“Vocabulary”

It happened soon after she hit her head in love. Piya showed it to her partner, Tintin, who was growing worried about her recent proclivity for loud gesticulations. It was a pulsating, invisible outgrowth at the base of her skull that she pointed out with ease but was impossible to locate. Tintin dismissed it for the time being as her wishful thinking. She was often prone to flights of fancy. He always thought creative people were a little like that. A few days later, while she was getting home from work, she saw words leak out of the pores of her body, and away.

She routinely boarded a bus and when the bus conductor asked her the name of her stop, she gaped at him, fighting with her memory. But all she could recall was a lane full of shady trees, the angry gulmohar, the vibrant palash, the tall coconuts and all the varieties of ixora that dotted the many gardens there. She flailed her hands madly when she saw her stop and got off hurriedly, much to the chagrin of the driver and the conductor. The same day on her way back from the bazaar, while the lanes remained as familiar as the veins in her hand, she felt lost when the rickshaw puller asked her, “Didi kon dik e? Didi, which direction?” Small beads of sweat gathered on her forehead, made their way across her skull and down her medulla as she hunted desperately for the words ‘left’ and ‘right.’

Giving up after sometime, she used that filler for the first time consciously, something that would slowly feed on her and grow monstrously. Pointing to the right, she told the rickshaw puller, “Ye, oi dik e, that side.” The confused rickshaw puller turned and looked at her and she felt pity for his sweat-covered dark face. She tried to smile at him to assuage her guilt. But at the same time, it all began to seem very funny to her by the time she dumped the fruits and vegetables onto the dining table and related the incident to Tintin. He looked at her unaffected, “It’s not a joke Piya, you should be more careful.” And then he coached her like a child.

“Look, which party ruled our state for the longest time? What’s it called?”

“Left,” she immediately chimed.

“Yes, so now whenever you want to use this hand, or this direction remember the symbol of that party. Can you picture it? Describe it to me.”

“It’s a red hammer and sickle.”

“Exactly!”

Piya tried that trick thereafter. A large red hammer and sickle formed every time she turned left, it slowed her down, took its time to get out, but it worked for a while.

She dealt in words for a living. An English language teacher and translator, words buzzed in Piya’s brain and hummed in her throat. When she taught the intricacies of English words in her classroom, the layers of their structure or the correctness in their phonological patterns, her mouth would break those pieces into mincemeat and savour each morsel. She liked bending words to do her bidding.

She penned applications for people in the staff room who smiled at her, their eyes warm. It filled the void in her somehow. Those words. Like thick cardboard bits or wrapping papers that her mother never threw away, the ones she found tucked away in corners of windows, underneath uneven shelves, the skewed shoebox, between the bottles of oil and the wooden shelf. Those bits held her mother’s life, her words held her own.

In the evenings, she would get Tintin the customary cup of tea, and rush to her laptop, muscling her way through words, stringing sentences like fairy lights from one language to another. She would see the notes of Bach in some of them, in a piano interlude, or hear Mohammed Rafi haunt her with some soft melody. And finally, at the end of the day, just before bed, she would hum those sentences to herself in her soft, musical voice and closing her eyes, she wondered if she had managed to carry what the author wanted to say and not lose the beauty of it. This exercise filled her days with colour, and she kept coming back to drink at this fountain religiously.

By the time Piya finished her first book of translation, a gripping novel that she enjoyed tremendously, she started writing her own stories. Small bursts of moments hardened in the constraints of a few words, small vignettes that would sometimes go astray like her thoughts and spill over from the boundaries of flash fiction to a short story. Each one of them brought out a soupcon of buried thought in her mind. Life took a lot more burying than digging up. The book did fairly well, but it also asked for more of her than she was prepared to give.

She reluctantly gave in to the role she had to play for publicising it. Translating it was never enough, she soon discovered that if she wanted the book to live a little longer, she would have to approach people to read it and state their thoughts. So, she left polite knocks on doors, and ran as soon as they opened. He was among the ones who answered. Megh. The man from the land of hills and clouds. She stopped at his name a little longer than she did for most others. She didn’t ask herself why. There was too much living to be done. She sensed his spirit when he came back in two days with genuine interest and praise for her craft. She flushed at his candour. He recognized her words.

A day later she saw that he had shared his own poems with her. She didn’t know of his poetry. As her eyes waded through them, she saw the bravery and outrage, the tenderness and passion, she saw a hand come and touch her in the back and the touch felt unexpectedly warm. She murmured a hasty praise in return and kept the phone away. She was wary. She knew how these things quickly meandered and morphed into serious, sinister things. After all, all of us are part of a peculiarly lonely species craving human touch, small islands in corners of rooms, in different corners of the bed. That’s all they did for a month. Shared pieces of writing, editing and suggesting, laughing over books and favourite authors. Messages soon changed to phone calls when he declared one day, “I am lazy and I hate texting,” cheekily throwing in another line, “Besides, I like the way your voice sounds in my ears.”

