Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings (10 page)

“I like to think of it as a talent. You know?”

Ruby gently wiggled her left nostril, as if she was about to sneeze. Then with a quick jerk, she tossed her head back.

“See?” she said. Two streams of blood were shyly inching from her nostrils. She let the blood trickle over her cracked lips and down her chin.

“Wow,” I mumbled. Ruby grinned.

“I think there’s something beautiful about bleeding noses, don’t you?” she said, dabbing delicately at the streams of blood. “Not broken ones, just ones that bleed. Oh and lips that are cut at the corners—I
love
that, it looks so…gothic.”

“Vampirish.”

“Exactly.”

“Starvedandbeatenartist-like.”

“Yeah. Well no, maybe not that.”

“You know, this might not be healthy,” I said. Nosebleeds were delicately serious emergencies in my family. They were connected to something dark and traumatic that was lurking deep within a supposedly healthy body. Ruby glanced at me, carefully cradling the drops of blood in her hand.

“You’re just jealous,” she said quietly.

•

“FAKE nosebleeds, you mean.” Jasmine was very insistent on this point. Making your body do something it wasn’t supposed to was considered artificial in her world. She also didn’t like Ruby very much.

“It was not fake, I saw the blood,” I said.

“So she bleeds on request, big effing deal. I bleed once a month in a far more interesting place, you don’t see me making a big deal about it. Did you know I could flip my eyelids?”

“What?”

“Want to see? I can flip them right now.”

Jasmine began fiddling with her eyelids, twisting and turning them as she assured me she used to be really good at this.

A few minutes later we were on our way to the hospital.

•

While Jasmine shrieked beside me in the cab, I realized that our tolerance to pain changes over time. As children, a little pain isn’t that big a deal. You climb a tree and scrape your knee. You put safety pins through your fingers. You get a nosebleed. This was the special power that Ruby still had. I could see it in the way she cradled the drops of blood in her palm, the way she shrugged off the disgusted stares.

“A lot of people think it’s weird or gross,” she said. “It’s easy to think that, I guess. It’s harder to think it might be something else.”

“A good luck charm,” I said.

“Sure.”

“A rabbit’s foot. A distinction with a bloody nose.”

“Exactly. Not the rabbit one, the other one you said, the distinction one.”

•

Jasmine’s eyelid mishap was the result of manicured fingernails, contact lenses and toxic eyeliner all coming together at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Will I ever see again?” she whispered as I took her home. Her head was sloppily wrapped in yards of thick white gauze with bits of cotton poking out of the sides. At my insistence, the nurse had put Tweety Bird stickers on the lumpy bandages covering her eyes.

“Three days. You’ll be fine in three days; it’s like a scratch on the skin, he said.”

“Three days of darkness.”

“You’ve never flipped your eyelids before have you?”

Jasmine sniffed silently.

“Have you?” I asked again.

“No.”

•

As jealousy flitted behind Jasmine’s Tweety Bird bandages, something extraordinary happened—Ruby tripped.

In a very unGothic turn of events, Ruby’s fuzzy yellow banana slippers stalled during a routine dash down the stairs and remained on the third stair while Ruby went careening down and landed on her face. She did not just break her nose—she smooshed it. The blood ran onto the floor, slithering through her fingers as if it couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

She opened her mouth to scream but ended up hiccoughing instead.

•

It was like watching your friend stare at the manhole that had just swallowed up their last quarter.

“Is it very bad?” I asked gently.

She blinked back tears and nodded.

“Ids breddy bad.”

“Did you tell the doctor about—?”

She shook her head.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, squeezing her hand.

As soon as her nose had healed, Ruby spent an entire afternoon trying to coax a little blood into her waiting palm. She twitched, tossed her head and then she asked me not to stare because it was distracting her. Nothing happened. She sneezed once but that was about it.

We no longer spoke of nosebleeds. It was something silly like trying to flip your eyelids. Now we spoke of important adult things that made us yawn and tap our coffee cups in a preoccupied way. Sometimes I would catch her out of the corner of my eye—she would gently turn her palms up, wiggle her nose slightly and I would hold my breath.

And nothing would happen.

The clock would start ticking again, a lawnmower would hum in the distance and I would pretend to be looking at something else.

