The last bell rang,
nice and long, trilling with a cheerfulness of a young bird having taken flight
for the very first time. It would only take a few more minutes and the gates of
the school would be pushed open to make way for the sparkling waves that would
spill out of the red-bricked convent premises.
The second graders always ended with a session dedicated to
fitness and meditation on Thursdays. This new addition to their curriculum was
a curious mix of clumsy martial art kicks and punches and a vague summing up
with sleep inducing breathing exercises. For some of the girls, it was two
hours of additional play, ideal to release any left-over energy saved up from
the not long enough recess. For some, it
was endured indifferently like the moral science and EVS classes. But for
Tutul, it was nothing less than a dread. Not so much the class itself, but the
return from the exercise hall back to her classroom. You see, this class
demanded Tutul to shake off her tightly bound canvas shoes and jump and hop,
stretch and balance, all on her puny-pale bare feet. That much she was used to.
Why, that’s what she did at home all evening. Actually the matter was not in
fact her feet. The matter was her shoes. More so, the treacherous laces that
snaked around devilishly over her shoes. They lay sprawled teasingly. Not how
they were supposed to be. Not how they were pulled and tugged to sit by her
father in the morning. She walked back to the bus slower than usual every
Thursday, making sure she does not trip over those tentacles growing out of her
little feet.
Tutul hated knots. Of all kinds.
There were those that magically formed in the depths of her
bushy hair each morning. They were for the most part invisible. But they would
spring to the fore painfully, as her father ran the sharp toothed comb through
her hair.
Then there were the knots of her pajamas that refused to
budge when she wanted to go pee so bad. Which string were you to pull for
salvation? She always chose the wrong one. And the knot tightened its angry
fist into a ball of stone.
And how could she forget, her brother’s tangled earphones.
It was rare that she managed to steal them from him. But when she did, by the
time, she had sorted out all those stubborn twists and turns, to allow a smooth
and blissful moment of music, her brother would already be on her back and
would snatch it from her hand.
And as she grew up, the knots only proliferated more and
more around her.
Some she encountered
each day on her travels in the crowded city. The kind that was at every other
junction. A giant knot of smoke exhaling trucks and buses, cars and motorbikes.
She wondered how they got so chaotically tangled. Sometimes there was a patient
man who would slowly and painstakingly, with the concentrated and noble air of
a classical orchestra conductor, try to disentangle the many threads jamming
the road. But almost always, the symphony created was a harsh blaring of
impatient horns and angry howls. And through all this, the knot remained
intact, all of us, tightly bound in its grip.
But there were those that kept getting more and more
oppressive. These knots cropped up in her friendships. And in her love. Taking
root in misunderstood silences and growing stronger with careless words. These
too, In spite of fierce battles with them refused to budge. And then she saw,
on some days, and most nights, as she stood before her mirror, the darkest
knots creeping upward from her neck and spreading all across her face. She
watched herself carefully with a melancholic resignation in her eyes, running
her fingers over the crisscross of dark strokes that shone through her pale
skin.
But at uncertain times like these, she also sat by her high
window and blinked at the blinking city lights. And slowly but steadily, a
humongous and beautiful patchwork of knots illuminated itself before her. It
lay sprawled defiantly and with a rugged pride for miles and miles below her. A
confused tangle of wilting towers and dusty foliage, of lonely corners
intersecting brimming highways, of clouds of dust kicked up into the universe
and a stagnant pool of water holding most delicately a perfect half-moon in its
breast.
And for that moment, however brief, she with her knotted
insides and the city with her own, they sat together like friends on their way
home in the bus, tired, but resting on each other’s shoulders.
