Memories | Nidhi Srivastava Asthana

The man lay with his back to a wall that had a slit near the ceiling. He was perfectly motionless. But then there are stores of remembrances. Can memories be stilled? Can they ever stop hurting, teasing, crushing and even nagging?

Let alone volatile flashbacks, the prisoner was even ignoring basic sensations. As if seeing, smelling and hearing – let alone thinking and remembering – were prohibited in the jail: just like drugs, alcohol and sodomy.

Even though the convict was not moving, who was he kidding? His mind was agitated. He was scared of his own fury. His rage had stubbornly refused to go away till it finally went against him. He had screamed and raged at the Judge in the court and admitted to even imaginary wrong-doings. Now it was too late to bottle in the rage. Or try to achieve closure. But he was no sage.

The still man was staring at the mottled wall in front of him.. A big black ant filed past. He slipped in his resolve and let his eyes wander to follow its antics, but felt detached. He could not be bothered with what it was doing once it had marched off.

Suddenly he felt a slight, soft movement on his left toe. He registered it, but pretended that it was happening on the wall. But it was too much like his tiny-toddler son’s trusting brush-of-the-fingers on his jutting toes: when little Chickoo came to force his father out of bed every morning he found Pappa at home.  

The gentle tickle began to travel up the his hairy leg in a light, teasing way like a caress with the tip of a finger, sending up tingling sensations right up to his groin. He shifted his focus to another patch to distract himself. To keep himself from thinking of her.

The sensation seemed to be playing hide-and-seek. There for a while, then nothing except his own grudgingly expectant wait. Yet, his inner defence became active the moment he felt another movement. There it was – in his bellybutton. Like a cheap trick to cause an instant chuckle. Like Mujju’s silly one-liners whispered to distract from the stresses of each wrong they chose to do together. For a second, he felt laughter building up. He stopped breathing. The moment passed.

He felt the soft touch deviating from its till-now straight path. It turned erratic and excited on the broad expanse of his chest. Till it found his thick neck. Its creep was like an ominous foreplay of the fingers of a strangler. The shape on the wall he was staring at turned into a dagger. Perhaps, deep inside, the criminal smiled at his own safety – there of all places – from the crime outside.

A sensuous graze like that, on the cheek, could awaken a dead man! The felon held his breath and a strange longing for the sensation to finally reach his lips shook him. But it took a detour and plunged into the cavity of his ear. He felt it struggling in the yucky stickiness inside. Another recollection surfaced: the twirl of his mother’s cotton ear bud, which had always felt threatening when he was little even though she always tried to calm him with soft words and gentle sounds.

As tears welled up in his eyes, the dagger began to float. Was nostalgia making the gaolbird cry? Or was it frustration at his own failure to keep his mind a complete, convenient blank?

A common house spider on stilts pulled itself out from the mess in his ear and, after a few meandering forays, reached the bridge of the captive’s nose. The man moved his arm and reached for the insect with his fingers. And he crushed it between his forefinger and thumb with sullen ferocity.

Nidhi Srivastava Asthana worked as an instructional designer in the computer software industry in India, loved sharing historical stories with her students in Myanmar and Thailand, lived in the USA as a student and has been an accompanying spouse to her peripatetic husband in six countries. Her stories have appeared in ‘Indian Literature’ IL340 (Sahitya Academy), ‘Manushi’ and Literally Stories. Her essays have been published by Kitaab.org, ‘India Currents’ and liveencounters.net.