Stranger in the night
I am trying to sort through the casual sounding remarks he has made all evening, compliments littered nonchalantly like bread crumbs, while tapping my feet to the rhythm of the silence. We are outside in the balcony, and he towers over me. He is looking waywardly towards the lights on the other building that have almost all gone out. Thinking, I don’t know what.
I hadn’t left my bed in days when I received his message at 10 am, two days ago. It was what finally prompted me to sit up straight. I opened and reopened the message several times before switching off my phone and sinking back into my old sheets. Boredom or apathy; who could tell ? I let the orchids on my window sill die. Day followed day and before I knew it, the whole year had gone by, while I carefully cultivated and nurtured the wrong kind of habits.
I still don’t know what he’s doing here; why he has re-entered my life like a changing season, giving me only 3 hours to climb out of the castle of inaction I had cocooned myself in. Lazy in my words, lazy in my writing.
The last time I saw him was when I had decided to surprise my brother for his graduation. On a whim, I had bought the cheapest ticket possible, in the seater class and 24 hours later, with the sun on my tail and eyes lined dark with kohl, I knocked gingerly on room 35.
The first half of that train ride had been horrible — three hours after the train pulled out of Hyderabad, my period hit me in the gut with a force, like it hadn’t since I was 13. I lost awareness of my surroundings for a little while and saw red. Huddled against the window corner of my shared berth, I clung to my knees and cursed myself for not listening to Ma every time she reminded me to always carry pads. Desperation overcame my stubborn-ness to never ask for help, and I looked around and shuffled over to the aunty I found most approachable. With a glistening brow, I whispered to her, if she had a pad. She looked at me with pity, and shook her head. I retreated to my corner and prepared for the worst. Maybe I could get off at the next station, find a hotel for the day, get back my bearings. It seemed like a ridiculous option though; there were not a lot of big cities along the eastern coast railway I was travelling on. Maybe I would have to scour every woman on the train; somebody had to have a pad. The woman I had spoken to earlier shoved her phone into my hands and told me that her son was coming to pick her up at Vishakapatnam, which was the next stop, arriving in 4 hours, and if I told him on Whatsapp what I wanted, he would get it. I stayed up until 4 am when the train finally pulled over and relief flooded me when I was handed the Whispers Ultra I had asked for. That woman could not have known how much her easy generosity affected me that day. A calm finally settled over me, the rhythmic movement of the train, putting me into a trance, the desolate glances of the sea lifting my sprit. Wrapped in a white dupatta, I felt like a monk.
It was Arya who had opened the door. A low whistle.
‘Stranger in the night, and who are you ?’
‘Siddharth ? … I’m his sister..’, I had mumbled.
“Well fuck, how did you get here?” my brother called out from somewhere at the back. He looked at me, mildly irritated, just the way he had done when we went to school together and I had turned up at his classroom because Ma had mistakenly exchanged our lunch boxes and I hated the jam sandwich in mine. Like he had looked at me when he was constantly told to look after me when we were growing up. Like something he had to protect, albeit, begrudgingly. That same look. Ma claimed I got ‘lost’ often as a child, by which she meant I wandered off with people she believed I had no reason to be friends with. And so she had set him on my back, always one eye trained on his younger sister when all he wanted to do was be careless with his own friends. He had fallen so easily into the role Ma assigned to him, and reinforced every Rakhi — that of the protector and so, I let him have it. I became a compulsive liar; I didn’t tell him of the accidents I had or of the trucks with ‘HORN OK PLEASE’ written at the back that I got into.
Arya just looked amused. He mouthed ‘good luck with that’, winked and sauntered away, into the night. That was my first meeting with Arya; Arya, the editor of the college magazine; Arya, the nihilist; Arya who was going to join JNU and become a social reformer. Hadn’t we all just fallen in love with him, or all the stories we had heard of him.
