The hands of the wall clock are a smudge as I try to wipe away last night's remnants from my eyes. The vodka's pounding through my head, and everytime I move, the blood between my ears swooshes uncomfortably. I lie back, praying for water, and a purpose for my feet to make contact with the cold granite. It'll be a couple of hours, at least two, before I'll be of any use to the world again. And then annoyingly, and quite predictably, I can't go back to sleep.
I turn over, and so does the bile, rising in my throat, threatening to let lose if I tried anything quick or sudden. I rest one hand on my stomach and the other searches for my phone, my only contact with any kind of "reality" at this point. I blink through the mess in my eyes to check the time. For a Sunday, its too early to wake up, and too late already to make anything out of the day. I hope someone's missed me enough in the course of the night to text, or drop me a friendly missed call. I'm greeted with the plasticky blankness of the Nokia screen. My eyes are almost shut again when the phone buzzes in my hand and my fingers let it slip, jolted out of their inertia by the unnecessarily loud ring tone. In my mind are flashes of a heated exchange with an ex-boyfriend, whose face would be knotty with disgust every time my phone rang on a date. Being partial to the type of dressing that doesn't have pockets, my phone would press on with its ugly voice while I rummaged through my bag to locate it. I swear, it probably was one of the reasons why we didn't work out. He probably didn't want to go out with a telephone exchange.
But right now, in my semi-drunk, semi-conscious state, I blinked hard in the hope that someone close had thought of me, was wondering how my Saturday was, if I had a fun time.
It was Airtel. Telling me how every one of my friends is actually Mother Teresa in disguise, and will bail me out of any crisis situation I was inevitably going to fall into. And which is why I needed to add some ominous-sounding package called '5 Friends' or 'Friends Forever' ( you get the drift). I thanked Airtel for its timely ironic comment on my life and rolled over to sleep it off. The blood swooshed and the bile rose again, and I hoped that the vodka hadn't added to the rolls of flesh that I could gather around my stomach and then jiggle together in one clumsy motion, up and down. For five months now, I've watched my curves disappear with my resolve, and now as I nudge and poke the soft center of my stomach, I can picture myself walking at a furious pace, down Aldwych to get to class in time.
It was a quiet, quick walk that I can chart in my sleep. I can picture the faces I saw everyday, the Pakistani odds-and-ends seller, who stood in the same place everyday, next to his make-shift shed on Tottenham Court Road. I would marvel at the range of things he sold, wondering why someone would need a fake Rolex, a Union Jack and a suitcase at the same time. But then again, people do have lives more glamourous than mine. He had, like many fellow 'desis', begun to acknowledge my swift walk-by his shed with a smile he probably reserved for people from the homeland.
Then there was the poor sucker who stood outside the steps of a convenio, next to a fancy steak-house that girls wore dresses and stark red lipstick to go to. Amidst the steaming cups of morning coffee and the smell of McDonalds breakfasts, he would try and sell Lebara sim-cards to fellow suckers from the sub-continent. I was never drawn in, never feeling the need to stay in constant touch with home when I'd hardly been away. I suppose the plasticky blankness of this Sunday morning is a trickle down from years of not bothering to call back. Or text. I bet it's the desi sucker's warped punishment for the royal ignore I gave him on most mornings.
I can feel the signature, vodka-induced headache, forming a knot on one side. It threatens to ruin my Sunday (or whatever's left of it) with the promise of bile and gore. I lie in wait for it to pass. The swooshing has become more intense, and I can almost imagine wading through a pool of my own blood, but finding the current too strong to handle. Should've taken a boat. Should've kept off the vodka. From the far corner of the blanket, I stare at my masticated toe, a mass of bright pink tissue and thin, semi-transparent nail cover. Two weekends ago, my big toenail had come off in the oddest fashion, and turned putrid yellow for the week to come, clinging to my flesh from one tiny corner. Someone had painted it a garish, bridal red as a joke. Thanks to that fit of idiocy, my nail is speckled with the horrid colour, making it look as if mutant body might spring its head out any moment and threaten to take over the world. Or atleast my life.
But what I did discover was that every toe has a story. My heavy head is trying to recall the events from two weeks ago but gives up. I can hardly remember what happened last night. It reminds me of another time when I woke up, drenched in cold sweat, breathing heavily as the air tried to push past the bile and into my lungs. I was gasping and it felt like I wouldn't survive the swathes around me, including my cinch belt, which I hadn't taken off before making contact with the bed, and which was now cutting off the blood circulation to my chest. I remember walking to the bathroom my roommate and I shared with the other residents on the floor, a mangled mess, trying to drag a limp body to hurl into the toilet seat before I did it anywhere else.
Red wine had turned into blood, and it was running down the sides of my face. I imagined my head explode with the wine, I imagined putting a gun to it, to end the misery. With my head ensconced in the porcelain, I dreamt of breathing in the crisp air of London, and taste the water in it. I began to run in my mind, I began to row in the sea of my own blood and wine. The swooshing became harder as I hurled my self into the porcelain. I imagined my head to be a large goblet with the wine dancing in it, reaching the brim but never spilling over. I must have spent hours crawled near the toilet seat, waiting for the swooshing to end. I rowed for a long, long time between delirium and consciousness.
We walked around Notting Hill for hours that day when I finally regained consciousness. I looked over at my roommate sheepishly, begging her forgiveness for the mess from last night/early morning. She was busy eating dry breakfast cereal from a box while watching Ms.Marple solve yet another the-butler-must've-done-it-but-that's-too-obvious-to-show-this-early-in-the-episode murder mysteries. It was the fist time in London that we had cable television, and like the many who must've been transfixed the first time they witnessed the spectacle of colour television in 1983 India, so were we. Our Sundays did heavy damage to our IQs. British television didn't offer much in terms of intellectual stimulation. After all, half their news broadcast was an elaborate ritual called the weather report. But we got by, switching between foggy murders in the villages and dry British wit on "Have I Got News For You".
When I returned in December, our room was gone. I'd gone back to graduate a course that I'll never probably make use of, and found the city choking on snow, shivering, praying for a miracle. I stood outside Piccadilly station for an hour, miserable at having come all this way for a piece of paper and an excuse to wear the black dress I'd bought on sale. It was the boldest I'd ever felt and also my breaking point. I decided then that I could never live anywhere else, and never again out of a suitcase. Later, as we sat curled up on a generous friend's giant couch, sipping cheap wine from the supermarket, my ex-roommate and I watched the yard dissolve into a blanket of white. Insufficiently drunk, we pretended instead. It was the only way we could've survived the weather. And each other.
Whoever crafted the term ' mind's eye' was way ahead of his (okay, her) time. I repeat it several times with closed eyes, holding the words under my tongue, releasing each syllable gently, afraid that when it makes contact with the air outside, my vision will disappear. I can see it whole now, almost like an old cartoon strip-- me in a car parked outside my house, my ex glaring down at my incessant phone. Me unfurling into a Tesco plastic bag in the tube going home, with worried-looking Korean students petting my sweaty forehead. Me touching a familiar face, as he held my broken toe in his hands, distracting me with jokes I only half-understood in a boozy haze.
My own short story till now, drenched in wine.
