Neurotic

‘It’s way past midnight’.

“Who remains awake at this ‘happy hour’, signing a pact with the mind’s secret chambers?”

“Neither a ghost, nor a she-demon, nor a witch, but a dark, sombre truth of a female body in her prime, screaming through her perforated core…”

“Wait, what can we make of the tangled web of the contours of her face, her haywire hair beaten by the blues, the shapes and paradigms of the neck, the arms, shoulders, the body?”

“Whatever is the ‘body’ here, or…wait…are you talking about the semblance of an anatomy here?”

“Well, whatever one can make out…the light is still on, the faint flicker of a light, at times opaque white, at times dim, unfathomable.”

Ah yes! One can see the light, still lingering in the moon flesh, and perhaps an unmapped path following till the near end of the track in the mind’s corridors, intercepting like a faint apparition. In crossing the threshold of the midnight and the dark hallways leading to the ethereal, early morning, she has come a long, long way, a long-awaited daughter of a storm brewing in the silken blue and white of a bedroom, feeding on her ‘hysteria.’

The rhythm of the heart warns of a neurotic bout; she gorges on the wildness of her battered dreams, crashing against her shores. The boxed-up particles of her entity, her neck, shoulders to bosom and beyond, the palimpsest of her deepest scars rest beneath the subterfuge of manoeuvred ritual of boxes.

Box no. 1: The rituals of a fulfilling motherhood. Before she could fit in the box, it was nipped in the bud.

Box no. 2: The rituals of unconditioned obeisance, as taught by her religion. She defied that as well; all her life, her religion was poetry, singing and art.

Box no. 3: The rituals of pleasing the divine entity, the sacred God. Before she could even think of fitting in the box, a Godman, represented as a spiritual guru by the family, touched her, groped her, bruised her.

Box no. 4: There, she tramples them all, the rituals of social determinism. An epitome of an unforgivable blasphemy in her youth, she followed no archetype—the ideal mother, the ideal sister, the ideal wife, the ideal woman.

Box no. 5: The rituals of maintaining an hourglass body, a virgin, chaste being. Even before she could spell them all right, did it all become a distant dream?

Her azure hair has defied the façade of odd-smelling womanhood, the chaos and the cliff’s edge of her spoken truths.

“Let me read some more, please.
Let me learn and explore some more, please.
Let me explore the big, wide world, please. Let me join other women, my sisters, suffering!
Let me go the court and testify…it’s rape, a sin! Oh, let me, please!
Let me give birth, please, it’s…it’s an innocent life, please, please!”
And then,
“Let me live, please, will you just let me live on my own, in my own terms, obscure and alienated? Twisted, fragile, shadowy, yet breathing, pulsating? Please?”

Yes, spoken words, phrases, broken sentences, reiterated over and over again, chewed on like a cud. How much of a woman she still is, followed by shock therapy, abrasive cuts, burns, injuries, yet hungering to follow the unnamed tide of her life still, they wonder. ‘They’, the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of her sane, flourishing family!

‘It’s way past midnight.’ The clock chimes—one, two, three, four…she knows it all, takes it all, flickering in her silent room tucked away from the main, visible parts of the house. Festive lights in other corners of the home creep up in her consciousness like phantom spirits watching her every move, every step, every fall, yet she cannot gauge their multihued presence, their swirling, twirling antics.
No, by no means can the thin streaks of that makeshift splendour invigorating the others in the same household be the panacea of her being.

“Is she still drugged?”
“Her brain seems to be degenerative, shrinking every single month.”
“Good for her, that she remains shut, cooped up in that faraway corner at the extreme left end of the house. No connectivity there. It’s a blessing in disguise. At all times, the watching is on, in shifts, in turns.”

Voices spell out, one by one, in unison, just outside the quiet den of her microcosm.

Drowning her head, her clogged up body parts in the deluge of a home they built for her, brick by brick, she wiggles, an anomaly in form, structure and content, an elegy of sacred ‘otherness.’ The ‘otherness’ of being an outcast which other girls with an iota of feminine pride would never, never dare to imbibe.

Is that the first call of yet another vague, nameless morning in her life when, for a sliver of a few seconds, her ears caught the cooing of a cuckoo bird on the window sill? What did the tiny creature come to tell her, when the window remained bolted since the longest time that one could remember? Soon enough, her eyes will take in the slivers of the morning light, yet the light will not heal the agony of her shards—the war-torn body, the weather-beaten soul.

Her translucent tales can be the altered realities of Sylvia Plath, the divergent, wrinkled truths of the second sex of Simone De Beauvoir, the dark, hovering clouds of unabashed femaleness of Maya Angelou, the proclivity for artistry and the swirling dance of despair of Virginia Woolf. Once, she had read them all, time and again…she was a shameless sucker for women’s fiction and autobiographies, a sucker for the daring political and social manifestos by women, raking up insidious storms within.

The cuckoo still coos softly, indulgently, perching its slender black body in the windowsill. Perhaps in its song, the lines of a long-forgotten anthem of freedom that she had learnt by heart during her student days, are resurrected.

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill/ of things unknown/ but longed for still/ and his tune is heard/ on the distant hill/ for the caged bird sings of freedom.”

Amid the sharp, melodic cry of the morning, she lives on, the endless war cry of thousands of souls, wafting in the bubbles of abandoned colours, haywire consciousness. She lives and breathes in a rhythm of her own, a missing link between the dark recesses of the impenetrable night and the clarion call of the illuminating dawn.

[Inspiration for the story/narrative: “Untitled”, 30”H x 24” W x 3” D Acrylic, a painting by Dallas-based artist Dana Brock. Dana and I had collaborated during Art Meets Poetry, Texas, March 2023 to bring out an amalgamation of words and art. From a small poem which was the seed of this story, it has evolved into a short fiction/narrative.]