september 16th: missed deadline, one story [The Salt in the Well], etc.

so. this story was supposed to go somewhere else. i had written it for a publisher's call, revised it, overthought it, opened the document several unnecessary times as though staring harder might constitute editing, and then did the most administratively accurate thing my life could have done with a deadline: missed it. alas. for a while i thought that meant the story had also missed whatever small life it was meant to have, which is stupid. because, a deadline is not a funeral. and, i got to stop treating it like that. so, i pulled it apart again. removed things. added some. put other things back. annoyed myself with sentences and phrases. changed names over and over again. tried to make the ending behave a little. tried rewriting the ending in different voices. and now i am putting it here instead. perhaps this blog is where my late, rejected, undelivered, missed, improperly filed little things come to acquire some home and maybe a citizenship. anyway. here.

The Salt in the Well

The mustard oil always left a yellow skin under her thumbnail that smelled faintly of rancid pickles for days afterward. Raina wiped her palms against the seat of her salwar, but the grease had already soaked into the cotton, turning the green fabric a dark, translucent puddle-color. The brass bowl wasn't hers anyway; she had slipped it into her tote bag from her aunt’s verandah in the market town across the river while the old woman was busy arguing with the milkman over three missing rupees. Raina mentally defended herself occasionally with thoughts like aunt owns several bowls, never uses this one, or once said she hated its dent. Her aunt was probably still looking for it, blaming the maid.

The three-foot iron rod sat across her knees, heavy and annoying. It didn't have a balance point. It was just a piece of scrap she’d pulled out from behind the railway cabin after the line shifters went on strike last November.

Down by the concrete water tank, the village wasn't hiding. That was the thing that made the back of Raina’s mouth taste like brass. Nobody was screaming. Ari, who ran the ration shop, had brought out three plastic chairs with the woven diamond patterns on the backs. The white Bolero had been parked with one rear tyre on a spilled pile of Ari’s onions, which Ari had so far chosen not to mention.

He’d given the chairs to the men from the Clearing so they wouldn't have to stand while the tea boiled. A couple of small boys from the primary school were leaning against the front mudguard of the Bolero, tracing their fingers through the dust on the door to spell out OM. One of them started drawing something obscene beside it until the other smeared it out with his palm. From behind the counter, somebody kept asking whose tea glass was whose.

Everyone knew why they were here. Sami’s daughter had been having the fits again, the ones where she bit her own tongue until the milk turned red in her mouth, and the local healer, the man who gave her powders, had already taken five hundred rupees without fixing it.

“They’re saying she found a dried crow head under the tulsi pot,” the woman on the bus had told Raina three hours ago, her voice flat, competing with the rattle of the broken window frame. The woman had been peeling a mandarin orange, dropping the pith onto the floorboards between their feet. “The mother’s sister says the girl only started doing it after the old widow down by the pond looked at her during the new moon. People are getting tired of the bad luck. The well water tastes like lime this month.”

Raina had just nodded then, her fingers twitching against the zipper of her bag where the iron rod lay wrapped in an old lungi.

Now, the tea was done. One of the Clearing men—the one with the squint and the nylon shirt that stuck to his shoulder blades—wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and stood up. He had the tongs tucked into his belt. They were long, heavy things of black iron, three feet from hinge to teeth, the metal worn smooth in places and rough with old pits in others.

Raina got off the ledge of the low culvert. Her left foot had gone entirely asleep from the way she’d been sitting, and she had to stamp it twice against the dirt road, a sharp, prickling irritation running up to her calf.

She walked past Ari’s shop. He looked up from his ledger, his eyes lingering on the iron rod in her hand, then dropped his gaze back to his numbers. He didn't call out. In these parts, people carrying metal usually belonged to someone else’s argument.

“Hey,” Raina said when she reached the edge of the plastic chairs. Her voice didn't ring out. It was dry from the bus ride, and she had to clear her throat halfway through. “The Bolero's blocking the lane for the night tractor.”

The man with the squint looked at her, his hand moving automatically toward his waist where the tongs hung.

“Who’re you? Sami’s family?”
“No,” Raina said.She didn't wait for him to stand up completely. When you’re five-foot-four and your shoulder hurts from carrying luggage, you don't do the speech.

She swung the railway rod sideways. It wasn't a clean stroke; the weight of the scrap iron dragged her shoulder down, and the tip caught the edge of Ari’s plastic chair first, splitting the blue molded leg with a loud crack before it hit the man’s knee.

He didn't yell about god or righteousness. He just let out a high, wet squeak like a stepped-on frog and tumbled sideways into the dust, his tea glass shattering against a brick.

The other two men rose, but they were awkward, their knees catching on the low table. The tongs slipped from the first man's belt as he rolled and struck the dirt beside the blue chair leg Raina had just split. She turned too fast, got dust in her mouth, and dropped hard on her left knee, gravel biting through the salwar. She never got a proper look at the other men’s faces.

She dropped her railway rod (it had a chip near the top anyway that kept catching on her sleeves) and lunged forward on her hands and knees. The dirt was hot and smelled of spent diesel. Her fingers closed around the rough, pitted handles of the tongs.

“Leave the bag,” the second man yelled, his voice cracking with the sudden, ugly confusion of an afternoon turning into an incident. He reached for a bamboo lathi in the back of the truck.

Raina stood up with the tongs, her breath coming short and smelling of the oily breakfast she’d eaten at the junction. She swung the heavy iron flat against the side of the Bolero’s bonnet, leaving a massive grey dent in the white paint. The noise was loud enough to make the schoolboys run toward the temple alley.

“Move the car,” she muttered, her thumb tracing the greasy hinge. “My legs are tired.”

The walk back to the state highway was four kilometres of loose gravel that kept getting inside the strap of Raina’s left sandal. By the time the headlights of the 9:15 night bus to the district town finally washed over the dust, the back of her heel was raw and leaking a clear, sticky fluid that glued her sock to the skin.

She sat in the second-to-last row, right over the wheel well where the floorboards vibrated so hard her teeth clicked if she didn't keep her jaw slack. The tongs were wrapped in three layers of the evening paper she’d found on the bus station bench, tucked vertically between her thighs like a large, awkward umbrella. The grease from the hinge had already soaked through the sports section, turning the face of a local cricketer into a dark, translucent smudge.

The conductor told her to move “that umbrella” before they had cleared the bus stand. Ten minutes later, when the tongs leaned into the aisle again on a bend, he told her a second time. The old woman beside Raina complained that the newspaper was touching her foot and pulled her sari hem away from it.

When you’re carrying three feet of stolen iron on a night bus, the conductor gets to decide whether it counts as luggage. He tore Raina an extra half-ticket. She paid and spent the next twenty kilometres resenting the tongs for becoming expensive.

She didn't feel victorious. She felt like she had gas from the cold paratha and that her aunt was going to notice the brass bowl was gone by tomorrow morning.

The newspaper around the tongs had gone soft with grease by the time the bus crossed the river. Raina shifted them against the seat frame and smelled, for no good reason, the coconut oil her mother used to put in her hair when she was small.

*

Back in the village, the tea had gone entirely cold.

Ari’s mother, an old woman with cataracts that made her eyes look like boiled marbles, stood over the broken blue plastic chair. She wasn't looking at Nilo, who sat on the gravel holding a wet towel to his temple. She was looking at the ledger.

“Eighty-five rupees for the chair, Nilo,” the old woman said, tapping a blunt fingernail against the wooden counter. “And don't tell me to ask the girl for it. She’s on the district town bus. You brought these people to my porch, you pay for the furniture.”

