August’24 Issue: Short Stories and Fiction

You’ve Already Won Me Over, In Spite of Me by Shuktara Lal

She absently raised her hand across her chest, placed it on her shoulder, cupping it as if to offer it support as she looked at the gulmohar tree outside the lone window in the corridor. The outside mirrored the interiors of her workplace today – grey, insipid.  Except the gulmohar. Like all the trees in the city, it did not demand to be seen and yet, if one’s eyes happened to fall on the tree, the interplay of red and green and yellow and brown dispelled all thoughts and emotions that bore them down. Perhaps for a few seconds, perhaps a couple of minutes they were still, as if nothing else existed, only the tree in front of them.

Shayoni noted her body respond to the stillness, breathing it in, a deep full-bodied breath that expanded her spine. Her toes pressed down into her not very comfortable shoes and she raised herself ever so slightly. There was nothing still about her office. It was an everyday steroid fest with multiple everythings that were expected to be completed, stat. Shayoni’s director’s primary circle of friends, all originally from Kolkata, were now heading divisions of assorted organisations, schools and businesses in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, New York, London and Shayoni often got the sense that to pre-empt the very formation of thoughts in their heads about Kolkata being slow and work crawling in the city, she had taken it upon herself to ensure that no one – in the city or outside – could force-fit her organisation into the (sometimes benign) jokes and (often mordant) jibes about the work culture of “Cal”. Bearing the brunt of this, of course, were the hapless 80 people working with her, resigned to carry home what they couldn’t finish during office hours and clock late nights to meet deliverables and keep up the image of speed their director had decided was their USP.

“Not that we get even half of what those other places are paying their employees in Delhi and Mumbai,” was a common refrain muttered over lunch when there was time for two colleagues to eat together.

“My niece in New York was shocked to hear how long our days are. She said she doesn’t know how I manage,” Amrita admittedly looked somewhat stoked for being the object of awe.

It was Amrita who on seeing Shayoni clasping her shoulder one day had enquired what was wrong and on hearing that she’d virtually overnight developed a stiffness and pain whenever she lifted her arm, retorted, “Perimenopause. Amaro hoyechhilo. Two years. Tarpor aste aste chole gelo.”[1]

“Could be blood clots from Covid vaccine. Take leave, see a doctor,” Jasmine offered as she rushed off to a meeting with her supervisor.

“Three years after taking the vaccine…?” Shayoni looked at Amrita who shook her head and mouthed “perimenopause” again.

A break-up after three years of trying to make a relationship work. A job that made her feel nothing but fatigued. The growing realisation that she would never have a child. And now perimenopause or Covid blood clots.

She didn’t share any of this with Amrita. Instead, she nodded and ventured a wry smile.

That night she was flying out to Manila to watch Alanis Morissette. Live. Three months ago, when she saw the concert announcement, she paused, then tabled it for later. It seemed risky to take two days’ leave on the pretext of going out of town (for a family wedding? family weddings sat well with HR) but in reality vanish without a trace from the country. What if there were an emergency? A month later, she bought her ticket, immediately asking her travel agent (who moonlit as her co-conspirator) to proceed with flights and visa. Last night, she’d packed her carry-on, including distributing contact lens solution, moisturizer and facial creams into the tiny containers she’d begun collecting to avoid exceeding 100 ML.  

Shayoni had learned to keep this version of herself under wraps from the people she shared her days with. To use leave to watch a concert would guarantee barbed comments about how lucky she was to be single, how she could up and leave for “exotic” getaways whenever she wanted, how she didn’t have responsibilities. Like several of their married counterparts across the country, they saw the single female experience as a stretch of predictable terrain that could be partitioned four ways – career-driven women with “no time”, women who must be “lacking” in some department because nothing else explained their being unpartnered (therefore pitiable and lonely), women who were “difficult” and women with impossibly high standards. There were no pockets of elasticity for the complexity and nuance permitted within married female experiences. Shayoni had two other colleagues who were single and they would occasionally lock eyes with each other, smile, as if to share in code they got it. But they desisted from broaching it explicitly.

********

How does one be feminist and articulate loneliness? Shayoni struggled with this. She was mourning the end of a relationship, mourning that she would never be a parent but articulating it made her get slotted into the pitiable and lonely box. Before she stopped talking about it, advice was not in short supply. When she’d told a friend she was grieving experiences she would never have, prompt was the rejoinder that she didn’t need a partner for IVF or adoption (the alacrity she displayed with that bit of wisdom would win her director’s approval, Shayoni informed her friend). Others told her she needed to put herself out there and approach dating apps with the drive of a Meta data analyst. When she said she didn’t want to be a single parent and when they heard about the dates she waded through (not unlike wading through flooded Kolkata lanes during the monsoons), their advice dried up. Forget a relationship, merely the basics hadn’t been a few swipes away. All her friends were married and sometimes they felt guilty about that when they were around her – as if they were enabling a system that isolated women like her – even those of her friends whose marriages were internally falling apart. Others didn’t know what to do with a problem that wasn’t fixable and began to look vaguely uncomfortable when the topic arose.

