Word Count: 7280 | Reading Time: 25 min
“Can I buy you both a cup of tea?” the man asks them in Bengali, his smile too lazy to not be genuine. Dressed in a shawl, his hair long and wild, he looks like one of the bauls. Aditya and Megha take him up on his offer, since they’ve come to Santiniketan to mingle with the bards and townsfolk during the winter harvest festival. The locals treat the two of them like tourists, but then, they are—city people from a world away. Everyone they’ve met has been friendly, welcoming. They don’t think twice about talking to another stranger.
The bearded man buys them tiny, shot-glass sized plastic cups of sugary cha from one of the stalls selling snacks and drinks. There is a turtle-like placidity to him, the careful way he hands them the cha, his shawl wrapped tight around his neck so his head seems to emerge from hunched shoulders.
“Are you both from Kolkata?” he asks, probably because it is the nearest big city, and their clothes and accents always give them away.
They say that they are. “Where are you staying?” he asks. “In one of those new lodges?”
Aditya hesitates because his Bengali is rusty from his years abroad, and it embarrasses him. Megha glances at Aditya and takes over. “We’re staying in town. My family has a house here.”
“They are here also?”
“No, they’re at home in Kolkata. They don’t like to visit during Poush Mela, too crowded.”
“I’ve been visiting the Mela here for many years, you know,” the man says. “There weren’t so many people coming for the festival, even ten years ago. This town was once full of field and forest that is now getaway houses for people from Kolkata. There used to be nothing but snakes underfoot. Now people can step a little less lightly.” He smiles at them.
“You must be here to sing—you’re a baul?” Megha asks him, hurriedly, to fill the silence between them.
He laughs gently. “Oh no, I’m just a fellow festival-goer. I play no instrument, I could never be a bard. I am here because I like to make friends. I think it pays to treat people well. Some of my friends are over there. We are just here to enjoy it all,” he says with a nod to a circle of men a few feet away, sitting on the grass and drinking tea amid the passing legs of the crowd. The blue smoke of bidis wreathes their heads.
That languorous smile rolls across the man’s face again. “It brings people together, the harvest festival,” he says, waving his hand. He’s right, of course. There are thousands of people packed into the field, from all over the vast countryside that fills the spaces between Indian cities. Their heads bob like a sea, bathed in jaundiced neon from light murals and the flashing decals of cheap fairground rides.
“Like you two, all the way from Kolkata,” the man says, lilting the name of the city as if it were a distant, exotic land out of reach instead of three hours away by train. “I can see that you are not brother and sister. That’s all right. You are a good-looking couple. It makes me glad to see such happy, good-looking young people together.”
They thank the man with polite smiles, downing their cha. Aditya coughs, his tongue and throat burning. The man crumples his little plastic cup, now empty. There is a crackle as he tosses it to the grass.
“Can I make a prediction?” he asks, poking a large, bony hand out of his brown shawl, which hides his lank body like a cloak. They don’t even need to nod before he decides they’ve agreed.
“Give me your hand, my dear,” he says. Aditya watches as Megha does. Her hand lies small like a chocolate in the man’s joined palms. The sight is oddly disturbing. He makes her hand disappear within his before flipping it, exposing her palm and running a thumb across it. Aditya gets goosebumps. The man nods, sage-like, his long hair bobbing. “Now yours,” he says to Aditya. Aditya flinches slightly when the man takes his hand, though he doesn’t expect to. The man repeats the motions he went through with Megha, but quicker. The man’s fingertips are coarse and dry, as if the whorls at the ends of them are etched into wood. He touches lightly, lets go. Aditya pulls his hand away.
“Yes,” the man grins, lids sliding over his eyes slowly as he blinks. “You’re an artist, aren’t you? You both are.” Megha isn’t, exactly. She works as an editor for a small academic press. But Aditya’s nod is enough. “I can tell that you’re an artist, you have the look,” he says, looking at Aditya. “You will fail her financially, because of this. Husbands cannot be artists. This you will have to live with, if you marry him,” he says to Megha. “You must marry, of course. You don’t look like the kind of girl that goes around with a boy without getting married. A girl like you, such light skin, from a good family, is a pride of this nation. You are destined to be a good wife and give us healthy children. There is trouble ahead for you both, though.”
