Divya M Kizhakkeyil

The Final Bow

It was a perfectly ordinary Friday morning. Everything was as it should be.

Scorching heat that refused to let her sleep past seven—yes.

The hiss of steaming idlis from the kitchen below, where her mother was hurrying to get her chores done on time—yes.

The final drone of the ceiling fan as it dutifully stopped in accordance with daily power cuts—yes.

A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach on thinking of the exams—yes.

Anu stared at the dusty blades of the fan for a long time as they came to a halt in torturous slow motion. An idle thought flitted around in her mind that she should ideally be calculating the number of rotations the fan made in a minute.

She knew very well that every moment that she spent idling, aspiring students were getting ahead of her, revising more theorems, and learning last-minute equations. Her percentile would have dropped by a minimum of two percent in the ten crucial minutes she had wasted that morning. She could picture the way Professor Subramanian’s lips would curl in derision. It was pure weakness to let the base feelings of lethargy overcome her at this critical time. He had always warned his students of this happening. The world was full of temptations; and like how the serpent tempted Eve with the apple, the devil spent most of his/her time thinking of ways to distract exam aspirants from their textbooks.

She stretched on the bed, thinking of the dream she had had that night.

She had never divulged this info to anyone, not even to her closest friends, but sometimes, her dreams reflected the future. Not exactly the future of the world—like if a third world war might happen, or who would win the world cup, or which political party would get offended next, but she had always dreamed about anything major that was about to happen in her life.

A week before Plato, the neighbor’s dog, mauled her arm, leaving two angry gashes covered in blood and dog drool, she had dreamt of waking up with a bandaged head, like a mummy.

A day before her midterm results came, she had dreamt she was washing dishes in the dingy backyard of what looked like her grandmother’s house. And sure enough, her scores were the lowest ever, and she seriously thought she would have to give up on college and a career. She turned beet red even thinking about it.

Last night though, she had dreamt of a tall, handsome woman in a dark and dusty room filled with cobwebs. Her face looked vaguely familiar, but not something within the grasp of her blurry consciousness. Anu was filled with a compelling urge to reassure the woman, to tell her not to lose faith, to just let go of the pain. But the woman was too distracted to listen to her.

What could that possibly have to do with her day?

Was it her future that she had seen? She liked the thought of being as graceful as that woman, although not so grief-stricken. What right did grown-ups have to be sad when they didn’t have to worry about things like exams?

Anu was fumbling around for answers—like the woman had, the previous day—while trying to calculate the magnetic field of a twisted semicircular wire using the Biot-Savart law, cursing them with every bit of energy her sleep-deprived brain could muster. How could Biot and Savart have spent so much time together, finding out stuff and not arguing about who owned the idea more? She knew she would have killed her friends by the time they finished making some groundbreaking discovery.

Maybe one of them had ended up killing the other in the end.

She felt bone-weary all of a sudden. It’s just one more day, she told herself—or actually, just eight more hours.

Seven in the morning, she would be out of bed.

Half past seven, she would be ready to have her mom’s hot idlis and sambhar.

Eight o’clock, she would be out of the house, hall ticket in hand, a thousand answers in her head and a million worries in her heart.

Midnight, relief forever, or at least until the day of doom when the results would be out. No more mock tests, no more rounding of answer choices, no more guilt pangs on catching an extra hour of sleep, and no more of Professor Subramanian’s classes, wilting under his glance, willing herself to concentrate.

She would come back and sleep till evening and watch TV till dawn. And tomorrow was just the first day in a line of idyllic vacation days. As she arched like a cat in a final bid to shed sleep, her eyes locked on the poster above her bed where a tall boy in glasses confidently quoted, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

All of it was ending that day—yes.

***

Eight in the evening, the same day.

Lisa sat hunched in the darkest corner of the room, hugging her knees.

I could never be mad at her, Anu thought dully, watching the rings Lisa’s hair formed on her bare arms. Was Lisa too thinking of the betrayal, like her?

Tears flowed down her cheeks until the salty taste in her mouth shook off the last of the sleep from her.

“Shouldn’t we do something, Lisa?” Anu wanted to shake her hard, to see the same fear reflected in her eyes too. Instead, she crouched down on the dusty floor and let the tears gush forth till the dust and tears mixed and stuck to her face as a gooey mix.

