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I have the following in consecutive pop-ups on my phone: “Teenage girl assaulted in caste encounter,” “10 tips to boost ecommerce SEO,” and “Influencer displays tanned legs in the Maldives.” They say Google recommendations are based on one’s interests, but the last time I read up on caste was for a seventh-grade, deeply problematic assignment on Hinduism and it is a matter of principle with me to never set foot in tourist traps. From my window I see dumpsters and a man in a black slicker tipping bins full of new trash into them. Someone on a bike nearly runs into him – he stumbles, holds on to the bin by a whisker and screams “Fuck!” as half the contents spill out. I prepare my breakfast in the kitchen, layers of sliced meat and cheese on day-old bread that I get for cheap at the supermarket. My mother reminds me every day to eat healthy, but my body has been out of balance for too long – if I go green now, my system won’t know how to take it.
*
Excerpt from my neighbour’s new book: “She tossed her head back, stretching her neck and leaning back on her elbows to relieve any cricks, and that was when she felt it at the back of her throat – the unmistakable taste of bile. Caught by surprise she swallowed – quickly, automatically, and felt it go down, the tepid sour-sweet liquid, no more than a small mouthful but enough to unnerve her.” My neighbour has been releasing a book on Kindle every other month for the past four years and has tailored down to an art form the ability to stretch out for sentences what others might wrap up in a few words. She claims to have won awards for her writing, and when I looked her up afterwards I saw it was true. She has won awards, three of them, all from a publication based somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia that doesn’t show up on Google Maps. It is suspected that she is not actually a student and thus does not belong in this building. Face-wise she could be thirty, but then age is a tricky business. I was suspected myself of being under sixteen the first time I went to buy a bottle of wine.
*
I use the patch of clean counter beside the stovetop to roll my dough, dusting my fingers with flour first as the Internet said to. The dough always rises, in its defence, and having risen refuses to be felled again however assiduous the onslaught of my rolling pin. In all the videos I have seen about rotis they always cut to the part where things are nice and circular, as though someone had waved a wand or pulled a 3D-printing trick and there it was, the perfect flatbread, guaranteed to fluff up over a flame and be unstintingly amenable to the scooping up of lentils. In the end I throw golf balls or patty-cakes of the dough into the oven and bake until puffy. I have friends who would be deemed unfit for marriage on this count.
*
From the girl in the room opposite mine I learn a new word – dépaysement. In essential terms it means homesickness but it is more along the lines of being uprooted, of drifting in space, and only someone reared on the language would know how to use it and when, the exact sequence and coincidence of events that would call for the use of dépaysement over all its synonyms. “What he feels when I’m not around, that’s dépaysement,” she laughs. The he in question is her Caribbean boyfriend, about whom she talks with the certainty with which one might talk of one’s birthday. Dépaysement, I practise in the shower, and get the accent wrong each time.
*
I visit museums around once a week, as much for the fact of their being free as for an interest in art. As a child I could spend hours looking at paintings, but there is a sarcophagal sameness to all these Old Master renditions and even the best of them have eyes that see no good in you and make that plain. You, I say to an early Bruegel, you would only be valued by someone looking to never get a night’s sleep again. The thought trails into a fantasy where someone gives their enemy the Bruegel as a form of slow revenge, like arsenic, seeping into the recipient’s mind and keeping him up night after night until he kills his lover and then himself. Back home I seek out my neighbour and tell her about it, saying that maybe she’d like to spin it into a psychological thriller of sorts. Her face puckers up and she shakes her head. “It’s too commercial,” she says. “It’s not literature.”
*
I have been coming home to cigarette butts in my sneakers and under the pillow for about three weeks now. I mistook the first one for a bug, and indeed it was about the size of one, dull and lonely. I have confronted the lady who comes in to clean once a week – no, was all she would say, shaking a fresh one out of a Dunhill pack, no. She is past forty, heavy in the bottom, straw-haired, lines across her face like someone inked them in. At the same time I remember that the butts in my room are Marlboros.
*
They mistreat the cat that lives down the corridor. Every night I hear it yowling, often for minutes on end, and during the day it is silent, presumably recovering. I try to tempt it out with tongue clicks and meows and a helping of milk in a saucer, but to no avail. Perhaps it knows that lactose is in fact bad for cats and thus refrains.
*
My visitor seems to have switched loyalties. The butts today are not Marlboro, but Player’s.
