Pigeon and Koel

 

 

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.

– Mary Elizabeth Bradon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).

Arundati died so I can live.

 

I think of her as I ladle out the last bit of oat grit. Congealed. Fresh summer air rattles the plastic blinds. Tonight, I’ve decided to stay awake. I have to. I might oversleep and miss the flight. The flight’s at 11:00. But I must leave at 5:00. I can’t afford a taxi. I must take a bus and then a train and lugging 60 kg–12 kg more than me–can take long. I have no notion of space and time. I don’t know how long it might take  to  get  to  O’ Hare  from where I live, and how long, even if I do get to O’ Hare–which the online maps say is an hour and a half–it might take to get to terminal 5. The International terminal. There was quite a lot of rigmarole the last time I’d been there to pick up Priyanka. My roommate. She’d just arrived from Bangalore. It took me an hour and a half to get round the fact that you had to take a train from the airport to get to the terminals. I can get easily lost. And I get into a nervous giggle when I ask for help. And this was two years back when I was much bolder, and before I had even started wanting to be a writer. And two months before I had met Arundati. All my books–60 kg–are packed. The mattress has to be left beside the laundry, the tables and chair, the tiny wooden bookshelf, the yellow lamp above it, the printer I had bought for $24, which Priyanka wouldn’t take even for free, the two puce fix-it-yourself cloth wardrobes I’d used to cut out a coffin sized room of my own from the hall of the flat I share with four other girls: everything has to go. To be lined up tomorrow by the kerb and then mawed in by the large green garbage-truck. I have a nip at the miniature Cabernet Sauvignon I’d bought at 2 for $3. Cut a sand-wich with half a sardine for breakfast and get up to wash my plate and the sauce-pan for the last time. And boil some water for tea.

 

Eight hours left. Twelve tea bags. Four teas.

 

I’d smoke a cigarette before while the water boiled. I’ve given up smoking now. I’m skint. Plus, I have to go back home. Priyanka asks if I’d like some pizza. She’s been giving a party. She’s got a job at downtown. She’s a C# programmer. $60,000 a year. She’ll make more in one year than her poor old father scrimped up all his life. I refuse. She hugs me and says goodbye. Her friends shake hands. I plug my earphones  back before they can collar a conversation. They know I’m going back home. I haven’t finished my MS. I have failed in more than one paper. I’ve told them of course that I’m going to my cousin’s at California to try to graduate next year. The water’s boiled. I pour it into my little red teapot and leave it to cool.  Arundati is the  only person I’ve had tea with my teapot with. And probably the only person I’d ever. The teapot has to go. No space for it. Plus, it might break. I’ll keep the lid. I rip three tea bags of tea in and while it steeps I think I might do away with the mattress. The heaviest of my appurtenances! I lift the mattress length-wise up and where the mattress was the carpet’s more beige. I should’ve got myself one of those blow-up lilos my roommates sleep in. So much the easier to do away with.

I hug my mattress and lug it through to the gap between the two puce fix-it-yourself cloth wardrobes where I must sidle through. It’s a good thing I’m eating fish now for over a month and a half. I was a vegan before. Anorexic before that. We’re a corner flat – farthest   from the  lift. When the door opens I push my bed in diagonally and wedge in to the corner. The janitor who’s just locking up the laundry–it’s 10–scowls. I tell him I’m moving out tomorrow and he says that’s okay but could I please leave my stuff by the kerb? I say, Yes! Good night. Have a goo’ one. I get back to my tea. Have a goo’ one. I smile.

 

The download’s almost complete. Over the past week I’ve been downloading comedies–The Larkins, George and the Dragon, All Gas and Gaiters…–I’d been watching the past semester when I realised I had delinked myself from the real world. Now I need something stronger. I’ve read the first fifty sonnets of Shakespeare before literature more pressing caught my attention.   Now I think  I’ll  do my first Shakespeare play until I got into the flight. Then there was the memoir of my favourite writer to see me through. I’ve downloaded  an audio and a video version of A Mid Summer Night’s Dream and read through it once and learned words and mythic references I hadn’t known. Now it’s all packed in my handbag.

