The Case of the Missing Earrings

Do you know why we don’t find half the things we search for in life?

Because we are looking for the wrong things.

Often, in the wrong places.

Corona had laid siege to my clothes and jewellery closet for more than a year. There was nowhere to go and no reason to glam up. This long period of sartorial dormancy had made my pyjamas, shorts and faded tees establish themselves as the haute couture for the rest of the season. Accessories and jewellery were going through major existential crises and they languished like fossil rocks in a desert. And I myself had begun to look primitive with my over-grown locks and patches of sneaky grey.

One day, spurred by a sudden interest to add some zing to the listless life spent between the laptop and the stovetop, I decided to spruce myself up a bit. I got myself a chic haircut and tinted it a fine brown.

Some felicity of appearance having been restored, the attention shifted to the accessories, viz. the bangles and earrings that had begun to get vexed with my flippant attitude towards them. They had gathered so much grease and soap from prolonged use that they begged to be rinsed and retired from service. They looked like poor imitations of what they actually were.

‘All right, I relieve you of your current responsibilities. Go, huddle with your clan,’ I declared and after a quick wash-up, sent them away on superannuation.

I then decided it was time for a touch of sparkle on the earlobes. For some unknown reason, an old, favourite pair of bling flashed in my mind. It had been a while since they had got their due, and I felt obliged to justify their presence in my life by giving them a few days in the limelight.

I have a reputation in our family for being a ‘preservationist’ who puts away things in very strange places and fishes them out when required even from the remotest hidey-hole. I have saved the nerves of people many a times with my ability to ‘search and find’ things that hadn’t been spotted for long. A streak of Sherlock Holmes, you could say.

So, the earrings in question emerged in my memory as being kept in a small box sheathed in blue velvet from years ago. It had another pair of bling for company, I remembered.

Leaving the vegetable to boil, I began to dig into the modest cache of valuables expecting them to find the earrings in a jiffy and return to my remaining chore in the kitchen.

A,B,C…A,B,C…the little blue box I don’t see.

I went over the exercise of taking out all the stuff from the stash. The result was no different. Panic began to grip the edges of my body. My breathing shifted gear and became laboured puffs. My newly coloured hair started to soak in sweat as reality sank in.

Two pricey pairs of earrings were missing.

I widened the search location, from the farthest points in the house to the deepest burrows. All my investigative talents to ferret out things came a cropper as the morning wore off, yielding nothing. From boxes to pouches to purses to toolkits to the kitchen and shoe cabinets, everything was laid bare. Not because I was likely to find the earrings among screwdrivers and spanners, but when you search, no stone must be left unturned.

The intensity and extent of your hunt depends on what you are searching for and how valuable it is to you. How rattled you feel depends on what its loss means to you.

I refused to accept that it was lost. At the most, misplaced, I said to myself. But then, where? It was still within the confines of our home – of this I was certain. Unless, unless, in my last spring-cleaning spree, I had accidentally dumped it with the junk and thrown it in the garbage chute. I wiggled at the thought as if a cockroach had landed on my shoulder.

I pushed the air down with my palms and muttered. Relax. Relax. Relax.

In less than two minutes I started to rationalize. Even if I had thrown it with the rubbish by mistake, it wasn’t an earth-shattering tragedy. Was it? What I (God forbid) had lost was merely material. Something money could buy.

But money was what we were struggling to make in the wake of the pandemic. Now, more than ever before, every Dirham counted. We spent every minute in ceaseless toil. Is there a worse disservice I could do to my spouse at this point than announce to him that my carelessness had caused him a loss of X amount? And at a time like this?

But then again, functionally, how will I suffer if I had two pairs of diamonds less that I only wore occasionally? Should I worry myself to death over something so transient and temporal?

I oscillated between wisdom and incoherence. Between guilt and serenity. Between the thoughts that life was a lot more than possessions and life was also about the things we gather with sweat and blood.

We win, we lose and through it all we survive. Somehow or the other.

Meandering through the havoc in the head, as I began to put everything away, an overwhelming sense of calm began to come over me. It felt as if it rose unsolicited from a source that possessed me unawares.

Deep down my heart, I knew that what I was searching for was somewhere around. It was there. It hasn’t gone to the scrapheap.

It made me say, ‘Stop the search. If it is true that it isn’t lost, then it will appear from nowhere. Suddenly. Someday. When you aren’t looking.’

Prompted by the faith, I dropped the search instantaneously and started clearing the cot. I could list all the things that were strewn on it by heart for that’s the number of times I had rummaged through them. They were all restored to their places in the cupboard. In the end, a few empty jewellery pouches and boxes were left out, waiting to know their fate. I had hoarded them for long. I decided they had no more use and hence could be discarded.

