite peach. A gloomy magenta instead of pink. Orange was orange, but that of oranges that had gotten rotten. Even yellow looked dark and dull, stricken with some sort of ailment. Most often than not, her father too would look confusedly at the covers. Bodies, faces, hands, eyes and everything that was deemed to be Anthropocene seemed to be drawn with lines of charcoal from the dying embers of a house burnt down somewhere. He would look at them with a tired face, questioning whether all the portraits etched in charcoal he ended up drawing had their origins in these frail covers.

Years later, waking up in her friend’s apartment, she would once again be instilled with a moment of wonder that was carved into the palms of her hand many years ago. A tiny world within the ten fingers that curled into a ball, inside of which a butterfly, with wings that carried all the light in the world, fluttered about like a dance of the gods. Padma felt her heart beat in rhythm with that of the yellow butterfly as she ran across the backyard carrying this ball of luminosity that she had captured for herself. It was as if what was everything deemed beautiful and everything deemed damned were to be in her control, and on that fateful afternoon, Padma had discovered what would later be described as ‘memory’. As she let go of her hands, an illumination that was brighter than a thousand sunflowers had blossomed on earth, which even had the Gods peeping down during their sacred hours of siesta. In her, they saw a thousand summers that blinded them. Padma let out a cackle that floated in like a whisper and made every listener cave in towards her. As she grew taller and much healthier than the rest of her bloodline, Padma would sustain the same cackle that alerted the heavens. But now she lay curled up on the floor, waking up to the depths of her mind, the same depths from where she had stemmed out and came out into the world as Padma. She woke up with a newfound childlike wonderment.

2

Padma had taken an autorickshaw along with her friend Jenny after a party last night. A night where she saw faces that had puzzles drawn on them, that kept shifting on their own, the more you talked to them. Like a Rubik’s cube, she’d try shuffling and throwing away each of them one by one. She’d try to reach out for Jenny’s hand, more often than most; she let out her stray hand and poke her to lead her out of crowds of people who spoke like noblemen and professional somebodies, but all of whose voices died down with each passing word. It reminded her of the lessons in conversation that she had endured as a young girl growing up. Rules that were laid down by ghosts of her ancestors, who would still annoy her with their taunting whispers. In a house that was built by them, she’d find them in every detail. Intricate patterns that would carry omens hidden deep within the beams of light across the verandahs, chiselled portals that drew in air, howling into the courtyard, floors that creaked and spoke in a primitive Morse-like code. A house that seemed to be in an eternal conversation with time, except for the present. All the descendants of Padma choked at the first words as infants. They would go on in this world of silence as they went on felling trees and building houses. Padma would break away from this generational curse in a way that would raise a few eyebrows and question the futility of the great task of indulging in a war of words, or in simpler terms, a conversation. Inside the household, when the sun had set and evening hymns had been secretly sung, it marked the hours of a charade that would go long into the night. Padma remembered that earlier, it was the radio that spoke for everyone across the different levels of the house. Padma would look into the courtyard that sat much higher than the rest of the rooms because it had the old machine hung on one of the roof’s overhangs. Depending on how the voices from the radio could traverse the other rooms, Padma could see the rooms shift their places with time. Her father’s room was never open; it lay buried below the courtyard in a pit that Padma often looked down on. Her mother would leave her room open, and it was in fact the only room that seemed to be in place. His brother, though out of his cradle now, would find a great difficulty in being indoors. His room seemed to be floating above them all, like a great white tusker floating in the skies, which, from time to time, envied a young Padma. Meanwhile, her grandmother would surround herself with flowers of the garden, away from the drama. It would take her nearly a decade, long after her grandmother had passed, to understand why she stood staring into untidy and unkept, that grew day by day beyond their compound walls.

