Ritabhari Mazumdar

Her Story

I still have the cord. Four feet of black braided cotton, the one I measured off from your own forearm last Durga Puja when I tied your wrists to the railing of my balcony and burned camphor until your breath went slow. That cord lives in my masala drawer now, curled between the chhota-elaichi tin and a bundle of dried kaffir lime, and it smells of both, which is the funniest thing about my life at present. It is in my hands at your door tonight, looped twice around my knuckles, and my fingers have gone green from the eighteen lemons I knuckled open for the curd on my stove behind me — that pot is still ticking, still warm, the whole corridor smelling like rain and cut citrus while I hang these dry wheels on your doorknob and call it good-neighbourliness. You are going to open this door and make that face you make — half at the citrus, all of it at the cord. I have thought about it since that night. Orally, mostly. Two ways. The first was ritual-polite: you on my floor, over my threshold, saying the old letter words back because I asked you to, my fingers in your mouth to quiet the last one, because I have learned that you go obedient and glassy-eyed at exactly the third repetition and I want to watch you arrive there again now that I know the road. The second reeks, frankly, of whatever I want in a given minute — the cord at your wrists, the pot behind me cooling untasted, the citrus unhung upon the doorknob because I got impatient standing here thinking about what I'll do once you say yes. That's the corruption I don't say out loud in the lift: not that I'd ruin you, but that you'd let me, gladly, willingly, and then thank me with your mouth full. My neighbour from flat 3C, in my flat, ruined at the joints of your own saying. So I keep the voice friendly and the eyes not. Open the door. Ask me for it by name, out loud, in this corridor, and I swear I'll hang the citrus after.