Figments

by Abhishek Udaykumar

Eat the orange one at a time, she said, not realizing how little sense it made. She meant, eat each segment one after the other, it was pleasurable that way, though she wasn’t always around when we paused for the day; and the boys were trying to play cricket on the terrace again though the ball kept falling to the street. We watched them through our bay window, the old city had such structures in those years, and the balconies were circular with French grills and creepers running along their powdery pillars. Our bay window had a diwan attached to it and the view outside was a cold and narrow alley with pushcarts and shrouded figures trying to get past each other. We had worn purple all of last week and the sun had left the city white and flaky like a stiff macaroon, while its tall sandstone walls fortified the worlds at the bottom of each lane. And how deep the street felt from the diwan, the people crawled like insects along the city’s seabed, as women shook their sieves high on the rooftops and hung their elongated clothes in colourful columns along the peeling buildings. I didn’t return to the city after my uncle robbed my mother’s share of the inheritance; but I never believed her when she told me that the street had felt that way because I was still a child. The entrance to the house was barely visible – a little door on one side of the building that needed a thrashing to swing open, leading up a spiral staircase inside a minaret like tower, with little windows at intervals and no landings, as the door to each house appeared along the way – opening into big single-floored flats that instantly felt like home. Jugni lived upstairs but she was mostly with us, she spoke too much but we hardly ever spent time together without her. My parent’s room was a pastry of unraveling clothes and ancient things that hadn’t found a home in all their decades there. My mother’s dressing table stood in the middle, like it was meant to be in a museum, and the beds that clung to the walls sat lower than my father’s floor desk. The diwan was the highest seat in the room.

The central market came down when I was in college and the first mall of the city was built in its place. The traffic around the area was unimaginable for weeks – my mother told me about it over the phone for three straight days. She called me once a month because I said I wanted to be ‘independent’ like the other girls in the hostel. I came back home that summer but the mall was commonplace by then. It was the first sign of what became the ‘new town,’ beyond Park where the roads were broader than the highways that led to the airport. I sometimes longed for the train journeys home every summer, but sometimes I felt sad when I reached the cantonment and found myself back in the old steelwork’s bazaar. Jugni studied in the city and she still lived with her parents, but it didn’t change things between us till my final year. By then, she had finally given up on Mahi and had found a way to live without wishing for him while still thinking about him.

The three of us would sneak out in the afternoons when our parents were asleep, to buy ice-lollies outside the cobbler’s quarters and watch the fights that broke out by the liquor hovels. We would shuffle about the streets till the world bored us and we found ourselves in Lal Maidan, where people played cricket and ran around with kites like they were trying to fly. We would laze about on the big wide pavilion where the audience sat when the city played matches against other districts; but our parents didn’t let us go watch them so my uncle took us on his scooter, the three of us hugging each other one behind the other as he waved at passing strangers, fearing that he would topple us into the gutters, the breeze lifting us by the hair till we nearly forgot about the match and wanted to ride through the city forever and ever. We would return in the evening and Mahi would always walk back home by himself, to the end of the street and around the corner into the row of low-lying brick homes where I had never been, though it was just down the road, it had always made me imagine his lonely walk at the end of a day when we parted ways. There were sights and smells in the city that I couldn’t have talked about, because my life, like every other schoolgirl’s, was a routine, I knew what I was allowed to see, and a little more that I managed to discover on my own. Like the time that I decided to walk back home after school on a whim, it was the only time I did it, and I still didn’t know where I found the guts – to hide in the bathroom until school was out and the buses had left, and follow the lanes that cut through the city, trying to find my way back to my neighbourhood. There were times when I didn’t know where I was headed, and my legs stiffened, my throat drying till it felt like a roll of sandpaper, my eyes sweating with the fear of scary people appearing out of alleys like in the movies. But nobody did anything to me and though it had felt like an era, I eventually found myself back where I had started and followed the usual bus route instead, until a young girl accosted me at a dusty junction and held onto my uniform, pleading with me to come with her and buy her a meal, as she had grown sick of begging for money and just wanted to eat.

