The drive is long. It’s one of those few instances that I have sat in a car — A nice old ambassador that has seen better days. The road is wet and winding.
It’s starting to rain heavily in the Lonavala valley and the ominous clouds are not going anywhere.
The call from last night was unexpected.
“Would you feel all right coming in to visit?”
It was years since I had been there. I never wanted to see that place again. I have worked long and hard to get away from it, as fast as I can.
The car rolls through the valley at a decent clip. The highway is coming to an end as the apartment blocks of the town start to come into view.
I am familiar with these roads having walked them for hours on end, always with two people walking on each side of me. Never alone.
Maya is waiting for me outside as the car comes to a halt. Her hair is grayer than what I left her with years ago, although the serene dignity surrounding her is still the same.
She seems happy to see me and notices the look on my face taking it as a not so welcome sign of things to come. She instead moves ahead and gives me a big hug and I finally relent too and hug her back. I have always had a love-hate relationship with this woman.
As we walk in down the long passageway, I see the glass room just behind the next corner. The door is still the same metal door with a rusted handle. I look for marks on the door, the ones I remember but they seem to have been long painted over.
She is sitting on the sofa right around one corner of that room, like an animal on exhibit in a zoo as we watch her from the outside. Her legs are tucked underneath her. She is a frail dark girl wearing an oversized sweater, too large for her size, the sleeves dangling longer than her thin hands.
The room fills me with a familiar dread. I remember it vividly, its details made sharper by every nightmare that has slowly faded away from my memories. It’s the room with the gray padded walls stripped bare except for a sofa and a chair, both screwed firmly to the floor.
I am familiar with the smell inside. It smells of shit, vomit, and … many many lost battles. The padded walls are littered with scratches reminiscent of its occupants, their lives scratched, suddenly uprooted.
I am with Maya outside watching her from the glass window. I have no idea how to do this.
“You going to be ok?”, she asks looking at me with concern. She can’t decide who is more at risk here, me or the one inside.
I nod in affirmative. She pats me on the back and I turn around and push the door open.
I have never been this terrified.
“Can I join you?”
I don’t get an answer. I am not expecting an answer. I sit down in the chair away from her, my hands visibly steady, even though I am not so from the inside.
The stench is overpowering, but she seems to be oblivious to it.
“Down here, did they tell you who I am?”
She keeps looking down towards her hands, pulling and twisting on her sweater.
“You’re the patient. Maya asked you to talk to me.”
I nod.
“That’s right. I was here for a long time”
“How long?”
“2 weeks. It felt like 2 years”
“You must have been crazy…”
“Yeah …. I had a lot to work through. Maybe a little like you”
“I go home next week. Parents can’t afford this” she says her eyes firmly implanted downwards, not reading the magazine, yet turning its pages over and over.
“Are you looking forward to going home?”
“Why do you care?”. The voice is cold and silent. She continues to look down, scorn written all over her face. She doesn’t even pretend to hide her disdain.
“What was his name?”
There is silence. She continues to pull at the sleeves of her sweater. The clock on the wall high above continues its slow march.
“My friend’s name was Hetali… They named her after her grandmother.”
She stops pulling on her sleeve and yet her body visibly tenses up. She is listening. I am watching. I am waiting.
“You know I went to visit her room, her room at her home, surrounded by all her things. The sheets still had her smell and I sat there and wrapped them around a pillow and held it, pretending it was her. I sat there, for hours, until they finally dragged me away….”
For the first time, she looks up. She has big brown eyes, distant, without a hint of emotion. They are the darkest, most empty eyes I have ever seen.
“My mom put all of Ram’s stuff ..in a storage….as soon as he died”.
“No. She can’t do that”, I see myself shaking my head vehemently in the glass window across the room.
“You have to tell her to get them out. You need it with you. Trying to erase his memories is not going to help.
She fumbles around with her old sweater her eyes downcast. She starts to say something, then stops and contemplates for a while. I sit there silent. Then it happens.
“I just….”, she stops again, and suddenly her body goes into heaves of sobbing, the sudden outburst.
“I just miss him so much. He was just three years old. ”, she says between big heavy sobs. I sit there. Never claimed I knew what to do. I try to give her a napkin. She refuses.
“I don’t care…”, she shakes her head softly. The dam has finally burst. The floodgates are open, the rush threatening to overwhelm everything, everyone around her. Including her.
“My mom, she just wants me to be better. She wants me to be myself again.”
“Well, you are not going to be better for a while……and you won’t ever be the same again. She has to understand that “
She looks up at me when I say those words. They come from my heart and are a product of my experiences. I am suddenly very calm.
“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out…figure out a way to kill myself and make it look like an accident”
She looks up suddenly chastised. “Please don’t tell them I told you that”
“No… I won’t. I get it though. I came close to understanding that too.
“Why not? What did you do?”
“I smashed someone’s head with a beer pitcher”
She looks up glaring for a second with the unexpected answer and then suddenly starts to laugh. We both start to laugh. She has a lovely smile and it lifts the dread hanging around the room.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that. It didn’t end well. I have stitches to show.”
I sit next to her and slowly take her hand in mine as I look at her.
“But you do whatever you have to do. Dying is not the answer. I know that it feels like a good solution right now, but you want to live”
She looks up at me almost challenging. But she holds on to my hand, slightly tighter.
“How do you know that?”
“Because it’s incredible to be alive. …Where everyone assumes that life is a given, but you and I both know, that it’s not. You and I know that breath can end. That life is a gift, maybe a gift worth having”.
I nod to myself, sitting straight up. The time is coming to an end. As I stand up and, she does too. I hold her close while patting her back.
“You will miss your son but you will keep him with you…and you will live now, for both of you”
She cries softly. They are no longer heavy sobs, but tears just flowing freely as I hug her, as I would my own sister. I know that we will never see each other again. Maybe it’s for the better, for both of us.
The car moves back down the road where the leaves are green and washed clean from the rains before.
The fog has settled into the valley. The birds are still hanging on to their branches trying to shelter themselves.
As the car picks up speed rolling down the curve, the driver is humming some tune from the local radio station.
I hold my hands out slightly. They are shaking. I cannot ever do this again. It still cuts too close, too deep, even after all these years.
I wish I could lock those memories away or just erase them from my psyche. But I can’t, even if I wanted to.
I will never forget her limp body hanging from the rope. Those cold pale legs will always haunt my dreams. I will replay her words over and over in my head. That regret and that anger will never just go away.
Maybe I could have saved her if I had just listened to her, to what she was saying rather than what she was speaking.
“That boy is going to destroy my life”, she had kept saying again and again.
Why did I not listen? Why did I not listen?
I lay down my head against the headrest in the back seat and close my eyes.
Bombay is 3 hours away.
Plenty of time to get back to normal.