Sami’s wife, Mara, stood by the mudguard of the Bolero, her arms crossed tight over her chest. She didn't look at her husband, who was sitting quietly on his haunches in the dark. She looked directly at the older woman from the Clearing, a widow named Jori who traveled with the men to ensure the kitchen rules were kept during the travels.

“If the smoke isn't done before the moon goes thin, the milk in the whole lane will turn sour by Tuesday,” Mara said, her voice sharp with the exhaustion of a mother who hadn't slept in four nights. “My girl is still biting her tongue. What are we waiting for? Nilo's knee isn't the one leaking blood.”

“It wasn't under the tulsi pot, anyway,” Mara added. “It was under the sleeping mat. Sami says crow. My sister says chicken.”

Ari’s mother turned a page of the ledger. “First fit was the morning before Aya looked at the girl.”
“You weren't there,” Mara said.
“I was here.”
“That’s what I said.”

Jori didn't look at Nilo either. She was staring at the scrap railway iron Raina had left behind in the dirt.

“We can't use that,” she said flatly to Mara. “Look at the edge. It’s railway iron. It’s been run over by coal wagons and freight trains. It’s got no lineage. You think you can cleanse a house with a piece of the old coal-freight line?”

“It’s heavy enough to crack a skull,” Mara muttered.

“This isn't an assault, Mara, it's a clearing,” Jori said, her voice dropping into the rhythmic, instructional tone of a schoolteacher. “The tool matters. The iron we had was seasoned.”

They tried anyway, an hour later, because the girl in the house started screaming that her skin felt like dry husk.

Jori led the way down to the pond, carrying a heavy tyre-lever she’d forced Nilo to fetch from the Bolero's tool kit. Mara followed close behind with a tin canister of mustard oil. The men walked behind them, carrying the torches, silent and awkward, like boys dragged to a wedding they didn't want to attend.

When they reached the mud hut by the reeds, Aya was already sitting on her wooden cot. She looked older than sixty, her hair a dry, yellow-white thatch that smelled of cow dung smoke.

Jori stepped into the doorway, raising the tyre-lever.

Aya didn't flinch. She didn't even look at the metal. She looked at Jori’s hands, then let out a short, wet laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete.

“Ancient lineage?” Aya said, her voice dry as tobacco. “Nonsense. Beni bought those exact tongs second-hand in ’84. Eleven rupees.”

“Twelve,” Jori said.

Aya looked at her. “Eleven. The left hinge was rusted through.”
“You don't even remember which yard he got them from.”
“Neither do you. Somewhere across the river.”

Jori paused, the tyre-lever hovering six inches above the old woman’s shoulder.

“He bought them for the shop,” Aya continued, picking up a small brass lota from the floor and taking a slow sip. “Then his nephew died of the lung-rot that winter, and your mother—”

“The winter after,” Jori said.
“That winter.”
“The next one.”

Aya drank from the lota. “Your mother told everyone the tongs had picked up the shadow of the dead boy’s breath. That’s how it started. You didn't inherit a holy relic, Jori. You inherited Beni’s bad debts.”

Jori looked down at the tyre-lever. Behind her, one of the women coughed. Someone outside asked whether they were really going to use a car tool. Jori lowered the iron. Mara spat on the threshold.

“My daughter is still sick,” she said. “Find the girl who took the tongs.”

The room Raina rented behind the district town refinery smelled of damp lime and the sulphur that came off the wastewater ditches at three in the morning. It was six-by-eight, just large enough for a metal folding cot and her blue vinyl suitcase.

She didn't put the tongs under the mattress; they were too thick at the hinge and would have rubbed against her hip bone all night. Instead, she stood them in the corner behind the plastic bucket she used for bathing, wrapped in the same grease-rotted newspaper.

She had an interview at noon at a small corrugated-iron workshop that made brass padlocks for the export market. Her shoulder still throbbed from where the railway iron had yanked it, and her thumb had a split near the nail from the dry bus air.

The woman who ran the workshop was named Sabi. She sat under a rattling Usha fan that did nothing but push the hot smell of machine oil from one side of the desk to the other. She didn't look up when Raina dropped her metric certificate on the glass top.

“Can you work a punch press?” Sabi asked.
“Yes.”

Sabi made a small tick on the form.

“You’re from across the river,” she said, her eyes fixed on a ledger of shipping manifests. “Your aunt called me. She says you stole her brass bowl.”

“I took it,” Raina said. “I didn't steal it. I’ll send it back when I get the first week’s wages.”

Sabi turned a page. A large grey cicada was crawling slow circles around her inkpot. She picked up a brass lock casing from a sample tray, weighed it in her palm, and pressed a thumbnail against the edge.

“Heavy enough,” she said, mostly to herself, and put it into the export carton.

When you’re making cheap padlocks by the thousand, half the job is deciding which small imperfection can still be shipped.

“She also said you were carrying a three-foot iron bar on the bus. What’s that about? You trying to get into the scrap business? There’s no money in it here. The local municipality boys take forty percent before you even get to the yard.”

“It’s not scrap,” Raina said, though she wasn't sure why she was defending it. “It belonged to the Clearing people down in the district.”

Sabi finally raised her eyes. They were small, sharp, and surrounded by a network of deep yellowed wrinkles from forty years of looking at lathe machines. She let out a short, dry snort.

“The ones with the tongs?” Sabi asked. She reached behind her chair, where a heavy zinc-plated lever used for stamping lock-frames hung from a peg. “Jori’s crowd? They’re still running that old circus?”

Raina looked at the zinc lever. It had the same dull, oiled polish as the tongs in her room.

“You know them?”

“Beni bought those tongs from my first husband's yard in ’84,” Sabi said, leaning back until the plastic of her chair groaned. “They weren't even made for the sweet-shop. They were part of an old boiler assembly from the abandoned British indigo works upriver, beyond the embankment, that got torn down after the rains. Beni wanted them because the grip was long enough to handle the hot crucibles without singeing his beard.”

She tapped the zinc lever once against her palm. The door to the cabin didn't slam open. It just clicked, the latch slipping because the frame had warped from the August humidity.

Jori came in first, her white cotton sari grey around the hem from the district town dust. Mara followed her, carrying a small vinyl vanity bag with a broken zipper, her face dark and grease-streaked from the three-hour ride. They didn't look like an inquisition. They looked like two women who had missed their lunch and spent forty minutes arguing with a rickshaw driver over the fare from the junction. Sabi didn't get up.

“The lane outside is private property, Jori. If that white Bolero's blocking my delivery rickshaw, I’m calling the municipality.”

“We don't want the car here,” Jori said. She didn't look at Raina; she looked at the desk, her fingers twitching against her sari edge. “We want the iron.”

“It’s in my room,” Raina said, her hands dropping into her salwar pockets. Her fingers touched the brass key to her padlock. “I’m not giving it back. Your man Nilo owes eighty-five rupees for Ari’s chair anyway.”

Mara stepped forward, her voice low and thin.

“The girl’s still screaming, Raina. The healer man says if we don't have the iron back under her pillow by sunset, the spirit will settle in her liver.”

“The iron won't do anything,” Raina said, looking toward Sabi for support. “It's just old boiler iron from the indigo works. Beni bought it second-hand.”

“We know what it is,” Jori snapped, her old face tightening until her chin looked like a peach stone. “You think we’re stupid? You think because we live by the pond we don't know where scrap comes from? Of course it’s boiler iron.”

