Content Warning: references to self-harm. Suicide
I came to see you despite my best interests.
The buzzing humidity of Azizpur’s musky air swarmed my face. The palm leaves were so bright that they looked wet — like they’d been weeping too.
I felt the sun biting my skin, but nothing stung more than the hot ground that seared my palms as I fell at your feet and dug my fingers into the dirt that covered you now. Nanu’s words rang through the emptiness of my mind: “Don’t linger alone with your grief there. She’ll come for you. They live in trees by the cemeteries so they can feed off broken women like you.”
Broken women like me. Finally, shattered into enough pieces to be forced into the role of “woman scorned” in the lore of the people who inhabit these wetlands.
I imagine there’s a Nanu who’ll seat her giggling grandchildren around her feet, letting the cold concrete floors of their tin-roof home soothe the skin crisped by the sun’s blaze. She’ll tell my story, painting me the same as every other “broken woman” who couldn’t deal with herself after her husband died. All the women in these stories are too weak to save themselves from the wrongs of men who made empty promises. Yet, we all live together in the memories of these generations longer than them, even if in the form of a cankered monster.
I hoped she would come for me. Set me free, I dare you.
Your gravestone screamed your name repeatedly. “Loving husband” — those two words came as a whisper as if afraid to even utter the thought; a delusion that shouldn’t be fed. Perhaps that grave knew what I didn’t.
What did I know? Your car crashed into a tree. It was dark and rainy. “Low visibility,” that’s what the cop told me with a matter-of-fact tone as I melted into the kitchen floors of our now-empty home. I don’t think even he believed what he was saying. Maybe that’s where you wanted to be — a dark road with low visibility, the perfect cover for the exit you so desperately wanted from this life.
I think about us more than I want: the silences that filled the gaps between our bodies in bed, the avoidance of your eyes with every hollow I love you, the never-ending late nights at work, the smell of lilac perfume that clung to your shirts after every one of those nights.
Sitting there as the words “loving husband” blurred under my tearful gaze. I don’t think I know that was ever you.
There was a jingle from within the trees, dainty and shrill as it pierced through the humidity. The haze was suffocating me, kisses burning against my sweaty skin. Then there was the humming, wafting the air like a perfume. It was hard to ignore.
“If the words feel like they’re hiding from you, then there’s probably something to hide.” Her voice was crass.
My head turned to face her against my will. Her skin was gray and cratered, resembling the moon in its physicality but also because she was unlike anything human. Long, dark hair flowed down her back. A gold chain was adorned around her hips, jingling with every sway. The matching bangles on her protruding wrists told me she was a bride in some past life.
Her hands, leathery and cold, slid around my neck as my mind panicked and my body froze. I couldn’t move as the weight of her tiny frame pushed against my body. I heard the crackling of her insides as she smelled me.
“You smell like a worthless jasmine perfume I’d buy on the side of a Mirpur market,” she sneered, and I felt the smile crawling on her lips as her skin moved against mine. “It wouldn’t have been hard for him to notice someone else with how much you’ve let yourself go.”
I dug my fingers deeper into the warm soil, desperate to pull myself over to the grave so she would let go of me.
“I can almost see the way he would have clung to her body, praising God for all the ways it wasn’t like yours.” She giggled.
With my cheek pressed against the dirt, the crushing weight of her existence on my back, I felt the jolts of heat rising from the grave.
“I can feel his hunger, the greedy taste of his want for her body, to consume every inch of her in ways you couldn’t imagine.”
My body melded into the sunken soil of the grave as she pushed my face forward. It was like she wanted me to see the feral need for sex that was twisting your face from underneath. I closed my eyes. I saw all the images of you with that woman, the ones made in the deepest pit of my mind as I tried to figure out how much life she gave you with every touch and every kiss.
“No wonder he killed himself,” she scoffed.
The weight of those words and the accumulation of everything I had hoped wasn’t true crushed me. There was a crack in my spine. I let the pain wash over me, asking it to drown me.
Then, there was a silence so overwhelming, it felt like there were layers of earth above me. I felt the vibrations of life ricocheting from above. Voices were mumbling through my daze. I struggled to open my eyes as hues of yellow light burned them with every attempt.
I knew this place. I could hear the laughter of my sister and me, children playing with the stuffed animals in that room. I looked around at the cream wallpaper as the bright light faded into the walls. The outdated flower print looked familiar, and as I forced myself to lift my head, the smell of musty peony perfume infiltrated my nose and rekindled my thoughts.
