Illicit Activity Outside the door to Narnia

The office is white, stark, stylish, like no nonsense can ever go on here.

And that might be why two girls are hiding under a desk, white, stark as the office. It might, just.

There’s scuffling, and occasional sighs, very warm.  Giggles. Very inappropriate mumbling, effervescent, light, bubbling, rising up to the ceiling in escalating excitement. Two little girls playing hide and seek, breaking buttons, knocking their heads against the table top, their colourful socks’ seams coming loose, giggling uncontrollably. One bites the others ear and the other swats her away, with bright, fluorescent coloured giggles.

But they hush now; a man is walking into the room.  Bright yellow shirt, pink tie, just the right baby pink beret perched on his head at the perfect angle and an absolutely straight face wearing the funkiest Black glasses you ever saw. Just the kind of person you would expect to see in a perfectly styled, white as snow, always in season Prada office.

One of the girls is suppressing a laugh, and the other is trying to suppress her some more, hand on mouth, almost unable to stop giggling herself. They keep hiding, each in turn silently shushing the other, long, lithe limbs entangled. Their hearts sound like an elephant rampage, beating nervously, excitedly, against respective ribcages, close together. Quiet, hush, they murmur alternatively, unable to wipe off glowing adolescent smiles from their faces.

The man is carrying a huge rolled up sheet. He walks very decidedly to the centre of the room, where he unrolls the sheet. He seems completely unaware that he isn’t alone. It is the life size image of a white house with blue doors and windows. It covers up the whole floor of the huge white room that they are all in.

Then he walks to the table, as if he knew that they were there all along. The girls can hear approaching footsteps, their smiles are fading, panic stricken expressions replacing them. He drags the girls out by the scruffs of their collars to the centre of the room, bending down. He opens the blue paper door on the blown up poster of the white house, and pushes them in.

They stare, as though their minds are about to explode, at Narnia. 

On a warm, warm Indian night we lie awake

Its a narrow night, squeezed between a long day and an early sunrise, thinks the little girl in the house next door. She thinks of the story she’ll write tomorrow and how its going to be funny, and everything will be just the way she wants it, it’s her story, after all.

Then she remembers, vaguely, a song that the boy in the corner of her class had told her about. He’d asked her, evidently apprehensive, did she like music. Well, of course she did, it was MUSIC! Who didn't like music?! Well, his brother didn't  he liked ... Well, the boy wasn't sure what his brother liked. She had looked shocked, verging on appalled. A few girls from their class were also going the same way; they tittered, at a distance. She didn't like these girls, she said, he murmured a subtle agreement (maybe) and they’d moved away. Then he’d shyly told her about a song by ‘Porcupine Tree.’ She’d listen to it, ‘Porcupine tree’ sounded funny though, she laughed out to him. Ears red, he volunteered his ipod. She listened to it, it wasn't like much she had heard before, it was true, she glanced at him three minutes into the song. Two and a half minutes later, she gave him her verdict. She liked it. It was cool.

It hadn't been like anything she had heard, and she had downloaded it as soon as she got home.

Now, lying in the dark of this narrow night, she thinks of how she had thought of smoke, of feet slowly climbing creaky stairs and alien orbs in the night sky, and she isn't so sure. Maybe the story isn't her own after all. Maybe it’s all charted in a master tape. She realises she isn't being very coherent and exhales slowwwly. It’s a very hot night; the AC needs to be turned up.

She feels sleepy, but not.

The boy from the corner of her class remembers the journey home today very clearly. He’d had an ice cream afterwards, but his brother hadn't waited for him. He said he had ‘stuff to do’. His brother always turns the AC up too high, like now, and now the boy is shivering under the sheets, acutely aware of pages turned sharply every time the preceding numerical is solved. It’s a whip crack, he thinks. Every fucking page turned is a whip crack. He notes the expletive in his head and realises he’s getting annoyed. He turns violently, making his brother note his annoyance.

His brother turns a page louder this time. Him, and that stupid guitar, that could never wait, so why should his studying wait? Even Mumma would agree. He smiles, pleased at his wise conclusion. He turns to the next page.

He knows Mumma agrees because she has always said so. Always said that it is so lovely to see his hard work, to see the results every month, and Mumma is sure he will get into the top three IITs at least. Shuruthi Aunty thinks so too. In fact they all do, all the uncles too. He’s a very hardworking boy, they’d expressed, this last Deepawali.

The boy from the corner of her class is annoyed by Shuruthi Aunty every morning when he goes to school. She watches him every morning. She watches him LIKE A HAWK, she thinks, it pleases her to watch her neighbours like a hawk, she knows things about them, then. She believes in BEING AWARE. She likes to be aware of that girl in the next building, the one who comes home only for vacations and wears much too much kohl. That girl is so vain, she likes being pretty, Shuruthi Aunty always told her maid, when she saw the girl leaving the compound gates. It is NOT SAFE, this liking being pretty, she thinks. She believes in being safe. Her like for being aware has something to do with her dislike for being unsafe, she has always said. She stands, every morning, at her balcony, being aware, making her maid as aware as she is.

