[Trigger Warning: sexual violence, trauma]
We’re in Maya’s kitchen off 80ft Road. It smells like burnt sesame and rain. There’s a pot of ramen on the stove that she’s stirring without intention. I’m sitting on the countertop in my mini skirt, feet swinging loose like the root of an onion. The steam fogs up her glasses and she looks at me through the translucence and she’s silly smiling— kohl smudged into the creases of her eyes, nails chipping red, a hole in her dress from where someone stubbed a cigarette on the way over. Maya never wears glasses.
She joins me on the kitchen counter, hangs her legs off the edge and offers me a fork. Our slurping is loud, rude, hot bits landing on our bare thighs, cheeks, orange liquid smeared across the lips— chapped, broken, kissed stupid. She looks at my chin, leaking from the seams and she’s so amused, throws her head back and belly-laughs. Loud. Rude. We’re not concerned with the mess we’re making.
We leave the dishes in the sink. Sway through the long corridor dotted with pictures from over the years— a balcony in the dry Bombay summer. She’s five, in a blue dress and matching ballet flats, cheek to the railing, looking over the brown sea. I can taste the metal in my mouth, the salty air, the perfume her mother is wearing like a necklace over her chest. In another one, she’s seven, cotton candy pink in her hand and between her teeth, a ball pit in Dubai, she’s grinning toothless, scar tracing her shoulder blades that still glisten with sweat in a similar way. And then there’s us— arm bands strapped tight, fresh from a swim, sulking. Sad. It was the sunniest day of the year.
‘Here’ she hands me a t- shirt to sleep in. Marge Simpson against a grey melange. In the mirror, we’re standing side by side, toothbrushes crashing into our teeth as we scrub, swish, gargle. Spit. The bathroom smells like warm vanilla and The Smiths play softly through the door.
And if a ten tonne truck kills the both of us
To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine
*Maya was twelve the first time a boy called her sexy. I remember we were on the farm and it was a Saturday. The breakfast scones were nearly gone. There were eight of us around the table, reaching for the crumbs of pastry shrivelling in the warm light as we flipped through yellow script pages. It was a cold reading of ‘Nothing’ by Janne Teller. From what I remember, Pierre Anthon is sitting in a plum tree.
He is eight and has just declared that nothing is worth doing because nothing means anything anyway.
‘He kissed me at the after party.’
‘He invited you to the after party?’
‘Yeah it was so crazy, Martin Garrix was there, I was so wasted, we had shots.’
‘So he kissed you at the party?’
‘In the bathroom. Backstage, you know, one of those really dark places’
I felt a violent urge to run over to Tæringvej 25 and climb up to Pierre Anthon in his plum tree and stare into the sky until I became a part of the outside and nothing and never had to think about anything again. But I was supposed to amount to something, be someone.
‘How did it happen?’
‘I was wearing that maroon H&M skirt I bought with you and the gig was ending, it was the last song I think. He asked if he could kiss me and I said yes so he took me to the back and in the bathroom, he told me I looked sexy.’
‘Oh my god.’
She was so tall, barely over 5’4 but she towered over me in her camo shorts and her half-red hair. She shaved her legs and waxed her eyebrows. She played the guitar and sang Billie Holiday. She was funny too and the boys loved it. I would always tell her that. ‘He so likes you,’ I’d say, to which she’d shake her head and quote Woolf or some other sad woman on the internet like Savannah Brown who writes poetry and says ‘putrid’ a lot, and ‘lucid’ and ‘lover’.
The city we lived in was Maya’s. We never hung out on the weekends because I couldn’t drink yet or smoke cigarettes. In the summer after sixth grade, one of her musician friends invited me to a hookah bar on Church Street. He was older, shaggy haircut, green converse and a Nirvana tee that hung loose on his shoulders. She didn’t speak to me until we were sat beside each other in the little red booth by the mirror, and the waiter asked for my order.
‘A vodka cranberry please.’
‘I’ll have a 60ml whiskey. Shots anyone?’
