Walking Home

 

                                                                   

See the cat. The cat is playing with a mouse. Rolling it from left to right, then throwing it up in the air. See the mouse. It’s paralysed by fear. Death wraps itself around its body tightly, leaving only its faint heart fluttering.

The evening air brings a chill. The kind that comes with the beginning of winter. Days grow shorter and nights longer. And things that flourish in the dark begin to unfurl under a pitch-black sky. The space between the sky and the earth, between houses and alleys, between people, are slowly inhabited by things that perhaps rise along with the dark.

Walking home at night, up the dark unlit road, through narrow bent alleys, isn’t easy, but home beckons, and the only way to claim that warm bed with a hot water bottle, is by stepping out into the dark. Bidding goodnight you leave your friend’s house. The streets are empty. Closed shutters stare blankly at you, and not a single soul is up and about. The echoes of a thousand footfalls from daytime still resound in the air, and now and then you prick your ears to the sound of feet clattering somewhere down the street. But in truth, only an empty street yawns behind you and ahead of you. The only real sound is the sound of your own footsteps, and the yelping of a few stray dogs lying curled up in the corners.

You clutch the plastic bag in one hand tightly, the one containing the veal you bought during the day. The fingers of your other hand curled around the flashlight, you take the winding road that ascends towards your house. The streetlight has long since died and no one has bothered to replace it. The higher you walk, the darker it gets, the number of houses dwindling every bend. You begin to hum a tune to keep that otherworldly chill away. That chill that begins at the nape, slowly spreading itself upwards making your hair rise on ends. Your back arches. You feel a presence right behind you. You dare not look behind. You hurry ahead, your pace quickening.

See a pair of yellow eyes gleaming like two tiny headlights. Jumping out of the bush stopping abruptly in front of you meeting the eyes of your flashlight. A cat. The nocturnal animal slinking away with a dead mouse in its mouth relieved to see that it is only an unsuspecting human crossing path with it.

The presence behind you doesn’t leave you. You reach a large bend, and gathering pluck, you turn your head just a fraction, your eyes darting towards the corners naturally, to see if there is someone there and if there is, whether it is someone walking home like you.

The footsteps behind you are as sure as yours are, crunching on the gravel under the weight of the body. It surely must be someone walking home too. With the thought that you’re better off letting them pass by, you stop at the bend and sit on the parapet, your fingers wound tightly around the plastic bag, your heart shuddering as the footsteps approach you and walk past you.

See the back. It’s the back of a man walking past you. The way the shoulders swing as he walks tells he’s young. His steady steps carry him ahead of you. Only the white shirt, discernible against the dark, swinging eerily as it disappears in the bend.  It’s just a young man walking home. Relieved with the thought of having company, your fears ease and you resume walking whistling as you go along. As the houses thin out, the spaces are inhabited by bushes and trees. You shine your light on it and you think you catch a shadow sneaking quickly behind the bush. You peer carefully into the bush. It’s only a bush. You shake your head smiling. When you’re alone in the dark, even your own imagination turns on you.

See a silhouette. Further up in another bend. The white shirt visible, sitting on the parapet. Meaning to exchange a greeting, you dart towards him. When you’re about five meters from the man you halt suddenly. There’s something odd about the man sitting on the parapet. He is facing the opposite direction, towards the town below, and yet when you crane your neck to take a sneak peek at his face, it seems he’s facing you. Only he’s not. You can only see the back of his head no matter which way you look.

You could’ve have turned around and dashed down the road. You could’ve gone back to your friend’s place and asked to stay the night. You don’t. You feel you’ve come all this way up, and all it’ll take, is for you to walk past as quietly, and as normally as possible as though nothing is amiss.

You hold your breath. Your feet move forward, your fingertips are numb. You walk, slowly, deliberately, your flashlight trained on the spot in front of your feet. Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and your ears ring loudly.