Raina stared at her. The silence in the cabin became very loud, filled only by the rhythmic clicking of the cicada’s legs against the glass inkpot.

“Then why do you need it if you know it’s scrap?” Raina asked.
“Because people know it.”
“That makes no sense.”

“Last rains, we went two villages past the canal without it. We used a tyre-lever. It slipped, the rite broke, and the woman’s brothers decided we had to start again. I told them it was finished. They kept hitting her anyway.”

Raina’s fingers tightened around the key in her pocket. “So the tongs make them listen to you?”

Jori looked at the desk. “When I carry the iron, they stop when I say stop.”

Sabi pulled Raina’s application form back toward her and filled in the date. Mara nodded, her thumb nervously flicking the broken zipper of her bag.

“If we go back without it, they’re going to use the railway scrap Nilo found. That thing’s got sharp edges, Raina. It’ll break her collarbone before the first prayer’s finished.”

Raina didn't take her hand out of her salwar pocket. Her thumb stayed pressed against the cold brass ridge of her padlock key, her nail digging into the metal until the skin turned white.

“What happens to Aya when the iron gets back?” she asked.

Her voice didn't have the weight of a challenge. It was just the flat, small question of someone checking the price of rice.

Jori looked out the window toward the courtyard, where the cicada had stopped its circling.

“We do the five days of the fence,” she said. “She stays behind the granary. No salt in the flour. No iron in the room except the tongs across the door frame. By Saturday, the fever leaves the house.”

“And if she doesn't stay?”

“She stays,” Mara said, her hand tightening on the vinyl vanity bag until the plastic seam stretched. “She’s sixty-four, Raina. Her knees are bad. Where’s she going to go? If she’s behind the granary, my brothers don't go into her garden with the bamboo poles. It’s five days. She’s done it before.”

“It makes her skin peel,” Raina said.

The split beside her thumbnail caught against the ridge of the padlock key. For no good reason, she remembered the widow she’d seen three months ago in two villages beyond the canal, or perhaps it had been three villages, and she could not remember whether the woman’s sari had been blue or green. She remembered the fingers. They had been raw and pink from the caustic ash they used to scrub the bad shadow out of the palms.

“The ash water cleans the grease off the porch after the smoke is done,” Jori said. “If she doesn't wash her hands in it, the neighborhood women won't buy her dried cow-dung cakes for their hearths. You think you’re saving her from five days of dry bread, Raina? If we go back without the iron, Sami’s family will have her house down by tomorrow morning. They’ll say she’s the reason the well water tastes like lime.”

“The water tastes like lime because the rice mill and dyeing shed upstream and the small chrome-plating unit near the highway have been emptying their waste into the upper ditch since the winter strikes,” Sabi said from behind her desk. She didn't look up from Raina’s application form. “I told the panchayat three years ago. It takes eleven thousand rupees to line the well with charcoal filters. The block development officer took the money and bought a scooter for his nephew.”

“The filters don't stop the girl from biting her tongue,” Mara said, her voice rising, thin and dangerous as a wire. “The well’s been there since my grandmother’s time. The lime didn't make the milk turn sour on Tuesday. We don't have eleven thousand rupees, Sabi apaa. We have eighty-five rupees for Ari’s chair and we have the night bus back.”

Raina stood between them, her fingers still locked around the key in her pocket.

For two years she had looked for men like Nilo... men who arrived in groups with rope, bamboo, and whatever iron was nearest, and believed that if she could catch enough of them alone, break enough wrists, steal enough iron, something somewhere would stop.

Now she thought of the tongs standing behind her bathing bucket.

She thought of Mara’s daughter. Aya’s bad knees. Jori’s rules. The water. Sabi’s eleven thousand rupees. The brass key could lock one room. That was what it was good for.

“The key is under the water pot on my verandah,” Raina said. “The room behind the oil depot. Don't touch the blue suitcase.”

Jori nodded once. She didn't say thank you. As she reached the door, she paused.

“Your aunt found her brass bowl, by the way,” she said. “She left it by the well herself on Sunday when she went to wash cumin seed. She forgot she’d carried it out. She’s been accusing the maid since Monday morning just to keep from looking foolish.”

The 4:30 bus back to the district was nearly empty. Raina sat near the front this time, her chin resting against the vibrating metal of the window frame. The conductor stopped beside her seat and looked automatically at the floor between her knees.

“No umbrella today?”
“No.”

He tore the ticket and moved on.

Her left heel had stopped leaking, but the sock had dried hard against the raw patch of skin. Every time the bus took a turn, the cloth pulled slightly away and stuck again.

She got off at the crossroads three kilometres before the village, where the road ran beside the drainage canal.

By the time she reached the pond, the sun had gone orange behind the brick-kiln smoke. The white Bolero was parked beside the granary with brown packing paper taped over the broken headlight. One corner of the paper had already come loose and kept lifting whenever the wind came through the lane.

Ari’s mother was sitting on her porch with the ledger open across her knees.

“You come for the chair money?” she called when Raina passed.
“No.”
“He hasn't paid.”

Raina kept walking. They were already doing it.

Mara knelt beside the mud wall with the mustard-oil tin between her knees. Its lid lay upside down in the dirt. Jori stood in front of Aya’s cot with the long black tongs in both hands. The old woman's hair had been cut badly. Some of it was still caught in the neck of her blouse, and she kept trying to shake it loose by moving one shoulder.

Two of Sami’s sisters held her arms behind her back.

“Hold the wrist,” Jori said.

The voice was different from the one she had used in Sabi’s cabin. Louder. Slower. One of the sisters shifted her grip.

“I am holding it.”
“You’re holding her hand. Wrist.”

The woman muttered something and moved her fingers higher. Jori opened the tongs. The left hinge gave a small rusty click.

“The iron has to see the bone.”

Aya laughed once. It wasn't much of a laugh. More air than sound.

“Your iron has seen enough of me.”
“Keep still.”

Jori brought the tongs down. She didn't swing them. She put the flat teeth across Aya’s forearm and pressed. Aya’s heel struck the leg of the cot. The wood scraped half an inch through the dirt. Mara nearly knocked over the oil.
 
“Arre, hold her.”
“I am holding her.”

Aya hissed through her teeth. A dark stripe of old grease appeared beneath the iron. Raina smelled machine oil. For a second she was back in the workshop with Sabi tapping the zinc lever against her palm, asking whether she could operate a punch press. Then Aya twisted. One of Mara’s brothers stood up from the low wall beside the water tank. He had been picking dried mud from the end of his bamboo lathi with his thumbnail. Now he held it properly. Jori looked over.

“Sit.”

He remained standing. Jori did not raise her voice.

“I said sit down. This isn't your part.”

The man looked at Aya, then at Jori, then lowered himself onto the wall again. The bamboo rested across his knees. The other three brothers did not move. Raina put her hand into her pocket. The brass key was there with two old bus tickets, a thread pulled loose from the inside seam and something gritty that was probably sand. Cold metal against her fingers. Small enough for one lock. Mara had begun counting under her breath.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”
“Too fast,” one of Sami’s sisters said.
“I know how to count.”
“You're counting too fast.”
“Then you count.”

Nobody counted for several seconds. Jori kept the iron where it was. Aya's face had gone tight and wet around the mouth.

“Enough,” Jori said.

She lifted the tongs. The brother with the lathi stayed sitting. A dark line remained on Aya’s arm. Mara picked up the oil tin. “Now?”
“Wait.”
“How long?”
“I said wait.”