This is because she likes being safe.

The maid is having a hard time falling asleep tonight. She has thoughts of her two little children, left behind in the village. It must be cooler there. It never gets this hot there. She wonders what they ate tonight. She thinks and thinks of them, unable to stop thinking. There are too many mosquitoes tonight. She feels like they will eat her alive. She wonders if the children are bothered by mosquitoes every night, and a sudden fear grips her. She creeps out onto the balcony, she will ask didi if she can talk to her children tomorrow. She hopes they won’t contract malaria. A few more months and she can go home. She stares out onto the road, thinking of all the names of all the neighbours that she can’t remember, for a brief moment, before she goes back to worrying about her two little children.

 It’s a narrow night, squeezed between two very long days, the little girl from next door thinks. She nods her head to the implacable beat of a beautiful, unusual song, where there seem to be three separate beats, and she can choose any one. She can almost feel them, the metallic tones. She nods her head, but she isn’t really nodding, she only thinks she’s nodding. She thinks that she is falling asleep, and it’s such a warm, balmy night. She likes the word ‘balmy’. It’s a good word.

The boy from the corner of her class wakes up very groggy next morning, thinking, as usual, of excuses not to wake up, listing them in his head, while Shuruthi Aunty watches from the balcony, the street, and the sandwich that the maid is packing for her son. She’s being aware. She’s always on top of everything. She’s telling the maid there were so many mosquitoes last night. In fact, there were so many mosquitoes last night, that the family next door, they lit a mosquito coil in their daughter’s bedroom, you know, to kill the mosquitoes.

They lit the coil, and the daughter asphyxiated and died. In fact, it just happened an hour ago.  It was so sad, really, she went on, the girl next door, so young, too. She shook her head. The maid had packed the sandwich, and Shuruthi Aunty went down to drop her son off at the compound gate. She saw a neighbour on her way back up, and shared the news about the girl next door. Really Shuruthi, how did you find out so soon, said the neighbour. It really was too sad, it was agreed. 

The Unborn Child

Blank screen, blank page, blank verse. You shut your notebook with a contented sigh.  You pull at your hair sometimes, in the hope that it will grow longer, but mother says it never will. You write for her, sometimes, for mum. You always showed her your writing, even as a child. She’s beautiful, you’ve heard everyone say, and you agree completely. You wrote about it, long ago. You wrote about it recently, too. She looked so pretty from where you were sitting, at her feet, in the grass. The sky was so blue. Like a thousand diamonds sparkling in the sun. It made you think of a song.

You write about music sometimes. You tried to play the flute once, but when you blew into it, it caught fire. You dropped it; the flames had nearly singed your hair. You had been shocked, nearly bursting into tears. Later, when you calmed down, you watched the fire sing. The flute had never sounded better. You remember the strains fading into the night. It makes you mellow even now. Mother said you had found a new way of making music, you had clapped your hands in excitement.

Blank verse always captivated you. Blank pages made you want to write, and blank screens made you want to break them with the neat swipe of a baseball bat. No one likes a mess, you have been taught, and neither do you. You clean up the pieces when the screen shatters. Each piece is very beautiful. They reflect your eyes. They reflect the sky behind your eyes, and the trees.

Its the season for the trees to shed their leaves now, and each purple layer of skin falls onto your head, into your palms, onto the ground. It doesn’t rain, it only ever sheds leaves here, the seasons work like that, mother had said. You wrote about that. About leaf shedding.

It was shedding leaves when the sky cracked open, and you are just shutting your notebook. The last thing you see is the sky crack open. 

Welcome Strangers, Legends, Martyrs, Painters, Pipers, Prisoners

“I’ll be the girl who can’t be moved,” she said, adamantly. Then we laughed and I tried to bribe her. I told her I’d buy the dress. She got up immediately, and we left. “You only want to see me in the dress because it’s skanky,” I laughed. We laughed. Then we played in the video game arcade, and half an hour later, it was time to leave.

Two days later we talked on the phone. I wasn’t sure, I told her, about where I should start. I was confused. I really didn’t know where to start, at the beginning or at the end. We were talking about my paintings. “It was funny wasn’t it, when that woman was all, beta, are you done with the machine, and some other guy had already taken it?” Ten minutes later we were talking about two days ago. I watched the fan spin around and round on the ceiling, from the ceiling, really soon, with the ceiling. It seemed to slow down.

Suddenly I felt like screaming, tearing the roof down with the ceiling, because of my screaming. The hands on the clock seemed to slow down. I felt like the painting on the walls weren’t my own. The voice that was talking now, echoing in my room, was not my own. The friend on the other end of the line, was not my friend. All of it belonged to someone else.

“I’m sorry. I … tuned out, I think.”

I put down the phone in what felt, suddenly, like despair.

This is where I sort of left off, once, very long ago, and here I shall resume, because it is time.