Secret Lunch over and talk for the moment exhausted, Barkha and Shakuni continued to sit around the table by the window that overlooked the Beas River, to sip our coffee, pour ourselves another glass. It was here that Shakuni asked what Barkha thought about this idea of “finding oneself.”
“Is there a character in Ramayana, Mein Kampf, Homer, in Shakespeare, in the Bible, in the Gita who thinks to ask, ‘Who am I?’ ” And the conversation was off again.
“Besides Lear,” Barkha said, “who asks ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ And don’t you love the question ‘Who does he think he is’ or ‘Who do you think you are’ followed by a rhetorical exclamation point?”
Shakuni’s chair faced east. He had been watching people on the neighboring rooftop, and he said, “They’re having a party, and they didn’t invite me!”
“Do you know those people?” Barkha asked her.
“No,” Shakuni said.
Shakuni said that his search began with his grandmother Shankeshwari, the one he was named for. “She died before I was born, but I’ve seen an old sepia photograph—two photographs, actually, taken by someone standing outside the open door to her bedroom.”
Barkha was following her own thought: “The room is lit from the left, so there must be a window in the corner that one can’t see around. Secrets of the sepia bedroom: someone picked that flower and put water into the water glass; someone had set the glass on the bedside table. . . .”
“That’s what I mean!” Shakuni said. “What does it tell us about who we are that we are tenderly intrigued by an imaginary person walking through an old photograph but couldn’t care less about our neighbor passing our window at this very moment?”
Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived above them, on the eighth floor, jumped out of her window. Barkha was just coming back from the coffee shop, carrying two lattes, when the neighbor hit the sidewalk. Barkha dropped the tray, spilling coffee all over herself, and her eyes locked in on the stains on her sweatpants so she wouldn’t have to see anything else. She heard running, panting, and voices shouting. Within seconds, a crowd had gathered, and the sweaty guy who cleaned the lobby was calling an ambulance. Someone said that the woman’s name was Draupadi, and someone else said that she’d seen her crying in the elevator a few days earlier. “It’s because of covid,” the cleaner said. “Everyone’s committing suicide these days. They were just talking about it on the news.”
The distant sirens mingled with the vibration of Barkha’s cell. It was Shakuni, but she didn’t want to tell him anything over the phone. She touched her cheeks to make sure she wasn’t crying, took a deep breath, and walked into the building. “Hey!” she heard the cleaner calling after her, and, when she turned around, he yelled, “Lady, where do you think you’re going? You’re a witness.” “A witness to what?” Barkha asked. “I didn’t see anything.” But the cleaner wouldn’t back down. “You were the closest one!” he shouted. “Look—her blood’s all over your clothes!” “It’s not blood. It’s coffee. I dropped my coffee,” Barkha said. “Well, it looks like blood to me,” the cleaner proclaimed. “The police should have a look at it.” Barkha froze for a moment, but, when her phone started vibrating again, she kept walking. “Hey!” the cleaner yelled again, but then a different male voice said, “Poor girl. Leave her alone.” Barkha wanted to run into her cabin at the news agency where she was the Editor-in-Chief and run the story.
Shakuni is dead while I write this story. In a year, he will not be alive, whether I write or don’t write this story about him. Except perhaps alive in the way stories live, or alive as people say people are alive in stories. People say that as if they do not understand: dead once, dead forever. As if they don’t know that once is all the time a person ever gets to be alive. As if they don’t know that Shakuni doesn’t hear, doesn’t desire mourning, clamor, and cries. As if they do not comprehend that their millions of bodies piled up all weigh less than this sheet of paper on which I scribble and that the commotion, agitation, the exercise of my millions upon millions of heartbeats will not summon a single breath of air when Shakuni needs it.
I will not pretend to bring Shakuni to life. Nor pretend to bring life to him. Shakuni gone for good. Won’t return. No place for Shakuni except the past. A place where he always belonged, he made the present for us, didn’t even know he was. And he visited me. And the past is not even past, a wise man once declared. Same abyss behind and in front of us is what the wisecracker writer signifying, I believe, and, if I truly believe what he believed, where would I situate Shakuni. if presented with an opportunity to put him somewhere alive? Not here. Not here in this story where I know better.
When she was writing, she was in her body, she couldn’t argue with that. But how to explain that she was somewhere else as well? When she was writing, it was as if she were working from six inches above and in front of her own head. If the energy of writing fell back into her body, all writing stopped. Then she was just herself, sitting in a chair. She was ready to admit—to herself, if not to her friends—that keeping that energy afloat was peculiar work, bodily work. It was like bathing a squirming baby that you weren’t allowed to look at. Babies are so slippery. You can’t believe it the first time you bathe a newborn. It’s like trying to wash the water. Writing was like that. Like water. More like water than like a body. Wasn’t that something she liked about it?
Everyone wanted more of the real, more of the world. Maybe it meant that they could get up from their writing and go do something else, immediately, something useful, wash a baby in real life, for example, looking at the baby the whole time. They could soap the baby’s back without any worry that they might accidentally drop the baby out of its blue plastic tub and into the grimy kitchen sink. They wouldn’t have to worry about the baby’s little arm or leg slipping into the garbage disposal, oh, God, or about the baby sliding out of their ungloved hands and onto the bathroom floor, cracking its head, the blood, oh, God. Not that she had a baby and never intended to, either.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it all the way home: Shakuni’s body, body, body, body, body, body, body.
P.S. This post is based on a writing prompt. And I think I have gone ballistic here with tense, active and passive voice. The whole park is littered in confetti of language!
Topic: Barkha B meets Shakuni