Aya pulled her wrist toward herself and looked at the mark. She spat into the dirt beside the cot.

“You people haven't even fed me.”

Mara looked irritated.

“You had rice.”
“Dry rice.”
“You threw the dal.”
“It smelled bad.”
“It was morning dal.”
“It was bad in the morning also.”

For the first time, one of Sami’s sisters laughed. Only once. She stopped when Mara looked at her. Raina's hand remained around the key. Nilo stood near the granary with the purple swelling still spread over his forehead. He saw her looking at him and touched it automatically.

“You broke the chair too,” he said.
“You owe eighty-five rupees.”
“That old woman is robbing me.”

From the porch, much farther up the lane than seemed reasonable, Ari’s mother shouted, “I heard that.”

Nobody answered.

Mara poured the first cup of mustard oil. Some missed Aya’s head and ran down the back of her blouse. She swore. Jori moved the tongs away from the cot and laid them across the doorway. One of the brothers started to rise again. Jori looked at him. He sat back down before she said anything. Raina took her hand out of her pocket. The key had left a small ridged pattern in the centre of her palm. A piece of blue thread from the pocket seam was stuck around one of its teeth.

She pulled it free.

Near the reeds, the upper ditch emptied into the pond in a thin grey runnel. Mineral scum had gathered where the two waters met. A torn biscuit wrapper turned slowly there, caught against a root, freed itself, and caught again.

The lime smell came up whenever the wind changed. Behind her, Mara had started counting again. This time, more slowly.

-------------------------------

*

a small note because there is one piece missing from this version of the story.

there used to be a section in it about a woman in raina's family who had been burned by her father after some quarrel involving marriage, family, ritual, clothes, caste. you know, all those things which begin as one thing and somehow become permission for another. so the thing is... that part did not begin as fiction. it came from a memory of my own family, or perhaps more accurately, from one of those strange inherited memories where something was seen when one was young, other things were told much later, details changed depending on which adult was speaking, and eventually you no longer know which parts you remember and which parts you remember being told. what i remember most is a 'back'. but sometimes, i even question that remnant of memory. i get scared to ask my mother again about it. but, anyway. i had wanted to smuggle that memory into fiction. maybe because fiction is useful like that? you can give fiction the unbearable thing, that is, somebody else's name, another house, another family, and for a while you can stand at the doorway and inspect it as though it belongs there... and psychoanalyse it. but as i overthought the story, it was asking this story to become about something else, so i took it out. since the story is ending up here instead of where i originally intended to send it, i don't particularly want to hide that little theft from myself either. raina does not have to carry this memory for me.

it came from somewhere real. or not...

-------------------------------

There had been a room in her grandmother’s house that nobody switched the light on in during the afternoon because the back door faced west and, according to her grandmother, electricity was not free just because the government behaved as though it was. Raina must have been nine or ten. Her mother was sitting near the back step sorting something into two steel plates... green chilies, perhaps, or beans. Raina could never remember that part correctly.

She remembered the light, though. That came through the open door in one long square and stopped just before the cot. Her mother’s cousin was sitting there with her blouse lifted up to the neck. At first Raina thought she was naked. Then she understood that she was looking at a back. The skin did not look like skin. It was pale in some places and shiny-dark in others, gathered into soft ridges that reminded Raina, horribly, of the underside of a newborn baby’s foot. There were no ordinary folds anymore. When the woman breathed, the whole surface seemed to tighten and loosen at once.

Raina stared until her mother slapped two fingers lightly against her knee.

“Don’t stare.”
“What happened?”

Her mother went on sorting whatever was in the plate. For years afterward Raina remembered the story differently depending on who she was angry with. Her mother’s cousin had wanted to marry a man from another caste. There had been shouting, then pleading, then weeks when nobody mentioned it at all. Eventually the parents had almost agreed. Plaintively. Nobody in the family ever agreed happily to anything important; they agreed the way people in the village accepted a leaking roof during the rains, by placing a bucket underneath and complaining about it to visitors.

Then, one night, there was a quarrel which was about a ritual that involved clothes. Raina never understood exactly what. A cloth that had been sent to the wrong house, or worn before some ritual, or touched by someone who should not have touched it. Her mother knew, probably, but every time she told the story that part changed shape. Sometimes it was a sari or a churni. Once she said it was about who was meant to wash it. But, it didn't matter.

By nightfall, the quarrel had become about everything else. Sometime before morning, her grandmother’s brother poured kerosene over his daughter. That sentence her mother always said plainly without any gods or caste or family honor. He poured kerosene over his daughter. She survived long enough to be brought to the grandmother’s house.

The man she had wanted to marry came once in the first month. Then once more after the rains. Then he stopped coming. Years later, when Raina was old enough for her mother to tell the story without first checking whether anyone else was in the room, she said the cousin had died.

“And that fellow is nowhere to be found, he probably left,” her mother said.

They were sitting on the same back step. The house had a new water receptacle by then. Someone had painted the doorframe hideous rani pink. Her mother looked at her.

“You blame him?”

Raina didn't even have to think.

“No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”

Her mother made a small sound through her nose, neither agreement nor disagreement, and went inside to see why the pressure cooker was whistling so much. Raina stayed on the step. For a long time afterward she remembered the back more clearly than the woman’s face.

Back in the village, the tea had gone entirely cold.

-------------------------------

~ Oizys.

september 8th-10th. somewhere in a managerial chat window, i escaped

08th September. 

9:10 am.

i woke up earlier than usual today morning. why? did i fall asleep early last night without committing the usual, ritualistic, daydreaming with the phone in my hands trying to unsuccessfully hide it from my mother and then silently wither away into some distressed sleep after some rigid, stiff, pseudo-masturbatory vomit? maybe. maybe not.

anyway.

i woke up. i did the morning necessaries. and by the time, i reached the tea cup on the dining table against that hideous dining wall with hideous tiles of even more hideous tiles, the animosity between the mother and daughters had dissipated and the general family gelling had dawned. discussions about the day, everyone's work, timings, when will everyone be in or out.

actually. 

it may have dissipated yesterday maybe when my sister asked me to accompany her to the doctor and while returning back home we bought some grapes. and after we came back, we sat together, mother and daughters, on the same dining table discussing the hilarious incompetence of the doctor. my father came up. i froze and remained shriveled all while he was having a discussion with mother and sister which they found hilarious but i had long stopped laughing.

anyway. he left. mother and the daughters continued their discussion. but what had dissipated between us somehow found some place in me. after we all retired to our rooms, my mother tried continuing the innocent talk but what had been conserved within me in that small place was germinating, so i put an end to the questions of "oh is that coworker joining?", "oh have you decided which laptop to buy?" by saying i have no time. as she left the room, my frustration took a leap over my conscience and my hand slapped the mouse as it had been acting up because i had worked too much the whole day on the laptop. not that i wanted to intentionally produce a sound and give it to my anger publicly for my mother to hear, but there was a small moment where i did think if she heard.

that horrible little second after making a noise in anger. not guilt fully. but, something meaner. the consciousness of being heard.

while i finished my work, she had finished her dinner and was about to retire. and i replaced her at the dining table while she went to sleep. when i finished my dinner which did calm my frustration a bit, my mother had fallen asleep. i was supposed to work. but, i couldn't resist my body wanting to plop down and get buried under covers like a quiet, peaceful, hidden dead body done with the little life it had to live for the day.

morning! 

as i woke up, my mother pleasantly greeted me. funny how families regenerate overnight. some tiny domestic lizard-tail phenomenon. cut something off in the evening and by tea time the next morning there is conversation again. nobody says sorry. nobody says we are okay now. somebody asks what time you will leave. somebody complains about traffic. tea is poured. resurrection accomplished. 

after our morning discussion i came across a video where a man was talking about how to write, i couldn't focus and absorb it. so, i came back to my half-room and i watched the video. in between my fingers involuntarily would pause the video as my bouts of daydreaming would command them to. a sentence. pause. another face in my head. pause. some imaginary room. some imaginary conversation. some version of myself who apparently has all the time in the world. then back to the man explaining writing. but i ended up completing the whole video and i wrote two lines in my notebook before starting this blog. the steps, he suggested, were: observe, react, narrate. very simple. suspiciously simple. 

