The Girl Who Died Next Door - 9

Almost blue.

(Story so far: A new neighbour moves into the vacant apartment next door to Kavya, a television professional. His name is Shayan and he's an artist. The apartment had been abandoned after Suvarna, the teenaged daughter of the family that lived there, committed suicide. Shayan becomes obsessed with Suvarna's spectre and paints her day and night, allowing her to age and live through his canvas. His obsession comes in the way of Kavya's strange fascination for him, and keeps their story from ever becoming something more than a neighbourly friendship.)

I saw Shayan so little these days that it almost felt like I'd gone back to my neighbour-less days. I was almost blue, because I wasn't sure that it mattered whether I saw him or not. Chet Baker's Almost Blue seemed the perfect choice for the moment. As the mellow notes caressed my weary, melancholy soul, everything seemed clearer; all those times Suvarna had averted her eyes from me, in fear I had thought. But suddenly, I was reminded of a woman in the train who bore burn scars all over her neck and arms. Her eyes had held the same furtive, frightened flutter. One might have perceived it as hostility but fear was what it really was and perhaps, a call for help. Was Suvarna's seeming avoidance of my company a convoluted cry for help? Were the rumours about the servant true after all? And if so, perhaps she was having her revenge on me for not coming to her aid; for not hearing her silent, veiled pleas. Perhaps that was why she had chosen to monopolise Shayan's canvas - both physical and mental. That canvas seemed to have become her playground; a sorry substitute for life. Sorry? Really? My mind whispered. It was right of course. There was nothing sorry about the medium Suvarna had chosen. Within his palate, Shayan possessed every fathomable colour; every hue known to mankind. Did life offer such a wide choice? It does, but the tragedy is that much of this choice is out of reach. If our lives were paintings, there would be a dominant spectrum of colours in each but none would boast of every colour in the kaleidoscope. None would be able to say - "I've seen it all." Perhaps, living within Shayan's brush-strokes was not such a bad idea after all. Idly, I contemplated haunting Shayan when I died.

***

The doorbell rang one Saturday morning, while I was deep in alcohol-induced slumber. In my dream, I missed a step but before I could plunge headlong into nothingness, my eyes cracked open. For a moment, I thought I was suspended in mid-air in a land of no-return. Sometimes I think I had a narrow escape from being marooned in that world of no sensations except heart-stopping dread. My head spun when I stood upright. It seemed that the phantom of last night's inebriation was still determined to haunt me. I decided not to fight it. With the honey-brown phantom's arms wrapped snugly around my neck, I walked unsteadily to my door. When the clouds cleared, quite unlike the stubborn monsoon sky, I saw a dishevelled Shayan shuffling on my doorstep. His eyes simply wouldn't focus on one single spot and I wondered if he could have possibly downed more whiskey than I had the previous night. And then he surprised me by reaching for my hands. "Kavya, you have to help me. She's going to die and I have no idea how to stop it! I simply cannot stop painting." I watched his features contort with pain and desperation and contemplated upon the warmth in his fingers. I like people whose hands are warm and heavy with something pleasant. People with cold, clammy hands make me want to jerk away with a combination of distrust and repulsion. "Show me," I said, and followed Shayan into his apartment. Our hands were still entwined and I had to hold my breath so stop his warmth from seeping into me.

His apartment looked even worse for wear than the last time I had set foot in it. And yet, the blasts of colour that emanated from the portraits carefully stacked all over, somehow made the rooms beautiful. And I hated them for it. I hated the fact that every stroke resonated with careful deliberation and loving perfection. I despised the softness in her features and the dreamy wistfulness in her eyes. I wanted to shut my eyes against the realisation that that was exactly what Suvarna might have looked like, had she made it past the turbulence of her youth. "I wished I'd known," I found myself saying. "Known what?" "That the servant was molesting her. I'm sure of it. She tried to tell me, many times. Not in so many words but in several other ways. I wish I hadn't been blind." If I had bothered to listen, Suvarna would still be alive, Shayan would have never been a part of my memories and he would still be smiling and sane. He would still be himself and not this raging mass of despair that now stood over me, refusing to let go of the comfort of my skin. I jerked my hand away and for a moment, enjoyed the hurt that crossed his face. Of course, that was immediately followed by regret. That seemed to define most of my life - impulse followed by regret. "Where's the last painting?" I asked and followed the motion of Shayan's pointing fingers. There she was, Suvarna, in her twilight days, her beautiful features wizened by the curvature of years and her milky glow dimmed by the shadows of approaching oblivion. "I don't want her to die," Shayan whispered, the thickness in his voice like a coil around my bones, pressing until they threatened to snap. I made the mistake of speaking my mind. "Isn't it a good thing? You'll be free, at last." Bony hands were gripping me by the hands and enraged eyes threatened to set my face aflame. "Free?" Shayan said, the low decibel of his voice pooling at the bottom of my heart like inky fear. "These have been the best days of my life, Kavya. I have never felt so absolutely absorbed in my life and my art as I have felt these last few days. With every wrinkle and silvery strand that I paint, I find my soul shrinking. I fear there may be nothing of me left when she's gone." With a start, I realised that my eyes were moist. This was unexpected. It struck me that Shayan had spoken of Suvarna as though she were his soulmate. "Why don't you ask her what to do then?" I said coolly, wrenched his fingers off my reddening arm and managed to walk out of his apartment without shivering once.

