Sickness

Winter breaks last two hundred years. During those two hundred years, I am not allowed to go into the room at the corner of our apartment. I call it The Other Room. In The Other Room, there is a sickness. The Other Room is where He resides. His memory has faded. His eyes are glued to the stock market all day. The stock market is active from 9 am to 3:30 pm, but for Him it lasts twenty four hours, two hundred years.

Sometimes She enters The Other Room. I hear shouts, I hear Him refusing to break contact with the computer screen, where the stock market lies covered in sap. I sunbathe in the balcony. The Other Room contains a sickness that I want to forget about. The Other Room contains a sickness that I want to run away from, but the sickness has stretched a month to two hundred years. Time stretches and so does the sap that lies on the computer screen. Slowly, it fills the entire room.

A Rebellious Rock

That Round One From Uphill’s day has been eventful so far. Someone just skipped him across a stream from one bank to another.

That Round One From Uphill is a rebellious rock. Most rocks do not like being skipped.

They like staying fixed in their little homes amidst the mud, and try their best not to morph into the near-flat shape ideal for being skipped. That Round One From Uphill grew up with different ambitions. Leaving his fate to human hands, according to him, was a way to see more of the world outside of where the stream takes you.

On that eventful day, a human considered That Round One From Uphill’s flat shape to be ideal for skipping. And luck was on That Round One From Uphill’s side—after eight skips he reached right across the stream.

So his name wasn’t a curse after all—his parents thought naming him That Round One From Uphill would be an antidote to his flatness. Contrary to the rock civilization’s beliefs, names do not determine destiny, thought That Round One From Uphill.

Rocks like to name their offspring names formed of sentences, so that they could be translated into any language. For humans, these names seem very long, but for rocks whose average lifespan is half a million years, they just take a millisecond to pronounce.

Goodbyes and Flights to America

The actual flight to America starts two days before the time on the boarding pass. It starts with the nostalgic silence between me and home that both of us are overly sensitive to. It starts with the scent of various snacks being prepared in the kitchen, to ensure my proper nutrition in the week after I reach. It starts with the cooking of all of my favourite meals. It starts with increased pressure on me to pack and to buy the remaining things that need to be bought before I leave. At various points throughout those two days I fight back tears multiple times. I feel guilty about leaving for a place so far away and causing everyone sadness. If they see me cry, they will be sadder and more worried. 

I count this with the flight because it is harder than the multiple component and extraordinarily tiring flight itself. The more flights I take, the more used I get to hard goodbyes and accepting harsh truths. 

The actual flight is an incubator for paranoia. It involves sixteen hours half asleep in darkness, spotted by meals and a sleepy layover where I try my best not to fall asleep on a bench, riddled with caffeine-induced hallucinations. It is the perfect environment for all of life’s stresses to pop into your mind with a louder volume. Over the years I have started fearing flights. Over the years I have also learnt not to participate in any anxiety-inducing events in the days preceding a flight. 

My life has consisted of a total of seven flights to America. One through London, one through Reykjavik, one through Frankfurt, one through Moscow, one through Tokyo, two of them direct flights. Each of them has made me more used to saying goodbye, something I have a lot of trouble with and so put a lot of effort into. Sometimes I wonder if I say goodbye too much. It is nice to let the people I know that I really appreciate their existence, and saying goodbye is one way of doing that. It is also the most painful way of doing that.

Something with existential dread

When I was around eight years old we rented a new house in a neighbourhood of Paschim Vihar I do not remember. It was a yellow house with yellow walls outside and yellow walls inside. The walls were the colour of depression and darkness, the colour of the cheapest paint available in the market. 

I initially liked the house because it had two floors. None of the places we had lived in before had two floors. It was like a movie to me. In all the American shows I used to watch, houses always had two floors. I felt like I could have my own space, and that little treat countered the sombre shadow of the yellow walls. 

I do not know if I found the house depressing because of the above reasons, or because of the hopeless atmosphere in my family. My mom would work either in the kitchen all day, or work on keeping the house clean. Watching her do the same thing over and over again to a house that did not treat her well added to the despair. 

Initially when we moved in during the heat of the summer, we hadn’t installed any air conditioner. The humid heat contributed to the yellow darkness. In one room there was the dreaded black darkness. The lights did not function, and the roof used that as an opportunity to throw as many droplets of water as it could to the bed. These invisible drops and puddles were felt heavily by our bodies, who tried to fight against them.

Puddles would also sneak into this house in the form of drain water. The ground floor had trouble guarding against them, and it became a daily task for my mom to get rid of both the wet and its smell.  Each time she would clean them up, her sweat would follow a trail down her face and fall to the floor. This way the puddles made sure they stayed alive.

Every day, we hoped that the roof would hold some of the water in its arms. Every day, we hoped that the malevolence of the dirty water would stop greeting us. Every day was filled with the same despair, the same yellow darkness that the puddles reflected. 

Black Circles

In a corner one can see water seep out of a pot through the crack in its bottom. It makes the concrete below the pot darker, a darkness that slowly grows and grows and attempts to colour the entire ground black. A pupil slowly dilates, and reaches the edge of the universe. A pebble falls into the pupil, and ripples are born.

