I.
Moonlight trickled in from a hole in the attic ceiling.
The blood from Myna’s glass-pricked hands formed a dark silver puddle on the floor, slowly streaming in different directions, like trails on a map. She reached for the stale liquor bottle that she’d stolen for a few sips from her father’s alcohol cache; her careless father who was too drunk to notice. It was a full moon night and while that might have prompted him behave like a werewolf, it was actually routine behavior.
She’d fled and locked herself in her room, as her mother had advised her to do on such occasions, covering her ears to drown out the screams. But her father’s loud slew of expletives always made the floor and leaky wooden rafters of the ceiling, quake.
In one corner of the room sat an old rusted trunk filled with mementos of her mother’s childhood: love letters in faded ink to boys she’d briefly talked to (before her family dismissed her in an arranged marriage with minimum dowry), tattered copies of National Geographic-s and Vogue-s that still smelled of far-away places, an old Polaroid camera, Barbie dolls with limbs or heads missing, an ancient View-master that if held up to the light still flickered with images from faerytales, a spangled silver-blue dress salvaged from a school play where once upon a time her mother had played Cinderella and danced on a shimmering stage with the prince, her then-best friend.
Of all the things, it was the dress that Myna adored the most, even though the sleeves were frayed and the threads had come loose. Sometimes she’d hold it against her bosom, as though cradling a lover that was never there, or she’d dance with it pretending that it were one of her imaginary friends, as an old gramophone sputtered vintage melodies, or she’d wear it and gaze at herself in the cracked Venetian mirror, like curious Alice or Snow White’s wicked stepmother, wishing she were prettier or someplace else, while her pet rabbit peeked in from a corner.
The scars on her body stared back, as if ashamed to be noticed.
But tonight, she wore that dress and kneeled on the cold floor. The summer night was humid and claustrophobic. There had been barely any vodka left in the bottle, yet the air smelt of alcohol, incense and something musty and rotting. If someone had peered in through the hole in the ceiling, they’d have noticed the pattern of candles arranged on the floor like a pentagram and that she lay in the center of it, her hands folded as if in prayer, her eyes closed but stained with tears and dried blood.
Myna was muttering softly.
She whispered for her father to be human again, for her mother to gather the courage and run away with her, and ever so faintly (as though she were afraid someone would hear her) for a friend.
Slowly, her father’s screams subsided and her mother’s cries grew fainter, like the ending of a song. The gulmohar and kadam trees in their garden rustled nervously and the candles flickered, before a sudden gust of wind blew them all out. For a moment, the moon shimmered, as though it had just blinked and the ghosts that silently haunted their ancestral house, without opinion, seemed restless.
Do not do this, they seemed to whisper. These are things you mustn’t beg for.
All I wish for is a friend, she sobbed. Nothing else and nothing more, a hand to hold in the dark, against my lonely beating heart.
II.
A few days later, the newspaper announced a forecast of shooting stars.
Myna was very excited for it. She was sure that for some special seconds, it would make her feel infinite, as though her soul would glimmer and swirl among gassy nebulas and flickers of white light. She thought, it would be like snowfall, except it wouldn’t be cold.
It was a windy summer night and a Lana del Rey song hummed in her iPod, as she waited on the terrace for the stars to appear. As she waited, she wondered if the first two parts of her spell had worked.
She and her mother were now taking turns to dilute her father’s alcohol with water and mix herbs in his food, herbs that the women at the local Kali temple promised (in exchange for a fresh two-thousand rupee note) would keep a man’s temper cool and calm, like a sea at low tide. It had been a few weeks and while he still railed and broke things when the world didn’t go according to his plan, his anger had less enthusiasm, as though he were a tame beast who had forgotten the sound of a low-pitched growl.
And strangely enough, her mother had found a job as an English tuition teacher and five kids from the neighborhood visited their house twice a week, with somber and studious faces, furiously scribbling down essays in grammatically-atrocious English, eager to be corrected when their pronunciation didn’t sound British enough.
She realized that spells, like wishes, had strange ways of working and she found herself worrying less and less for her mother’s safety.
But school on the other hand, wasn’t any better. Sometimes she’d return from PE to find her bag wet with something that wasn’t just water or filled with scraps of paper that spelled out expletives even her dad hadn’t used. Often, she’d get into fights and with her disastrously poor reflexes, she returned home with bruised eyes and arms.