Soon after she’d collect her first string of hundred-rupee bills, with a smile that stretched from ear to ear and a ‘thank you’ filled with utmost gratitude. Her students would in return the same and the whole ritual of imparting and accepting knowledge continues its beautiful cyclic course with no trails of any transaction or paperwork. On one of these Sundays, after her students had left, it was Padma’s mission to knock some life into hordes of sheesham and mango she discovered that had miraculously survived the vermin attacks over the years. Tied with thick blue sheets of tarpaulin that found a new life for themselves to protect these planks that were kept aside for later by somebody in the family. Usually, her father would be able to point out the places where once stood a giant mango tree, and would later tap on the almirahs, cupboards and other bits and pieces of the living trunk it once was. Padma would pick up the tinier paraphernalia that she kept finding as she would go on her occasional scourge expeditions. Not everything was hidden deep below the floorboards, lurking in the basement. Neither was it waiting for someone to ascend to the attic and discover them basking at the tiny sliver of sunlight that had slipped in through the cracks brought on by the conquering torrential downpour of yesteryears. Beside the rusting iron figurines and statuettes and medallions and other accolades that have been won over the years, mostly by the men of the house, lay tiny fishes carved out of wood. As a pastime hobby that turned into a new fixation, her grandma would start out by carving these fishes, for the reason that she saw them the most since she was the one anointed with the kitchen. Pink perches, that she only got the chance to see dead and lifeless, were brought to her so that she would dip them into a curry that brought streaks of embers once again into the household. She herself seldom ate fish, but she spent a great deal studying the pink and yellow scales and took pity of whomever who chose to put them in a curry in the first place. Now and then, she’d hoped for some of them to be magically alive beneath all that ice. But neither did they survive the ice, nor the eight hours out in the back of a truck. Adopting one of them, like the very many pariahs her husband had brought home, was in contention in her mind. She then wondered what a pink perch, who had an entire ocean to itself, would feel when limited to a glass bowl inside of which it saw nothing but its own reflection. It was better to die a slow death before they were buried with white crystals that smelt like home but burnt like cinder chips.

Soon, loud thuds and mechanical whirs from the makeshift workshop that had been set up on the exterior kitchen that now no longer had a roof, attracted a few neighbours and onlookers who were walking past the gully roads. Some of them were even taking their eyes off their kites to take a look from above, only to see a young woman dragging planks of wood, followed by a ruckus that saw her cut down the wood and hammer it all together like some puzzle. What was a Sunday, like any other, was now becoming a noisy affair that set everyone to speak in murmurs that seemed to have eluded Padma’s ears purposefully. Before the sun climbed up to its highest point by noon and looked down upon the still mostly fast asleep city, Padma was on a mission to bring together something.

“A sawing machine?” her mother gasped as if she had seen the ghost of her dead husband standing in front of her on a quiet muggy night.

“I’d like to make a bookshelf”, Padma replied. She’d go on to narrate how she planned to make good use of the planks she’d found under the locked storage of the kitchen outside.

“Buying one…would be too expensive”, Padma reaffirmed her decision to make herself a bookshelf.

Soon she was already zooming on her scooter, with the sawing machine borrowed from her uncle’s workshop tied to the passenger seat with ropes of pink and yellow.

“But Padma…”, her mother would look around her before she carefully told she was about to say

“…this house doesn’t have any books.”

Sitting on the kitchen counter, Padma would burst out into a loud giggle.

3

Far away from home, the university library was her anchor. It tied her to the campus hours after she had delivered her lectures. From time to time, Jenny would mention she could come by her apartment and take a nap before she went on a final evening round across campus grounds and then to her apartment later. Padma would refuse, because she hasn’t given in to the habit of sleeping in the afternoon, and it shall remain foreign to her way of life. These are the little habits that preserved her sanity, and all of these small rituals were the remnants from a good year or two, which she remembered through these small fractions bitten off from the past that she manages to bring back by the end of the day. She then hoarded it in her treasure chest of vivid nostalghia. Some of which had a physical nature were locked up in a grey suitcase. Another reason why Padma sought refuge, particularly in the library, was that the books reminded her of a bygone home. But somehow, she refrained from relating this sanctuary to a place that had lost love. Regardless, the library was unsentimental. She was at an age where she could clearly map out her stance in relation to everything that had a beating heart, and the rest of which did not. And when it came to the library, which had no windows, she felt more disconnected with the raging world with its violent symphony that felt like thunder funnelled into her eardrums. Yet this wasn’t a place for herself. All the shelves hosted an undying camaraderie; it witnessed beginnings and endings that started with gradual smiles and pursed lips. It overheard all the silent whispers and the suppressed laughter. Padma had outlasted everyone from her batch when she decided to enrol as a tutor. At moments, she would look across the verandahs for a familiar face, and she’d feel punches of anxiety hit her when she’d expect a familiar face to come running into her. Nobody showed up, and Padma would limit all her excitement to a passive smile towards her students when they greeted her.

