Memories in a Water Cooler
It’s an abstract evening, the kind that slips into a coma each time you think you’ve saved it, so I hold my dress and imagine that I don’t bite my nail paint, or eat Cocoa Puffs without milk, or miss the days before global warming, and live happily forever after.
*
Sometimes I wonder if you know what it’s like to want to love, but get trapped in the quicksand of your being instead, and notice the sunlight patterns on the bathroom floor or spin with the ceiling-fan all day, but say nothing, despite the pearls on his five o’clock shadow.
*
It reminds me of Estella, who’d pull on her sneakers and escape through the keyhole while you’re still drowning in her eyes, and never look back to find you breathless, but it’s not her fault if her heart’s a soap bubble that finishes before you start—Great Expectations, small defeat.
*
Except you’re a terrific dead person, and if my heart stops beating for half a second then that’s okay since sometimes after putting us all to bed, the night-sky wants to tip-toe out of our lives because it knows that I hate standing at the water cooler, thinking about you.
*
And you’re to blame, because 20 years ago I’d wear frilly socks and ask Mummy if you’re coming back today with my Barbie stationery set, but she’d only watch me chasing ants on the front porch all evening as I tried hard not to lose track of who I am.
*
Her eyes weigh me down, you know? Not her head, or a-s-s, or the 4-month food baby from the dinner party, but her eyes—her risk-averse, barbed, annihilated, Paleolithic, punctured, tricky, wayward, kohl-smeared, inaccessible, wounded, wounding, anti-contact-lenses, tired, deceptive, tiring, burnt, resigned, quaint, deserted, jagged, long-gone, unsubtle, and heavy eyes.
*
And when I look into them, I’m sure if destiny has loopholes it must look like this, because I want nothing from you, you or you—I have too many pretty shoes and red zigzags underlining my conscience, and parrots on the trees outside my classroom that never go home.
*
I hear the machine voices whispering into my ears the names of Metro Stations and how Hiawatha loves me in spite of all my demented reminiscence of home and hometown because he believes that not having the answers to Papa’s questions doesn’t make you a hopeless someone, having them does.
*
So I’m the noisy party that’s never out of beer and you’re the evening breeze, because there’re one million mistaken verses on the windscreen of detachment as long as we’re all difficult people, you’re the ash from my cigarettes under everybody’s shoes, disappearing where I touch you― you don’t belong.
*
You sound like the solitary noises on a windy, power-cut afternoon, because the blank Microsoft Word document is shaped like nostalgia and leaves behind the smell of burning incense on my hands, so the curtains fly, the social-networks lose the war to solitude, and nobody picks up the telephone anymore.
*
The water sprinkler murmurs its secrets to the golden-green grass each morning but doesn’t ever talk about the inscriptions on Dadi’s skin or her desert colored eyes since she returned to her purple universe where people knit sweaters and go to school on horse-carriages in 1947 and never come back.
*
Because no one saw her driving her nails into sweaty palms and her devastating remoteness into everything else, when you kissed Baygon and the cockroaches in the kitchen died of heartache, thinking about your muddy cricket gear and the Gabriel Sabatini poster that went missing in the universe after you.
*
Who are you? The men within my naked singularities, the men without it –dead, daddy-like, or darling, because whether you make love or lunacy or teach me fifty-two times-twenty three is not the point; the point is who are you, living in the cracks of my Math tests and orgasms?
*
And that’s why moths are my favorite, because the light sends them up in thin smoke but they don’t give up on it, so let’s outlast the pointlessness of us in a world that’s too grayscale, living like each other’s paintbrush. I guess I’ll see you then. Eleven-thirty. Water cooler.
Kritika Pandey is a Young India Fellow, freelance features writer, blogger and a 2014 Charles Wallace scholar for Creative Writing at the Scottish Universities' International Summer School (SUISS), University of Edinburgh. She has written opinion pieces for the leading Indian newspaper, The Hindu and short stories for eFiction India Magazine. She was the winner of ISB iDiya for IndiChange Blogging Contest 2013, organized by the Indian School of Business, for her article on sex-trafficking of women and children in India.
