Jottoshob 06: May I Have a Label?
To my dad, who stood by me when most others found me rather inconvenient.
Hi my loves,
I’m sorry for dropping the ball on the newsletter for several Fridays. I had a lot on my plate, personally and work-wise. I wanted to come back when I had things relatively under control. So, here I am, with the short story you all voted for. I must say, I was relieved that the short story option won in the poll. I didn’t want to write this one as an essay. But, having written it, I feel like it’s a little bit of both, so essay-voters, give it a try maybe? :)
Thank you, for allowing me this space. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am and how dearly I look forward to Fridays because of you.
One quick thing before I let the story begin. Raima’s story is both fact and fiction, but I won’t tell you which parts of it are true to my life. That’s the freedom stories bring. Maybe the traumas are mine, maybe they’re somebody else’s, maybe they’re a mix, or maybe I’ve made the whole thing up to illustrate a point. Either way, I hope you’re left with something meaningful. :)
P.S: The story gets heavy, I know, so if somebody feels unsettled after reading it, talk it out with me on Instagram or write back by replying to this mail, and I’ll try my best to calm you. <3
Raima sat at her desk, in a room that her father said smelt like cigarettes, but to her, it just smelt like home. She craned her neck, her head hanging rigid, almost like it was frozen in place. It was curious how she was always playing a game of ‘Statue!’—limbs rigid, jaws clenched, every muscle completely taut. Whenever a random Insta guru asked her to “loosen up”, she never knew where to begin, or how to start untying twenty-five years worth of knots.
She could hear children bursting firecrackers outside. The put-put-put of each explosion sent her back in time. In reality, there were no crackers. Not this time anyway. The Supreme Court’s insistence on green crackers had left people confused—not that anybody was checking—and the High Court’s prior ban had sucked the markets dry. The streets were eerily silent. No toy guns firing away, no trees of fire threatening to burn her clothes, none of the gleeful, skin-crawling squeal of children as they reveled in the smell of things burning. No, there was none of that this time. So, what Raima heard echoing inside her head, was really just her memories.
As she tried to click-clack the keys on her laptop, she couldn’t shake the feeling of intrusion. Why can’t the world just forget about Diwali? she thought. Why can’t everybody pretend that it doesn’t exist, and move the fuck on?
It wasn’t the pets she was worried about. It wasn’t the old (and young) with heart disease. Although, those were very valid concerns. No, Raima was worried about déjà vu.
Every Diwali, she was sucked back into terrifying memories of death, of abuse, of family politics, of the responsibility she shouldered of protecting her younger cousins from transgenerational trauma. I can’t let it get to them, she always thought. It ends with me.
While others strung fairy lights, clicked ethereal portraits of themselves under the blinking stars that adorned their house; while everybody else was doused in feverish festivity, Raima felt like the elephant in the room. She always had.
There were a number of reasons why she never fit in with her extended family. When she was younger, very young in fact, she’d been ridiculed out of the dressing room. She could never quite remember why, but they’d called her a cockroach. Had she, a five-year-old, been out of sorts in a room full of women changing clothes? Had she acted gay—whatever that meant? Raima often pondered over that last question. Had her gayness been revealed when she was a tiny child sitting completely confused and awed by the human anatomy? Had they thought something was wrong with her? Or her body?
Raima never found answers to these questions, but they kept clawing at her. The same people would now, about twenty years later, throw themselves at her, ask intrusive questions, and hug her bones to breaking. When had she stopped being a problem, then? When had she stopped being a cockroach?
There were many other reasons why Raima was the elephant in the room. She had laboured for the pujo and helped with many a ritual while being on her period. She hadn’t told anybody she was bleeding that year, because she wanted them to realise—when they inevitably found out later—that her blood hadn’t cursed anything.
All these memories and more flitted through her head, as Raima left her desk to dress for this gathering once again. Another year, another fresh paint of trauma. Her mental health was running in the negative. It would be wrong to say her happy brain cells had run out, because she wasn’t very sure she had any in the first place. At a party with her friends that Diwali, she sat alone in a room, working on a thankless project, watching her friends laugh from a tiny crack in the door. That is often how Raima felt about life—sitting alone, watching everybody and everything else pass by.