She stopped talking about it because she felt she was an island unto herself in Kolkata. She was doing very well financially at a job that she was good at but with every passing day becoming more indifferent to. She was ostensibly successful with a 3 BHK flat of her own, enough space for guests. She knew she was perceived by her circles as independent, which she was, yet she was also acutely aware of her aloneness every single day, acutely aware that this wasn’t the life she’d thought she’d be living.

But you can’t be so socially stable and yearn to share your life with someone as well; it wasn’t an amicable binary. If anything, it seemed to make others nervous.

Her phone beeped and she let go of her shoulder. It was Mia:

On the A, have a meeting downtown. Thought of us taking the subway together. Started crying. Still crying. PM or legit grief? [This was followed by the eye roll emoji and the large grin emoji.]

Shayoni and Mia were attempting categorizing triggers that caused them to tear up out of the blue into Perimenopause or Grief Resulting from Life Events. So far, they’d been unable to classify any of their episodes with any conviction.

Shayoni felt the tears well up in her own eyes. Laughing, she turned away from the dazzling tapestry of life-force in front of her and headed back to her computer. Two more hours till she could punch out and then another couple till she left home for the airport.

************

From the moment she is cleared by the security personnel and she enters the airport, she feels a change of pace. It’s a pace she has control over. She breezes through check in and security, sashaying through both within 20 minutes. In all the times she has flown out of NSC Bose, she has never encountered any lags or snags. She seems to glide to her gate, she sits down. The duration of her flights and the layovers first in Singapore and when returning, Kuala Lumpur, would be longer than the time she would actually be at Manila but she doesn’t mind. She checks notifications on her work WhatsApp groups. 49 messages have come in one of them: she has to wade downstream through 29 thumbs ups and noted-s after reading the one that has caused the flurry of activity. She deletes the messages and types Ja- in the search box and his message window shows up as the first result. She opens it and looks at his last seen. It’s a habit she hasn’t been able to lose. She starts typing, “Going to watch Ala”, backspaces all of it, clicks the ‘back’ arrow twice (first click back to search results, next click back to her latest messages) and returns to her home screen.

Years ago, much before they’d started dating, he’d given her an Alanis tee (which she will wear tomorrow to the concert). She misses, most of all, their friendship. He doesn’t want them to be in touch anymore. She closes her eyes and switches off her head.

*************

12 hours later she is in Manila more wired on account of muted paranoia that she will fall asleep in the concert given that she never sleeps well in flights and on top of that, work has kept her up the nights before. The first thing she does while she waits at immigration is turn on her phone with the same paranoia that her international roaming plan won’t work – it’s an obstacle race entirely of her creation that she trundles through whenever she travels out of the country (and she travels a lot) with the last hoop in this case being finding the concert venue and collecting the physical ticket in time. Her roaming plan activates seamlessly. She queues up for a taxi; the man driving it is friendly and they chat about Kolkata, Manila, both of them equally self-deprecating about the cities they live in. He knows about the concert and is impressed that she has come all the way to the Philippines just to catch Alanis Morissette. She is apologetic about coming solely for the concert, explains getting more leave from work wasn’t an option and says she will have to plan another trip to do justice to his country as a tourist.

At the hotel which she chose for its proximity to the venue, she freshens up cursorily, impatient to clear that last obstacle. She verifies the location shown on Apple Maps with the hotel receptionists, distrustful of both tech and her ability to navigate, and darts out. It’s a less than 10-minute walk (she chose the hotel well). The same irrational nervousness resurfaces as she reaches the box office (what if it’s closed, what if there’s a mix up with her voucher). She shows her voucher and receives her ticket. She wonders why she can’t be like one of those people who never worry about these things. Why she can’t manifest positivity.

But now she’s all set. Even she can’t conjure up a scenario that could go wrong from here.

This time, at the hotel, she lingers, showering, wearing what she’d picked out for the concert weeks ago (including that tee), doing her makeup. She goes to the restaurant and eats an early dinner.