*
“Sugar?” Baba asked, reaching for the teacup Ma was handing him.
“One teaspoon,” she answered as she sat next to him.
The smell of cardamom filled the room. Heat crawled up my back and caressed my cheeks. I turned to see the giant windows behind me roaring with bright rays of golden light.
My heart had stopped beating, following the rhythm of those who resided down here. The sky was pink, fluttering with life. I watched in awe as the birds — shades of green and hues of red I’ve never seen — soared through misted clouds. The trees were alive in every sense of the word. I felt the breaths they took just from looking at their winding trunks, a deep brown that made my eyes hurt from the depth of its colour. There were fields, green and hued with a gold mist, that stretched for what looked like an eternity. This whole world was matted in warm yellow light, staining it like a gold-flaked painting.
“Death is more beautiful than the life you and he tried to create, isn’t it?” I heard her voice like a quiet inner thought. My parents basked in the sunlight, unaware of my presence.
“Look harder.” Her voice echoed.
Baba had a newspaper draped over the side of the couch, which he busied himself with — his preferred method of self-education was always the op-ed section of the Daily Prothom Alo. The collection he acquired over the years still sits on his desk, their yellowing pages coughing up dust clouds the rare times I enter his study — I could never bring myself to throw them out. Ma quietly sewed seams on her saree blouse, ignoring Baba’s habitual cough. Not much had changed for them down here.
“You aren’t looking hard enough,” she urged again.
They sat in silence, separate from one another but together in their aura.
“Focus!” Her voice was shrill. Pain shot through my head, and that’s when I felt it.
There was an overwhelming warmth, fiercer than the sun’s rays but more loving than the destruction of flames. It glazed over the pain, enveloping it like a plague of kindness. There was so much fervour in the room, and when I looked back at my parents, I felt it oozing out of them like a life force. Their silence was full, spilling the tenderness that dominated them. It was an embrace without the physicality of their touch or the reality of their words. This was their peace.
“No. This is their love,” she corrected me.
And that’s when my heart began beating again. I felt the thud in my chest, growing louder with every beat that tore into me. It was constant and gnawing, yet with every tear, all I felt was warmth. It was like a radiating sun resided within me, and with every glance my mother took of my father and every smile he returned, the sun shone brighter.
*
Deafening silence took over again. I was almost certain I had gone deaf from the pain until I heard the echoes of my breathing flatten out.
Warm wind shuffled past ivory curtains. The scratchy fibres grazed my face as I turned away from the overbearing sunlight.
And there you were.
You stood by the stove as bubbling puddles of yellow butter danced around. You smiled at absolutely nothing as you prodded the English muffins around. The butter crackled against the grain of the hot pan as it sprung off the muffins and filled the space between us.
“Do you want chili flakes on the avocados? I know you hate the way they get stuck in your teeth, but we don’t have any cayenne right now.” You looked up directly at me.
“You— you can see me?”
You rolled your eyes like I’d said a cliché pickup line. “Babe, if you’re trying to pretend you’re a ghost, can you tell me how your dead self wants her avocados?” You flipped the muffin onto a plate.
“I– I … sure. Give me the chili peppers.” I couldn’t look away, afraid that even one second of distraction would cause your mirage to crumble like sand. A smile sat on your face quietly, never uttering the words of leaving.
You sprinkled red flakes over the soft green hills and slid the plate over to me. I saw a pale yellow, pillow-like heap splayed across from the English muffin.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Egg. Traditional tamagoyaki but cut into little pieces. It’ll be softer, like a mousse.”
You loved eggs. We went through dozens in a week as they infiltrated your meals. I, on the other hand, hated nudging my fork around in the jellied mess of poached eggs but hated the texture of scrambled eggs even more — an everlasting battle that none of us could ever win when cooking breakfast. What breakfast is complete without eggs? A question I faced every morning when I sat down with a yogurt bowl.
A smile tugged at the edges of my parched lips when I realized what you had done. It was almost painful to feel those muscles move again after so long.
“You get your protein in without vomiting!” Your smile soaked into your cheeks, and a sob crawled up my throat.
I reached out to touch your cheek. I wanted to feel the warmth of your smile burn my fingertips.
Before my finger could graze the stubble of your chin, the sun dropped, and the room pulsated in a dark purple light.
