"Locks of Medusa"

Image Courtesy: Augustn Fernandez, Unsplash

Preeti saw her phone blink twice and fall silent. Her hands could not measure the distance between her frame and her phone, both lying on the queen bed, both islands unto themselves. She wanted nothing more than to sleep before transitioning to the next day.

It had been a year since her husband had shifted to Bangalore, taking a promotion in a multi-national company and she was in Delhi completing her PhD in English literature. She was lonely without him, of course, as life had taken over their marriage, after four years. She had thought it was too soon. She had not unpacked all the experiences yet. But constraints of middle-class meant working long hours, taking promotions and moving to other cities, while their relationship took a back seat, huddled in one corner of a dark room.

Skype calls were never enough, they soon ran out of words. She would want to look at Kaushik’s face but then it seemed silly considering the work that had to be done. As she saw Kaushik fall asleep on video, the white light, suffusing her face, Preeti would wonder about the gap in her chest, where her heart was purported. The gap expanded a little each day, eroding cavernous spaces in the hollow of her chest where the wind would play noisily. She felt her mind had branched into a plethora of compartments, taking care of her work, her assignments, her calls to her family. She would often observe her voice in those calls as a disinterested outsider. She marvelled at its calmness and tried to equate it with the person that roamed the emptiness of her one-bedroom apartment, and her mind. She knew she was slowly unravelling each day and would often have bright images at odd hours plunging her eyes painfully, while she would be out.

Preeti knew she was in trouble. She couldn’t begin to think of a means to describe her problem even to her closest confidantes, some of whom commented on her hollowed eyes and general restlessness. She often felt that her problem, stemming from loneliness, reeked of privilege. So, she corked it tighter each day, sleeping fitfully with eyes tightly shut against the darkness, opening her eyes at times, till they took comfort in the inky blackness of her room, shapes silhouetted in the faint street light streaming through dense curtains. She took to reading during these hours, to kill time, to distract her mind, to find kinship.

A few days back, while rain seeped every corner of the city and thunder proclaimed itself proudly, Preeti saw her phone blink. A message in the messenger application. She usually didn’t check these messages. She found most of them unwelcome and unsavoury. But that night, she was particularly lonely and this familiar face’s text, “What keeps you up so late?”, stunned her. She could not grasp why she was so curiously surprised. She knew this man. She had seen him visit the university for academic work a few times. She had always been polite and distant. So, she did not really know how to best answer that text. It was 2:30 am. She escaped leaving a formal ‘hello’, switching off her phone in dread. As she lay in bed cajoling sleep to come to her, she mused about her visceral dread, clutching at her rib cage, crushing her muscular heart. She fell asleep soon and the next morning nodded her head ruefully, admonishing herself for overthinking.

She had been reading a particularly interesting story the next day, around 2 a.m. at night, when her phone blinked again. It was the same person who had asked a expressly poetic question. She told him she didn’t know how to answer that question. Her mind had immediately become clouded and her senses befuddled, but somewhere in the corner of her mind, she sensed a thrill, a dangerous thrill and a tenderness that she had not felt in the longest time. She thought to herself, “Don’t be a goose. Talk to him”. The conversation stretched for an hour, in which she tepidly walked the surface in circles. The next morning as soon as she switched on her mobile data, a morning message popped up from him. She felt happy and the joy expanded through the day when he repeatedly asked her to meet and they sent songs, poems and letters to each other in the rain. She wondered how easily she had fallen in love, although she knew that it wasn’t that simple, she needed a more complex term for what she felt. Love was pure, simple, she wasn’t sure what she felt for him- this acute need, qualified as love per se.

She had made that digital room her own. She was fulfilled suddenly, at peace, but unnervingly happy, and that escalated bliss was the first she had felt in her life. It scared her in equal measure. She was a rational person and she watched herself pouring her soul out to this man, his attentions vacillating over the course of the two weeks they had been speaking to each other, till they reached her in a few, insufficient droplets. She reached out to hold on to the last vestiges of self-control. She had weaned away from food, sleep, friends, conversations with Kaushik were perfunctory at best. What she was amazed at was how normal she acted, how ordinary she sounded, while her insides screamed in silent ignominy, in utter loneliness.

She thought she would tell him, this man who had appeared suddenly and twisted her mind into such intricate knots that it took all her intelligence to separate them- she would tell him how she yearned for his messages, as if her life at that moment amounted to nothing more than the digital dream she had constructed. She did. She received a lukewarm response- “Work pressure, love”, with colourful emojis that stood for nothing, just like digital intimacy made no sense to her, it made her lonelier, suffusing her body with strange yearnings that knew no home. The casualness of his message, his offhand assurance and his wish for her to take care of herself, numbed her thoroughly, which was immediately replaced with dazzling pain. Pain shot through her chest in bright red, emanating in innumerable tentacles like Medusa’s head lodged deep and angry in her insides. In her pain, she rationalised and forgave him, how did she matter in the bigger scheme of things? What did a few messages at the guilt of night matter? She couldn’t comprehend her own unravelling in the past two weeks, that had sped too fast and crawled too slow depending on the state of her mind.

Preeti got up and slowly made her way to her wardrobe. She touched Kaushik’s shirt and smelled it, pressed it close to her chest. But it only smelt of rain, mildew and naphthalene balls. It wasn’t him. Her pain crippled her so completely that she felt she would burst if she didn’t do something. She couldn’t shake the image of Medusa’s head from her mind and she looked at her image in the mirror. Feeling too weak to walk, she slid across the floor to the dressing table and opened the drawer. She held Kaushik’s hair trimmer in hand. Taking a long look at herself, she spoke softly, “What is the point of such sadness?”. She took the trimmer and slowly shaved her head, long threads of pain, clumps of desperation and wisps of longing falling all over her. Her shorn head shone in the dim light. She rubbed her fingers on her clean scalp and smelled it. It smelled of talcum, and shampoo and freshly mown grass. It was oddly calming. Preeti didn’t feel as light as she thought she would, but there was a supernatural calm, a stillness as she looked at the night sky. The phone blinked white but she didn’t want to look at it anymore. She knew that the next morning was another matter. She would come to it slowly, like dawn leached into the skyscape.  

Monograph Magazine, Vol. 11, August 2022