*
I think of a new use for an old shirt – curtain. I take the allocated ones down and knot a row of unwashed upper-body-wear along the rail by the sleeves. I pay some attention to aesthetics, putting them as much in the sequence of the rainbow as I can, but my only green shirt is currently serving time as foot wipe and so I use something black with turquoise piping in its stead. Between the mustard yellow and the cerulean blue it looks subdued, as though aware of the insufficiency of its greenness. I test my handiwork by sniffing – the smell is there but only faintly, a sweat-dust hybrid, thinned out by dispersion enough to be unpinnable to any one source. And I can use the allocated curtains as extra wraps.
*
The girl in the room opposite mine does not take public transport on principle. She walks everywhere, even if it is at the opposite end of town, and lives off mostly to-go meals on that account. Automobiles are killers, she maintains. Her legs are lead pipes encased in lycra, as thick in the thigh as in the calf. I recommend strength training to avoid muscle wastage; she pulls out a statistic about how strength training is bad for women. She is pale, the girl, and has no breasts to speak of. I once caught her doing ballet moves in her room wearing nothing but stockings and a little white band of cloth around the waist.
*
Excerpt from my neighbour’s next book: “It was a dismal state of affairs by any account, and yet it could have been worse. She could have been flipped out head-first instead of feet-first and landed with her nose in the bog below. She could have caught on a tree branch and dangled all night like an old dress. She could have fallen upon the back of a cow who would have jumped over the moon with her.” Are there links between each book, I ask, connecting themes, bigger questions of some kind. It’s absurdism, she informs me coolly, there are no themes. “Everything’s fucked up. Absurdism is the only way out. If you read my blog,” she adds pointedly, “I talk all about it.” There is an ashtray full of safety-pins on the kitchen counter that I am debating ways to help myself to, but right then a flatmate comes out of her room and picks it up. “We need more chess pieces,” she says to no one in particular as she retreats.
*
Classes at my university last anywhere between two and five hours, and the teachers follow a version of the Pomodoro technique in which we all take a break every hour and regroup five minutes later. Everyone else has their established friend groups; for myself there is the coffee machine, riddled with buttons, by which I can conjure a triple macchiato grande should I wish. One can drink or eat in class as much as one likes, the focus being on the lessons learned rather than whether or not one’s mouth is full. At the schools I went to, public humiliation was the norm – woe betide the first-grader who raised a bottle of water to her lips without asking. It is only when we file back into class that I remember the test. I am handed a page with a column of questions, each with four choices. Players of Russian Roulette would be glad of their odds being 25% – I am unable to be glad, but I am at least less ruffled. I start to tick.
*
I have been located by a student who speaks my language. She swoops upon me with a gush of it and carts me off to the campus bistro for lunch. She speaks German well enough, but rolls her eyes at me the moment the cashier’s back is turned. “So guttural,” she says, using the accepted term among us foreigners for the language. I state that I have not learned any yet; she nods in approval. “Hold on to your cultural pride,” she advises. As she munches on a cheese roll and talks about her PhD I try to place her geographically in relation to myself, her name being the sort that could belong to any of the states. My sandwich arrives and she wrinkles her nose. “You eat pork?” “This is beef,” I say, watching myself fall in her estimation. She eyes me without speaking through my first three bites and then shakes her head. “You’ll end up like one of them at this rate,” she says, inclining her head towards the cashier.
*
There is a homeless artist at the university metro stop every night after seven. Tonight he is spray-painting a monkey on the station wall. The monkey stands at least eight feet tall and has plantain-size ears and an angry red penis. The artist moves without pause or visible breath, switching one can for another as arms might protrude and retract on a machine. I let two trains get by as I watch him work and it is only the sleepy heralding of the last train for the night that unpins me. As I leave he is adding a spurt of flowers to the monkey’s head with fat wavy petals, like worms.
*
It is nice to not have to check the train seats for betel-leaf juice before sitting.
*
Today my visitor has been smoking weed. I find the end of the joint under the pillow and unpick the paper, crumbling the still-warm leaves between my fingers. With weed my attachment is a childish one, born of the popular associations with artistic thought and higher states of being, and while my own trysts with it had been dull in the extreme, who knows that my visitor may not have cracked the code? The girl from down the hall on the right is eating a burrito in the kitchen and shakes her head when I ask if she’s seen any outsiders around. “I just returned five minutes ago,” she says. She is about to retreat when she turns back. “Have you seen my jade brooch?” “I saw you wearing it two days ago.” She frowns, shrugs and enters the bathroom as I begin to peel a carrot, patting my pocket first to ascertain that the brooch is where I put it.
