by Anupama Krishnakumar
Nine women. Nine emotions. And their waits. Anupama Krishnakumar writes nine bite-sized stories centered on women and the Navarasas. Part 1 features Śṛngāram (Love), Bībhatsam (Disgust), Hāsyam (Mirth), Bhayānakam (Fear) and Adbhutam (Wonder).
Śṛngāram (Love): Kamini’s wait
Kamini’s friends laugh at her when she says she loves weekdays because she could go to the office. ‘Really, Kamu? What on earth is wrong with you?’ they ask her, bewildered. Careful not to give away too much, she replies that there is nothing wrong in liking work. What she doesn’t tell them though is that there is one moment she waits for every day that she goes to work. For Kamini, it had been a rather long wait – to discover love in her life – the kind that stirs your being and touches your heart deeply. And now, just two months into her work life, she had fallen in love. Suraj, her senior colleague, had arrived in her life, shining and radiant, like the glorious sun! Now, every day she waits for that one moment, pregnant with hope, desire and love, when by some divine ordinance, her eyes would lock with Suraj’s, before they would both look away, gasping for breath. A moment she thinks she could live her entire life in. Like it was some kind of bubble in which she could exist forever, untouched by the cruel realities of worldly life. Kamini struggles to express herself and she knows Suraj does too; yet she finds supreme joy in her wait for that one moment, to rejoice the unconfessed-yet-reciprocated love that has graced her life.
Bībhatsam (Disgust): Bhumika’s wait
Bhumika thinks she can’t handle it anymore. The past ten days have been an ordeal – her breasts feel sore, her thighs ache, the cramps in her pelvic region suck the life out of her, her head feels like it would split open any moment because of the pain. This entire wait for her period to arrive drives her mad – she is filled with disgust for the world and its unfair ways of working. She curses nature’s methods of creation; for making the female body the centre of all suffering. Bhumika takes one good, long look at her pre-menstrual self in the mirror and loathes what she sees there – a pale, ghostly, disgusting version of herself. Nothing seems to lift her spirits – not her favourite gulab jamun, not her favourite Coldplay music, not her favourite shade of lipstick. Even her warm, snuggly quilt annoys her. Yet, she pulls it over her herself, turns to her left, and drawing her legs close to her chin, tries to rest, waiting in disgust, for the trickle of menstrual blood.
Hāsyam (Mirth): Harshini’s wait
Harshini’s cousin, Praveen, tells her with a goofy grin on his face that there’s so much humour on the Internet these days. ‘Stand-up comedy, YouTube channels that crack you up…there’s just so much, you know…’ he tries to convince a visibly unimpressed Harshini. ‘Oh yeah, I did check out a couple of them,’ she replies nonchalantly, ‘sadly, they don’t even make me smile.’ Praveen decides that his mission for the day is to get his (did he think stubborn, in his head?) cousin to LOL at least once. So he takes her through the entire universe of online comic content – see this, see that, he says, only to realise that it is just him who is laughing boisterously.
Harshini is evidently losing it, in this wait to find mirth in the online world. ‘Oh God, Praveen,’ she sighs, ‘enough man, let’s just end this, shall we?’ ‘One last thing, please, please,’ he says, opening a video. In it, there’s a man disguised as a woman, playing a Hindi-speaking mother, and a rolly-polly teen (just like Praveen, Harshini thinks) speaking to her. It shows the typical mother-son tussle and Praveen sees that Harshini is starting to get amused. Five minutes into the video, the mother tells her son to go buy vegetables, while the son is busy playing a video game. “Mein tujhe subji leke aane ko bol rahi hoon, aur tu PUBG khel raha hai,” she says, sniffing into her pallu, and Harshini bursts out laughing. ‘Of all things, this?’ Praveen thinks, but he is relieved that his wait to make his cousin LOL is finally over!
Bhayānakam (Fear): Bhavya’s wait
Hospital visits were not new for Bhavya. But this time, things had taken a turn for the worse. Her father’s health had deteriorated over the last few weeks, just when they were thinking that he was recovering fairly well after several rounds of chemotherapy. That morning, he had woken up, coughing blood, and Bhavya had rushed him to the hospital without wasting a moment. And now, standing outside the ICU, she watches her father, lying pale on a bed, with multiple tubes attached to his body. She is surprised to see how calm his face looks after all the struggle. Bhavya recalls their conversation from two nights ago. ‘Bhavya,’ he had told her, ‘Here you are waiting for me to live life again, when all I am waiting for is to die, and say goodbye…won’t you let me go?’ Recalling this, fear grips Bhavya, and she thinks that her father has possibly reached a point of no return. ‘Is he clinging on only because I don’t want to let him go?’ she wonders, as she waits to know of her father’s fate, with fear in her throat and tears in her eyes.
Adbhutam (Wonder): Amulya’s wait
Months ago, when her gynaecologist pointed to a tiny speck moving about in the screen, Amulya strained her eyes to catch a glimpse of it. ‘That is your baby,’ the doctor announced, and Amulya was filled with a sense of wonder she hadn’t experienced in years. ‘The heartbeat is at 164 bpm,’ her doctor said, and Amulya was stunned. Here she was, housing a living being, the size of a speck of dust with its heart beating so fast, that she would nourish with her blood and life. For her, her pregnancy had been a wait full of wonder. She had watched her foetus grow from a dot to a framework of bones to a body with flesh and blood to a fully-developed infant. And now, lying on the bed in the labour room, screaming her lungs out in pain, she gapes in wonder, with her heart in her mouth, as her gynaecologist pulls the life she had nurtured within her, out of her womb into the real world – the end of a ten-month-long wait.
Read part 2 of this series here.
Anupama Krishnakumar is an engineer-turned-journalist. She co-edits Spark and is also the author of two books, ‘Fragments of the Whole’, a flash fiction collection and ‘Ways Around Grief & Other Stories’, a short-story collection. Her website is www.anupamakrishnakumar.com.
