And The Roses Bled

I

It is a common opinion that love, being a fleeting emotion, is the hardest to keep. Love is an elusive bird, they say, which if captured, tries to free itself forevermore. I beg to differ. There is an endeavour far more difficult than caging love—keeping a secret.

Secrets are the hardest to keep for two reasons—they weigh too much and the truth has a way of leaking out into the bright sunlight. It’s in its nature. There’s even this kiddy riddle about secrets I remember from school—something that you tell but should never be told, something that you keep that never gets old. It’s so true. Secrets never get old and they never ever die. They are hungry little parasites that feed on one from within, neither letting their host live, nor allowing them to die.

Secrets are heavy things. They are heavier than the greatest of mountains and they erode the being deeper than the largest of rivers. They corrode the spirit until little holes appear in the bright, flawless fabric of the soul—black holes which suck up all the light and pour darkness and death into life. They become diseases, manifesting into the real world in hideous forms.

I too have kept a secret. You must have guessed that much by now. I have kept it for an awfully long time and have no wish to carry it beyond my grave. There, at least, I want to be free of its weight. This burden has broken my soul. It sits like a massive boulder on my heart, blocking my air, corrupting it with its stench.

I never imagined I would tell anyone about this. We had an understanding—my best friend and I—that we would bury the dead and keep our lips sealed. But today, maybe I ought to face my fears and lend a voice to the horrors my eyes once saw. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but I suppose I have my reasons.

It restarted a few days before they actually diagnosed me. I’d been having headaches, severe ones. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to acute pain, as if someone were going at my head with an electric drill. That would lead to the whole room spinning around me, every object in it swimming in an invisible, painful fluid. I hated light. I hated movement. I hated life. Then I would vomit.

I never told anyone about it because I feared they’d label me crazy. What I feared even worse was the possibility that they might disregard it altogether, and tell me I was only imagining it, that nothing was really wrong. In a tiny corner of my heart, I cultivate a hope that someday people will see reality as something subjective rather than objective. Someday, advice like ‘face reality’ will cease to exist and it will be accepted that we are all facing our own individual realities, no matter how insane we might appear to our neighbour.

I wasn’t seeing what others see, or feeling what a sane person ought to feel. They’d instantly start looking for answers in my head if they found out. They would look for causes of madness, of insanity. You see, when the headaches came, they would be there, around my bed, and the closer they came, the more severe my pains would become. At one point, I thought they wanted my head to explode like an overfilled water balloon. Pop.

My mother found out about the pains when one night I failed to reach the bathroom in time and regurgitated my dinner all over the little rug in my room. I was in too much pain to do anything about it. I lay in bed with that sour stench all around me, enveloping my existence in a nauseous cloud. The next morning, the maid came to clean up and told Mama about it. What did I tell you about the truth leaking?

I tried to convince my parents that I was alright, that it was one isolated incident, and that it hadn’t happened to me before that day. But Daddy was not convinced. He said the dark circles that underlined my eyes and the weight loss my body had endured in the past month told him a different story.

They took me to a Doctor Garg, an elf-like thing with wispy hair and piercing deep-set eyes. He asked me questions. It felt like an interrogation and my tongue slipped.

How long have you been having headaches? he asked.

A month or so. I told him.

When mostly?

At night. When I wake up.

You wake up often at night?

Well . . . I didn’t like where it was going.

Do you sleep well?

I wake up at night sometimes.

It lasted a few more minutes and by the end of it, I had effectively told him that I woke up almost every night and saw things no one should have to see.

It sealed something in his eyes. He gave me a lopsided, somewhat pitiful smile as he watched me sympathetically. I suppose he had his verdict. He gave Daddy a whole list of tests he wanted conducted on me. They did just that and found out all there was to find out, or so they thought.

The doctor told my parents about my condition; but he didn’t just stop there. He told them more. He was mistaken of course, in presuming he knew what caused my nightmares; but he informed them in such an assured manner, they took it for a fact. I don’t consider the presumption his fault really, for you see, it is a condition that most well-qualified individuals suffer from. It is a side effect of what I call extensive external learning, where the individual imbibes the information passed down to them without ever sifting the knowledge within for what gems and surprises might lie hidden there. Perhaps one gets so comfortable with one’s prior knowledge of things they might not quite appreciate the surprise that alternative possibilities may bring.

I overheard snippets of the little conversation the good doctor had with my parents. I heard words—tumour, nightmares, insomnia, therapist. They started looking at me differently after that. It’s all in the eyes and their eyes were different. And of course, Daddy asked me more than once if there was something I wanted to talk about.

I understood this much: the doctor had told my parents I had a tumour in my brain and needed therapy and that I was suffering from nightmares and hallucinations which are sometimes observed in patients with this condition. Everyone thought I was delusional.

You don’t have to tell me or Mama . . . if you think we won’t understand. You can talk to anyone you choose . . . Daddy said.

I understood he wanted to put the idea of a psychiatrist in my mind. I refused. I have lived with a firm notion that was most probably fed into my mind by something my grandmother said when I was only a child.

Mad people go to psychiatrists, she said when my mother had seen one for a few sessions many, many years ago.

I am not mad. Nightmares or no nightmares, I didn’t want to see another doctor who would try to analyse something I had lived with all my life.

I wanted to keep my life to myself; but the way they look at me, the way they treat me since then—that sympathy, treating me like a little kid who isn’t even potty trained, or as if I were senile, as if I were actually mad—that makes me want to tell them what it really is. I can’t, though I wish I could. But that is not my only reason. I have been misunderstood before. It hurts, but I can live with it. My most pressing reason for wanting to tell it all to them is quite something else and I will come to it in my own time.

