Sometimes, it is all she can do. Stare at the ceiling, at the concentric circles that fill up the white space with one corner bleeding in coffee brown.
A stain shaped like a heart and if she looks long enough, she can even make out wings. It always makes her think the same thought: how did the coffee-heart reach there? She imagines the previous tenant to be so tall and so drunk that one night he threw the coffee to the ceiling and it reacted to this violence with love. But then it must have had its revenge too and fallen back on his head. She knew that much about gravity but little else about physics. Her father trying to explain an inclined plane to her one evening so many years ago. And all her mind could muster up was the inclined entrance to her house and the kennel that stood beside. Poor Ruby. Was it any wonder that he refused to stay in that kennel? All her imaginations of prison emanated from that kennel.
She has to get up. There is work to be done but the bed has shaped itself lovingly against the contours of her lumps and love handles. It feels like love. And the silence. It is the hush after a song ends. She wills the laptop to sing again. Only the sea gull obliges and lets out a half-hearted cry. She imagines herself as thin and svelte, being able to spring from bed… isn’t that what thinner people do? Her head settles back into the worn-out pillow and eyes go to the ceiling. No, she has never sprung from a bed ever.
Her eyes stray to the fraying ends of her white once-fluffy towel. It reminds her of the holes in her pyjamas. That makes her look down at her once pink but now an indeterminate murky coloured socks. And a dread settles in the stomach. Everything, everything has a time to go, she tells herself. Even she will be leaving soon. She wants to leave a tea stain too for the next tenant to wonder about. But that dread returns, catches her criss-cross thoughts and sits on them. It is always what she doesn’t want to think about that she thinks about. Today it is her shoes. Her faithful, loyal, hardworking shoes. She has hidden them for now. She cannot bear to look at them. Not yet.
Suddenly she remembers a story a friend told of a hypnotherapist being able to make you recall your past. Her mind is too swift for her thoughts. It immediately picks up the shoes and deposits them on a black curved coach with an academic-looking woman in a green Georgette saree looking down in pity. No wait; that is her Psychology teacher standing there. How wanting is the imagination and how shallow the mind. She sees her teacher-turned-hypnotherapist for the afternoon pick up her shoes, turn them over, sniff disgustedly and lay them back on the coach. And how will she gain access inside the examination chamber? She sees herself explaining to the nurse outside that she is the only relative left and she has to be let in. And she enters and her shoes turn and look at her plaintively. She averts her eyes. She can’t look. Not yet.
What would they reveal to the hypnotherapist, those shoes? Will they narrate about that magical day when they walked for four hours without stopping and were still ready to jump for happiness late in the evening, just like that? Will they tell her how proud they felt when she wore them to parties when all her friends were wearing black, heeled monstrosities? Or will they go back even further and laughingly narrate how she was so afraid when she first bought them that they would turn out to be as evil as the others? She hoped not. Too embarrassing. She sighed. How wrong she was that day. How beautiful they turned out to be. How comforting in their wide ugliness. They were originally even called ‘widths’ but she had christened them simply’ blue’ because of their patches of colour — once electric blue now electric minus.
She suddenly flings her bedcovers and springs, yes springs from the bed, kneels down, opens the lower drawer and takes them out. Glue! Super glue must work. It will work magic and sew together life and limb again. She looks down at them for confirmation. But they were bleeding brown, dirty tears. They knew and she knew too. Ventilator support. That’s what glue was.
Sometimes, even love isn’t enough. But she knows it isn’t stupid to believe in miracles.
This story first appeared in www.rashmi-vasudeva.com