Cassandra’s Eyes
She
By Sharmillie Rahman
It was an ordinary morning, or was it?
All mornings were weighed down by those phantom expectations that always came along with an anticipation of inevitable disappointments. They came slouching from across the hazy pages of the days and months of her forced amnesia.
On that day, she woke up with a premonition of an end.
The door of the veranda was left ajar-- the morning light set one foot tentatively inside the door revealing a column of fine dust through which she could glimpse her plants, breathing cautiously in their earthen pots. He was turned on his side. There was a slight hump that ran down the middle of the bed dividing their sides like a boundary. Sometimes she could even visualize a barbed wire that he used to carefully install along the border before going off to sleep.
‘Pancakes usually puff up in proportion to the amount of baking powder used, hmm…” she mused turning in her mind the recurring thoughts that refused to go away! She must decide now! “One more teaspoon, maybe,” while she was still juggling with a troubled understanding of his cavalier, unaffected approach to life. ‘’Why is this alienation from reality? Why hang on to an illusion of perfection, why this entitlement to immunity from guilt or responsibility …” the brain muttered away under the steady but discordant hum of life. Was she being self-righteous? Was she looking for an idealized improbability of seamless meeting of minds exactly the same way as he was? Love was enough for him; for her it also became a liability to ensure the conditions that could help materialize this very eluding love!
There was a transmitter standing dangerously close to her balcony. The electric wires that carried sizzling pulses of energy spooled out, in her mind, a dark pall of electro-magnetic web over her plants, slowly sapping them off colour and vitality. Sometimes, her ominous thoughts were like those wires, spreading their wily tentacles over her mind, taking all its joy away. She was afraid to be alone. When she had no other option she crawled into the cocoon, that was her bed and rubbed her calming fingers over the most alive part of her body that shortly radiated a sense of being so complete that it shot through her body all at one fell swoop, followed by a temporary oblivion.
The world lay at a distant shore! No TV or newspaper, an ideal world for the new age hermits has served only to isolate her even more within her miseries. He, on the other hand loves to take long strolls out on the streets. A person much interested in the everyday oddities that momentarily distract you, sometimes clicking away with his mobile camera, while she looked on absentmindedly, her gaze merely skimming over the sepia texture of the scenes ebbing and flowing away as if in slow motion. He also chops veggies and cleans after her in the kitchen; bathes her; and firmly holds her hand on the streets, sporting both his fancy leather boots and his woman. He never shoos away old beggar ladies and can hardly resist a temptation of stepping into wayside sweetshops. He makes quite a jovial character styled in dated fashion, and imbibed with a secret satisfaction over his looks. This was her man.
She met him through his voice. It is deep, with kind of a liquid timbre, like liquorice. Then he became a neurotic need, for little merit other than his readiness to be with her, to keep her at his side. He is a quick learner, he taught himself to speak impressive English and also learnt how to impress her, and before long wormed his way into her head. It is this man she wanted to leave behind in that house when her legs buckled under her debilitating anxiety bouts.
She felt more naked dressed than without, she thought his eyes measured her for what she did or did not do with her looks. It was towards the end, surprisingly though, that she discovered how music was a dependable thread that could flimsily tie them together in its loose binds. Then there was that constant, looming threat of slipping into her fears of isolation, aloneness. Then partly it was the heat that left her drenched in sweat, conjuring up the phantoms of dread. There was also the heat of desire that still had not waned off but instead kept on whetting itself because it was another kind of music that often entwined them in the realm of chasing a common carnal goal.
That was all, everything shrank and caved in around her. She felt like a rookie, caught out at her own wrong deal of cards.
It is when he stands at a certain angle-- it still takes her breath away. The curls sparsely hanging over his neck. He still makes his strong romantic protestations. It is the plants that flowed across the disjointed planes of time to become her preoccupation at the present, in the other house she shares with somebody else. The music links she used to receive through his texts have also fallen to few and far between these days.
Her hair has grown longer, so did a girdle around her midriff. Summer is edging slowly towards winter. He came to see her in a black shirt with pleats running the length of the front. But she could clearly see that his patience is waning, sometimes his smiles are forced, and between spells of fights they somehow manage a few engaging adult conversations. They sleep on different beds; the dividing hump now has stretched itself out into several miles in between. It is the voice that still has not ceased from dripping reassurance of a presence into her mind.
Teacup rings on old lacklustre wooden table tops is surely like the lichens on weathered tree-trunks. A visual palimpsest of someone else’s story reeling into mine. The circle is a mystical thing. Like – coming full circle- placing the beginning next to the end, denying linearity, it renders the end the doorway to another beginning. The divide is blurred, and the notion of ‘trans’ becomes the all abiding truth. She thought she had crossed the divide, but one is way too entrenched for that in the reality that has all along sustained her lived experience. One can’t just wish away the contours of known life and remodel it on an idea of an imaginary one! Sounds pretty straight-forward, right? For him, it was a movie wistfully projected onto the surface of his real-time flow of things. They attended family weddings-- occasions for buying presents, getting dressed, as if to go to a masquerade, with each repetition the mask affixing itself more firmly over what it conceals. She was carried away by his enthusiasm, by the force of his devotion to role-playing, she was not with him during his theatre days, but she could guess play-acing came naturally to him especially since he does it with all honesty and conviction. Her shrink wants her, now, to decipher her emotions and find out if they carry messages of guilt, regret. She followed her heart like he did, then at one point she collapsed into herself. She still remembers when she shuddered at the words of the Kazi, “You have to put it down in writing, how, your husband has ill-treated you … ‘’. Then it really hit her… the stick with a circle at the tip which you dip in soapy water before you blow through the circle… and the rainbow bubble that comes to life, scintillating in the sun… the bigger it grows the excited you are as it sucks you and your world into it… then it dissolves and you continue to blow and blow until you have exhausted the liquid…
He doggedly stuck to it story, his love.