I opened them one by one, once again, just to make sure they were empty and could be thrown. I tossed four aside after checking them quickly. I unzipped the fifth pouch and looked in it. What I saw inside knocked me for a six.

Four pieces of diamond earrings.

Not in a blue satin box as I had thought, but in a blue cotton pouch.

I sank to my knees and cried. What I had found in that incandescent moment weren't just the earrings. I had found the deepest secrets of existence.

Never lost. All the time there. In front of my eyes. Blinded by, I don’t know what.

In that glow of my sudden insight, I found myself again.

Promise Me That You Will

‘Promise me that you will.’

I read the message through the morning haze in my eyes. The words are unclear, but I don’t need my reading glasses to decipher them. Those words are deeply etched in my memory, yet I read them every day, first thing in the morning, only because I now know no other way of starting my day. Or ending it.

There comes a point in love when even the subtlest expressions can be interpreted without the help of the sense organs. You don’t touch, feel, hear, see or taste love anymore. Knowing that it is there is enough. You merely live it, as if it is what paves the way for the air to fill your lungs. Your breath then becomes your love’s abiding companion.

Early morning musings like this have now become a routine, and I lie in bed for a good half hour reeling in them, at the end of which I get up, and reach for my journal to document the first thoughts of the day. Whatever I scribble in it then are extensions of my thought triggered by the first thing I set my eyes on in the morning. Mira’s five-year-old message. ‘Promise me that you will.’

It hasn’t been easy for me to preserve those five significant words in my phone. I have always lived in the fear of losing it to a random technical snag that might obliterate it forever, and it forced me to store it as an image in my email. Umpteen number of mails sent to me by me, all unopened in the in box. I even have a hard copy of it saved among my other paper documents in the bank locker.

I have kept the message safe from every possible hazard. From software virus to a fire in the house. It is the only thing that gives me a reason to exist, to continue living the way I never thought I might after her exit. It even made me survive a covid attack and spend days on the ventilator without capitulating to death.

It is strange that I never responded to her message in categorical terms, but for reasons I can’t clearly say, she knew that she had my promise. All she did was to keep reminding me about it, casually sometimes, poignantly at other. Saying it holding my hand lightly or thrusting her head on my chest. Laughing sometimes, teary-eyed at other.

By reiterating it several times, she was only making sure that I ingrained it deep in my heart, making it hard for me to forget it even in my sleep.

‘Promise me that you will.’

And I have, so far.

At least the first part. I have continued to live without her.

And perhaps, today, I may keep the second part of it too if my heart and mind come together at the appropriate time.

****

The rain could have stopped in the morning, but it hasn’t. Having fallen all night and flooding the low-lying areas in the city, it had no reason to be so relentless. I crane my neck near the window to catch a glimpse of the sky. It is overcast to the edges meaning the monsoon woes aren’t going away anytime today. I wonder if I must call up mom and ask her for a postponement of the meeting.

Rain has always been a good alibi to me to avoid doing things. A wet outdoor isn’t my kind of thing. But to Mira, rain was a reason to celebrate the smaller things in life. Like stepping out without the umbrella and soaking like sponge. Sipping ginger tea in the balcony and letting herself be sprayed all over. Taking out the car and driving to a faraway restaurant just to have choley bature. She pushed the boundaries when I found reasons to shut the gate. She constantly sought and found fresh grounds to flourish as if life was entirely at her disposal.

But she was wrong. Life wasn’t at her command. And the day she knew the reality, she began the groundwork to make sure that I didn’t not use it as an excuse to bulldoze my life and bury myself under the debris.

‘Promise me,’ she kept repeating, taking my hand in hers, as she began slipping into the abyss gradually. Several times in a day, making it tough for me to escape the obligation she was nailing on me. And I sat silently, staring into her ashen face, running my finger on her cracked lips and clearing her forehead of the strands that had strayed in. And she smiled as if she had found her ultimate peace in the mere touch of my finger.

Those were moments that made me want to both die and live. Moments that gave me a reason to give up and carry on. It was hard for me to know which way I would swerve once she was gone, and she knew I could be mulish and maverick, defying her with a vengeance.

****

The rain is striking hard against the windowpane, and I realize that if I wanted, I could use it for deferring an occasion that has been upon me for a while now.

‘Keep it for another day. Tell them. It won’t be possible for us to get there, ma. There is water all around this place,’ I lie to mom on the phone, peering into the road that still was good was traffic. The water hasn’t started causing disruptions here yet.