Years later, she would come around and accept her issues with confrontations, after many humiliations and countless instances of getting treated like a doormat. She would dare to seek help, not endlessly debate it She would debate with herself for a while and finally decide on getting help. She would mark her success each time she spoke her mind. She would feel ecstatic each time she refused to pay an unfair cab fare and walked away. She would proudly stand her ground whenever a friendly colleague tried to pass off her work as his own.

She would learn to subdue her weakness (never conquer it) little by little.

That is, if she managed to survive the slow fire that was dancing indulgently outside.

I am going to die today, right now! The thought was like a particularly foul-tasting food morsel, swallowed with difficulty, trailing through her food pipe, melting her intestines into a sick, revolting pulp.

She had thought of death quite a lot, as an idle fantasy to lift her from whichever disturbing reality she was in then.

Like, the day before the exams.

Being under the stern eyes of her chemistry teacher (Chemistry being her weakest subject).

Caught by her father for watching Hollywood romances.

Countless stupid, precious moments.

If she had had enough imagination (which she didn’t), she would have thought of a peaceful death. She would have thought of death as a rescue, as a friend who would take her to a happy afterlife at the end of a long and fulfilled life.

But not this—getting charred at sixteen in an abandoned shed, with her best friend for company.

She would have howled again, if she could have, but there was nothing left in her other than a hoarse whisper. How long does it take for a body to be burnt? Surely not more than ten minutes. Ten minutes of pain. Six hundred seconds, six hundred billion nanoseconds.

She couldn’t remember the last time she got burnt. She was extremely careful around candles and matchsticks, stayed far away from Christmas and Vishu crackers, and never entered the kitchen. She had no idea how much a burn would hurt. But people did this all the time, didn’t they? Why would fire be the most chosen route to kill oneself if it wasn’t the fastest and easiest? Thoughts were jumbled up in her mind, and they felt like the angry outpour from a tap that had been shut for a long time. Were these normal thoughts for someone in mortal danger? She didn’t know what was normal—she scarcely felt human anymore.

She suddenly remembered her dream from the previous night. How did that imply that she would get burnt to death tonight?

Of course! Her heart leaped up—she hadn’t dreamt of this horror, because this was not the end. No, dear God, this couldn’t be the end. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t even hear the crackle of the fire anymore. There was just an eerie silence outside, and distant rumblings of thunder. It was too cloudy and windy for a day in March. At least five people had remarked to her today that it was going to rain hard in the evening. Maybe the downpour was about to start, which would put out the last few embers of the fire, and then, tomorrow, they could walk out, meet up with Nandini, then maybe kill her.

Anu lay there, letting a few more tears fall, this time, tears of gratitude. This was just a huge scare she would remember till her dying day.

Finally, she turned to Lisa, managing a smile.

“Phew! Quite a scare. Glad it is over!”

Anu noted that Lisa gave a start, as though she had been in a sweet reverie and suddenly became aware of where she was and whom she was with.

“Well, you know, you could say something,” Anu said. She was feeling irritated now. Lisa looked different somehow, as though she had turned into a different person in the last hour, ever since they had been rudely woken up by the smoke.

“No, it’s not over. It’s just the start,” Lisa said as she got up and walked over to the door with light, fairy footsteps. “But,” she turned to face her, and for the first time, Anu noticed that her eyes were brimming with tears, “there is no one else I’d rather be with today.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Anu would have been surprised at this rare display of affection coming from her. She realized they had not been alone like this for years and years. She had always been there.

“Not over?” she asked, hope going haywire in her heart. “So we die today? But we can still escape.” It seemed incredibly stupid, waiting around to die.

Lisa walked to the door, her ears pressed against the door, listening. Finally, a satisfied smile came over her lips. “Who said there is no point? We will be forgiven. Don’t you see? She will forgive us.”

Who, who, who?

“I don’t think Nandini is coming back,” Anu said, shuddering involuntarily. No, Nandini had to be back, it was all going to be okay.

Lisa looked at her with wonder in her eyes, a faint glimmer of scorn curling her lips. “I know Nandini is not coming back,” she said slowly, “you always put too much faith in her, you are too loyal.” She sighed, shaking her head.

Even with panic welling in her, Anu felt the sting of her words. We both did, she wanted to say. We both thought the world of her.

But the words remained lodged in her throat as she saw Lisa look up, her eyes widening in horror.

