The Blake Paradox

A few years ago, to get out of work for a couple of days, I told a lie. Sure, that’s how it’s done. You say you’re not feeling well, your basement flooded, your car broke down, there’s been a family emergency. Some even say there’s been a death in the family. I went one step further. I called my manager one morning, sobbed into the phone and said, “My best friend, Blake, got into an accident last night and died. I’ve been at the hospital all night.”

Two days later, when I finally went back to work, everyone came up to ask me how I was doing. They asked me what happened, if I wanted to talk, assured me that they were there for me if I needed a shoulder to cry on. Tears readily sprung to my eyes, and surprised even me. The story rolled off my tongue without me having thought it out. There was an accident. My friend was driving home after dropping me home on our way back from a movie. It was late. Some guy, drunk, ran a red light and swerved to avoid hitting a parked car, landed into the wrong lane, and crashed into my friend.

The HR Director called me into her office to ask me if I was ok. She told me about her ex-husband who’d recently passed away, and who’s death she only found out about one day as she was browsing the Internet. She asked me if Blake’s family had been notified and I told her his dad lived in New York and I didn’t know how to get in touch with him. I said I had keys to his apartment, and she suggested that, difficult as it may be, I had to go back there and see if I could figure out a way to get in touch with Blake’s dad. She asked if I had someone who could go with me. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. She took it to mean that I was in shock, took my hand, and said, “I want you to go home. Take some time off. But please tell me if there’s anything you need.”

It struck me then, that they really believed me. I realized the implications of this big lie I’d made up, and would be compelled to continue making up for as long as they remembered.

Though no one had ever heard me mention his name before, Blake was a close friend of my main character in the novel I was working on at the time. I knew my characters really well, very intimately, having been the one who created them. Two months later, when my computer inexplicably crashed, I lost my novel and this Blake character. I realized that I had lost this fictional best friend, once again.

This time when I cried, there was no one I could share that loss with. My co-workers thought I’d lost him a while ago, while my friends outside of work, didn’t know he existed. My nostalgia was implacable. On top of that, was the guilt of having plunged Blake into non-existence; I felt I had killed him.

My conscience nagged at me, so I constantly recreated Blake, by making him a recurring character in my writing. But in every piece that he appears in, he is lost to me. He is the best friend who dies, the lover who leaves, the stranger who comes into the main character's life for a brief tryst that is never consummated, the friend who’s ashes a character is bringing back to his family.

Now, years later, I have a co-worker/intern/assistant named Blake. Every time I speak to him, I feel guilty. When I say his name, I feel like I’m lying. I’ve become friends with him but every time we have a conversation, I’m thrust back into my fictional world, the only place Blake actually exists, if even for short periods of time.

Leaves

The room is dark except for the bleak late evening moonlight struggling to seep in through the thin curtains billowing into the room. There is a desk against one wall, with a window overlooking the untended backyard. Sheaves of paper cover every inch of the surface of the desk, and on top of them all, at the center of the desk, sits a 1941 Royal Quiet Deluxe, its keys collecting dust, a ribbon broken. A pair of glasses rests on a stack of black and white photos with scalloped edges and a grainy finish, browning with age. In the corner, on a stand, is an old gramophone. Yes, it works. In fact, at this very moment the stuttering static fades into the first few chords of a sitar. The air is warm. The notes sweat, glisten. Listen. A tabla joins in. The song rises.

Across the room, the only other source of light is the soft orange glow of a forgotten cigarette burning away in an ashtray, next to a rocker where a man, his head falling to his shoulder, is sound asleep. In front of him, on a low table, an abandoned game of chess waits. The man snores.

On the pale blue walls around him, canvases hang; empty, white. Each has taken him a few weeks to finish. He’s stood at his easel by the window everyday the last few months, transfixed, unable to pull himself away, struggling to grasp an image, a memory and turn it into something real. Something more tangible. Each time, the finished painting is very slightly different from the others. A breeze ruffling through her hair. A subtle up-turn of her lips into a barely detectable smile. The eyes, crinkling in the corners. Just the eyes alone take him hours to get right. In the end, there she is, looking at him from every corner of the room, from every angle. Through the hair over her eyes, that he itches to brush away. Peering up through her thick lashes. From the corner one eye in a profile. And in one with a look on her face as blank as the canvas it sits on.

A breeze from the open window blows the ashes of the cigarette towards the sleeping man. He wrinkles his nose, his forehead creasing, but then his face relaxes. He shifts. Places his feet on the table, precariously close to his ivory queen. And he opens his eyes.

Fingers grasped tightly around the teak armrests of the rocker, he pulls his torso forward and peers out through the sheer white cotton drapes out past the straggling strangers lost in thought at they cross the street to the other side, or walk along the sidewalk, their faces hanging. Across the street at the bus stop, where a young couple stands side-by-side, leaning against a tall tree, looking straight ahead. Once every few minutes, the boy leans out to check if the bus is coming. The girl taps him on the shoulder, and when he turns to look at her, she points to her cheek. He leans over and kisses her. A few minutes later, she taps him again, he turns around, she points to the other cheek and he kisses her again.

The old man stares at the barren tree, bereft of the warmth of its leaves, of all but one. That one leaf, resilient, faithful. The tree, holding on. The leaf, its edges turning orange. The tree, holding on. The careless young couple leaning against it. He worries. The young man walks back into the street, craning his neck for an approaching bus.