The concert is at 8, she is out of the hotel at 7.15. It’s raining so she runs back in to grab her umbrella. She can safely leave a little later but the problem with not manifesting positivity is let’s wait till it subsides is submerged by it will get worse and you won’t get a taxi. And she certainly did not come all this way to miss the beginning of a concert because she pulled a Hamlet with rain. She breaks into laughter and dives into the rain. The wind, in Manila, she notes is worse than the rain and her umbrella is yanked inside out before she can even cross over to the main road. Woman struck by lightning / gusts of wind on way to Alanis Morissette concert dies. She reaches the SM Mall of Asia Arena drenched but alive.

It’s when she finds her seat and finally sits down that the sheer scale of this moment surges through her at last. Alanis has seen her through her life since 1996 when she bought Jagged Little Pill out of teenage curiosity and was blown away after she heard it on her Walkman. She would pour over the lyrics on her cassette’s inlay card and school night after school night listen to the songs in bed when she should have been sleeping. Alanis was scrappy. She didn’t try to sound mellifluous and dulcet unlike all the other female vocalists she’d heard till then. Her voice was real. Relatable. She didn’t exercise any kind of censorship on the questions she asked. She didn’t believe in filters but neither was she brash. She questioned everything, politely. 15-year-old Shayoni worshipped her. And 41-year-old worse for the wear but still-standing Shayoni who has asked so many questions over the years finds in her a kindred soul. Every record she has released has spoken to something she was going through at the time if not experientially, then emotionally. She is among her most constant relationships.

The arena is filling up; she is surrounded by other women. The air they breathe in and exhale is a lightweight gossamer duvet of anticipation, atoms of headiness dancing in and around them. Filipino singer-songwriter, Ice Seguerra, parts the air, opening the night. He is welcomed warmly and partakes of the unuttered understanding that he is a bridge carrying over 15,000 women (and men) to their main destination. The air parts again (several spilling-over-with-excitement minutes later) with a video montage of Alanis. The arena erupts, they scan the stage for signs of an entrance. The panoply of clippings morphs into the opening riffs of “All I Really Want”, when Shayoni (perhaps everyone else too?) least expects it and Alanis enters the stage. She seems almost diminutive, dressed casually in an oversized t-shirt, jeans and sneakers, like one of them. Except she isn’t and as she strides across the stage with power, assuredness and, simultaneously, softness, Shayoni watches in wonder. It’s as if she’s become the women she sang about in “Incomplete” – both attached and (securely) detached from the effect she has had and continues to have on swathes of millennial women. Generation X-ers too. She leads them through “Hand in My Pocket”, “Right Through You”, “You Learn”, “Forgiven” without stopping; Shayoni is numb, alternating between recording videos on her phone and memorizing her without tech aids. She wheels into “Head Over Feet” and half way through it Shayoni falls back in her chair. This time, she doesn’t think of Jay. She thinks of his sister. They’d gone to concerts together, spent hours talking about politics, music, art, gender. She’d sent her long messages after Jay and she broke up. Initially, Debjani would respond, though briefly. But then she left her at read. A bunch of long messages imprinted with the double blue checkmarks and no replies. It has been close to a year and she still can’t fathom why they had to break up as well. Theirs, she thought, had been a separate relationship. She’d leaned on her and thought Debjani leaned on her too. When Debjani had been grappling with the death by suicide of a friend, Shayoni had flown down to be with her.

Did she mourn the loss of Debjani more than Jay? How does one mourn the loss of a relationship that belies classification into friendship, family or work but is an unspoken sisterhood involving a 41-year-old and a 55-year-old?

She didn’t expect “Head Over Feet” of all songs to remind her of Debjani.

She takes a beat to look around her, women singing without inhibition, without hesitation, unselfconscious, unafraid, in full-throated fervour, on key and off key, smiling, laughing, swaying their arms, phones, a mesh of unbridled freedom in a large enclosed area with a 49-year-old woman on stage overseeing them without affectation or spectacle. The opening chords of “Ironic” are struck and Alanis stretches out her mic to them. In response they sing the opening verse as one, echoing her inflections and pauses, they know it like they know their own bodies.

The stage turns red. Shayoni, and everyone else, knows why. Alanis’ ‘I want you to know’, the undertone that changed all of their worlds when they heard it for the first time, whether as teenagers or twenty-somethings, assuming the first verse had set the tonality of the rest of the song, till she took their breaths away when she abruptly ripped into the next verse, can’t be an undertone when so many women undertone it with her. It is the last song they’ve been waiting for.

You seem very well
Things look peaceful
I’m not quite as well
I thought you should know.

Did you forget about me
Mr Duplicity? I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner
But it was a slap in the face
How quickly I was replaced
And are you thinking of me when you fuck her.