As numb as she was to the air that swiftly flew across the vents, to Padma, this wasn’t the mere coldness brought on by the overtly cold air conditioning. She’d go up and down on a good day, trotting fast across the rows and coming to a sudden halt. This was her library roulette. This was less intimate than someone suggesting a book, or killing the joy of searching for a title that you set your mind on. This was a dispassionate sport, and all she cared for was the theatrics that came with all the stories of love, not the romance itself. Her sudden halts left her hands clinging onto an unknown dusty jacket, which she slowly pulled in from its wooden encampments. Later she’d go through mercurial specificities that she was unsure which would ultimately lead her to throw the book into her tote bag. The book would descend and join a dump of relics from different timelines, all of which have grown roots to the old denim cargoes, which were now sewn into this unglamorous tote bag. After a successful roulette, Padma would now start with the sacred. She always sat alone with her earplugs and her notebook on queue. She held her book with her left hand, and she grazed her cheekbones and an occasional pimple. She would run her fingers down across an inch-deep scar, which was getting more and more visible to her as she aged. From her forehead to the near hollow valley below her eyelids, a tributary ran that reminded her each day of the second life she had been presented with. But contrary to what she witnessed, it was nearly invisible to people around her, and some would only notice this mark of a second life, years later.

4

It would start as words being swallowed. Loud bursts of energy would be followed by hours of soft mumbles. Padma would be quick to snap out of it, but she’d realized unless she did something about the malady, she would eventually give in like the rest of her family. She realized by now that her brother was long beyond her grasp and was now confined to his room. He would sometimes shift to his father’s old room every other weekend, hoping the little trips would make up for his grand days of travel. Padma slowly saw her brother take up space in the house like one of Father’s domesticated bovines. She would speak in half sentences, raising her voice, wailing as she demanded he fight back. Her mother would look through the doors of the rooms; she too, barely left her bed. As for her part, she had lived her entire life fighting for love that never came for her. Finally, when she gave in to the muteness that followed, she expected everyone to follow her, but rather, she was forced to see her daughter go on to fight this painful duel. For a moment, through Padma, she felt young again. But she hoped for a miracle that would burn the last speck of wood down, with them reduced to the soot like the charcoal portraits of old book covers, so that her daughter could live a normal life. Padma, on the other hand, would not let the voices die down. She’d look into their eyes whenever they had conversations with their faces turned elsewhere. She would shout from all parts of the house, her voice tethering the empty rooms into their places. She never let them close their rooms, and if they did, she would place her head on the walls, speaking through them. Her brother and mother would, in turn keep theirs in turn, listening through the cement whirring and nodding in return. The initial years would pass with Padma barely holding the house together for most parts, but she yearned for a miracle of a different kind. This would be the case when she realizes her voice is turning gravelly and she starts spitting blood midway through her sleep.

As Padma’s life was taking a turn, far away, the designs for her future life would already be drawn. Ghor was found on a rainy day. Nobody in the society knew where he came from. He was first noticed by the guard who found him crying at the ditch that ran around the building. Since it was one of those rare events of torrents in this city, the ditch was only gradually filling up, and hence the lost pariah, rather than being drowned, was hit with a minor scare. It ran around the building, little yaps that finally reached the ears of the guard’s children, who happened to be playing cricket at the parking lot. The guard would take him out and feed him for the first couple of weeks before he was taken into custody by everyone in the building, who began to nurture the little pup. A few years in, the guard and his family would move cities, and Ghor would be left alone inside the parking lot. He was never alone, for the residents never really changed, and to him they were all his masters. But at times, having everyone for a master was the same as having no master at all. However, Ghor was a loyal friend, and the only problem that his undying loyalty posed was that nobody other than the residents could enter the building at ease, for Ghor came for them.

“It was only a week before”, warned the caretaker “, The man had a minor cut on his ankle from the bite, but nothing serious”

“I will be careful”, Padma assured with confidence.

