Brinda woke up, the side of her body in contact with the bed, drenched in sweat. She looked up, the misaligned fan placed directly over Ashok’s side of the bed. Except there was no Ashok. He had died exactly three years from today in a car accident. Yet, she left his side of the bed empty or at least a crude pillow’s length estimate of it. She didn’t exactly know what purpose it served but lately, she increasingly felt the need to document every small habit of his, to acknowledge and keep them alive in some way or the other. Maybe the reason behind this was forbidden feelings taking root in her heart and a particular chat in her phone growing longer each day. She woke up and shook her head as if in an attempt to erase those texts from her memory. She tied up her hair in a bun, readying herself to drag through another day, a few wanton strands coming loose in her hand. She wound them around her finger, a little too tightly, the sting of the self-chastisement spreading like a balm over her skin.
The sink was overflowing with utensils accumulated over the week. She looked around for a clean saucepan, not finding which, she rolled up her sleeves and got down to washing. The tiles were peeling off the backsplash and from cracks in the disjointed tiles, came out files of red ants. When they had moved into the flat, five years back, the house had been no better. Plaster peeled off from the walls, shelves creaked under the weight of anything slightly heavy, cupboards were infested with termites and the walls were painted a hideous turquoise that wrapped the apartment in perpetual gloom. But riding on the thrill and novelty of moving in together without marriage, they didn’t seem to care. Friends presented them with hand-me-downs to furnish the house which they gratefully accepted, having busted a large part of their budget on the deposit on the apartment itself. The couple moved in against the will of their parents and as such weren’t blessed with any family heirlooms either. The apartment soon became a hub for their friends to hang out and on more than one night per week, they would find themselves sitting down for dinner with a few of their closest friends. On occasions like these, dinnertime echoed with resounding rounds of laughter and banter, as they occasionally reached out for each from under the table, a shy smile creeping up on their faces over the shared secret intimacy. The novelty soon wore off and small differences started cropping up. She started railing about his growing pile of laundry, his habit of not taking out the trash, and his increasing hours of night shift. He started railing about her nagging, her excessive need to feel reassured, her tantrums. What they didn’t rail about, however, was how their pay gap bothered Ashok, or how his unusual proximity with Sneha bothered Brinda. What slowly started at oblique references, soon turned into ugly fights and more and more things that they had sworn they would never tell each, they told each other. And one day he even slapped her.
She rinsed off the last plate and before closing the tap, filled water in a cup and was about to water the herbs on the windowsill, when she found the soil already wet. She wondered if it had rained the last night but couldn’t remember. She made a cup of tea for herself and went in to the living room to find a man reading The Hindu in Ashok’s usual spot, a cup resting on the armrest, the exact spot where Ashok had formed a stubborn ring of condensation from years of callous use. On hearing her footsteps, he folded the paper into a roll and looked up at her.
Those familiar hazel eyes, the same shirt that he worn on this day three years back, slightly small at the waist. Brinda felt light-headed. She wondered if she was hallucinating again but it had been some months that she had visited her doctor and the pills had worked really well till now. Her stomach growled. Ashok looked back at her, a disgruntled expression over his face. “Why were there so many unwashed dishes in the sink? No wonder the kitchen is infested with roaches. And what’s with the dead herb garden?”.
Brinda stood there, her knees shaking a little, his words coming to her as if from under water. She walked up to him, and traced the outline of his face with her fingers. His night-old stubble prickled against her fingers. She probed his forehead feeling for a bump or a wound. Nothing. Ashok, visibly exasperated with this scrutiny, disengaged himself from her probing hands and unfolded the newspaper, and went back to reading a forgotten segment.
Brinda went back to their bedroom and opened the closet. She opened the locker and rummaged through the items. His watch lay there, not a scratch on it. She went through all the files. No death certificate, no broken watch, nothing to account for that day! She ran down the stairs and went out to bring in the mails. She went through all of them and several of them were addressed to Ashok. All that had stopped with square pieces of worded condolences, were now in their mailbox-his official letters, his bills, his insurances. She slumped back on the sofa wondering if she had dreamed the last three years, if it was possible to have such an elaborate dream. But it couldn’t be. She had lived through the agonizingly long nights of the apartment closing up on her, of waking up in cold sweat from having dreamt of the accident or at least the version that she thought must have happened. She had been to the mortuary, identified him in the death glow of the light, collected his belongings and never looked at them again. She had carefully remembered his side of the bed, his cup of choice, his spot on the table making sure to maintain them as he liked. And most importantly, she remembered the guilt that rose like bile in her mouth every time Sujoy tried to take care of her and she let him. Sujoy! Had he also disappeared like everything else that came in the wake of Ashok’s death? She checked her phone and a relief coursed through her limbs to find their chats intact. She felt disgusted with herself and when she saw Ashok coming down the stairs, she ran up to him and hugged him, willing herself to remember her love for him. She welcomed the tears prickling behind her eyes, hoping it would clear away any stray thoughts of Sujoy that remained in her mind. Ashok tried to calm her down and enquired after this sudden outburst but was visibly more concerned about the wrinkles that she had etched on his ironed shirt. He took her up to the bedroom and put her to bed and left for his office.
She was awakened by the sound of the doorbell ringing. She went to answer the door, wondering what time it was. The apartment was shrouded in darkness. She switched on the lights on her way to answer the door. It was Mira and Ajay. All the friends that they hosted when Ashok was alive started pouring in through the evening. All of them seemed to somehow know that Ashok had returned. None of them seemed to remember that he had died in the first place. The evening rolled on with multiple rounds of drinks, the glasses occasionally rising to toast someone’s promotion or shared laughter over a sexist joke. Ashok came back from office and joined in on the gossip, breaking into laughter over some cracked joke. From where she was in the kitchen, Brinda couldn’t hear what they were laughing on but she saw his eyes crinkle up in laughter and all at once he was the Ashok from college, fun and carefree, his back often arching back in laughter to reveal a widening smile to the sky.
She was snapped out of her reverie by Mira who discreetly pulled at her elbow, nudging her to a secluded corner of the room. Mira pushed behind a few strands away from Brinda’s face and gently probed her cheeks. Brinda took a few seconds before she understood what was happening. How had she allowed herself to forget all the abuse? Overwhelmed with his loss, she had not only forgiven his brutality but patched it over in her memory with the version of him that she had actually fallen for.
Who really had forgotten Ashok? And who really remembered?
That night, when Ashok slipped in beside her on the bed, she reached out a hand for him, her body aching for his touch. He shoved away her hand with a less-than-gentle push, murmuring something about having to get up early the next morning. Shame crippled up on her, the sting of rejection paralyzing her. She lay like that for a long time, as the fan rattled from the ceiling, churning out the viscous air in the room. When the tears had dried in uncomfortable patches around her eyes, she pulled out her phone from below her pillow and texted Sujoy, ‘Wanna meet?’
The story was adjudged the runner-up in Rendezvous, 2021.