Mom doesn’t agree. She knows that if she lets this opportunity slip out of her hands, she might never have me go again. She knows that I was using rain to dodge the meeting and begins to blackmail me emotionally with tears. Her sobs are distinct, but I refuse to take them to heart knowing her penchant for melodrama. She laments as if she is a newly bereaved woman, mentioning every sorrow in her life from losing her younger son in Kargil, to Papa’s state of acute dementia to Mira’s untimely departure. She makes it sound as if I am responsible for every woe in her life, and the only panacea to it was by getting me to accept her proposal.

‘There is only one way for life to go. Forward,’ Mom says with utter despair and disconnects the line. I stare at the screen for a while and look outside. The rain isn’t an alibi now. It is indeed falling hard as if it has scores to settle with the city.

I wonder what Mira would have done on a day like this. She’d have forced me to pull the car out without the faintest worry of it getting submerged in the city underpass. She would have cocked a snook at the weather that was striving hard to rob our sentient joys and dragged me out to be a partner in her crime.

If there is one thing she would not have done, it is staying indoors, brooding. Mira would have taken the rain in her arms and whirled with mirth. The rain was her primary lover, and I was only an add on, she often said to rib me.

Suddenly I feel a faint motivation to get ready. I open the cupboard to decide on the shirt. What does a forty-six-year-old man with a flourish of salt and pepper hair and an impeccable French beard wear when he goes to see a woman of thirty-eight who as per his mother wore only pastel shades ever since she became a widow? How dapper has he to look? Should he appear enthusiastic or stoic in his approach?

I don't have answers to the questions. As my resentment mounts, the interest to get ready slumps as quickly as it had risen.

‘Oh God, should I even show an interest in this?’ I mutter shutting the cupboard hard and releasing all my pent-up frustrations with a bang on the door. My hand hurts and I wince. The dilemma of making choices in life has never before been so stark and challenging.

Suddenly, I lose all my nerves and sink into the couch. If I ever consent to this, it is like losing Mira all over again. My days will not begin and end with her last text message. 'Promise me that you will.'

It will take away the sweet sadness with which I had filled the void of her death. The shape of my sadness that had stood in my life like an iceberg will begin to melt. Mira’s vibrant contours will be substituted by a pastel-shaded silhouette. Her memories will be usurped.

She will eventually cease to exist, even in my thoughts. It’s not what I want. But then again, it’s what she had made me promise I will do once she was gone.

I hear the phone ring on the bed. It’s mom and I am not inclined to take the call. I let it ring a few times before deciding to leave it there while I go in for a shower. Outside, I hear the phone ringing on a loop, making me spare a vexing thought for mom.

I wonder which form of love deserved the precincts of my heart. Love for a mother or for a deceased partner? Which of the two sentiments had more credence on a rainy day like this? Or any other day when the paths forked, and your heart conflicted with itself over which way to choose.

‘I am coming,’ I scream from under the shower as if mom is standing outside the bathroom door.

I am angry for having to choose. I am angry because I have no choice. Mira has decided it all for me. And now mom too has joined the cause. Of course, I could dare them and go my way, but what will I be establishing by doing that? That I had sparse regard for Mira’s last wishes, that I put myself above mom and her? That I have a mind of my own which at its best served neither me nor them?

‘I was in the bathroom, ma. Now won’t you let me have a shower at peace?’ I snap into the phone.

Mom sounds hurt by my words, and she begins to drawl the way she usually does whenever she has to slip into a sob to blackmail me. I feel as if I am caught in a cleft stick, between Mira and mom. And I realise with an increasing sense of certainty that they both were on one side. I am the outsider, the ditherer, the one who wanted to keep his grief swathed safe in the name of memories and irreplaceable love.

That Mira cannot be replaced is certain. What they together are conspiring to do against me is to make me find life in pockets other than the pains of the past. And it isn’t a wholly wrong idea, is it? Ever since Mira left, I have only been unliving.

At this rate, mom said one day eyeing Mira’s framed picture on the wall and sniffling into her saree, I would soon crumble and be gone. And that, she would not allow, not until she was alive. I could do it after her death, she said, as if she had a date on her mind when she would go and when I could start the process of breaking down into parts. Like an old car that no one had any use for and would eventually be lugged to the junkyard.

I try to to brainwash mom into changing the day’s plans. She rejects all suggestions to postpone the meeting and says, if need be, we can take a cab.

‘Cabs during Corona?’ I say irritably and promise to pick her up in an hour, if the roads are clear that is.