See ahead. Don’t look to your right. He, it, is sitting there in perfect stillness watching you with the back of his head. The steps you take as you pass the man are the slowest steps you’ve taken, and no matter how much you’d like to hurry; your feet just won’t move any faster. With your chest threatening to burst, you finally cross him. Pretending not to have seen him at all, you walk at a normal pace, and on reaching another bend, you launch into a sprint. You run. You run like you’ve never run before. Your flashlight swinging haphazardly. You propel your body with unfailing grit as the climb becomes precipitous. This steep climb you’ve always complained about now seems trivial as you race upwards.

You run until you can run no more. Your legs give in before the rest of your body does. The sudden arresting of your legs send you sprawling on the ground. The palms of your hands acting as brakes preventing your face from crashing against the tarmac. You’re aware of a sharp burning sensation on the edges of your palms and on your knees. Your flashlight has rolled away and died.

Hear the footsteps. Right behind you. You freeze as you hear the soft crunching of gravel close now. Your head turns around of its own accord even when you don’t want to look.

See the man. He’s standing over you now. White shirt gleaming, arms dangling on the sides. Thin beanpole straight legs. He’s looking at you with the back of his head. Even in the dark, you can see a shock of thick black hair where his face should’ve been.

Fear, an emotion effected by perceived threat makes a human achieve feats that otherwise isn’t possible. You don’t know how, but you’ve pulled yourself up with one swift movement. You jump up in half a second and sprint with legs that could carry you no further. It is as though your body is carrying your legs because you’re aware of your body heaving forward and your legs following after.

You grope, trip, stumble, stand up again, but you don’t stop.

See the dim warm light pouring out of the window up ahead. You’re finally at a five-minute distance from home. You can see the light glimmering through the trees and bushes. Someone’s still up. Soon you’ll be wrapped around by the comfort of reaching home. You’ll walk in, you’ll sit down, ask for a glass of cold water. Too tired to take a bath you’ll wipe away the cold sweat before you slip in between the sheets warmed up by the hot water bottle, and you’ll close your eyes. You are home, safely tucked in bed.

Your body jerks with a start. You’re still on the road that leads home. You realise you have stopped. Silence sits heavy around you. No more sound of footsteps behind you. No strange feeling of being followed. You breathe a sigh. A relief sinks into you as you realise how confounding the figment of a fear-driven mind can be. You drag your feet, your body drained, the blood in your veins still humming with the remnants of that pulsating fear. You finally reach the landing. You open the gate leading to the garden. Your legs are killing you. You can barely move. But you want to turn around one last time. It is true when they say that one can resist anything but temptation.

You turn around. Just about five steps from you, there he is. Standing with his shoulders slouched a little, as though he’s tired from the walk as well. His head slightly bent; he’s still peering at you. The faceless mass only an arm’s length away from you. One of his arms is stretched towards you and from his hand dangles the plastic bag of veal that you’d left behind when you bolted earlier. Slime and blood trickling from its corner. You’re paralysed. Your heart stops. You open your mouth only to let out a voiceless scream. You’re swallowed by darkness.

See the sunlight peeping in through the crack of your curtain. You’re awake. The house is still asleep. Images from the night before, flash across your eyes. Was it all just a dream? A feverish dream from which waking was next to impossible?

You walk into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Something urges you to look outside. Thin mist swirls in the garden and in the morning sun, one can catch dewdrops settled on the row of marigold heads. Just beside the row of marigolds, where the boulder sits, you see a small heap. You peer closer, cracking the curtain wider. You recognise the pink of the plastic bag, its mouth creased, its contents still secure within, left atop the boulder.

Casualty

When my mother conceived me, she wasn’t in a good place with my father. A failed marriage loomed over them and their desperate attempt to save it became my inception. Marriages were meant to be a permanent bond until death arrived to sever it. No one knew what it was like to live separately after a seemingly trying time together. Even if you hated your husband, you were supposed to live with him for the rest of your life and vice versa. Affairs on the sly, separate bedrooms and cold wars were all secretly acceptable but not divorce.