Once someone had spilled ink on her skirt and she spent the night trying to scrub it off, only to realize that she had bleached the deep maroon of her skirt to a pale pink. The next day she was suspended for being in the wrong uniform. She didn’t mind, because it meant she had more time to read books in the house, those ancient dusty tomes that her far-richer ancestors had left behind, and the ones that discussed magic, folklore and superstition in great detail were her favorite.
But she was so restless.
When Myna walked home from school, she would think about the strangers passing by and wonder if any of them would ever befriend her. She assigned identities to every faceless nameless person she saw on the bus, and if someone spoke to her, to ask her the time or to move for space, she’d be startled, but eager to help.
She was so desperate for the third part of her spell to work, it made her feel ashamed.
And so, while she waited restlessly on the starlit roof, the sensation of being watched sharply prickled her back. She turned instinctively and saw a boy on the adjacent terrace looking at her. He seemed vaguely familiar, in the way she half-remembered the faces of her neighbors, but that was all there was to it.
“Are you excited about the shooting stars?”, he asked, gaily.
She peered at him closely. Yes, he was one of those neighborhood boys who would play cricket in the driveway and had a knack for climbing trees. His name was Rahim, she remembered.
Her dad did not approve of her interacting with them, and perhaps that was why she never felt the urge to socialize with them. All their faces had blurred together and she couldn’t tell them apart. He seemed commonplace enough with acne marks on his cheeks and scraggly hair, dressed in a faded Batman T-shirt and shorts.
“Yes, I am”, she replied.
“Why don’t you hop on over to my roof?”, he asked, in that same happy tone.
“What?” she asked, incredulous. Not only did the invitation seem a bit too sudden, but the gap between their houses was wide. A jump although not impossible, in the dead of night, seemed quite foolhardy.
“Why not? We can watch the stars together. If you’re scared, I can hop over.”
He paused, noticing the surprise and alarm on her face. “I mean, if you want me to. I know we’ve been next door neighbors since forever, but we haven’t talked much. I know you love to draw though.”
“What? How? How do you know that?”
“Because you win the local art competition every year. I actually came second last year, and I thought that was unfair because my painting wouldn’t have held a candle to yours. Your picture of that mermaid was breathtaking.”
“Wha-what did you draw?”, she asked, unsteadily.
“Uh, just a jungle. It was hideous.”
She thought she vaguely recalled the picture. And he was right about the mermaid. She considered him. Rahim seemed real enough, but what if he was a phantom concocted by the spell she had cast that helpless night? What if magic, if indeed it was real, had trickled through the cracks in her ceiling like moonlight, and slowly, ever so softly, made subtle changes in her life?
He seemed like a picture she must have seen so often that she’d forgotten about it or never bothered to register it in the first place. Had he always been real, or was the spell tugging faintly at the threads of her fate?
“Yeah. I remember that one.” She spoke slowly, “You used reds and purples to paint it, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I did. I didn’t expect you to remember”.
He was beaming.
For a few moments, there was silence, and then the night sky blazed with stars. She decided to take the plunge.
“Are you sure you can jump? It’s a steep fall, you could die.”
“Watch me fly!”
And with the confidence of a child pretending to be a superhero, he jumped.
He almost made it, and then his footing slipped and she caught hold of his arm. He found his balance and made his way to her roof, grinning nervously.
“Are you okay? Is it alright?”, he asked.
In hindsight, she realized she ought to have been the one to ask that.
“It’s okay”, she squeaked, as they sat down beside each other, eyes upward at the white starry flashes streaking all around them.
Later she would also realize how surreal that was, to have a boy she barely knew on her terrace in the middle of the night, stargazing together. But at that moment, she was just too flushed and excited to think of anything else. And he seemed too enraptured with the stars as well.
They did talk, in snatches.
When he told her his name, she repeated it softly to herself, as though it were an incantation, even though she knew it already. Rahim asked for her favorite constellation and she said it was Cassiopeia, that beautiful queen who was imprisoned in the tapestry of the night sky for her beauty. His was Aquila, the eagle that carried Ganymede right up to Zeus’s outstretched arms. She imagined herself as a queen, astride an eagle, soaring among the clouds. For a moment, she turned and looked at him, but his eyes were still skyward. The air smelt sweet, as if the flowers in the garden had suddenly bloomed.
