A Place to Hide

Following is an extract from one of my debut novels, A Place to Hide. It is based on the manifestation of caste and gender discrimination in urban areas. A synopsis of this novel was presented at one of the most prominent literary festivals in the world, Jaipur Literature Festival’s event, iwrite Jaipur BookMark, in 2019, where it was appreciated for its language by leading Indian literary agents.

Matsya was solving an equation using the Pythagoras theorem when the doorbell rang and her house was filled with downgraded opening tunes of meri saamne vaali khidki main, didi tera devar deewana, and dhoom machale.

The doorbell was bought a few years ago at the whim of her father who liked songs he could move his hips to. More than the hips, it was the leg movement. One foot would be up on the toes and the same side hip would be protruded out. With each beat, he would twist his ankle in the air and try to be as flexible with his hips as he could while moving the fingers of his outstretched hands rigidly like a magician invoking a magic trick, but less gracefully.

Matsya did not bother to get up. Greeting strangers or people she barely knew in the colony was not a part of her calling. She expected her mother to take care of it and stayed back to marvel at the epiphany of the philosopher - how beautiful the moment must be when he realised that the sum of the square of two sides of a ninety-degree triangle was always going to be equal to the square of the longest side - the hypo-ten-use. What she did not know was that this equational relationship had been in use for at least a century before Pythagoras was even born. This could have been her first lesson at how misnomers produced selective, filtered history but the questions based on that were never asked in the exams, and so the teachers never bothered.

The annual exams were due in a few weeks and with the panic built around them, Matsya wanted to make sure she gave her best. It was an easy thing to do with a subject like maths, which she enjoyed like a child enjoys licking a centre-filled candy, waiting for the big reveal. Maths was like magic for her. It was one of the two keys that helped her gauge what it meant to have a pattern, to know what it means to be certain. And for that reason, she disliked the chapter on Probability, which had too many patterns for its own good and it felt like a gamble she did not want to be a part of.

A few minutes later, Matsya heard the murmurs of a man at the door, which went on for a while. Then she heard her mother’s summon. A plastic chair was scraped against the cement floor and she understood that whoever had come visiting, was going to sit down and stay for sometime. Her curiosity implored her to check who it was but she did not want to leave the comfort of the equations. However, a few moments later, her mother barged into the room and pinched her cheek.

“I am calling you out, can’t you hear?” She said through pressed lips and clenched teeth. The next moment, she eased her face and turned polite. “Come out. He is asking about sesus something.”

Matsya put the cap back on her ball pen and left a hypotenuse hanging without its sides.

A middle-aged man, with his face half-covered in beard, sat in the veranda holding a large grey hardbound register with a red spine, opened in the palm of his hand. He had sombre eyes, a tired voice, and kept tapping on the top of the register with the tip of his ball pen, the cheap plastic kind - two rupees for one - which Matsya detested.

As soon as the man saw Matsya and her mother come out, he blurted.

“Name is done. What is the religion?” His eyebrows were furrowed. He did not enjoy what he was doing.

“Hindu.” Matsya’s mother said without missing a beat.

He scribbled on the register and without looking up, asked the next question. “Caste?”

Matsya was caught off guard. She looked at her mother for a clue: will you take this question? But her mother simply stared back with pressed lips as if judging her for her silence. Matsya had been taught not to mention her caste in public but she was not good at lying either.

The silence that ensued was as familiar to the man as it was to the two women.

“Jat,” Matsya said and gulped. She looked at her mother who fidgeted on her feet with a blank face.

The man stopped tapping the pen on the register and looked at Matsya. His face was not furrowed anymore. There was a touch of gentleness to his wrinkles like old people did when they saw a young person trying to lie but knew better than to call them out. They meandered to give the person another chance.

“This is for the census. Sahi sahi bata do.” He said calmly and Matsya felt encouraged to let go of the burden without realising the trap it could be. But before uttering anything she looked at her mother who had started laughing nervously.

Matsya’s mother, a woman with heavy thighs and fat under her chin that she constantly pulled at hoping to pinch it into oblivion, was beautiful. Not just because some days Matsya would get a glimpse of her in the mirror and could not help staring, but also because one of the first things some women, like Matsya’s music teacher, said on meeting her mother for the first time was: your mother is beautiful. Matsya’s mother would bob her head sideways with lips pressed into a sly smile, trying to act casual about a compliment she sought sorely but could not believe. She felt there was an underlying conspiracy to mortify her, that no one as pure as her intentions existed in the world and that everyone, most of the time, was manipulating her.

This implied a lot of things for her daughter as it did for her husband. Like, when dressing up for a school party, Matsya asked her mother, do I look pretty? And her mother said, no. Like, when Matsya confided in her mother that she pissed a bit in her pad during periods, her mother only made a disgusting face. Like, when her father would come home late from the office, her mother would question where he had been, and after a point get slapped, or on some days, even get kicked, but would not stop asking, not until she found another sinner in her daughter.