Jugni began to sing in the fourth-grade. Mahi’s mother ran a vocals class at her house ever since she quit teaching at school, I heard she was still teaching despite her hip replacement. I often thought about how I spent a lot of my teenage years imagining Mahi’s house and Jugni sitting in the living room with the other students, she used to tell me about it, but Mahi was a quiet boy and he didn’t speak about much besides football, becoming a pilot and living in Spain someday. We always believed that the idea emerged from something rudimentary like the kind of cars they drove in the country and that his favourite football players lived there. But Mahi wasn’t expat material and he ended up living ten kilometers away from where he grew up and worked in a multinational company. Jugni still spoke about him when we talked over the phone and I listened patiently like I had done all my life. His house was part of a colony that had once been constructed to resettle refugees from across the border, it was a long, flat structure that almost looked luxurious considering the current claustrophobia of vertical construction, with spacious gardens surrounding the houses, though they had largely turned to a wilderness of grass, save for a few patches that were looked after by families with a passion for gardening; but the interiors were small with narrow corridors and big rackety windows and washing areas and grinders made of stone installed in the backyards. There weren’t as many shops around the colony when we were children, except for an old tailor who preferred working outside his store on the elevated plaza, where a little ice-cream shop and a stationary shop stood side by side. Jugni and the students would loiter about the colony after class and then at the plaza, before they finally went back home just before dark. She would sometimes come straight home and sit next to me on the sofa while I was in the middle of a movie and tell me about how his mother had made ginger cookies for them, and how Mahi oiled his hair in the evenings.

I used to play chess by myself every time I felt sad. I would snuggle into a quilt on the diwan and watch the rain pelt the city like it had done something wrong, as my mother complained about the damp staircase and how she should have bought the week’s groceries earlier. My father had begun to talk about moving out of his ancestral house because it would get harder to climb up the staircase as the years went by. They fancied living in the ‘new town’ in an apartment with elevators and a walking track, once I was through with school and my college expenses had been sorted out. But they didn’t move till I finished college and began work in a new city in the South. By then, my parents had had enough of the old building and the colonies around it that would never change, the lack of parking in the streets and the forever mess, the noise and the growing pollution in the air, the leaky ceiling and the dull kitchen that had seen more bulbs than the store down the street had sold in a decade. They didn’t fathom themselves maintaining the house and sold it before they moved into their dream home on the other side of the city. Sometimes, towards the end of the day, when my office grew quiet and nothing moved, I would melt into the couch outside the pantry and close my eyes, and feel like I was back on my diwan, looking down at the cobbly street, the big bay window hazy in the mid-afternoon glare, a day after the thunderstorm, fiddling with the chessboard from the previous day, mulling over the precious weekend and how much I wanted to be Mahi’s special someone, but couldn’t do anything about it for Jugni’s sake, though I knew that he would never like her back, for she was superficial and ignorant about things outside her world, unlike him; because I had known her since we were born, and Mahi had come along when we were nine, we had a world before him and somehow no matter how long I lived, that period always seemed like it occupied a significant portion of my life, and I couldn’t betray the bond we shared around our first discoveries in the world. Until that day. Mahi had come home because he wanted to watch aero planes from the terrace of my building, because his colony was too low and didn’t offer him a clear view of the sky. We went up to the terrace, I took a water gun with me in case Jugni happened to come by, although I knew I would simply end up making a fool of myself, as I watched him survey the horizon with great sincerity, his grandfather’s binoculars glued to his face, despite the empty sky, waiting patiently for the mid-afternoon planes bound for the Middle-East. He always grew excited when he saw a cargo plane, though they were rather infrequent. It wasn’t just their size that intrigued him, but their lack of windows and giant wings. I stood up and strolled along the big glass walls that looked out into a lush manicured lawn and a pathway lined with lampposts and silver oak trees. The others were at the canteen but I had a meeting in half an hour and I was supposed to be preparing. It wasn’t anything that I did about Mahi that changed our relationship, but what I didn’t do. I hadn’t intended to trip on my shoelaces, while he was busy with his planes, but I fell anyway and though it hadn’t hurt much, I feigned a sprain and refused to get up, until he was forced to escort me back home, down the spiral staircase, with all his strength, as I limped along and did my best not to overact, past Jugni’s house till we were finally home, sweating as he held me and worried for the first and last time in his life about letting go of me.

