Augend and Addend

I was in a hurry. You don’t get an appointment with the Editor-in-Chief of Femina everyday. Mili however, started feeling extremely restless. Ever since I left home for the meeting, she had been fiddling with the blue turtle-shaped shell attached to my key-ring with the name Ornesh engraved on it with crushed glass. Right before entering the main entrance, Mili had noticed a man selling candy-floss. I had already walked past him and through the door, and was trotting up the lobby when I suddenly felt the urge to cry hysterically. I felt no distress but the tears came rushing on like the wrath of Poseidon defending the whim of the six-year-old. A few people turned their heads at me, probably whispering, “ Faggots are so weird! But then, they’re faggots.” The ‘few people’ might have been just Umesha Kakima herself. She always went on ranting about how “queer” and different I am from the others. I don’t mind her constant chidings and criticism though. It doesn’t feel like home without her, or them for that matter. I rushed out and came back in within three and a half minutes, a candy floss in my hand, smiling despite being an agelast. Mili was finally pacified. I was glad I could get on with my work. The office of Mr. Abhimanyu Spivak was on the eighth floor. As I pressed the button the elevator, I stole a momentary glance at my reflection on the door of the elevator. The elephant-print blazer looked good with the bright red dhoti pants I had bought from Fashion Mela, 2019. I walked inside. “Which floor was it, ugh.” My elevator jerked a little as though it were running out of patience and visibly perturbed by the interference of my entrance into its ruminating mind palace.

-       “The eighth floor, you nincompoop. You have known that since morning.”

“Yes, right. I’ve got this, right?”

-       “Yes. You have, honey.”

The ever-lost forefinger stopped hovering about the floor buttons and landed like a mild thud of peace on “8”. I reached the third floor. “What is happening, Hahmed?”

-       “ A mild electrical disturbance. It is okay! Relax, yaar!”

All the three light bulbs went off. A sudden short circuit followed by a power surge made the elevator scrimmage and fall, as though into oblivion. My hands started shaking. I wanted to scream but Uncle Sam wouldn’t let me. The cold perspiration beads formed an octothorpe on my forehead.

“Breathe, Ornesh. You are doing just okay. Breathe.”

-       “I don’t want to, Uncle Sam. I can’t even if I do.”

Mili started crying. In the reflex of a thousand milliseconds, I tore a paper off the Resume I was clutching in my hands and put it in my mouth to stifle the fatuous wailing. I shrank to the ground, wrapping my arms around Mili to console her. She shut her lids close while I tried to gulp down the suppressed urge to shout. I don’t know why the lights had to flicker at that instant but they did. Mili looked up and was horrified to see the hands of a thirty-five year old man enwrapping her six-year-old self. I could tell she was traumatized. I couldn’t stop her this time. I needed Uncle Sam, more than ever.

“Shake that candy-floss stick in front of her. That oughta calm her down a little bit.”, Uncle Sam replied, taking a puff of my smoke and releasing it into sheer vacuum.

It worked. I was still sitting down on the floor of the elevator, my body numb to the unnatural immobility of the mobile space I was in. The flickering lights made their shadows dance around the four walls that I could feel closing in on me. It felt like my flesh was being scarified all over and my head being warped as I was being initiated into the Vanuatu tribe of Tommen Island. The four square feet space filled with the vaudeville of mania acted like a nauseant on my deplorable head and I wanted to submit to the evil staccato of mockery around me. I seemed to look for the familiar face of Umesha Kakima amongst that crowd. She was better than the voices calling me a freak. She was always dressed in a yellow saree with a red border, minimal hair held back to an almost disappearing bun, a perpetual frown on her face peeking through the brown-rimmed rectangular glasses resting on her sweaty nose. She wasn’t there today. I crouched on the floor, my sweaty palms crossed around my knees. I needed to calm down. I reached over to my purse, sprawled across the floor, and the hands, caught in a neurotic gallimaufry, automatically took out an old photo. I stared at it for a while and it cajoled me. I remembered the words of my mother as my fingers fondly brushed over the little paws of little Litzy. “The annual clean up of the house before Diwali is as rewarding as exhausting. Look what I found! Little Ornesh with little Litzy. Oh Shiva re Shiva! You loved him more than your life.” My heart had wrenched at the sight of the photo. It felt like my heart had turned sanguinivorous and was feasting on my blood instead of pumping it. I could feel the alveoli shrinking inside my lungs and I gasped for breath. My mother thought it was another attack and gave me one of those pills- those nightmarish pills of cataclysm. I looked at the little paws. I knew Litzy but why was I there in that photo? What was I doing there? I didn’t recollect ever having played with Litzy. I remembered Angad playing with Litzy when we were six.