There were several rifts in the nuclear family, especially since the parents had migrated to the suburbs in Meerut leaving their robust joint families back in Punjab. The mother, already detached from her home after being married off in her teens, was further detached from her in-laws and remained in quasi-exile until her husband retired and the couple went back to Punjab to live in a house built on the one her mother-in-law died in. Despite the political strife that joint families have built into their system, the farce of unity in the face of hardships - especially, medical and financial - was what the couple sought desperately in their old age. In any case, the shortcomings of one’s children worked like glue to connect the parents in Matsya’s paternal house.

Till the father’s retirement, though, the mother-daughter relationship remained fraught on an everyday basis while the father remained in the office on the weekdays to participate in the bickering only on weekends and holidays. Matsya’s mother, however, thought herself to be too perfect to make mistakes and Matsya was just an adolescent to process the different forms of violation she was going through. She knew something in her house was amiss but it would take her a few years to stumble on the exact words for it, and when she would, it would be both a stab and an ointment.

The word that Matsya revealed to the census man - after he coaxed her into believing she was in the presence of a person who understood her silence and confusion, her shame and hesitation, and there was going to be no punishment, no humiliation, just harmless, non-judgemental bureaucratic record-keeping - and the secret she confessed to Shyna a few weeks later - all to be an honest friend who did not hide, lie, or manipulate, and because she read on a school board in the second standard that honesty was the best policy, and she knew she wanted to be the good honest girl her parents were manufacturing her to be, even if it came at the cost of personal sacrifice - the word she used was different from the one she said almost half a decade later in college, which, along with a person’s death, became a live stake in her mind to be struggled against for years to come.

When the summer arrived, following the winter of binge-watching Korean romance, the effect of no longer being a ‘woman’ but a ‘Dalit woman’ continued to weigh on Matsya. Even though the intensity was forced down by the daily grind, the days when the mirage of normalcy was shattered were a dime a dozen.

One day, lying on the starch-stiff bed-sheet in her hostel room, she mused about its pleasant blue colour like a clear sky with fluffy clouds, only here, the clouds were the polka dots of pink, white and red, some smaller than the others. They were round like cornea and made a beautiful pattern with their randomness, the kind one figured out only after staring at it, and Matsya did stare at her bed-sheet often, just like she did into the void, losing herself in thoughts that rarely made it to speech.

Matsya had lived and seen enough to not question the worth of spoken words. They were uttered once, twice, thrice, but if no one heard them, what difference did they make that silence did not achieve? Speech would dissipate but the speaker would stay, limp in limbo, questioning if any sound came out of her mouth at all. She heard herself though but did she?

Matsya not only drifted into silence but also found herself shrinking and gradually becoming invisible to the point that when people did respond to her words, which she uttered in a fit of joy or anger forgetting her invisibility, she would get dazed to think, did this person just talk to me? And would become silent again, drifting away assuming how uninteresting the life of that person must be who, of all people, heard her. What use was it to be with unassuming people who did not respect themselves enough to want to talk to her?

This is how Matsya reasoned her silence. Surely, this was the most right thing to do - protecting people from listening to her and becoming inconsequential in the process. She was doing people a favour.

But if things were as simple as that, Matsya would not have the kind of turmoil she had in her mind. It was these moments that ruptured her sense of what ‘real’ was. The moments when she would walk down the corridor ruminating on the purpose of walking, should I crawl like the woman in the yellow wallpaper? that someone would call her name out cheerfully from a distance and burst into a smile and wave profusely and she would wonder, surely this person could be inconsequential but what about their happiness at that moment that appeared to exist exclusively because of her? That someone was happy to see her.

But then how could someone be so happy to just see someone?

These moments would confuse her and manifest into a dull hug from her side as a response to the tight bear hug. Such gestures by people would challenge her into considering that maybe she was not invisible after all. Not, at least, that invisible. Maybe she was translucent, something she never considered. The sad part was that looking in a mirror was no good. The reflection would appear just as solid, though alien, like that is all she was - a reflection of herself.

Matsya slept during the day and roamed the hostel corridors at night. I-J would prod her that maybe she was a vampire, but Matsya knew better. Vampires could afford the luxury to be parahuman, to live on the societal fringes in stimulating castles shrouded by bat-wings, and have an entire macabre ecosystem to themselves. But in Matsya’s world, the days were spent in chaos and the nights were spent in anticipation of the chaos. There were no individual caskets but dorms and shared rooms and blood was swapped by watered-down coffee that tasted like roasted mud.

Similarity of actions did not imply similarities in the consequences - a lesson in politics that was yet to be learned by her.

At some point, I-J did think it would be fantastic to be invisible so Matsya did not have to look for places to cry and hide in, especially, when the cacophony of human existence got too much. No matter how invisible Matsya felt, in absence of a physical metamorphosis, she remained human to her disappointment - and, sometimes, relief.

Soon, visibility weighed down on her, just like invisibility did, and one day, feeling overwhelmed about what to believe in, Matsya decided to disturb the sand-cloud in her mind she had gotten used to and tapped the words in her mobile and read the results that came up.

Feeling invisible? Could be a sign of depression.

People who feel invisible are often victims of physical and emotional abuse: Don’t ignore the signs.