Finding solace isn't what she was looking for. She was looking for disturbance; a little tremor somewhere. The quietness of the last few days had gotten to her. She looked in corners and behind doors. She peeked beneath the kitchen sink and under the bed. She looked for that escaped scream that refused to come back to her. It was all so suspiciously still. So silent that even the clock had stopped in protest.

She had a bewildered look on her face as she searched on and on till she decided not to. Curled up into a ball on the sofa, she rocked herself back and forth. It’s okay. A little silence does not lead to a lifetime of quiet, she told herself.  

Suddenly she heard someone move in the next room. A melody filled her ears. It was so much better than the tremor she was searching for. The footsteps were music. She listened attentively to the clearing of the throat, the shuffling around, the opening and closing of drawers and then waited for the call. She smiled. The clock had started ticking again. 

She liked letters. When she was little, she used to see her grandma’s face so alive when she tore open the letters from her masi who lived in Mumbai. She remembered that smile now. It always gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Those blue sealed letters were so special. There were little titbits about Masi’s life, how she was coping in a strange new place and even what she had cooked recently. When her cousin grew older, the letters even contained drawings he had made of her, her brother, and everyone the toddler could think of. These letters she could only remember by smell, visions, sarees her grandma wore and bits and pieces of smiles and almost tears.

She grew up in the era of emails and then smses. She disliked those perfunctory words, the phrases that did not have a slant and details of one’s personality. She had written love letters once. They are as lost to her now as the person she had written them for. She still thought of letters. The scrapes and scratches of personalised emotions. The tip of the T, the missing dots of Is. The quality of the paper, the fineness of the ink. She jumped up and looked for a page she could write on.

Continuation of broken pieces

Sometimes you remember the simpler times and smile. Sometimes there aren’t any simpler times to remember. At other times, there just aren’t any smiles. With that thought in mind, she looked through the photographs that had been quietly slumbering in the depths of her hard drive. She went through them meticulously. Remembering, all the times that were captured in photographs, she realised that she wished she had captured moments that she needed to remember. These were things she had forgotten. These photographs had no more meaning in her life than the tissue she had just ripped to shreds while looking at them. She wished there was a way to capture emotions, tears, stains...that sudden prick you get in your heart when you get hurt. Those she would have loved to look at. And laugh. Laugh so hard. She needed a smile, and the photographs didn’t help.

Broken thoughts of a lost soul

Recently, she had been thinking of the word marooned a lot. She remembered she had learned the word in school. It was in a pirate story. She was sad for the poor sod who got marooned on that sad sack island. But, since then, every time she thought of the word ‘marooned’, she had images of darker hues of red and someone trapped in it. It was like watching a man roam around with lonely eyes and lonelier expressions in the smoky maze of red. It was demure. She closed her eyes and tried to think of blue, yellow, green...black. And the black stuck. The silence in that colour struck her conscious like a piece of ice on a hot summer day. It encompassed all the thoughts and swirled about finding debris and sucking them in. All that was left now in the hollow of her reminisces was blackness. It was calm. It was peaceful. She slept.

Violence

The word violence never had any special meaning. Not for her. She always took it to be something that was part of her life, like transport or rent or even the random guy who tried to touch her bossom every time she took a bus or traveled in a train. Violence was synonymous with everything she had been through in her life. It was trivial. It was petty. 

She had seen it in her eyes of her father, when he had repeatedly struck the wall with his fist, when her mother had come home one day, eyes smeared with shame and her kameej half torn. Some hooligans had molested her. She did not get a chance to get a good look at them.  Her father had refused to lodge a complaint against the faceless, nameless culprits. He had just asked his wife to freshen up and not to tell the neighbours. She was nine, and had seen the violence in his eyes. She had also seen it slowly wash away with the drops of blood on the wall and the tear stains on her mother’s face. She thought that’s how it is supposed to be.

She was fifteen, when her best friend had come to school with a blackened eye. Her refusal to say anything about it was annoying. They were best friends. There wasn’t supposed to be any secrets. She later found out that her friend had been sexually abused by her uncle. When she complained to her father, the black eye was a punishment for telling lies. The violence had struck her hard. She could not fathom why the wrong person was at the receiving end of it. She had seen the residual violence in her friend’s eyes when she had gone about her days getting quieter every day. 

She was in college, when she fell in love. She did not know whether it was because he was so charming, or because she was naive enough to think that good looks and better clothes was what a girl looked for in a guy. He had taught her how it felt when he ran his hands on her thighs and planted a carefully careless kiss on her forehead. He had taken her hand in the dark movie theatre and she had thought this was it. He had eased into it. He had taken her home because it was raining. His room smelled of freshly laundered clothes and old cigarette butts. The first kiss was awkward. What followed was unexpected. When stopped by her repeatedly, she was startled by the violence in his movements and the tone of his voice. She was puzzled when she was asked to get lost, and not so politely given a shove. On the way home, she shed tears for the part she did not play. She wondered if what she had done was foolish. She had stayed up all night and was still unable to figure it out. 

As she grew older, she had come to understand what violence was. For her, it was not what was apparent, but what went unsaid and unchecked. The movements, the flickers of the eyes, the midnight tears, were all part of the vicious cycle. She slowly adapted herself to the world, because the world refused to budge from its place. She learned to look around her with fear when she walked on a lonely road. She learned how to use her bag as a shield when she travelled in a bus. She now knew that men were not to be provoked, because in the end, no one will be able to save you. She was adept at putting on the veil of obscurity and walking away when the stranger licked his lips at her or commented on her ass. She was the epitome of womanliness. Or what she had learned was necessary for survival. 

Violence is trivial. It is petty. The truly condemnable is what brings about that violence. She had learned not to give it another thought.