This is what I dreamt yesterday, this is where the lady had been—in this godforsaken place, looking up, like Lisa, for the inevitable tumble. And she suddenly realized whom she had dreamt about. How stupid of her not to have known earlier!

That was the last coherent thought in her mind as the roof crashed down on them. The flames rushed in like an old friend made to wait long, cross at the delay, eager for an all-encompassing embrace; tall, blinding, scorching, swallowing them in one go.

The flames danced through the night, relishing their feed, the flavor of nubile youth in their mouths, till the predicted rains came and squashed the fire, tearing it away from their ravaged bodies.

No one in the small town of Ilanjipalam had seen such a storm in the last ten years.

No one in Ilanjipalam had witnessed such horror in their lifetime.

Could it really be the end?

It’s not that Maya had never experienced time standing still. She knew it; she knew it well.

She had finished watching Pirates of the Caribbean—Part 3, for the fourth time, an hour ago, on the little screen in front of her. When Will Turner shared that last kiss with Elizabeth before he set off on a boat filled with dead people, she had felt yet again that the clocks had stopped ticking.

However, this was a whole new annoyance. She was thousands of miles above the ground, watching the needles on her wristwatch chase each other, waiting for the magical announcement to please fasten her seat belts as the aircraft was finally landing, and that the weather in Bengaluru was twenty-five degrees and pleasant.

The usual fluff of clouds that would say hello outside the airplane windows was absent today. Not that she missed the clouds. She never found any beauty in them; colorless and shapeless, the way they were. To her, they were nothing more than blotches on the sky and its subtle hues. The only time she liked them was when they were dark and menacing, like a gunman waiting with his forefinger on the trigger; you know he is going to fire, but never know when.

She checked the watch again—thirteen more hours. But it already felt like she’d been on the plane forever. The United States and India had never seemed so far apart on the globe.

Or, maybe, this status quo was just perfect for her.

She didn’t seem to operate well on land (nor on water, she presumed, having never tried that). Maybe a perpetual limbo state might work better for her; neither here nor there, no one around to talk to, and no one to care for.

She sighed deeply, trying to keep her mind away from that day.

She could still feel the chilly Milwaukee wind that blew on her face as she lay on the soft, wet grass of the lakeside park, watching her cluttered apartment complex through the corner of her eyes, a hat over her face shutting out the rare sight of the sun…

***

There was the crunch of grass beneath her, the idle babble of the kids playing near her, and the gurgles of the brook by the side of the park’s fence.

She didn’t know when she drifted off to sleep and when she awakened from it, deliciously drowsy. Something was bothering her, a worry in the back of her mind—but what was it?

Her eyes were heavy with sleep. Why was she so tired, why hadn’t she been able to sleep the past few days? She pushed that thought away too, constricting it till it burst open and yelled out inside her.

She opened her eyes with a start.

Where was she? What had she done now?

She looked around frantically—there were the same happy voices, giggling children and sulky ones, doting parents and disinterested ones—normal, idle, happy life, all around.

Panic gripped her as she stood up and ran past the slides, the swings and the monkey bars where the children were hanging upside-down, leaving her blanket lying in a heap.

Where was her baby? Her stomach clenched at the thought.

“Can I help you, dear?” a middle-aged woman who had been indulgently watching two kids roll around in the grass asked her, slight concern lining her face. Her husband seemed politely interested, careful not to overstep. Maya was panting too much to reply.

“I can’t find my baby,” she managed to gasp out; it felt like each word she spoke scorched her throat.

She saw the startled look on both their faces and watched as though in slow motion, the man rushing to alert a bored-looking guard at the gate, the woman rushing to pat her shoulders.

“Oh, you poor dear! She will be around here somewhere; is it a girl or a boy? Was the baby in a stroller?”

Maya sat down, crushed by the weight of her thoughts. Where had she seen her baby last?

She shouldn't have taken that nap; how could she have been so thoughtless? There was no excuse for this.

If they knew, they wouldn’t help her out. They would point fingers at her, blame her, leave her alone, or maybe even have her arrested. It was her fault that she had lost her child; it wasn’t anyone's responsibility to help her out.

She brushed away the hot tears from her face. The crowd around her had thickened now, still, everything looked unreal. Parents were clutching their children close to them as if to protect them from getting contaminated by her grief.

She was tired and hazy, but so were all new parents. Why couldn’t she remember anything?