 As I grew up, I never heard a kind word from my father to my mother, and I never saw my mother smile at my father. They slept in separate rooms, and I slept with my mother. For me, that was natural. Parents weren’t supposed to coddle one another or pass, knowing smiles at one another over meals. They were meant to – like my parents – live under one roof in their respective rooms and argue whenever their paths collided however briefly. Every day as I went to school and my father went to work in the tea factory, I wondered what my mother did when she was by herself. I didn’t have to wonder too long because one day we were sent home early. I found my mother sitting in front of the mirror and staring at her reflection in perfect stillness. From the back, she looked like the statue of goddess Sarasvati in one the pandals put up by our village during Sarasvati puja. Wavy dark hair fell down to her waist in a thick tumble, and as I stood at the door and watched her dumbfounded, and as she stayed like that - oblivious of my presence - I realised that I had never seen my mother’s hair open like that. She always had it tied in a knot on top of her head, or kept it platted.

“Ama.” The words escaped my mouth in awe. I was struck by the beauty of her thick dark hair that cascaded like waves; waves of the Balasun river after the sun went down; waves of the Balasun river under a full moon night, mysterious and breathtaking. She whipped her head around as soon as she became aware of my presence, and I saw that she was wearing make-up. Bright, beautiful eyes lined with kohl and red lips stared back at me.

“Why the hell are you home so early?” She spat out and suddenly, all her beauty disappeared with the words that came out of her mouth turning her back at once into the bitter gourd she usually feeds me. I have vowed to never have or cook bitter gourd ever in my life when I grow up.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked. I was curious. She never left home.

“Do I have to go somewhere every time I put make-up and comb my hair? Can’t I do what I want for once?” She said, her sentences all ending in questions that I had no answers for. Turning back to the mirror, she added, “as long as your father isn’t at home, I can bloody well do what I want.” I understood then that it was all about father. A part of me was happy that she wasn’t going anywhere, but a part of me wondered what our house would be like without her.

She suddenly stood up and ran to the bathroom emerging half an hour later without the make-up. A lop-sided smile hung in one corner of her mouth, and her eyes were glassy. She had washed her face, and it appeared red and raw. Perhaps she had rubbed it too hard. The rims of her eyes and the tip of her nose were a bright red like the lipstick on her lips a while ago. Had she been crying? Drinking in the bathroom?

I realised later that she had been doing both.

I was old enough to see that my mother was miserable and that my father was more like a guest who stayed the night watching tv into the wee hours of the morning drinking whiskey. I didn’t understand how he stayed up every night and still be on time for work. Once, I stayed up all night studying for an exam and the next day, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d studied the night before. I fell asleep on the desk and failed the exam.

It wasn’t until I began watching shows on the black and white tv in my neighbour’s house that I saw that a father and a mother could smile at each other and say kind words to one another all the time and sleep in the same bed and exchange knowing smiles over meals. To me, that was some revelation. I wanted to see more of that. Somehow, I got hungry for shows like that. It was like I was craving for food that I had never tasted. My best friend Pema chuckled when I once said that I would like my father and mother to be kind to one another because the folks on tv were so kind to one another and when they were so nice to one another everything seemed so lovely all around.

“Dummy. All that isn’t real. That’s what tv shows do. They make you long for things you cannot have.”

What would she know? I thought later. She only had a mother. She never knew her father since he’d died long before she was even born. That’s what mother had said when I’d asked her about where Pema’s father was. Then I had been horrified when she’d added. “I’d be lucky to be in her mother’s shoes.” What kind of a wife wishes for her husband to die? I thought revulsed by my mother’s words.

