It’s been a while since you last heard from her. A couple of years, maybe? More or less, if you had to guess. You’ve lost sense of time lately, and most attempts at timelines by you can’t be placed much higher on a scale of accuracy than throwing darts at a minuscule target blindfolded. Yes, that’s a good word to describe yourself now. Running amok like a headless chicken.
In the larger, grander scheme of things, you often stop to ask yourself whether you are toeing the line of dramatics or not. Should you be picked up and chucked onto a stage, the spotlight shining on your frumpy little face? At the end of the day, do you grant yourself the leeway to mourn something you never had? To ache for someone who was never yours in the first place? This misplaced sense of belonging and owning has embedded itself so deep into your brain that it takes an enormous, almost superhuman strength to pick up the pieces of privilege you have strewn all over the ground and walk away. And there you go again, calling this superhuman. You really cannot get over yourself, can you?
You are your own broken record. And in the reflection of the vinyl that spins endlessly, you see her face.
***
“Baba, come here for a second, na.”
You sigh, deeply. Perhaps too deeply - you hope she didn’t hear you. That would invariably call for another round of whining and complaining. It might just descend into a screaming match this time, and, dear god, a sigh checked and suppressed, and a walk from the drawing room to the kitchen is the least you can give to avoid that. You trudge along to her.
“Taste this. Needs more salt?” she says, holding a steel spoon up to your lips.
“Just a pinch more, bachhe. And let it simmer for a minute longer. The thicker the soup, the more flavour it packs.”
“I don’t know which Tarla Dalal cookbook you’ve snagged that from, baba, but I don’t think a lot of chefs will agree with you on that,” she says, rolling her eyes at you, and prying the spoon out of your fingers. However, she turns the gas down to its lowest and covers the dekchi with its glass lid. She listens to you often, but not without giving you a hard time about it first.
No one tells you that living with a daughter in her early twenties is perhaps more challenging than the feared teenage years. And especially if the relationship you shared with your daughter was…well, special. A stubborn, impertinent, bullhead of a child is something you can deal with. But a girl you feel too much for, on too many levels?
You live outside of society’s firm boundaries of right or wrong, acceptance, and rejection. You disgust yourself. You subconsciously shift from an amble to a nervous trot when you pass mirrors. What are you if not a monster? Sometimes, you have the urge to get rid of everything you own. To clean, to purify – through material possessions. You find it difficult to believe in an intangible superpower, but it is becoming increasingly easy to put all your faith into other things – objects, buildings, books. People. A person. This binds you in ways that you do not realize for very long until suddenly you do. You trip over yourself trying to detach, to be alone, to pull yourself away from everything you have associated with love and comfort and safety.
Because your love is dirty and tarnished. It will never see the light of day, and a love left in darkness rots until it stinks. Rancid.
***
And so it has been a while since you last saw her, and since then, you’ve tried to let her go. You’ve tried to forget and move on, and more often than not, you’ve succeeded quite fair. Yet the old ways are always waiting, and in your game of hide and seek, as you get better, they often devise startling ways to find and tag you. On some days, it creeps up on you slowly, like dew, like oas. And on some days, it hits you bang slap like thunder and lightning, and everything frightening.
All it took was one message and one phone call to turn everything upside down.
“Baba, I miss you. I miss us. Can I come home?”
***
On the first day that she comes to your house, she asks you why you've covered the walls of your room with old newspaper. You say it's pre-emptive for renovation - something you've been putting off for months now. She sits at the edge of your dining table chair and nibbles at the oranges and sweet tea that you have brought for her. The ticking of a clock on the wall cuts cleanly through your consciousness and sounds like torture against your unshielded brain.
You look at her, and she looks at her hands, inspects them, picks at her cuticles, and rubs a spot on her palm in a continuous subconscious circle. Then, softly, the sound of the azaan wafts in from the verandah whose gate you have left ajar. The shadows elongate, contract, and glide slowly across the floor, shrouding and then freeing the mosaic-like shadows of elderly people walking heavily down the street.
The sun is setting, and the sky is an unimpressively dull curtain of grey. The colour of suffocating clay, the insides of a pressure cooker on the verge of explosion.
The time has come, you think to yourself.
You look at her, and, unsurprisingly, find her gaze already fixed on yours. You speak without words. Bodies speak, saying they should go.
Again, you think, the time has come.
A door creaks. The bottom of a calendar hanging on a wall claps against the chipping paint. The pedestal fan whirs softly in the corner. It is the house telling you to close your eyes.
No one moves.
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