Maya looked at me sitting there in my strappy sandals. She raised her blocky eyebrows. ‘Shot?’ she asked in a way that was cold and distant. I didn’t care. I was over the fucking moon. Seven shots of vodka arrived presently. It was three in the afternoon. A small fan feigned movement in the far corner. I was sweating, saline diamonds clinging to the hair above my lip. Shaggy Guy held his glass up to mine. Clink. My throat was burning, my chest itchy and my stomach warm. I smiled at him. And at Maya, who smiled back before turning away from me to ask the group, ‘Ciggie anyone?’
They shimmied out into the light. I hadn’t realised how dim the bar was until the back door closed behind Shaggy. I was alone at the table, which was crowded with empty glasses and what was left of the limes. Yellow carcasses belly up, the bones of a chicken mangled on a steel plate. There was blood on the cartilage. A red smear where white meat once was. I wretched and thanked god they were still outside.
*
I’m nineteen now and she’s sitting in the corner of the hospital room. It’s flooded with light. There’s a brown blanket hung over the foot of her bed. She looks weary. The floors are a pale yellow tile and everything else is blue. My eyes are so swollen I can barely take in the scene.
There’s spit collected in my mouth and I try swallowing when something hard comes in the way. It’s foreign in my throat and instinctively, my hand that’s white and sore reaches past the mouth, the dryness and pulls on a tube. I panic from its length, yank harder and screech as it cuts through the tissue lining. The rip is loud. A nurse comes running in to help me sit up. A draft blows over my body. I look down at my hospital gown.
It’s hard to recall, in a sensible chronology, the series of events from that night. I can’t remember what the ambulance looked like. Or who was by my side when the village roads curled wayward, I can’t remember if I fell. If there was someone to break it. The fall. The night. My little heart that couldn’t understand how things had vanished so quickly. Memory is fickle when it’s hard to hold onto— moving like an image in the cinema. Blink. And everything you thought to be true, passing and passing. Blink. Blink. Blink. There isn’t a way to tell which is better, knowing or unknowing. But what I know is this:
I am standing in the queue trailing outside the dive bar with my fists stuffed into the pockets of my jeans. It’s summer in Haryana. Delhi is only an hour away on the Yellow Line, but we’re a long, long way from the city. I can taste cranberry on my tongue, which is still swishing around the same Orbit from before we left campus. It feels like a raisin against my cheek, shrivelly and weird. We were drinking on the way over, four girls in the back of a minivan, Maya up front, hurtling down narrow bylanes, our high-beam headlights cutting the blackness.
*
In the line, my waist is tight, ass, thighs, torso. Stupid from all the giggling. I feel faint with excitement, my hollow stomach is suddenly swarmed with large moths fanning against my throat. I fear if I part my lips too wide, one of their fat, brown bodies will escape me. So I keep shut and clench my fists even harder. We’re at the front of the queue, at the threshold where the thatched roof ends. I hand someone a folded hundred and he stamps me, hard.
My wrist reads BYTE in dark purple ink as we walk through the bar and out into the centre of a rice field. It’s busy and loud. I can feel eyes on me like fire ants pricking my skin, biting down on the low neckline and the denim at my hips. I flinch but swallow the feeling whole. I know I look good in these jeans.
We find a spot to set the liquor down. It’s the kind of scene you bring your own speakers to and ours are big. Black. Burly. Denting the brown tabletop when the bass starts heavy. The air is thick. Stubborn. Unforgiving. It’s the month of burning and the farms in the distance are on fire. There’s a small window between harvesting rice and preparing the land for the new crop. The residue begins to disappear mid-October but leaves behind warm death on a breeze till Diwali has passed and the worst of the summer is long gone.
And amidst this burning, shots. And vodka cranberries from solo cups. The drink is rough on my tongue and it’s going down slowly but it feels really really good. I’m lighter even as my legs heavy and I’m hot, so hot and I have so much to say. Like ‘Kanye West is a fucking genius’ and ‘fuck the GDP’ and ‘I got cheated on in May’. There are three boys at our table. Their sleeves are rolled to the elbow, shirt buttons undone to reveal a chest that’s sweaty and wide. I’m so overcome by desperation, I want nothing more than to feel that hand on my waist and for everyone to see it there- big and tan against the pale belt of skin above my jeans. They’re 22 and we’re 19 and their meanness is thrilling.
‘Oi babe, don’t you worry about the economy, okay?’
I blush.