Megha glances at Aditya, one hand going to the small of his back. He knows what her fake smile looks like, and it makes him uneasy in the best of circumstances. She’s wearing that smile.
“We should go now. We’ve had a long day,” Aditya tells the man.
“Hmm. You must have been exploring the town? Let me tell you something. You shouldn’t go to the groves beyond the maidan. There are people who fuck there in the evening, under the trees and in the bushes, out in the open, as if they don’t care who sees them,” he says, face wrinkling in sudden revulsion. “Young men being men, getting carried away by their nature, them I can understand. But these shameless girls with them, they have no modesty. Imagine, doing such things in the open, none of them even married. It’s filthy. Such women cannot be the future mothers of this land. You are good young people, you would be disgusted if you saw it, I know. Stay away from there.”
Aditya feels Megha push her shoulder against his arm. Her hand stays at his back. He can feel her fingertips through his jacket.
The man licks his lips. “Let me buy you both another cup of tea.”
“No. Thank you. We really are feeling very tired,” Aditya tells him.
“Then what’s the harm in more tea, yes? It will wake you up. You cannot retire this early when the Poush Mela is going on. You’re young and from the city, how can you be tired? Look at all these people, they are hardworking country folk who are all awake long past their bedtimes. Just to enjoy,” his teeth appear from behind the oiled curls of his moustache and beard. “Tell me something. You don’t speak much, but when you do your accent is different from hers. Did you go abroad?” he asks.
“I went to America, I did my studies there,” Aditya tells him. He can’t tell whether he should be rude and insist on leaving. He feels a dull throb above his genitals, a fresh urge to urinate.
“I knew an American, once,” says the man. “White as an eggshell. I speak very good English, you know. So this lonely man could talk to me. He gave me lots of money to show him around in Delhi. He paid me to be his friend. So I lived in Delhi off the money he gave me. I didn’t like it there. I didn’t like him. I left soon enough. My true home is in the mountains in Rishikesh, the holiest of places. It is a long and rugged road up to it.”
He looks at Megha.
“You must visit me there. Yes. Yes, you will come to Rishikesh, and ask the guides to take you to cave 42. But do not trust the dark-skinned guides by the paths. They will carry you up the mountain on their shoulders. It is an uncouth thing, for a girl like you. If you’re not careful, they will take you to their own caves, and you will never leave. No, come to my cave, my beautiful girl, and I promise you I will put a wild tiger cub in your lap.”
Megha grips Aditya’s forearm. “We really must go now, I’m sorry,” Aditya tells the man, and takes a step back, eyeing the men sitting in a circle not far from them.
“Oh, you’re tired. Don’t worry,” the man flashes his widest grin yet, his hands hovering around Megha and Aditya’s shoulders, as if about to touch them. “I will buy you some more tea, and you will come sit with my friends,” he says, and walks between them towards the stall.
“Take me back to the house,” Megha whispers.
“He’s getting more tea for us, we can’t just…”
“Take me back to the house. He just touched me. He touched my ass.”
“What?”
“I told you, he.”
“What the f—”
“Don’t. Don’t.”
“What?”
“Please don’t. Just. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Okay. Okay. Let’s go. Come on.”
Aditya holds Megha’s hand and leads her away, past the circle of men, the stranger’s friends, into the swirling throng. They don’t look behind them, don’t see whether the stranger and his friends saw them leave, whether they are following through the crowd. Aditya knows what happened to Megha when she was a child. She takes her hand out of his, and walks alongside him rapidly.
“Are you okay?” Aditya asks. She walks, not nodding, not shaking her head, arms crossed against her chest. He touches her shoulder. “Megha. Are you alright?” She shrugs his hand off quickly. Flinches. His hand a spider.
“Please. Please don’t touch me. I’m fine.”
“Okay. I’m sorry,” he tells her. They walk through this endless sea, with its own humid gravity of bodies seething in the mist rising from the grassy earth. Eventually, they come to its shores, escape its claustrophobic tides, walk back across the empty ground, the sparsely-lit country roads of Santiniketan, the stars a thousand eyes open now above them. The lights of distant bungalows and houses twinkle between black trees, a far-off warmth. There is salt in Aditya’s mouth, a residue of that tide of humanity left behind. “I can’t believe I just stood there. I’m. I’m so sorry.” Megha is silent.