As time passed, Padma had been going through the weight of carrying all her being, along with the precious little artefacts of her daily life, to this new city. She lived a maximal life, and with Padma came all the remnants of a life that she’d hope to build on. The size of her bags was puzzling to her neighbours and it all seemed a bit too much for an eighteen-year-old at the time. She also seemed to carry an old grey suitcase that seemed odd for not just a woman, but anyone during a time like this. But inside this great relic, Padma had stowed away all the declarations and souvenirs of an undying love that was less spoken of by her. The caretaker and his daughters had helped her move everything in, after which he had given her a gist of the society, and it was then that he was reminded of Ghor. A week would pass, and Padma would slip safely past the parking lots, and then the stairs and she’d find no sign of the furred protector. Ghor was nowhere to be seen.

5

Padma remembers a line of lampposts that went uphill with its lunar glow pulling crowds into the temple at the top. The road would be cleared during the annual festivities marking the temple’s formation, and so would the forest slip into a muted silence as the villagers barged uphill. Erstwhile, there’d only be a few making the climb upwards. However, during the ten days that led to the final full moon of the month, with which the rituals concluded, there wasn’t the question of sleep. On looking back on those nights under the globes of yellow that blinded her while she tugged onto her father’s shoulder, she would recall a certain memory that ached her little heart. Padma would watch her mother struggle behind, with her brother wailing on her shoulder. She saw her mother’s eyes glisten and her forehead furrow as she would clutch her brother close and gaze around the swarms of people who marched uphill. At breaks, she would slip into a song that would calm her brother. Her husband would pause to turn back and smile, later resuming with the ascension. Occasionally, her mother would find a fellow neighbour or distant kin who had come by for the sleepless endeavour. She would hold their hands, comforting them, and at most times urging them to visit their home as soon as they could. Looking at her from four or five steps above, across her father’s shoulder, Padma would be observing a different kind of woman, different from the one she found inside the house. This was no longer the woman she’d known all these years. The only slightest of noises this woman had ever created was when she accidentally dropped a saucer during the morning haste or when she’d bashed a few clothes on the rock a little harder while rinsing them. But here she was, leading a flock of chittering women, right at the centre, with a limping right leg that didn’t seem to slow her down at all. She was sweating as if she was kept to boil, with her body giving up at times. Padma saw her take a big heave and wave at her, and she would pace forward to catch up with them.

At the top of the hill, people would squeeze in and around the temple, waiting for their glimpse at the deity. This was when her mother, for the first time, would demonstrate how to have a conversation with God. Padma, having long known about the existence of this being in the sky, had hints of what was to be done. But she was never told what they spoke in these few seconds of silence, and they’d welcomed darkness into their sights willingly, in the hopes of being led by a divine light from elsewhere. To her, this god-seeking ritual seemed to underwhelm the birth of this new kind of woman, who now had her arms tightly held around her, as Padma was shielded from all the looming dark bodies under the half-moon sky. When she met God, Padma planned to negotiate, and this alone was her agenda. For she’d know that the little ache would only grow if she were not to shield her mother in return. Padma would discover, on that temple at the top of the hill, a certain fear that she would carry on to her death. The fear of losing her mother’s smile that invaded her being, yet it did not hurt her. She would remember this day as the day she confronted God and the day she feared for all motherhood.

The local tall tale in these parts was the ghostly apparition of a woman with a jar. A jar of puffed rice, to be precise. She was a recurring nightmare for pilgrims and hoodlums of the night alike, for she had no judgment. The woman is said to have been a resident of the village years ago, a widow whose husband had succumbed to illness, soon after their third son was born. However, she would bring up her boys against all odds, despite the rest of the kin abandoning her as she refused to remarry. But her life would take a turn when she would make the trip uphill and, on her return, would buy a sack of puffed rice. The taste of which had mesmerized her, so that she would, in turn, keep it in a big glass jar. The woman, in fear of losing this forever indulgence, would only eat a single bit, only when her resistance had broken. She’d never find the same type of puffed rice and would often refuse to eat whenever her sons offered her the ones they’d bought. Her taste was not to be adulterated. With time, her sons would go elsewhere, for they too would start families of their own, but always keeping by their mother, who they continued to visit every month. But the old lady would soon be brought on by a numbness after she had slowly nibbled down the last grain of puffed rice, and now would never leave her room. It was only when the youngest son visited after the torrid monsoons that year that he’d only find the husk of something that once had been alive. Even in death, the woman had clutched the glass jar in her bosom.

“So, why is she still here in the woods?” a little Padma would enquire.

“Well. That depends,” her mother would pause before she grins at her beloved. Her father would let out a wolfish laugh of disbelief.