9:10 pm.

so, i opened a new draft to write my next blog post. but, alas! work, too much work that i ended up making a to-do list in a spreadsheet. everyone's coming and going, lunch, an unusual afternoon sleep strayed me away from writing. of course. observe, react, narrate, nap.

in the evening, as everyone's coming back was approaching, i stumbled upon a story and i read it. i will be honest, it had been a bit since i read something that gave me this experience. first, the writing was such that my understanding of the story coagulated with my emotions as i read it. i flew through the story without feeling myself flying through it. there was none of that labour i sometimes feel while reading where i can hear my own brain dragging sentences behind it. this one entered softer. somewhere beneath language perhaps. by the time i understood that something in me had been affected, it had already occupied the place. maybe it resembled some of my heavily ruminated daydreamings so it coalesced inside me, sort of?

yes. maybe.

there are stories which feel familiar because you recognise what happens in them. this one felt familiar in a more humiliating way. i recognised the weather of it. that is probably what broke something open. the quiet. the waiting. two people trying to occupy some tiny pocket of existence while everything around them keeps acquiring weight. language becoming insufficient and then becoming too much. words from one tongue bleeding into another until even speech stops behaving like a proper border. i liked that. or perhaps liked is too cheerful a word. i understood it bodily.

there was rain in the story, or the feeling of rain even when there wasn't rain. translucent fabric. dampness hanging on things. concrete. water caught somewhere. tiny insects of water on surfaces. that sort of atmosphere where the city is not openly screaming yet but something has started rotting inside its mouth. nothing needs to explode. sometimes a place only needs to become harder to breathe in. that is sufficient. the people inside it shrink accordingly. curfews. parapets. rooms. closed doors. distances which could technically be crossed but which have become morally, politically, spiritually kilometres long. and meanwhile two people are still trying to look at each other.

awful. beautiful also. but awful. because the separation was not some giant wall you could point toward and say, there. enemy. obstacle. tragedy. it lived everywhere smaller... in vocabulary, in a pause before saying a word, in whose language arrives first or gets lost first when someone is frightened, in memory losing its original pronunciation, in the body understanding danger before the mouth has assembled a sentence for it, in a city slowly becoming suspicious of the people living inside it. that got to me. especially the language. because what a miserable thing, to have the outside world insist upon clean divisions while the inside of you remains badly mixed. i think, badly is unfair. beautifully contaminated. languages getting tangled under pressure because the body does not care for ideological neatness. memory certainly doesn't. love even less. and i think that is where the daydreaming recognised its relative.

mine also likes impossible little enclosures. two people somewhere they should not be. in one room. maybe a stairwell. big a terrace. crowded train compartment. some city imagined badly from photographs. some temporary place carved out of the world where outside rules become muffled for an hour. then somebody has to leave. there is always leaving. or almost leaving. or the threat of leaving sitting in the room before anyone says it. the slow burn and build up always builds up to that leaving. sometimes i think my daydreams have spent years rebuilding the same doomed country under different names, same border, same ache, but different wallpaper. and this story had wandered too near it.

so when i finished, i had a soft release of cry that came out of that. not sobbing or even cinematic. some leaking like eyes doing their small mutiny. it felt like a scream with no sound. and it spruced and sprung up my daydreaming that i had not dreamt for a while now. suddenly those old inner rooms had electricity again. faces returned. voices. those stupid scenes i have repeated enough times that they probably have grooves in my brain now. and because the story had put that slow grief into me, the daydreamings also came back altered slightly. wetter somehow. quieter. less concerned with dramatic rescue. more with people sitting beside each other while the world makes their sitting beside each other progressively harder. this is probably embarrassing to write. good.

anyway.

one after the other people came and interrupted and one of my classes started. so, i had to tape down my cries. there is something so degrading about having to schedule emotion around institutional obligations. cry until 7:28. class at 7:30. camera off. mic muted. yes ma'am. present. i tried crying it out a bit before it started. tried pushing the feeling out quickly like one can evacuate water from a sink before someone comes to inspect the kitchen. it didn't work. feelings apparently dislike deadlines. so some of it remained. behind my eyes. inside my throat. somewhere down the sternum maybe. and there it sat while the class began and somebody spoke and slides moved and words appeared and i took notes like a person whose body had not five minutes ago been trying to grieve a fictional life because it had confused it with several unlived ones of her own. which is perhaps the whole problem. fiction does this dirty work sometimes. it finds the thing you have spent months disguising from yourself and gives it different names, different city, different people, different weather. you relax because technically none of it belongs to you. and then some tiny sentence moves. and there you are. caught!

09th September. 

10:20 am.

i tried writing more yesterday but there's just so much work. i will try to write more today but i don't think i will be able to. 

11:30 am.

i woke up early again today because i had a class. and, today, as well, there is so much work while completing side projects and searching for new jobs. all while this new story has engined my daydreaming, this particular daydreaming that's engulfing my sentience and taking all my time. making me cry while i try to stimulate with myself but i end up throwing my phone away and burying myself deep under covers burrowing into those daydreamings. i wish death would trick me into this and lap me up with its tongue and take me away forever.

not even violently. please.

something almost animal about it.

some large indifferent thing finding me half-asleep and already folded enough and carrying me elsewhere before i have the time to become afraid of being carried. maybe that is the fantasy beneath so many fantasies. not being brave enough to leave but being removed. being exempted from the act of departure. because then departure requires decision. and decision requires a self! and my self has been outsourced to so many imagined people lately. one of them says something. the other looks away. there is some rain somewhere. and a room with a weak yellow light. someone's shirt clinging damp to their back. some language failing at the exact moment it is required. then i am gone for twenty minutes. forty. an hour. work tab still open. spreadsheet still open. messages accumulating. emails waiting. real people asking real questions from the other side of the screen. and i resent them for interrupting something that does not exist. this sounds deranged when written plainly.

perhaps because it is.

i have always known maladaptive daydreaming steals time but sometimes stealing sounds too active, too theatrical. lately it feels more like seepage. my time just leaks somewhere. no burglary. no broken lock. i look up and the morning is dented. then afternoon. then night. and what exactly have i been doing? working, yes. reading, yes. replying to people. attending classes. applying for things. maybe eating. but between all these things there are these soft collapses where my brain slips into another architecture and comes back carrying grief from people who were never born. the body apparently cannot tell. it cries anyway. it tightens anyway. it gets aroused anyway, which is another humiliation. oh, the humiliation in arousal. sometimes i begin with the crude bodily intention of trying to stimulate myself and within minutes it mutates into something else entirely. no sex really. or sex has become some poor doorway through which loneliness, fantasy, shame, tenderness, possession, fear, all rush in without tickets. then the phone feels disgusting in my hand. i throw it away. turn over. pull the covers up and disappear into scenes i have already watched from inside myself a hundred times. same people. same almost-touch. same leaving. always leaving. perhaps that is why the story infected this particular daydreaming so efficiently. it gave atmosphere to something i had already built badly. suddenly my old scenes had weather. damp walls. political unease. mixed language. tired streets. a city which could punish two people simply by making every ordinary meeting difficult.