It’s louder. I can feel my arms flailing more than they’re used to. I’m like four shots down and it’s as if I’m standing at the far end of the field- at the precipice, where the earth’s been bent for irrigation and I’m looking in.
BYTE is a disco chessboard, colourful and unruly, body glitter and black sequins reflecting the moonlight back and into their eyes before spit flies from their whiskey mouths when they tell you you look pretty. And you stick your tits out and suck your belly in and pout or laugh or touch their arm that feels completely strange and wrong but everyone’s looking at you, and he’s 22 and tall, in Fin or Philosophy, and you’re 19 and silly, pretty enough to get his attention but now, you’ve got to keep it. Keep his eyes on you, so you lead them to your lips. You’d prefer not to kiss him, his body is hot like burning, there are fruit flies between the two of you and your upper lip is pooling, but you do it. You kiss him and he kisses you back and his tongue is so far down your body it’s comical, but you swallow the laughter and let his hands rest brashly on your ass.
It’s just past midnight and a sudden, slashing wave of boys dip the ground beneath us, mud scattering like brown rapids down a mountain. There are nine or thirty of them now, I can’t really see through their jockey figures- it’s like I’m at the movies, sitting in the dark. There’s a blue-white beam running over me and there, on the 88' x 40' expanse, is a bright night with a soundtrack and the eye blinks repeatedly. The transition between frames is awkward. I swallow. A vile tang is crawling upwards from the bottom of my throat, I gag to myself then look around in a panic to make sure no one saw it.
I have to get to the bathroom somehow. I can see the bright green door, swinging on its hinges diagonally opposite from where I’m sitting. I know I can make it, so I pull myself up and begin to push through the crowd. I can’t make out which song is on but I know all the words. So does everybody else. It’s chorus-like. Something about dollars and bitches. The soil beneath me is arid. Untethered. Shifting with my weight. And the others. Who are jumping. Thumping. Fighting. Fisting.
Someone grabs me by the shoulder but when I turn around, I see nothing and I think I’m smiling into this nothing, my balance threatening to give any second. A huge wave of vertigo rides over me and now the sky is wide, wider and wider still. I think the stars are falling and the moon, I think is leaking into my open palms filling them with silver that threatens to spill. I’m trying hard to steady the gaze- focus on the little bulb in the corner outside the green door. And if I cock my head sideways enough, it’ll appear straight but I can’t seem to find it— my head. I’m a neck and tits. And it won’t keep still, the bulb. It’s like a bird flapping its wings in my face. My hands reach out for something, they tremble, flail and crash into someone beside me. The body is firm, hard to the touch. And then the ground, harder still. It feels good to know there’s no further I can fall.
Fade suddenly to black.
*
I open my eyes, completely oblivious to how much time has passed. I’m half-sat on a plastic chair by the entrance, alone and my feet, on looking down, are bare. Strokes of red mud drawn across them. My jaw is sore from holding my mouth open or not holding it at all. I can feel the air on my tongue as if it had been hanging from my teeth like a dress shirt on a clothesline, probably flapping about, yielding to every slap of wind from the warm summer night.
And then I’m gone again.
*
When I come to, six or sixty hours later, the doctor is saying something to me but I only catch a few words- ‘stomach pump’, ‘swab test’, ‘Rohypnol’. He’s looking down my gown- its thin edges flapping open under the air conditioning. I try adjusting to conceal my breasts that are so tender I could cry. There’s a drip in my wrist. I cough into my left shoulder and that’s when I see Maya. In the far corner of the room, she’s sitting cross-legged in sweats and a Superman tee.
I can’t remember where she was when we were drinking. If she had sat at our table. If she played the music. I can’t remember if she queued Britney Spears or the last time we’d spoken. Was it when her parents lost the bar on Infantry Road? I can’t remember the last time we were there. At CSharp. Or who played the final gig before the room went
dark.
I can’t remember if she was afraid of the hospital jargon and the wheelchair. If the stain on my jeans made her choke. I can’t remember if I ever saw her cry. Maybe once. In Mannheim, when the teacher called her a slut for wearing that little black dress out in the freezing cold. I can’t remember why she said that. No one else really minded. The dress was pretty and the theatre was warm. I can’t remember what the opera was about. But I remember it was beautiful.
