by Abhishek Udaykumar
It was when she said ‘subliminal,’ one afternoon, that I found myself quite still. Once again – in the cool corridors, like a mired leaf still staggering after autumn. She had said nothing after that. I listened to the carpeted choir that rose to the ceiling. Fitting myself perfectly in a zeitgeist of afternoons that would never return. Young and still unfermented by ludicrous ambition. With my scorecard of sadness. My friends lingering, sometimes conjoined, sometimes lit with a candy charisma – sometimes unforgiving, sometimes scathing. I rolled beneath the trees outside our windows, around the forever pick-up truck and the radio station in the middle of nowhere. Mimicking the mercurial clouds as I waited and waited for her.
Such was college. The lanes and columns of solitude static in time. The corners and hovels of endless chatter, and the carnage of cuddles – one lover after another. But that wasn’t me. I sometimes ate alone, and sprinted around the football field for pleasure. It was always summer, but the nights bleated beneath the speckled windchill, nothing was ever certain that way. I would sit amongst the archipelago of benches at the back of our class. And listen to the boys talk about the previous night. Serene in my sneakers. The windows breathing in the scrubland. A happy man trying to skip across the stream that had dried up long ago. There were days when we would sit together. If we decided to keep our truce for the day. We wouldn’t speak, but I would copy her notes. She let me do that, and I would work tirelessly as though – our words could be brought back to life with that impudent substitute.
Some nights were alcoholic. Oceanic at first, and acidic beyond. The quest for lunacy, feathered by a fortune of moonlight. We couldn’t have known who we were then, but I was a catapult and a swing in the park, with too many friends and seesawing love. All I wanted was for her to walk me to dinner again. It pained me to watch her eat. She would tilt her neck to the side and crane it momentarily to grab the food from her spoon. And focus on her fingernails as she chewed. She seemed to be a bird that knew little beyond itself. Innocence was a hurtful creature. It made one yearn for an existence within another, to destroy the inadequate, acrimonious self.
That night the power went off. The fields that were our only company – folded into themselves like hollow dunes. The village beyond the campus blew itself out like a candle. We remembered our mothers and our fathers, who slept in oblivion and watered their plants on alternate days, as we wandered in herds through the maroon night. The goblet of day had dwindled into dots of glimmering grey green joints. We huddled behind the dorms that drifted along the monumental college. Baking ourselves till we were light as geese. Some of us exchanged lovers and scattered beyond the haunted canteen. The last structure between us and the wilderness of cotton country. It was too hot inside and too chilly outdoors to complain about our deeds.
I lay in the little amphitheater. A memory of her passing by the physics lab that morning vivid before me – like a sunlit river. It was uncomfortable on the grass so I turned over on a stone bench, like a homeless wastrel. She in her pink skirt and funny frills, her latticed hairband and pearl-like necklace. She believed she was an old-school girl with an inner world. And I nursed her belief in my labyrinth of longing. The image of her made me fidgety. I dug my scalp and kneaded my fingers; I had turned into a manic zoetrope. And all the while I hated myself. For we had avoided each other and let the moment slip into a graveyard beyond the world’s reach. There was nothing that one could do about time. I ached and swallowed with desperation, as though I had suddenly stifled with an incurable malady.
A slow cylindric breeze lifted the cinders off the soil and granted me a passage to breathe. Someone spoke in the darkness and then laughed a hysterical laugh. The sky was calmer now after a sip of absinthe. The world spread itself into a song and hurt us with harmless tools and brittle melancholy. I examined my new, blue blooded body and wondered if forgetting was a form of self-defense. And then I found myself in the middle of a small crowd of guffawing students, writhing with the joy of being alive and free. A habitual monsoon awoke in the cavity of my being. The cascade of friendships pirouetted me into a spherical lagoon – that watched each memory of her like an untainted child. Till the mercury of night swam its course and brought another beaming day, a few benches behind but across the universe from her.
The happy man was trying to cross the stream again. Then the drone of the teacher and our knobby pencils as we held our heads. Her hair tied and kotted and crossed over like a complex pastry. Her neck making me weak, as I camped out in my jacket like a tramp in a crooked tent. Our most recent days of fun had been on the roof, in the middle of lunch when we listened to music and threw shells of seeds into the staff room balcony. We had taken the bus out of the village once, along the highway made for nowhere. A nowhere for the winds to fan the earth as though it were an ocean made of land. Just to buy an ice-cream that we had loved when we were kids, and hadn’t eaten ever since. I scribbled on the last page, and then I scribbled on the desk. She was busy writing notes like always, in red, blue and green. I had watched her eat her mango duet like my life depended on it, everything in me had turned to yellow, to a custard of sticky abandon and precise memory. As we sat by the windy highway and made each other laugh till our guts hurt and we needed water to drink. We had grown quiet on the way back. The sanctity of travel nestled perfectly within us on the bus home – as the sun magicked through the layers of clouds, in different colours.