So, when she finally got to the pujo, she took a seat at the far end of the aisle, and stayed there quietly, fielding client calls, fielding complaints, fielding visions of a (now dead) bad man trailing the floors of the house. She had thought that his absence would make her happy. Finally. But it hadn’t. It had brought some peace, sure, but she couldn’t shake the fact that her elders had failed her. And the other children.
Why had no one protected me? Isn’t that what adults are supposed to do? Raima remembered how inconvenient most people thought she was, how uncooperating that she wouldn’t just stay silent.
Just as she was about to delve into the yearly thought spiral, her favourite cousin cozied up to her. Let bygones be bygones, Raima thought, as she smiled at the little lady beside her. That was when her younger cousin began yelling, “Who are you? WHO ARE YOU?”
Raima smiled. Her haircut had elicited very tense, disapproving looks from the general public, so she was prepared.
“You look like a boy! I’ll tell everybody you’re a boy!” he yelled while grimacing.
She thought she was prepared.
“Seriously, who are you? You’re a boy!” he chuckled, running away.
She thought…she was prepared.
But was she?
You see, depression is a funny thing. It’s an intelligent little beast. It can take mountains you have scaled before and make it seem entirely new and daunting. It can take a pea from an innocent pod and convince you that it’s a cyanide pill.
Raima’s phone beeped at the exact minute a little silence had returned to the street. She’d received a warning about her account. A haughty client had complained that she hadn’t received the work on time, and the freelancing platform firmly asked her to get her act together.
Raima wandered further down the street so nobody could see her cry. She had been working from dusk to dawn, quite literally. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to bed before the birds broke into a cheer and the sky turned light blue. It had gotten to the extent where dawn had begun to scare her. As the sky began changing colour, she felt like she was caught in a race against time. In a race she was bound to lose because her depressed brain had stopped working altogether, but the algorithm didn’t understand that.
The algorithm wanted what it wanted, and Raima had bills to pay.
As she gathered herself into a dark nook, she cried. Not the freeing howl one might expect. No, Raima hadn’t cried in a long time. She never quite had the time or the energy to invest in it, and besides, it always gave her a runny nose. But that night was different; it felt like everything, every last bit of effort she had put into her life, and the lives of those around her, had yielded nothing. Irrespective of what she did, she bumped into one roadblock after the other.
She wished she were surrounded by a din of firecrackers ripping up the sky, because she wanted to yell in its cover.
Can’t you just be a little kind?
Can’t you see I’m struggling?
Raima wanted to wear these words on a cardboard sign hung around her neck.
Can you please speak to me softly today? I’m a little fragile.
I am unable to handle criticism today; could you please come back tomorrow?
You may not see it, but I am doing my best. Could you shelve your tips for now?
Different lines, different cardboard signs, depending on the day. Raima laughed out loud realizing that this was perhaps the first time in her life that she wished we’d all come with labels. It would be so much easier, so much kinder, to treat people in a way that they could handle. It was at this precise juncture of thoughts, that a large tubri burst near her foot. Raima had unknowingly walked into a landmine while lost in thought, and yellow sparks were the last thing she remembered before everything went…loose.
It is weird how people say the last thing they remember is the world going dark, or things going quiet. No, it’s how the body becomes jelly, completely loses its structure, and you fall, keep falling, never quite hitting the ground.
When Raima awoke, she felt like all she had were her eyes. Or, to be precise, her eyelids. There was nothing else she could feel, and that made her wonder what newborns felt first. Was it their hands? Their feet? Or perhaps, did they also feel their eyelids first, seeing as that was what they struggled with so much?
“Hey, didi is awake!” a familiar voice chirped.
The world was still blurry but speckled with light, and Raima contemplated asking The Voice to draw the curtains, but now was probably not the time.
“Didi, how are you feeling?”
The Voice was now close. Too close, in fact. Practically inside her ear.
“Okay,” Raima mouthed, still groggy.
“We were so worried! Maami is getting you some water!” the kid yelled.
Raima rubbed her eyes, not because she wanted to see the world, but because she wanted to see who The Voice was, so she could ask them to shut the fuck up. The decibel level was just unacceptable. She wasn’t in a coma, for god’s sake.
As her eyes cleared up, she saw her cousin kneeling beside her, silver glitter smeared across her forehead.
Seriously? Raima thought. They’ve been celebrating while I was out like a light?
“Didi, didi, didi—"
“—SHUT THE F—,” Raima paused. The glitter on the kid’s forehead was turning into…words?