She lost track of time, and didn’t realize that by the time the meteor shower had ended, she was lying on her back. His voice seemed to reach her from a far-away tunnel and she blinked.
“That was beautiful”, Rahim was saying. “Wasn’t it?”
“Uh huh? Yes yes, it was.” She felt dazed and his figure seemed to flicker like a magician’s parlour trick illusion.
“Well, looks like I better be off. Good night”.
Without a second glance, he had jumped and clambered back to his terrace.
She got up and leaned over ledge. “Hey!”, she called out to him.
He turned to face her.
“Are you real?” she shouted.
His eyebrows creased and he seemed taken aback.
“What do you mean?”
She laughed.
“If you’re not a figment of my imagination, do you want to come over tomorrow? We can play some games on my computer.”
He smiled.
“How about after school? Let’s aim for five o clock in the evening?”
She waved at him, her heart beating furiously like the guitars thrumming in a punk-rock song. Her spell had worked, she was sure of it. Her letter to the universe was finally delivered.
She had asked for a friend, and he had appeared, a boy of the stars.
III.
When the pink sky was slowly deepening into purple, the doorbell rang.
This was probably the first time she would be having someone over. She still didn’t know what kind of a person Rahim was and she was nervous about making conversation. She had waited with bated breath all morning, afraid that he wouldn’t show up after all or that her parents would be angry. But her mother was busy teaching two kids on the ground floor and her father was shut up in his private study, with his television and beer cans. She nearly stumbled as she rushed down the stairs, and saw that he had arrived with two tubs of strawberry and black currant ice-cream.
She gasped. “You needn’t have bothered. I had some chips.”
Rahim grinned. “One can never have enough ice-cream.”
Well, I can’t argue with that, she thought, as she excitedly led the way to the room which had an antiquated desktop that functioned as the family’s shared computer. The machine blinked a few times, and it took a while for it to get started. The game was an old role-playing platformer that where an exiled princess must escape her tower, battle dragons and goblins, defeat the evil sorcerer who had cursed her family and restore peace in the kingdom.
He said he’d heard of the game but he hadn’t played it before. It was one of Myna’s favorites even though it was really difficult, particularly when it came to navigating some rocky cliffs. Sometimes she’d have to restart the game, if she failed too badly.
It wasn’t really a two-player game, yet it was a different sort of multi-player experience as they took turns controlling the keyboard and the mouse and talked incessantly. They argued over which dialogue option to choose or which part of the medieval city to explore, as they decided the trajectories of the pixelated characters on the screen.
While she was convinced that the princess’ own actions were partly responsible for the curse, he insisted upon her innocence. No, look at the way she kept things from the tavern owner, she’d say and he’d counter it with, people don’t blurt out their secrets to someone they’ve just met, unless they’ve been slipped a truth potion in their ale, which by the way we have to do, to find out the right way to slay the dragon.
It seemed that while she would have preferred exploring and experimenting, he seemed to follow a very logical and precise approach, and that fascinated her. Occasionally, as he talked, she’d stop listening to his words and sneak sideways glances at him, looking to see whether the edges of his figure would shimmer and she’d realize that he was some hologram. But when his arm brushed against hers as he offered her the last scoop of ice-cream, she knew he was as real as her mother and father and her white rabbit that followed her around the house and whom he’d taken a liking to.
It wasn’t until her mother shouted that dinner was ready, that they realized just how fast time had elapsed. And it immediately made her sad, as if the giddy happiness that had come from the ice-cream and the game and his company, had suddenly dissolved. Myna wished she could have hidden him in a wardrobe and then come back once her parents were asleep. But Rahim took the initiative to introduce himself to her mother. Her mother seemed surprised but was civil and asked him to stay for dinner which he politely declined.
She stood in the doorway, her face flushed, waving at him. He thanked her for the evening and said he’d definitely return to finish the game.
She would have liked to ask him to meet her on the terrace that night, but it seemed too early for that.
***
That year, the monsoons were sickly and humid, and the sleepy suburban neighborhood in which she lived seemed to reek of something fetid. At times, the rain would pour ceaselessly into dark muddy puddles and white-red mushrooms sprouted in unexpected places. Rahim came over once or twice a week and when he didn’t, she played the game alone, looked for mushrooms in the rotting door posts and window frames of her large house and replayed their conversations, remembering the way he’d laugh at something clever she’d said.