Every muscle in Aditya’s body is tense, painfully so, his heart clenching rigid with adrenaline. He feels sick, only his penis curled flaccid amidst the storm of hard, burning body parts sliding under clothes in the darkness. Megha next to him.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Stop saying that. It’s not your fault,” she says.
He feels so, so very terribly, like a man.
#
The road is silent, empty. No one else walks with them. There are only occasional pools of streetlight in the night, bathing dew-speckled leaves, dusty side road. The rest of the world is wrapped in mist and darkness. The thin curve of the waning moon is lost in cloud. Bats flutter above them, just sound in darkness. There is faint music from the fairground in the distance. They are far from the centre of Santiniketan, with its tarred roads and university campus, its shops and dhabas. Out here, it is all fields and groves, interrupted by houses.
Megha looks behind them often. There is nothing in those pools of light they leave behind. It’s difficult to see anything else on the road. The houses leading up to Megha’s family’s place are dark. Their owners could be asleep inside, or far away in the city, no one behind those shut windows.
Their throats are silenced by the inability to comfort each other. They’re surrounded instead by the billion-limbed rasp of insects singing around them, the squelch and crunch of their sneakers on damp leaves and twigs and, finally, gravel as they open the gate and enter Megha’s family plot. The yellow cone of the porch light beckons, a lighthouse in the still mist.
#
They lock the door behind them, slide the latch shut. The house is old and cramped, built by Megha’s great-grandparents back when Santiniketan was more forest than town—a university haven surrounded by lurking wilderness. It is chilly inside, predictably like a tomb, for all its low cobwebbed ceilings and framed portraits of dead relatives embalmed in monochrome and glass, glazed by the antiseptic brightness of humming fluorescent lights. They close the windows against the mosquitoes and the whispers of the thick garden around the house, which is demarcated by a grove that falls into the slopes of the shallow valley behind the property. The train tracks run through that valley. Days and nights in the house are punctuated by the rhythmic clatter of trains on their way to and from Bolpur station.
Once they’ve shut the windows, checked the doors, Megha can tell they’ve run out of silence. Aditya is looking at her, and he smells sharply of anxious sweat. He’s worried about her, and it makes her feel small. A damsel. She knows he wants to talk, so she switches off the lights in the bedroom and takes off her clothes in the dusky nocturnal glow of the curtains.
He tries saying her name, to remind her that he’s there for her, but she doesn’t want to hear it. She kisses him, and he’s salty. He tastes of fear, which seems a silly thing to think, but she feels it in the sourness of his saliva, the resisting twitch of his lower lip as it hardens against her mouth. He doesn’t resist long.
They fuck in that dim light, under the ghostly veils of the mosquito net, put up earlier in the day by Ashok and Anjali, the caretakers paid to look after the house when no one’s around. The caretakers are also the ones who left rooti, daal, and chicken curry on the tiny dining table in the kitchen. It’s cold and uneaten. The ancient bed groans and creaks under their bodies. Megha finds herself distracted from pleasure by the flimsy wooden bed, disconcerted by how much it sounds like something hiding underneath, a decaying throat sighing in rhythm with their sex. She almost stops, her entire body prickling with goosebumps at the thought of something breathing, smiling under the bed. She licks Aditya’s stubbled chin instead, and grinds against him harder.
#
The house is small, and sound travels easily in its cramped rooms. The bedroom is by the living room. The front door is in the living room.
Megha can’t sleep, and she’s wide awake when she sees a shadow cross the curtains of their window. At first she thinks she’s imagining things, just mistaking the patterned shadows of the trees against the window for some other movement. But then, with a hard, cruel inevitability she realizes the front door, in the next room, is rattling.
The man is here.
The man who would put a wild tiger cub in her lap.
Aditya snaps up, the bed sending a painfully loud crack through the room. “Fuck,” he whispers. “Fuck. Fuck someone’s at the door. Megha.”