The arena swells open, expands into spaces far beyond it, the embodied magical effect of a huge audience of women singing in shared kinship, in an intuitive no-explanation-needed coalescing of individual histories associated with that song into a subliminal collective consciousness where time stands still for 4 minutes. Thousands of histories of rage, across cultures, of being dealt with unfairly, of hurt, of grief, and, now, 28 years after its release, also of the somewhat world-weary wisdom that comes with the forties, interlock, ephemerally.

About 90 minutes after she ran on stage, Alanis runs off, disappearing into another world, leaving them in theirs. They hang around their seats savouring the remnants of the spell that was spun on them as it scatters and dissipates. The air returns to its normal feel and women head out separately, shouldering their histories individually once more.

Shayoni walks back to her hotel alone.

**************

Back in Kolkata, Shayoni is in an Uber that zips towards New Town. It’s after midnight but Kolkata is brighter somehow. Shayoni always loves Kolkata a little more when she returns to it, wherever she may be returning from. Although a more recent extension of the city, New Town has not been able to withstand the Kolkata effect, evidenced by the odd railing functioning as a road divider caving in on itself (it remains unrepaired) and the debdaru trees that started out looking decidedly manicured, now wilder, as if they came into their own and declared their unique-to-Kolkata personalities. Four years ago, Shayoni moved back from New York to Mumbai to live and work in the country she’d been born in. It had always been what she had intended but not too many people, her family included, understood it. Mumbai was the logical choice because it was easiest to port her work there. It’s not as if she didn’t like Mumbai – she especially valued the freedom and mobility options it offered women irrespective of the time of day. But she wasn’t young enough to be able to rationalise the amount of money she had to fork out to live in what she considered a tiny 1 BHK. And she wanted to live in a greener city, not a city where trees are planted as an afterthought to prettify gigantic gated communities. She moved back to Kolkata during the pandemic.

In one of the last of many fights they’d had when they were both trying to resuscitate a relationship that had been on life support for months, Jay had told her she was a failure for moving back to India. She knew a lot of people thought that of her and had swatted them aside like flies, never second-guessing herself for a decision that had always been on the cards. But when Jay became them she felt she’d been punched in the gut. For her, they died that day.

She glances at her phone but this time doesn’t open WhatsApp just for the sake of opening WhatsApp. When a dream dreamed as a girl in school comes true in the life of even a jaded woman, it acts like an anchor, an umbilical cord that contains the multitude of selves one’s life encompasses as years are added on years. It helps change habits – at least for a few days. But this time, perhaps, longer. Perhaps after she completes another year in this job, this time she will leave. Perhaps she will take the plunge and do something on her own, as had been her original plan. Perhaps she will get used to living with absences. With things that didn’t happen. With empty spaces. Perhaps she will stop banging her head against the wall trying to decode why Debjani closed her door on her.

Perhaps she will let it all go.

Perhaps.

---

[1] I too had it… Then gradually it went away.

The Sound of Life by Takbeer Salati

The first time T heard the heartbeat, she crossed her heart on the bed, facing the USG machine.

When they had first learned about the pregnancy, he saw the happiness through the tears in her eyes and ran back through the lanes into the mosque backyard, where men wore white kurtas and caps, their children trying to pray the way they saw their elders do. He wanted to pray to thank God for this blessing.

It was a long ride. Auntie liked to present it as a war game, where each step was  carefully played. Some steps had already been taken care of, like the comfort cushion, no washing of the dishes before getting to the ninth month. Others were seeing it as a carefree routine of a pregnant woman     .

T didn’t like waking up with a potbelly, so she kept making schedules. She had the deepest, most soothing voice of all the young girls in her family. T knew if she sang to her baby, she would feel at peace. T used to play music and ask for the food that she often used to munch on. Makhana’s coconut water were kept on the shelf, reminding her to eat at regular intervals.      

T didn’t ever want to marry, so she lived outside the house for her education. Especially when she knew all that women did after marrying was give birth and wash clothes or dishes. She called her mother one day and said:

“I am your daughter and will always make you proud.”       

If there was anyone in the world who wanted her children more than her, it was her mother. She was often seen knitting baby clothes for her, thinking what color would be best suited. T’s mother would also call the baby by nicknames and secret names for      people who she didn’t want to know about the pregnancy.  She was      strong and had raised  two daughters, including T and her sister during a time of conflict and hardship. Calmly, she looked at T one day who had come for a visit to her maternal home and said, ‘T, you will make a wonderful mother. You are kind, soft spoken and you welcome everyone.’ T’s mother had not only transcended but also imagined the children of T.    

