On Estrangement

Summer afternoons had always reeked of sultry tanginess to her.

'You can't smell sultriness.' , I reminded her, 'It's more like a state, an attribute even.'

'Yes, you can.', the back of her head would speak to me in a voice tremorous enough to unsettle a teacup in a tray, 'Everything has a smell.'

'Everything?' What is it about voices you decipher that makes them so alien to you?

'Everything.'

'I would think that unlikely.'

'When will you ever let go of your smokescreen of intelligibility?' Her nonchalance stretched itself like the wings of a weather-beaten sparrow while her voice rang with renewed vigour - 'I'm telling you, everything has a smell - people, places, emotions, attributes. And if something doesn't have one, you assign one to it. There's no other way to catalogue them.'

'You actually keep a mental roster of these?'

'Well, they go awfully awry. One has to try, or they start acting like themselves ; they drift apart.'

'Go on then, tell me my smell.'

'You don't even credit my honesty. I won't be mocked.' I could feel the eyes roll in her socket, nursing contempt, and crevices of her chapped lower lip align in perfect symmetry with the upper.

'Tell me anyway.'

'You used to smell of nothingness. Now it's just your skin.'

It would be hot, stiflingly hot inside her big room, with sunlight bouncing off the creamy walls & settling within the folds of the curtains which would never be drawn across. The clock would strike two & it would be time for time to get suspended for the rest of the afternoon. The vestiges of the afternoon would soon be compressed like a spongeball by sheer mental arithmetic (rules of which will never be the same for the days to come) only to be released with a bounce into twilight, soon overflooding the embankments of evening, pregnant with the possibilities of a summerstorm. A wind will blow. A gentle, yet steady breeze - sending a trickle down her brown flesh, leaving a trail of goosebumps. I would wonder whether it's 6. I have to return home soon, or somewhere less secure, less haunting. There's a storm coming.

'Do you wish to stay? There's a storm coming.' Her silhouette by the window was growing darker by the minute. I heard a peal of laughter waft across the street that divided me and her from the entire world, and crawl its way to my senses like an impossibly sinister infection. Does it happen before every summerstorm or am I noticing it for the first time in eons? Does every city seem to don a garb of mourning before the thunder strikes? Does it always look so grey before the rain finally kisses the earth, loses character, and turns to a blob of muck? Must it be so?

Was it laughter I heard, I wonder. Maybe I had smelled echoes of an ancient flirtation reverberating around the corners. The wind is getting wicked. I must hurry.

It is becoming rather daunting to discern the colour of her flesh in this darkness. All I recall is an obstinate brown, one that neither transformed nor mellowed, speckled along the arms with infinite dots. She thought brown was her most trusted accomplice in the splattered wooden palette as it never deserted her. You'd always have plenty of brown, she said, because the real shade you wanted came from mixing black and crimson, not the bottled hue they sold in packages. The latter was too dull to be used for human skin.

'Darkness should always be robust, never anaemic.', she would say sometimes, nodding her head thoughtfully. Back then, I adored the trick of being unresponsive - it took words hostage but eventually prevented them from getting too close to the sun. And it already felt like 45 degrees outside.

Her long dark fingers, one on which a golden ring fitted snugly, had a slight dent at the back & my brows instantly furrowed when I stumbled upon her hands one afternoon. It was a dainty ring, unlike the slim band of gold I wear on my middle finger. 'What did you do to it?', I asked, taking her hands in mine ; my voice perplexed, somewhat distorted like the ring itself, as if almost going through a physical pain of sorts. 'I sat on it', she replied. And after the uncomfortable intuition of reprimand had weared off after a moment, her entire body shook with unrepressed laughter.

I often associated certain smells to certain people or places as a kid. It was more a cognitive process of recognition than one of communication. I remember my lost father by the heady smell of Old Spice. For my mother, it was jasmine oil bought from the local grocers. The threshold of the ground floor corridor which marked off the Hall of Meditation from rest of the school building smelled of incense. Or was it boot-polish? Now that I come to think of it, inspite of she and me growing up in the same part of town, frequenting the same places, singling out the same people to taunt and love ; inspite of my eyes learning by heart all her idiosyncracies by sheer proximity & not by any relentless urge of knowing her, I could never really salvage from the residues of her being, elements that might give rise to a sweet-smelling wisp of smoke. That is what unnerved me. Smells don't usually do that. The ones that are supposed to develop within you uninhibitedly belong to those that mediate your physical space the most. The ones you end up remembering, however, are those which have a heightened sense of individuality.

In other words, the undomesticated ones.