excellent.

as though my brain needed production design. and i keep returning to the imagined tenderness of people who cannot safely remain in tenderness for very long. why? i don't know. maybe permanence disgusts the mechanism somehow. if they could simply be together, then what would i do with them? send them grocery shopping? make them discuss electricity bills? perhaps yearning requires obstruction to stay alive. perhaps my brain has understood this and become a corrupt little municipality issuing permits for suffering. no uncomplicated intimacy approved within city limits. there must be a border, a family, a language, a war, a train leaving at 6. somebody married to somebody else. somebody dying. somebody unable to say the word. 

something. 

there is always some fucking checkpoint. and outside these scenes, i am supposed to procure employment. this is almost funny. my contract ends at the end of this month and every day i open job portals like a minor ritual of self-threat. scroll. save. maybe apply. close. reopen. read description. experience small spiritual death at "fast-paced environment". continue. side projects. courses. capstones. workshop draft. volunteer work. current work. future work. imaginary life. all fighting for the same badly maintained acreage inside my head. 

i think perhaps this is why i wanted to write this at 11:30 in the morning. not because anything has happened. nothing happened. that is always the stupid part. nothing happened and i am exhausted by events. inside me whole cities have been evacuated before lunch. outside, someone has asked me to update a spreadsheet.

11th September.

12:03 AM.

the whole day went by.

morning started early again today. i did some work. and i blocked those people who were having an online dispute about who is a better revolutionary by using expletives. it got a bit disgusting, my stomach revolted. there is only so much revolutionary machismo one can witness before the revolution begins resembling several men yelling outside a tea stall except now everyone has read marx and has access to quote-tweets.

maybe that is unfair. anyway, blocked.

my manager texted me early and asked if i could lead a project in my city.

i was filling up my appraisal form trying to boast as much as possible with my inferiority complex. an interesting clerical exercise. please describe your accomplishments while every molecule inside you submits supporting documentation proving you are mediocre.

i had to sit with that text. but i am thinking why i did not panic much. i did sit and think and eventually lied that i have left my state altogether for personal issues. left my state! look at her. apparently somewhere in some managerial chat window i have achieved geographic mobility. it stayed a bit with me but then it did not make me shiver, make me jittery, angry, crazy, puke. (__) there was also the disgusting embarrassment of the lie itself. how quickly it came. almost practical. somewhere inside me there is apparently an emergency bureaucrat constantly prepared with documentation for a life i am not living. yes, she has left the state. yes, personal reasons. thank you for understanding.

meanwhile she is going to come to the same city and same state. there is something pathetic and a little delicious about lying that i have escaped. for a few seconds there, in somebody else's understanding of me, i had. the daydreaming kept me occupied. i had some rice for brunch and my daydreamings engulfed me into a sweet sleep and i missed a meeting! actually missed it. not metaphorically. not spiritually. calendar meeting. people. work. gone. i woke up with that horrible post-sleep displacement where the room has become darker and the phone contains evidence that time continued without your permission.

i feel like quitting this job and not telling anyone at home. will they notice? can i procure another job immediately? if i pretend to work they might not notice. right? right? i can wake up. open laptop. sit at table. stare seriously at something. type intermittently. attend imaginary meetings perhaps. tell mother yes work is a lot today. complain strategically once or twice. everybody already understands work through closed doors and laptop screens anyway. perhaps employment itself has become sufficiently theatrical that unemployment can impersonate it for a while. and i can give job hunting full day might end up finding something? maybe. maybe i would wake up with a purpose then. job portals from morning till afternoon. applications. cover letters. tests. follow-ups. rejection emails arriving like automated condolences. 

still.

movement.

i want to leave. this job. this circumstance that has trapped me in this job with this family in this country. sometimes these things collapse into each other so badly that i cannot tell which one i am actually trying to flee. the job becomes the family because the family is why losing the job terrifies me. the family becomes the country because leaving one seems to require somehow leaving the other. the country becomes the job because every vacancy reminds me what passports, cities, salaries, qualifications, caste-class-family geography, all the invisible little border police of one's life permit and do not permit. and then there is me in the centre behaving as if the correct linkedin listing will solve the architecture. 

maybe i don't even want another job. i want another consequence on another morning by another table. a life where leaving one workplace does not threaten to expose every other dependency underneath it. but unfortunately one cannot search for "complete alteration of circumstance, immediate joining" on a job portal. or maybe one can? 

location: remote. 

so after ignoring all the piling up work that mounts on me, i daydreamt and daydreamt and reached the end of day. the strange thing about daydreaming for hours is that afterward i feel simultaneously over-lived and unused. inside, so much happened. outside, nothing got done. someone was held. someone left. somebody cried against a shoulder that does not exist. there were conversations with excellent timing. i said things without stuttering. somebody understood them correctly. whole emotional governments rose and collapsed. 

then i look at my laptop. thirty-seven unread messages. 4 unfinished tasks. spreadsheet. reality has terrible production value. 

no dinner did i have. took a shower and sat down to finally write. this blog post is becoming the only proof i have that the day occurred at all. because otherwise what happened today? i lied that i had left. then spent the day proving i hadn't.

~ oizys.

september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.

september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.

i try to write and fail. i set in my mind to start a blog post one day covering whatever has happened and then the distance between my set mind and unwilling body becomes larger and larger. fueled by disgusting, dangerous intrusive thoughts; disheveling, deranged maladaptive daydreaming; daunting reality; destructive environments; dull work; and my little, thin, disappointing life choices hitting me from all ways everyday. i keep thinking i will write when my head becomes a little quieter. a stupid bargain. my head has apparently interpreted 'quiet' as an unconstitutional demand. since i was twelve. or ten.

so far, since my last weblog update, nothing big has happened. i have been swamped with work, one coworker with her only true achievement of weaponized incompetence has been a menace trying to maneuver me. an old colleague has come back who would put the former colleague's maneuvers to shame. recently they collaborated to frustrate me to oblivion for a simple task of nomenclature i asked their support for. nomenclature. naming things. apparently we have reached a point in my working life where the naming of things can become a small bureaucratic war. maybe adam had it easy. one of my other coworkers has moved on to another project and we don't talk anymore. no bad blood though. so, i miss her companionship and camaraderie a lot. my manager is... well a manager. present in the metaphysical sense, i suppose. emails exist. meetings occur. managerial substances move through the atmosphere. nothing particularly useful comes out of this weather system. her habit of not paying attention to issues that i escalate and then over-dumping it on me last-minute has been aggravating me.

this coupled with my mother trying to persuade me to apply for jobs my father wants me to apply for and pushing me everyday while i try my best to survive. a job tab open. another job tab open. some examination. some vacancy. some thing father heard about from someone somewhere and therefore it must now become a possibility i am morally obliged to want. i sometimes think half my life has been other people arriving at my door carrying futures for me and becoming offended when i don't immediately crawl inside them.