“Take lessons from this phase”, she said, still imagining carrying her children. 

            The evenings were mostly spent writing and drinking chilled coconut water and listening to the call of azaan every time it was prayed. It was only three months later that T first heard the unusual sound coming from somewhere…She looked pale and the visits to the doctors had suddenly increased. Nobody asked for anything. There was a sign instead, that she had to      be treated well. Pregnancies aren’t  and they are even harder the first time. You run on stories told by others, the ones who have been there, who have become mothers and survived, if  only to listen to the voice of their own children. If that wasn’t the most beautiful sound in the world, T didn’t know what was.

Still the doctors assured them that everything was fine and      that the mother would see the world with her children soon. On such a visit T noticed what the USG room looked like. The walls were white ,with paintings of the womb and hands holding it. The machine was kept at a position just beside the bed. T remembered everything as nostalgia, a memory where the skies archived the hopes of many mothers like herself.

Ever since the doctor appeared, T’s mother took a long breath, a sigh loud enough for even the compounders sitting on chair and table to hear. Back when they were only successful child births, the first cry of the babies was the signal, today if a mother wails, everyone knows a death has occurred. T wasn’t prepare she desired a baby herself. She had photos of babies downloaded in her phone and had also asked AI to make one for her. She was happy to have that downloaded too. This all shifted on that certain day, when the skies fell apart.

            In the number of visits that they took to doctors, it never occurred to them that all this could end abruptly. The smell of T’s skin had changed with the change in the way she looked now. She could hear the the voice of baby and imagine it calling her ammi or maa     .

For T especially, time was running on Kafka’s note[1] . She was confronted with life decisions with great mounds of anxiety and guilt . A big strangle in her throat made her float into the      abyss. She would try to imagine what it must have been like for her mother. She didn’t want to show it, but she felt closer to her mother than ever. Before the crawling happened, everything else felt easier, like a vacation. T used to spend time with her mother playing chess , listening to the sounds of rain, its thunderous roar.  They’d make breakfast and read Urdu poems together. The last such breakfast she remembers was for T, a big round omelet. Everything they did together lasted until dusk when T would feel tired and retire back to her bedroom.   

T’s mother would still tell her the stories of her pregnancies. She needed to vent it out because T’s pregnancy was no less than a hurricane. Smiling at her, she would remember the times when  the conflict was too intense, and she had run out of milk. The stories would revolve around watching  men march through the lanes asking for freedom . She then narrated about the times she went to school carrying the pregnancy inside herself. T’s mother had memories of the first dress T wore, which involved a nice tunic curled up in its design. She used to sleep beside the window, right on the floor and feed T.

That day she didn’t eat until the afternoon, when a doctor advised her to eat something for a better USG. The eatery was a nice place to hang out and the food was great. She had no interest in the food, yet kept eating without a word. Carrying the photo of the USG and the baby she sighed and said, “I am tired.” She walked up the 12 flights of stairs back to the car and the doctor.

In some      clinics, the sound of the heartbeat of T’s baby inside the womb was enough. Other clinics were noisy with children screaming and crying. At some clinics, women were seen doing exercises for better delivery of babies and some were crying as T did. She didn’t imagine this as her scenario. That day she had visited almost 10 clinics unable to understand what these sounds meant . She had heard the baby’s sound and the doctors’ words. She had exhausted all her energy to explain to doctors what had happened and what not.

The last doctor for the day T visited was round and fair, short, reading something on the scream from the spectacles. When she heard the heartbeat, she gave a smile, which assured T that everything would be okay. Then she looked at T through a big expressionless face and said “You are too young for this.     ”     .

Her eyes were big and she asked T her favorite questions like who was her favorite author and writer? She was wearing her doctor’s coat and a smile that was an assurance of fighting against all T could comprehend. The last sound of the heartbeat felt closer and she knew nothing was going to remain as such.

‘Your name?’ she demanded when T started and said nothing. T’s heart thudded loudly in the doctor’s ears; she didn’t know why, but everything looked so bleak. There was something in the air immediately and neither of them had put a finger to it. When she was out of the room, the doctor called those who accompanied T. You are too young, you know, for this, kept echoing in her ears.

The doctor had announced the abortion. T had no idea. Those who accompanied T looked at T and cried.

That day they decided together to never believe in destiny. T had all her eyes swollen up. Everything felt as a dream and T saw her mother crying her eyes out because the doctors had decided. The death of her unborn children. For T, the most beautiful voice was  and would always remain the heartbeat of the unborn.

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