Laila

By Prerna Prakash

She watched the cigarette smoke swirl up towards the dirty ceiling fan. 

As the open window let in a cold draft of air, Karuna crumpled herself into the warm sheets, leaving one arm dangling off the mattress on the ground. Her wrist rested on the floor, next to the makeshift ashtray. This time she’d used a tin can that their dinner had come out of. They didn’t have much in the new house, but if college had taught her anything, it was that everything was an ashtray, just waiting to metamorphose. 

***

She’d arrived in Delhi two years ago, bags in her hand and dreams in her eyes. A small girl from a small town, planning to make a big splash in the bigger city. As soon as she’d stepped off the train, buffeted by the melee, she’d known it wasn’t going to be easy. Where she’d come from, the people were slow, the days were slow, and life was slow—she’d hated every second of it. She had begun preparing for her new life as soon as her phone had pinged with the college acceptance.  

Her first introduction to the city had been a bright, loud chaos. As soon as she stepped off the train, the glare of the station had transfixed her. 

She remembered rubbing her nose, as if it would magically begin working in a new city. She could see the rotting piles of garbage that buzzed with flies in the corners. Guthka stains adorned the walls, reminding her of the time when her art teacher had told her that Pollock was not acceptable material for her final essay. Only Tagore or Hussain. 

As people got off the train around her, she could see the beads of sweat hanging from the tips of their noses, darkening the backs and armpits of their clothing. 

She knew, instinctively, that it was pungent. Somewhere subconsciously, her memory had stored the sting that came with strong smells. She didn’t remember the exact moment that the roses in her garden had stopped smelling fragrant, but the flowers still brought her happiness.

Standing under the well-lit hoarding welcoming her two meagre bags and herself to Nizamuddin Railway Station, she had heard the announcements overlapping each other. The vendors on the platform begged and pleaded the travellers to buy things they didn’t need, despite the late hour. Children screamed and ran after each other, worryingly close to the edge of the tracks, while their parents slept on the floor with sheets shielding their faces from the harsh buzzing of the tube lights. Some other platform had been ushering in another train, its loud whistling dwarfed in the microcosm of sound that blanketed the world around her. 

The sounds had soon jumbled into a steady but loud white noise that swallowed her. The crowd had jostled for footing and she had been pushed to the exit with the tide, where she had caught her first glimpse of the city.

Delhi glittered at midnight in a way that her small town could never hope to. Standing at the cusp of her new home, she’d been mesmerised by the billboards, autorickshaws, and taxis, standing immobile until one angry commuter banged into her. His absentminded abuses brought her back to reality. 

The drivers had been huddled in a huge group at the threshold of the station, shouting at newcomers for their attention and money.

“Come with me, only eighty rupees to the metro!”

“I’ll take you for fifty!”

“Share to Pahadganj for twenty. Best price here!”

At the back, rickshaw pullers slept in the seats of their rickshaws, curled up against the rest of humanity. She had wondered how they could sleep surrounded by all the noise. In the humidity of July, she could almost see the clamour rising into the air with the heat. As her eyes moved up, she couldn’t help but marvel at the sky that was a dull, throbbing red—without stars or clouds—a sea of smog reflecting the millions living and breathing down below. Claustrophobia had clashed with her excitement as she stepped forward, looking for an auto which was further away from the accosting crowd of drivers.

***

Sitting up in their single mattress in the single room they’d begun renting a month ago, she pulled the warmth of the blankets with her, stubbing out the cigarette. The winter had made the windows hard to open, strategic sprinkles of rust jamming the bolt into its groove. She would have liked to keep flowers on the sill, if not in a vase then another tin can, but had been rebuffed when she tried to bring it up.

“They’re just corpses of beautiful things that could not run away.”

Despite her arguments, she always lost. The winning statement always being, “there’s only one window here, how will you smoke? You’ll have to keep moving the flowers.”

***

Her addiction had begun in the first few days of Lit Theory. As Derrida and Spivak frolicked across the pages of her notes, her head began to beg for reprieve every half hour. Cigarette breaks soon turned into waiting for each other near the gate, lighter at the ready, phone buzzing with urgency.

“I’ll be there in a minute, getting out of class.”

“Hurry. Waiting by the panwadi.”

By the time the fourth semester had rolled in, the panwadi knew their names, they knew each other’s secrets, and they couldn’t imagine smoke breaks without the other’s company. As they deconstructed feelings within themselves, a relationship punctuated with laughter and shy glances made home near the college gates. 

The walls of the college were made of red brick, and it was as beautiful as it was tall. They’d stand against it, leaning, while coils of silver smoke escaped their nostrils. She’d learnt how to do that on their second smoke break, laughing as the smoke tickled on its way out. She felt like a dragon and wondered if dragons could smell fire. One of the reasons that she’d never smoked at home was because she always feared what she couldn’t smell. Her friends back home used to wrinkle their noses at the men standing in dark alleys, clutching at bottles wrapped in opaque plastic bags and cheap cigarettes. The first time she’d smoked, she had snuck out of her house with the neighbour’s son, three years older than her in grade twelve, one of the worldlier people she knew. She’d coughed on what he promised was a clove, gulping down the smoke and panicking when it didn’t resurface. He’d laughed and shown her now to do it, kindly sacrificing another one from his precious pack. Later, he’d tried to grab her breasts and kiss her. That was the last night they’d been friends. 

She loved the little pop-up flower shops that adorned almost every street corner in Delhi. She did not know much about the history of flowers until they’d spoken about it after college one night. In the 16th century, when the Mughal emperors came from Persia and Afghanistan to rule India, they brought camel-loads of roses with them. She’d known other people who were studying History, she’d known many people who loved flowers, but none had explained things to her in words that drew such vivid pictures in her mind. They talked about becoming lecturers and writers, and as the summer rolled into winter, Karuna realised that she couldn’t go a day without their now-daily meetings. 

