Paranoia
Somebody
had told everybody I was a lesbian.
I should have seen it coming on the day I nudged the girl next to me to ask
what ‘fuck’ meant. She turned to me and kept chewing on an over-chewed gum, her
face ruptured and taut with knowledge. Somebody threw a chair with a loud clamouring
noise whenever somebody tried to talk. They changed those secret glances like
fake currency notes. I must dance I thought, as I watched her thin white bare
shoulders jiggling in front of me, in front of the boys. I looked at the vague
disco lights and I felt hungry. I looked around for a place to sit, I felt
hungry. “Where can I get a bite?” My escort looked at me with jiggling
shoulders, a ruptured face taut with knowledge. It was 1 am in the night when I
looked outside my window. There was bad music playing and I had been asked what
would I do if I was asked to give a blowjob? Someone told me I looked like
Sharon Stone. I thought of Tagore and Keats when someone accidentally stabbed me
with a burning fag. I opened the window. It was immersion day for Lord Ganesha.
Naked Uncle peered from the opposite window. He was of course, very naked. I
was hungry. “Where can I have a bite?” I asked them. They gave me a steel
tumbler of vodka and cold drinks. She was dancing. They all laughed, their
faces were taut with knowledge. I saw the naked ladies coming up from the sea.
When I walked into the water, it was clear, I could see through to the crabs
and the snails. He pushed me over in fun. Someone called out the marks in the
vernacular paper. They read out my essay. For weeks afterwards, whenever I said
something out of the ordinary, they labelled me as the exotic. They did it with
their fat faces, their rimless frames and their thigh length skirts. I came
home and banged the door shut because I didn’t know why I didn’t have my
periods yet. My father looked away when I came running out to greet him in
summer wearing a torn white chemise. My left breast slipped out. “I would tell
him to suck my breast” I had said. They had all sneered at me and they went on
jiggling their bare white shoulders under the lights and in the river of very
bad music. I understood this was a place where people could come home and wash
dirty laundry at 1 O’ clock at night, this was not a place to be hungry. She
told me it was bad blood that I was flushing out of my system. I looked at her
face for signs of a white lie. It was calm and taut with knowledge. I needed
someone weird enough not to feel weird. I do not know what he needed. I had
slapped him the first time. It was just like a Bollywood film. “Is she
alright?” my boss had asked. They had made me dance like a courtesan. They had
cut me a cake on my birthday out of pity. They all thought it was sufficiently
brave to cuss a drunk and powerful man over the phone, that too after downing a
couple of beers. I had walked right past those men to get those two cans, right
past the guy at the telephone shop who sent me heartbroken SMSes at night. They
all told me I had beautiful eyes. “You looked liberating” he said the night I
foolishly danced to the bad music, the night he said, “the trees look like
peacocks at night” I could have thrown up, right there on the quality of his
ideas. He smelt bad. One night when I was sexting him to bed, I asked him about
love. I remember his face. I remember the shack, the sea, the women shaking off
the sea water from their bodies. “Isn’t it nice that we can watch these
semi-nude ladies together with a beer?” I felt hungry and I said, “Where can I
have a bite? He licked his lips and looked at me. His eyes, those eyes, were
taut with knowledge.
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Sreemanti
Sengupta is an advertising
professional based in Kolkata. She writes experimental fiction and poetry and
has been widely published in the print and electronic media in places
like Mad Swirl, Paragraph Planet, Certain Circuits, Bare Hands Poetry,
Onager Editions, Ppigpen and many more. Her published works have
been read at the City Lights Book Store in New York and her haikus translated to French
by celebrated poet-collagist Bruno Sourdin. Sreemanti has self published ‘First
Person’, an experimental novella in collaboration with Brazillian
artist/photographer Ana Vivianne Minorelli. The book is now available online.
She is also the editor at her self-run ezine ‘The Odd Magazine’ (now in its 14th edition)
which features alternative creative art, poetry, photography, interviews and
more from across the globe.
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