“Shh baby. Please, they’ll hear,” Megha whispers, holding his arm tight. “Maybe they’ll go away thinking we’re not here,” she says, so soft she’s not sure he can hear her.
“They must. Have followed us. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Baby shhh please I need you not to freak out please okay? Don’t freak out. I need—”
There is a bang as something slams against the front door. They can hear the heavy lock shudder on the latch. The wooden bedframe snaps again. Megha’s chest aches as she sees a giant spider of shadow against the frosted glass of the window, behind the parted, still curtain. A hand against the window. A faceless darkness as someone pushes their head against the glass. A squeak. The man has brought his friends. There is a sharp crack of something hitting glass from behind the bathroom door, which is just few feet from the bed. There is a window in there too. There are metal grills on the inside of all of the windows in the house, thankfully. The front door shakes hard again, the lock on the inside banging against the wood as if in response to the intruders.
Bodies take over. Megha can still smell the wet latex of the condom, tied in a knot and tossed to the cold floor. Their sweat. Their spittle, drying on skin. Her stomach is throbbing, and she’s afraid she’s going to shit the bed. They’re both shaking, rigid against each other. With a trembling hand Megha grabs her phone and turns it on under the quilt so there’s no light visible, or so she hopes. Aditya’s phone is dead in his backpack because he’s so much of an artist he doesn’t give a shit about phones and doesn’t care enough to charge it. Megha realizes she has no idea what the number for the police in Santiniketan is, or if there’s even a thana nearby. Perhaps in Bolpur. Snapping at the heels of that realization come the memory of all the news stories in which police laughed away women harassed at night, called them liars, sided with rapists, were the rapists.
The door rattles again, loud. The sound of bones in a casket, waking. Aditya is frozen next to her. “Call, call the. Call someone,” he whispers. I can’t, she doesn’t say. The men outside will hear. Maybe they’ll just go away. Who’ll come and help them here, in the countryside, at this time? The next houses are several plots away on either side, and possibly empty. Behind the house, a valley and railroad. Megha thinks of her parents, but she can’t find them on her contact list, absurdly. She tries to select names, but she can’t, her fingers jerking across the screen. Then she sees the ‘No network’ in the corner of her phone screen. Of course—no reception out here; sometimes out in the garden or the dirt road. No wi-fi in this house. Landline’s in the living room, probably long disconnected, feet away from the front door, the men behind it. She’s paralyzed under the blanket, little girl waiting for the creature in the dim room, the dead thing with broken feet turned backwards sliding across the floor, features upside down so its face is an unrecognizable leering mask of alien motives, creature coming towards the bed any moment now, fingers against the blanket pushing down to skin. She’s seen it before, by the half-light of broken sleep and rotting dream, crawling over the bed to sit on her chest while she’s unable to move. Her fingers are shaking so hard she can’t dial or do anything.
The screen goes dim. “Fuck,” she whispers.
Little girl waiting for the man in the room, the man she knows is her older cousin but is somehow not at this time of night, can’t be because cousin-brothers aren’t supposed to be lurking by her bed so late like the bhoots, the backward-footed ghosts he’d delighted and scared her with stories of, face contorted and torch held under his chin. No sign of a torch in his hands to tell her this wasn’t real, no exaggerated expressions—just a blank hunger. Something else, something awoken behind cousin-brother’s dead eyes.
He crawled over the bed.
Megha untucks the mosquito net and rolls off the bed, landing hard on the stone floor with a slap. Closing her eyes tight she crawls underneath, shivering and cold and naked on the stone floor, waiting for the backwards-footed thing underneath to grab her. The bed groans and shakes. She hears the thump and squeal of flesh on floor, and a hand touches her. Her muscles are flooded with adrenaline, and she feels her fist crack against bone before she can even register that she’s lashed out. She hears Aditya make a noise like a loud cough. They lie there together, like Adam and Eve, unclothed and revealed to the world. The rusty scent of blood pouring out of Aditya’s nose from the punch. “I’m sorry baby I’m so sorry I don’t, I didn’t mean to,” she tells him. He hisses like a snake and she recoils, and she realizes he’s trying to shush her, comfort her, hold her. She can’t stand the clammy texture of his arms around her. They’re both too sweaty despite the cold. The phone is in her hands. She doesn’t want to switch it on for fear of this coffin-like space keeping her safe and trapped, she doesn’t want to see Aditya’s face in that pale blue glow, the blood marking out a crimson grin in a ghost mask, she doesn’t want to see that he’s not Aditya at all, but something else, that ancient god behind dead eyes, animated by the rutting of horrible men from across time. Her fists are clenched.