It was the end of that winter that she’d found a red rose tucked into the front pocket of her bag, with a little note that sent her heart fluttering. 

“Will you be my girlfriend?”

***

With a sigh, she looked at the tiny alarm clock that her mother had packed in with her stuff. It was too late to head to class, she’d most definitely missed Feminist Theory, and she did not want to get up for anything else. 

Reluctantly drawing the blanket closer to herself, wrapping her nakedness in the warmth they’d shared only a few hours ago, she stood up. The cold from the floor seemed to travel through her body like a wave, raising goose bumps as it crashed into her scalp, then ebbing and making her shudder. 

She walked to the kitchen, tucking the blanket into itself, fashioning a trailing dress. From the cupboard, she pulled out the packets of tea ma had sent from their little mountain town. She lit the gas and used the same machhis to light another cigarette as the water heated up, much slower than she wanted it to. 

***

A few days after arriving in the city, she’d decided to take a nighttime stroll through her neighbourhood. Her hometown fell asleep as soon as the sun went down, and she never got to get out after dark too much. She loved the night, and she would steal out as soon as she heard her parents snoring in harmony. She used to run down to the banks of the lake near her house and sit in the crisp night, looking at the stars that dotted the sky, looking like a spilt can of glitter across black velvet. 

She’d only been caught once, while slipping back into the house. Her parents had been sitting in her room, stern, all the lights on. They believed her love affair far more nefarious than it actually had been, misconstruing the night sky to some boy in town. They hadn’t believed her that night, and probably still didn’t.

After that night, they’d started locking the doors and hiding the keys in their room. It hadn’t stopped her. She started slithering out of the window, but it took more effort, and soon she was left searching for stars in the small patch of sky between the two buildings that flanked their house. They cared too much, and it had always annoyed her.

She could almost hear her mother, pottering about in the kitchen, talking loudly through the thin curtains as she packed a tiffin. Karuna had been in the last few days of grade 12, and ashamed of her mother’s lovingly wrapped roti sabzi.

“You have to be careful in that city, there is so much crime there. This morning in the paper…it was only Delhi Delhi Delhi. No one is safe there. What a time to live in—it is supposed to be the capital.”  

She’d ignored her mother on principle. 

As she had passed through silent neighbourhoods, she thought about her new college. She’d tried to count the pavement tiles as she thought about the books that she and her father had painstakingly found in the bookshop back home. So many authors she had never heard of, so many intimidating titles. She could not wait to get to the hostel and bust them out—finding a spot where she could make her little library. She closed her eyes and smiled, stifling a yawn. 

Weariness had set into her bones as suddenly as her life had changed. Even though she’d escaped the dreary schedule of her boring life, the schedule still dictated her sleep pattern. 

As she’d made her way back towards the hostel, North Campus had been silent. She’d looked in through the windows of the flats lining the road at silhouettes moving across backgrounds of ochre and beige, and she’d cringed at the loud honks of cars that whizzed past her, breaking her reverie. There had been people on the streets near the hostel, smoking and laughing, obviously students. 

She wondered if any of the girls standing in the multiple large groups belonged to her girls’ hostel. Since moving in, she’d only met a few, and most of them had been older to her, in their second and third years. She’d walked past the laughing groups, head low, looking only from the corners of her eyes. Their short clothes and dark red lips made her want to look back, and the burn of longing pricked her. She looked down at her salwar kameez and hated the dull blue of it immensely, and suddenly.

As she’d collapsed on her makeshift bed in the temporary room, the darkness conjured up images of night skies and beautiful girls, and she rolled over in fitful sleep. 

***

She held her cup of tea close to her face. Listening to the constant chatter of traffic, neighbours, and life surrounding her, she suddenly felt like going back. The small town with its silent alleys tantalised her. Home to Ma. Home to the rose gardens.

Walking to the mattress, she slowly folded into the soft coir, settling into the depression she’d made. Picking up a book from the pile beside the ashtray, she tried reading it, but the words didn’t make sense to her. Her mind was still dwelling on the roses. 

Sighing, she lay the book face-down beside her, and brought the cup of steaming tea closer to her face. She inhaled the hot steam that warmed up her nose. As she sipped, she noticed a small white flower sticking out under the pillow. She reached for it, a bubble of happiness escaped her stomach and seemed to travel upwards, to her throat. Now her lips. 

She smiled. 

Picking up the pillow, she saw two small white flowers—theirs. And a note. 

“I love you.”

Karuna tucked one of the flowers behind her ear, emulating by habit. 

Maybe she didn’t want to go back just yet.

***

When her room had finally been allocated, she’d rushed to the hostel reception, and the disgruntled looking woman behind the splintered wooden slab had given her a key for a single room on the second floor. As she was heaving one of her suitcases up the dingy stairs, a girl with a small white flower in her hair had rounded the corner and stopped. 

“Do you want some help?”

“If you don’t mind. I have another bag down in the hall.”

“Sure,’ she’d said. 

Amidst her struggle to pull the suitcase up one of the stairs, she’d seen a flash of dimples before the girl with the flower put her warm hand on Karuna’s, grasping the handle alongside her. She’d helped balance the bag on the stair, before letting go, leaving Karuna’s hand abruptly colder. 

In that moment, strangely, an intense desire to smell the flower had risen from her gut, travelling to her nose, making it tingle. She’d brushed her nose with the back of her hand, chagrined, and looked down, away from the kajal-lined eyes of the girl staring back at her. “Hi, I am Karuna, I’m on the second floor. Just got assigned my permanent room.” 

The girl grinned lopsidedly, in a way that Karuna would soon embed into memory.

“Hello, I am Laila.”

By Prerna Prakash