That’s when I threw up. Frothy yeast-like puddles formed at
my feet. Think Tana, think. Hysteria is not an option here. That there is hard to get rid of DNA! By virtue of my profession, I knew that. I stared at the pool of vomit, mentally slapping myself. Get a grip. Springing up, I cleaned up the mess feverishly, and then scribbled across a sticker with the felt pen. There. I pasted it on the refrigerator. A three-word epitaph for Mummy, OUT-OF-ORDER. Why not? It describes her well. On an impulse, I wrote the word HAZARDOUS right under the elegy. Again, though not a poignant one but irrefutably a fitting nickname in the light of her capers in the past hour.
And this unfortunate incident? What are you my dear Tana
in a flap about? Is it unheard of? A daughter hurting her mother? No Ma’am—it’s not the first time or the last. Common enough sentence: Often you hurt the very people whom you love the most. And not exactly unchartered territory for me.
I dumped the bag into the box too, before using up a full roll of stickers to paste all around the edges of the chiller’s
seam—sheer wastage of paper; I should treat my planet more thoughtfully—for whatever it was worth. Ripping it off would be child’s play if anyone wished to do so.
That’s when Anupam hurtled into the room like a crash cart.
“Uh, Sister Tana? What are you doing?”
Not the most serendipitous encounter! Dumbstruck, I stared
at him as though he had interrupted a séance.
“Well?”
Finding my tongue, I blurted, “I was admiring them,” —I
pointed at glass jars with organs from deceased folks— “it’s
my hobby.” My pulse shot up several notches.
“That’s your hobby? Get a life, Sister.” Sniffing sinisterly,
he said, “Something smells … like puke.”
“Corpse.”
“Corpse?”
Hanging in by a thread, I pointed at the door. “The smell of
your er … raw-material probably percolates through the door.”
Just as I started to panic, fighting off a sense of danger, he
said, “Happy, uh, organ watching.” Then picked up a jar with an eyeball in it, before walking out.
That went wrong in about a thousand different ways, I
thought. But still, right too. He can order anything, absolutely anything on the menu.
Shortly, I drifted back into the nurses station, pretending to
be busy with my phone.
“Hey Tana, your mother came to visit,” Rosy told me.
“Really.” I shrugged. “Why?”
“She asked for you; tried your phone, too.”
“I’ll call her. The battery’s dead.” Smile and I’ll kill you too.
“Someone’s been naughty.” She pointed at my shoulder. “A love bite?”
Is that a threat? A trick question? Does she need to join
Mummy in the fridge? Oh, Raspreet, the girl who trolls around
for stories, drink the elixir of your Guru’s name for the very
last time… Dear Diary, before you leap out of my hands to judge me like Papa did, let me educate you—that’s how God made us homo sapiens. It is He who entrenched this instinct for survival in every living being, embedding it in our DNA. Watch the docudrama series, I Shouldn’t Be Alive and you’ll know what I’m about. This series tells the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who found themselves in epic survival situations. First person accounts from the survivors combine with re-enactments to bring back to life the emotional and physical journey they faced in their fight to stay alive. This here, right now is my fight. Honestly? In all good conscience I was loathe to snuff out a bystander in the drama of my life.
I glanced down only to see a pink bruise on my shoulder. “Um … I guess.” My face was on fire as though I had put on a molten lava mask. I fumbled in my bag, took out a pill and scoffed it down hastily. She doesn’t know anything. It’s my mind that’s playing tricks. Not her.
“What was that for?”
“Harmless Benzos,” I lied, noticing her worried expression.
Diary, later in the day when Dr. Varun eyed my wound
suspiciously, initially I hemmed and hawed suitably: “It’s
nothing.” And then when he persisted with his questioning, I
gabbed on, “The fried-egg wasn’t to his liking, Vikram likes
his eggs a specific way: Omelettes—fluffy, well done and
folded. What does he say? `Not flat like uthappams. `”
“Such a pig.”