Do I have a concussion? Raima thought.
The lines jiggled around and settled on a coherent sentence. Raima leaned in, squinting her eyes to read the characters.
The others don’t want me to play with them. I’d love some company.
Raima looked from the words, to the kid with glittering eyes, back at the words, and felt her hand reach out.
“Sorry baba, I’m just tired. You can come sit by me for a while and we could watch some TV?”
The kid shot up onto the bed with glee and began flicking the channels. Raima excused herself and walked out of the room. She wanted to wash her face, and hopefully ask somebody what the fuck that forehead glitter thing was about. She can’t possibly be losing her mind, right?
Right?
As she passed the doorway, she bumped into her Maami who was holding a glass of water.
“Ei, feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you,” Raima smiled. “I wanted to ask some—”
There it was! That glitter thing again! The lines crisscrossed their way into a sentence.
I’ve been working without sleep. Can you please not put more chores on me?
“Yes baba? You want something? I can whip you up a plate of kachoris. You must be hung—”
“No! No, I’m not. No hunger. Just wanted to ask if I can take out the garbage on your behalf?”
“But—,” she paused. “You just woke up. It’s too—”
“I’m fine,” Raima smiled. “Besides, some fresh air would be nice.”
Maami nodded, heaving a sigh.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Raima shot her kid cousin a smile. “You keep flipping the channels and find us a good movie, okay?”
Moving to the space under the stairs, the bags seemed to be overflowing. Why had nobody else thought of taking these out? Jesus.
Raima wrestled with two huge garbage bags, pulling them out of the house and up the streets to the vat. It smelled terrible, and Raima was almost regretting offering to do the job. When she got to the main lane, she saw two old men hugging. Now that’s a rare sight, she thought. She was just about to turn away when she realized one of them was her grand uncle. That grouchy man never had a good word to say, let alone actually embrace another person. For a second, Raima was scared it wasn’t a hug. Maybe he’s trying to choke the other man in a really creative way? she thought. That would be more like him. But as they separated, she saw him smile.
Raima quickly turned away, as if she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. Something that could destabilize popular reality. Like a mafia boss playing kumir danga, a Brahmin uncle not wearing the poitey, or the Prime Minister voluntarily sharing the accounts of the PMCares Fund.
There were some things that just…weren’t supposed to happen.
Raima dumped the garbage bags quickly and was about to rush back when she bumped into an old friend.
“Oh my, arre I didn’t recognize you! I thought you were some random boy!” he laughed.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Raima thought. Again?
“Listen, you assh—” Raima couldn’t finish cursing because she could see glitter on his forehead too. ‘My father threatened to disown me if I was found wearing ma’s makeup again,’ it said.
Raima cleared her throat. “Hmm, so what if I’m a boy?”
“Noth-nothing. Nothing,” the boy stammered.
“We’re too old, don’t you think” Raima moved in closer, “to be worrying about who deserves what genitals?”
The boy nodded.
“Besides, I remember us trying on your mother’s saree when we were kids. We pulled off an amazing show, na?”
The boy laughed. “Yes…yes, that was fun.”
The two exchanged a knowing glance before they waved each other goodbye. As Raima looked around, she saw all types of strange things happening. The vegetable vendors who fought every single day for the prime spot, were taking turns alternating their spots. The cranky old man in the mobile recharge shop was laughing as his nephew showed him a YouTube video. The aunty who judged every young girl as they passed by, was holding a backless blouse her daughter had just bought her. It seemed like she was crying, but not in the bad way.
It’s almost as though everybody had suddenly tapped into a unique frequency where they understood the far-reaching effects of trauma, or how a little kindness, a little effort towards understanding where somebody else was coming from, went a long, long way.
Raima’s glance flitted back to her grand uncle. The other man was patting him on the back saying, “I’ve missed you, old friend. I wish I had known how you were feeling earlier. I never would have said those things.”
“It’s okay. Kachoris?” her grand uncle beamed.
“You bet!” They set off, arm in arm, towards the stall that sold the most oily, most mind-numbing ghee kachoris. Raima faintly remembered how Maami had once said that the old man had an aversion to the shop, how he never ate anything from there—something about a fight 30 years ago.
“Looks like the labels worked, haan?” a voice whispered. Raima abruptly turned around to spot whoever had said that, and in that precise moment, once again, a tubri burst.