Elbow Room

The water is scalding hot. It pours in a thick linear transparent line in the empty plastic bucket — resonating around the tiled bathroom walls like drum rolls. She sits in the cold on the silver steel settee, naked. Her body hunched and gathered in her arms, swaying back and forth — waiting. She watches the steam rise like smoke from a funeral pyre, divine and purifying, disappearing into the ceiling.

Slowly, very slowly, she puts both her feet into the bucket. The warmth attacks her toes, feet, spreading to her legs up to her cold bony knees. As she does that, the water spills over from the bucket onto the floor, overwhelmed. Bones in her thin legs crackle like cold logs in the fire. She puts her hands and arms in next. She finds a therapeutic relief in the boiling hot water that almost burns her skin. It feels like she could go to sleep under that effect. Stay here forever. The band that holds her hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, she loosens with a wet hand. As the warmth reaches up to her thighs and back and neck and face she feels renewed. The warmth seeps into her very being, getting the blood frozen in her veins moving again. Hot red thick liquid. She can feel it travelling in her body like tiny fishes. All her troubles seem to melt for a while. There she sits, hanging suspended in mid-air in space-time continuum.

Now that her body has adjusted to the hot water, the heat that had embraced her body like love begins to abandon her limbs. She takes her arms and legs out of the bucket and stands up, her teeth clattering against each other. Her hands are wrinkled and pink. Water drips like greed from her body. She stands there contracting back the cold slowly. The wind jabs at her naked soggy body as she stands shivering... defending herself with a dry towel.

The curtains over the windows block the rain falling outside from view. But I can hear it crash on the winding rocky garden path outside. A thousands jabs on my heart. The smell is intoxicating. Ive always wanted to make a perfume out of it. But thats nothing new. Many love rain, many love that very earthy wet fragrance that oozes like a genie from a bottle, awakening all desires. It isn't for the first time that rain has fell on someone's dry thoughts as they do on mine this moment—rinsing them alive and breathing again, throbbing on the temples. Not for the first time has the sound of thunder sent blood shooting down someone's veins as it does in mine tonight, as pipes and sewers are unclogged in a rainy gush. It isn't for the first time that a memory has opened its arms to lament the romance in the air. Nor am I the first one to wipe a tear escaping through the corner of my eye as i sit facing only the sound of rain.

Its not an easy tear, one following the other, like the ceaseless rain outside. Its a hard-earned tear like a drop from a dry tube well on famished earth. And im grateful for it. Even though a torrent would be so much more merciful than this suffocating starvation. I stare at the curtains, imagining the lush greenery dancing, shivering in the wet wind. Sheena is in the bathroom, talking to Bhuvan. Its Valentine's. I wished id have given them some privacy but its 1.30 in the night, and i cant leave the room. Its isnt Valentine's Day thats making me cry. The rain is. But for the rain, it would probably have been just another practical day. But for the rain...

“That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, comtempt, and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love...the total passion for the total height - you are unable of anything else.”

Something inside me—like a shell—which was protecting me till now, saving me from an unknown malaise, is beginning to crack. I can feel it inside my chest. It cracks, sometimes it melts, sometimes it wants to come out with a final push like a baby is born. People around me, i see, have it already broken in them and its not a defeat. Its a predestined failure to save a beauty that was born to die. It was meant to be broken, like a fruit is meant to be eaten when its ripe. I didnt even know such a covering existed—over your heart, over your soul, your innocence, your self. It breaks one by one. A million cracks slowly spreading over a block of ice.

Some are immune to it, those who were born that way or make themselves immune to its stranglehold. Others like me must find Knowledge a painful evolution.

I can hear it cracking inside me. Inside my womb, evolving to die, like an aborted foetus. Under my chest sometimes, tapping it from inside every hour, ready to burst out with a gasp. Sometimes like a woman sick with pregnancy i wish it'd just come out. And i know id be someone dead, someone changed, someone new.