Warming up, I continued, “French toast—golden-fried and
crisp. Fried eggs—sunny side up, perfectly round, not runny,
sprinkled with sea-salt and on hot and crisp toast. So, the toast wasn’t crunchy enough and he jabbed his fork right here.” My lower lip quivered like jelly. In the aftermath of the traumatic
accident, shock had permeated and shaken my soul to the core,
translating into deeply distressed body language. And I have to
say, the scratches resembled the tines of a fork to the tee.
“Who does he think he is? The Sultan of Brunei?” Varun
said, “far bigger worries in the world than his eggs. Thank God he doesn’t want perfectly poached eggs—a hard thing to cook. I’ve heard you say ‘people are unknowable.’ Now I know what you mean. Although he seems like such a docile chap. Appearances sure can be deceptive.” And then he rubbed the corner of his lips with his thumb and finger. “He may be drugging you too.”
“Wh-what? What makes you say that?” I smiled inwardly.
“A little bird called Rosy may have told me something about you blacking out. I think we should go the police. Unquestionably, this is domestic abuse.” He stood up. “I know the commissioner. He’s a seasoned cop.”
I pushed back the chair and stood up too. “No, no, Sir, I know you mean well but I know I can change him, I promise. I
want to give this relationship some more time. Patience and
fortitude have helped salvage many.”
He nodded, albeit rather reluctantly. “Here, this’ll help.” He
gave me a few white, biconvex tablets, “You can repeat up to
every four hours.”
I recognized the tablets to be codeine sulphate opioid
analgesic from my rehab days. It had helped with the
withdrawal symptoms.
Late evening, after clocking out, I drove some distance away from the hospital into a deserted alley. No CCTV here. On foot, I rummaged through a few dumpsters. I was ready. A
raincoat, a cap, some soot on my face and I was soon heave-
hoeing Mummy out of the box.
Just one look at her greyish blue body, and I began to
hyperventilate, spiralling down a dark abyss. Please be alive.
No luck there. Drugs, this one’s on you. Clearly.
Minutes later, she lay quiet as a mouse in her death bed which happened to be a cold locker in the morgue. Your spectacles—they’re cracked. I’ll get you new ones, I thought as I removed them carefully off her face. Oh no, you don’t need them. You are gone. This second thought left me gasping for air, overcome as I was with sorrow and gagged as I was from the putrid smell of the rags. The glasses fell to pieces in my hand. Possibly, the befuddlement of my mind could be attributed to my grief and the day’s cocktail of drugs.
Oh, Diary, this was my worst day ever. Singing’s not gonna
help tonight. No way. It’s not fair what happened. But then there’s nothing fair about survival. Life’s full of impossible
choices. Secretly, mother-mine wanted to be with father-mine
being the two sides of a khota-sikka, a fake coin. That’s the
only way I can make sense of why it happened. My mother’s a twinkling star, high up in the sky, shining like a bright diamond.
So, I’ve given you a blow by blow account of the
incident
. Did I just say that? Pun NOT intended. Oh, Mummy.
Oh, Diary, I seek you like a lost girl looking for the right path—turns out all roads lead to you.
In mourning,
Tana Sharma
“THERE YOU GO.” I SLIDE the eye-mask on the Diary’s eyes. “Am I so unlovable?” I ask myself. Mummy didn’t love me either—it was all a pretence. Turns out she was ready to sell me down the river, going all psycho on me. “And this fellow here.” I glare at Vikram. “The ACCOUNTANT, that’s who he is: Keeping this bahi-khata to note down my transactions.” I kick his leg off me. “Move that stump.” Needless to say, the rough day is taking its toll on me.
People are unknowable. “Mummy, whatever happened to ‘I would lay my life for you without a thought’? Life sucks! Is no one trustworthy? Betrayal after betrayal!” I think the Diary looks gutted. To assuage her pain, I raise my hand, “Okay, okay, you don’t need to answer that—that was rhetorical. People just say things. They don’t necessarily mean them. We do have each other, dear Diary. I trust you. Present company excluded from my circle of mistrust. You make up for everybody. You and me, always. You’re mo Anam Cara—our bond cuts across all convention and category, with you I feel a sense of belonging, solidarity and recognition.
