A to Z Stories of Life and Death
By D.Biswas
Copyright 2011 D.Biswas
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She let out a squeal when she saw the first snail, a dot on the glass wall with its own antennae and goo crawling out of a shell.
It thrilled her to see a creature in the aquarium that she hadn’t put in, at least not on purpose. It brought everything closer to the illusion of nature, which is a wild, uncontrolled thing, an illusion she had tried to create with rocks, moss, driftwood, soil, plants, fish, shrimp. Now she had snails!
The next day she saw another snail among the expensive grass, and five more in quick succession. They’re thriving, she said, and that means my fish and shrimp and plants would thrive too.
But two days later she saw no fewer than a dozen, some much bigger than those she had spotted the last time. On closer examination, she discovered twenty-three of them. She read up a little, and discovered snails are not as desirable as she had once thought. Not too good for the plants, and they used up food and oxygen she needed for her fish and shrimp.
Besides, now that so many dotted her aquarium wall, they no longer looked cute. She removed a few and put them in the bowl of water along with her Devil’s Ivy, taking care not to hurt them, releasing them slow and easy into their new home.
No matter what she did, she found snails braving their way up the aquarium wall, like lost souls seeking nirvana. They ruined the view of her piece of nature. One day, losing patience and with arms cramped from hours of fishing out snails, she crushed one of them. Then another, and another.
Hope God forgives me for taking so many lives before breakfast, she said, but these are pests, and I’m sure He understands.
Then she decided to bring in Assassin snails. These were big fellas, who like Kings and Prophets, would descend on the resident snails and decimate their numbers as appropriate, redressing the balance of nature.
But the Assassins became part of the populace, eating snails as per their moods and appetites, caring little for her need to eliminate tiny snails. She didn’t like what they looked like either.
Fewer snails graced the glass walls now, and as she crushed them under her fingers, she sometimes had the sneaking suspicion that God put her and others of her kind on earth just the way she ‘put’ the snails in the aquarium. And cared just as little for their existence.
Every time she thought of this, she saved a few snails in her bowl of Devil’s Ivy.
In a year she grew tired of the aquarium and its epidemic of snails. She sold it on a yard sale at a large discount, and from then on, did not think about God. Not much, anyway.
I love it when you run.
It gives me something different to do. You know how this constant stream of lectures, seminars, papers, bore me. A thousand times I’ve told you, you’re my protégé’. I’m the mentor, you the mentee. There is no escape.
I teach your body, mind, and soul, and while I teach your body, you enjoy it-- all those tricks to please a man that you need to learn if you want to come up in the world. You’re a girl, remember that.
You’re like the sun, you said to me, the first time I tore up your petals, and the room reeled with your woman smell. I feel as if I’ve burned up and dissolved, you said.
Too much poetry, I said as I gathered clothes back to my wrinkled body, you’ll learn.
But now I know you were right.
I had melted you that first time, those first months. Should have kept you that way, molten, burning with ‘passion’, ‘poetry’. Instead, I let you harden, catch your own fire. You have nightmares, you told me, where I’m a black hand, reaching towards you, closing in.
You have become your own sun, and you want to set the world on fire. I see that.
You have to learn one last lesson: our insignificance. Nothing matters. No one would catch fire. But you will burn.
I’m too old to give chase, put out the fire. But I can wait in ambush.
Tell me about commas, he says, his head resting on my lap.
He makes those words, Dimmi delle virgole, linger and sing in that simple request from student to teacher. Only he is no longer just my student.
At forty, as a language teacher, interpreter, erstwhile world-travelling backpacker and former cocaine addict, I thought I had done it all, till Calogero came along with his family to this Malaysian seaside resort in Langkawi.
This resort is my home till the time I need to be hospitalized. The owners are happy to have my services for the price of board and lodging, and happier still that Calogero’s family has hired me for 6 weeks to be their English tutor and occasional tour guide.
Ma mi senti, bella? asks Calogero, his black puppy eyes a little annoyed, his face flushed under the tan he has acquired in the last ten days. His hair is all messed up and curled in the salt from the sea, and it gives off a dark blue sheen, like that of a lost young sea god.
Beads of sweat dot his forehead. It is hot in the afternoon shade, and his family and most of the resort are taking their siesta. Besides, we’re a little removed from the resort. A jungle and rocks flank this stretch of the beach, the hushed murmur of the sea broken by birdcalls and whispering trees.
