ye rog purana hai

pt1?

It starts in the soles of my feet, and when it reaches the back of my shins, the nights are spent painfully. There’s an inability to toss and turn; there’s no cure for it except to wait it out. It moves north, above my knees where my childhood resides in scars and scratches that I inflict on myself. Pain digs into me, I dig my nails into my skin, the cycle gets complete. The throbbing reaches the insides of my thigh and turns into something else. Flickering candle in the night, soft blankety sensation on cold skin, hot vessel with guaranteed recoil from touch. I feel it all. I become it all. 

Romi visited me a month ago, at the end of summer when the silvery monsoon had just punctuated the seasonal sentence of life. The dilapidated stairs were slippery, concrete chewed off at edges, seemingly fixed by Somebody using moss and moist green bloom that felt like earth’s vomit, reminiscent of my drunken days when I would be slime inside out. Nobody knows where Romi is, at any given point of our lives. He erupts when you need him, out of thin air. My reason to gloat over others is that he Knows when to reenter my life. My cause of shame is, I let him. 

He just showed up, at our ancestral place, suitcase on the side, a cotton shirt billowing in the breeze. I had forgotten what the human body could look like, yet in that moment I could see it all. 

He said he wanted to live like my childhood. I told him that would be too isolating. He didn’t say anything romantic or hopeful or loving, just asked me to show him the bedroom.

I sat in anticipation in the verandah, his voice floating downstairs. He was on a call. I picked on my skin, fixed my hair. I had already started to recede into the girl that I once existed as in this house, with more people and lesser space. 

He descended the slippery stairs, barefeet. He wanted to bathe. I decided to eat him. Told him I used to bathe in the verandah itself, out in the open. He took the bait, because he had placed the hook.

I sat and tore him piece by piece while the lime yellow soap, a remnant of my memory, traveled all over him. My naana would buy everything in bulk from the army ration store. All cousins smelled the same, like lime and sweat and minty talcum powder. 

I watched the froth accumulate in his crevices, while he looked at me like I did not exist outside of his realm of performance and pleasure. I felt the pain enter my stomach and drop further until. How I wished to be the soap, solid but capable of melting. Bright. Useful. Used by him. On him. 

My nail beds started to bleed, and I felt like the dirty girl I never was. I wondered if he would say anything if I went and shampooed his hair, touched his spine with slippery, rushed hands. What if I licked the bitter suds off of him and he decided that wasn’t close enough, and took me to my childhood bedroom. The old posters of actors long dead or married staring down at us, in the coolness of the room, emitting heat unto each other. 

coming back.

heera