Portraits: After Midnight

short story | in your dreams, you grow wide like the city / you carry everyone inside your belly

Hi everyone! Welcome back to A Poem A Week. Off-late, I’ve been wanting to venture out into more fiction writing. But since I’m still a novice fiction writer, I envisioned ‘portraits’ as a writing exercise. These are brief character studies of ordinary people - some real, some imagined. These are experiments in developing characters, their worlds and their inner lives - and I wanted to let you all in on my experiments.

And if you’re mainly a poetry person, you will still find the poetic, the mundane and the surreal in these pieces! This is my first very piece from ‘portraits’ - I’m excited and nervous. It’s called ‘After midnight.’ Let’s begin.

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After Midnight

Almost midnight. Leaning by the small square of your window, you watch as the city puts on her second face. The smells of cumin, dry roasted chilli and fried onion rise from the late-night food stall. Rickshaw drivers crowd around for a plate, passing around steel flasks and a box of cards. Laughing, wiping their brows with red and white cotton towels before their next shift begins. Trails of banter in Tamil, Kannada and Hindi mingle and carry through the balmy wind, clarified by the silent hour. You are only watching. Your hair is damp and fragrant from your bucket-bath. A hint of synthetic jasmine and coconut oil. Your skin is still cool from the coppery water that spurts through the rusted taps, your face meeting the warm air as though it were another skin. A tingle. A surge. A feeling that at least for now, you belong only to the night. You brew a cup of too-sweet, too-strong, too-milky tea and return to the window. These cups of late-night tea aren’t a secret, but you’ve never mentioned them to anyone. You lower your mouth to the smooth rim of the chipped blue ceramic, closing your eyes to the pleasure of what is yours entirely. 

At this hour, the lane outside your house smells of wet leaves, night flowers and petrol. Your gaze shifts to the narrow corner store that opens after 10 PM. A gaggle of college students are buying loose cigarettes from the barely-adult boy at the front of the store. Soon they will disappear into the loud, yellowish doorway of the local bar where one can only pay by cash or tab. A slab of light from a passing car illuminates the students' faces. They are already high on cheap weed spiked with rat poison and the feeling that this is the freest they will ever be, slinging their arms around each other's shoulders and swaying like blades of grass in an open field. Footsteps. Fading laughter. Blink. Flicker. A neon facade for a dingy massage parlour lights up. Two women in translucent saris appear beneath the glow of the facade that stutters ‘24 / 7’ in intermittent bursts of pink, green and yellow. One hands the other lipstick. The other holds up a hand mirror for the first to slick back her hair. A cat stalks a beam of light. Wide trucks rumble down the lane, heavy sacks jostling in the back. A man pushes a kebab cart, the bright orange meat dangling off of sharp skewers, glistening with oil. 

The ebb and flow of the midnight city fills you with something bittersweet. You long to be elsewhere, deep inside these tarry, urban tides, instead of merely gazing on from a window. You imagine kneeling before this black water, this churning night and surrendering the pretences of daylight to it. Like a ritual, like something sacred. Slowly you shuffle to the kitchen and rinse off your tea-cup, careful not to let it clink or clatter. Then with equal care, you soap and scrub the dishes in the sink. This is why you stay up late, you tell your family. To do the dishes. To do what must be done. When your day begins tomorrow, it will still be dark. As though you never went to sleep at all, but rather moved from one dark, silent hour to the next. When you wake, it is always as a different woman. As an actor, with your name and your face, who performs your life until returning your body to you at night. The actor is the one who packs stacked lunches and lights lamps and collects milk and newspapers. Who closes her eyes while bathing and lives a lifetime there. Who haggles with vegetable vendors. Who pins her starchy sari and ignores the stabbing pain in her knee as she walks to the school. Who hides the meat-dishes in her lunch box from her colleagues who fear that the libidinal odours may pollute them. Who dabs the afternoon budding of sweat from her forehead before scolding the troublemakers in her class. You children. You children will be the death of me, she will say. That woman. You know her intimately. Sometimes when you are awake at night, you feel her shoulders brushing past yours. 

Quiet. You walk through the thin slip of the hallway. Past the latticed tablecloth, the painting of a running horse, boxes of stale fried snacks, framed wedding photographs and the miscellaneous clutter of a lifetime you’ve never managed to throw away. In the grey light, these objects look distant and unfamiliar, as though you weren’t walking through your house, but a museum display of it. You stop by your daughters’ room to check on them, to listen to the sound of their breathing. Sometimes you envy them. They are still at the age where sleep comes easy and deep. When dreams are simple and forgotten by morning. You watch the grainy rise and fall of their two sleeping bodies. You think of the strained smile that people give you when they tell you not to worry, the next one will be a boy for sure. Dark blue hush. A smattering of stars. A swallowed sun. Your daughters too are other people now, but sometimes you still can’t tell where your body ends and theirs begin.

By the time you slip into the bedroom, it’s almost 1AM. Through the curtains, you notice a thin sliver of moon - curved and pale like a fingernail that pressed into the sky and bruised it. You go to bed imagining yourself as the waning moon, a bulbous dark side blooming out from your waist. Your husband is fast asleep, inches away from you. A world away from you. Tomorrow he will stretch open the morning paper with a loud, taut flap and wait to be served his tea: half milk, a touch of cardamom, no sugar. Then he will clear his throat to be served another cup. You don’t know when his boyish face hardened, when his brows settled permanently into a furrow. You close your eyes, listening to the low rumble of his snores that punctuate the night. 

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You fall asleep. In your dreams, you grow wide like the city. You carry everyone inside your belly. The hawkers, the men sleeping on the pavements, the tired women at intersections with dusty babies on their hips, the raucous drunks, the buttoned up office workers with their haughty expressions, the teenagers with streaked hair and frayed jeans lurking in parks after sundown, the roar of machinery, the last train grinding out of the drab station, the late night traffic flowing like silt, turning into sediment, the street food frying and sizzling, the cats and dogs and rats and roaches, the flies teeming around overflowing garbage and cow dung, the walls stained with betel juice, graffiti and urine, the vacant lots and shadows. You carry it all. Your daughters, your students. You carry even yourself. You turn inside out. You borrow the lipstick from the woman under the streetlamp. You buy a cigarette from the corner shop. You drive off into the night, the wind fluttering through your clothes louder than the sound of the sea. You grow old in your dream. Weathered. You look in the mirror and see your mother’s face. The face of her mother before her. The faces of those dead and living, pressed into your skin. What is that burrowed into the ridges of your face? A life lived only for what it means to be awake at midnight. The knowledge that the rest was simply borrowed. Tenderly, you smooth your thinned out grey hair with a bangled hand. You are old. You bow at the sink and weep. You pray to a god whose name you do not know.

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Thank you for reading till here! A Poem A Week is a reader supported publication. Your support helps me experiment with my writing and share it for free. If you liked this piece, then feel free to share, comment, subscribe or pledge a paid subscription. You can also make a one-time donation on Kofi - it would make my day!

And here’s some fiction I’ve been enjoying on here!

1. The Gem by

   EJ Trask

The Gem

2. meromictic by

   Clancy Steadwell

meromictic

I'll be back with new writing next week. Until then, take care.

Love,

Anagha