Haemophilia

By Prerna Munshi

“You look delectable in this red shirt!”, she offered him an unabashed compliment. They had just minutes ago, bumped into each other at the rave party. There was hardly anything audible. unless one screamed his way into another’s eardrum.

“Nikhil”, he extended a warm hand.

“Quite a compliment, that!”, he laughed into her ears.

“Alisha!”, her voice upright. “Nice to meet you. Do you mind a moment out of this ruckus?”

“Absolutely, I have been finding one!”

They dodged the people around and made their way out of the wilderness inside. And accompanying them, were their glasses, still full.

Morning was at its wee hours. The party had roared throughout the night. The portico opened to the beech. The remains of the night still coloured the sand and the sea.

“Its quiet here!” , she said.

“And relieving too!”, he left a sigh of relief.

Holding her glass of her drink and looking at his , she asked “A non drinker, huh! What have you been doing at a party like this?”

He smiled. “Friends, you know. They drag you down to hell.” “I see!”

“But what brings you here!”, he couldn’t contain his amusement. “Habit”, she laughed.

They walked along the shore for another ten minutes when Nikhil was called by his friend.

They left for the party again, exchanging just their names and a heart warming break from the doped revelry.

And that was that. That was how they began meeting and things took the course. The usual course it takes from being strangers to being acquain- tances to being friends, to being closer friends, to being lovers. Soon, a brief courtship ended up in a marriage.

“Alisha, how do you bear to see all this bloodshed and eeww! Please…..Please change the channel! I can’t stand it a moment longer.”

“What! I find it so interesting!”, she snatched the TV remote off his hands, and reset it to the last channel.

“You will enjoy it too.” She advised him, her eyes still glued to how the man was skinning the animal off and butchering it to pieces. “Its so infor- mative. Don’t you see?”

“No!”, he retired to the bedroom. “Good night!”

The next morning, as they hurried to their offices, Alisha offered him an apology. “I sat by the TV till late. I shouldn't have. I wonder why I watch such programs, they are stupid!”

“INFORMATIVE was your word last night!” , he chuckled.

“To hell with them! I had nightmares.”, she was feeling nauseated at the thought.

“Hahaha. So you get your lesson? Hurry up! We are late!” He rushed her to her stop.

“Ciao!”, her eyes lingered on him for awhile. “Buy me something red tonight.”, she left a sly smile.

Nikhil found it all in good taste. He had loved Alisha for she was a a kind of her own, leaving him at wonders, at mysteries, at dead ends and he was besotted enough to chase her.

The evening, he brought her a bunch of red roses. The look on her face was not hers. She had become somebody else just at the sight of them.

“Red drives me crazy, you know!”, she blatantly confessed. “How I love them!! They are a different Red, no?” , her eyes were shining a different radiance.

“I will buy red curtains for the bedroom tomorrow, red carpets for the floor. Why don’t we paint the walls red?”

“Alisha! They are already red.”

“No. Not this shade. A darker one!” , she bitterly snapped at him.

“What obsession you have! Sit down. Let’s eat outside! Are you listening at all? Alisha… I am talking to you.”

She was busy arranging for a vase for her roses. “You should have bought more of these bunches. How lovely they look! ‘Lovely’ is not even the right word. Everything that’s so gorgeously beautiful is ‘delectable’ for me!”

“Oh yes! That was the first word anybody had offered to me as a compli- ment”, he winked and tried drawing her close to him.

She withdrew, all the while, murmuring to her roses.

Through all these years of knowing her, Nikhil could never find an answer to a few of her strange streaks. Neither did he too long ponder on those nor he felt they were so important an issue to be dwelt forth.

“Buy me a pet, Nikhil. The home is boring otherwise.”, came one of her sudden urges.

“I don’t like pets. They are repugnant.”

“What is wrong with you! They make a house all the more liveable. And what do we anyways do after office? Its a tired place, this place that you call home. There is no one to talk to.”

