The Weeping Waters

Sometimes, in my flashes of forgetting, I couldn’t remember the first time I had slit her skin.

She told me there was no first time. No first of its kind. No beginnings. She introduced me to her realm of déjà vu — where all beginnings kept repeating from time immemorial.

Blood was her expression of déjà vu. Recurrence.

Her blood was strangely cohesive. They sprang from the association of her being, defied the gravity and froze somewhere in the air. They captured a block of air in my room and made a home. When the sunrays touched them, the red droplets kept glowing for a few hours until they turned brown. Drying. The patches kept lingering in intangible spaces of my room. They smelled of the sea.

Her blood was also volatile. I could remove the strains of the brown blood from my undiluted air by simply holding the burning end of my cigarette beneath it. And see them fade like my memories. But I’d never be able to take a puff of those used cigarettes, ever again. Their taste would change. And they smelled of the sea.

In the centre of her solitude, I had found a dusk. The red seawaters. The setting sun. She walked towards it. As I sat on the shore, I watched her from behind. I couldn’t help noticing the details. She walked straight. She moved farther away from me; closer to the sea. Her pace was constant, as was the rhythm of her footsteps. She stepped into the wet sand, then to the shallow waters and then to a place where the waves broke. Slowly, into her unchanging rhythm, I discovered two personal disturbances – One, was the realization that she’d never stop. The other, a question that I needed to ask her.

So, I got up and ran behind her. I reached near her. And even in my ever accumulating forgetting, I remember holding her right palm with my left hand. Perhaps, it’s the instinct. The instinct of feeling her warm skin. The instinct of touching her cold solitude. Her unwavering stance. She didn’t turn her eyes away from the sun, even for once, as I held her hand. She didn’t speak.

And therefore, I started walking with her towards our sun. We walked deeper into the sea.

When the sea had almost reached our neck, the sun suddenly sank completely into the sea, leaving some fading traces of red to the horizon. She suddenly, pulled her hand away from mine and started running towards the shore.

When she reached the shore she set her body free to crumble on the wet sand. As her body fell on the sand, it got fragmented and scattered into the sand. All over the places. I tried to collect the pieces when I reached near her. That was the time too, when I’d ask her the question, for the answer of which, I had wanted to save her. And only for the answer.

“Why do you want to die?”

She had opened her eyes slowly, making me realize for the first time that they were closed until then. I don’t remember if that would be one of our recurring first meetings. The beginnings of déjà vu. Maybe, my voice was unknown to her, as was my face. Faces. None of these occurred to me before she looked at me. But she looked at me as if she had known me for centuries and my asking of such a question was too common a fact. As if I’d been asking her the same question since so long a time that the answer wasn’t really important anymore.

But it was important for me to know. To ask.

“Why do you want to die?”

I repeated.

And I remember that repetition. Resounding. On the walls of my forgetting. Perhaps, she had answered me. Maybe, she hadn’t. But the question had become the way she wanted it to be. Unanswerable. Constant. Flowing. Like the red seawater. And her own blood.

She had come out of the sea one moonlit night. Naked and bleeding.

She had slit herself beneath her neck and above her breasts. Droplets of the sea played all over her body. Running down. Crashing, jostling, mingling, magnifying. Making its way through them was a stream of blood.

I never knew the origin of her blood. Was it her body or the sea? And were the sea currents so strong that they’d cut through her skin? She seemed wet. Drenched. She hadn’t seemed so wet that dusk, when she returned from the sea. Tonight, it seemed she too would melt down into her own bloodstains and flow back into the sea. And somehow, that leave-taking of hers seemed oddly perpetual. Recurrent.

However, she didn’t leave that night. She fell asleep beside me on the shore. I kept lying there beside her and watched her. I don’t remember how long I’d been looking at her. I don’t remember when I fell asleep beside her. And I don’t remember what those strange dreams meant. I felt someone was playing with my body. Slitting my skin. Making love to me….. whom I couldn’t see. I just couldn’t get my eyes open.

Next morning when I woke on the shore, half-naked, I found out my body had been disassembled. With pieces lying on different parts of the shore. And suddenly, I was not one but many.

When in my room, she wouldn’t let me turn off the light. She wanted to see her own blood.

“You know I can’t cry.” She’d always say handing me the razorblade, “Let my body weep the blues.”

I’d do as she said. She’d sit mute. Watching the blood flow down her skin.

She said her blood were also the memories of things that had been and things about to come. Of things that should’ve never been or would ever be. She said blood were her weeping waters. An ablution of difficult times. A difficult nation. She said. Silently.

Amidst all my collective forgetting, I remember one night. Distinctly. We were sitting on the shore.

“I wish you’d let me slit your mind too sometimes.” I told her.

“Nothing but my body belongs to me.” She answered “My mind belongs to everybody else.”

“Don’t you believe in yourself?”

She smiled looking at me as I said this. Somehow, that smile didn’t look natural on her face. And then she said something that even my celebrated amnesia couldn’t take away from me –

“The man I loved had been a soldier. He kept fighting when he had none of his comrades left beside him. In the end he fought not because he had any hopes of winning, because he couldn’t return unless dead. Because retreat is shame. In the end, perhaps, there was only one bullet that pierced right through his heart. It never mattered where the bullet came from. Actually, he had slit his own skin, his own heart too, to be called a hero.”

She paused for a while looking at the dark sea, then continued –

“Self. Belief in myself. Where does a self begin? Inside a body or outside? Inside one’s family, one’s culture, one’s society? Is self an individual term, isolated from others? And where are the places that our ’selves’ reside? My mind belongs to everybody else. And I can’t help but slit my skin. Cause that’s what we are meant to do. In our growing up years, we’ve been taught to become sadists and masochists. I can’t help it. We can’t.”

She started screaming. The music of the sea broke into her screams. Creating silence. Breaking it. And creating it all over again.

That scream would later be her salvation, too. As she would learn to step out of herself. Detachment. The only form of serenity.

And I wished her scream would be louder, shriller, harsher than it had been. So that all of us could have listened to its broken melody too. Resounding and filling up the nooks and corners of the streets. The town. The land. The world. The heart.

The feelings of déjà vu.