Stop.
Hello!
She left,
When?
Long ago
Why?
To buy drugs,
Thank you.
No problem.
Deep breath, count till ten before screaming.
Never pass a joint the wrong way. Thumb and forefinger upright
I said let the thirst intensify.
Breathe woman breath, don’t die on me.
Very gently, she takes an unfathomable drag from the narrow end of the rolled line of nicotine and hashish. It slows her limbs; locomotion escalates to a different realm. The stench is all encompassing. It is fragrant, almost like a sedative. They do not hold back. They continue for days to smoulder, to reel, to beam.
There is not a moment of veracity, which brings their perception to a halt. Frozen and trembling they smoke hash through the soot encrusted makeshift bubbler. One psyche, one mission, never to be sad.
The foetus squirms, engulfed in an ocean of amniotic fluids it drowns in the external miasma, it perishes within the host. Unaware of the information that she carries a corpse within her, she sits still and lets the dogs coil beside her, comforted by their warmth, she bleeds. She has exhausted her allowance of happiness, she seeks for more. No money, no strength, it is only will that takes her to the resource down the road. The man revels in her despondency. She’s desperate; she needs to survive, for the life she awaits to wring out of her vagina. The man gives her five days worth of deliverance and in return wants to touch her raised belly, reluctantly she lets him. His paws gnaw at her clothes, they grab, they taunt, they slither and they grope she struggles but never shed’s a tear.
The church bells chime in the distant. The Sabbath is upon them. The man lets go, if only to wash his hands and go back to his nine children and a dirty wife. She goes back into the setting sun. This old town, slow, unkempt, does not interfere with this woman, the mangy dogs her only companions greet her and she fondles them. She carefully reaches into the recess of her large clothes, blue, borrowed, old and stolen. Extracts the small pieces of heaven and feigns delight. Slowly she scrounges for tobacco that lies on the floor amongst soil, faeces, alcohol, maggots, and filth. She crushes her heaven and mixes it with the filthy tobacco, rolls it dexterously into a long strong joint. Lights it, inhales and slackens her nerves, no tears no guilt and absolutely no awareness. She gulps down greedily the entire length of her heaven. Then it begins, just like the wailing of a baby or a tortured feline, she stumbles to the centre of the space that she has inhabited for the last twelve days, sixteen hours, forty eight minutes and twenty six seconds. Her gasps are audible, as her moaning reaches a crescendo, heart palpitating her hands crawl to her matted hair, she stoops, her hands clenching her scalp, immune to physical pain, her eyes darken and then all around her it all comes crashing down.
It ebbs and flows through her. Tormenting her, she sees her life in a kaleidoscopic hallucination staging itself in front of her. Sweat, blood and other bodily discharges aside she sees herself being taken in through the back door, all she did was wear that dress her husband told her not too. They drag her; tear the wretched dress off her back. It rained that night, torrentially; her pleas for help were drowned, they locked the door committed the deed, laughed recklessly and left her under the moon to drown in her blood and tears.
Impregnated, the morning after she flees from society, family and humanity… he said that he’d call her everyday if all she craved for was attention. She slowly started forgetting him, deciding that it was the best thing to do. But she secretly craved for his touch, his affection, his presence. Darkness engulfs her; she stands and holds her belly, talking incoherently at the corpse within her. It is dead. She needs to die. She needs to smile for one last time and this time she needs to figure out the difference between heaven and hell. In a cave, amidst the wilderness, she smokes four days worth of hash. With each drag she sees, distant memories, the goldfish in her nursery, the kennel she and her father built for Cornelia, her graduation, tomato colada she and her mother made on summer afternoons, the taste of champagne on her wedding night, the drink she nursed in that fatal red dress that entombed her. But her last thought, her last memory as she smoked the burning roll at her fingertips was of the corpse within her.
With an ultimate burst of resilience she crumbles to her knees and clasps her hands in a prayer and speaks her last word. The rain started the minute her breath expired, almost like divine fallacy, almost like irony, it rained just as it had, the day she was gang raped. The heavens cried then, for her, for her transgressors and they wept, again, tonight. As the rain extinguished the burning stub, it wept for the woman who died alone. The woman who paid the price of sin, ending her life with the one word that would redeem her, the one word that could purchase salvation for her, the one word that would tip the scales of justice in her favour. The one word mortals’ fear and the gods venerate.
Sorry.
Abhik Bhattacherji.