“Some say her jar’s empty and she’s still searching for that puffed rice”, her mother would continue,

“But some say she’s still luring people, inviting them to take a handful”

Padma gave out a cackle as she scooped a handful of puffed rice, and she went running in circles around the table. Her mother would make them with melted jaggery smeared all over them, which she loved. To her, it was better than any plain old puffed rice in some glass jar.

6

Lalitha hums in the afternoon when everyone else in the household is fast asleep. She plays the radio at the slightest of volumes so that it does not interfere with the snores and grunts orchestrated by her husband during his midday slumber. Her kids would soon retreat to the bed, abandoning their toys in the baking sun. Lalitha would look for any remains of life that seemed to be on the move, but except for the occasional rustling of the leaves that’d put everyone to sleep, the world had retreated to a curious realm of nothingness. For her, the darkness that crept into her eyes, later the mind, and finally her body, was not tempting enough even though it rested her bones. She would tap her feet anxiously, sometimes both legs bounced as she found herself in a restless fit, but no longer bound by the prying eyes around her, waiting to critique her manners. Her fingers ran through her head, scratching off flakes of dandruff or, at times, the idea of it, leading to her scraping of parts of her scalp. Nails were an easy target for she chewed and bit on them with firm but ageing teeth that were no more stained than ever with years of sipping black tea. Sitting at the patio where the sun beamed in during some time close to the early evening tea, Lalitha was all alone under the solar lens staring out into the open. It is now that she hums an unrecognizable melody with a voice so muted and filled with dread. A dread that came with the possibility of it travelling across the walls and floorboards and reaching her family’s ears. So, she sang at a depth where only the butterflies could hear as they danced on in silence. Butterflies, which would die in a day, and her songs would have no proof of ever existing, brought her much joy. As for the butterflies she mourned in silence, but an exhilaration would come upon her when she was in bed later that night, thinking of tomorrow’s new audience.

Lalitha slept on benches joined together. She was unable to find sleep on a cot like everybody else in the house, and it was then that she stumbled upon this marvel of an idea. She dusted off the old benches that were unkept in the shed outside, and with the help of her husband, she moved them indoors. Along with a cupboard and a small table where she stacked her notebooks, was her idea of one’s own room. Only her rooms had blue-tinted glasses that allowed light to play a game whenever it made its way in. In the afternoon, the yellow walls were turned into a dull green colour of dying mosses of summer. When the windows were open, light found other ways to continue its little show. It made its way through her old orange saree on the top of the roof that has been clinging on since the last monsoon. Waves of orange caressed her face when she would be sitting all by herself in the mornings after she’d opened her windows to the world outside. Moonlight crept in from the night sky to visit her as she tried sleeping on her bespoke cot. The shivers of the nightfall seemed to have been sucked in by the old Ashwood that now is as cold as a block of ice over which Lalitha rests her body. The screeching pain that carried the muffled screams of her tissue was now frozen in a room that was turning purple. Cracks on the wooden ceiling deflected the ray of light. It was a constellation of tiny blades - dark bodies which deflected light and cast rays of shadows. It reminded her of the casuarina trees that stood tall with their needle-like leaves and swayed ever so slightly, marking the sands with straight dark lines till infinity. As she found herself right in the middle of images of her history colliding with that of now, she would, right at the apogee of consciousness would tire and plunge into her dreams. The dreams would continue from her train of thought moments before, despite jumping worlds.