“What will you talk to a pet about? Alisha, you silly woman. Talk sense. And let me work . I have this presentation to make.”

“Work is always your excuse. I too work but I have a life beyond…that I struggle to keep alive. And please don’t offer me your suggestions to hang around with family and friends. I have had enough of them.”

“What are you turning into, Alisha? A recluse? Why don’t you socialise? You badly need to.”

“Don’t lecture. I need a pet. That’s all. You don’t have to delve into my unsociability!”

“Buy one for yourself. I don’t care.”

The next day, in the evening, Nikhil was welcomed home by

his wife and a purr… a white kitten. It looked at him with its soporific eyes, its body fixed in Alisha’s severe embrace.

“So, you bought this.” , Nikhil came rather indifferently. “Mea. Not ‘THIS’ ! ”, she rectified him.

“Dogs are better…way better… What do cats do other than sneaking a chance to find better owners?”

Alisha evaded. Nikhil knew she was incorrigibly determined.

And Mea became Alisha’s partner. Rather, it was Alisha, acting a pet to Mea.

“Can’t you leave it for a while? You just have to toy around with a new obsession every now and then! That’s it, Alisha.”

“I love her. She has given me a whole new world that you could never.”

“Don’t compare me with that damned cat! Speak some sense for God’s sake. Your world revolves around this ball of fur? Mine doesn’t. I am still in my right minds!”

Arguments over Mea went more frequent. Her love for the animal was reaching delirious heights when one day, Nikhil, didn’t find her with the cat. He found it a little too hard to believe but Alisha was sitting all by her- self, engrossed in her works.

Throughout the day, Alisha, firm and composedly sat with her chores and there was not a hint of the cat around her. Not even its feline smell. He didn’t bother to ask about it. He was, anyway, relieved.

The night, Nikhil smelled a rot somewhere. He followed it to the kitchen store room. The bad odour got worse. He thought it must be a rat. He turned on the lights only to discover Mea hided off, her head crushed , throat slitted.

Nikhil was catatonic.

He turned to leave only to affront her, transfixed by the look in her eyes. “Sss…shsshee is d..deaad!”

“Nikhil, I killed her. Don’t worry.”

He could only believe his ears. She was not Alisha…somebody else in her embodiment.

“You were right! Cats are never loyal. I couldn't bear it. I fed her. I played with her. I loved her. And see this was what she did to me. She clawed me.

See”. She lifted her right forearm at him to show the claw marks, the cat had left on her skin.

“And then she whiled away in every house around, in my absence. She was mine…just mine… my toy … but everyone played with it…so I thought I would better break it! Are you happy now?”, the neuroticism started ringing in her voice, her eyes sparkling at what she considered a feat.

Nikhil nodded a yes in utter horror and bewilderment. He knew his wife needed a treatment. What he didn't know was … it was already too late.

The next day, Nikhil left for a psychiatrist. Told her about all his wife’s symptoms. Dr. Martha, a leading psychiatrist in the city, had an uncommon dexterity in handling such cases.

“No. Its a terrible idea to bring her to the hospital. You can’t break it to her yet that there’s something wrong with her. We have to go very slow. Usual- ly, patients of this kind, torment themselves, are distraught and behave in ways more than normal that it becomes nearly impossible to make a diag- nosis. You need her to believe that everything’s fine with her. You need to make her talk about it! Medicines, come much later in this. First, we need to make the patient as articulate as possible about their inherent fears, their suppressed insecurities, about their repressed angers. You need to liberate her first.”

‘I get it, Doctor. But, its hard.”

“It is. But, you need to be patient. You can’t lose her to madness. Devise your own method. I can only offer you a set of instructions on how you can.”

“Alisha, why did you quit work? You were good at it!” She cocked an eye at him.

“I don’t want to talk about it. I wanted to spend more time home.”

“Alone?? Don’t you want a child to make you feel more home?”

