Monalisha Dash Dwivedy
The dust of difficult times is still lingering. My shadow knows how to dust off, not my body. My day starts with a things-to-do bucket list, steering caterpillar lines, scampering through a barrage of quizzical glances sizing me up, pot-bellied shoves – a silicon world of masked faces glaring menacingly at my burnished brown skin. My night slips into a tar can leaving me alone with the moon. The honey gold Calvados loiter on my lips like his passionate kiss last night when I suddenly felt like someone else who happened to know so many things about me, like my preference for subways over cars and how often when surrounded by strangers, I felt I have met each of them somewhere. There are days I wear only to dust, hear only dust, taste only dust. I touch nothing and want nothing to touch me.
Unlike many Canadians, I am yet to learn how to drive. Instead, I walk a lot. Teenagers bounce past me, eating salty potato chips and drinking fizzy sports drinks from the bamboo buddha Chinese restaurant. The girls brighten up like Pina-colada checking the latest social media posts. They live normal life. I cannot.
From thousand miles away in India, my mother calls to tell me dad is glued to newspapers -the obituaries are his favorite section. Sometimes he would recognize someone and go into a world of nostalgia, pain, and shock. The last time Neha saw her father awake; it was through the glass at a hospital. When Sharma’s uncle from New Delhi sensed death approaching, his body was moved to the garage where he was administered Ganga Jal. A hospital allowed Naaman to die in his mother’s arms as he was only two.
I lost count of my fingers, how death approached like a swift sword, wiped out people known to me. So I try to obey all social distancing rules and continue to write in the first person. But the mind is still a whirlwind, a volcano, like a monster seething with revenge. Seasons have lost their meaning. Reality is breathless as If jogging with a fever. Yesterday’s humidity still clutches at me. My sense of time tells me to travel back in time, prevent the birth of Hitler, destroy Wuhan’s laboratories and stop Gandhi’s sleeping experiments with his eighteen-year-old grandniece.
I open the windows wide. The wind teases my nostrils with soft fire roasting kebabs in light butter, followed by a heavenly aroma of biryani cooking in an earthen pot, the essence of kewra, and delicious meat from a neighbor’s kitchen. I try to meditate on the smell and slowly slip into a dream.
When all is right with the world, I would open the door of my sea-facing home. Soaking in the lap of twilight, I will allow a thunderstorm to seek solace in me. I will promise the waves that I am always there for them, no matter what.
(The Author lives in Toronto, Canada. Views expressed are personal)
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