 

I delete all the files I’ve worked on. No footprints. The last file is a work on phonetics. It was not more than three months back and the word ‘chaste’ had altered me completely. In a way I feel (even look) like a three month old! This was when I had just begun to have all my time for myself. Until then the degree and my love of literature were nip and tuck. But now I was half way through my fourth semester and I knew I’d already failed. Language left me. I put it down to the menopause. I started forgetting the most basic words. But the beast in me grew more glutted. Heavier and more hedonist than ever. I’ve been carrying the beast in me since last summer when after two semesters of footling around with stupid stories, I’d started writing a long poem, something about a young girl going through a world of butterflies, angels, mermaids and coming out into a world of absolute light: two kinds of light: yellow (the younger sister) and white (the older): and looking at herself from the moon typing and typing on the park bench: of course I was under the influence of marijuana: but that was the first time I had arrived  at the  notion of two ‘I’s. The finished ‘I’ and the finishing ‘I’. A kind of X mark…

 

But memory won’t go so back, though it was just a month less than a year back. I am surprised I am able to put it down with this much clarity. Having or keeping the beast inside – that has been the addiction. The beast liked good music. The beast wanted to fast. Then it wanted almond milk. Then it wanted kippered herring. Now it wants tea.

 

Six hours left. Nine tea bags. Three teas.

 

I think I’ll do away with the bookshelf. I’d lifted it from the kerb in the first place. Like the table I eat on. On which I’ve left the tea to steep. The night’s nippy. I get back to my tea… I was learning Greek for a while. Online, from someone called Pantelidis. And Priyanka would come to me and  wonder at  how much  time  and money I spent on what she thought was poetry. This is just the sort of thing I was running away from – people thinking of what I was doing as a hobby. I had stopped having conversations with her that did not include the room rent or the electricity bill or the internet or something I had owed her or the house on SplitWise. I was not to be disturbed. I went to the library to borrow books on French linguistics. The librarian Chuni Lal was undone in a way only an Indian can. He asked me repeatedly if there was something wrong with my health and was I eating my chapattis? He was my boss during the Summer holidays. He told me when I checked out the six books I had borrowed were due in five days. I have them all in my bag now. The French book, and six beautiful scarlet cloth-bound Jane Austen novels last borrowed in 1986!

I  wanted to learn many languages because that is what I thought serious writers did. The French book introduced me to phonetics in a way my Greek tutor could never have done. This was the first time in my life, as I’ve said, after I’d given up on everything, I’d begun to fathom out that the way you pronounce a word was a part of knowing a language. Until then for me it was just words. So one evening, while I was reading A Room of One’s Own and was being asked to be wary of chastity, I began to wonder if ‘chaste’ was pronounced to rhyme with ‘haste’ or ‘hast’. There were so many English-es, so many languages in my head that I was confused. What I’d learn over the next one hour was that no legitimate form of the language had come to me. My tongue had been hurtling around all over my mouth. ‘Chaste’ had two sounds I had never made. One: the consonant ‘tsh’ (ch), and then: the long A (ei). Because I had given up on everything no part of the language was not mine.  What was given to me was not English at all. It was like everything else about our Indian lives in the 21^st century: pinchbeck.

 

I had to  have it  pared down  and this  could be done only

scientifically. I put up cardinal vowel charts and consonant charts and that is when I started watching those late ’50, early ’60 sitcoms. I had nobody to talk like! The stilting phonetically untaught American accents of my roommates giving interviews on Skype behind the two puce fix-it-yourself cloth wardrobes was now only as irritating as the half-Tory-half-Indian accents of writers back home. Arundati included. Now prose read differently. I felt I was making sounds in my head that had been made for generations. Recipes read like sonnets. The beast couried.

 

I have no misgiving now like I had a semester back in the December break about going back home. Not that I have much choice. My Visa expired three days back. Plus, I am a credit card fraud!

 

I fold up the table I eat on and on its dark brown veneer a cardioid drawn in gold I’d hide with the teapot is now exposed. Its long tapering legs fold sideways. I have to charge my phone. I listen to music all the time. Sometimes I don’t even know if it’s there. It becomes part of you. If you listen deeply. And if it’s deep music. The coffin sized room is lit with mild yellow. It’s almost empty now. Just the table I’m working on, the chair, the two puce    fix-it-yourself    cloth   wardrobes,   my suitcases and carry-ons, the lamp. Language is injected into us, while we’re young. It’s warm, it’s supple, it’s gritty. Then it congeals. At the age of twenty six years old, when you were expected to be at your most profound, I was groping for pronunciations. But I had my validations. The sexual inversion that had happened to me plus all the T.S. Eliot I listened to in the small hours of the morning when I go to sleep and the first fifty sonnets and practically every-thing I read for hint and gratification has given me an X mark of my position in the scheme of things.

 

Four hours left. Six tea bags. Four teas.