“Dear friend, I hate to shatter the illusion but this world isn’t a kind one. Turns out that even parents can be heartless— mine treated me like a weed despite naming me a stem, a plant. So, pardon me if I’m a little sceptical of the ways of the world. However, let’s not let it get our goat,” I whisper to her.
Lullaby-time:
“Hush-A-Bye-Baby…”
‘Weird, weird, weird,’ Mummy screams inside my head in
her limited vocabulary. She never did understand anything I
did or do. I explain patiently to her ghost, “Mummy, the
thing is it’s rather difficult for me to hear my thoughts at
bedtime—convoluted as they are, thanks to the cruel ways of
the world. Singing helps crowd, or is it drown, them out.
Hush-A-Bye-Baby…”
“Who are you talking and um … singing to?” Vikram
elbows my ribs. Alarmed, I jerk backward, bumping my
head against the headboard.
“Sorry… old habit. To myself. Gotta kick it off some
day…” I curl up like a baby in the womb and resume
singing the lullaby, thinking positive thoughts. Pretty, soon,
really, it’ll all go away. It’ll stop bothering you, Tana. You’ll
move forward. Not surprisingly, I strongly desire the very thing I had dreaded until tonight—oblivion promised by
Coke, Meth, moon rocks or the like. Maybe I can memorize
the Hanuman Chalisa. Vikram swears by it.
And then that offensive knock again. I sit bolt upright.
Does no one sleep in this house? It wouldn’t surprise me to see Shobha Didi sleep-walking the corridors.
“Who’s that?”
“Sister Tana, it was you, wasn’t it?” Shobha Didi’s voice sounds like the warning rattle of a rattle snake.
“What?” My heart falls to the bottom of my stomach.
“It was you who threw the walnuts?”
“Uh-huh, yes. They’d turned rancid.”
“Don’t do that again. I was gonna send them to Pitampura for oil-extraction.”
“Sorry.” I grimace. Go slither under a rock, snake-snitch. Poisoning Mummy with your slimy tales!
“The almond peels?” she asks.
If she’s challenging me to a verbal duel, I have no
particular desire at that moment to engage in it. So, I stay
silent. And then I remember and run to open the door. “Sorry,
Didi. Peels have oil too?”
She makes a face at my ignorance. “They were to go in a
scrub.”
“I’ll remember. Could you pack Kashmiri biryani for lunch?
Thank you so much.”
“Sure,” —a closer look at my face and she shrinks back—
“what happened to you? You look dead on your feet. Get some
rest.”
And your purple lipstick doesn’t do you any good either.
More a serpent than a servant. Go annoy someone else! I slam the door in her face. Maybe I can call a snake charmer to lure her out of Lutyens.
Seventeen
HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH
DEAR DIARY
IT IS HALF past twelve, and I write with a heavy heart on this dreary night as grief claws at my innards.
Harrowing day at the hospital today—am absolutely appalled at what transpired. My head’s spinning, going round and round in circles as though I danced around a mulberry bush.
To start with, I touched Mummy’s feet before keeping the foil wrapped biryani on her face. Her favourite dish.
“I wish I could have given you a respectful cremation, Mummy.” I kissed her goodbye. “But you left me with no choice.”
Then I mixed sodium hydroxide with water, heated the lye mixture to boiling, and liquified her along with her phone. Later when I went in to check on her, expectedly the tissue had dissolved and the carcass was reduced to a brownish sludge, leaving only a skeleton. Oh, my Mummy’s bones. I dumped all except for one—it feels good to have a piece of her, to bring home to give her the decent cremation she deserves. Let’s get you home Mummy, reunited with Papa. A match made in heaven.
Shobha Didi’s knock interrupted me mid-thought. “Set the
alarm for six a.m.”
“What was it again?” My brain groped for a hint.
“I told you, didn’t I? To show you how to skim the cream off the milk.”
“Sounds terribly exciting.” I made a face. “Do you want me to take notes?”
