Shrimps and Gunpowder
by Amita Basu
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
I drag my suitcase up the alley. The potholed asphalt and narrow inclined driveways constitute an up-and-down obstacle course where a pavement should be. After Goa’s endless beaches, half-empty in offseason, this treeless narrowness is disorienting.
I glance up at our room. Against twilight’s midnight blue, our second-storey window flickers white: the ceiling fan whirring against the fluorescent light tube. Komal sits hunched over her laptop. Her left arm is raised, fingers worrying her scalp, table lamp shining on the bald spot that’s colonising the crown of her 22-year old head.
I haul my suitcase up the dust-slippery stairs as quietly as possible but, at the landing, I see Komal standing in our doorway, shifting her weight from one flat foot to another, grinning. “Hey, Pragya! How was Goa?”
I fling my arms around her. “Ow,” she says, her voice comically flat. So I squeeze her some more. Discreetly, I exhale from my nostrils the bhringraj pungency of the restorative hairoil that saturates her scalp. “Goa was splendid!”
I squat to push my suitcase under my bed. Turning to rise, pivoting, I spot, under Komal’s bed, at right angles to mine against the other wall, the hillock of Cheetos and Doritos, Little Hearts sugared biscuits, and 5-Star and Dairy Milk chocolates: all ten- or twenty-rupee single-serving packets, a rainbow of neon plastic. My gut spasms and it’s all I can do not to recoil. I face Komal brightly. “I’m starving. Travel tales over dinner?”
“Okay!” Komal reaches for her jacket. She always wears a jacket outdoors, even in this roasting April, perhaps to conceal her breasts, which are big but not saggy.
I glance at her laptop. “Wait, you’re reading a manuscript. Due tomorrow?”
“Ye-ah,” Komal drawls. Her welcome-home smile vanishes, leaving her smooth fair-skinned face, with its double chin, expressionless. “But I can finish later, ya.”
“You’re on page 254 of 270. Why not finish now? You must be in the climax.”
A wave of irritation scurries halfway across her face before she suppresses it. My ten days’ change has made me forget what date I was coming home to. It’s 2008: I no longer call Komal out for failing to speak up for herself.
When we became friends, I laughed at her doormattiness and tried to train, roleplay, and bully her into assertiveness. That was three years ago. Last September, when we got this room together, I had a mirage of an even closer intimacy. All that is gone. And now I’ve only irritated Komal by confronting her with another minor conflict where she has failed to assert herself.
“Well, this MS is not exactly a page-turner.”
That’s Komal-speak for ‘It’s shitty.’ She’d sooner bite her tongue out than disparage someone else’s work. “But, ye-ea-ah, I guess I could finish first? D’you want a snack?” She heads for her junk food hillock.
“No, thanks!” I clear my throat and settle my voice. “No, thanks, I’m not hungry. You take your time.”
I phone my parents, as I promised to do when I got home, as I did when I caught the train at Goa, and when I disembarked, and when I caught the bus at Bangalore Central. On speakerphone at their end, they ask me whether I’ve eaten and tell me I must be exhausted. They give me weather updates from Calcutta, 1,900 km away.
Hmmm, I tell Pa and Ma, my mobile phone two inches from my ear, wondering why they’d think I’d give a damn. I lean back. These big executive swivel chairs are the only nice thing in the rooms at this paying-guest accommodation.
Komal rocks as she reads. Hunched, she seems to have grown into her chair. Has she gained weight while I’ve been gone? We’re both 5’3”, but she’s 80 kilos: at least, she was in October, when I discovered that old-fashioned weighing machine with the running lights in the Sagar restaurant, that Sunday when I managed to drag her to Lalbagh for a walk.
Her bald spot has grown, too, unless her table lamp is playing tricks. I try not to stare. But Komal’s oblivious. Whenever Komal pulls her hair out by the roots, she enters a trance, like a baby junkie suckling heroin milk. My skin creeps and I wonder whether I should look away and I wonder whether I should hang up on my parents and confront Komal.