Angad used to love Litzy more than his life. And I used to love him. Used to? I love him. He was, is and always will be the love of my life. I remembered playing with him in the backyard, chasing snails and frogs. I was born into the family of civil servants. Every time Angad and I used to go shopping for grocery with Maa because I always urged her to tag along with her to take a look at the fascinating clothes on mannequins from the windows of South City Mall, I could almost hear the people muttering under their breath, “ Poor Rubi and Himanshu. Imagine being IAS officers only to be cursed with a mad son; or is it a girl? Nothing can be understood from the way this child dresses. Ishhhhh. Ram ram.” Angad said, “Hey, I just remembered. I caught a snail in the morning when you weren’t looking. I kept it inside the broken glass bottle by the pump. If we don’t rush back, the snail might run away. I really want to paint him today. Please let’s leave?”

He always did that. He was always good at it; distracting me whenever he could feel I was offended or in pain. We grew up together. I remember being sixteen when Umesha Kakima said, “Boys from good families do not fall in love with other boys. It is abnormal. Why can’t you just be normal?”

-       “But Kakima, I am a girl, about to be a woman any day now!”

Yes, I remember the accouchement of my womanhood too vividly. It were as though it happened yesterday. I was lying down on the bed listening to Britney Spears on my bot and Angad came in. He was wearing the loose joggers he always wears and it was honestly annoying. He didn’t even have the decency to knock. I was mad at him for running off in the middle of a school project when he was supposed to help me out.

-       “ What do you want now, Angad?”

-       “You.”

-       “What?”

-       “ Kiss me Ornesh.”

-       “ What?”, I stuttered.

-       “Kiss me, please.”

We kissed. I felt his hands touching my breasts and loving my skin, inch by inch. I was a woman. I could feel it.

I was sent for intensive psychotherapy when I was seventeen. That is right after I had started spending more time with my parents. They had finally settled down. I remember having fought a lot with them. They chided me for not following instructions that I never heard. I remember that morning. I was finally going to tell my parents that I am a woman and my body did not feel like mine. I was standing near the door of my bedroom, looking for the missing pair of slippers when I was interrupted by Umesha Kakima. “Don’t tell them. You will break their heart.”

-       “Why would it break their hearts? I am just telling them the truth. They deserve to know the truth. They are my parents! I am sure they will understand.”

-       “Understand what? You want them to understand that you are a seventeen year old woman trapped inside the body of a young man and you take counsel from all of us. Do you want them to know about us, too? Do you want them to understand all of this? Are you sure?”

-       “ Stop. Please stop…

PLEASE JUST STOP. STOP.”

Maa walked in. I will never forget the expression on her face. She was dumbfounded with terror. She looked at me as though she were looking at Deimos. Tears came out of her eyes. It felt like one single drop of water was slowly expanding into an ocean inside my skull. I collapsed and my body felt like a conglomeration of ash lost inside the grand design of patchwork of the bedroom rug. It was then that I was made to pop pills like Melody. They told me it was Dissociative Identity Disorder. I stopped seeing Angad. It all added up. I did not understand why at that time. I stopped seeing Emily H Paxton too. We never conversed but I liked having her around. She always had a book with her. A lot of them left. I forgot how to laugh. The voices came and went, much like the crowd outside who felt pity for my parents. I couldn’t tell my dreams from my reality. Morpheus seemed to fiddle with me like Mili did with my keychain. Those pills, I despised. I lost my family because of them- the family that actually listened. It wasn’t until I was twenty-two when I found Uncle Sam. I was waiting in the hospital during my father’s open-heart surgery. It felt like ichor was spilling from my heart. I started pacing rapidly. Sweat got the better of me.

“Just breathe, Ornesh. You are fine.”

He was pacing with me. “You are fine. You have to breathe.”, and suddenly, I wasn’t so anxious anymore. I met Hahmed after that. He became my closest friend, my confidante. He was mostly always around telling me what to do, how to have a little fun, think about love. Umesha Kakima arrived soon after but she wasn’t that frequent anymore. She would arrive in the middle of a college assignment or an online tutorial and I would suddenly feel the need to wash the clothes and prepare my tea with cinnamon and a stick of Rajnigandha. I made sure nobody understood anything from my face. I stopped expressing, altogether. I have to do what each of them want in order to be able to get to my work. It is exhausting but it satisfies me at the end of the day.

The lights in the elevator flickered again. A cold shadow crept over me. I felt as though there was another person crouching just like me, right behind me. I needed Uncle Sam but he wasn’t there. My breath shattered like porcelain crashing onto polished marble.

 A voice whispered, “ I missed you, Ornesh.”

-       “Angad?”

“You are the Augend and I am the Addend. It all adds up in the end, doesn’t it?”

The power that went out in the elevator returned my power to me. It all added up in the end.

 -Anwesha Modak