A Useless Interruption: A short story of a girl who thinks that she does not live enough to write about her life.
Photo credit: undefined from morguefile.com
She started with a tentative scratch. A tiny blue line at the top of the page. The tiny blue line would reach out to other blue lines and soon the page would be covered with her beautiful handwriting. Titi stared at the white page. She needed time to think. She had tried to keep pace with her favourite lizard. “You prey – I write”, she had said. But Lizard was eating very efficiently, and she had only one little blue line to show for herself.
“You are R.G. ma’am’s daughter, right?”
“Yes?”
“She told me to take you to the staff room.”
“Ok.”
“Have you heard? A boy in my class tried to commit suicide! The exam’s just two months away! I’m feeling pretty suicidal too!”
“Why don’t you go back to class? No need to come with me.”
The school had found something to talk about. Titi wondered whether she was satisfied. She had at last found something to write about. “Nothing ever happens.” With the point of her compass she had left this little reminder on her wooden desk. Hadn’t she always waited – and with infinite patience? Would anyone have read Anne’s letters to Kitty if she had been a seventeen year old schoolgirl sitting placidly at the bottom of a well?
“Titi, a boy is in hospital. I might not be able to go home with you. S.R. ma’am will take you home.”
“Yes, ma.”
“What a stupid boy! I’ll tell the headmistress – two years back my daughter was in the same situation! Did she try to kill herself? No! Is it my fault that he never managed to score more than 50%? No consideration for anybody! His mother can blame me all she wants. Huh! If she looks hard enough she’ll find a dirty love-letter or something!”
Titi could almost feel the dark circles forming under her eyes. But she couldn’t allow herself to sleep – not now! “I am a seventeen year old paedophile”, she wrote. She wrote the last word with a certain amount of vindictive pleasure, ending the ‘e’ with a flourish. Seven words – forming a lie – he was only two years younger – hardly a child. But wasn’t it better to offend with the lie than try to defend with the truth?
***
Nothing ever disrupted the calmness and purposefulness with which the Ghosh family’s life progressed. Radhika Ghosh was a Maths teacher, in school and at home. Niloy Ghosh was a busy doctor. Their only daughter Tilottama was a pretty girl of varied talents and interests. Every morning, mother and daughter left for school, engrossed in conversations about the importance of breakfast, hard work and good behaviour. Every evening the house buzzed with life. Numerous patients would throng the waiting-room; on the floor above, about fifteen young minds would try to concentrate on a whiteboard. At night, the family sat down to dinner and analysed the day in detail, and special attention was always given to Tilottama’s words and actions.
The news of the attempted suicide deeply affected the Ghosh family. Niloy remembered the child – he had belonged to the Wednesday-Saturday batch – he had once fallen down the staircase. Radhika, worried and angry, was not in a mood to teach, which had never happened before. Tilottama waited in silence. The whole school was uncontrollably excited. Every other day, a student somewhere would commit suicide, but such things had always seemed so remote – until now! Everyone was busy making speculations, depending on his or her own special knowledge.
Tilottama’s best friend Anindita told herself again and again, “I told her not to get involved with him! All that nonsense about love knowing no boundaries! That happens in movies! In real life, you just have to find someone suitable.” Contrary to what her words might suggest, Anindita was a diehard romantic. She truly believed that her friend had fallen in love, and was genuinely sorry for her.
***
Lizard was nowhere to be seen. The triumphant winner, he had retired with dignity. Titi was alone with the seven words that she had written. On a scrap of paper she tried to list all the different kinds of emotions she thought she must be feeling. She persevered until she reached number 9, and then gave up with a sigh.
“Why are you in bed? Don’t you have a test on Tuesday?”
“I’m trying to think.”
“Oh? Is this why you took up Arts? So that you can lie in bed and pretend to work?”
“You can say what you like.”
“Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that! I don’t know what’s wrong with your generation! You are absolutely heartless! All of you!”
“I know! It’s odd, right? We are big black boulders with legs!”
“Keep quiet! You people are so selfish! Did that boy stop to think what would happen to his family if he died? I won’t be doing his sums for him in the final exam! He is dumb and lazy. Whose fault is that?”
Very softly, Titi read aloud to herself – an old paragraph written long ago. It had been written on a particularly memorable day. One of her more grandiloquent passages.
A sentence does not end at the period. It ends with a parenthesis. The unsaid, the inexpressible, the vital phrase that follows it. Unarticulated – rendered invisible by the cloak of the brackets. Those words haunt the sentence. But one can only guess at its existence. One can only speculate what that all-important line means. We look at the speaker with all our eyes; we strain our ears to catch those words. We FEEL! But we are not meant to know.
Titi scowled in dissatisfaction. How juvenile! Of course people said only half of what they meant. She had wasted precious words to state something very obvious. Slowly and deliberately she tore the page away and put it in the dustbin. Everything felt different today. She looked at the seven words on the white page. Soon the white would be beautifully patterned with blue.
“Hello?”
“Did I wake you up?”
“I couldn’t sleep! I was worried about you!”
“Really? But you couldn’t call?”
“You were in hospital!”
“Huh. They let me go. The doctor was such a bas**rd. He said that my mother would be able to take care of me. As if he knows what she is like! However hard I try, I just can’t get away from her! Didn’t I try enough? Thank god that she got tired of bit**ing about your mom and fell asleep, her voice was killing me! Hello? Hello? Titi? Hello?”
Titi looked across the floor at her phone. The back-cover and the battery had come apart, but it seemed unharmed. Titi reread the words that she had produced. With a sudden burst of violence she tore the page to bits and flung it across the room.
__END__