It had been a rainy Friday night when they finally finished the game and she was afraid that he’d never come again, for it seemed he had no other reason to. Perhaps some of that sadness had flashed on her face, for he asked, “Is something amiss?”
“No, no”, she replied, a little too quickly.
“You look sad.”
“It’s just…”
She fumbled, unsure of what to say.
“It’s your parents, isn’t it?”, he asked. “They’ve been fighting again, haven’t they?”
That was true. While the fights were no longer as violent, they were still loud and full of invectives. And given how the houses in the lane were all huddled together, it made sense for the neighborhood to gossip.
“It’s…” she began.
He touched her hand. “Perhaps I could come over tomorrow in the morning and stay the whole day? It might cheer you up.”
He must have seen the way her eyes glistened with joy, for he laughed and promised to get four different flavors of ice-cream the next day.
After he left, she rushed back to her attic room, gathered the candles in a circle and spread salt on the floor. She drew sigils in the air and prayed to the spirits to keep tomorrow free from all jinxes. She crossed her fingers when she came downstairs for dinner where her parents sat silently at the table and announced, “My friend is coming over in the morning.”
Her dad looked up but didn’t say anything. Her mother seemed delighted. “I’ll make something nice for lunch then.”
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Myna couldn’t wait.
If you wish upon a shooting star, they do come true, she thought.
IV.
Myna was so excited at the thought of spending the whole day with him that she woke up at the crack of the dawn and while the crows still slept, crept down to her mother’s dressing room and poured some floral perfume into a tiny homeopathic bottle. She brushed her hair repeatedly, willing it to shine the way it did in glossy magazines and dabbed bits of that scent on her hair and skin. She took out her mother’s dusty spangled dress from the trunk, wore it and added some glitter in her hair. She fancied herself as the princess from the video game, although that princess was too concerned with saving the world and had no love story of her own.
When he arrived, he didn’t say that she looked pretty or beautiful, but asked if they were planning a vintage tea party. No, she exclaimed, it’s the princess from the game, don’t you see!
Ah, he had replied, understanding dawning in his eyes, you look nice.
She’d never taken him up to her attic room before, but that day she did. She had placed flowers in the old liquor bottles. He marveled at the strange books in her collection and talked animatedly of his love for dinosaurs and other pre-historic creatures. He can rattle off facts like an encyclopedia, she thought. She showed him some of her old toys and the little Pokemon game cards that she’d collected from chips packets over the years. He was struck by how carefully she had kept them, pressed between the pages of ancient books and for a while they talked about their favorite television shows from childhood.
At some point, he asked, “If you’re the princess, what am I? The evil magician?”
Consternation flooded her face.
“No, no, of course not. You’re…”
She stopped. She didn’t want to say something stupid and soppy like Prince Charming.
He prompted her, laughing, “One of your admirers then, who help you on the quest?”
She had a vision of chandeliers and flute music and ball-rooms glittering with light.
Blushing, she said, “Then, would you like to dance?”
The words escaped her mouth before she even realized it. A strange expression crossed his face.
He would refuse, of course.
“Sure”, he said. “Maybe we can make that gramophone sing for us?”
Perhaps even the ghosts had stopped to watch them.
It felt so surreal. Surely, she had stepped onto another plane of existence. His hand was on her waist as he led her through a slow waltz. Sunlight poured into the room, making the dust motes glimmer like little faeries, bathing them in a sepia-golden light. The air smelled of lost things, musty and sweet. The vinyl records were from her father’s childhood and it seemed to her that the love songs of yesteryear were so much more sincere. She was so suffused with happiness, she felt that she could dance forever and perhaps she would have, if something at the window hadn’t distracted him.
He broke off mid step and said, “Are you seeing what I am seeing? Over there?”
She turned to see what he was pointing at and gasped. There was a tiny dragon, with glistening red-black scales, seated on the window sill. Its fiery breath had singed the edges of the frayed lace curtains.
They looked at each other in wonder and then back again at the dragon. The dragon seemed not to have noticed them and stared far ahead into the misty garden. She put a finger to her lips and made a stealthy move to grab the polaroid camera that lay in the trunk.
“It’s like one of the dragons in the game!”, he mouthed.
She tiptoed back to where they were standing and looked at the dragon through the lens. Yes, it definitely was a dragon. A faint smell of smoke hovered in the air. She pressed the shutter button.
