Short Fiction: Bindi

Bindi by Purav Pradhan

Glass beads tied into a thread makes up a necklace on Bindi’s chest. There are glittering lights and the ghastly bokeh on the mosaic of the changing room. Hollow muffled voices space the room like smoke infiltrating the humid atmosphere. The smell of cheaply scented make-up and sweet lip balm cakes on  Bindi’s face like a corpse before cremation.

“Bindi, the client has come! Will you take all day decorating yourself? Come down fast!”

Another day like yesterday. The only difference – yesterday, a nervous sweat put down a sheen on the forehead and glistened on a body about to be disrobed and humiliated. Today – the same ravaged body, the same ravaged heart – pulses slower.

“Bindi, are you lost, you slutty bitch! The client is asking for you. Step downstairs”  

Lost. I am lost. Lost in this endless madness which smears feces on the face and stinks up the soul. Lost in this sedated noir of men with no names. Lost as another among many like me – only – a woman – I am not. My heart had always wandered toward my own kind – only she who bears the longing of my own desires. Her. 

The fan slowly hummed above Bindi. It couldn’t cool the air. Perhaps the air couldn’t be cooled. An air hot with liquor breath and animal lust. What could cool it? A heat which could only find dissipation inside bodies. A body left to suffer. A body like Bindi’s. Of her.

“Are you dead already! I haven’t recovered half of what I got you for. Do you wish to keep the client waiting? Downstairs, now!”

That fateful day should have never arrived when Bindi was torn apart from her. She was Bindi’s. Everything to her. They were brought here together. Both woke up in the same place where they were now meant to die. But at least they were together. That was the only affection Bindi felt. Only caress that she was moved by. Only love she found in that coffin cell.

When the ethereal darkness cloaked their everlasting nights, when the turbulence and fervid wrath of men poured down like acid rain on their withered bodies – Bindi and her, and many others collapsed inside their shells seeking shelter from their agony. There were many shells like that in the same catacombs of lechery. Shells hardened with time. But soon to be hollow. Or already.

“The client is losing his patience and so am I! Do you want me to crack open this door and dispose of you in the sewers like I did to her?”

The man had asked for Bindi on that day. Except Bindi was too torn with the scars of the previous night, bleeding still in the corner of her cell. It was then when she said, “I’ll go, you stay”. She let go of Bindi’s hand, the hand she had clasped so tightly. That gordian knot was open. They took her away while Bindi inched forward helplessly in pain and daze to stop her, but her weakness was paralyzing.

The man didn’t look very pleased with her instead of his regular  Bindi, but was too far gone to care. He went in and lay down flat on the bed. She followed and latched the door behind her. The other girls murmured outside – “That goon of the MLA sahab, slogans and shouts liquor prohibition, campaigning women empowerment as party’s agenda all day. How he lives by that through the night. Devil be on him.”

Inside, she approached the wasted man. He had urinated on his clothes which now seeped into the mattress. The air was thick with the putrid stench of alcohol, sweat and piss. On seeing her, he leapt back to life and threw her on the bed. She landed on the soaked sheets while he thrusted himself into her.

The man was parched with his burning appetite, drinking from his bottle, in the heat of his unsatiated lust yanked her head and smashed that bottle on her face, shattering the glass splinters into a dripping pool of blood. She let out a wailing cry of anguish. They heard it outside.

The door opened as the man left the room. The girls peered in. She lay motionless in her bed, staring into space with a face smudged in glass and blood. There was silence. Nobody stepped in. Nobody tried to help.

The man peeled off a few crumpled notes from his wad to a woman at the back. It was settled. He left. The woman beckoned at her men to heave the body out of the room. There was an inch of life left in it and by the morning, that too had slipped away.

Bindi sat staring with hollow eyes at her reflection in the mirror. The faint hubbub of discordant noises outside took over the empty silence.

“Oi! Bindi! The client is waiting. Quit dawdling and come down this instant!”

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