In our neighbourhood, we’d often hear about a boy and a girl eloping for three days and three nights until their families gave up searching and welcomed them home as a couple. People in our village talked about how deeply the couple were in love that they just couldn’t do without each other. Could two people love like that? I wondered. Then what of my parents? Did they start with a love like that? Or were they just brought together by my grandparents one day and said that they were to live as husband and wife from that day on?

Mira, a girl in my class who sat beside me, slipped a note in my desk one day.  I really like you. It said. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say and why she’d had to write a note when I was sitting right next to her. I liked her too, and I liked Pema, just like I liked everyone in my class. She probably read my confusion because the next thing she did was pull my hand under the desk and squeeze it and look at me like the people on tv did. I panicked, because no one had pulled my hand under the desk and squeezed it looking at me like that. For some reason, I kept this from Pema. I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to keep this a secret and I felt disgusted when I thought of Mira's hand on mine. What was that?

When I came home, my mother opened the door with a blue eye. I pretended not to notice it. She went back to her room while I went to the kitchen to rummage pots and pans for leftover lunch. I ate a bowl full of rice and chicken, and I still wasn’t satisfied. I felt hollow inside. Father came home in the evening piss drunk and picked a fight with mother again. I wanted to run away from home. A week later I bled, and terrified as I was, seeing the big black spot in my underwear, I screamed so loudly that my mother banged on the bathroom door and struck me hard with her knuckles when I opened it. That was when I was told that I had become a woman. My stomach bloated, and it hurt everywhere, especially my chest that had begun to swell too. “You better be careful now. Boys will smell you like dogs.” My mother said, pulling out a sanitary napkin from the drawer and handing it to me. I was mortified by the sudden changes in my body, and I thought that I was dying. One thing I was sure about those days was that I had been struck by a terminal disease, and I was dying. I waited for death to embrace me, but it never arrived.

The bleeding stopped to my relief only to appear again a month later. I had thousands of questions popping in my head continuously those days, but every time I began talking to mother in bed at night, she would turn away. When I pressed, she'd breathe heavily and say, “enough! You are a woman now. Understand that. Men will want you the way you have never been wanted. Keep away from them.” Keep away from men was the first real advice I got from my mother. Men like my father I thought, who never smiled or said a kind word to mother or to me, who drank like a fish and picked fights almost every day.

 Our house turned into a battleground when mother began to hit back. Soon we had broken things lying around in the house that could no longer be fixed. I wanted to run away from home. I thought about it every night, but where would I go? Then one day it dawned on me. There was a monastery far up on the hill where only female nuns lived and practised. I had been there once or twice during festivals. Could I go there and live with them? There wouldn't be any men smelling me up like dogs there. What would happen to my mother if I left? That was one troubling question that reared its head up like a snake in my head. I was never close to my mother, and I hated the way she got annoyed at me for every little thing. She wasn’t the kind of mother I saw on tv or read about in books.

Sometimes I wanted to do things to make her cry or worry. Like that time when I didn’t come home for the night. I stayed at Pema’s house without telling her. The next day, she slapped me across the face and pulled my hair, saying, “how dare you! How dare you do this to me too!” I was more frightened than hurt. I didn’t know who to hate more. The man who was my father in name only, or the woman who gave birth to me and called herself my mother but did nothing else that other mothers did. I had learnt to do things early by myself. I cooked, I cleaned, I washed, and I could take care of myself better than any other girls my age. My mother only cooked when she was in a good mood, and that was rare.

Then one day, news hit our small village. “Did you hear?” Our neighbour, a woman with a substantial girth, said pushing herself in through our tiny door.

“Namu has left her husband.”

“For another man?” My mother asked, dark rings under her eyes making her look like a ghost.

“No, she left just like that. She didn’t even bother to take her things. And oh, those children! What will happen to them now? Disgraceful woman. Couldn’t she have thought about what this will do to her parents? They will be treated like outcasts now.”

