The year had stretched and yawned, and was up for a revolution. Everything was a little damp everywhere. It seemed like every sound coming to me was passing through a glass curtain. The earth stretched on and stopped as a fine green line in the distance, where the grey would take over. Heavy clouds, akin to the clothes left to dry in vast fields, hung in the sky, impenetrable.
I had been eating everything, and it had still not been enough. Hunger isn’t hunger when it is portioned. I can only eat what I have. I don’t have much.
Telephone lines all across the road, with poles punctuating their length, got wet in the rain. The cars flashed past us on the sharp curve, reflecting as shiny droplets on the wires going in the opposite direction.
Every day I would look forward to getting out of the auto at that curve and sitting on a wonky wooden bench with my life right next to me. I’d save a cigarette for this. There would be rain, background chatter that meant nothing, and songs that we should have left behind in 2012, but we carried with us, making it ours, whenever a lyric would arrive dressed as a self-portrait.
Most nights were spent in a haze, but the kind that was woven out of patches of all the comfortable blankets you left back home. Once in a while, we would sit on rocks, by the rocky craters that got filled up come July every year. The moon would glimmer in it, the croaking frogs making the water vibrate long after the wind had stopped. On one such night, I felt like a ghost was following us, but I couldn’t be sure. I tried to not let it get to me, I walked faster, clutched the bike seat a little tighter, closed in a bit more. How do you situate something otherworldly in your vocabulary? We have managed to do so with love, but even then, sensation and words fail the emotions that grow all over you like moss, when distance, of any kind, in love prevails.
There would be things to do, piling on top of each other, melting into each other, until a statue of responsibilities started taking shape in the corner of my room. It looked a lot like the ghost that had been in hindsight. I stopped indulging in substances for a bit, to clear out my vision. I started wearing kohl. I took out the photo card my mother had given me of her god, lion headed, red eyes, protecting those who are true of heart, those who are devoted.
Come to think about it, I was devoted, just to not something tangible – another way in which my mother and I converged.
All attempts at clarity of vision failed. Each night I would sleep the same sleep, wake in the same rushed routine, work the same work, until I stepped out of the auto and was doing the same things of the kinds that I liked. The same chai, the same cigarette, it festered under the roof of greed, I wanted more, more, more.
The ghost seemed to not leave me. I did not try reasoning with it. The office elevator had the capacity of 23 people, yet when I entered alone, I felt like I was the last person in. When I looked up from work, the hum of the office’s skeleton would sound diseased. The coffee kept having a film of something on top, I could look in it and see myself clearly, but from years ago, when I was unaware of what all was coming my way.
I started believing in signs and symbols. I knew something evil was looming over me. It is one thing to doubt, one thing to believe, but it is something else to Know. It is so personal, you cannot even convey it in its entirety to somebody who is Most Personal to you. Just like love. You keep quiet, and you start hunting for physical indications of the haunting.
We were fifteen days into July when my cat fell ill. After Noorie, I was convinced that the ghost had come for Heera. I kept insisting we had to take action, but my neurotic tendencies have left people a little tired of me, they tend to take me as lightly as a sunny day’s prediction here July onwards.
I started connecting the dots in my head. July of last year is when I got them. Heera must have been hit by the affliction of missing her. He was heartbroken. He took off from the house one day. We looked for him in the school playground, behind the construction site, inside people’s houses. After half of the night had passed, or at least half my age, we found him, stuck in a pile of wood – akin to a funeral pyre. Nobody got it. I saw it clearly.
He grew weaker by the day. He started looking different. It worried me. We rushed him to the vet, who assured us that it was nothing. Why do we trust each other when there is an educated tag behind the opinion?
By the time our bedsheets were changed, he was well again. He was jumping around. He started sleeping on top of me again, just like I would sleep on my aunt when I was afflicted with chicken pox and had an ounce of divine within me.
Days went by. I thought the curse had been lifted. I placed the protective photo back in my wallet from the inside of the book I was reading. I thought I could stretch my limbs a little.
Only I fell into the moonlit pool, face first. The frogs jumped out in surprise.
I could still see things, which seemed to move nobody else. The tree that bats would circle by the big stage was cut down. I could hear some sort of wailing during the daytime. The army of bamboo by the grove creaked and bent a little lower than usual. The pond, shallow and nameless, refused to show up in photos; it was green, but all I could see was a light. Dogs kept crying at night – an omen of death – I kept informing my mother about it.
I believed I only had to hold on until the month was over. I braced myself for whatever was to come.
A fight broke out right outside in the street. Somebody’s head was split open, but the intensity was unclear from the terrace. Three days or so later, when August lined up by the glass curtain, no sound, only a heavy presence. Bags were packed, trains left the station, one of them carrying the shield I was clinging on to. I was overcome with a fever that stemmed from a nightmare I had – somebody was after me.
On the last day of July death occurred in the neighbourhood. A young woman, younger than me, but already a mother to two. Suicide. Coming back from work, I skipped the wooden bench, and was instead met with a glass coffin; the wailing closer to my house now. It went on for two days.
I cleaned my house to no music, only sounds that were tethered to the fine line between human and beyond. When I got to the unwanted statue, it felt like touching water. It looked like light. I dreamt myself, dragging it like a dead body, to the pond, and dumping it in. Dreams have no sounds, but they have sensations. My fever broke.
journaled 8 pages today. i think another fever will come and break with much more intensity soon.
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