Komorebi

by Praveena Shivram

Do you know what my last image of you was before you came back home as stuffed cotton inside a bandaged cast that was meant to resemble the shape of your body?

My last image of you, strangely, was the trajectory of saliva that left your mouth, as it frothed and bubbled out with your words, landing on my face just inches away from yours. I don’t remember if your eyes came close together as it always did when you were angry, or if your cheeks puffed out, red like bed sores, or if the tips of your nose and ears quivered indignantly. And then you went and smashed your bike headlong against a speeding truck on a blind turn, you who lay there in a mangled heap with your remains that had to be scraped off the road with a spade, you whom I had to recognise with half a shoe (the brand new Nike for the marathon next month) dangling against your feet like a suicide attempt gone wrong.

The police are here, Mrinal. What should I do?

‘Mrs. Anuradha. Please have a seat. We have some routine questions to ask you.’

What does that even mean, ‘routine questions?’, like the questions are going to wake up in the morning, make tea and wake you up so it can offer you tea, just the right temperature, not too hot or too cold, in a cup and saucer with no thumb marks on it? Or will the questions slip into my feet like snug chappals and walk around with me after you leave for work… as I straighten this cushion, put the clothes away, watch the maid and cook come and go, dance to some music or just stare into the mirror, waiting for you to come back home and claim me, relentlessly, like how waves claim the shore?

What am I saying, Mrinal? You have gone, gone to a place I can’t reach anymore. And the police are still talking to me about you.

‘Mrs. Anuradha, was that normal behaviour?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘Your husband, Mrs. Anuradha. The neighbours tell us there was a fight in the morning, after which he banged the door shut and left. Was that normal behaviour?’

Was it, Mrinal? Of course, it was. It was normal for the neighbours to watch our every fight and every kiss, your every slap and every squeeze, as if they were living with us, inside our bodies, attaching themselves to our cells and multiplying like cancer. And in the one year that we lived together as husband and wife, we fought endlessly and every single time, you banged the door shut; something you never did in the two years we spent making out behind other closed doors in so many different places. Do you remember that time in the forest in New York, Mrinal? When we found a hollow big enough for us to walk into and we pretended to close the door and just snuggled against each other and rushed out in ten seconds because there were ants crawling all over us? How much we laughed, do you remember that, Mrinal? And then you, always good with languages, a Bengali who could speak Tamil, pulled me close and said I was your Komorebi; you put your face close to mine and with your lips brushing my ear lobes you said, ‘Komorebi is Japanese for sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees. You are my Komorebi, Anuradha’. Oh, how I had cried when I heard that! How silly we were, believing in the indestructibility of words and the fragility of memories.

‘Madam?’

‘Yes… I mean, no. Sorry, what did you ask me?’

‘Sir, can the questions wait? She is obviously in distress.’

That’s your dad, Mrinal. He just got back after cremating you. Your mom, in case you are wondering, was given a sleeping pill and she is fast asleep. I refused to take one. And my parents are being my parents and are yet to arrive. The smell of the police, Mrinal, is quite the repellent. Funny, how we never knew this before.

But then, there were so many things we didn’t know. We didn’t know that even though our bodies fit together, it doesn’t mean our silences would merge into each other too. We didn’t know that passion had an ugly side as well, firing up our skin in entirely different ways – the bottles thrown, the smashed mirrors, the suicide threats, and the constant need for me to make space for it, to allow it to shrink and squeeze into the corners of what we (you) thought was love. Together, you and I indulged in the dance of death a little too often. We didn’t know regret and guilt could become the caged animals in a dystopian zoo looking forlornly at the world outside.

And then you went and did the unthinkable. Is that what the police are asking me about, Mrinal?

Your dad is here now, guiding me away. He rests his fingers between my shoulder blades, exactly like you used to do when you wanted to leave a party early. I can feel something inside me crumble as a wave of you-ness sweeps over me. Your dad has led me to our room and made me sit on our bed. He has been thoughtful enough to leave me a glass of water, and just like that, the you-ness goes away. He leaves a light on, because now it’s evening and the shadows will become thicker, making it impossible for me to shake them off.

The light falls on a picture of you and me, on my side of the bed. Your side of the bed I still haven’t been able to look at. Give me time, Mrinal, I will get to it. This picture of us is from our first holiday together, you remember? We sneaked off together, lying to our parents, pretending this was an office trip. They didn’t know we worked in the same office, one cubicle apart. We met at the station that night, you remember? I was wearing my white t-shirt and ripped jeans and you were dressed in black pyjamas and a grey t-shirt that said, “I speak fluent sarcasm”, and we spent all night trying to make our fingers go places they had never gone to before. We snuggled under sheets, tumbled into each others’ dreams, wove our fingers together like that was the tapestry of our future, unshakable, inviolable. We let our bodies do the talking and then got so used to it, that much later, when we realised bodies can become silent, it was too late to hear the words that were being said. There was just so much noise. And venom. Under the tongue. Like a snake.

This picture was before all that. Before we got married and realised the four walls that contained us was simply not enough. See how our eyes are crinkled in laughter? And my dimple matches yours perfectly. I can see it even through that day-old stubble. Our heads are stuck together, my hair tousled, yours immaculate, your arm is around my shoulders, we are in the hotel room, and just after you clicked this picture, your arm dropped down, into my shirt, and we fell into each other like starfish in the ocean, not even bothering to come up for a breath.

And now you are gone, like wish hair I cannot follow. Did you know Mrinal that I hated every minute of living with you even though I loved you? And last morning (was it only yesterday? I feel like a thousand suns have already set inside me) when you spat out your words, just after I had mine (Why don’t you go and die, Mrinal, I said. Fine. That’s what I will do, you said), I could feel something in our worlds shift. Now I can’t even remember what it was we were fighting about, though I know it must have been something silly impossibly bloated up as something important, just like we did with our lives through our Facebook updates and photographs. I wanted to grab you then as you banged the door shut, hold you back, and perhaps find that vortex again where we could fall into each other − a black hole inside our black hole?

But I let you go.

Did you not see that the leaves are too dense in this forest and sunlight will eventually give up? Love was not for me, Mrinal, love like you wanted. It never was. You do see it, now, don’t you? You do see now that love works in mysterious ways like fungus on mushroom feeding off each other till there is nothing left, except darkness so complete, like a cloud suffocating the moon on a starless night, that even exotic Japanese words cannot survive.

You didn’t survive. And now, with you gone and nothing left to hate, I am afraid I won’t either.

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