Only three people knew what really happened that year in 1997. I am here, one of the three, telling you as things were. But even as we talk, I can feel that alien thing snuggled cozily up in my brain, pulsating, waiting like an unexploded bomb.

I am inclined to believe this urge to talk about that series of incidents, and being able to clearly see them in my mind’s eye today—all this started since the tumour took form in my head and they came to visit me, night after night. It is only a possibility, but one that I am willing to entertain.

I assure you what I went through was as real as this shell of a body I walk around in. Our bodies are real for sure, don’t you think? I mean, wouldn’t it be funny if these turned out to be the delusion?

These days I find myself reading about near-death experiences. I may have to walk through that white light sooner than I’d imagined . . . I read about heaven’s splendour and hell’s fires, and I wonder if I haven’t been through them already . . .

If I am giving you the impression that I think dying is easy, then let me assure you that it’s not my intention. The thought of dying—even after all that I have gone through—is bloody difficult, pardon my language. I am scared. Maybe it is life itself that makes death so difficult, lusting after just one more day to see the mortal world. Or maybe, it’s my hope for normality in the future.

Hope, I tell you, is a very tedious thing to deal with. Many people I have known have ended up bloodying themselves on its razor-sharp edge. Hope—it’s a drug. It makes you feel . . . ecstatic, for a while; promises great things in the future. Embrace me, it says, and I will bring you your paradise. And like all drugs, it deceives and betrays. And yet . . . and yet, you want it even more, always a heavier dose, until your life spirals out of control and the only conceivable way out of the whole mess is the dark, merciful embrace of death.

Oh, damn me! I am rambling again. Sorry. They say I’ve been doing that since the diagnosis. Maybe I just want to get it all out of my system before the devil comes for me.

Anyway, getting back to the point—this isn’t about my current problems or about hope or dying or disappointment. This is only about that year ’97 and what happened then. I know my best friend, Ravneet and I agreed never to talk about it. We decided no one would believe our story.

But none of that matters now, does it?

II

To begin with, I wasn’t born alone. On the 18th of April, twenty-eight years ago, my mother gave birth to identical twins in a Chandigarh nursing home. She gave us popular names of the times, not bothering with tradition. So I became Alisha and my sister, Nina.

I have lived a considerable time now and except for the events of that one fateful day, my memory of my sister is rather vague—flashes of her bubbly, effervescent personality, the fluffy white teddy bear she clung to at night and called Bobo, the pink frock she had been wearing the day we lost her . . . that’s right, Nina was snatched from our lives when we were both six and were studying in the first standard. And before I forget and move on to other things, I must tell you a little about the day she disappeared.

It was a sunny middle-March day and we had some holidays from school. I don’t remember what they were for though; just that we were home on what were working days for adults. Holidays were sometimes tough for my mother, because we were always up to one mischief or another. We were a lot of work, come to think of it, and so we had an ayah called Jassi who helped Mama take care of us.

Jassi came from our ancestral village. She must have been sixteen or seventeen at that time. I remember her floral printed salwar suits and greasy black hair. The scent of the amla hair oil always hung around her in a stifling cloud. More than once, Mama tried to convince her to change her oil and she failed every time. No one ever talked her out of it. Even today when I smell that oil on someone’s hair, I automatically think of her.

On that sunny middle-March day I was talking about, my mother had a terrible headache. She mentioned that at the dining table during lunch as she swallowed a white tablet with water—it must have been a Disprin—and retired to her bedroom. Nina and I quickly gobbled up our lunch with Jassi’s help. We ate aloo parathas that day. I know it’s not really ‘lunch’ food, but we did. I remember because I’ve never eaten them since.

After lunch, we settled on a game of hide-and-seek. The front and back lawns of our house were mostly open space. There wasn’t much to hide behind, so we played in the house. The thing about Jassi was that sometimes, she herself started behaving like a six-year-old. It was hard to imagine she was any older than us, at least mentally. At those times, instead of telling us to hush up and behave, she’d go right along with us and contribute her two cents worth in creating a ruckus. I shouldn’t, however, judge her too harshly. She was a good companion.

So the game began inside the house with three players. We hid behind the curtains and the sofas in the lobby; on the far side of the fridge in the kitchen; behind the dining chairs, under the dining table. I even banged into Bimla, our daytime maid, twice, as she was clearing the dishes from the dining table. Sometimes we hid in our room, slamming the doors as we went. All in all, we were creating a small storm in the house.

Mama tolerated us for quite some time before she finally came out of her room. She ordered us to either take a nap or go out and play in the lawn. Jassi was awarded a scolding, as was expected. I saw her trying to control a fit of embarrassed giggles as Mama chided her.

We chose the second option and filed out of the verandah and into the back lawn. The only structure adjacent to the back lawn was a small laundry room. In it lay my mother’s semi-automatic washing machine, boxes of detergent powder and a collection of tubs and buckets; nothing useful for us there, or so we thought initially.

The trunks of the giant mango trees were too thick and high for us to climb, so we sat on the soft grass in the shade and thought about how we could use, or waste, our afternoon. For a while, no one came up with any bright ideas, so we began with singing—Antakshari.

Antakshari was always subject to cheating. Nina had this odd habit of reserving songs for herself. Whenever I’d sing a good song, she’d tell me to choose another one for she had already ‘chosen’ that one in her mind long before. I could not read her mind to ascertain whether or not she had actually chosen the same song before I did, but I’d just give in. It made me lose the game on most occasions, but somehow, it didn’t quite infuriate me.

So, Antakshari went on for a while until it got really boring and we went to idly plucking tufts of grass from the roots as we heard the birds chirp high up in the