I stood up to scratch myself, and drew the attention of a few others. Then I sat down again, and thought about a line from her novel. Nobody else knew that she was a writer. It was over the holidays that she’d let me read the first chapter. There wasn’t anywhere for us to go. The campus had turned to a shell, the real summer had broken through and nothing was more pleasant than the violence of heat. She didn’t want to go home and I couldn’t step out of her sight if I wanted to, so we pretended to finish our projects in the rustic library. We’d start the day with our books and things, and in a couple of hours we’d be flipping through Walt Whitman and Ulysses. By noon we’d be reminiscing our childhood and then we’d walk to the dining hall and back. When it was finally breezy and bearable – we’d stroll out to the football field and talk some more, till it felt like our lives had been longer than we had believed. One afternoon we were in the library and she had just finished telling me about the time that her father once disappeared. She leaned out of her chair and across the table, her hair spilling on my wrist. Her forearm touching mine. I didn’t move. She decided to show me her book, a novel that she had begun at the start of college. I flipped through the manuscript with one hand, paralyzed by her skin as it slid against mine. I imagined her writing late through the night after the world had become a blackhole. There was a line in there that, despite my audacious speedreading, I remembered and replayed in my head every day. ‘The authors of misery were all across the continent, and everybody believed that they had to go somewhere to be free. But I defied my species and stayed rooted in actuality – and nothing happened, nothing happened to me.’
I went to the loo once in the middle of every class. To breathe a little and fathom the corridors and courtyards as some ancient ruin. I’d sometimes drift away from the building and towards the football field, to relive our summer together and talk to her in my daydream. The sentence often drew me into a lonesome world of immeasurable silence. The idea of ‘nothing’ made me shudder and sometimes turned my vision of her into a daymare. I felt distant and invisible to her, and misguided enough to talk to her in my head all day. Why did she want nothing to happen to her? Was it but a figure of speech, a voice to a dimension that she indulged from time to time, without conviction but spurs of elation? I didn’t know it then, as I twisted into her and gently clasped her wrist, turning my palm over and letting my fingers find their way around hers. Her eyes seemed to drown in my eyelids for a few unearthly moments, before I leaned across and kissed her cheek, and then her lips for as long as I could. It was barely a moment after that I saw her standing afar, beyond the bookshelves and by the counter, still looking at me – this time with disbelief and betrayal splitting her face in two.
There was a lemon tree in the courtyard that had been planted by the first principal. It had grown wider with the years, though it lacked much height, and cast a net of shadows on the arid soil and moldy architecture. I stood there in wonder and thought about how many things in life began after they ended, and how human life was futile and adverse at the face of follies and chances. I had another year there and the sound of time passing by clipped my senses to a murmur. The world had become mute and I was but a bard in an elaborate pretense, deeply aware of the inevitable end. She would perhaps finally go home for the winter, and I would be forced to snap out of my dream. I didn’t know her phone number, and I didn’t know if I ever would. The coming of absence and the persistence of voids brought me to my knees, though I was still standing by the lemon tree in awe of everything that the earth had sprouted – only to take them all away.
She appeared before me. With her unmistakable scent of unnerving aloe, and the oil she pasted on her calves that annoyed me a little. She sat down and tossed a pebble at the tree trunk, looking less at me and more at the corridors that yawned before us.
‘Yea,’ she said, perhaps to herself. I took a step-forward, and then a step backward.
‘Yea?’ I said, perhaps to myself. She glanced beyond me, a brief glimpse that grazed my shoulders, before she snatched it back and turned to the sky.
‘You passed in chem theory,’ she whispered to a passing cloud. ‘I thought I’ll tell you, because we studied that together. I went into the staff room during lunch, and checked the papers. You passed.’
And then she was gone, like the agony that kept my spine erect and made me spin like a top – I felt a wave coming at me and I didn’t know if I wanted to run. The weeks that followed our summertime silence had turned me into a fiend. I had drunk through every village wine shop I could find, and smoked all that my friends had left behind. And when I ran out of weed and money, I smoked some tea, and then some ferns I found on the football field. I walked around campus all night and listened to the same songs over and over again, till I was but a haggard lamppost with a tattered banner draped around it. And there I was, almost ecstatic again. I was bemused that she would ever sneak into the teacher’s den and sniff through their things. Did she do it for me? I twirled on the spot for I knew that she wouldn’t ever do that for herself, she didn’t need to. A delusion could be liberating, and clarity made one rigid.
I had to celebrate. There was half an hour left before the chemistry period. I loitered about the building until I found myself on the football pitch. Covered with the roots and shrubs that had grown beneath our stride and silence, our different summers across every season and the occasional breeze that lifted it all up. And all I wanted to do was relive each moment of the last ten minutes, as she sat before me with angelic deliberation, and spoke to me like she would be mine forever – even if she didn’t want to say it, even if it wasn’t true, till I had imprinted that memory into my trove of pictures, sounds and smells. Till then, I would go round and round the football field, listening to her voice in my head, and remembering how she moved her hands when she spoke. How she looked at me the moment I turned away, for I lacked the strength to watch her relentlessly. I wanted to remember everything. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I got on with it right away.
About the Author
Abhishek Udaykumar is a writer, filmmaker and painter. He studied English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London. In addition to writing, he has made thirteen independent films and several series of paintings. He loves playing sports and looking out of train windows.