Yet, there was something curious about summer and her that never quite succeeded in occupying separate domains inside my head. Summer, and I never bothered to figure out why, reminded me of her as much as she reminded me of summer. I don't know if seasons ought to have a clear-cut smell of their own, and even if they do, I don't happen to know what smell should be assigned to summer, even less of how summer would smell like in Calcutta. I have never personally been very fond of this season at any point of my life till now. Summer to me, has been nothing more than a compulsory cyclical companion of timed togetherness, made bearable only by its norwesters, that leave their imprints on the ancient floor-tiles of unwashed corridors in the form of a finely-grained dust-film, after they've been conjured from the body of somnolent streets like moaning, mournful ghouls by a hot-headed breeze. This thin film of dust, slippery beneath the naked feet, settles over almost everything - any artifact, living or dead - setting off invisible steams of exhaustion and cooled anger after a storm has hollered past, leaving the universe dishevelled.

She crept into my rather dull imaginings of summer in the way impending summerstorms crept into the unfinished conversations of two unsuspecting lovers, who suddenly found their phone lines have gone dead.

I still detest summer, but my half-hearted musings about the season still has a lot of her in it. Her face dissolves sometimes, but I am drawn back to a texture of leathery brown skin, untouched by summer's harsh caress. My mind sneaks, almost apologetically, down a corridor belonging to yesteryears, to halt in-front of an image.

An image of her - crouching on the bathroom-floor ; her long hair, curls of soap-softened scotch-brite tumbling in a cascade over her shoulders, almost veiling her face, as she frantically rubs lotion over a prominent V-shaped rim on her back - a rim demarcating two different skin tones. A sunburn.

I creak open the bathroom-door, & realise that this was probably the only touch of summer left on her skin that I could remember of.

As the hinges of the door groans under the pressure of an unannounced afternoon visitor leaning against it, I see her eyes flick for a moment, then turn ferociously towards the door. Fierceness melts into panic as her eyes recognize the apology in mine and turns into a sonorous wail

'I'm never going to Digha again!', looking up to me in memory, she says.

I watch her, as she lies in the pool of her own sorrows, washed in sunlight crashing in soundless waves through the shafts ; sunlight, that gradually settled in a concentric circle around her pool of sorrow. And before my eyes are barely able to decipher the genuineness of the golden glint on her left earlobe, a wave of brown, unforeseen, crashes upon our insignificant, brittle worlds, painstakingly woven out of equally flimsy narratives of love, loss, and despair. Mostly despair.

That is where my memory snaps.

Peals and peals of laughter continue to trespass. Who the hell can be laughing like that at this hour? The sky has turned an intense purple. Or is it violet? I could never discern one from the other ; both looked so pretty. Like unidentical twins. A streak of lightning spans out most flamboyantly across the horizon and travels further. The first non-verbal language of comfort in a long day. Very soon, every bit of civilization would be catapulted and blown to bits. I have to hurry.

'Do you wish to stay? There's a storm coming.'

I almost shrieked. The coolness of her touch on my elbow was unnerving.

In a room this familiar, her closeness bothered me ; by imposing on me a sense of sisterhood I knew so well but refused to accept in the present circumstances. There was concern in those eyes, I think. As they looked down at me beneath the lashes. Kindness, even. But I couldn't bring myself to return her gaze. It seemed inappropriate to look kindness in the eye with indecision. But time was not on my side, so many thankless moments have started to frown already ; a response was due. Words were due.

'I'll help you shut the windows.'

Of Mannerisms and more.

8th June, 2014. Sunday.

Today's evening suddenly became beautiful. It was unexpected, considering the prolonged dry spell we've been experiencing for the past week, with only rare gusts of wind and pathetic drizzles as the only short-lived comforts.

This evening, however, was accompanied with wonderful, strong gusts of wind, although no rain, and streaks of purple lightning criss-crossing the sky that had turned a soft red. This time tomorrow evening, the house would be swarming with guests and filled with loud laughter. My cousin sister's fiancee's family will be coming for an unofficially official meeting with my sister's folks.

Super-secretive, my cousin is. Everyone in my home is that way, actually. Including me. We are mysterious people, which is all the more reason for us to have an unusual ability for speculating.

Take me, for instance. I had speculated a long time back that the person my cousin sister stays up late to talk to every single night cannot be a female. And I was right.

However, what was not right was me trying to eavesdrop on the doubleton's conversation, even if I could catch only one side of it.

Secretly, I feel thankful that I remember nothing about my incorrigible act. And that is the only weak murmuring in my defence. I mean, I must have felt guilty about it ; otherwise I wouldn't have tipped her off by saying she ought to speak in a muffled voice during night times as our adjacent rooms shared a rather thin wall and my only window rather near to her balcony.