“Oh god I wish I were more of a man,” he sobs in the dark. “If I were big and an asshole no one would come near you. I could I could protect you oh god. If I were a fucking frat boy with big muscles no one would—”
“Please, please shut the fuck up. Please shut up they’ll hear,” she says through chattering teeth. She has never hated Aditya more, nor loved him more, for the honesty of this sickening confession, for making this about him. Like every man in her life. He wants succour from her trauma. He knows what happened to her as a child. He knows what Megha’s cousin-brother, six years older and beloved by the family, did to her at night. He has seen himself take care of her, but he wishes he had a girlfriend without PTSD. She knows he does. Of course he does. Who wouldn’t? Poor, sweet Aditya, who thinks being a man is being big and strong and hard as a fucking crowbar whenever she wants, who sometimes apologizes until he’s near tears when he can’t get an erection, and thinks it’s a weakness, that he’s letting her down, when she wants nothing more than to fuck him right there and then because of it, to take his flaccid cock into her mouth when that happens, and she does, and he grows hard in her mouth and she loves those moments so much but in that love is a shard of hatred for his yearning. Not for her, but for that masculinity her family worships, that the world worships, that everyone around her worshipped and prayed to and appeased when they told her she was lying about her beloved cousin-brother in her bedroom at night, lurking like some dead thing, some backwards-footed morally rotted soul-less thing out of a story instead of a human being. She has lived in the world of men. She jerks at the squeaks and taps from the window, innocuous bird-like sounds that aren’t, that are the fingers of men. She has lived in the world of men with this man who thinks he’s not enough of a man, and she has loathed and loved him for it, and she can admit this in this coffin, this cave, finally. Here they are, a shared sacrifice to that god he prays to, that masculinity that has cursed him with an average, unathletic body and what he calls an effeminate artistic sensitivity God fucking forgive him. God almighty, she feels so close to Aditya as he drools blood next to her here. She grabs him in the darkness, tight, and holds him close to her.
“I’m so sorry,” he blubbers.
“It’s not your fault,” she whispers. It’s not your fucking fault, stop making me fucking say that you asshole, she doesn’t whisper. She wants to tell him so many things. It’s okay to not be a man amongst men. It’s okay not to be big and strong. It’s okay to not be the manly dickhead all the girls supposedly go to because nice guys come last, don’t they, you fucking dick. Just like you came last when the woman you wanted so bad but so hesitantly courted with tales of exes breaking your heart fell in love with you despite, and stayed with you, and now you’re stuck with her and her baggage, Mr. Nice fucking Guy.
The darkness is jagged now with claws and fingers, spiders and black bloated lips that smack at her thighs as her skin glues to the floor with cold sweat. Every scratch on the window an electric current through her body. The front door shouts out to the darkness, explodes, it rattles their bones, so splittingly loud in the rural hum of nightfall. Aditya says, barely able to articulate the words because of his shaking body, “I, I can go open the door, hit him. I can go distract them you go out the back door get help.” Trying to be the man. “No no you stay here, they’ll hurt you there’s more than one, please. Adi I don’t fucking care, just stay with me,” She kisses Aditya hard, teeth snapping as her jaws spasm with his, sinking into tongue and raising more blood, hot in their mouth. She holds her lover close and hopes and prays for this to end, for it to just stop, or for the man who would take her to his cave and never let her leave to just break the door open and enter, wait at the curtained doorway of their bedroom, his locks cascading shadows against his shoulders, his features inverted, mouth a slit in the forehead, eyes soft and rolling like tiny toothless mouths below, the corrupted face she’s seen so many times upon half-waking paralyzed to hypnagogic hallucinatory shadows of her dear cousin-brother crawling over the bed. Then this will be real again, with a man at the door, in flesh, an intruder, one she can run to, whose face she can look at and recognise as a man she met hours ago, not the undying ghost of a living relative she cannot hurt. It will be real, it will be a thing to fight and flee, rather than this, being trapped here in this coffin with Aditya, barely able to move in amazement at this nightmare, at this thing that is happening to her and her boyfriend that cannot possibly be happening except in a movie, to a couple who’ve just fucked of course, the girl haunted by a traumatic past. Fuck you, god, God, you unoriginal shit, and she thinks of God as a man with an oily beard and a languorous smile.
