The Gates are Open

              

            Pankaj would be returning soon and Navni was counting the hours. She had her phone plucked into her saree at her waist. That was so that she would not miss a ping. Her eyes roamed around everywhere but her sight was stuck at the door and the clock. She had been asking herself strange questions like how early a flight could land and how easy would it be to get wings and fly to him before he could fly to her. On more than one occasions had she visited the so long forsaken temple in the courtyard, looked petulantly at the hoard of dry peepal leaves in front of the deity, and prayed.

What did she want? She had not been decided on this matter for a long time. For an infinite measure of time, she had given up on God. For when that began, she was undecided too. It must have been around the hard times of graduation, particularly the time when she could not win the race. There was one thing for which she was always willing to move her body – for running – and God had denied her the opportunity of excelling there. For no reason but failure had she given up immediately after the run. In the retrospect, that day before Pankaj’s flight arrived, she realised that giving up was a mistake and blaming it all on the God was another, even bigger, mistake. Thus, her mind started fluctuating right in the morning when she put her hand inside that big space in the head that was so full of desires and wants and needs that the infinite time of a life was horribly insufficient to realise them.

From that tinderbox of wishes she fetched out two very simple-worded demands. “Give it another chance, God,” she told the deity. “Please bring him home early. Please bring him home right now.” Thus, the two interlinked desires were stated. She wholeheartedly believed that the God had heard her wishes. Somewhere within her subconscious, a recuperative craving to look at the main gate took a steadfast hold and she spread a mat on the main door and sat down generously, as a noble lady would.

In the kitchen, the masalas had been properly sealed. Even as she favoured the spicy fragrance of cinnamon and the subdued marks of turmeric, she knew that Pankaj disliked the things that were not in their place. So even as the Sun struggled to leave the horizon, she sought out after every misplaced thing. She caught the wild wisps of scent before they could infect the welcoming air, she barred the stray rays of light from entering the rooms where she did not like them. She scrutinised the corners. She scrutinised her clothes for cat hair from that day she had touched a cat in the garden. She washed her hair. She washed herself thrice. The drawing hall had been settled multiple times and inspected from various angles, some that no sane person would be capable of viewing the room from. Stains on the walls had been removed. The sofa covers on all the sofas in all the rooms had been cleaned and properly replaced and awaited the venerated seating of Pankaj.

Since all was done and there was little to do, and mind you that she had no wings and yet she had a hardcore need of real, fleshy wings behind her back, she started imagining them. She remembered that dizzy night, that now in her memory had the forlorn haze of the mountainside, when Pankaj had first held on to her waist and they had danced and kissed. It was not under the moonlight. They had not stepped on dewy grass. In her fancy, it was inside four walls that kept the foggy night outside and let the sparkling moonshine in. She wore a thin gown. His chest was bare. As they thumped on the hard, powdery ground, things moved in her head and she knew that she had wings, and in that fashion of a spectacularly-fashioned dance, she began flying. She flew around her house and above it. She winged her way through the locked windows that had never been opened. She flapped against the peepal leaves which hung on to their branches inanimate because she had locked all the wind away. As the peepal leaves lurched, she danced. And she awaited the arrival of the man she would marry.

*

When the clock struck ten at night, she felt like all the hair had been shaved off her head. The lightness of the moment became unbearable. For a very thin moment, she floated in the air, planting her feet uncertainly over the unsure reality. When she reached the ground, she felt something in her belly, like a giant worm – rotating, tumbling, twisting, touching the walls of her stomach in all the wrong places. When she almost verged on vomiting and brought herself to her feet to lock herself in the bathroom – there could be nothing more dangerous for a sane place than an insane person -  she realised that she was wearing the wrong clothes. Her dress for the welcoming must be pale and colourless, simple and stylish, in line with the spirit of the times. Pankaj was returning from a different place and he must not have her in her own but his own style. Thus, the red dress would be replaced with a white turtleneck and blue jeans, but it must be rapid, for the visitor was barely an hour away.

In the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror. First it was with straight hands – a gentle casting of a gentle glance on her outwards. Looking into her eyes, she pouted, then she creased her lips towards the right, then to the left. Then she let her lips be tight and her face straight. When she felt the satisfactoriness of her face take over her, she, relieved with her innate luck, caressed her breast. She felt the tenderness, the tightness of her body. She felt the warmth of her skin. It would be great, she wondered, if she had rather abandon clothes altogether for this meeting. Maybe he will like her the most in her most civilised nature, in the depths of her wildness.

Once the clothes were put on, she gave a final curative look to all the spaces and the walls. Needless to say, she was particular of the tightness of the windows, the stillness of the blinds, the fragrance of the corners and the diffusion of light rays. Entering the living hall, she glanced at the clock. Any moment now, there would be a knock on the door – she went and opened the door wide. There would be a huge influx of cold breeze but a welcome visitor should never be entertained by a closed door. She had already left the main gate open – it was his own home, after all.

