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Much of my writing has flown inwards at this point. I don’t know what to do about it… Yes, I understand, I should try to force through it, but the ideas, they lull me to sleep, and I am so alone these days… 

Recounting that last conversation with Romi on our love stained bed, I let my hand slide. Everything that was deemed risky between him and I was justified by the fact that it would help with the writing. But the writing, we would say and laugh, knowing none of it was a laughing matter. I wish he had listened to me and taken me once and for all when I offered, and then disappeared from my life. Why couldn’t people do things to me the way I wanted them to be done to me? But oh god, that would be such a boring life; I would know the script, I’d be the captain of my own soul. 

I let the music play itself, until a song comes on that I had discovered when I was merely fourteen. That song stayed while all romance left, or I left it all behind. Today it feels like sweltering tongs picking at my coal heart, and carrying it in the rain to let it cool down. It doesn’t help.

My body’s rhythm matches the pulsating rain as I walk around my house like a ghost who is scared of the body it inhabits. I do not turn around when I sense a presence, I feel a jolt awaken me to see that the crouching figure is merely a chair with my clothes on it. Clothes that I got down from the terrace a week ago but haven’t gotten around to putting away.

Everything is sentimental to me, and I fear I am losing the war against time. The future seems smoke, coming out of my own pyre.

The silver bangles I wear on the daily are losing their shine. I wear them when I do the dishes, when I take my evening bath. I wear them when I wash my clothes and scrub the floors. The jingling sound weaves itself into my memory web, reminding me of my mother and her glass bangles, clinking somewhere miles away, years ago. I would wake up to go to school to that sound emanating faintly from the kitchen. The only reason I don’t wear glass bangles is because they break easily, even when there’s nobody in this house to break them. 

My earlobes are getting bigger, because of years of jewelry weighing them down, so I wear nothing mostly. I feel ugly because of that, and then I have to remind myself there is nobody in this house and it is just me. I can’t be ugly when I am alone but also, I can’t be ugly when I am alone. I think of my great grandmother with earlobes so big she could stuff a bidi in each hole, relishing them after lunch. 

My father visited me a while ago. He got me a small perfume and my mother’s saree I had asked her to send. He likes his alone time, so we did not even eat dinner together, a fantasy I had designed in my head so that I could dread it. I felt spurned, jilted, relieved. I sat in his hotel room, heard him talk and then took an auto back to my place. He would never tell me anything, so I took him fruits and cash, and placed it awkwardly on the table right as I was about to leave. This was the first time he had visited me anywhere after I had left home in March 2022. This was the longest we had been alone. He saw the place where I worked, he scouted the neighborhood where I live. He did not ask me how I was. 

I wore the saree a couple weeks ago, and walked around, looking like a  girl trying to be a woman. The bindi, the bangles, the anklet, the earrings - an entire routine I replicated from my Ma, making it my own, a proof that I am grown now. 

The rain has settled into a soft, blurry sound. My hand has traversed all across my flesh until the peak. I will wake up tomorrow and wish I were dead. I will go to work anyway. 

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heera