*
I remember in the middle of dough-making that there is a Project Management presentation on Friday. I check my phone for messages and there they are, sixty-seven of them, on the chat group I have muted, mentions of me followed by where-are-you and can-you-please-respond-asap. The other people in the group are all from Madrid and speak exclusively in Spanish, planning each project their own way before switching to English and assigning me the introduction or the conclusion as one might assign a visiting cousin the smallest bedroom. We are supposed to meet at three and it is two-forty-five now. I cover the dough with a towel, check my T-shirt for obvious wrinkles and head out.
*
The girl down the hall on the right has a boyfriend. I have seen the backs of his head and arms, both scabby. She seems to like projecting a life independent of him – the few times we have talked, she has mentioned night runs, fish fingers and the difficulty of maintaining a white lab coat. The girl in the room opposite hers is the youngest of us and has only ever been with a man once. “Someone from school,” she confesses, “he’d moved away when he was fifteen and I ran into him again just last month, at the movies. And it was so good, what we felt, it was like ‘where have you been all my life’, you know? But then it got weird after that first time, so we kind of stopped.” There is something appealing about her breathy candour, and I contemplate making a friendship of it. She goes on, however, to talk of the many classmates from her college who found rooms in the same building and how they were planning a hike that weekend. “You can join us if you like!” she offers nicely enough. I observe the passive slump of her shoulders and decline.
*
I take on average twenty minutes to shower, singing first a Whitney Houston and then a Jonas Brothers song, one ear on the alert for knocks on the door. We have a single bathroom and a cupboard-sized kitchen among the four of us, and yet I cannot recall ever not having either of them free when I needed it. It’s as though the other three know what I am like and are punishing me for it this way, by giving me a wide enough berth to do what I do but also to make me second-guess myself, to keep me always on my toes while showering or cooking about whether or not I’m taking up someone else’s space. I imagine the whispered conferences when I am not around, about the way I speak, the way I walk, the way I hold pens between my forefinger and middle finger when I write. On the latter I have been quizzed ever since I was a child, but what is one to do, reflexes like that can’t be unlearned. Or can they? I search for YouTube videos on the topic and find them all circling around the theme of ‘how to fix your handwriting’. The notion that I need to be fixed is repellent and I switch to the new album from Kaleo. From thence to acrylic pours, to fried rice techniques, to interviews with James Corden, to goats attacking truckers, to scenes from Jurassic Park. It is past four when I sleep, and past ten – two hours into my finance mid-term test – when I wake up.
*
Someone has left an empty jar of face cream on the kitchen counter. I wait a day and a half before slipping it under my top and darting back into my room. The Internet calls it a coping mechanism, a response to unacknowledged trauma. I prefer to think of it as a found art project – things I take from street sides, from open surfaces, from bathroom sinks where people have left them behind. It will be a statement someday, I promise myself as I sift through the bagful of finds I have gathered so far, even though the part that evades me is what that statement will be. A local flavour will likely be involved, a way to fix it temporally and spatially as representative of my life. Only yesterday, however, I removed a picture postcard of the parliament house swiped from the bulletin board in my classroom. No cliches, I had told myself as I tore it up. And all at once with a not-unpleasant shock I see what my neighbour meant that day about the Bruegel story being too commercial. I put the bag away and open her blog on my laptop, a mostly-black webpage titled somewhat ominously “Thoughts From The Deep.” She shares posts about once a month of the semi-intellectual-diatribe-against-life type – common enough, and yet there’s something fresh about the way she does hers. Right at the bottom, from about six years ago, is a post that reads: I have secrets I cannot abide to share. I close my eyes and think of the secrets I couldn’t abide to share – lies told, math tests copied, men cheated on – and for a few brief moments I allow myself to feel sorry about it all. When I open my eyes there is the ping of a notification. She has uploaded a new post, a page-long essay on the boiling of water that begins as a sort of battleground setup and concludes metaphysically: “It has begun, the transcendence into a higher state of being, and it will not be paused now.”
