After finishing Anna Akhmatova, I stumbled over her words and fell into the darkest cave of silence. Feeling numb and breathless, I even forgot to blink my eyes. I was with her, 300-long hours in the queue, in the scorching sun, in front of the prison where her son was taken for no reason, just to know what happened to him or what they are going to do with him. Days and days fell into the graveyard of time leaving only uncertainty at the end. Her loud words shut my ears from within – “Rising from the past, my shadow / Is running in silence to meet me”.  With a jerk I looked around. I felt the blood in my veins boiling. I sighed many times, hoping to cool my veins. Sitting on the half wall on the terrace I saw the sun, drunk, its gold melting and dripping into the sea water, and ready to plunge into the depth of the night.

There was a knock on the gate. I rushed downstairs to open it.

“Oh! No! Not today,” I wished to scream.

It was the lady with the hunchback. Not exactly, it was a huge cyst on her back which was removed a couple of months back. For some years she used to carry the load of this cyst and a basket full of fruits and vegetables on her head. She had to walk more than 7 kilometres to reach my area of the city. I used to empty her basket, buying everything to let her go home fast. Every time while she had the tea and idlis I served she would say I was her daughter in some previous birth. Well, today of all days I was not ready to entertain her. Last two visits, even after her confirmation that they were clean, the mangoes she gave were poisonous. I had to throw them away. She became healthy and her son really takes care of her and I don’t understand why she still has to cheat people.

I opened the gate silently and helped her to take the basket down from her head. After giving her usual tea and biscuits I told her today that I don’t need the mangoes. “See, our uncle sent a sack full of mangoes from his farm last week, it is still enough for a month, today you should excuse me.” A lie partly, though he did send mangoes, they were almost finished except for two. I went inside and showed them as a proof. She sat there silently with a sad smile. Today somehow her expressive sadness didn’t help, unlike before when even in her smiling face I used to see the wetness of tears. I went inside and got a hundred rupee note and gave her. “Take an auto and go home. It is too far for you to walk back home now carrying this weight.” I didn’t waste time, waved an auto to stop, and she silently sat inside it. After locking the gate I saw that it was almost 7 p.m. Sitting by the side of the bed I fell back, keeping my legs down. I stretched my hands back as if to open my chest to suck a lot of cool air in.

Evenings, there were so many trains passing by. All start with full compartments and one could see the passengers filling the door areas, through the gaps in the bathroom window panes. Under the shower, in the silence of the bathroom, I felt the water licking each of my pores. How long I spent feeling lost in it! Anna Akhmatova had gone, long back. She is at peace now. Here stands another woman who is numb knowing not what hit her throat in this so-called life of hers – I thought. The tears disappeared into the water. Slowly I started to weep, tears suppressed for so long, until I felt the throat sore and jaws burning. All alone in this house. I could have done it outside too. But something stopped me always. I wanted the water takes my tears down the drain. Elders used to say in the old days girls’ tears and water-drops from their wet hair should not touch the house’s floor. It will become a curse to the house. But none said that tears which are redirected inwardly and the pain it causes congesting the chest is a curse for anything/anyone. Well, the woman is under a separate law always. Some parts of hers are visible, while some others are not.

When the night grew, after all slept, I sat on the sofa like an empty earthen pot, upside down, placed on the stone wall of a washing area after its use. Sleep was never a good ally to me. It comes and goes at its will. At times we fight when it comes in odd times or when it leaves in time of need. Nothing is bound to anything in this world, neither in each other’s need nor in each other’s feelings, and everything just carries on in a monotonous way around me.  I can’t just blame anyone for my lonely life. None is born to give company to anyone eternally, neither husband nor kids. All leave when they have to. Some leave never to return, even in the rarest dream. That is the way of this world.

After two years …

“Standing on this stage, dear friends, in front of such a huge audience, I feel my knees trembling. Because I myself have not heard my own voice for a long time and now it has become a stranger to me. In this era of technology, not the sound of words but the images of words reach the other. And they have lost their voice, the emotion in such a voice and also the rhythm. You can hear them in synthesized voices, lifeless, using technologies but not that from a human throat. Which trembles in pain and joy … which opens and contracts in emotions.  And this world has become bereft of any feelings and emotions towards beauty and beast altogether. It has forgotten its freedom to cry and laugh at its will, like a child. But I must thank you for reading my words and that you brought me here to talk to you. I have nothing more to speak than what you already heard/read. Even if there is something … let it be … because that is more beautiful for it to be so, than said.”

The publisher came in the evenings to drop the sacks full of fan letters – as it is a routine for her during weekends. I felt happy, always, to know that people have not forgotten to use pen and paper. And I think I am happy too, to see myself now, to let everything pass by while I walk on, ahead. Otherwise I would have been the same empty pot, upside down, placed on the stone wall of the kitchen wash area, after every time it is used.