meanwhile, i have been exploring the depths and scepters of communist-socialist history from USSR, Cuba, Congo, and then whichever country/person/party/split/revolution one footnote throws me into next. because, naturally, one cannot simply read one thing. one thing has a name inside it and the name has a history and the history has a disagreement and the disagreement has fourteen people who despised each other over the correct route towards liberation and suddenly it is 2 a.m. it all started with watching some photographs, speeches, and interviews of fidel castro and che guevara. its so random. my interest was randomly piqued about their friendship. so many people of who only i knew their names and now after reading more and more, i have been gaining so much understanding of the world functioning, society, human oppression, the bizarre plumbing underneath things i had previously accepted as just... things. why certain states like the u.s., israel, france, britain behave[d] the way they did. why certain countries like afghanistan, iran, congo, palestine became laboratories for everybody else's "ideology" and greed. why a person i had once stored in my head as [NAME FROM HISTORY] apparently spent their entire life walking through an argument which has outlived them. how land, labour, money, empire, class, female body, and violence keep appearing in each other's family photographs. 

and there are all these embarrassing little recognitions. 
oh. 
ohhh. 
wait. 
that is what that was? 
and, the more i read and understand, the more there is to know. 

i knew things, obviously. or knew the school books' embalmed versions of things. names in paragraphs. revolutions reduced to dates, countries made into shapes on maps, dead people flattened into two ideological sentences which could be underlined before an exam. and now. now they keep acquiring organs. motives. failures. uglinesses. contradictions. enemies who had enemies who later became friends with somebody's enemies. sometimes i feel terribly stupid. sometimes i feel like i have found a trapdoor underneath the world and instead of climbing through it properly i am crouching there with forty tabs open. 

and then there are things i come across which don't leave me alone afterward. i keep thinking about the letter ayatollah ruhollah khomeini sent to mikhail gorbachev. what a strange historical object to encounter at 1 or 2 or whatever a.m. on a laptop. khomeini writing to the leader of the soviet union in 1989, basically looking at the ideological illness of the USSR while it was still standing and telling gorbachev that whatever he was searching for could not be solved by turning westward and that the problem went deeper, into materialism itself, and then inviting him to look towards islam. there is something almost eerie to me about letters sent towards collapsing things by people who do not yet know exactly what shape the collapse will take. or perhaps they know a shape. i mean, people knew the shape of the collapse of ussr will take. everyone thinks they know the shape. a letter travelling from tehran to moscow. gorbachev receiving it. me finding it nearly four decades later because i apparently cannot read normally anymore.

and samantha smith. oh samantha smith. a ten-year-old schoolgirl from maine becoming frightened of nuclear war and doing the remarkably uncomplicated thing adults somehow make impossible: she wrote to yuri andropov and asked him, essentially, are you going to have a war? why? do you want to conquer us? and he wrote back. then invited her to the soviet union. and she went. eleven years old and she went. her courage, oh. i don't mean courage in that inflated quotation-image way people use the word after somebody has already become safely historical. i mean physically. a little girl getting on a plane and going to the country she had been taught enough fear about to write its leader asking whether he planned to destroy hers. walking around there. meeting soviet children. seeing them as children. allowing herself to find out something by going near it. i think perhaps this is why she keeps needling me. because i have spent so much of my life frightened from stationary positions. i research. i imagine. i rehearse. i construct the entire geography of danger and escape inside my skull and then continue sitting exactly where i was sitting. samantha just wrote the fucking letter. then she went. there is also something unbearable about knowing how enormous the machinery around her was. reagan. andropov. nuclear arsenals. propaganda. governments manufacturing each other into monsters large enough to justify more weapons. then this child entering the thing with the embarrassing question adults had buried beneath strategy: if neither of you says you want war then why are you preparing so enthusiastically for one?

children are humiliating like that. sometimes they accidentally uncover the entire fraud because nobody has taught them yet which ridiculous premise everybody has agreed not to question. maybe, because children have no dignity?

and then, years later, the ussr ends. not even necessarily the grand geopolitical collapse as it usually gets presented to us with flags lowering and maps changing colour and commentators declaring the end of eras. i mean the actual strange administrative lastness of it. here's the transcript hosted on .su. the supreme soviet. december 26, 1991. people sitting in a room and having to conduct a meeting while the state to which the meeting belongs is disappearing. imagine having an agenda for the end of your country. there is something so sickly human about bureaucracy surviving until the final second. a. t. alimzhanov is presiding. there are speeches. formal language. the soviet flag over the kremlin has already been lowered. the first and last president of the ussr has resigned. this enormous political project which contained generations of struggle, revolution, liberation, belief, terror, sacrifice, bureaucracy, war, childhoods, songs, queues, science, prisons, apartments, dead people, living people, millions upon millions of ordinary breakfasts has arrived somehow inside parliamentary procedure. and near the end alimzhanov wishes them a happy coming new year. says they will meet again, if not there then somewhere else. somewhere else. god. then he asks deputy nosov if he wants to speak. nosov does. "dear comrades!" and he says their decisions are illegal and invalid. that only the congress of people's deputies of the ussr has the right to decide them. (noise in the room.) that parenthesis. i just cannot get over nosov'slast cry and the parenthesis. a whole country has reached its grammatical ending and somebody responsible for producing the transcript has to put the noise somewhere, so history receives nosov's last cry and (noise in the room.) then the presiding officer essentially says the meeting is closed. all good. all good! and that is it. how does anything end like this? perhaps everything does and afterward we manufacture the ceremony. i don't know why i assumed the death of a state would know it was the death of a state while it was happening. maybe i expected history to possess better dramatic instincts. thunder. somebody saying the correct final sentence. an orchestra somewhere understanding its cue. but there they were discussing procedure, objecting to legality, exchanging new year wishes. people still had somewhere to go afterward, presumably. coats to put on. somebody must have been hungry. somebody perhaps had plans for new year's. the ussr ceased to exist and everybody still had to get home.

this is the kind of thing that has been happening to my brain lately. history has become less historical the more history i read. which is inconvenient. i used to think time made events solid. now everything seems terribly porous. countries look permanent until suddenly you are reading the transcript of their final meeting. ideologies look like enormous impersonal nouns until you find somebody's letter. the cold war becomes arrows on a map until an eleven-year-old girl goes to summer camp. and people become names until you look too long. then they become people again. terrible development for someone already prone to thinking about everything past the point of usefulness.

which, actually—

there was some new development around the people i was lurking around while i was flailing around the far-left internet and that kept some rooms of my mind occupied and took me in a ride to make me understand more and more of this weird political-internet underbelly i wrote about in the previous weblog. the suspected things, the people, people around those people, organisations, affiliations, accusations, who-followed-whom-before-who-unfollowed-whom, ideological genealogy being performed through instagram stories like some deranged family tree. i am saying development because i don't know what other word accommodates something simultaneously happening outside me and inside my already over-chewed suspicions. and of course every new thing made old things look slightly different. this is the irritating thing about learning. the furniture moves when you aren't looking.

something i dismissed three weeks ago develops a second head because now i know one additional name. somebody's old sentence becomes stranger. a photograph becomes worth staring at. a coincidence becomes either less coincidental or embarrassingly more ordinary. i go back. read again. search again. find another document. now i am staring at the internet like an auntie peeping from behind a curtain except the neighbourhood feud is ideological and half the neighbours may or may not be imaginary.

anyway.

while i have been doing all this extremely important work of becoming a poorly trained online archivist of everybody else's political lives, my own life has been throwing forms at me.