My eyes darted between my mother and our neighbour, and strangely, my mother smiled as though she was glad for the woman. But when she spoke, she said, “you’re right; her parents will be shamed, and everybody will feel sorry for her husband and the children. She will never be welcomed back. Where did she go? That woman?” The smile lingered on her lips a few more seconds but our neighbour, who was busy lifting lids off our pots to see what mother had cooked, didn’t notice it.

That night in bed, I turned towards mother. We faced each other and just as she was about to turn away, I spoke. “Do you want to leave too?”

“What?” Her voice was hoarse.

“I said, do you want to leave father too?” I repeat.

“Go to sleep. It’s late.” She turned away, and I didn’t see the tears that fell on her pillow. I only felt her shoulders shake.

That night I must have grown a whole lot because for the first time I felt a pang inside. It hurt, and it wasn’t my pain. It was my mother’s. She had been in pain all along. The pain of a loveless marriage. The pain of an indifferent husband, sorrow for all the wasted years in school and college when she could’ve used it to find a job and become independent. Pain and anger for trusting someone else more than trusting herself. Pain for not being able to become a mother to me, for not being able to love me.

Love, a confusing emotion had somehow niggled its way inside me, and it was no short of a miracle. It was perhaps my birth-right to feel it even if no one had taught me how to. That such emotion was a natural order of things and should come just as naturally as the seasons. I felt love for my mother that night. I wanted to hold her even when I knew she would slap my hand away. That night I felt love for my father. I wanted to tell him it’s okay. I understood how he ached inside, being despised by the woman his parents had so carefully picked for him. For the first time, I understood that it hurt him more than anything else. The monastery on the hill that beckoned me so loudly that past month, now seemed too far away and the journey there seemed impossible.

I was born as an attempt to save a marriage. A loveless marriage. I stood as a testament for two people who had tried and failed but had nowhere else to escape. I thought about the way Mira had squeezed my hand under the desk and looked at me with a kind of yearning. Was she feeling love?

I don’t know what it exactly means to love one another. I can mimic it from books and tv and films of course, but I don’t really know what it means to do things for love, but that night, I was willing to try. I wanted to try. I wanted to feel loved and I wanted to love another person. Home, was where I wanted to start. My mother and father were the people I wanted to start loving. Love, that little word suddenly felt so big and unattainable, but I was willing to try.

*Illustrations by Yoshay

Friendship for Grown-Ups A Review

By Nao-cola Yamazaki

Translated by Polly Barton 

“One day, there was light. The light hit the rock. The rock was filled with life, [.]”

An immensely delightful read, Friendships for Grown-ups is a collection of three very short stories that are interlinked with one another. What got my attention was Strangers Press’ artistic format of this chapbook, so beautifully compiled, and of course Yamazaki’s graceful and delicate writing. Three stories that start with an amusing almost comical story called A Genealogy, which is about a rock’s evolution into finally becoming this woman called Kandagawa. An inanimate object such as a simple rock gives -through an evolutionary process – birth to an animate being, a woman whose name is Kandagawa, and who is the protagonist of the second story. I loved the part how as a human Kandagawa goes to the bath house and when she stretches her legs, she remembers how in the past she used to be a fish.

“When she looked at the painted nails of her feet that were sticking out of the bathwater, she though they looked like fins.”

The second and third story focuses on relationships. In The Untouched Apartment,
Kandagawa is having a dream about her previous apartment that she’d shared with her ex-boyfriend Mano. She then gets a call from him out of the blue, and together they set off to see their old apartment. Walking together in their old neighbourhood and visiting their university and restaurant, Kandagawa realises that she no longer is the person she used to be when she was with Mano. Like the coelacanth climbing out of the water onto land in the first story, she has evolved, moved on and become someone else.

“It was a white pebble, about the size of a peanut. She’d chosen it because it had looked somehow pure. She held it under the fluorescent light, and stared at it. It still had traces of soil in it. Unsure whether stones are combustible or non-combustible, she hesitated for a while. Then she threw it in with the non-combustible rubbish."

