Long Distance

The phone rings.

It rings in strange places.

At the reception desk of a place I am walking into for the first time. In the middle of a meeting at a new client’s office. As I walk past the STD booth, the bank of phones ring one by one.

People turn to me with puzzlement “Are you. . .? There’s someone asking for you on the line. Very faint. I could barely hear her.”

I take the phone. I whisper “I’m listening. Talk to me.”

Silence.

Late at night, I beg you. Sodden with drink and sorrow, I shriek into the phone demanding you talk to me. Tell me now what you wanted to. What you were so desperate to tell me before.

The static hisses and breathes on the other end of the line.

You wanted to talk to me. That was what began it. You sat down next to me at a music festival. All through the long windup and unravelling of the raga you peppered me with questions, until the people around us began to hiss and glare. The shape of our relationship was drawn then. Me a circle, drawn close upon myself. You a silver hook shaped like a question mark.

When you are falling in love the first set of questions maps out the surface. Measures the landscape and the miles traversed.

Drops lines to plumb depth. Listens to echoes to gauge the deep empty spaces.

The second set of questions digs a little deeper under the skin. It uncovers the arteries and highways that your blood flows along. All the routes that led to your heart. All the rips and rents that drained it, that still seep under the tender new web of skin you have grown.

The third set of excavations uncovers artefacts and bones. Things gnarled and bloodied and buried in secret in the back-yard under a black moon. Those with mud on their hands know when to stop digging. Bury a seed too deep and it will be strangled by your dark weeds, unblessed by sun, soon shriv-elled.

Questions. I have never had the courage to ask questions.

I lie.

I invented childhood friends, strange games we played, a landscape and history of myself. A whole life till the day before you came. I answered your questions by embroidering layers of story and myth till I wasn’t sure where I ended and the brocade began. What a fine covering it made. It kept us both warm.

Questions, always questions.

“Did you always know you were like that? How did your parents take it? I mean—do they still bug you to be married?”

“Do you know I sat down beside you because I could tell instantly that you were one of those?”

“Do you know I’ve never even wanted to hold another woman’s hand before? Whose hand did you first hold? Who did you kiss? Who have you loved?”

I was all her firsts.

The first time she ever trembled against a woman’s breast. The first time she understood that desire could take you over and thicken your mouth and tatter your breath and turn your spine into a taut bow aimed at the stars. The first time she shuddered through an entire night. The first time she was a bird and an animal and an element. A chimera that swooped from fire to light. The first time she opened her eyes wide and cried out “Oh—I never knew! I never knew this!”

Even after our first kiss, our first night, our first month, our first anniversary I remained the love she could not name. I was one of those. She was on the other side. Her denial drew a line between the public us and the private us. I didn’t care. I took what she gave me and drank it down and grew unsteady upon my feet. Who was I to complain about what she hid? Was there not a sealed chamber at the heart of me in which the whispers came and went?

“Do you love me? Do you love me the same as you would have loved a man?”

“Will you always love me this way—never leave me, never lie to me?”

“Are you mine—really and completely and truly?”

“I know how to cope when a man leaves. I know that. But this . . . what would I do if you ever went away?”

I fed her answers. She was happy. We grew fat and sated upon our feast of love. But there is always a sealed chamber that the bride does not know about. A threshold she must never cross for on the other side lie corpses blue and embalmed in the thick brine of tears.

She opened the door. She stepped over the threshold, eyes wide with surprise. She called friends. Old employers. Past addresses where I had lived. And found all of it was constructed. The friends were strangers whose names I had usurped. The employers had never heard of me. The past addresses were empty lanes, municipal rubbish tips. But her questions led her to the corpse after all.

I came home from work to find her standing there, every bulb in the house lit, every door and window opened, trying

to breathe.

“You were married? You have a child?”

I said nothing. She demanded explanations. Railed at me for lying. Screamed and wept as she detailed all that she had found in that sad little sealed room. Then she packed and left.

She found the corpse but it didn’t stop her digging deeper. Hands bloody, nails chipped and broken, eyes blinded with tears, still she dug.

Those childhood stories I had told. The games I had described. The garden. The two cats, one blind, one Siamese. The more she asked the more the fabric tattered and rent.

I called her. I didn’t mean to apologize. I didn’t want to explain. I needed to hear her voice. She needed to hear my truth.

“The time you were left alone and a snake came into the kitchen?”

“The bedspread you had with an elephant embroidered on it in gold?”

“The lover who used to chant for an hour every evening?”

I was silent.

“Was all of it lies?” she asked.

Yes, I said.

“Talk to me” she pleaded, “tell me the truth for once! Talk to me, damn you!”

I hung up on her. It was the last time she called.

The phone rings. I am alone at home. There is not a day it has not rung in the last four months. I let it ring on and on and on. Then my nerve breaks and I grab it.

“Hello?”

Static. The roar of an empty ocean. The sound of distance and time and space. The scream of emptiness.

“Are you there? Talk to me. Please.”

She’s dead. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She hung up the phone, climbed a hundred and three steps to the terrace, another twelve iron rungs to the water tank and jumped into the night.

Now the phone rings in strange places. I grab it—desperate for her voice. But there is never anyone on the line. Just static that is filled with the deep breath of someone stepping into a hundred feet of space.

Yes, I was married. My son’s name is Aditya. At night he wouldn’t sleep unless he was clutching a handful of my hair. I had long hair done in neat braids. Sometimes I put it up in a bun. I was ordinary. The woman who lives next door. Who collects her child from school and frets about what she will pack for him to eat at tiffin. Late at night she lies beside her husband and her fist is in her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

I think I always knew. It was the whisper that ran round and round in a sealed chamber buried in my head. Sometimes I would open the door and stand for a moment at the thresh-old. Breathe in deep. I was suffocating. Turning blue and cold in the bell jar of my life.

I told my husband it was too soon after the baby. That I wasn’t ready. Then he began to suspect.

I had the phone disconnected at home months ago. Still it rings. Late at night it shrieks and shrieks.

My heart is clotted with blood. It groans when it beats. I miss my son. I love him and my husband will never let me have him. That was the price I had to pay for him to let me go. The choice I made at the threshold of that chamber. Leave my son. Walk away. Or sentence him to a childhood of bedtime stories in which his mother was the monster, twisted and foul and depraved, that waited in the dark. Leave my son. Or stay until my veins were thick with congealing blood, my lungs empty and starved. Leave. Vanish. Disappear. Leave no thread that could ever lead anyone back to the windings of the life I once had.

Waking from sleep at night I tilt my head, listening for the phone. It rings.

I loved you. Yes, I loved you. So I lied to you. We always lie to the ones we want to keep. Then they leave us. Sometimes they go very far away.

The phone rings.

I pick up the phone. “Listen” I say, “I’m telling you my life. Listen.”