She heard the loud noise, moth-eaten words reaching her ears again this time. Sometimes she focuses on condensing her listening, other times she lets the chitchat find her unsuspectingly.
Mithali accepts chatter that gives monotony a character.
She had found herself telling someone, in the middle of a realization, that she does not recall the oddities of growing up, but she feels an ambivalent pull towards consistency, and that’s the most anyone can sum up the nature of home as. She hears it in the azaan at the crack of dawn and the one at six in the evening. It doesn’t matter what Mithali is doing at the time; if she is attentive, she can transport herself to the laxity of home as if she is waking up from her afternoon sleep at fourteen. That feeling grounds her, all the way here.
Mithali’s father used to complain about toothaches that went all through the night. He refused painkillers till he had crossed the threshold of pain into a controlled bearableness. The hurdle to invincibility, he knew, was giving in. He must have carried these battles with nightly terrors to his mornings, they made him obstinate about his foresight in poverty. It didn’t let anyone find a better course of action than persistence.
Had she been patient, she would have heard something more than repetition in his voice.
In a cramped space of three people, Mithali marked one room as hers, though it contained nothing of significance that was really hers. She made small cuts on clothes out of frustration. She wrote with glitter on one of the walls, to keep that room as a young girl’s bedroom, but she couldn’t persuade her parents to buy anything of value to represent that room still. She was insistent on dividing that house into three rooms, but nobody else cared about personal space as much as her. In the end, Mithali devised a lie to hide that house altogether. She told everyone she knew that she lived in the house that theirs shared a wall with. It was bigger, had three floors, and didn’t look like it was tethering on its last legs. The lie gave her mind a secret, and she let it blend into her like second nature.
She looks back at these trivial moments with uninterest. They don’t stand up to the weight of importance. They were relieved of their nostalgia when they were hidden for so long, they could have disappeared as some urban myths that she recalled till she moved away, and Mithali would not have cared about preserving them. When someone asks her how she feels these days, her answers seem like a sequel in the making of times gone by, temperate and loyal.
She is careless about the influence of steering a conversation.
As it happens with tawdry sequels, she too would not be able to carry anamnesis through the stages of life’s development with the same vigour. Most of her memories are not truthful, and for the sake of empirical record-keeping, one has to stick to what they have actually lived through. When they follow her around while she is busy, she tells herself, “These are just mild disturbances, they don’t make up the formula of what didn’t work.”
Her mother did that a lot. She held onto things till all Mithali could associate with her relatives was the times they slipped up. That one time, he showed up to that birthday party drunk; this one time, he met with an accident because he felt like he could outsmart everyone else. Such was the ridiculous heights of the charges she pressed against them; Mithali didn’t think of relationships as normal. She stayed away from them and blamed it on her proclivity for aloofness. She doesn’t know how far you have to graze from the herd to call it a search for greener pastures. She lives only five hundred kilometres away, the least she can do is call them about their day.
The thing with nostalgia is that it feels like it might help if it is so distinct.
What were you up to last week?
Where did it begin?
Why do you think one thing leads to another?
Mithali is at a place where she feels, life has come full circle, for everything. She listens to 90s music, looks up punk aesthetics, and tries to bring up the dead. She lacks determination and she is looking for some kind of attachment.
She has admitted as much to her mother, but Mithali is wary of her mother telling her, “this one time, I had to overcome things in order to stay happy.”
She doesn’t roll her eyes at her mother anymore.
Moving around in a potpourri of emotions as she has, like a kid flirting with a bland bowl of soup that he has been instructed to drink, Mithali found a tolerance for people’s ways maybe. On the other hand, she could just be considering life an extraordinary feat. There have been times when she has seen people point out with evidence that encore fix lapses in judgement. If her parents had enough, her mother would not pry open those relatives, and so forth, until you reached the beginning and you could have a do-over in your imagination. Some of it could help fight the mediocrity that holds her back.
These are just hopeful scenarios to combat what is over.
---------------------------------
The final girl makes a comeback.
She is writing unfinished plots. The killer is still running amok, twenty years later, and this is a viable opportunity to clear her name. She has no use whatsoever if the killer has been put to rest. Unlike other revisionist storylines, Mithali is still alive and refers to herself as a superficial person. There is no compulsion to accomplish.
Mithali’s mother, surviving her father’s death, can demand a retelling of who she used to be. The haunting that plagues someone after a loved one dies enables them, but she is not able to find her mother inside that dilapidated house. She would have shared with her the times she lied about their family. They are both moving away from each other, and they need to own something specific to tie them together.
—------------------------------
She swings her left leg over the balcony wall. She saw someone do that in a movie once, and it looked like they were being lifted with a buoyant force that prevented things from sinking. She relies on that image to digest the panic of sitting astride the boundaries of the fifth-floor building. She has other images helping her through. Mithali loves old westerns and anything that has to do with horses and ranches. She is swaddled by rodeo cowboys, reinforcing courage in her mind, and she becomes unconcerned about the dangers of falling. She sits there without breaking a sweat as the rest of the celebrations continue, in packets of four and five, mostly inebriated and shielded from interferences.
Nobody is looking for her. Someone made a mess on the bathroom floor and they were handed a mop. She doesn’t want to clean up after herself, and the balcony felt like a safe option to vomit, in case, and watch it splatter on the roof of a fancy car.
Mithali pendulates her weight and estimates the pivot of her balance. It's easy for anyone to let go. It also should be easy for someone to rebuke the readiness of such thoughts.
She must have sat there long after her glass was empty. She was listening to the jaggedly flow of the music from the building, opposite the one she was sitting in while keeping one ear out for the mirth originating from behind her. Mithali has managed to divide her ears into two skilful bipennate leaves, sensitive and alert.
She cannot pinpoint the moment this happened, but it could have been around the time she was ploughing old apothegms; the ones that we don’t sincerely remember unless absurdity presents itself and someone thinks a worn-out proverb, like “a drowning man will clutch at a straw” will help summarise it as frequent. She has not fully established herself in any kind of life; her coping abilities are paragon responses, that one should fight uncomfortable situations, valiantly.