“You still got some time,” the man says out loud, his voice gruff from a lack of use, closes his eyes and leans back in his chair. Against his chest, a pocket watch ticks. The second hand makes its rounds. The minute hand takes a step forward. The man’s fingers tap the front of the armrests. The polish has worn out at the ends, leaving the wood soft and familiar to his touch. Sweat pours down his back. He rubs the wood, carefully massaging it, tenderly. He rocks back and forth and the rocker creaks. Back and forth. The tabla beats. Listen.

Outside, the bus comes. The couple gets on. The last leaf on the tree breaks free of its branch, flutters and soars dizzyingly towards the pavement. Inside, the old man clutches at his chest. His forehead creases. Then relaxes. His foot lands against the ivory queen. She falls.

Outside, the leaf lands softly. It shivers in the breeze. Stills. And then gets swept away to join the rest of the old, dried leaves across the sidewalk. When rain comes, minutes later, it clings to the bottom of a shoe and disappears down the street.

Inside, the needle on the gramophone rises.

Don't Write About Me

"Don't write about me," he said. So I did.

we don't live
as rectangles
straight, this way or that
then turning
because you say so

dust collected on your words
all that time, unused
unrecalled
I pulled them out of that old trunk
(memory)
shook them out
I scrutinized, discarded, saved

every time you move
you leave something behind
an old receipt
(the price quite steep)
a rainy afternoon
spent looking out the window
mail
video store cards
a cup, presented
on the first lonely birthday
books you never meant to read
soft things
hair collected from a pillow-

these remnants
they don't fit you anymore
but words
you fold, hang, frame
wear, drink, paint
you save- take them with you

"Please," he said, "please."
(I nodded, promised, lied)
"Don't write about me."

The Artist

He died from being an artist. Or was he a postman- delivering loveletters? Yes, he died of a broken heart.

He was a poet who lost his words. He misplaced them and couldn't find them anywhere.

He looked behind his fridge, he looked under his bed. He searched between the pages of the books on his shelves. In desperation, he even undressed his lamp and peeked under her shade.

He saw her bulb and wondered if maybe the words had evaporated due to her yellow heat. So he sat back and took a deep breath- he inhaled and he inhaled and he inhaled. Without exhaling.

His lungs exploded, shattering his ribs, which punctured his heart. And he died and he died and he died- all night long.

Words

A soft blue chair, that turns in its place. A blanket, green and orange. Lampshades salvaged from left-along-the-sidewalk. A wooden table, crafted by a friend. A piano- Mozart's "Sonata in f minor." Old blown out candles from I-wonder-when (dust settled around their wicks). Books, books, books, spilling from their shelves: dictionaries, anthologies, novels, journals, poetry, Shakespeare, bible, Quran, others. Framed pictures, paper lanterns, bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. A desk piled high with more books, books, books-

...and behind them, my love, in his stripes, floating in his words.

Old Photographs

That’s me. Third one in from the right; the giggling one with her head down. The pattern of henna on my palms has not yet started fading. The gold jhumka earrings hang heavy on my earlobes and I am proud of them. They are the first piece of real jewelry I’ve owned, an heirloom my grandmother gave my mother for her wedding and now my mother has given to me. The folds in my sari are weighed down by the gold thread embroidery and sequins that adorn it; one tiny glimmer of light catches my eye, a sequin that has come loose and I have to make an effort not to pick at it. The sari is hot and difficult to walk in, but now that I’m married, I finally have the freedom to wear one and so I do. At every step, I worry the whole six yards of the delicate chiffon will come undone and slide right off my body. I try to stay still, not get up unless I have to so that the chances of that happening are slimmer; the less I move, the less the sari will.

It is the day after my wedding and I have returned to my parents’ house for the ritual morning-after brunch. My cousin, the one in pink to the left of me, can’t stop cracking jokes. It is no secret that I am no longer a virgin, a fact I am embarrassed of as my father stands in front of me taking the picture. Later this evening is the Valima reception to formally celebrate my deflowering, a successful consummation proven by the blood on the white sheet that my mother-in-law grabbed this morning while I was in the shower, and set on display in the courtyard, hanging on a clothesline. When my husband and I left this morning for the brunch, she was still sitting on the phone boasting to her friends, mother-in-laws who had not been so fortunate.

But a week after the wedding, my husband leaves to finish his engineering degree in America. He promises to send for me and in his absence I am expected to live with his family, my in-laws, instead of with my own parents in my own room in the house I grew up in.

As though living with strangers isn’t enough, my mother-in-law, has decided that since I am living with them, she no longer has to do any housework and everything is left for me. I cook. I set the table for lunch and dinner. I wake up early to make their breakfast. I iron their clothes and I wash them. I wash the dishes. In barely two weeks the henna on my palms has faded to a pale, almost invisible orange. I am no longer a bride. Just a wife, abandoned indefinitely by the man I am to live the rest of my life with.

Babu Ji, the respectful term my husband addressed his father with and I adopted, still calls me bahu; bride. No one refers to me with my name. My mother-in-law is Aapa. My husband is nameless, too. I know his name and have only uttered it in my bed at night as I sleep by myself. I roll the letters in my mouth. I repeat the name. I whisper different tones I will say his name in when I am with him in America. In America everyone says each others’ name. Husbands, wives, sisters, brother, mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law.