MATCHBOX

And when I stop to consider how it all unravelled, I see it was in these days of December 2012 and the days that followed, when I was so wrapped up in myself post the failed abortion, numbed by the city’s violence.

Numbed and sinking, I didn’t notice how quickly he drifted away, as quietly as he had arrived – a click of a door, a turn of the head, a tap of an app and there he was, sitting on that plush leather chair by the window that first night, watching me with a blank face. And just like that, now he was gone.

He is gone.

The day of the failed abortion, I stepped out of the auto and into the metro station, not looking back, nothing to say to him. And since then, I have messaged him – SMS, WhatsApp, even Facebook Messenger – once, twice, called the mobile number he used only for me, even his landline once, over these months.

Initially he responded, but just hello, how are you, are you looking for a job these days? Just these perfunctory, casual messages once a week, then once in two weeks, less and less as time passed. And when I responded, nothing back, till I messaged again, two days later. I held on to the hope that he would call, message, just something, but as the weeks passed I had to finally admit to myself he wanted nothing more to do with me.

Just like that, he has dropped me from his world, erasing that Friday night – Muniya, Nepali – erasing our affair, erasing the child we could never have, throwing me back into distant orbit all the way home to Greater Noida, where I belonged.

Everything changed after that night, but the less he messages me, the less he responds, the less I see him, the more I miss him. With a hard force. Her too, never known.

I miss them.

And so to mourn for her, to not miss him, I walk these days. In the winter smog, I walk all over this city, non-stop, up-tempo, outpacing the jumbling thoughts in my head.

Take the metro to the central Delhi of my childhood in Jor Bagh, my youth, blossoming into a woman – the faded pink symmetry of low blocks that lead one to the other, a childhood spent scratching out the eyes of politicians with black ballpoint pens, delicate foliage of the overhanging khair trees in endless afternoons of lukka-chuppi, of kabaddi and hopscotch, the stupor of summer holidays. The night guards in cabins, the shrill whistle and lathi-tapping of the watchman on his rounds, the white Mother Dairy packets falling in the mud, mango dollies after school.

Nothing changes here. Nothing ever will.

I walk in central Delhi now, through carbon and fog that settle low in the lungs, make the amorphous dread something real. I walk and walk and reach IHC, IIC, IGSS, Paryavaran Bhawan. I meet a government building with one thousand windows, snaking corridors of paan stains, offices and cabins in cupboards that lead to more such cabins, with paper files wrapped in twine gnawed by rats.

I meet a dead end.

I walk. Roam around the beautiful expanse of Lodhi Gardens, forgetting the metropolis that belongs to this century just outside. In the foreground, Sheesh Gumbad in decay with black doorways that lead to nowhere. Crows perch on the spindling branches of a lone tree that has shed all its leaves to brace itself for winter.

I take a photo of this on my phone.

This city, this wrenching beauty of this city. Breeding dark fantasies. Everyone feels it. Everyone secretly unsettled. A haunted house of a city. History’s necropolis, masquerading as a metropolis. Ten thousand bodies hidden beneath the earth. One small body, on top of all the bodies of history, beside the towering water tank at the edge of the compound in the brigadier’s farmhouse in Noida. The other young body from the toilet, at the other end of the compound? In someone else’s compound? In the forest beyond?

Where? Where?

Where where where?

Night sets in as I turn to leave. This desolation, these silences, those dead before my eyes, what do they say to each other in whispers as I pass by?

I walk further. Stop at a rampart slick with dew that glows gold, the moat that surrounds. I pick up a stone, hurl it against this wall of the city. It hits the wall and falls to the ground.

I pick up and hurl another stone.

I peep through the chinks in the gravel mortar, pick up a twig and scratch at the crevices, pull at the weeds, dig through with my fingernails. The dogs wake up, snap at me, spitting saliva on my ankles. A watchman appears from somewhere, shrills his whistle. 

Haanji? Kya Chahiye?

But before he can say anything else, I am already gone.

I walk in the Delhi of my childhood and I met a bastion here, a crumbling wall there, a citadel. I turn and go back and meet another citadel, a fortress, a great and glorious tomb.

I walk along and reach a roundabout that splits out – Janpath Road, Akbar Road, Motilal Nehru Marg. I take any one of the roads. I reach another roundabout. I go round and round the junctions and boulevards of this city, a labyrinth stuck in the mind.

Tick-tock, clip-clop. The next night and I wear my highheeled shoes. I walk over drunk men, poor men, poor drunk men slouched over the street, half expecting an arm to grab the flesh of my calf, pull me down. I walk along the inner circle of Connaught Place, cutting through drunk teenagers falling out of My Bar Headquarters a whirr of men loitering in the shadows, opening their mouths to say something, smacking their stinking booze-addled lips.

Then a nasal voice from behind – side-please-baby-sideside – a hijra in tight jeans and a swishing ponytail makes her way like a hurricane through the Saturday night crowd as the men hoot and snigger. I weave in and out through the inner circle and outer circle, a carousel of red and blue disco, winding into the sleazy heart of the city.

I am hungry for you I say to myself inside my head underneath my breath, hooded beneath my black coat, my stomach a tight knot, palms clammy but ripping out the thin cloth inside the coat pockets as I walk feverishly across these city streets, these city nights.

It rings hollow into the night, my hunger.

But I am so hungry.

Excerpted with permission from Girls Who Stray by Anisha Lalvani published by Bloomsbury, 2024.