What is Whispered
When the people left the room, wisps of their souls hovered around indefinitely, sniffing at corners and wafting around the legs of chairs. Then all at once – just when it seemed that they would settle down and peacefully become one with the carpet which beckoned dust and all things insubstantial with its wavy anemone fingers – they were sucked out of the atmosphere by the bodies that belonged to them. They whooshed out in a swift movement like the vanishing flick of a lizard's tail. Like comets with fiery cosmic tails, they nosed their way urgently down the hollow elevator shaft looking for their owners. It was a few minutes before the heavy aroma of solitude stole up and took over. But when it came, it arrived suddenly. It arrived with a finality. The brown stains on the four teacups suddenly seemed slimy and ancient.
A new world emerged outside the cloistered, upholstered room. The ordinary, the indefatigable outside, filtered in. The faraway clang-clang of a construction worker, toiling in an unknown location. A policeman whistled. A car rode on the horizon, meeting the sun every time it hit a speed breaker. On the square patch of grass below, two maids chattered loudly, the late afternoon sunlight beating down on their squinting eyes. The pigeons cooed on the window ledge, gnarled pink feet scraping over the crusty mosaic of grey-green droppings. The last yellow rays gliding in through the window panes, arrived with hazy specks of dust that drifted and sank endlessly till the light waned.
By the time the sun went down she had ironed the clothes and washed up the crockery. She went into the bathroom and unwrapped a new blade. The edge scraped her skin noisily as she brushed it with a dry finger, frowning, blinking, and then tested the sharp edge on the inside of her wrist. She put the plug into the bathtub and started running a gurgling mixture of hot and cold water. Bubbles hovered to the surface when she poured in a soapy liquid. Soon it started steaming. In the small living room her bare feet left soft, depressed marks on the deep carpet, which quickly swallowed up the impressions on its surface. Below the carpeted floor, furniture was being moved. Below the furniture a baby lay asleep. Below the sleeping baby an empty apartment still echoed with the just-departed clatter of carpenters. Below the emptiness a computer clicked out letters on a white screen under the light of a yellow lamp. Below that sat a watchman, watching, oblivious to the layers of life above.
She waited for the water to fill up. In her faded bathrobe, in the bedroom, she sat on her dead husband's armchair. Untouched by his skin for three years. She wondered if any flakes of his skin were lodged in the space behind the deep leather seat. Maybe some of his hair was there. She would never know even if she looked and found some. How could she know if it was his, or her own? She had heard somewhere that leather retained smells. She pressed the crown of her head into the soft leather and breathed deeply. She imagined she was smelling the back of his neck.
A knock on the bedroom door startled her. Her head raised itself from its half-reclining position. "Come in," she whispered, stupidly, knowing that there was no one in the other room. But the handle turned and the door was pushed open. She watched the wood tease the carpet weave into going sh-sh-sh. A tip of a shiny black shoe. The fragrance of spice and musk in the after-shave. Her neck twitched, the nape moving her head to an angle, like a pup cocking its head. At the edge of the door, a brown forearm, then an elbow. She saw her husband emerge from behind the door, as if in a series of snapshots. Click. Click. Click. Her face was wet. He was twenty.
"May I have this dance?" His standing knees a foot away from her bent, sitting ones.
The song was old. The notes reverberated off the stretched canvas of the oil paintings on her walls. The strokes of colour wafted off like candle light. Their swaying feet left little valleys in the carpet. They danced their first dance all over again. Or for the very first time. Hesitant, shy. Tentatively entwined. Inhaling new scents. Her palm moved timidly from his steady shoulder towards his bent neck. Their clasped hands touched ever so lightly. When they kissed they had danced for almost an hour. His arms quietly descended to encircle her waist. She leaned into him, giving him all her weight, pleadingly. Already confident. Already afraid.
When the water seeped out from under the apartment door, the people broke it open. In the bathroom the blade was clean. She lay curled up in bed under the sheets, and in her stiff palms was the aroma of musk. A tailcoat and bridal gown lay heaped on the floor together. The colours of the oil paintings on the walls had melted and mingled into strange whirls and coils.
It was whispered that he came back to save her from a painful death.
Tejaswini Apte Rahm attended the University of Sussex and University of Kent in UK and is a writer currently residing in Dhaka.