 

I was willing to lose the moisture of habit. Arundati wasn’t. She was a poet and for her moisture and habit were everything. I still think of the poems she had posted to me by her sister Vasanta, after she died. This was towards the end of December. I was in my third semester. A semester back when I was a normal Indian girl, buxom, blue jeans riven at the knees, white tee-shirt, with a job at the library I’d wheedled out of a senior girl, I’d booked tickets for Bangalore for December. But now I would miss my flight. I would be “detained” at the airport for security check! I’d pinched the idea from a novel I’d read! I was such a strait-laced girl in the view of my parents, I had managed to pull the wool over their eyes. Winter vacation came and I had the house for myself.

 

On the day of my last finals, I saw Arundati at the bus-stop opposite our college vestibule. It’d been a long time since we’d stopped being neighbours. But we’d stopped being in touch even before that. One night when we were both very drunk and she’d stopped talking to me after that I feared the worst. In the beginning she was avoiding me slyly, then it became pretty obvious. When she left, she never told me. I learned it from her roommate and my classmate Clarissa Fepusi. I also learned that she had spent $100 cleaning the carpet off the red wine stains. But when she saw me now she plucked her earphones out. The blue pleated full-hand shirt, checked and raffishly darned, the tweed jacket, the puce pashmina shawl; the twig like legs,  the  black   trousers, the  T-Bar  shoes  and scarlet socks; the wizened forehead; the cadaverousness. She knew I was her doing. Her flight was in the night. She could take a taxi. Could she visit me now? Did I still live in the same house? Was I going back for December? The CTA passes our colleges gave us for free bus rides were valid for one day after exams. We took route 35 to building 555 where I live right behind the block where we were neighbours on the other side of the park where we’d sit and I’d smoke cannabis.

 

We spoke about roommates, she asked me how Priyanka was and I told her she was in the other room sleeping – so we can’t smoke at home. If only she’d come the next day! I asked if I  should roll her a fag. No. She smoked     –– shorts now. She looked at my bookshelf. There were thirty–no more!–books. I wedged in a roach. We got up and I left some water to boil for tea. I wanted to show off the teapot. I bet she had never made tea the way I did. She asked if it was okay to leave the stove on high. She turned it down to sim.

 

While we smoked she asked if I’d read any new author in a tone that wasn’t supercilious – Yes, I’d read Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, but I was reading mostly the authors she’d introduced me to: Poe, Austen. I didn’t tell her ‘Shakespeare’, it was too private. And I told her ‘Conrad’, though I hadn’t done more than just buy a Dover Thrift paper-back of  Heart  of  Darkness  and  read about him on the internet, because English was his third language and unlike her he didn’t do an MFA.

 

Two days back the  credit card  Priyanka  had  introduced me to, for the $50 bonus we’d both get, had arrived, and I bought $50 and more of food and tobacco for the Winter. Frozen vegetables and oats and almond milk and tea and English Muffins. I cooked her some with jam for tea. I poured myself tea in a second-hand Queensware cup I’ve done away with and her in a chipped blue porcelain cup I am drinking from now. She liked the teapot.

 

I am very thin! Am I smoking too much marijuana?  No.  I’ve stopped  long  back. I don’t even drink now. And I’ve lost at least 30 kg! I must go back home. No. I have my flight in two days and I’m going to miss it. Why? Privacy. Okay. And did she know – I have failed in one subject? Unbelievable! I am the most studious girl she’d ever known. I shrugged. Have I written anything? Have I had anything published? No. Has she? No. Things have changed after she left Chicago for her last semester that didn’t require her to be at campus and went to her sister’s at Brooklyn (where she was off to that night before they flew together to Bombay). She’s stopped listening to the Western classical music she’d introduced me to and has gone back, almost entirely, to the Indian classical   music   and dances of her childhood.

 

I  didn’t  discuss  my  menopause with her though I guess from the trace of down on my arms and above my mouth and the fact that with only my shirt on without even the cardigan   I   wear   at   home  she  must   have   noticed I had no slush left and guessed.

 

So, what was she going to do now? She was going to go back to Bombay, look for jobs at art centres – her idea of poetry had changed and now she wondered if anything she’d ever written still made sense! Why? She slopped her tea on the carpet and didn’t look apologetic. She sucked through her teeth with an air of abstraction and ennui. She started riffling through her phone and I was glad she was finally talking to me as a literary equal.