I randomly pick a t-shirt to make the occasion informal, and then decide against it. Mira never liked t-shirts. She said t-shirts stole solemnity from a man. Made him look frivolous.

I ignore her favourite green Ralph Lauren shirt that I have not worn for five years and pull out a plain white half kurta that I wore whenever I had no interest in looking any better than I must. Which I didn't have most of the time. All my old dressing habits had changed, the only exception to it being the use of the Lacoste perfume that both Mira and I liked equally. So much that we both used it without gender distinction.

I spray the perfume liberally on me and feel Mira’s presence in the vicinity. I remember her telling me that she would take this scent with her to heaven as their love’s keepsake. Fragrances, according to her, have an all-pervading and immortal quality to them. They don’t expire, neither in the senses of the living nor in the spirit of the dead.

There has to be something so intimate between two people in love that it transcends time, she always said. To me, it is this fragrance. And the other thing that will keep me bound to Mira are the words that have become gospel to me. Promise me that you will.

To honour those words alone, I am going today. This perhaps will be the end of my unliving.

Perhaps.

Freedom Song

Have you thought of a name for me, mama?’

The voice is as dainty as the sound of a dandelion landing in the heart.

I place my hand gently on the bump in my belly and run it over the fabric of my gown. At six months, it isn’t as big as I thought it might be and can easily be hidden under a flowing dress.

‘It’s a girl. Boys make your belly distend more,’ I remember my mother announcing with glowworms flickering in her eyes when she saw me the last time. My mother loved daughters and this disposition had evenly spread and seeped into me too like melted margarine on a toast.

For reasons that I could not comprehend myself or explain to anyone, I believed I would be a better mother to a daughter than to a son. It didn’t have anything to do with the way I was born and brought up or what kind of a daughter I eventually turned out to be to my mother. But there was a fairy tale quality to my dreams about bringing up a girl baby.

My days are now filled with ideas of dolling up a girl with frills and flowers. It is as if my life would acquire a blush on its cheeks thrown in from the pink of her baby feet when she arrives. How will it be to hold and kiss each of her crimson brushed toes? How will it be to let my thumb be swaddled in her tentative baby grip? How will it be to listen to her girlish goo—goo that means to say, “Mama, I will with you for as long I am your girl.’

Daughters. They will forever be there as virtual stilts, no matter how far they go or what they confront in their own lives. They are a mother’s nonnegotiable assets.

‘Have you thought of a name for me?’ The dandelion voice grazes my ears again.

I haven’t.

‘Darling, what would you like to be called?’ I ask drawing patterns with my finger on my belly.

‘Err…can I choose my name? Really?’

‘Of course, honey. You can choose anything. It’s your life.’

I feel a tingle in my tummy at once.

‘What are you doing?’ I laugh, inspired by the funny sensation inside.

‘I am doing a happy jig, mama. You just made me happy. How I love you for saying I have a choice! I thought…’

And after a few fleeting seconds during which time she probably lapsed into some distant thought, she says, ‘Mama, you know what?’

‘Hmm?’

‘My friends back there said to me that I would be lucky if I made it safely to the world. They said the path was treacherous and every effort would be made to make my journey tough. And the stories they told the rest of us waiting for our turn made us want to hide among the clouds so we wouldn’t be picked for a birth. I just didn’t want to be born. I was so scared. I still am. What will happen to me once I am out there? Will they do bad things to me? Will you protect me then?’

Sensing a tremble in my sinews, I close my eyes and drop a prayer capsule into my womb. It travels down to where she lies cradled, wraps her in its aura and dispels her fear momentarily.

‘I have heard gruesome tales, mama. About how they treat girls out here. Are they true? Do they…’ her dandelion voice suddenly falls silent.

I feel a momentary squeeze in my tummy. I imagine my princess cringing inside. I drop another prayer capsule.

‘Darling,’ I say and draw a deep breath before considering my reply.

I wonder what sort of evil things my princess had heard about the world from her friends. Both those who made it and who didn’t. I realise that the instances I have heard and seen in my life give credence to her fears. But had she really heard the gruesome tales as they were?

What notions did she carry within her babbling heart? What did she envisage in her tiny head about the life that was ordained to her?

I kiss the back of my fist as if it were her forehead and lay my hand on my child, the vibes transferring through my pulse like soft sunshine diffusing into the woods. I shrug mildly to get rid of my own disquiet before I pick my words. What I say to her next will be crucial.