Ruby would sigh, crumple up her hands and ask for another cup of coffee.

Murali is tapping his fingers to his forehead, trying to remember something. His shoulders are hunched over and his feet twitch sporadically.

“What? What is it?” I ask.

He sighs and shakes his head. I trace the letter ‘S’ down his back and yawn. When I open my eyes, Murali is gone. I look under the bed and behind the chair. I call out his name but no one answers.

•

“Diya?”

“What? What happened?”

“He’s gone.”

“Who?”

“Murali.”

“What do you mean he’s gone?”

“I mean he was sitting right beside me and I yawned and now he’s gone.”

“Don’t be silly, he probably left.”

“He couldn’t have left, he doesn’t know how to open the door. Meaning it sticks and he can’t get it open by himself.”

“Is this some kind of joke? Do you two have me on speaker phone or something?”

“No, he’s really gone.”

“Listen, call me back.”

•

I begin to tabulate everything I know about him. He is left-handed and has scars on his feet from a bike accident. He collects butterfly wings and hides them between the pages of an empty pocket diary. He never wears a watch. He believes that my door is haunted. Sometimes he thinks there are tiny demon-hands holding it shut. Sometimes he just kicks it and says “Stupid fuck.”

“How come
I
can get it open?” I asked him once.

“Because you’re haunted too,” he said.

I open the window to see if he has fallen out and broken his ankle but he isn’t there.

•

“It’s Diya. Is he back yet?”

“No.”

“Are you high or something? It’s okay if you are but are you sure he was there?”

“I’m sure. I don’t know. I thought he was here.”

“Okay. That’s okay.”

“Diya, I need you to come let me out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t get the door open, it’s stuck.”

“Okay. Okay hold on.”

•

The light dims and bends on the floor like liquid. Murali suddenly seems to be everywhere at once, in coloured bits and pieces. I remember the curve of his teeth, how I sometimes felt like shrugging him off like a heavy overcoat. I think of all the questions people will ask.

Were you the last person with him?

Yes.

How often do you lose things in your room? Have you ever lost a person before? How well did you know him?

I know that he hummed when he peed. I know that as a child, he thought girls came from their mothers and boys came from their fathers.

Was anything bothering him?

He didn’t like my door. He thought it was vindictive and haunted.

Did you make him disappear?

I don’t know.

•

“Hey, it’s me Diya. I’m knocking, can you hear me knocking?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, so how do you want to do this?”

“Pull the door towards you when I say.”

“Ok. Now?”

“No wait. Okay now try.”

“Fuck. What happened?”

“I don’t know. Usually I can open it fine. I don’t know what happened today.”

“Is he still gone?”

“He’s not here. I don’t know what happened.”

“Everything will be okay. I’m going to get somebody to help open the door and then we’re going to figure this out. We’ll go look for him, how about that? I’m sure he’ll be there.”

“Where?”

“We’ll find him, don’t worry. We’ll figure this out.”

•

I picture roots shooting out like sprays of black lightning, anchoring the door into places filled with broken things. I don’t think they’ll be able to get the door open. I don’t think anybody will be able to do anything.

The evening fades into a thick, dark smudge, swallowing the lines and corners of my room. The only thing I can see is my pillow which is lying on the floor. There is no trace of Murali—no fingerprints, no butterfly wings, no notes saying “gone fishing” or just “gone”. It is like he was never here.

I sit beside the door and listen as a forest of broken bones blossoms inside me.

The spider was balled up like a tiny, brown fist in a dusty corner of Ganesan Brothers Private Limited Company. There was no extravagance in its death; just a gentle curl, a folding which no one had seen or heard. Alarmel got up from her table and went to have a better look. The spider’s husk seemed skittish, as if life had weighed it down and it was now ready to tumble away to bigger and brighter things. She pulled out a small notebook and wrote:

Who will brave us when they save us?

We have the beauty of the flowers in case everything else sours.

The cockroach would surely sing if it was made of other things.

At the end of the day, she wrapped the spider in a piece of paper and took it home with her. She decided that she would eventually bury it or place it on her windowsill. Or maybe she wouldn’t do anything at all. For the time being, she put it inside an old Horlicks bottle and looked at it under her table lamp. At first it reminded her of a flower that had closed and had no intention of opening again. Then it reminded her of a lamp that she had seen in a craft store. She pulled out her notebook and wrote:

A sneeze like a spider all tied up inside her.