Over the years, I had thought of sending him long, anonymous letters. Telling him of all the strangers I kept bumping into, wild and stumbling, with only a pocketful of loose change. And that maybe it was because of the sheer vulnerability that I projected that they treated me the way they did. If anyone else heard of my encounters, they would think I was making them up, but not him. He would have told me that what looked like sheer stupidity to everyone else — ‘I mean how could anyone be so careless’ — was really me shedding the defences I kept up otherwise. He would have told me he saw in me an instinct for self-preservation, but more, a willingness to allow its breaching.
Do you feel it too ? This growing, this gnawing in the pit of your stomach that growls at you, that transforms your anger into something manageable, something embarrassing even. Who put out your flame ? — I want to ask him; to cross this arm’s length distance we have so diligently maintained. But mostly this distance between what I want to say to him and what I don’t. I part my wine stained lips and blow circles of smoke towards him instead. Maybe the wind will carry what I have swallowed — something about learning to let go and what doesn’t come back was probably never yours. That’s what they say, anyway.
‘You know my first cigarette ever was with you?’ Some secrets I let slip; this I tell him trying to catch the moon’s reflection in his eyes. He doesn’t say anything for 2 seconds. Three.
A part of me wishes we were back in his musty hostel room, paint peeling off the walls. When he had stepped out for a smoke and tilted his head towards me, I had leaned across, plucked enough confidence out of that humid august evening and taken the cigarette from him; that first long drag making my mind swoon, like a baby in a cradle.
Raised eyebrow. Surprised or mocking; who could tell?
‘How old are you?’ Don’t tell him, I had said. It would be too much for my darling brother to learn of my non-conformational side.
That’s how it was. A secret thick between us, that swelled and enveloped, and gave way to more secrets, whisperings. In that dying summer, fuelled by the stack of beer cans in the fridge he illegally kept in his room, he had told me of winter bazaars in old Calcutta. He was really a poet at heart, he had said. When he recited shayari in Urdu, I learnt of the humour and grace, the depth he could have. I think, I talk, I hug. Not necessarily in that order. His playfulness made me think of the first gray clouds, that promised rain, respite from the heat. His deep voice had even begun to sound like thunder, or maybe it was just the intoxication. I am really a snake, I had replied. I leave behind trails of my shedding skin. We kept at it, the dugalbandi. You know, the autowallah who dropped me here — when I asked him to take me somewhere in Kharagpur, he said — Madam. There are only two places to see in this village — the place you’re coming from and the place you’re going to. Arya had thrown his head back and laughed when I told him this, and I noticed the metallic cap, glinting silver at the back of his mouth. I had told him how that word — madam — irked me, made me sound fancier, more graceful than I was. Elitist, I said, with some contempt.
Meera ..
There’s a sweetness to the way he says my name now, that wasn’t there before; like he means it, like he’s holding it a little longer, trying to invoke the mystic whose name is my inheritance.
He thinks I am cynical and sentimental in equal amounts, and he can’t make up his mind about which one is worse. He also thinks we have what is called a ‘generation gap’, he smirks as he says it. He argues quietly, calmly telling me that I have become consumed with ideas of self sufficiency. It makes me nervous to have rages in front of him. I want to ask him if he’s become friends with the devil now; if he sells his soul to him everyday. I don’t though. He would probably laugh and say something about having outgrown his idealistic ways and about how sentimentality is a weapon of the weak. I fear he’s going to go on and say something to make me feel silly and banal; perhaps the only person whose charm I’ve given over this power to. And I don’t say anything, also because in part he might be right — I do want to tell him sentimental things — like I have always wanted to. Of how I find a particular crescendo and fall of a really popular song, one that he’d never admit to listen to, strangely moving, bringing me close to tears.
I think I should go to bed, he says. Old man gets tired of all the running, and then he chuckles. The pause I take before finally getting up is pregnant with everything I have left unsaid this evening, but I’m not sure if he notices.
I’ll wake you up before I leave.
I can’t tell if he means to say goodbye before he leaves, disappearing for a few more years or if he’s just trying to be helpful. Everything he has said these 2 days has been like this, riddled with double entendre.
Maybe you should try slack lining, I want to call out before I smile and close the door to my restless dreams. Of course he won’t write to me, or call.
He is only smoke, I tell myself; the tender shard of an incomplete dream.
© Snigdha Dagar 2019