The click startled it.
The dragon jerked its head back and let out some crackling red-golden sparks. They both stumbled backwards and the dragon fluttered its wings and took off into the sky. They rushed to the window and saw it flying away, a black spot slowly receding into the distance until the white of the sky swallowed it up.
“It couldn’t have been real”, he muttered.
She carefully took out the polaroid image and flicked it in the dusty sunlight. “It was”, she replied and gave him the photograph. He gazed at it, stupefied.
For a long moment, they didn’t speak. Then he laughed uneasily. “We can be cryptozoologists, together”.
The three syllables in “together” melted her heart. He flung his arms around her and she hugged him back, convinced it was all a dream or that the dragon had been more real than…than this.
After lunch, they spread out a patchwork-quilt on the floor and spent the time solving jigsaw puzzles that spelled out scenes from faerytales. As they put together Red Riding Hood’s cloak and the wolf’s ivory-white teeth, she asked, “Do you believe in magic?”
He joined the wolf’s head and body together. “Depends on what you mean by it.”
“Like there are forces beyond us that can bend reality to our will. Like invisible lines connecting and crisscrossing each other and all of our experiences inside an intricate spider web. And sometimes we can pull the strings too and rearrange reality the way we want it. But like, there are laws to it.”
“Hmm. What are the laws?” He sounded genuinely interested.
“Well, some would say even pulling the strings is bad enough, but I think that’s okay. We do what we do to save ourselves. But pulling the strings to bind someone to us, now that would be wrong.”
His brows furrowed. “That’s an interesting theory.”
It did sound like theory, she thought. But magic had always been instinctive for her. The way she knew which dark alleyways to avoid in the night. The way she knew her dad’s moods and shut herself up when things got too bad. The way she whispered enchantments when she was excited for something so as not to jinx it. The way she’d cast protective wards around her mother.
But she wasn’t the only one pulling the strings, she realized.
That evening, they took turns in taking pictures of each other on her Polaroid. There was one where he was tangled up in faerylights, another where she swayed like a ballerina, smiling her happiest smile yet. She took a picture of him reading the titles of the books in her shelf and one where he flicked through the pages of her drawing pad that were filled with sketches of castles and ivy-twined towers, dragons and phoenixes, domed cities with glittering spires and princesses with roses in their hair.
“Perhaps this is your superpower”, Rahim marveled. “Whatever you draw, comes to life.”
V.
Myna had kept the photograph of the dragon along with all the others in a small tin box. Every night, she’d go through them, clutching the images near her heart like talismans, remembering the sensation of his arms around her, arms that had felt strong and warm and protective. She thought if he did not call, she could work a spell with the pictures and her blood, but she was afraid and besides, it seemed wrong.
But school was slowly catching up with them and they both had homework to complete and projects to submit, and with the exams looming, they didn’t meet that often. Sometimes the fights between her parents got so bad, she had to call him up to say it wasn’t a good time, perhaps they could meet later. Sometimes Rahim would cancel last minute, saying he had caught a fever or was feeling unwell. In the few rare instances when he actually showed up, he didn’t linger for long.
She filled page after page with sketches of them where she was a princess and he was a benevolent magician and they flew to distant realms on the backs of dragons and fought off monsters with magic swords. But not all of her drawings were fantastical. Some of them were quite simple, such as two teenagers on a park bench, reading the same book or on a terrace watching the stars together.
She never dared show them to him.
Meanwhile, the leaves changed color and the air grew colder. Autumn had come upon them and a sadness was slowly welling up inside her.
It was a week before her exams were due to begin, and she woke up to discover that her rabbit had died from the cold. She blinked back her tears as she buried her in her garden. Her mother was very sad too.
Unable to concentrate on anything, she dialed his number, asking him to come over.
“I can’t. I’ve caught a cold”, he said.
“Please. My rabbit died and my parents have been fighting all day and I think if I saw you, it’d cheer me up a bit.
That was true. Her mother was presently nursing a black eye and some bruises on her face.
Rahim seemed to consider the offer. “I’ll come up on the terrace then. Let me grab a shirt.”
She raced to the rooftop. It seemed a lifetime had passed since they first met each other there, on a star-crossed night. For a while they talked of trivial things, of what would happen to the characters of their favorite show now that the final season was cancelled, of how difficult school was, of how they’d rather battle goblins than memorize the map of South America.