Vikram rolled his leg onto my thigh. I lifted it up from under his knee and then let it slam back hard onto the bed.
Grieving still,
Tana Sharma
PEN DOWN, I TIPTOE TO the bathroom to get my hands on a couple of stupid-oblong-light-green roofies hidden cleverly inside a potted plant. After bolting them down with a glass of red, I crash on the bed. Vikram has been in snore land for hours now after having played his mandatory twenty rounds of Tetris.
No sooner do I close my eyes than once again, Mummy arrives unannounced, this time around in my mind, and as a ghost, dead as a door nail. Wan, weary, and woebegone, I cry, Oh, Mummy, please, are you going to traumatize me for eternity? This is the land of the living. You brought your end upon yourself. So, deal with it. Aren’t those your very own words of advice to me? Soon, the green monsters I downed begin to do their job. The same med I gave Mummy to save her from pain, only hers had been the ampule form. Dosage for me: Couldn’t be bothered. Use: So I can sleep. Side-effects: Don’t know. Don’t care.
Her face blue, Mummy purrs, “Wake up.”
“Wake up, Tana.”
Waking up with a jerk, I half open an eye, feeling
unaccountably frightened. Gronked, I touch my face only to
discover a nose that is damp from crying.
“It’s okay,” says Vikram, blowing cigar smoke onto my
nose as though to dry it, “there, there, it’s just a dream. The sun’s out since ages. Wake up.”
“You’re not Mu-mmy,” my voice cracks. I cough,
propping my head on my palm as I dig my elbow into the satin
bedsheet.
“Thank God I’m not.” He pulls me on top of him, putting aside his game.
“Tetris again?”
“No, Candy Crush.”
Tap, tap. There you go. The knock again. “Memsaab, I have
to run the machine,” says Phoolvati, one of the members of the highly trained two-women SWAT team, “clothes give ji.”
Eighteen
LITTLE BO-PEEP
DEAR DIARY
IT IS A quarter past eleven, on a Wednesday night in September, and I write from my
conjugal bed in 39-Lutyens Bungalow.
I can hardly believe I have been married for only seven months to the chimney/windbag. Seems like an eternity. I feel I’m little Bo-Peep who has lost her sheep, lost as I am in Lutyens Bungalow Zone.
So, this is the thing I have been meaning to write about—how this institution of marriage has begun to stifle me. The weather’s muggy too. Hellish Delhi. It’s as if the city’s one big boiling cauldron.
Admittedly, it’s my fault—I rushed into marriage like a burst dam. No wonder the alliance cannot handle the pressure and is slowly disintegrating.
Why does everything bad happen to me? In what world do
new brides sign up for waking to the sounds of whistling snores, breaking wind, and noisy children? Why couldn’t I have foreseen all the above? So many questions with one simple answer—I’d married him on a stupid whim imagining I had fallen in love.
Suffice it to say, love is blind. I clearly remember thinking
he’s the ultimate in good looks. Though I still think he’s not bad looking—after all, he’s tall, and has a nice face cut: Square-ish, rectangular… perhaps once upon a time that were so but now… amoeba-like-more-like—with that fleshy lobe hanging down his chin. Somehow, I didn’t mind it then but I do terribly mind now. God knows why. Hairs sprouting from his ears and ugh … even the neck. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. He refuses to visit the dentist or the laser-hair-removal clinic.
‘That’s for girls,’ says the regressive fellow. Now that I’m on the case, let me add another thing that drives me up the wall; his complete apathy for hygiene while using the toilet—despite the creepy fact that that’s where he spends a sizeable part of his life (favorite haunt, not a bar, not a park but a toilet)—leaves the seat up, doesn’t wash his hands properly. What good are Forest Essentials soaps for anyone unless you unwrap and use them?
Anyway, the worst thing: He’s rich—though I have my doubts now, for all I know he could be one of those bank defaulters with outstanding loans amounting to crores of rupees—but terribly stingy.
ROSE’S BENT STEM: Girl Tangled. 'Best thriller of 2019,' -The Tribune Page 12