Early morning before school

5 AM each morning, I would hear the alarm on my mom’s phone ring as I continued to salvage my sleep. The vague awareness of her sipping chai and meditating using her beads would engulf me in the darkness while I lay beside her, mostly asleep. My mom’s prayers and my own dreams would form a peaceful start to every morning. Although we would be shrouded in darkness, we were still extremely visible to each other, so very aware of each other that we would get used to it and not think about it. 

5:30 AM each morning, I would hear the words “Gauri utho” in my mother’s voice, asking me to wake up. The next few words would usually be, “utho beta time hogaya”, which translates to “wake up child, it’s time”. Having to wake up that early in the morning is a nightmare for every teenager who would stay awake until midnight. Three minutes more in bed translated to three hours of happiness. But since I had a school bus to catch, eventually I had to give up and break the sticky, loving contact between my back and my bed.

My mom would then hand me the cup of milk she had heated up for me—plain hot milk with a nasty surprise of dates at the bottom that were to be consumed when I had finished the milk. Drinking milk that hot would be an ordeal for my throat and would take fifteen minutes of precious time during which I would picture pleasurable fantasies of being asleep. Usually, if the milk was a little bit less hot and I could manage to drink it in twelve minutes or so, the rest of those three minutes would be spent in my blanket. In those three minutes, I would have the best sleep of the entire day.

After that, it would be time to wake up for good. Get off the bed, go to the bathroom, change into my school uniform. During the winter, the school uniform would have around four extra layers. Normally this would have meant waking up ten minutes earlier than usual, but fortunately my school bus arrived fifteen minutes late in that season and so I would be able to wake up at 5:35 AM instead.

In the background, while I would be readying myself to go to school, my mom would be listening to bhajans or devotional songs on the radio and making the food that I would take to school. With the tabla and sweet melodies forming the background in my ears and the serene darkness of dawn forming the background in my eyes, I would go about everything calmly and quietly and so would my mom. We were both there, near each other, quiet but together in a comforting sense of home. 

When I would walk out to near the dining table, wearing my school uniform and carrying my backpack, the food on the table would greet me. My meal was in a box, cooling down before the box would be shut and kept in my backpack. My mother would leave the kitchen and walk up to me, ready to comb my hair and braid it tightly so it lasts for the entire day. When I was younger, she would also untangle my hair for me, but when I reached high school the pain I would feel and the effort she had to do for it conspired to teach me the art of untangling. So, in high school, I would untangle the hair first and then my mom would braid it. Each time she did so, she would tell me to learn it and do it myself (something I have not done to this day). 

With everything ready, it would be time to wear my shoes (after dusting them a little to avoid my mom’s scolding). We would usually leave in a hurry, owing to my three minutes of extra sleep. The walk to the bus stop started with climbing down the usually dirty staircase of Nagin Lake Apartments, a place where none of us wanted to live but to which both of us were used to. In the little parking area under the buildings, we would see every day the car that had been there since the beginning of time, standing there in an old and dusty way. In the time since we moved to that place when I was ten to when I graduated, I saw that car every day. Each day I would think, who would leave a car, just like that?

The length of the walk would vary—the initial part was three minutes up until we reached the gates of our apartment complex. Then, depending on how busy the road was, we would either cross it, or take the overly lengthy and unnecessarily curvy bridge that was built over the road. It’s extreme length and the time it would take to cross it caused us and many other people to cross the busy road for a long time, until more accidents started to happen and threw more and more people and careful stray dogs onto the long, tiring bridge. 

This long ordeal—with or without a stray dog—would eventually lead to us greeting the bus stop. It was time to wait for the school bus, say goodbye, and go to school. The magic of the morning would slowly be lifted as reality would seep in and the sky would turn the bright white of day, the bright white of rationality.

New Furniture

The sofa in the drawing room was born in my uncle’s place before I was born. The dining table joined us from the same place, from even more ancient times. The small cabinet on which the TV rests used to reside with my aunt. Most of the furniture at this house has seen more of the world than usual furniture. They feel at home, resting against a background of lightly decorated light yellow walls and dim lighting and things that don’t match.

This is why when the new bed entered the house one day, it stood out in sharp, brown contrast. The rest of the furniture looked on, confused, as the bed was brought into my brother’s room. I empathised with the older furniture. To me, the new-looking dark brown bed seemed bigger than it was. It took too much space in my head, and so seemed bigger to my eyes. Everyone was happy this piece of new furniture joined us, but none of us were used to it. 

Things were changing. The older furniture was fearing its demise. It was dreading being forgotten about, dreading that all memory of its contributions would be lost. In an attempt to provide it some comfort, which might have gone unnoticed by the older furniture, I would attempt to use it more than I would use the new and shiny brown bed. The sofa would welcome my occasional naps, and a lot of my possessions suddenly moved to the drawers spotting the TV cabinet. The sudden rush of anxiety that had entered the house with the new brown bed had now transformed into a wave of trusting calm.