I remember giving her this forewarning, while watching 'Conjuring' in her laptop. The warning must have been effective, because the succeeding nights became, very calm.

The fact that me and my cousin watched a gory ghost story together shouldn't make one think that we're close. We're, in fact, the opposite of it. But that's another story.

The night is comparatively cooler now, though the wind has stopped.

I'm sitting at one of my most favourite spots in the entire house - an almost circular balcony overlooking the vast green expanse belonging to Madhav Prasad Birla, a pastel-grey road running beyond the gate, and remnants of what used to be a proper garden once. Mosquitoes pecked my bare feet and hands constantly. I have to retire to the solitary confines of my room sooner than I'd like.

The sky has turned a dirty shade of purple and still looks pretty. The silhouette of the trees looks dirty too ; emaciated with age and unmitigated exposure to sun and rain.

The curtain outside my room always looks super-dirty too - patches of dirt clearly visible in the soiled creases of the pink cotton material. I don't think it's a proper curtain. It might have been made out of an overused bedcover, the artist being my father. I developed a habit of using this soiled embellishment as a substitute for drying my hands, often. Which makes it soil-ier.

Last to last day, I heard my Boroma (cousin sister's mother) rapping at the door, asking for a safety-pin. I opened the door and was surprised to see her holding a silky-smooth curtain, struggling with the string which supported my trusty soiled curtain.

'What's the matter?', I asked, looking pointedly at the curtain and it staring back at me.

She broke into a smile and said that this Sunday, folks will be coming to our place regarding my sister's wedding-talk. I smiled back automatically. That explained Boroma's fuss. The silk curtain needs to be slipped into the the string with the aid of a safety-pin and is to perform a short task as the doorstep decor for that night, until the folks finished their wedding-talk over dinner and went home.

I can't say I heavily missed the soiled curtain, but I couldn't get used to the feel of silk sliding over my arms and fingers as well, each time I slipped in and out of my crappy room.  There is something about newness that unnerves me to the point of shunning any type of alteration. Also, I felt a pang of discomfort when, out of habit, I wiped my wet hands on the curtain today, realising instantaneously that the curtains had been swapped yesterday. Discomfort arose due to two reasons : one, the curtain belonged to someone else, looked expensive and I didn't have the right to soil it ; two, my hands were still wet. The curtain-material, silk or no silk, couldn't soak the moisture readily. My old curtain was a master at it.

I feel hungry. I wonder where mother is. The bloodsuckers have eventually forced me to withdraw myself to my room. It's almost eleven. My eyes burn a little from sitting in the dark for too long and straining them under the faint white light of the streetlamp. I look down at the garden from the window, half-clouded. The floor of the garden is sweeped clean. It looks disrobed, naked, bare, as the earth is usually strewn thickly with dry, crisp leaves falling from the overhanging trees. The leaves fall in abundance, throughout the year, nobody sweeps them. They continue to fall in a thick layer, giving the garden an unintendedly classy look, an air of painless abandonment. The leaves get baked in the scorching heat and turn so crisp that you can distinctly hear a sharp scrunching sound when they get crushed beneath someone's feet. It is an oddly pleasing sound, oozing crispness. Personally, I believe it's an unerring way to let you know that there's an intruder in your house at night. Sometimes it's just a local stray dog or its feline counterpart. And now that alarm has been snooze-hit for at least a month.

It seemed childishly offensive - these stark indicators that your house was being straightened up for some people soon to be tied in fresh bonds. Take for instance the fat, dusty stacks of newspapers which have been accumulating in the basement for more than a month, and has recently been done away with. Their absence has left a giant, gaping hole in the basement, and nothing can be done to make the hole look like a prettier hole. It's not that those piles of paper added a whole lot of meaning to our boring stories ; if anything, it serves as a rats' den at night - but that's beside the point.

The fact that suddenly everything had to be sweeped and dusted and stripped and donned and plucked and pinned - seemed part of a desperate heartfelt attempt to hide something so ordinary, so familiar, that the calm surrounding the whole endeavour proved difficult to process into one meaning.

It's 10:25 now. The guests came, laughed, talked, had dinner, were mildly intimidated by the pug, and left. I noticed two, only mildly interesting, things. That the fiancee didn't come. And the moment the car parked outside revved up, my aunt carefully removed the heavy ceramic flower-vase that had been adorning the living-room and folded up the pretty crocheted white fabric upon which it had been placed.

I changed into an unwashed skirt and a washed tee from the kurta and bottoms I had been wearing that night, and soon after, was called to a simple fare of rice, daal, and mashed potatoes.