The front door rattles again, and holds.
#
Something is squirming in the cradle of Megha’s legs. She is in a cave, and it is freezing. There is a creature, damp and pungent, coming out of her. Its fur is sleek, and it is snarled in serpent or umbilicus. Outside the cave mouth, a hurtling wind breaks its icy teeth against endless mountains, screaming and screaming as the world crumbles. She knows there are terrible things out there, trying to get into the cave. They laugh with the mouths in their foreheads. They stumble in the wind like clockwork because of their feet, twisted backwards on their ankles. The wind keeps them cowed despite their laughter, despite their seething masses crawling like insects across a vast continent, across the world. She can feel the great black monuments of the mountain she’s inside collapse in this apocalyptic wind, the dead-eyed god-men of aeons past shattering to reveal the ancient bones of the earth. She places her hands on the creature in her lap.
#
Megha wakes with a man next to her. She flinches back at the blood on his face, encrusting his mouth and chin. There is light to see by, though dim. They both wear wedding veils of cobwebs, the sagging wooden beams of the bed inches above them. She peers over his shoulder at the room, the still curtains of the door, the shining floor dully reflecting early light diffusing through the frosted windows. The air is thick with drums, fast, her heart. She feels acid churning at her throat, scalding her chest. She can’t see any stray shadows moving in the room. She searches and sees no feet, backward or otherwise. She strains through her thunderous heartbeat to listen to the house, but it is silent. Only the telltale chirp of birds outside to announce the coming morning. From what seems very far away, she can hear a train coughing across the tracks in the valley, carrying people going about their lives on the outside, travelling across the dawn-bathed landscape. If the man is inside the house, he is silent, hiding somewhere. Would he have dragged them out from under the bed by now to do whatever he wanted to do? Maybe it’s just been an hour or so since they tried breaking in, and they are waiting outside. She doesn’t want to turn on her phone, lying black and silent between her and Aditya, to check the time. As if the man will see its beacon even through walls. But daylight must be near, if the birds are out.
She looks at her naked boyfriend, his erection lightly touching her leg. His snoring is a gentle whistle. Her knuckles throb—she wonders if she broke his nose last night. She dreads the moment he will wake up. She dreads him asking her if she’s all right, and wants him to. She dreads emerging from their stinking coffin, which smells like death, their shared death. The floor under them is sticky, and there is a reek of ammonia in the air. She feels a burning between her legs. Probably a fucking UTI.
The silence, so profound and calm after what they went through just hours ago, washes over her. She wants to remain in it forever.
She dreads talking again, breaking the silence. Talking and listening. To Aditya. To her parents. To her family who denied her truth once, and surely can’t this time, because they have a male witness. She dreads leaving this tomb with Aditya, and entering again the real world, where this happened to them. She dreads making their relationship work, rebuilding it from scratch after this night of rebirth. She dreads the train journey home, if they get that far and don’t get their throats slit by a man in the next room. She dreads the men they will eye on the three-hour journey from Bolpur to Howrah Station, looking for that familiar bearded face, that oily smile. She dreads going back to Kolkata, and the men among the millions who will stare at her for the rest of her life, try and touch her on the streets and in buses, try and hit on her at parties and repeatedly offer her drugs, drinks, and rides home even after she’s said no. She dreads putting on her clothes, and seeing Aditya in his, to know that they’ve both eaten from that fleshy, squirming fruit, and forsaken their moment of awful innocence.