Love is like a butterfly that turns and tumbles in the sky.

For a split second, Alarmel wondered if she was a poet. She thought she probably wasn’t since none of what she had written made any sense. Maybe I’m a senseless poet, she thought to herself. She looked at the bottle and heard something blossom at the bottom of her heart.

•

During the next few days, Alarmel scoured the office and found two moths, a bee and a handful of caterpillars that seemed to have died in a cluster. She added them to the bottle and wrote:

In the room the women come and go, don’t ask them why ‘cause they don’t know.

My love is like a redred rose that’s drowned beneath the garden hose.

Things out of season in a garden become like reason and start to harden.

What is this life if full of care we have nothing to eat or wear.

The bottle no longer seemed like a bottle; in fact, Alarmel thought it looked more like a bubble filled with legs and broken chest cavities. She felt less inclined to bury it now. It seemed like an entirely new entity that had grown out of shards of exoskeleton and bent phrases.

One morning, when there had been very little in the way of dead insects, the man who sat at the next table suddenly jumped up, his arms flying out like he was holding the world back from some large and imminent danger.

“Look,” he said, pointing into the binding of an accounts ledger. Nestled inside was the carcass of a large, fat silverfish, almost the size of Alarmel’s thumb.

“It’s just a silverfish, Velu,” said Alarmel, as she carefully slid her pencil tip under it and scooped it up.

“I’ve never seen one so big, have you?” said Velu. “I thought it was a lizard, dirty bugger. Just toss it out the window.”

“Yes, alright,” said Alarmel as she folded it carefully into a piece of paper. That evening she dropped the silverfish into the bottle where it promptly crumbled to pieces. She wrote:

A silverfish in a silver dish.

Behold the long and short of it—sometimes jasmines smell like shit.

•

Velu always came to work breathless and disoriented with beads of sweat dripping down his nose and forehead. It would take ten minutes and an entire bottle of water for him to find his bearings and Alarmel often wondered if he ran all the way to work. The next morning, after sweating profusely under the fan and downing his morning bottle of water, Velu turned to her.

“So you threw that silverfish out?”

“I took it home.”

“For what? You keep fighter fish?”

“Yes,” lied Alarmel.

“I heard they eat mosquitoes.”

“They eat anything.”

“Really? You mean like rice?”

“No, insects. He eats anything that’s dead.”

The next day, Velu brought her a large, green dragonfly with a string attached to its tail.

“I was flying this last evening,” said Velu. “I used to fly them all the time when I was a boy. We would all go to the river and catch them by the tail and then fly them on the way to school. Will he eat it?”

“Who?”

“Your fighter fish.”

“Oh yes,” said Alarmel, folding the dragonfly into a piece of paper. “He’ll eat anything.”

•

Every morning Velu brought her something different—a large black spider, a broken rainbow beetle, a butterfly with a torn wing. Velu would place them on her table like flowers and tell her how he was bitten by a scorpion when he was a boy, how his uncle had died of snakebite. Alarmel would fold each insect into a piece of paper and write things like:

For now the way is very clear for measuring the atmosphere.

Shells and ships travel in clips and crash against our fingertips.

The bottle was now a clogged and crumbly mess of bodies, some of which had completely turned to dust. Alarmel bought a sheet of white foolscap paper and copied down everything she had written so far in her notebook. Instead of listing the phrases, she let them run into each other like an unending train of words. When she was finished, she read it back and realized it made absolutely no sense. Sometimes it was awkward, sometimes it was just plain silly.

But on the whole, it was the most perfect thing she had ever read in her entire life.

•

The next morning, after Velu had given her a handful of ladybugs, Alarmel handed him the piece of foolscap paper, neatly folded into a white square.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Just read it and tell me what you think.”

“Is it your resumé? Are you looking for another job?”

“Nothing like that, just read it.”

Alarmel waited for him to read it during the day, then reminded him about it before he went home. The next morning, Alarmel came in early and waited. People came in and looked at her with a smile and raised eyebrows—“You’ve come early!” they said and she nodded and said yes, I came early. As usual, Velu arrived drenched in sweat, his eyes popping out of his face. He drank deeply from his water bottle then came to her table and pulled up a chair.