*
“You could at least give me a better excuse than you cut yourself.” I was sitting on the couch, my hands clenching pounds of gauze around your wrist. I hadn’t noticed it then, but the way my hair was pulled back tightly in a bun drained it of its dark, silky sheen.
“It’s nothing. It was my razor blade. I was careless, sorry.” Your eyes avoided mine.
“These cuts are so deep, Aamir. There isn’t—”
“I said it’s nothing. Just leave it.” You pulled your wrist away, and I watched the sadness flood my eyes.
“I feel like I don’t even know you anymore,” I whispered.
You said nothing.
*
There was a teacup sitting on a table. It smelled like citrus.
A man sat on the armchair with his legs crossed, staring down at the newspaper on his lap. A woman sat at the other end of the table, book in hand, eyes too glued to the page to do anything but read. Citrus filled the air between them, binding them to the silence. The man’s impatient gaze shifted from the ink-smudged letters he didn’t care enough to understand over to the brown watch belted on his wrist. The woman’s unfaithful gaze climbed up from the neatly printed letters of her novel.
What happened to us? Her eyes asked of him, careful not to break the silence that built their fragile world. You used to buy me roses every Friday after work. Her defeated posture whispered out into the abyss of what used to be a marriage.
She dragged her fingernails along the rough fabric of the armrest. “We used to be fun. We used to be excited. We used to be in love.”
The man lowered his newspaper as his gaze wandered toward the clock that hung aimlessly on the wall. “Are we not in love?” His eyes darkened with the burden of asking.
“No.” Her eyes were unapologetic.
The man lifted his newspaper, crossed his legs once again, and into the abyss escaped the silent truth. “Then maybe I lost that love somewhere in between the flower shop and our home.”
“They’re not random people.” The woman whispered in my mind, sounding almost sorry to even utter the thought. I looked back at her. Saddened eyes, her dulling long hair, the crinkles of her frown that mirrored mine.
That’s when I saw your silent eyes, avoiding the regrets of your life. It was us — sitting in the dying silence that coated our non-existent marriage.
“Maybe you two were never alive, to begin with.” Her voice was a soft kiss to the folds of my brain.
Unprompted, you headed to the door of the room. You opened it, and I could feel just how wide your smile was on my lips. The darkness of the room faded as the yellow rays of light glazed the room, spilling out of her presence. There she stood, gusts of expensive lilac perfume saturating the air with its need to possess what didn’t belong to it.
Then you kissed her.
With every grab you made at her skin, how you tried to devour every bit of her, I felt the way your bodies merged from the way my skin cells rumbled like a colony of fire ants. I seethed with a scalding ache, consumed by the flames of your love for her. It was a raging love, angrier and more ferocious than what I felt from my parents — more tangible than anything we ever had together.
All for a woman I wish I had found the courage to ask you about.
“That’s death,” The woman answered.
This woman had snuck her way into the fibres of my being. Her undying breath and tender grasp pulsated in the folds of my brain. Life, for him at least, started with her.
“His heart was always plagued with her rotting essence.” Something about her words was hypnotic. Maybe it was the way she left them imprinted in the creases of my brain like a parasite. The touch of her skin, soft and scented like jasmine, ran down my neck.
“You were never his.” She turned my face to hers. “Do you understand that?”
Her face was uncanny; it was identical to mine but more radiant and fulfilled than I had looked in years. With the craters gone and the colour restored to her round cheeks, her eyes glistened with hope. She was flushed, not with life but with love. It was the heat that radiated through her body and touched mine, it was embedded in her voice and floated through the silence between us. Her fingers travelled over my tired skin, and I wondered when I had ever been so beautiful. Maybe it was her who brought out the best in me. Her eyes held mine, asking if I was relieved knowing you had committed suicide because you didn’t love me — you had never loved anything.
She smiled at me, and it stung how radiant it was.
I had almost forgotten how a smile suited the wrinkles that wore my face. I felt her arms wrap around me, the abnormal strength of her body reminded me that she was still there, under all my skin. I felt the sweat of her skin – our skin — rubbing off on me as she tightened her arms. My ribs pressed against my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe.
There was that deafening silence again.
*
The sweltering heat woke me up. The night sky had set. The trees were humming a lullaby.
I pulled myself up, smeared with hues of dark red from the soil of your grave. There was a cool breeze slithering through the trees, but I was warm — overwhelmingly warm as the beating of my heart tore into my chest once again.
The thud of every beat grew louder until I could barely hear the gold chain adorned on my hip, jingling with every sway as I followed the hums of the trees.