She looks at her man with blood on his mouth, blood born of terror, blood spilled by her hand. His eyelashes are long in sleep, his long hair unbound and draped over his neck, stubble framing his soft mouth stained livid by her violence, his arms loose and slender, the slight, smooth sheath of fat over his gut resolving into the smallest of Bengali pot bellies. After two years of treating her like a glass figurine, he has broken. In one night, her trauma is now his too, she realizes, and wants to throw up, a rapturous, horrible glow deep in her gut, crawling up from her womb. He has never looked more beautiful, in this moment of peace, before he wakes to a new and terrifying world.
Looking at Aditya, Megha knows what she must do.
She slides out from under the bed, slow and careful, phone in her hand. She desperately hopes Aditya doesn’t stir. She isn’t ready. She wonders if the man slipped something in their tea last night, or whether it was just the adrenaline crash that sent them plummeting into sleep despite imminent danger. Aditya keeps snoring through his hopefully unbroken nose. Megha winces as her hip squeaks against the floor, and gets up, her knees and joints spasming with pain from being coiled tight all night, skin itching with mosquito bites. Her throat is dry as she looks around the room, her eyes adjusting to the dimness. Shadows against the window, the speckling of leaves. She gasps, and breathes out as she realizes it’s just their quilts under the mosquito net on the bed. She turns her naked body, feet imprinting a circular rune against the chilled stone, checking each dark corner for an inverted face, lurking. She can feel the tremble of spiking adrenaline returning, encouraged by the cold. Padding barefoot, avoiding the tied condom, she picks up her panties and t-shirt from the floor where she’d dropped them last night, and hurriedly puts them on. She wants to wear the jeans sprawled on the chair in one corner, needs to go to the bathroom, but knows that would wake Aditya. There’s little time.
Holding her phone tight like a weapon in front of her, she walks out of the bedroom and into the living room. Bracing for hands to emerge from either side and grab her throat, her breasts. She flinches, ignores the sparks flying through her body on nerves. The living room is empty. No crouched figure grinning at her from under the glass tabletop. The front door is shut, the heavy lock and latches still intact. She has never been more grateful for her parents’ fear of the house getting burgled while it stands empty most of the year. Megha turns right and through the curtained doorway leading into the kitchen and dining room. Walking through the silent house feels like swimming through an undersea wreck, the light from the paling windows a liquid blue. Megha puts the phone down on the dining table, where their dinner still sits uneaten. Flies crawl frantic over the mesh food covers that entrap the congealed dishes and rubbery rooti. A flash of guilt that they’ve wasted the caretakers’ efforts. Her stomach growls and sucks at the rest of her, but she doesn’t feel like eating at all. At one end of the kitchen, the back door to the garden is also shut and locked. It’s tempting to just slip into the normalcy of these undisturbed rooms, pretend that nothing at all happened last night. Wipe it from her memory entirely. She knows from experience that it’s not so easy.
Glancing at the living room doorway for the man, for her man, for any man, Megha turns on the gas stove on the stone countertop. The click of the knob, thump of blue flame is like an explosion. She winces, waits for Aditya’s voice to pierce the silence in a panic. Nothing. Silly. It’s not actually that loud. The doorway from the living room remains empty. Each time she looks, the curtain resolves into the hanging shawl of the man waiting, standing and biding his time watching her. Megha forces her breathing to slow, suppressing the urge to sprint back to the illusory safety of the space beneath the bed, right next to Aditya. The heat of the stove’s fire caresses her belly through the t-shirt. Something runs across Megha’s mind like a tiger through the wilderness, a memory from the depths of sleep, gone before she can glimpse it. She fills the kettle on the counter with water, tilting it and not turning the tap all the way to keep the thrum of water on metal muffled.
Kettle on flame, she waits. In the December morning chill, she draws close to the comforting heat of the stove, which distracts from the burning discomfort between her legs. She turns and finally allows herself to check the phone on the dining table, squinting against its light burning the tender murk. 5:13 am. So close to sunrise. The empty doorway to the living room gapes at her. Just the curtains, still. Aditya is silent, and therefore asleep. The sleep of the dead, as they say. Stay dead, my love. She wishes she could have bound and gagged him as he slept, left him there while she takes this time, to do whatever it is that she’s doing. The thought of Aditya bound by her hand unfurls like a humid flower, releasing an aching longing to make love to him again, to his helplessness, mirroring her own, to let him know how fraught with desire is his vulnerability. She’d asked him once if he’d like to tie her up in bed, and he’d acted almost offended, not taking the hint, making her feel vaguely ashamed. He has always feared his desires, and hers, caught in the undertow of what once happened to her. Steam begins to emerge from the spout of the kettle, the bubbling water sloshing against metal. Megha turns off the flame. She takes a glazed terracotta cup from the drying rack, and pours the boiling water in. Inside the ancient fridge with its icicled freezer, she finds a browning lemon. She slices it into two with a knife from the rack, drops one squeezed wedge into the cup of hot water.