*

They had bought it together some time back when the weather was ripe with the talks of their marriage. The trees knew that it was spring, and it was a bounteous spring that time, and thus the branches of the mangoes were laden with yellow globes and those of apples with red ones. It was a festival every day and the rodents celebrated in the gardens. All this was in store for so long. It was piling since ages, like books in a library – it did not increase the weight or the burden, but only the beauty. They had met in a corporate a long time back – oh how ancient it seemed today! and they had fallen in love over two days. On the first one, they walked the long winding roads that led to heaven – when it got too steep a climb, one pulled the other. On the second one, they walked the sane human ways, and then came that foggy night when he first told her that he liked wild things only outside the room and then he held onto her waist and kissed her and they danced on a hard, powdery earth. Some years later, they decided to marry. On one day that came too early, for they should at least have married, he came across an advertisement in a newspaper that he should not have been reading at all for he knew not its language, but since the advertisement was imprinted in big glaring English alphabet and since the colours in a picture are universally readable, he told her that they should buy themselves a dream home. A month later, they moved in together. Some five months later, he was transferred to a foreign country. Life went on like the grinding gears of a huge rock-breaker, with its obtrusive, ghastly sounds that no one wants to hear but everyone does and that soon turns into music because you cannot find any other sound and silence is killing. After two years of sporadic meetings, she gave up on her job and sat down on an insignificant day by an insignificant window with a diary made of brownish handmade paper and a glistening black-ink pen in front of her. She began writing. She did not know it but she was lost.

*

She passed by the cupboard that was full of the pages she had filled. She did not bother to look at it because she did not care for what she had written. It was instead an object of disdain. Writing for her was a means – not to express herself, not to demonstrate what she could not speak – it was not even a means of communication. It was a means – a bridge through time – to jump to when Pankaj would return. Then she would finally keep her pen aside. And her diaries. Once again she had succeeded. Soon, she would find a time, probably when Pankaj was asleep after sex, deep in the world full of her dreams – she would creep out of the door like a cat or a snake, noiselessly bring out the diaries and set them on fire. The windows would be tight, the blinds stretched shut. All her emptiness, all the void that there was in those years, that infinity when she was alone – when the Earth revolved and rotated only for others – everything would go up in light and ash and smoke. It would illuminate the world. It would be another sun. It would be a final end to all the malaise.

It was twelve, a new day. The sky looked dark from the door and its multitude of stars did little to add colour to it. She had removed the mat from under herself around an hour ago. The floor was cold. Atmosphere was dense and solid. Every now and then, there would be a noise and the air, for a very brief moment, would wring sharply out of its stillness, shaken out of its slumber.

A bird started hooting somewhere in the peepal. She cast a look on the courtyard temple, the indifferent deity. Slowly, she rose to her feet. A dog moaned somewhere far away, very possibly across an ocean. She pressed her bare feet into the loose sand of the courtyard and started making her way towards the gate. A monkey jumped from some branch to another and the whole tree started shaking as if from a cold. She felt unaccepted in the stillness of the night, in the wild – but it was her own house. The animals and the tree were her guests, not the other way round. 

At the gate, she meandered around for a while. One needed a closer look to tell that remainders of the gate’s colours were peeling off from here and there but even a distant glance could tell that the it was rusted at all its corners, that it was ancient and fatigued. Like every night, it was open and ajar. Like every other night, she did not look at the moon or the twinkle of the stars before she pushed the gate back into its positions and locked it. Like every night, she did not loosen her hold on the gate for minutes after locking it as she glanced into the path that originated and rolled into the dark night like it had no way to go, like it did not connect any place to the house.

*

Pankaj had arrived a few weeks after she started writing. Even though it was difficult to believe that, he did indeed arrive and how he did! He was so full of love. He had pulled her into his lap, he had carried her into the bedroom. Love that night poured from his lips and his eyes. He caressed her face, her hair, her shoulders, her bosom. She reciprocated all his love back to him. He had so much love for her that night that she regained all the remaining of her faith in the God. But he had not come alone. When the gates clanked open, there were two silhouettes there – a man, unmistakably Pankaj, and a woman. He had brought her for a visit to his country. When she came near them, both were smiling like they had seen the world together, and that the world had turned out to be a lot happier place than they had imagined. They looked at each other so often, and when they did so they looked only into each other’s eyes.

She did not know whether Pankaj saw the colour flush from her face. She did not know whether he still had the knowledge of that unspoken language that they had mastered. It had ultimately come to that moment when their bodies were entangled in their bed and the woman was probably asleep in another room. At that moment, Navni had turned to face the wall. For need of some support and warmth, she pushed herself into Pankaj’s body as he wrapped his arms tightly around her. Then with a shaky, burdened voice, she asked if he had any feelings for the woman. He had only hesitated in speaking and she had known. For the remainder of the night, she was no more than a dead body. She did move her hands but she did not feel anything. She did throw her legs around but only where he wanted them to.

They barely talked the next day. That night, Pankaj left. She did not ask her if he would return but she did smile, for Pankaj was smiling. Ten minutes after Pankaj had left with the woman, she went out and unlocked the gate and pushed it ajar. Then she opened the cabinet for a new diary. When it was night enough, she went and closed the gate.