Her dreams would be mostly her experiencing the extraordinary from the most ordinary of places. Lalitha waves at her brothers as they ride past her on a motorbike. She is sitting on that bench beside the gates of her old apartment she grew up as a kid. But she is no kid anymore, and she could almost feel the numbness wear off as she could feel her calves shrivel and wither. She remembered exactly what all of this was, as she stood there all by herself. It was an afternoon miles away on an island where she’d been born. She can faintly hear the sound of the ocean nearby. Lalitha remembers a straight road that ran from one end of the horizon to the other, with her house at one end and her school at the other. She lived the closest to school, hence she was the first to reach home minutes after the bell had rung. Here she’d wait, sitting on the bench, waving everyone goodbye as she saw them diminish into the blue sky. But now, years have flown past her, and she is still posted in the same bench, only to see her wave off more and more people whom she held close to her heart. Her brothers, who left her life when they boarded that train, followed by her parents, whom she lost soon after she was wedded off, her two close friends, whom she hasn’t seen since high school ended and so on. Sitting on the decaying piece of furniture, gripping the underside of her leg, she was starting to realize that the pain was beyond her right leg. A tiredness brought on by a monsoon fever seemed to have suddenly entered her ageing bodice, as tears rolled down her cheeks. She watched the string of vehicles move towards the bright blue horizon, which had a bright yellow band that streaked across it. A yellow bow that was now tearing open the skies, making her skin turn into a rotting pale green. It was then she saw her husband riding an autorickshaw, waving her on. Confused, she looks over to the passenger’s seats, but finds them empty. From the back of the rickshaw, she hears a familiar laughter that she has heard all her life. Padma and Pavan would be laughing as they’d be seen waving at her, sitting on the trunk of the small vehicle. Lalitha had collapsed with this, as she wailed, begging them to stop, but she heard the cries of her children’s laughter blur into time. She called upon the heavens for a sign, only for the skies turn purple and her waking up sobbing with a thumping fever.

7

Padma’s eyes were channelled into a stream of white light that shot across her eyeballs, burning her irises, and in turn making them glow like amber. She now saw what her ancestors saw. Her eyes were set on wooden racks on the living room walls, some above and some below. All the different shelves, some bulky and wooden, whereas others were lighter and metallic. And finally, the coffee table was spread out on the floor. All of which housed books and more books. Padma noticed the air vents on top of the walls, the same portals through which her mother spoke to her, in muffled songs of infinite joy and ingrained sobs of a perennial grief. She took a glimpse of the balcony and saw a kite flutter on the electric lines, with the light reflecting from its golden foil to her face. It was then she’d started taking heavy puffs like her mother on her purple nights, loud heaves in and out, as if she were blowing sparks to light up a fire. This was the cycle of life, and this was a memory from a lifetime before, and though this was the same little kid who fumbled for words in front of God to gamble her life for her mother’s. She would go beyond the manmade rules of letters and symbols to proclaim that life was living again through her, and she was just a vessel. For she knew she’d been standing in the same rooms many times before, and not just this lifetime alone. As time had taken her so far into the future, Padma had to pause once again to remember the relics that her father introduced her to. Jenny’s apartment smelled like a book in its entirety, waiting to be left astray, and be fed to the seasons, to be consumed and finally bow out into ashes on a burning heap. Padma was to remember this day when she had made the rediscovery of a shared history buried in her mind. She was fixated on the solitary milkweed butterfly, which seemed to be taking a nap on one of Jenny’s roses.

Jenny always looked upon her friend with an awe of respect, mixed with a tinge of disappointment. Respect for all the little quirks and moments of genius that made her an alien. But she feared Padma was an avalanche of personalities, and this led to an indifference to a dictum to live by. She knew her dear friend had been through a life that she couldn’t possibly fathom the histories of. But she wasn’t to go easy on a woman who plainly seems to run away from something, though she is virtually chased by none. Jennifer hoped and prayed that Padma was indeed chased by phantoms from a world indecipherable to her. For she was trying to blame something other than Padma for once.

She watches on as Padma tries to mouth different words to Ghor, hoping the canine will pick up in due time. She hugs him by the neck as she whispers to his ear.

“Amma”, she points to herself and keeps repeating to Ghor.

The quadruped kept panting at his master as she signalled with her hands.

His eyes were fixated on Padma’s hands, which were now more than just two as she was engrossed in a theatrical charade with her telling him what to do and what not to do. And at the end of it all, she would throw herself onto the ground as him, and he would poke his wet nose on her cheek as a mark of approval.

“I see you”, Ghor replies through a grunt.