She remembered the video game of the warrior-princess they had played when he had first come over. She asked him, “Do you think the princess ever finds true love?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to believe that she did, after all she went through.”
He paused. “I hope you find love too, Myna.”
She blushed a deep pink.
He added, “As your friend, I’d wish that whoever you finally choose is someone good. Someone who deserves you and is as amazing as you are.”
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She suppressed a giggle and said, “You know, the fact that you come over so often and we talk to each other on the terrace, might make people think we are lovers or something.”
He shrugged, good naturedly.
“People will think whatever they think. It doesn’t change anything. I love you as a friend. I’m not romantically attracted to you.”
He laughed, scattering his words carelessly, like stars.
Something shattered within her.
Far away, in her mind’s eye, the princess looked for herself in the mirror and horrified by what she found there, broke it into a million crystals shards. She recalled that one time he had spent the whole day with her and had danced with her and had hugged her and had decided that they ought to be cryptozoologists together.
She smiled weakly. “Yeah I know. You are my best friend.”
It was the truth, yes but only a fragment of it. The actual truth was too large and too impossible to contain within her, and she felt her heart sink. All those nights, she’d spent dreaming of them, becoming close, becoming more than friends.
I love you as a friend. I’m not romantically attracted to you, he had said.
She knew a spell for that but she’d never forgive herself for using it.
VI.
Myna and Rahim didn’t talk at all throughout the exam season. He lived right next door, but she hadn’t seen his face for ages. It was as though the houses had swallowed him up and where there had once been a door, there was only a brick wall.
Winter fell like a shroud over the neighborhood. The stray dogs and cats that haunted their doorsteps for scraps disappeared. Sometimes, she’d sit by the windowsill where the dragon had once appeared. Her breath misted the windowpane, and she traced his name with her mitten-less fingers before the fog erased it again.
She could barely bring herself to study. While practicing the map of South America, she imagined exotic far-off places and realized that she had actually drawn the map of one her imaginary worlds, a crumbling civilization of men who could turn to stone at will, until they were petrified forever.
She had stopped drawing pictures of them together. She had forced herself to not call him. Yet, occasionally during evenings or nights, when her parents’ constant bickering got too loud for her ears, she took to studying on the terrace with a flashlight.
But he did not appear.
A wicked idea had taken hold of her. It had struck her before in the past and she’d always brushed it aside, except now she no longer could. We shouldn’t pull the strings to bind someone to our fate, she had said a long time ago, to a boy in this very room, in this still and golden air.
That night, Myna got out all their polaroids and her sketches and arranged them on the floor within a salt-marked pentagram. She lit the candles with trembling fingers. Sweat clung to her skin and her eyes had a feverish gleam in them. With a rusty kitchen knife, she made a tiny incision in her wrist, letting the droplets of blood fall to the ground. Guilt and shame overwhelmed her for what she was doing but she ignored it. She was more desperate than she’d ever been in her life.
In the flickering candle-lit darkness, she called upon the spirits and stuttered her last desperate wish.
***
The next morning, just before she left for school for her last exam, Rahim finally called her.
Apparently, his exams ended the same day, and he was wondering if they could hang out, as it had been a while since they last had. He sounded like his usual self. They could solve puzzles and he’d bring the ice cream of course.
Yes, yes, she said hurriedly, hardly daring to breathe. I’d love that. Inwardly, she wondered if she had done the right thing last night. She was determined to finish her exam as fast as possible and return home at the earliest.
But perhaps she had used up all her luck, for the day had other plans for her. She wrote the worst exam of her life and afterwards was detained because a glitch in the school’s administrative system had erased all her identification data and she had to fill out new forms.
Any moment now, she thought, Rahim would be at her house, ringing her doorbell.
Once school was over, she ran back home, pausing only to pick up some wild blossoms that grew by the wayside. She’d wanted to look her best but there was no time to change. She reached home and her mother said that her friend had arrived an hour back and was waiting in her attic room.
Panic clutched at her heart.
She ran to the room and saw him poring over her sketchbook, a curious expression on his face.
“What is the meaning of all this?” he asked quickly, gesturing to a picture where both of them were tightly locked in an embrace.
She dropped the flowers she had picked for him. “This is not how I wanted to tell you.”
He turned the pages. The polaroids fell out, some of them still bearing traces of dried blood. The floor bore the markings of a broken pentagram.