Megha takes the key-ring on the dining table, mashing the keys in her fist so they don’t jangle. She walks to the back door, unlocks it, and slowly slides back the latch with teeth clenched. Her heart is drumming again, pounding the silent air. The house is unlocked. She has no protection. The man could be pressed against the unlocked door, listening, a foot away from her separated by wood. She opens it a few inches, allowing a crack of the outside to throw a line of light against the kitchen floor. Watching for bony fingers curling around the edges of the door, she places the lock and keys on the dining table, beside the phone. She picks up the knife and the cup of hot lemon water, and walks back to the door. Megha places one foot against the rough, chipping green paint covering the wood, and takes a deep breath. Using her toes, she leverages the door back. It opens with a groan of rusty hinges. Pearlescent light pours in.
Deaf to the world, her blood thundering in warning, Megha walks out into the dawn to meet the man, if he has waited for her. It is the birth of day, blue like sorrow clinging to the trees of the garden, the dew and dirt rough and damp under the soles of her feet. Between the grass and flowerbeds of the garden is the signature red soil of Santiniketan, bruise-dark in the morning. The cup steams into fresh air untainted by the smog of the city. In Megha’s stiff fingers, the cup feels heavy, an entire ocean trapped in terracotta. She looks toward the shallow, unseen valley behind the garden’s trees, that red earth running down to the railroad, and thinks of the shrubby slopes seething with men, their many eyes dead of feeling in upside-down faces, all crawling towards her, limbs entwined and hitching insectile over that ochre soil tinted by the blood of thousands of women through the ages. Her legs are unclothed, calves waiting to be grabbed by the terribly gentle hands that held her own last night, and read misfortune across her palm. She has no armour but a t-shirt and underwear. She has no weapons but the heat in her cup of water, the blade of her knife, the teeth in her mouth, and the fear in her sinews. She can’t help, at that moment, but think of her cousin-brother who she hasn’t seen in so long, who now has a wife and child he must be sleeping next to, hundreds of kilometres beyond this garden. His wedding was the last time she saw his face in flesh. She hopes his wife and daughter have never seen the dead thing she saw awaken behind his eyes, the sign of that ancient god of men.
Megha stands with bare feet on the damp grass, waiting.
If out of the bitter dawn air, glittering with mist, comes a man, she will throw the hot water in his face, smash the cup across his skin-clad bones as hard as she can, and sink the knife into his body with all her strength, making a red rain upon the red earth. It doesn’t matter if the man’s face isn’t inverted, like the ghosts of her cousin-brother that have visited her over the years and nights, doesn’t matter if the man’s feet aren’t turned backwards so he lurches towards her in a hitching dance. She will still find his throat and dig her fingers into his eyes, shove her knee into his testicles. She will run to the road and scream as loud as she has wanted to all her life, finally, teeth bared and streaked in blood at sunrise.
If no man emerges from the mist and trees that fall towards the train tracks, if only birds move in this temporary paradise, this limbo between life and death, she will wait for the heat to leave her cup, and drink the warm lemon water to sooth her fear-swollen throat, until Aditya wakes and finds her, and she will ask him to sit beside her on the doorstep and not say anything, for the love of everything in the world now tainted by last night. But there is a secret sliver of hope buried somewhere in her shivering body, isn’t there. That the man will appear from those trees. The birds are choral in the gloaming, and the sun flares across the edge of the world, invisible but for the roseate bleed of clouds to the east. The water in Megha’s cup sloshes with its little tides as her hand shakes. Her knife is a slit of reflected dawn sky in her hand.
From behind her in the house, she hears the sound of bare feet on floor, approaching.