On their way out, Padma would take a flower from the vase on the coffee table and slide it between Ghor’s belt. Jennifer would roll her eyes when her flowers were being robbed in front of her, but she’d then think how it was Padma who brought the flowers in the first place. She’d also gifted her that vase on a random day when she’d come from the Sunday market. Jennifer would watch Padma and Ghor slowly move downstairs and then onto their ride. A ritual she has been observing since the first day she saw a three-year-old Padma visit her new home years ago. She was reminded of that day, how, of all the places they could play around, they would hide beneath the kitchen sink and play with whatever they could find. Despite the memory still clinging to her mind, Jennifer could not recollect any of the dialogue that day; in fact, she wondered if they spoke at all. From then on, Padma and her family would visit them from time to time as their fathers worked together, and both of them would honour their friendship for it was not a choice, but a case of inheritance. The two would find themselves in each other’s rooms when the adults would go on about everything under the sun. They’d share moments of silence, with restrained smiles that would go on until both of them would be big enough to find places for themselves elsewhere. Now, in a city thousands of miles away from their previous encounters, both of them would find each other in their own worlds, away from all the noise that was hugging their hushed arguments. The two women often read books and smoked cigarettes in each other's living rooms in rotation. They would have conversations on the kitchen counter while they urged each other to learn how to cook so they would find liberation from instant noodles and half-cooked porottas. Padma would buy saplings and seeds whenever she could find them during her adventures in the city and would always buy a pair. Jenny, on the other hand, would hang a new painting on Padma’s living room wall as her own wall had no place left.

Padma would bring home Ghor soon, much to Jennifer’s horror at first, as she did not find an affinity with pets or with animals in general. She found the idea of another soul in her living room to be a nightmare, but Ghor was an exception. Ghor would be in turn be their guard, who would even start growling at a harmless pigeon who’d drop by the balcony for a drink. It was after one of the university parties, where Padma and Jenny had drunk a little more than their bodies could handle. Having not slept all day, and after dancing in circles on a garba night, alcohol was the last thing they wanted. After which, Jenny would lead Padma across the building by the jungle-ly back-quarters of the campus, leading to a clearing where she normally smoked her afternoon joints. Padma now figured out where Jenny went missing during the afternoons. Both of them would share a smoke and soon find the footing to take a rickshaw home. Padma would, however, take her helmet home despite leaving her scooter at the campus and since her arms were now turned to jelly, she opted to wear it while she sat on the passenger’s seat, giving the driver directions home. She would not remember all the blur that the traffic lights had brought onto her eyes, despite her trying to wipe them away incessantly with her fisted palms throughout the trip. The next moment she opened her eyes, she saw a dog huffing and puffing, and with both of them holding each other’s arms. Padma could hear the sound of the autorickshaw receding into the darkness that surrounded her. For now, she was left with the notorious beast, smiling ever so brightly towards her. Padma woke up all confused with the events of the rest of the night, where she had made a new unlikely friend in Ghor. Stories of him that ran around all the ears around her seemed not to tally at all. She opened her door ever so slightly to check on him, as she had tucked him in on her welcome mat the night before.

Standing in the midst of the morning mist that crept through the French windows that they forgot to close, Padma woke up with a familiar numbness that would momentarily cease the pain that was splitting her head into two. The little garland of jasmine buds that Jenny wore last night like a bun on her curls had blossomed by nightfall, with Jenny still deep in slumber, her head buried in her pillow. Padma too felt something had blossomed in her, but she was unclear how to put forth the idea of such fantasies and delusions of the ordinary into a meaningful sentence. The fear of those secret thoughts being left passive by whoever listened to her made her cling to them as long as she could. She would remember how her mother would honour the same decrees that they all shared, through her careful whispers on the telephone. She remembered how her mother, now whom she heard more than ever would speak words that lasted a lifetime, though it came from a receiver. Padma would mirror these times of euphoria that had come floating into Jenny’s apartment with the streaks of yellow butterflies years ago in another rose garden far away. Like her brother, who began associating whatever memory he held onto with the colours of this world, Padma had begun to see the world as it was. Like all her family, she paused for a minute, which saw an entire lineage had relived, and finally it was her time to find love again. Padma rushed to her tote bag, hoping to find that letter buried in all the paraphernalia that Jenny judged as alien. She was hoping to read this for later, and she couldn’t have picked a better morning. She reads scamper back and forth through the letter, going through the words repeatedly, but as if it were the first time each time. After which, finally, she kneels and rests her bodice on the cold floor. Padma promises to write back as she rests for now. Padma promises herself to keep this letter safe from withering, in her secret grey suitcase.

Hey, thank you for reading. That was like a whole chapter. We live in a strange time in history, and I’m trying to respond in a humane way to the world around me through my work. Though I have found no great answer to what all this holds in relation to the grand designs laid out by whoever or whatever, I find writing easy again. And I no longer find a futility in writing about people I’ve never met, or places I’ve never been to. Stories are just stories. And oh, here’s a playlist for you.