The glance in her eyes softened. “Nikhil, I would always want that but then I think I am not yet ready. I can’t seem to make up my mind. Some- times, I feel, there is a problem with me but I can’t identify. At other times, I feel I am alright. Now that you are around, I feel alright…completely in charge of myself.”

Nikhil embraced her. “You are completely alright. Don’t stress yourself much!”

“You’ll always stick around, won’t you? Even when I fall apart?”, she snuggled into him.

“Rest assured. Always!”

The treatment had begun without her knowledge of either her disease or the medication.She showed positive signs of recuperation. Medicines were added secretly to her food. Nikhil ensured he didn’t leave a trace of doubt anywhere.

One day, Dr. Martha called on his number. Nikhil was in the bathroom and couldn't attend. Alisha picked the phone up. A little doubtful on who this ‘Dr. Martha’ could be. What has Nikhil to do with her? She turned the an- swer key on, without uttering a Hello.

“Hey Nikhil! Can’t hear you. Is it you?” Alisha managed a “yes” in a hoarse voice.

“Your voice is not clear but listen to me. While going through a few case studies, I feel your wife has haemophilic tendencies apart from the usual psychotic syndromes she is showing. Haemophilia, you understand? Not the genetic disorder. If you break the word, ’Haemo’ is blood for Latin. ‘Philia’ is love…She has an affinity for blood and the color red excites her to an uncertain delirium. Do you hear me?”

Alisha disconnected the call. She understood what was going behind her knowledge. She was under a psychiatric treatment. As a psychotic case herself. She felt ridiculed at and betrayed. By no one else but her husband, the one she trusted the most on! Why did he never tell her? What if, he was seeing somebody else!      What if, he had had enough of her and was trying to prove her mad and run away with that excuse! What if, she really were a psychotic case, why would anyone ruin his life with someone like that! Such hundreds of contradictory thoughts did their dizzying rounds in her mind…like a whirlpool. And when her mind could bear no more, the questions, as if sucked up in a vacuum, narrowed down to a single conclu- sion… “Nikhil would leave me, in any case. I can’t let him go.”

He came out of the bathroom and could make nothing of her nervous eyes. She left for the kitchen.

Unable to make any sense of her, he followed her.

“What are we eating today?”, he tried looking amused.

She turned.“You are bleeding here”, she ran her finger on his cheek, her feverish eyes spoke of nothing but were glued to the little trail of blood.

“Its the razor again! I should change it”

She looked at him dazed, an avid neuroticism rose within her . She was tempted at how his skin radiated a plush red…the veins that throbbed be- neath…she was tempted to slit them apart…to see his enchanting red…

“Alisha. Why do you look at me like that? What’s on your mind?”, he winked slyly.

She drew him close, held her arms around his neck. “Dee..lect..able”, she whispered into his ears and jabbed the kitchen knife into his stomach and lunged it inside a few more times. She closed his mouth with her hand to not let him shout. With every second, he grew weaker, his choked shrieks, a whimper, his shocked pupils dilating to an unconsciousness, blood oozed from his gut like a spring, clot-less, as if haemophilic, forming pools right under. His body collapsed on the ground, flexing into terrible convulsions. She kept his mouth close.

“Easy! Easy. We are almost done.”

He could hardly defend, hardly believe. And it was a moment’s torment, now a morbid lull.

When her neuroticism was fed, she apathetically walked across the body, cleared herself off all the blood, the mess that she had become, cleared away every single trace of his blood except the drops that hung thickly on the knife, that she meant to keep with her as a souvenir, to remind her of the undaunted feat, she had just accomplished.

It was a cold wintery morning and to give this accomplishment, a charg- ing, she felt she needed to feel the air and the crowd…to bask in the glory of what she had done. She wore the best of her attires, applied the best of her cologne, locked the door behind and left for a cup of cordial frothing coffee to sedate her excited nerves.

She sat in the Starbucks cafe, sipping her coffee and staring out of the window. The blood-stained knife lay next to her handbag, covered with her blue silk scarf.

By Prerna Munshi