*
There is a card on the kitchen table when I return from class. It is from my neighbour, inviting myself and the rest of the block to dinner tonight. She has been accepted, runs the calligraphic text on the card, into a writers’ conference somewhere up in the mountains, and wants to treat us all to a celebratory meal. The girl from the room opposite mine is spooning peanut butter into her mouth and watching me read. So is it true, she asks me as I put the card down, did she really get into a conference? She’s won awards, I say with a shrug, I guess a conference couldn’t have been far behind. What do I care, either way I do not have to cook tonight, she laughs. Back in my room I ponder the question – what does one wear to someone else’s glory? It is too cold for dresses, and too warm for fleece coats. I find a pink blouse that has transitioned past ripeness and bears now a muted smell, like dry grain or rice. In honour of the night I add an extra layer of perfume.
*
There are fairy lights draped around the appliances and sequinned stars pasted on the wall. On the table sits the proverbial roast, a chicken that is whole and brown and glistening, actually glistening like in the advertisements for Thanksgiving I have always distrusted, and bedded in fixings of green and yellow drizzled with something spottily white. My neighbour has assumed position by the table with a knife in her hand and is dispensing with the chicken generously, almost eagerly, shaving slice after slice off the breast, sides, wings, flanks, fanning them out in threes on paper plates and putting one into every hand that approaches. A girl in dungarees has refused a plate. “I’m vegetarian,” she says. My neighbour looks at her with ill-disguised suffering and retracts the plate inch by inch, as though giving the girl a chance to change her mind. I shred the top half of my portion with the fork and that’s when I see it, the veins of red running through the inside. It is raw. I peel the skin off and chew, reminding myself that some people take their steak half-cooked on purpose. After the first layer of crispy brine comes a sting, truly a sting, of some metallic fluid. The Greeks divided our inner workings into four humours, only three of which would make it into modern textbooks, and who was to say that black bile – the one dismissed – did not in fact refer to the curse of eating flesh unjustly taken and served? I conceal the meat beneath the fixings and make my way over to the dustbin.
“Wait,” says my neighbour from behind. I smoothen my face into one of not-guilt.
“The compost heap is outside.”
Two people are kissing in a wooden chair, their pace neither quickening nor slacking as I pass them. I tip the food into the compost bin, and then drop to my knees and expel a mushy-briny mixture in which I can see the shreds of chicken and my own teeth marks in them if I imagine hard enough. Somebody giggles.
*
There is beer on the table when I get back inside. The chicken platter has disappeared, as have the plates from everyone’s hands, and I start to wonder if what I had thought was raw meat was merely a different style of cooking than I am used to. More people have come in, one of whom I recognise as someone from the house with the mistreated cat. Propelled now by an empty stomach as much as a sense of righteousness I decide to confront her about it. There is no cat in the house, I am informed with asperity.
“Then what is it I hear yowling every night?”
She blushes, a deep and actual pink, and walks away quickly. I watch her approach a man at the other end of the room and gesticulate towards me while talking as the man visibly twitches in response, and then it strikes me what they’re talking about and what the cat really is and I say “Oh!” out loud, like any tin-headed Enid Blyton schoolgirl who stubs her toe playing lacrosse. My neighbour has a beer in each hand and is talking loudly about child prodigies, which leaves me free to leave before she catches me doing so. Entering my flat I see a girl with purple hair grinding coffee for the filter and smile back at her before it occurs to me that I haven’t seen her before. I open the door to my room and find the bed made, the floor empty. For a moment I think the cleaning woman broke in, and then I spot the boxing gloves on the chair and register that it isn’t my room, and this is the wrong flat. And then I have my second “oh” moment in ten minutes as I realise how the cigarette butts came to be in my room and how the sameness of the flats extends to the keys as well, fitting just as smoothly into any of the four equivalent rooms on my floor, and I step back and out and count the doors – first, second, third to the left of the stairwell – before I reenter a flat and a room, my own this time, and lie on the unmade bed and drift off, my mind a whirl of thoughts about coincidence, secret visitors, the possibility of sharing a joint with them someday and the truly remarkable style of room security in this building.