i have been selected for two more courses which i am attending, studying, working, giving exams, preparing capstone projects for every week, an old colleague has returned with a volunteer opportunity to help his organisation and a workshop from which i was rejected has come back to give me a place and expects me to submit a draft within upcoming days. rejection apparently has an appeals court. i don't think i felt any happiness though. not in an ungrateful manner. just exhausted manner. and, so much at once and i just remember my work contract ends the end of this month and i don't know if i want to survive. because surviving means facing the fact that i didn't procure any other work/contract. because surviving means i have to continue here. because surviving means i have to continue taking this humiliation while being a silent casualty of weaponized incompetence of others and ignored management with no one to take my side. because surviving means also facing the fact whether they will increase my fee or not, because the last time they did not increase at all.

and money is such a humiliatingly material thing. i can philosophise myself into dust but rent, salary, fees, contracts, loans, deposits, groceries, bills after bills after bills, bank accounts, applications... they remain stupidly solid and grow bigger. you cannot existential-angst your way into financial security. extremely inconsiderate of capitalism. no?

this month started with my father's birthday. i did not remember that it was until my father sent pictures of his office celebrating and my mother's & sister's wishes followed. mine didn't. i don't know what to do with this sentence so i will leave it there.

the week ended with a scuffle between my mother and my sister over some food my sister and i decided to order on friday night. saturday morning, well i woke up at 3 pm, it was an off day. i felt disgruntled with my mother too so we did not speak much. by the night, i had become sick. the whole day, intrusive thoughts of various unwanted worries and shame-laden memories, voices of abuser people kept assaulting me mentally and at late evening, as i sat to have my first meal of the day, dinner, after a shower, i got my period. perfect timing from the uterus. applause. although i should have predicted but i never learn. shame on me. i tried my best to not throw up and combust due to my headache. and today, my sister left to spend the night at her friend's house and said she will come back tomorrow. my mother was asleep when she left, so she had told me and asked me to pass it on, the message, as she had heard that my mother and i had majorly started speaking while i prepared my lunch. after which mother went to sleep. it was in the late evening when i told my mother and apologized that it had slipped my mind or else i would have said it sooner. she was sitting up and she sat for a minute. i think she wanted to share a look with me to start a conversation. but i delivered the message and quickly turned my head. she left the room. i did not have dinner tonight.

*

anddddd... i finally sit down to write.

some of my old existential angst and dread-like thoughts came back to me as a pang. i think they did the final push and made me start penning. maybe, nowadays, writing begins for me only when something becomes sufficiently unbearable that even maladaptive daydreaming cannot digest it anymore. then my fingers are handed the leftovers. 

i am still stuck in this room, on this chair, on this table, this laptop, this job, this city, this state, this country, this part of the world, this family, this community, this lineage that has made me such a misfit for itself and made sure i will carry this misfit-ness everywhere, in me, if i ever go. sometimes i wonder, if i can, ever? ...go? there has been so much going in my head for a person who has barely gone anywhere. sometimes i think, by now, we can all agree here, i have mistaken thinking about escape for escape itself. researching places. imagining rooms. imagining work. imagining myself walking in streets where nobody knows whose daughter i am. rehearsing the grocery shops. the window. a kettle. some ugly rented mattress. freedom apparently furnished in my head by a kettle. then i return, although i never left, and the chair is still underneath me.

i feel like folding into a crumpled paper, shrivel up to into non-existence. what ever is this life and where did i go so wrong in it? will there be a trial for this? for this cage that i have somehow domesticated myself for? will there be a judge, jury, executioner? what is the punishment for this? or do people who keep withdrawing into themselves eventually become so small in the world's eye that there is nobody left to even pronounce them missing? is that the punishment? if one keeps closing the door, then another door behind it, then another, does the world eventually accept the architecture and stop knocking? how long can somebody hide inside their own boundaries before everybody outside learns to walk around the shape where they used to be? is this how one gets forgotten? slowly enough to be alive for it? is this death?

i think... that is what scares me. disappearance has always sounded to me like an interesting event. somebody leaves. or, somebody dies. or maybe, somebody is lost. there should be a before and an after. but, i guess, there are disappearances which happen quite administratively. incrementally. nobody files anything. you answer fewer messages. your friendships become old chats you scroll through once in six months. coworkers move to other projects. somebody stops telling you something because last time you didn't answer properly. family learns which subjects will receive silence. you stop going out. people stop asking. and then one afternoon you discover the world has very politely adjusted to your absence while you were still technically occupying it. horrible. absolutely horrible. and abhorrent. isn't it?

i try to find life in me somewhere. i feel like i have sucked all my blood dry looking for life within me but alas, i feel i have died within this body. within it, many rooms. and i lied somewhere no one can find me. i keep searching for the dead body perpetually. lost. maybe that is why i keep writing rooms? room inside room inside room. closet acquiring closets. the miseritorial cot. this stupid chair. the same table. the house. the country. oh, this country. sometimes i don't know whether these are metaphors anymore. maybe i have been describing one architecture from different distances. zoom in: skull. zoom out: bedroom. zoom out: family. zoom out: community. state. country. world. somewhere between these scales a very small thing is lying down pretending to research communist history.

me, hello.

maybe i keep acquiring vocabulary because words can enter places my body cannot. ussr. cuba. congo. revolution. exile. struggle. bourgeoisie. liberation. organisation. all these enormous travelling words entering a room where their reader cannot even travel to the next city without first negotiating ten invisible borders. ridiculous arrangement. i know. and still i read.

this must mean something, i suppose. or i want it to. or i am just making it up for the sake of giving this miserable excuse of a blog update a closure. i feel there is still apparently some small scavenger inside the corpse collecting things. a name. a paragraph. an opportunity. another course. a workshop which rejected me and then returned. a volunteer project. some half-written weblog. maybe this creature is life. maybe life is giving it too prestigious a title. perhaps it is simply habit with a pulse.

i don't know. this is important.

sometimes i think of all the versions of me my daydreaming has manufactured and feel embarrassed that they have lived more than i have. they travelled. spoke. argued. loved people. left people. stood on stages. wrote books. had apartments. had political courage. had courage-courage. did revolutions. loved. built. they knew where to place their hands. they knew what to say when humiliated. they did not turn their head when their mother wanted to look at them. they knew when to speak up to their fathers. what a population. and here is their exhausted country of origin. i sit. the problem with imagining so many lives is that eventually your own begins looking like the rejected draft. annotations everywhere. [move.] [say something.] [apply.] [leave.] [eat.] [answer mother.] [finish work.] [become a person here.] and i keep ignoring editorial suggestions from reality. today's was: eat dinner. ignored that one too. i don't know where i am going with this. nowhere, presumably. geographically consistent with the rest of my life. haha! but perhaps i wanted a record that these days happened because days which happen entirely inside one room begin losing their borders. saturday becomes sunday because sleep said so. august becomes september because the computer corner changed numbers. father's birthday happens through photographs sent to a phone. somebody leaves a project and disappears. a contract approaches its end. blood arrives. mother leaves the room. sister goes to her friend's house. history happens magnificently elsewhere and time here passes through notifications.

and i am frightened that one day i will look back and discover i spent years waiting for my life to become sufficiently life-like before participating in it. what qualification does a life require before i agree that it has begun? another job? another city? another room? money? permission? courage? love? acceptance? when? how? why? me? when? i have asked when so many times that the word has become furniture too. perhaps that is what i am doing tonight. inventory. in this sad little store of mine called life.

chair: one.
table: one.
laptop: one.
body: allegedly one.
life: whereabouts unknown.

~ oizys.