A feral fear crept into his eyes.
“What have you been doing? Is…is this some sort of voodoo?”
He had never looked at her like that, like she was unclean or had done some terrible thing.
“You shouldn’t have touched my things, without my permission”, she answered in a small voice.
“I know, I apologize for it. Your mother told me to wait up here and I thought I’d pass the time by looking at your marvelous drawings. But now I wish I hadn’t done that.”
“I was going to tell you today.”
He didn’t reply.
“It’s. It’s… true,” she cried, stuttering, with tears in her eyes. She thought she’d never be able to say it unless someone slipped a truth potion in her drink. But this was the moment.
“I do care about you a lot. I..I…lov-“
He cut her off. “I should have realized that sooner. I…I don’t know what to say.”
He looked dazed.
All the words that she wanted to say but she didn’t, couldn’t, sat in her heart like fluttering caged birds.
“I’m sorry”, he said at last. “But I can’t reciprocate what you feel for me.”
She hoped that at least, he’d come close to her, take her hand and give her one last hug. But he didn’t. He never would. He seemed frightened and disgusted by her, by what she had done in the dark of the night, the traces of which she had forgotten to wipe away in her excitement.
“I think it’s best for us to not talk again”, he said quietly.
With that he placed her drawing book on the table and left the room, before she could even beg him to stay, to listen to her for one last time. And he walked out of her life as though he’d never been there.
She reached for the sketchbook and ripped apart the pages, the photographs. The images swirled in the air like phantoms. She crumpled on the cold marble floor, whimpering, torn pages scattered all around her.
I’d like to forget it all, she sobbed to the fetid air.
But she couldn’t.
It all came back to her. The shooting stars. The dragon. The games they had played together. His arms around her as he whirled her in a dance. His laugh. The way he had once called her “amazing”. The way he would always offer her the last scoop of ice cream. The way he’d say hello to her pet rabbit.
The memories were claustrophobic, tiny phantoms made of thought and pinpricks of light, strangling her alive.
VII.
Dear Rahim,
If I ever wrote a love-letter to the childhood I never had, I’d talk about the imaginary worlds, woven out of dreams and spider-silk that I’d make up in the loneliness of an attic room. A room lined with bookshelves and imaginary friends in Victorian hats and with parrots on their shoulders, with whom I’d explore uncharted territories, turning the mundane into magic.
And you, you would be one of them.
No, maybe you’d be that childhood best friend I never had, a dreamed-up boy from the sleepy neighborhood where the houses are at least a century old and the streetlamps glow tangerine on windy nights. A boy who wouldn’t be scared of the darkness clawing at my tired, relentless heart, a boy who would befriend my wolves instead of slaying them, who would smell like old grandma-knit sweaters and hot pancakes on misty mornings.
A boy whom I could adore like a favorite book, creased at the edges, filled with dried flowers and little love-notes, whose pages my mitten-less fingers could ruffle through, as though it were made not of paper, but magic.
A boy who would melt into my stories, like a mountain lake in summer, as though he had always been there, as though I’d just turned my head and noticed him standing on the glittering sidewalk, who would dance with me on the dusty floor of my attic room and I would be dressed in my mother’s old spangled Cinderella dress, who if he ever saw a dragon sitting on the window sill would still believe his senses and not logic.
He would have a weakness for all things sweet, for love songs spun on vinyl records, for shooting stars that light up the tapestry of the black sky like the wishes of sleeping children.
We would be storytellers together, you see and, in our own world, we wouldn’t be limited by our names and our bodies and the colour of our skin. We would be defined by everything we wanted ourselves to be, and not by who we are, who we were, who we’re forced to be in another sadder parallel universe.
And so, those stories in the childhood-that-never-was would be all that we’d ever have, all the magic and the beauty and the grace that our real lives so often lacked, and that for me, was the most hopeful thing of all, because one day, many years later, in a parallel universe a thousand leagues away, you’d show up on my doorstep with a childhood game and a tub of ice-cream and a hug that is like winter sunlight, and I would wonder for one precarious moment, if I’d seen you before, if my letter to the universe was ever delivered, and I’d nod my head and laugh and welcome you in, like an old summer storybook friend.
After all, aren’t some stories suicide-notes that the reader discovers when it is too late?
Love always,
Myna
Illustration : Shimul Sarkar