*
I am invited to see the dean after lunch, runs the message notification on my phone, as though I am a guest and she is speeding up her afternoon salad on my account. And indeed when I walk in and take a seat it feels like we’re equals, the way she smiles and asks after me before introducing the purport of the invite. Here at the university, she says, they believe in the comfort of their students, and even more specifically that the boundaries of comfort are amenable to stretching. Consider it a rubber band, she says, one with a high – she extends her hands – degree of elasticity. She speaks with more deliberation than the words call for, and I can tell that she has rehearsed this metaphor, making sure she doesn’t fumble or even frown in front of me. But at some point – she continues, bringing her hands down – even rubber must stop stretching if it is not to break entirely, and even student comfort must have its breaking point, especially when it comes to either failing tests or missing them altogether. And far be it from them to judge a student by tests or assignments alone, but we are after all in a system, not a vacuum, and in a system, everyone who receives must also give. In short, I have six months left, enough to turn things around – and she has no doubt, she adds warmly, that I will do so much sooner – and I can refer to the student handbook for the minimum grades I must achieve. Anything less – she drops her voice to an apologetic pitch – and I will be recommended to my home institute for retransfer.
I used to like to tell people: “Give me the right stage and I will move the world.” The dean is waiting for me to speak, her hands clasped in front of her as though there’s nothing she’d rather listen to. And so I open my mouth to speak of – what? My found art? My unwashed clothes? My neighbour’s chicken? Which among these will resonate with the woman before me, she with the academic title and the earnest student-first principles and the right to a leatherback chair? She nods her head encouragingly, and there is a pencil on the desk I could flip and strike her on the nose with. Instead, I nod back, get up and leave.
As I come out I collide with someone whose files I drop. We crouch and gather in unison, his hands thick and knottily formed and with a crested ring that I recognise as that of the Freemasons. Standing up he towers a foot and a half over me and his English is only mildly accented as he smiles. He asks me which classroom I am in and seems pleased to know that it’s the one next to his. It is only when I am halfway down the quad that I place him as someone from my own building. Had he been at the dinner last night? What had he thought of the chicken? A month ago I might have been glad of the chance to see him again – today, I will likely forget him by the time I am home.
*
I can smell it as soon as I enter. There is a small mountain of it at my literary neighbour’s elbow and more to come, the knife going chop-chop-chop. She has been crying. For a moment I think that she too has misplaced herself but no, the girl down the hall on the right had admitted her about twenty minutes ago and told her that I’d be back from class soon, and in the meantime she needed something concrete and repetitive to do and there was an absolute mountain of onions beside the microwave. I refrain from pointing out that they are not onions, but shallots. It has been cancelled, she goes on, that conference she was accepted into, and they will not be returning her money. She tried to track them down online, and it turned out that they had no address and the number listed was out of service. They were a fraud.
We look at each other, and we look at the shallots. And then I pull out the covered bowl I had left in the microwave to rise.
“This might sound strange,” I say, “but those would be really good cooked up in dough.”
Out the cheap wine to keep us going, out the canola oil for the frying. I show her how I pluck bits off the dough and shape them into balls and she is dubious at first, but I reassure her by saying that this is by no means an original invention, people eat them everywhere in all kinds of cultures and give them their own special names – sopapillas, youtiao, doughboys, take your pick. From the cupboard I retrieve spices and red chilli paste to add to the shallots, making dents in each ball with my thumb and patting some of the mix in and pinching the dough back over it before tossing the ball into the Dutch oven, watching it puff and crackle and grow brown boils on top. There is a macramé-type bracelet on my neighbour’s left wrist with horsehead-shaped charms hanging from it. I can ask her where she bought it, or even persuade her to lend it to me, and perhaps she’ll just give me the whole thing if the food mellows her enough. She’s started eating one from the first batch and I can tell that she has burnt her tongue but she’s liking it, the way she’s nodding, and now she’s saying maybe we can add some cheese to it, parmesan or something, give it a little more of that nutty flavour. We’ve each had a glass and a half of wine and the world seems a little prettier than it did twenty minutes ago. Food connects, food enlivens, food expands the mind and body and I can live with that, I’m almost sure I can, the way I can maybe learn to live with myself someday. I take out the packet of Grana Padano from the fridge and glance at the per serving calorie count and shrug. A walk around the neighbourhood after dinner, perhaps, would not be amiss.
Deya Bhattacharya
Deya Bhattacharya is a freelance writer and former business development manager from India who started writing fiction during the Covid-19 lockdown. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Beloit Fiction Journal, Blackbird, Eclectica, The Write Launch, Prose Online, Button Eye Review and Pendust Radio (as an audio dramatisation). Her work has received support from the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and been nominated for a Best Of The Net award. Deya holds a Bachelor’s in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata and an MBA in Marketing from Management Development Institute, Gurgaon. She lives in Bangalore.
