I sauntered down the cement ramp, semi-deaf to the severely unpleasant
vehicular orchestra playing out to my left, training my concentration instead
on the complex drama unfurling in my head.
Strange things were happening. Darkness begged to be my
friend. Light wanted a vacation. In their vehemence, they bumped into each
other sideways, to form smoky self-styled Venn diagrams and condensed areas of
rainy grey in between.
And, so, it had to begin with a drizzle.
Only, the drizzle was really just overzealous mist. It hung
heavily in the air, weighed down by gravity, relenting in miniscule droplets. They
dripped onto my hair inconspicuously, forming a talcum halo. I was reminded
vaguely of several patches of paradise. I walked in the first paradise for a
while, listening intently to the bright green grass beneath my feet rebuke me
for intruding on its morning dew bath. The air was redolent of vanilla and
something musky. Voices of children wafted about in the fading background, intermingling
with the explanatory tones of an older man- an uncle perhaps. I was almost
transported to another time… in a car from the past, in which I now sat, listening
to my heart beat feverishly. I looked in the rear view mirror to find my lips
stained a bright orange and my face red and raw. There was a wild glint in my
eye, and my lips curled in a manner that suggested feral moments had been partaken
of in the muggy confines. As I turned to my right, I could discern but a waning
mass of memory. My arms, however, and my neck, bore scarlet imprints that I
could only begin to comprehend. I touched my arm to imbibe a sense of that
time, but it wasn’t my arm. An older woman held my hand, and steered me down a
wet boulevard. I tried to look up at her face, but she was too tall. I was too
short. I had taken my first steps not too many moons ago, and the damp tar road
seemed to teem with possibilities. I was being fed stories. Tales from the
epics, epic tales. In my head, pictures formed, like a comic strip. A bunch of
young Brahmin girls fighting wordlessly for a comb, for the next turn in the bath,
for the one extra biscuit. Sisters. My aunts they must’ve been; and my mother. And
then, I was on her hips. The hips that, not too many years ago, took part in emergency
ejecting me into the world. She was running. It was a drizzly morning in the city
I call home. We were racing against time and alongside the bus we desired to
board. An angel’s hand, she later said, pulled us in, just when she thought the
destination would be forever lost to her. And, so we sat in the bus. I was
around 19 years old by then; talking to my peers, as we sped into the verdant wild.
I cosied up in a corner, by a window, feeling the wind course through my curls and
the mounting drizzle gently attacking my rods and cones. I was happy, I was
sad. Teenage pangs did their job well. I had to shut the window before long,
because the drizzle had built into a promising rain. It was extremely stifling
inside the bus.
So, I stood up and pressed my ears against the large window
in my hotel room, which looked like it was sweating. I faintly heard the rain
sing to me, in a voice that was layered beneath the more apparent percussion
patterns she beat on the glass pane. She began to tell me secrets from lands
afar. That she had left her home in Egypt; evaporated from the Nile so cruelly.
I listened to her cry of longing. She and I both sang the same song that day. When
I could no longer bear the piercing pitch of pain, I moved away. Walked away.
Into a dark room where the television took pride of place. On a large bed sat
an apparition. Young love set my cheeks on fire, stoking something I identified
as desire. The warm specter and I sat in harmony, not saying anything, just
relishing the heat that separated us, brought us closer. And there was the heat
of the hot chocolate we shared- a delicious contrast to the steely concrete wild
which was being hosed down by the Gods. Broken lyrics and unchained melodies
looped around us. I shut my eyes, lost to the world, swimming in swelling
streams of anticipation. I woke to the sound of thunder and dangerous creaking
of branches. I sat huddled under an old oak; a thin stole my only respite from
the copious tears of heaven. I was alone in a dark jungle, infested with
reptiles. A lizard, the colour of bile, began its ascent up my leg, even as a
red snake slithered across my collar bone, turning slowly to look me in the eye,
as if to establish its superiority. I thought I had died. They say I fell into
a cold, cold coma.
I woke at all because they say I was struck by some kind of sympathetic
lightning. I believe I was struck by a mysterious epiphany, if ever there was
such a thing as a mysterious epiphany. I looked at my limbs to find them covered
in the glittery salts left behind by heaven’s temper tantrum. On closer
inspection, I found that the minerals had formed rapidly-absorbed miniscule pictographs
on my skin, depicting forefather secrets.
I got on my feet and stretched memory’s moisture away. In
the dazzling sunlight, I glittered like a life-sized diamond, as I sauntered down
the ramp. Walking towards and into a lifetime more of liquid remembrances and
shifting shapes.
