DON’T ASK

Be silent in two situations. When someone can’t understand your feelings through words. And when someone understands everything without any words. Archana waiting for her train to arrive, read on her mobile, forwarded to her by a friend from her hometown Sirsi.

A lengthy hefty tan-brown cobra slithering forward, halt. Turn stiff. Remain still. Its greenish yellow eyes alert, wide open, stare hither and thither before it, gaze ahead, then dart off towards its hole, its destination. The doors of the train that Archana took to reach Kanakapura, where she now lived with Rajan, closed. And in that instance, Archana sighted through the train windows, in front of her, like snake scales. A young woman in the opposite parallel railway line, with her head held straight, looking ahead, as if at something approaching. Attired in the exact same ankle-length, dark-grey salwar kameez adorned with embroidered white flowers and leaves, that Archana was wearing. Hit by a train coming in. And the woman flung off the railway line like a drab grey sack of charcoal.

Archana gasped, “She looked just like me.”

“Her hair, like mine… curly… shoulder length.” Archana felt the edges of her hair brush her shoulders, as she shook her head. “No. No. That is not possible. It’s not.”

“That wasn’t me. That was not me.”

“No,” Archana cried.

“What?” Sheetal her colleague seated beside her checking X, Instagram, and other app notifications on her phone, looked up and asked.

“Nothing,” Archana said.

“You’re  sure?” Sheetal put her phone in her bag.

“I am good.” Archana blinked, looked away.

“How is your relationship with Rajan?” Sheetal creased her forehead and asked.

“Don’t ask.” Archana shut her eyes tight. “I have to stop taking this train.”

“Yes,” Sheetal said, “and take a train or a plane that goes elsewhere. Not Kanakapura.”

“Agree,” Archana replied, her eyes misty.

Rajan, whom she had known and cherished as a man attentive, gentle. And she had left her parents to live with him. Turns out impatient, violent, indifferent. Court other women.

“Our life need not be… it isn’t… I guess, one beautiful… round… complete… circle, in which beginning and end disappear,” Archana mumbled “But one line added to a bunch of lines. A cluster of beginnings and ends. In that expansive space, Brahmanda, universe of universes.”

Sheetal nodded. “You stay with me, if you can’t go back to your parents.” She said, and collected Archana’s quivering hands in hers.

Archana bowed her head, looked sideways at Sheetal. A forced half-smile on her lips.

“Free. Freed at last.” Sheetal reciprocated.

“Yes,” Archana replied, her voice shaky “from my illusion—delusions.”

“Rajan.” Sheetal gently rubbed Archana’s thin limp hands in hers plump and soft. “Rajan.”

“Incorrigible brute,” Archana sobbed.

“Yes.” Sheetal nodded. Closed her eyes brimming with pricking tears.

 

YOU DIDN’T

Unabated violation, violence, rooted in vile sadism watered, fertilised, with general indifference. A minuscule size violence shoots out of desperation to end it. I suppose. How else to explain what I witnessed that evening in that village where I had been staying taking a long leave from my work as bank coordinator in a private bank.

The sun, sunk low behind a dense pink-grey horizon, nearly invisible.

Trees, shrubs, that lined the village red-dirt streets and lanes. Cows, goats, canines that loitered, roamed, with sheer entitlement. Beside weary villagers, labourers, traversing on foot and by run-down bicycles, bullock carts, public buses running on bone shattering unpaved roads, towards their house or streetside bars to grab a glass or bottle of country liquor and pour down their throat and into their stomach hungering for it, or to some secluded place to meet their lover, craving for sex. Look like silhouettes of wandering ghosts waiting for the moon and its gang of stars to arrive and rule the sky.

My mind tired, my body fragile, me akin to a piece of thin glass held up with a piece of coarse cotton thread wound around it. Since, my disintegration began four years back.

I hesitate to say.

All sorts of things have appeared before me out of nowhere. An elephant in my room, late at night. A lion beside me in a bus. Women in clothes worn in ancient times, mythological stories, scowl and slap me. But not this, Shri. Maa Kali herself, sickle in one hand and a decapitated head in her other.

“What horrible deeds did I commit in my past lives.” I cried. Dropped the pills prescribed to me by my psychiatrist. “O Maa. I didn’t rape… torture… any woman in this life. I didn’t.” I prayed, and prostrated before her.

“Get up, you fool. That is our Vidhya.” The pharmacist behind me shouted.

I, as if nudged in my sleep, turned my head, and saw him cry “Vidhya. Vidhya. What have you done?”

Bewildered, I moved and sat pressed against the wall of the shop. Watched what I thought was Shri. Maa Kali herself, tell him, “What else? Killed him with my sickle.”

She raised the decapitated head in her right hand and the blood-covered sickle in her other, like a butcher in a meat shop.

The pharmacist sobbed, “No, Vidhya. No. You didn’t.”

“Yes,” she told him. “He wouldn’t listen when I tell him, I can’t fuck you anymore. He comes every day, forces me.”

“Okay. Okay. What are you going to do now? That head in your hand,” the pharmacist asked, pressing his eyes shut.

“Go to the police station,” she said. Her voice loud, fierce, like that of a lioness enraged.

“With his severed head?” the pharmacist asked.

“Yes,” she told him. “Hand it to them, the police, who wouldn’t arrest him. To the judges who would release him even if they did arrest him.”