This compulsive hairpulling is called trichotillomania. It’s she who told me. She knows that she does it, but she doesn’t know when she’s doing it. She told me this, that evening last October, weeks after we became roomies. She never mentioned it again. I think I’m not supposed to notice it. I look away and say “Hmm” on the phone.
It’s in another world that I’ve been downing Kingfishers all week and dancing half-naked in bamboo shacks with strangers and with friends whose psychological damage is either absent or buried deep, under intact scalps, too deep for beer tears.
Back in this room, with its musty smell and dusty corners, I’ve forgotten not to stare. Maybe it’s like watching someone masturbate and I shouldn’t. Or maybe it really is like watching a baby junkie, and I should intervene. I picture creeping up on Komal, leaning over her and kissing her hand away.
“Ah,” I say on the phone. I’ll graduate in June, move to Delhi, and start getting my scholarship at JNU. My content-writing job will cover my remaining expenses. Then I can block and delete my parents’ phone numbers.
I’ve avoided accidentally memorising their phone numbers, accidentally listening to anything they tell me. Just two months to go before I’m born into a parentless new life. And when I’ve finished two years at this job, I’ll request a reco and get a better job, and at JNU I’ll have shiny new friends, who’re going places, who’ll spur me to go places, too. “That’s nice.”
Komal glances across the room periodically, eyes bright and sympathetic, as if she knows. I smile and roll my eyes. About my parents she knows nothing, and now I’m glad I’ve told her nothing. It’s she who decided we’re no longer really friends. She shouldn’t still be interested in my phone calls home.
Komal graduated last July and got a job reading manuscripts at Phoenix, a startup publisher cofounded by one of our literature professors. Phoenix gets mostly fiction manuscripts from first-timers; low-quality. Komal is self-sufficient now: she no longer needs to answer her parents’ phone calls.
“And you’re having your period regularly?” says Ma.
“Goddammit, Ma!”
Now I’m in for it. I sit up and rub my forehead. My parents react to a bad word as to a cat-o’-nine-tails suddenly across the face. One of the worst beatings I ever got was back home in the violet twilight after a birthday party, back in Calcutta, where I’d called another seven-year old a “bastard,” a funny word I’d heard somewhere. I’d glanced at Pa between the balloons and streamers, and amended it to “bustard,” another funny word, funny bird. That didn’t save me.
But Ma doesn’t rebuke my “goddammit.” She rephrases her question and vindicates her concern. After all, my periods did, you know, I was... but she can’t say the word. After everything that’s happened, she still can’t say the word. My vision blackens, my ears burn, and I picture flinging my mobile phone across the room. But that would startle Komal and let her know something’s up. She doesn’t deserve to know.
“Yes, Ma. I’m having my period.” I open my fisted fingers. They’re bleached from the pressure. Now the blood runs into them splotchy red.
“Good.” Ma asks about my dinner plans and whether I’m drinking enough water; me, famous water-guzzler. Weather reports and all the wrong questions, that’s my parents’ conversation... In Bengali there’s no word for “sorry,” no word that anyone in real life ever uses.
I go back to monosyllabic responses. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually heard Komal’s parents calling, not even before she graduated. Can’t be the time difference: Dubai’s only ninety minutes behind. Suddenly I realise Komal’s interest in my parents’ phone calls has nothing to do with me.
Is it by the roots that Komal pulls out her hair, I wonder. If I went and hugged her, would her fingernails smell like hair-follicle blood, ovary-follicle blood, menstrual blood? She crunches into a Cheeto that she’s sneaked out of a pack under her pillow.
When Komal and I became close, I told her that she shouldn’t eat junk food, that maybe she should see a psychotherapist about that other thing. “Hmmm,” said Komal. A thoughtful “Hmmm.”