Despite his old-smelling name, he is like any other seventeen-year-old, miffed when he does not get undivided attention, and like most Italian males I’ve known, he calls women ‘bella’ irrespective of their age.
I smile down at him, to let him know I’m not a hormonal Italian teenager at his beck and call.
We may have kissed a few times, and I’ve let him touch most of me, because sometimes I need to know this AIDS thing hasn’t killed me yet. To be touched is to be told you’re alive, useful. Attractive, even.
But things won’t go further.
Devi capire in Inglese, I tell him. You must continue your lessons in English.
What lessons? Calogero smirks up at me, his head turning on my sarong. His hands have explored that tanned stretch of skin under the makeshift skirt, and his eyes hold that memory. Sai che ti amo? he says, his lips unsmiling, intense.
Say that in English, I reply. You must improve, that is what your parents are paying me for.
I love you, he says, drawling out the words he must have learnt from Google translate, I’m crazy about you. He says the words with all his breath. I see his stomach contract under his thin, wet t-shirt.
A comma is a pause, I tell him, a waiting between now and then. I pronounce each word slow and careful, so he catches them all. It is not a full stop, I say. It means you want to go on, but want a little rest on the way.
He listens, lulled by the breeze and my voice, convinced he would have what he’s after.
Calogero does not know I cannot give him my diseased body.
You’re a little boy, I say, and I’m your teacher, that’s all.
Ed allora insegnami. Teach me, he says, trying to make his eyes smoky, looking a little cross-eyed instead.
Love enters later in life through the cracks left by the first heartbreak. All seventeen-year-olds deserve to have their hearts broken, and I resolve to break his.
Besides, I deserve a few commas before my full stop. I get rid of my sarong and race to the sea, not looking back to see if he is following me.
If Donatella Versace ever needed a double, this one would have worked. She had the fake hourglass figure, the stringy, flat, blonde hair, the bulbous lips, and sunken eyes penciled over high cheek bones. He checked his wallet. After he paid for the drinks, he might have just enough to persuade her.
He gulped down his drink, wiped his beard, and shuffled out to the men’s room, pushing through the crass Karaoke songs in Singlish, the cigarette smoke, the stink of cheap whisky, beer, and wine. She walked past him, almost colliding.
For a moment, he thought she would come undone, her breasts bounce on the floor, each going its separate way, her ass tumble out and rock slowly in its place, her lips splatter on the floor in a pink splotch. But her lipstick held back her lips, her bustier did an admirable job of keeping together her middle, and stockings and stays did the rest. She stayed within her skin and righted herself on her teetering heels.
Back on his seat, he waved for the check, and she came, holding the small black folder with her claw-like nails. The sight of them prompted him to look at his own gnarled hands, yellow, blue, and green paint cracked under his nails.
When he asked her, she smiled, and said in her nasal, Texan drawl, aren’t you too old to be doing such things?
I’ll never be too old to do what I do, he said.
Afterwards, when he had taken off her breasts, her lips, her ass, her heels, she talked to him of her husband back home who had married again, of her kids who must have grown up by now, of how terrified she was of growing old.
The studio loft smelled of her, her perfume, and turpentine. His hands worked as she talked, and there they were, the swollen body parts she had stuck on herself to become more of a woman, hanging on sticks on his canvas, sailing on strings. Behind her, from the window, the lights of the Singapore skyline dimmed out one by one, and the faint gray outline of tall buildings appeared against the dark of dawn.
Do me a favor, he said, come back often.
I will, she said. I love that you do what you do.
And so they came together, the man and his muse.
There it sat, a barn in the middle of nowhere. Not exactly nowhere, thought Dina; this must be somewhere, only she did not know where. She heard no crickets or birdcalls, no bells or creaks: the absence of sound was itself a sound.
Overgrown by grass, this barn looked abandoned, forbidding in the afternoon light. She did not want to step inside, but she had no choice. She could not walk much further and it would be evening soon.
She had survived three days on muddy water from random streams and puddles. She had walked without pause ever since that night they pushed her out of the truck, her bruises swelling. When she raised her wounded hand to wipe off sweat, the cut, which she had wrapped in a piece of her shirt, smelled like very old meat pie.
“So, have you made up your mind?”
Dina whipped around at a voice, testy like that of a grizzled bus conductor, to find a tiny old man. He stood with his hands on his hips, looked and smelled as if he lived in a dustbin.