13 March 2000
My labour bore fruit today. I was lucky to find Brahmi. Lucky is probably the wrong word to use. I have felt like taking my own life a lot of times but not someone else’s. But now I do. If I’m going to die eventually why not murder someone and then go? It’s not something I haven’t done before. Sami’s blood is already on my hands, how would it matter if there’s one more to add to that list? Only this time it would be well-deserved. Ever since I have met Brahmi, my fingers are twitching to do it. I’m doing better though. No more sweating, just naked anger. Now I wondering if pure hatred is the cure to pure grief. Could be, right?
Brahmi was surprised to see me. She thought I was there to share my loss of Dada with her, so she asked, concerned, ‘Raghu? What are you doing here?’
‘I have been coming here for a week. Where have you been?’
‘I wasn’t well,’ she said, clearly lying.
‘Richa told me you have been coming to my house even after the break-up. I know it’s true so don’t refute it. Just tell me why?’
She looked at me for a minute. Her brain must have been processing a pretext, a lie she could come up with, and she failed for once.
‘Ran out of lies? Tell me why were you there? You broke up with me, you wouldn’t reach out to me and yet you would be there and watch me. Why?’
She had nothing to say.
‘Sit here,’ I said and she did. I took her hand into mine and asked her softly, ‘Tell me? You can tell me. For once, please just tell me.’
She held her demeanour for a bit and then showed me her wrist which had up till now been covered with her full-sleeved shirt. All our meetings post her joining work clicked into place, and I realized she had never not worn full-sleeved shirts. There were clotted bandages. She had cut again.
‘It’s Vedant,’ she said.
‘Why?’
While I held her hand, she told me how she had found Vedant’s hidden video camera in the bathroom after a couple of weeks.
‘Nothing got recorded. I made sure I put the towel on it before bathing. He must have thought he was out of luck.’
‘Why didn’t you do anything? Tell anyone?’
She didn’t choose to answer that. What could she have done? Where would she have gone?
‘He got tired eventually. One day I found the lock broken to the bathroom. He walked in and acted like it was an accident. I was . . . naked. From that day I stopped bathing when he was awake,’ said Brahmi. ‘His patience wore thin. He came home drunk one day with his friend. The minute I saw them at the door, I knew what they wanted from me. I ran and locked myself in. I cut myself while they banged at the door. He probably thought I was sleeping.’
She sighed. My hands had started to shake so she held them tight.
‘Then?’
‘The next day he saw the cuts and stayed away. He didn’t know why I had cut myself but he stayed off me. Probably got scared that I might kill myself in his apartment. It worked for a while. I would cut myself, behave normally the next day, and he would be freaked out, not wanting to push me in any way,’ she said.
‘It was dangerous.’
She looked at me as if to say the same thing. What else could she have done? Report to the police?
I wanted to ask her why she didn’t tell me. I had the answer. Every time she would have cut herself, she would have thought she would go through the entire way the next time. She wouldn’t have wanted to drag me along. The further I was away from her, the better. That’s why she welcomed my break-up, why she didn’t fight for our relationship. Because she knew it had to end at one point or the other.
‘Then it stopped deterring him,’ she said. ‘He brushed past me, hovered around me, and touched me. The more he did, the deeper my cuts got.’
‘Now?’ I asked, wanting to scout him out and gouge out his eyes.
Brahmi wiped her tears. ‘I must go back. It’s late.’
‘How do you sleep at night?’ I asked.
‘With my door locked and with a knife under my pillow.’
A helpless silence descended over us. We knew the eventuality of this, of how it would end. We both must have gone through everything she has gone through up till now, how unfair life had been to her, and how there’s only one way to mercifully put this unpitying existence to an end.
‘We will get past this,’ I said to her, my words hollow.
‘How?’
‘I will save you,’ I said, desperately.
‘Will you? Like you’re saving yourself?’ she said, a tear streaking down her cheek. ‘Don’t you see it? We are doomed, the hopes we had clung to, gone, our own brothers deceived us. We can’t run away from it. Don’t I know what you’re waiting for?’
‘What?’
‘For Boudi’s child, are you not?’ she asked. She got up, not getting a response. ‘That’s why, you should go your own way, as I should mine. We will only want to drag out the inevitable, hope that one of us will save the other. It will all eventually come to naught, Raghu.’
I held her hand.
‘You still love me, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Can I ask you for something? Can you wait for me?’
I told her of the visions I had had when I had just begun to know her—of the two of us with slashed wrists, fingers entwined, on the top of the building. I knew it was unfair for me to tell her to wait; Brahmi couldn’t have lived in that house any more. There’s only one other place she could have lived—in the flat where Dada died. The lease was for a year and Baba wasn’t ready to let go of the apartment yet. The police and the landlord had been sufficiently paid in money and in tears to hold on to Dada’s tomb. Grief is a powerful thing. We have all been there—Maa, Baba, Boudi and I. The kitchen and the living room is wrecked, blackened with soot, walls half-broken, the blood washed off, but the bedroom is surprisingly untouched. The flat has no running water or electricity but it’s a house. Brahmi said she would have her bag ready tomorrow.