 

Before, she was introducing me to books and music and poetry. While I’d smoke marijuana in the park, she’d play T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and ask me–after I sobered up with tea–how I felt. While we drank she had introduced me to Classical music and had begun with music from the cartoons of my childhood – the Carmen overture, the Hungarian dance 5, the Hungarian rhapsody 2, and then the background track of that watch-ad which was from Mozart’s 25^th and that famous ringtone of Nokia 1100 which was the Badinerie of Bach’s Orchestral suite. And of course Für Elise. How could she have gone back entirely to the music of her childhood?

 

Before I could ask the taxi she’d uber-ed arrived and she sloped off. We didn’t even shake hands. I put it about now that she didn’t have the X mark that I had had. And had known when she saw me now from what she had known of me that I had had.

 

Three hours left. Three tea bags. Three teas.

 

Want to purchase a beautifully printed chapbook version of this story? 
Contact us now on WhatsApp

I think I’ll do away with the two puce fix-it-yourself cloth wardrobes now that my roommates have gone to sleep. Also I don’t fancy I should leave my tea-things and the plates and the cups and the other kitchen items by the kerb – I’ll drop them into the incinerator! I’ll keep just the blue porcelain tea cup for now. And of course my teapot’s lid.

 

I must get back to work – I have just been able to unspool areas of memory I thought were completely obliterated. The room’s completely bare: just the table and chair, the lamp, my luggage, the printer. So, towards the end of December, after I’d bought a Dover Thrift publication of the World’s greatest short stories (I’d started looking at myself as a short story writer) and was introduced to Modernism and had bought entire collections of all Modernists – another magic happened. I got a call from Vasanta. She told me that two weeks back–this would have been two weeks after we’d met–Arundati had died in her sleep of asphyxiation. It might also have been heart attack. They’ve just finished the ten day rites and she wanted to know if I still lived at building 555… because Arundati has left a post for me.

 

It was a sunny day and I decided to walk to college because I was out of tobacco. I rolled a cigarette with the last of the dregs and went down to the park to smoke. Also, I might try and meet my guide. He left the next day for Iran. I had planned to change my degree from MS to MSE which was two credits lesser, now that I had failed in one subject. I walked down to college through the 35^th street – seagulls swooped down to pick up crisp-packets and sparrows with eyes of asperity fought for chicken bones outside KFC...

 

Dr. Sani’s office was at the ground floor and the receptionist, a young Chinese girl, asked me to wait at the waiting room. The room was filled with students and just as I saw her and was about to leave (as it happens so many times) Clarissa turned and saw me. There was some unpleasantness. I sat by her. Apologised for not picking her calls, answering her text messages. I felt I wanted to be alone. She said it was perfectly normal and she felt that way all the time. I had lost so much weight! Was I even eating? I have hair-loss. I must visit my parents. Her parents had come all the way from West Cameroon and her mother had spent a day with her and had made her her favorite dish…

 

It was the most visceral feeling I’ve ever had, and nothing like the two minute orgasms I’d had with Meliza in Chennai (though it took about the same time). Her little fingers were diddling my cunt, mouthfuls of my breast and when she kissed, her dreadlocked hair falling mostly to one side of my neck I wondered if she noticed me cringe as I came profusely.

 

I hoped my pants weren’t wet and I didn’t smell of sex. But I was aware of a twinkle in my eyes, a slurp on my lips… When she came back we hugged and she asked me to eat A LOT of food and did I even have her number? No? She’d write it down for me on a bit of paper and I could decide what to do with it. And how was Arundati?

 

My turn was next. I told my guide my health had failed and so I had failed in one paper. He knew me by face: I was the only person in class who knew the Fourier Transform of an Impulse function! He was sad such ill luck had befallen me. And of course I could change my degree! Cut it down to thirty instead of thirty two! Get    an MSE instead of an MS! Just graduate this year and get a job and settle down! The old professor had lost faith. His students had no mathematical rigour anymore. They were just a bunch of gadabouts, and the college took them in just for the money. I’d have to make the changes online–there’d be a charge–and he’d accept it.

 

I went down to 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Halfzware shag. Rolled and smoked by the benches. A bunch of undergraduates were playing volley-ball on the dust.

 

Two hours left. Two tea bags. Two teas.

