Chandigarh Literary Society – Annual Short Story Writing Competition- 2023
1st Prize Winner – Jasmeet Dosanjh
She stands in the balcony looking at the rapidly plummeting sun. Things in her life have also been sinking at a similar rate. How she longs for someone or something to comfort her in these trying times. The shrill of the doorbell pierces through her reverie. She opens the door: and there stands the moon, electric cigarette plugged in mouth, silver fumes making a halo around his head. His t-shirt is crumpled in seven precise places, seven shrines on the map of his body that she knows like a song. His hair is lighter now, skin darker with inward living. And to think she had loved this man, devotedly, madly, once upon a lost twilight…
“I would’ve brought you flowers, but…”
She glares ice-blue into his yellow pupils, full of lies. Tell me baby, have you ever given me a pearl, ever put in my hair so much as a rose?
She sighs. This is no time for bitterness. She has understood this man deeply in this life, and adored him with earnest, sparkling eyes. Still his skin buzzes with the ghost of their memories, and when he speaks, she feels faintly as if his voice is coming from within her. Oh, how bodies fade yet their fusing remains- all kinds of love have something latent that is eternal, unchanging. When this love was still young, mindless, running, she would’ve offered him rose wine and fried chicken, and fed him with her own tender, rosy hands.
Now her nails are cracking, spotted white, and there is little light in her inwardly weeping eyes. And joy, she is an old friend, and joy has long departed, never to sit with her again.
“I am sorry, you know, about auntyji,” he says, sober of heart. The acknowledgment of her deepest, most pressing sorrow sends twitching shocks down her lips, and suddenly she is smaller than tile, smaller than bulb, smaller than sweet boy’s callused thumb.
He takes her into his arms, before she sinks into her blueness and fades like a ship falling over the other end of the earth, like a dimly pink evening sun. He blows on her precious tears, letting them swell and freeze like salt crystals: he understands this is her body accepting what her mind already knows. She needs to clean, to empty her crumbling house of grieving: hidden boxes need to open like cadavers and spill.
On her mumma’s chintzy dowry sofa she decomposes, and begins the telling of her lovely private tale: it was only mumma and me, ever since papa… as woman, with own money and own evening life I still could not bear to be away from mumma for even a day. All day I frolicked all young and giddy with fresh life, drank fruity berry cocktails and cool glittering beer, but came home to mumma, always mumma, and had midnight chai in moonshine bowls- she put her cooling soul in my cup and made my hot pot sweet and cold.
Ruined boy’s hands grow like vines over her limp arm, and fill her tired body with strength and life. “I will stay with you,” he says, making her sob with rich, dense passion. “I am here now. I am with you. I am here.”
“I have work tomorrow but…”
“Baby it’s Sunday.”
“Oh… oh. Right. Right, of course. Sunday, oh sweet green day. You know, every Sunday mumma would make me pronthe dripping with ghee. size of the entire tawaa, I swear. Little butter-filled planets, with seasoned onions and potatoes! Oh, oh…” she heaves, pressing her lips tight, as if holding in a river. He squeezes her hands, kisses her dewy forehead, and she comes pouring. “Oh, I miss her. I miss her Bo, I miss her more than life.” She sinks her head deep into his toned, warm breast. Human flesh, oh how it soothes the trembling green soul. She drowns in him, becomes one body: and how he soaks her in, makes her of his own earth. Like this, wet-lipped, lashes thick with syrup of tears, she falls asleep, skin touching skin, of boy from a billion blazing summers ago.
Sunday noon she wakes, rosy from deep inner cleansing. Something of her light has returned to her eyes, something of her lost boy’s strange magic has seeped into her, made her totipotent, luminescent once again. Her hair sparks awake with electric life. She rises from the sofa, and through the glass door of her lately messy kitchen she sees Bo, in peach apron and schoolboy cap, tossing sticky dough from one hand to the other, and with his secret third hand he mashes, looking very silly, huge unpeeled, softened, slippery potatoes in a bowl of chaat masala. She can’t help but smile. She feels him returning, she feels his ghost solidifying into something more human, something she can once again touch with her own hands instead of quietly yearning. And to think, that even in death her mother can make love pool around her, can give her daughter so much of her own magnetic soul.
She quickly washes and puts on makeup, after a long period of convalescence, of bare, unglowing skin, she decides to sparkle: getting ready to eat with boy who once felt like home.
She joins him, and gives him her old lucent doe eyes, thickly lined with Maybelline. He is boyish, really a fool, thick and jerky with his gym-boy hands, but she is filled with adoration: the dough sizzles on amply buttered pan, her new pan, now ruined with sticky burnt dough, but still she adores, summer of eons ago bubbling in her anew.
After eating, and patting swell of belly, she plays mother to sweet boy, slowly returning home to his favourite girl. She has something very important to reveal, a tender confession. Her mouth orange with post-breakfast mossami juice, she sings into his ear: “I prayed for her to go”. He stares, shocked and blue, but understanding. “I begged god to end her suffering. She decayed in my bed for one full year Bo, and her hair fell like fruit. It fell like summer fruit, for even in chemical, cancerous death she was close to nature, and her body lost colour like a dying forest. One day I came home from the office to find her in so much pain, I had to weep to the heavens to take her, to take my mumma’s withering body away from this home. Her time needed to come, Bo, I needed…”
He holds her face, with so much tenderness, that her skin melts like a popsicle in June. The taste in her mouth is chemical and cool. And she loved her mumma, she loved her mumma most in the world.
And second, she loved this boy. Eternal, unchanging.
(This story has won 1st prize at the Chandigarh Literary Society's Annual Short Story Competition 2023)
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