Phone calls became places to sing, ask for recipes, share anecdotes, recite Urdu shayari. They wrote every day and at night before bed read each other’s work aloud, seeking out words they loved, talking about their use, suggesting others at times. He scoured websites and fished out her forgotten registers and read them out to her, his voice thrumming in her chest, warm, golden, honey-like. She would close her eyes and listen to him, sometimes yawning in its comfort. Did a mother’s womb feel this restful? She often found herself in cacophonous laughter that unspooled from somewhere deep inside her, and when she checked herself, he would warble, laugh and ask, “Why did you stop?”

She observed their words coalescing in each other. She would find a ‘swarthy’ in his poem and he would hear her smile. He would detect a ‘nebula’ in her writing and his voice would change timbre. And when on her birthday there were phone calls every thirty minutes and he sent her anti-vomit medicines instead of cake, much to Tintin’s bewilderment, she knew it had already morphed into the very thing she had dreaded. Piya gave herself to Megh, inch by slow inch and in this giving, there was a certain fearlessness. She would see his coded but open avowals of love on social media and each day a little of her reticence fell off.

When their passion grew, Megh brought himself and a cloudburst to her city. And as the thirsty streets drank the first showers of the year, their days ambled fast in uber rides and coffee cups, ginger tea and light curtains, sofas that framed their love, television that spurred laughter, the singing of the national anthem in a cricket match, and beds that cradled snores and murmurs. Their love drowned out every other noise of the throbbing city, deleting the miles that separated them. That was a curious heaven, and they resumed life heartened by its benediction.

Good things often have a way of turning awry. Caution crept soft-footed and then banged loudly at their relationship. They recognized that the world they inhabited was not peopled solely by themselves. They had already chosen others before they met each other and had to abide by their previous choices. She wanted the two of them to be fair to the ones they held affectionately, who were blameless as far as they could tell. That is always a difficult moment to navigate.

It was particularly hard for the two of them because they felt rushed in their decision to suddenly create boundaries. His pained voice and helpless rage whetted her spirit. She instantly turned into the elder daughter she had always been and thought through ways they could survive each other. She came up with a plan and relayed to him the technicalities of it. But the hourglass that was her mind showed signs of cracks, and the sand slowly, unbeknownst to her, kept slipping to the floor.

On a particularly difficult day, Piya heard Megh’s words turn into a distant roar at the back of her skull. She saw the insides of her mind bend like a ductile aluminum sheet. All her memories converged and scattered, turning round and round like one of those cat memes on Instagram. She had found it both funny and painful when she first had watched it for the first time. Now that she felt her mind rotate at a speed greater than she could control, she wished for a tiny slice of oblivion. She heard the sharp sound of grating glass screech past her ears and as she held her ears to protect them, she saw more words fall out of her as though her tree of life had been assailed by the Kalbaishakhi.

The next day she stood at the medicine shop determined to get a packet of migraine medicines and just as she was about to give the pharmacist the name, she froze in horror. The name had flown out of her mind like a stray piece of paper. She looked at the pharmacist and helplessly mumbled, “Ye, I want ye” and then gesticulated to point out that she had a terrible headache. Soon, she turned very quiet and started missing classes, isolating herself, panicking whenever the phone rang. Tintin worried and suggested they visit a psychologist and Piya weakly nodded and said, “Ye, no, ye.” Tintin held her hand and nodded.

Piya began pointing at things. Her inability to use the language filled her with a strange dread. She would look at the phone imploringly and then turn her face away. She stared baffled at Tintin and her parents when their words refused to generate meaning in her being. They took to pointing at things to keep up with her. Piya worried that her own darkness would spill over others, so she sat at her laptop and tried her best to write it out as she had always done before. But her words had left her and without them, her being was inarticulate. Tintin sat alongside her and smiled at his soundless wife in silent companionship.

He took the page of the book she had begun translating two months back and sought to help her by putting a paragraph of the Bengali novel into a translation app. What came out was like thin, diluted soup- watery, too proper, soulless. The words lined up too neatly. As Tintin read them out to Piya, she couldn’t find herself in them, the string of lights that used to illuminate every night before bed stuttered now as if their filaments had aged. Piya went and stood outside in desperation and stared at the gibbous moon. Thin wisps of cloud filled its peripheries. She pointed at them and said, “Ye,” and then insisted, “Ye.” Tintin nodded in recognition.

She wanted to know the word for those clouds in the sky. “Megh,” Tintin said. Something rattled inside her quiet brain, and she smiled weakly as her mind whispered to her. She recalled his betel-leaf breath, round, shapely eyes, broad shoulders, the volatile strength, soft lips that turned tyrannical in desire. Piya returned to the room to where her bookshelves were. Her eyes searched for words and chanced upon her book and that of Megh’s. Sitting on the faded mosaic, Piya’s fingers ran over Megh’s handwriting and her own in that volume of poems.

She took a pen and started circling the words which jumped at her, once in her book, once in his—slithered, anarchy, unreasonable, butchered, hyaline, scars, overgrown, promises—words that kept tumbling one after another, that her pen raced to circle, words that needed to preserve what she had in those months, words that would take her to him. She clicked her pen repeatedly on those circles. “Ye,” she pointed, “Ye.” Tintin looked at her and started explaining those words to her. He told her stories. She looked at him eagerly, desperate to re-register vocabulary.

PR&TA Journal, September 2

https://www.pratajournal.com/vocabulary-rituparna-mukherjee