Komal does have periods of self-awareness: clearly the idea of getting help had occurred to her. Why not, then, I wanted to ask her. I missed my chance to ask her. Komal hasn’t really spoken to me since that drunken evening in the bathroom. She’s snapped herself shut, and I’m done trying to help. I’ve got my own life to solve.
Ma winds up: “Bhalo thakis,” she says. Stay well, take care.
“Okay.” I hang up.
Komal plucks out another hair and holds it before her eyeglasses. Yes, there is blood on its root. Yes, it is by the roots that she plucks them out, or why would there be a bald spot? She stares at the hair. So she does know what she’s been doing. So why doesn’t she just stop? She’s a year my senior, and whatever happened happened years ago, and how hard is it to get your act together? I did it. Nobody helped me.
Komal lids her laptop emphatically. “Done!”
“Ready when you are, Komal.”
Komal puts on her denim jacket before the rust-blotched mirror nailed to our plywood cupboard. The button over her bust will no longer fasten. She fastens the buttons above and below, studies the effect, unfastens the button below, then unfastens the button above, then tries the whole placket unbuttoned. Then, feet planted wide, body penduluming, she lowers her head and confronts her bald patch, left of centre near her crown. How does it feel, I wonder, to wake up and confront the corpses of the night?
I tear my eyes away. I text my tripmates banalities bouqueted with smileyfaces. They’re my batchmates: in two months, we’ll be scattered, will probably never meet again. But we promise each other, with all-caps and exclamation points, to do this every year. I’ve watched the grownups, the successful ones, I mean. This is what they do.
When I first saw Komal, up on stage at the Literary Association, she was speaking about Malamud. I looked up, thinking, Wow! Someone who’s read an author I haven’t, and not one of those junk pop authors.
But these last eight months, Komal’s read only shitty manuscripts, hunched, tugging at her throatskin, and some rubbishy Mills & Boons romances. And she’s written only Harry Potter fanfiction, which she knows better than to show me.
Never live with your idols. Better still, never have idols. Anyway, when push comes to shove, you’ll be all alone. All my life, we’ve moved from place to place. I tried to keep people in my life. But when I was struggling, nobody helped me; the people close to me only hurt me. Why did I think Komal cared about me? Life’s easier when you have no idols, when you’re the only person you expect anything from.
Komal turns around, hair swept stylishly sideways and backwards. I smile back brightly.
“Come.” I rise and change my shoes.
“Do I look okay?” says Komal softly.
I whirl back around. Since when does Komal care how she looks? Some days I hardly recognise this person she’s become. I care, too, I guess, but only in private, in decent. I’ll never be one of those women who do a whole hair-and-makeup session in a public bathroom.
“’Course you do!”
I stride towards the door. My foot dislodges, from under my table, a giant white plastic bag.
“Oh,” says Komal, “you can just —”
I’m kneeling over the bag. It’s plain and unmarked. The loops are knotted tight, but the plastic is white and thin and I can see it’s stuffed with wrappers: Cheetos and Doritos, Little Hearts, 5-Star and Dairy Milk. The wrappers have been folded small and stuffed densely and this plastic bag full of plastic is almost heavy.
“Can just put it,” says Komal. I shove the bag back under my table. “Sorry, you weren’t here, so I stowed it there, ya.”
“No problem! Hey, by the way, my treat tonight!” I haven’t meant to say this. But why not? Let’s get some real food into Komal, a goodbye meal or two.
She shuffles into the corridor. Yes, I can afford to treat Komal. I’m the only one in my batch who’s got a job. I’m racing forward; soon the past will be banished from the rearview mirror.
I leap behind Komal and seize her shoulders, like last autumn when I thought we were going to be soul sisters. As she’s descending the stairs, I notice her right knee is locking, her right thigh is wobbling. Is she getting arthritis at 22? I dig my fingertips into her soft shoulders whistling choo-choo-choo.
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Copyright © 2025 by Amita Basu