My baby has begun to decipher things, I reckon with equal surprise and jitteriness. The weeks ahead are my exclusive time with her. No one has a claim or an influence over her. It is my opportunity to show her the map of the human world. What I show her now is what she will remember, the stories that I narrate now is what she will believe and the thoughts that I infuse will decide what she will become. Despite what my life has been. Despite the shabbiness of it. Despite my fights and forfeitures.

‘Speak to your baby as often as you can,’ I remember my mother telling. ‘She learns the most when she is in your confines, untouched by the perils on the outside. Feed her the right thoughts.’

I briefly think of the dangers lurking outside, waiting to devour my child once she arrives. It is hard to deny their existence. It would be foolish to be blind to them and tell my child that she is coming into a paradise. Who would know about the dangers sneaking outside than me and my mother? We trudged our way through the dark forests inhabited by wild beasts and venomous creatures, but there is no way I can reveal the ugliness we have witnessed to my daughter. I must be honest with her, but it must be done without any brutality.

I think of ways to tell the truth without frightening her. As moments pass in contemplation, I sense my breath and my heartbeat slowly settle into a symphony. I seek the blessings of my deepest source to speak the truth to my child. No gnarled stories that will corrupt her or airbrush the reality of our lives. No tales of horrors that will scar her squishy heart. I had to be cautious, for speaking truth comes with its own dangers.

‘My angel,’ I whisper, making sure my words don’t fall on her harshly.

A vague stir inside indicates that she is all ears.

‘This is your mother’s story.’ I pause, unsure of which way to steer. A lot has transpired between my birth and now that I don’t know what to include and what to leave out. In the end, I decide to be brief, chiseling out the raw details.

‘I came into the world without my mother’s consent. It was a birth that wasn’t supposed to be, yet happened because my mother didn’t have the courage to smother me in her belly. She loved me too much for it.’

The uneasy silence that creeps between us makes me wonder if I was treading a precarious path and if I must stop now. But I decide I had an obligation to answer my child’s question.

Are the stories she has heard about what people did to girls in the world true?

I pour myself a glass of water and rest against a pillow on the cot. I slowly lapse into a state where my thoughts and words merge, and I let my story unfold intuitively.

‘I didn’t have the slightest clue of what to expect when I was like you and happily traipsed down to the world imagining it to be a playground where one could play all day. It was anything but that. I will keep the details for another day. But know this.

The world, as they have hinted to you, isn’t an entirely bad place. It is the ones who inhabit it that taint it black. They decide your size. How much space you occupy, how much you grow and glow.

Now you have a choice – to tow the line that these people draw and cast yourself in their moulds or to expand yourself to such heights that you touch the cosmos. Do you get what I am saying?’ I ask, patting my belly.

‘Know this. Freedom isn’t something that people give you. It is something that comes with your spirit. It is an inherent part of you. Learning to use your freedom in a responsible way is what makes you a complete human.’

I wait for a response from inside, wondering if any of what I spoke made sense to her. I had learnt that babies had an enormous capacity to comprehend things when they were still inside. It was only after they touched the mortal plains that they lost their insight and became blinded by the darkness and ignorance around. There was light inside, my mother said.

‘Yes, I have heard that they tied you up. They took freedom away from you and made you helpless. Such stories abound back there,’ she says, her voice cracking.

I cluck my disapproval at what she just said. Her thoughts were full of adversities, and it isn’t how I am envisaging her future. I want her to gain strength from the possibilities.

‘They can seize your freedom only if you allow them to. It is yours and only yours to keep and preserve,’ I say firmly.

She must have nodded, unsurely, for I felt a weak nudge inside. I shift from my side, and lay on my back, allowing her space to waltz freely inside. I reckon that she needed more room to build her convictions.

‘And you mamma? Did you live a life of freedom?’ she asks eagerly, lifting her voice just beyond a whisper.

I don’t reply. I don’t want to dish out a lie. There was no way I could tell her that I had let them do bad things to me as a child. And before that, to my mother. That I don’t know my father. Neither do I know hers. Somewhere in the corridors of passing nights, I was born. It is where her seed too was sown. Anonymously.

But she will not live the way we have lived. It is a promise I have made to my mother. My daughter will not do what we did. Surrender. Compromise.

‘No, I didn't. But you will live in freedom. All that I was denied, you will acquire. All that I suffered, you will escape. I can’t wait for you to come into the world and build your space where evil will fear to tread.’

I feel buoyed by my own inner voice that echoes through the length and breadth of my body till it explodes as sobs of release.

I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. A sweet silence permeates the air, which sounds like a lullaby to my unborn child. I hum with it indistinctly and sink into a velvety slumber.