 

Everyday is a Holiday

 

the Koel sings

and waits

for the street-vendor

to pass

 

 

a train

of honey-guides

and a couple

of mynas

and a loner

squirrel

looking for forage

join him on the tree

 

 

the pigeons regard him

from a distance

from the bathroom

where I am

 

my mother wants to pee

 

the pigeons stop

crooning

I get out and cup

my mother’s face

and step out

to the balcony

 

when a pigeon flies in

I turn back before it can

 

Arundati was the last of a kind. I had never thought of my mother until about a month back when it was certain I was going back home and I had booked my tickets. When I skyped my father would have to turn off the monitor before he called my mother in because I was so thin she couldn’t look at me without crying… I think of my mother now, who only came across as girlish: someone who was always on the phone or in her yellow pooja room, as someone who was valedictory. I am glad I am going back to her now. To love her a second time. But how to catch the face of someone who grew up with calves on her lap while doing maths homework – with the song of sparrows from their nests in the rafters, squirrels she’d feed when they fell off? I remember a story my mother would tell me – she was doing homework (there would always have been a calf on her lap) and her mother was cleaning sharks; there were three little fishes in the shark’s belly and my mother, who thought they were its babies, asked my grandmother not to chop them in – but my grandmother, who had eleven hungry mouths to feed, didn’t heed and my mother stopped eating fish from then on and became vegetarian. I was born to her after three still-born daughters. And she said she’d have named each one of them, ‘Bavani’.

 

Arundati   liked   my   name. She had  an  old  world, though liberal upbringing. When she first saw me smoking (this would have been in August, 2015, when I’d just arrived and was surprised to see pink glint on window glass as the sun set at dinner time!) and she took me to her house I was surprised her roommates were Clarissa  and two girls from Jordan!  Clarissa  and  I had VLSI  in common and we worked together. It was only in the second semester, when I was more confident about my degree, that I started writing stories and taking them to her. She was a monument of patience. She said she’d liked my attempt at éclat–she’d use words like that in everyday conversation!–but that I had only words in mind – no form.

 

I learned very little about her: she’d done her MA at ––, she had an older sister Vasanta, named after the raga her parents were partial towards, but she was curious to know how an Indian girl of my circumstances had become a marijuana smoking lesbian! interested in poetry! and this is the story I’d told her – it was told over two or three or four months, and it would end with our friendship:

 

I did engineering in one of the more liberal colleges in Chennai [I had told her] and lived at my uncle’s. I had to starve for two weeks to get my parents to send me out of home. That’s how cosseted I had been. I had never left home before but like my cousin who was doing her PhD at California I wanted to leave India (a prospect which my father accepted willingly and even agreed to finance, but left my mother cut to the quick) and this college had had a great many tie-ups.

So, during my first two years, I hardly left home, then there was a literary fest–you can imagine how soppy it must’ve been–and there I met someone from the Humanities Department. A stand-up poet called Meliza.

 

It is only after I met you, Arundati, that I have realised how being new fashioned is a very old fashioned thing! Meliza was a bad poet, but that she was interested in language interested me. We became friends. She lived at Ashok Pillar and we’d bunk college and we started drinking and watching stupid movies at her house. Then one day, while I was doing my record work, she came to me with a joint. I thought of my mother. But after she smoked her first I felt something in the body that wanted to try. She knocked back two shots of vodka and rolled me one, and then we had sex–it was our first time–and she took forever to come and it felt a bit like eating with my father – you had to wait for at least as long as you ate for him to finish. When she came at last (I wasn’t even naked: she was) she said she liked fucking me because I was like a school girl – I mewled. Those were the words, Arundati. ‘You mewl.’

Their degrees finish one year earlier than ours and when I was in my final year–more time–we smoked almost always. The boys (some of whom she was very close with: she probably slept with them) were all churlish, or green, or churlish-green! Her parents were always at a yoga centre at Mysore, and we had the house–it was a ground floor flat, in one of those Ashok Pillar apartments right beside a mango tree–for ourselves.

 

Like me she was an only daughter. She left to Delhi for her MA… But there is this one incident we still talk about when I call her. It was raining for one week continuously, Arundati, and I had just come back from Bangalore, and I went to her flat directly. She called one of the boys and got a pack of marijuana–for free?–in the evening. And we smoked and then fucked, both of us naked, and then went to the shower.

 

There was a power cut. We soaped ourselves and she stooped and kissed me and put her arms on my school-girl breasts and yelped FUCK repeatedly. She asked for her phone. It was in her back-pocket. She had stepped on an Indian leech. We both yelped FUCK repeatedly. We heard the generator whirr behind the mango tree where we’d fucked. Light came. There was another. It looked just like a large, distended, uncircumcised penis, especially when it looped – she grabbed a birch rod broom and banged it dead. She picked them both up disgustedly with a shampoo tube and slopped them into the commode and pulled down the flush, and we both stood by and watched them entering the whirlpool, FADE OUT.

 

Come back, Arundati.