“Invisible”
- ritumukherjee10
- Jun 23
- 6 min read
Kaaliya, Oh Kaaliya, the dark one, why are you wearing new clothes Kaaliya? Is it your birthday Kaaliya?
The cries and cackles of her cousins woke Krishna up with a start. She rubbed sleep from her face and told herself it was a dream. First came confusion, then incredulity. It was so long ago. Why did she still have such dreams? She and Kartik had gone to sleep around four in the morning and she felt her eyes hurt with the sun peeking from the curtains. Kartik was still asleep. She smiled warmly at him and pulled the bedsheet a little closer to his neck. She knew he turned cold in the mornings. She thought of her name. Krishna…a clipping for Krishnakali, named after Tagore’s eponymous song. Ambitious, wasn’t it? She had always known herself as Krishna, wondered why she had been named after a male God, until the day her grandmother told her that she had named her Krishnakali and sang Tagore’s song to her. To her young mind, the song made no sense, the only word that had reached out to her was kaalo, dark.
She had been an accident, that had no other choice but to be pushed out into the world. The result was not satisfactory. Smaller than most children, dark, with a mass of curls on her head, she resembled neither her parents, nor anyone in the family. Her birth had caused the family much consternation, in trying to relate her to any person from any of her parents’ sides. Her aunt had suddenly exclaimed, “Ah! Its Shejo Kaka, must be his genes”. “Leave her alone! She is Lakshmi, the only girl in this family of boys. She will bring you prosperity”. With those words her grandmother enfolded her in her arms. She would often say to Krishna, “Remember Krishna, Kaalo jogoter aalo, the light of the world shines brighter in the darkness”. To her young mind, and to this day, her grandmother was the wisest person. But Krishna had so many questions, one of them was, “What about the fair-skinned people then, Thammi?” Her grandmother would smile wistfully, “Questions only bring trouble Krishna, remember that.”
Her grandmother was the only one to touch her. Krishna felt so loved in her presence that she wondered why her parents dragged her back with them. She felt invisible and she did not know ways to make the world see her. She had phantom parents and ghostly friends with whom she would talk endlessly in her mind. The beauty of her parents, her cousins would intimidate her, their words would curb her desire to talk. So, she became quiet and it was a struggle to talk even in school. She was very surprised, therefore, when her oldest cousin, newly returned from abroad, wanted to speak to her. He spoke kindly, seemed genuinely interested. She had never seen him before. He was so fair, light brown eyes, with flecks of green, towering over her, that he seemed to her a movie star. She felt slighted and belittled by his beauty and had an impulse to run but he reached out and touched her. Warmth spread through her, like an acknowledgement of her being. She stayed. She called him dadabhai, as she had been taught. He would come once a month, bring her chocolates and lend her books from his collection. She read the tales he brought voraciously, always hungry for more. But she didn’t understand why he would often sit with her in shadowy rooms and terraces, where darkness would envelope them. Was he ashamed of being seen with her? Even in the dark, with the muted street lights in the background, his fair perfect face would shine gloriously. He would often touch her when it was dark. She would both like it and wonder about its strangeness, till one day he touched her so brutally that her phantom mother screamed out in her mind, “This is wrong! Run! Run Krishna!”
And she ran, blinded by the darkness, wounded by the bannister, she ran and crawled under the bed, shaking in fear. She would not want to see dadabhai again, or any man his age for a long time. They filled her with a familiar dread. She chose invisibility, and read a lot and lived vicariously. She eventually became a teacher. The first time she gave a bottle of water to her hiccupping student, she felt seen, she felt a love powerful enough to blight her darkness momentarily. She knew it was wrong for her to want to be seen. It was a fatal flaw. She had grown tired of waiting for her parents to be kinder, so she moved out and settled in a studio apartment. She quickly made a home out of that place-- plants in the balcony, bookshelves spilling over, warm bedspreads, it looked beautiful, straight out of Pinterest. But something was not right. Amidst the beauty of it all she still felt small, like the little girl had never grown up, the one who wanted to be seen. The doctors termed her bipolar. She was happy one day, morose the next, exhilarated one day, listless the next. Her friends said she would do well to marry. She eventually did. He was kind, faithful, doting. His name suited him. Kartik, with the mythical beauty of the god he was named after, he was fair, sharp, a winning smile with his crooked teeth and full lips, moreover, he was gentle, content, like he needed nothing more in life but to exist with her. She felt fulfilled but always found herself questioning his choice in marrying her. She never told him anything about it though. There should be some things unsaid in every marriage. The grey skies would fill her with sudden longings and as always, she would picture herself as a child searching for the warmth of her grandmother’s freshly made, sundried mango pickle which she would devour in the terrace while her Thammi would oil her hair.
The day she felt seen again after many years was when he told her she wrote prose well, that she should keep at it, like a habit, like breathing, or eating, or sleeping, like we hold onto joy. She was much older now, yet the child in her was never sated, the void never filled. So, she hurried to clutch parts of this man who said she wrote well, conversed with him at night when she lay beside her husband in bed, smiling into oblivion. Her organized life now was a little in disarray. Dishes remained undone, dust gathered on the furniture, her plants thirsted for water, like she waited by the phone for it to buzz. She was crippled with guilt when one of her hydroponic plants ran out of water and its fresh, green, tender stems withered to a nasty yellow. She filled it with water, begging for it to pull through and promised she would get her life back on track in a couple of days. She just needed two days to get a grip on her mind’s oscillating reality. Kartik had begun to notice but he was too kind to wring words out of her. One night, when she felt particularly restless, waiting with the phone in hand, pacing the roof, looking at the speckled harvest moon for companionship, the sound of the sea playing itself out in earphones, Kartik came and stood beside her. It was two in the morning and sleep evaded both of them. He looked at her with such longing that it baffled her. She found her own longing for this man she barely knew reflected in her beloved friend’s face, for that was what Kartik was, she had no else that really knew her well enough. She told him about her state of mind with as much kindness as she could summon, waiting for the accusations and neglect to follow. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her closer to him and talked so gently it seemed like a lullaby, “I know. I have seen you smile at the phone”. At that very moment, at a complete loss of words for his understanding, the child in Krishna held out her hand. Kartik took it and smiled. The two of them, with their own longings, stared out into the void. She felt some of the ink leech out of her, dripping out, thick and metallic, and dissipate into the darkness beyond.
Parchamonline.in, May 21, 2024
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