I spent the next hour staring vacantly into the morning, from my perch on the balcony, resisting the strange moisture in my eyes.

(To be continued)

In a Bombay train.

 

Courtesy: Jorge Lascar (Licensed under Creative Commons)

 Loud, cackling women

Erratic. Not in sync

With the rhythm of the

Train’s wheels

Or the drums beating in my ear

Or the fine whirr of the words

Rising out of my book.

Harsh, raucous speech

Abuzz with tawdry, uncontained excitement

Mutating, no longer human.

A foreign tongue

Of a foreign species.

The drums beat harder

The words rise swifter

Their music interspersed with

A voice I know so intimately

A voice I could name in my sleep

The railway announcer’s voice!

Youthful, splendidly even-paced

Like she had been born for this purpose.

For answering that existential question

Of where we are headed

And where we will eventually go.

If my life is indeed a train journey

And I don’t get to choose

Who travels in my coach,

I’d at least like to choose

The colour of my train.

A woman peers at my book

A little longer than necessary.

Frightened, I wonder

If she can see the words rising up as well

If she might want to seize them

Before they inhabit my mind.

Drums have now become

The mellow ripple of a piano

A beggar sings of love, of unrequited passion

The cackling has quietened

Human again

But not yet sublime.

And here we are, at yet another station

New coach members

New scents of aspiration, desperation

Vacant bliss and noisy frustration

I must permit them

The familiarity of my skin

Of the vibrations of my thoughts

Which have now become confused,

Misdirected mass

Of cackles, croons and cloistered cacophony

Rainbow of sounds

Bouquet of annoyance.

There I see men clad in orange overalls

Weathered skin darkened

By the passage of time.

Peering into unexplained mysteries of the railway tracks

And if I peered along with them,

Would my skin become weather-worn and shadowy too?

Buildings struggle to wriggle out of their foundations

And coconut palms strain to kiss the clouds

As we pass

But not a single nod of greeting

Not a whit of acknowledgement

We’re strangers – them and me

But we see each other everyday.

We’re strangers – the world and I

Though we breathe each other everyday.

Valley. Flatten. Fools.

Pic: Ankita Shreeram

Valley.

The swirling mist

Joined hands with sedate, grey clouds

To hide the valley from our eager eyes

Our thirsty eyes

Our city-weary eyes

Maybe if we’d all dived in

With our city-weakened bodies

And primitive desires

We might have made a hole

In the singing mist

And our laden souls

To allow,

A little joy inside.

Flatten.

Touch and go. That's all it was

But I still believe

At a meandering turn,

I might find you

Waiting.

Holding a smile in your hands

And an embrace in your eyes.

Time will flatten

Like a deck of cards falling

And it’ll be like

We never stopped singing together.

Fools

By the door of her stone house, she stood

Unsmiling, watching, sedate

Her sari was a dull maroon

And her children were a happy brown

Their merriness and her silence

Both blissful, yet different

So different

From the unrest in my heart.

They played with sticks and stones

And she, with paddy and hot coals

We’re fools, you and I

We play with people and thoughts instead

And we feel the needles poke in bed

Our sleep as murky as wakefulness

Guilt seeping between different levels of consciousness

Dissonance causing cracks in the armour

We so proudly wear.

I want to be naked

Mentally.

Soulfully.

Bodily.

Because You will cloak me

The one I seek

The one I see in the dreams I don’t remember

And walk with in the walks my selves don’t return from

You will show me

That we were never meant to hide.

Alone. Thirst. Economy.

Pic: Ankita Shreeram

Alone.

Can’t a word stand alone

Before a fullstop?

The way I do

Before the finality of your words.

I teeter

But pride holds me aloft

Your cowardice hems me in

Holding me in place

Unable to move

In any direction but away.

Thirst

We sipped from each other’s minds

Careful not to drink too much

At a single swallow

So the pool would remain deep

Forever.

What I tasted intoxicated me

And I wanted more.

I wanted

To feed my insatiable thirst.

Economy

Careful, lest you say too much

Care too much

Let your love too loose

Orphaned

Unsettled

Aimless

You will disintegrate

Bit by bit

Pieces cast into

Dark, uncaring nothingness

And you will yearn

For the softest echo

For a sign

That you are being heard.