*
Maya’s on the phone with my father. He’s downstairs straight from the airport from what I can gather. His voice sounds low, slow, like he’s tending to a wounded animal. She replies in short sentences, like she doesn't have the time for this. He’s probably asking her questions like whether she’s eaten, if the nurse is a woman, if I’ve eaten. She stops to look at me between answers like, Oh little girl, what have you done?
I rest my eyes until I feel someone’s hand is grazing the long bruise running down my right arm. I flinch violently. My father looks back at me and collapses into my little blue chest. He’s crying so hard. I think about him, age ten, at the foot of his father’s bed. He knows something is wrong but can’t be sure. How purple the feet are. How white the nails. How yellow the lids of his eyes against the morning. It must have been new- such stillness, such a taut passing of time. Maybe there was wailing in the far distance and maybe his mother was beating her chest by his head that was restful, away somewhere different. Peshawar, maybe. The big house he still talks about with the rabbits in the backyard.
Two police officers walk in with cups of tea in their hands. They ask the doctor what happened, eyes fixed on my skinny bare legs. Doc says ‘swab test’ again, ‘FIR’, and the cop, ‘discharge’, ‘underage drinking’. Maya says nothing, just looks at me- as if she’d felt my hot breath over the toilet, or caught my saliva in her hands when she found me.
Her stare lingers on my collar bone— little spots of purple, green, yellow gems trailing down to my left shoulder. Months later, in her Wordpress, self-published account of the night, she’d write:
How divine she must be to have her chest dipped in the stars, I think. How wonderfully she must bleed, I think. How stunning her bruises must stain, I think. Little girl I see the yesterdays and tomorrows nascent in your breasts and putrid glitter circling your throat, oh, gorgeous wisps of time-
I gag.
She called it ‘Blood Disco’. The piece would do its rounds, the boy I dated in high school would hunch over his phone between sets at the gym, scroll past the contemplative bits and read out loud all the times she’d mention ‘vomit’, ‘blood’ and ‘tongue’. My friends from uni, in the little group chat they made to plan my birthday, would gasp and shake, tsk tsk tsk, what a bitch. They’d post the picture she took of me in my gown, with my thumb up, long tube running from my wrist to the bag of blood hanging by my head.
*
Behind the pale blue curtain, I change into the fresh set of clothes my father brought me. I don’t look down when I slip out of the gown. I keep my eyes on the yellow tile, the blue in my periphery. The light cotton feels nice against my skin. Familiar and clean.
My shoes are still missing and the doc says I can’t take the hospital pair. So I leave them behind, soiled clothes in my left hand and my father’s arm in the other. I walk on the hot tar between the hospital exit and the ambulance that’ll take us back to campus. I know it’s burning blisters through my bare feet but I can’t feel it.
It’s bumpy, the ride. I can’t tell if it's the same ambulance that brought me here. I imagine it is. There I am, skinny jeans ripped further and further up from the knees. Horizontal on the maroon bed that’s been covered with a white cloth in case I were to make a mess. My feet are facing the boot and my head is rocking back and forth, each time the road curves, it jolts. Hard. Heavy.
It’s mid morning as we turn into a familiar road, a few hundred metres from the campus gates. The sun is inching towards noon, fast and blazing. I’m sweating from most crevices, between my toes, breasts and under my neck. I wonder if my father is angry. At them or me, but not at her, in those blue crocs she’d worn for years. I bought her a strawberry charm for them once, bright red. We called them jujubes.
She sits across from me, looking out the window. Into the charred fields of Haryana. The heatwaves over the countryside. The fruit vendor. The tea stall. The liquor store. I close my eyes and let the light fall onto me. I decide never to think of it again, and hope she does too. My heart is in my mouth still, but I’m praying she won’t say anything when other people will ask- about the stain, my nails and the places from which I bleed.
Shanaia Kapoor is a writer and artist from Mumbai. Her work has appeared in The Hindu, The Wire, TN2 Magazine, Firstpost, Alma Magazine, Indian Review, Juice Droplet, Lesbian Art Circle, Puca Magazine and The Martello Journal. Her photographs have featured in the Iova Winter Show, DUPA exhibitions and the Trinity Women In Law Report Vol. IV.