On way to Tangail, oh… it was a never-ending journey, the bus taking a detour due to road construction and it is a misplaced analogy to call it a roller roaster ride, because she remembered how those rides bring to mind a feeling of shuttling through a vortex as time sped past in an eternal loop; this was simply bumpy, being tossed about inside a tin canister while time surreptitiously slipped away. Pathrail, Bashak Bari, was where we were headed, a weavers’ village. It was before Baishak and we picked sarees for all the women in the family, that was a happy occasion!
It was his sense of family values that helped build the concrete steps she hoped would lead her to the threshold of a whole new world. Yes, the staircase, faithfully remained her handle on the real when all else crumbled down, a gateway to her sanctuary-- the second storey apartment she rented to set up another way of life, which she climbed, always filled with anticipation of a miracle, after returning from work.
There was yet another stairwell, the sight of which would more often than not leave her nerves prickly. It was more like taking one step at a time towards your destiny which you were at the same time trying on for size in front of a mirror inside the trial room of your own errors. Did she ever feel guilty while carrying on the charade for his/her and their benefit? Occasionally! But sometimes that crammed household offered the promise of an escape from his attention which most definitely had to shift for practical reasons onto the other side of his life. There definitely was a divide between these two households. He had only just recently moved out, and the schism was still very livid. She tried to bury this insistent thought under her conscious efforts to make herself at home in that strange place. And, that included giving him uncontested sovereignty over the place they shared. His practised behaviour rarely faltered, he loved to treat the women in his life with his personal brand of chivalry, mostly like damsels in distress which sometimes she found exasperating. At home, the women played along with his performances with wary indulgence. “You know Bhaiya is whimsical, do you think you can talk him out of seeing this girl? Don’t antagonize him, he is your only support in old age!” These are the words the sister told her parents and repeated to her the day the sister stood in rain behind the cover of the bus, outside the school, waiting for her to emerge out of the gate, to tell her how terribly the brother is pining her loss. She could not resist this opportunity to find herself in his arms once again like a favourite item of recent possession temporarily lost. It felt he had distinct sets of emotions to cater to each side of the divide, which in his mind was strictly compartmentalized despite the obvious overlappings. The end became unavoidable when this precarious rule of engagement was breached, when she began to steadily invade the space that lay perched in all its moral and existential squalor at the end of the flight of that other stairwell and soon turn into the necessary accomplice in perpetrating the mind-bending denouement.
The bags of grocery lay side by side, one to remain, the other to go. He was always ferrying a bag from one world to the other, he was the potlawala.
His potla began to grow heavier under the weight of the reality, that he was required to divide his loyalty between the worlds. For her, an all-encompassing rage began to froth inordinately; “Why don’t you leave the house…’, she screamed, trembling, holding ono the doorframe, never for once taking her eyes off. He was wearing his Jean jacket-- something not to her taste. Soon he planted his lips on her upturned ones, in a-way-too familiar gesture of a mutual conspiracy both knew was absolutely self-serving.
“Hello…”, time for his periodic calls! They are now waiting for a bus to Jahangir Nagar University, “Stop groveling, you just talked to her yesterday, she would not have died over night!” What if she did … or what if she, herself had the courage to stifle this festering relationship to a screeching end? She was lost to reality, she was trapped inside a lone train cabin trundling across a wasteland, and all she could view were lines that formed shapes her mind was too feverish to register.
“Hon…”
What was being said? What was it all about? It stopped making any sense, no matter how rigorously she fumbled with and picked at the knots to unentangle the strands of her volatile emotions, to name them, to cure them, to tell herself, “It is alright… “
There was a sound, flickering, imperceptible, barely breathing like a soft feather that floats in the air propelled by forces beyond its control. Then it stopped. It was choked before it could establish its being. A sound silenced before it articulated the unfathomable.
Then the teardrop shaped itself and weighed down by gravity it escaped,] first stretched and hanging by a thin tread like the needle of a porcupine, shivering in a moment of reflection before a decisive plunge. Soon afterwards a bristling torrent followed suit. Tears from a fallen citadel. The fort of the heart, or what you may, water, compassionate and abiding, reclaiming the self…
__ Pages from her digital diary. End of story.
AUTHOR
Sharmillie Rahman employs words in the service of self-discovery. She is an introvert and loves to live in her own mind. Through the years, she has dedicated portions of her time to reading, writing, and teaching literature. Her initiation into the world of art came about through her brother and eventually led her to a stint at an art magazine, where she would translate articles, write reviews, micro-edit, and pen her own articles – all of which she continues to pursue as a free-lancer. She had organized a fashion exhibition in her earlier days and an art camp in recent times with artists at various stages of their careers in the Bangladeshi art scene, which transpired into a contemporary art exhibition at a Dhaka-based art gallery.