In the final story Lose Your Private Life, which is the longest out of the three, Terumi Yano who is Kandagawa’s friend, is a writer under the pen name Waterumi. She falls in love with Matsumoto a musical composer but her feelings remain unrequited. This story really struck a chord because it is about defining oneself through the eyes of others. Yano is heartbroken when she realises that Matsumoto only loves her novels and not her as a person. Yano struggles with the separation between the art and artist initially believing that she is separate from all of the novels she’s written, just a girl in love with a boy. Like the first story, Yano too through a difficult process realises that her raison d’etre is her writing and that the art and artist are one, and as the title suggests Yano finds a way to lose her private self, merging with her art.

“I fall in love because I think that unless I fall in love I won’t be able to write properly, but the things I write are a thousand times more attractive than I myself am, so nobody ever likes me as a person, but I’m going to give my life up to writing, so it doesn’t matter.”

I resonated a lot with the second and third stories in a way that it sat so close to me in its reflections. That we are continuously evolving through different phases of our lives, and yet how that change is the only constant is something that we all ponder upon from time to time. It is when you see it in a body writing, it strikes a major chord. Yamazaki’s fine story telling in Polly Barton’s brilliant translation is a dedication to that very aspect of the slippage of time without the realisation of which we have become someone else entirely.

From a distance even dust motes twinkle deluding the human eye - Review of Twinkle Twinkle by Kaori Ekuni

“I try to be careful, but sometimes I fall in love.” Kaori Ekuni in her afterword of the novel.

Mutuski, a gay doctor bordering on OCD is married to Shoko a highly strung, slightly alcoholic woman. Shoko is aware that Mutsuki is gay when their marriage is arranged but she gives her consent readily. She strongly agrees that Mutsuki continues his relationship with his lover Kon, always coaxing him to tell her stories about Kon and their time together. When Mutsuki insists that Shoko should have a boyfriend, she vehemently denies. She doesn't warm up to the idea about having a boyfriend outside her marriage, but she is alright with her husband having a lover outside the marriage.
Sounds bizarre right? Well I thought so too in the beginning, and it took me a while to get into the story. However, it was much later I realised that I had actually fallen in love with this story and its eccentric female character. Shoko is unstable, fiery and drinks more than one should. She feels she’s culpable in fooling Mutsuki into the marriage and cannot stand his kindness. But the truth  is, she is deeply in love with her husband and with the way he is with Kon, knowing that their relationship goes way back to high school days. She desperately wants to have a part of what Mutsuki and Kon have. She wants to be accepted by the two of them and when she cannot get that through to Mutsuki, she retaliates through volatile outbursts and depressive behaviour.
Twinkle Twinkle is not your ordinary story and the simplistic writing does delude you to the point that it may sometimes even bore you in the beginning but if you have the patience, this gem of a story gets to you even before you realise it. It’s a late bloomer appearing cold and stiff in the beginning to the point of frustrating the reader, but slowly unfolds into this heart-warming story of love and a complete understanding of the other half. It also made me rethink about romantic love and its inevitable tie with physical consummation.
“The feeling I had that I was embracing water came not from the loneliness of a sexless marriage, but from the complex we both had about it – the suffocating need to be sensitive to the other’s feelings the whole time.”
Twinkle Twinkle does address the frustrations of societal pressures of how men and women are supposed to conform to their stereotypical roles of man and wife, but the author’s main intent is to tell a love story between unlikely people, and that, love is not something restricted to sexual preferences or the number of people. Love can bloom between any two or even three very different people.
The author mentions in her afterword that one of the chapters “Sleepers and the One that Watcheth” is based on a painting by Simeon Solomon. I looked it up and the author’s intention suddenly became clear to me.
I must add here that only Japanese writers can write about a topic so sensitive and so fragile with such serenity.  I also must give credit to Emi Shimikawa for her brilliant translation. 5 out of 5 stars from me.