“I’m so sorry,” he said and began wiping his face.

“Why, what happened?”

“See my friend Prabhu had to book train tickets—his parents are going to Tirupati. Have you been there?”

“No.”

“I haven’t either. Not recently anyway, got my first head-shaving done there, when I was little. Anyway he needed to write down their names because they changed the spelling recently, numerology you know. You believe in numerology?”

“No.”

“I don’t either. Anyway he took that paper to write on and never returned it. He didn’t return my pen either. It was a nice one, gel tip. I am very sorry, I hope it wasn’t important.”

Alarmel said it wasn’t and Velu placed three coconut beetles on her table and left. Alarmel began to feel things shift inside her head. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the dead insects in the bottle were just dead insects in the bottle. By lunch time, Alarmel decided that if she pulled out her notebook again, it would be to make shopping lists. She wouldn’t even look at dead insects. She would become a productive person, join a computer course and walk briskly for thirty minutes every day, breathing deeply with full lung capacity. She would do embroidery in her free time and go to the temple every morning. Most importantly, she would bury the insect jar the minute she got home. That evening, Alarmel sat in front of the bottle, hands folded, writing absolutely nothing. Before going to bed, she told herself that she would bury the bottle tomorrow.

The next day, Velu arrived with a noolpuzha honeybee. It was curled in the palm of his hand, like it was asleep.

“Very small, no?” said Velu. “I thought it was a fly and hit it with a newspaper. He eats bees?”

“Who?

“Your fighter fish.”

“He’s dead.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I don’t know. I came home and he wasn’t there. I mean he was dead.”

“He probably jumped out of his tank.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes they do that. Don’t worry, you lose something, you find something.”

Alarmel watched Velu walk back to his table and thought:

When I die, don’t bury me, just throw me in the sky and see if I can fly.

She opened her notebook and made a strict note to herself not to write any of that down.

•

Against her better judgment, Alarmel took the honeybee home. She placed it in front of the bottle and thought:

A poet is like a jar that has gone too far.

Honeybees are full of fleas.

She gently pulled the honeybee’s wings off and placed it on the end of her finger. For some reason it reminded her of a kitten.

Smitten with stinging yellow kittens.

No, no, Alarmel said to herself. Computer courses. Pray with furrowed brow and promise God that you will walk briskly and breathe with complete lung capacity. Above all, make it a point to make sense.

The tiny bee seemed to be edging along her finger and Alarmel thought she heard a rustling coming from the jar. It seemed like all the wings and legs and abdomens were shuffling together while the bottle swelled like a transparent balloon. Alarmel closed her eyes and saw words slipping across the back of her eyelids:

What is it about the sun that makes it burn for everyone?

Beneath the yawning velvet bee the village smithy broke his knee.

Crumbly is as crumbly does to forget about what crumbly was.

Take computer courses with full lung capacity, Alarmel murmured to herself. Pray to everything that walks briskly and sensibly.

Alarmel opened her eyes and saw that the bottle was neither rustling nor swelling. The bee however, had disappeared. Alarmel looked for it on the floor, inside her clothes and then inside the bottle in case she had dropped it in without thinking. After an hour, she was forced to come to the conclusion that she must have inadvertently eaten it.

•

The next day, Alarmel spoke to a colleague about computer classes, noting down course structures and module formats that cluttered up her notebook like a cloud of gnats. Whenever she found herself thinking of insects, she pulled out a piece of paper and did long division. Velu came at lunch and patted her table reassuringly.

“You lose something, you find something, no?” he said.

“I didn’t lose anything.”

“Your fish died—isn’t that a loss?”

“Oh yes. Yes it is.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper that looked like it had been washed.

“And see what I found? I said Prabhu forget the pen, I can buy a new pen. But you better find that paper. I mean it wasn’t even mine—what if it was important? What if it was a will?”

“It wasn’t a will.”

“Anyway, it got washed but I could still read it. He said to say he was sorry.”

Velu smoothed the paper out on the table and pulled up a chair.

“So what is this exactly?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t think it was a story because there are no people. Unless this is a story without people. Is it?”