My mother was the last person out of the house when my parents moved. Nothing had been left behind, even the old cabinet in the corner that had been collapsing in stages over the years had been rescued and transported across the city. I never forgot how my mother slung her handbag over her shoulder as she made her way to the door, as though she were headed out to the milk parlour like every other morning, till it hit her that it would be her last time out, and she turned back slowly to face the house she had lived in all her married life, always putting things back where they belonged and making sure the floor beneath the carpets was swept every day even if I made a fuss and had to move my things while she cleaned, all in vain – as though it had just been a game. I couldn’t watch her. I knew she was crying her silent cry; I knew this moment would come so I finished crying on the way back home, but no amount of anticipation could diminish that image of my mother standing between the door and the hallway, staring at the shell of our home, the straps of her handbag slipping down her shoulders as she held an irrelevant cushion that wouldn’t fit into the suitcases.  

Mahi usually went to play football in the evenings. And Jugni’s classes began soon after we returned from school, till it was time for him to go out and play. He would laze around in the verandah, the room with the big grilled window that overlooked the colony, before the hallway – where the students sang and held their palms out for his mother to strike them with a bamboo twig. Sometimes he would kick a ball around the yard and the stone paths that zig-zagged around the colony, waiting for his friends to come. Jugni would watch him through the hall doorway and the grilled window, singing poorly before she was rapped on her knuckles. She almost never had a chance to speak to him during her classes, in all those years that she learnt classical music; my house had always been their meeting point and I was always the spectator of their one-sided affair. It was past ten and there were bats hanging on the neem tree outside my window like pouchy fruits. I was making progress in my martial art class and I had made a friend who had promised to come home for dinner that weekend. I had begun to read again and bake once every two weeks, in the oven that I had bought over the new year in a discount sale. I remembered telling Jugni the next day about how Mahi had taken care of me after I had tripped over myself and sprained my ankle. I had rehearsed the night before as I stared at the ceiling, waiting to fall asleep, exacting the tone and pace and pronunciation of my carefully chosen words. She had come home expecting Mahi to already be there but I had asked him not to come because of my leg, though I was well enough to go downstairs that morning and buy a few packets of milk when my mother threatened to starve me if I didn’t. Jugni listened to me with big eyes, becoming still as I performed each moment with deliberation, stretching my legs across the diwan as she sat partially against the opposite corner. I could tell that she would never forget it.

I went downstairs to pick up a delivery and saw a heron perched on the compound wall between my apartment complex and the next. There were times when I spent the whole day cooking and spent the remaining hours washing up, before falling asleep with the music on. It was sunnier than it was hot and even the shadows were hesitant about stretching themselves in the afternoon sun. I was about to go back upstairs with my things when someone called. I was aware of how poorly dressed I was and I wanted to get back indoors as soon as I could, but I had a habit of picking up the phone no matter where I was. I once received a call when I was on the treadmill, and tried really hard to have a conversation despite the speed of the machine. It was an old college friend who was in town and wanted to meet, and though I wasn’t interested, I placed the delivery against a pillar and put the phone to my ear, the heron dancing along the wall and turning to me when I said hello. That night, when I returned from the restaurant, I found an old toy from the house I had grown up in, it had found its way into my bag accidentally after my parents had shifted, a buoyant rubber whale that used to sing every time it was immersed in water – in another lifetime. I had bought it for Mahi on his twelfth birthday, but I had never given it to him. I had realized how funny it was and how Jugni’s present had been a lot cooler, a mini steel fighter jet that he still kept on his office desk. I was tipsy and the house suddenly seemed lonesome and quiet, my friend from college had felt like a guest, a person who needed my entertainment but wouldn’t accept my dependence. I had a good job and made enough money to save up for the thoughtless future, I lived in a better city than I had grown up in and my parents were happier than they had hoped to be; I cooked and cleaned and exercised before work, my colleagues went out on the weekends and I went along if I had the inclination, a few of them had become my friends, and I had accepted that friendship between adults was more like an agreement and that things couldn’t be like childhood again; I went to my martial art class thrice a week and travelled to the coast with my friends in the long weekends – and tried not to call Mahi or think about how he and Jugni still lived in the same city. I sank into the sofa and switched on the news. I didn’t want to go home ever again.

BIO

Abhishek Udaykumar is a writer, filmmaker and painter from India. He graduated from Royal Holloway University of London with English and Creative Writing. He writes short stories, novels and essays and makes documentaries and fiction films. His narratives reflect the human condition of rural and urban communities. He has been published in different literary journals, and has made thirteen films and several series of paintings.