Suicide
Raima stared out of the window at an overcast grey sky, the sun concealed in some dark abyss of a gulf shaped cloud. Still in her nightclothes, she fidgeted with the little plastic bottle in her hands. "Sleeping Pills" it said - just that, dull and layman.
She had tried around ten of them the night before and other than the fact that she had overslept, she felt perfectly normal. Alive. She frowned and threw the bottle out of the window. It crashed with the uneven ground three floors below and trooped off into a road hole.
A car honked loudly outside, its bare blue metal body glistening with the first drops of rain. Raima turned around once to see her mother still screaming into the telephone. As the car honked again, she quickly walked out. Waiting for the conversation - euphemism of the year - to cease would be futile. Her Mom and ex-Dad had no better use of a Sunday morning than lashing out at each other from behind the security and faceless-ness of a telephone.
"I am here, I am here!" she announced, taking a seat beside him in the car.
"You sure you want to do this?" He looked at her apprehensively, more hesitant than he was letting on. He had always had a crush on her, but had never expected such a wild adrenaline streak. But considering this was the first time she was allowing him to take her out, he wasn't noble enough to refuse.
In story book language, they were going Valley Jumping. They would race their car to the end of a treacherous Shimla slope and emerge on the valley in the opposite hill, bruise less and not lifeless.
"Of course Mihir. Why else had I been so eagerly waiting for rain?" She chided him, putting on a you-such-a-child expression. He smiled and started the car even as she averted her eyes.
He was a nice guy Mihir was, or was he? Perhaps the only reason he went along with what she said was similar to the one her parents had to marry - The urgency to consummate a year of passionate courting in college. If only Mom hadn't been prick enough to advocate a no-sex-before-marriage motto, she might have been spared all the melodrama that was her life.
"Where are you lost?" Mihir prodded as she played with a stray raindrop that had come in from a tiny crack in the windshield. "Scared?"
"Oh nowhere," she said, springing into action, "are we there yet?"
"All yours." he winked, braking and following it up with a little back swerve, "and here we go!"
Raima's eyes didn't snap shut as she felt the wheels leave the precipice of the slope. A mass of intensely chilled air peeped in at her through that crack in the windshield and a split second later, she felt the thud of landing on a grassy slope. She smiled as Mihir impulsively hugged her, in a way glad that he was safe. Really, death was getting allergic to her. Pity that.
--
Weekends were her bane, though Raima as she nibbled a chocolate cookie and looked up from the novel she was reading. They were the days when the house refused to be silent. The phone would ring all day and if it wasn't her ex-Dad, it would be a host of frilly haired, self obsessed women who called themselves her Mom's friends. They would chatter and they would clutter and pass comments on her antisocial nature.
"Really Rupa," a particularly vile one had remarked one such evening. "Does your daughter ever meet people? Ever date? What if she is, you know, not interested in men?" A symbolic hush fell over the intellectual troupe as Raima walked in.
"Oh we were just discussing romance Raima," giggled the vile one, attempting to cancel the hush. "Some of my dates from college still pester me. My son gets wide eyed each time they call me darling!"
"No wonder Aunty, he has a hard time choosing whom to call Daddy."
No one stopped her as she elegantly walked out. She had spent that evening walking by herself on Mall Road - the part of Shimla she loved best. It reminded her of old English lanes, brought alive from the Enid Blyton books she had read as a child... from a time Dad would accompany her on Result-Day in school.
A plastic bag on the bed brought her back to the present. It was a crude silver polybag left behind by probably the maid.
"Wear the polybag snugly around your head and tie it in place with a rubber band." she read out from the manual, "and then go to sleep."
What an easy death! Seemed like butter, she thought. Now who used to say that? Yes, her Mom on her driving lessons taken by her ex-Dad. She had said it the loudest once right before comically colliding into a gate.
The stopwatch had ticked away a minute already. A bit stuffy, yes, but she didn't feel the least drowsy. Well, perhaps it was time for last wishes.
She didn't really want to die. Like die, die. She just wanted a new beginning as someone else. And given how defensive God was about his creations, she couldn't hope for rectifications.
A minute more...were her eyes closing or was she doing that on purpose? The manual said some rubbish about increasing carbon dioxide. She hoped it was right; she probably looked goofy sitting like that with a shower cap of a polybag wrapped around her head.
Slumber caught over as she let her eyes droop. A moment later, there was a knock on the door.
Raima quickly got off her suicide ensemble. She would have to do it later and try something quicker. No matter what, she didn't want to be discovered right after the act. What if they somehow saved her?
Hand combing her hair, she opened the door and scowled at Rupa.
--
"I am a very bad mother am I not Raima?" Rupa asked nonchalantly as she served herself some rice.
Raima raised an eyebrow. "What's with this new blackmail route Ma? Let's have dinner in peace." As it is, I am fed up of this Mom-Daughter compulsory Sunday dinner.
"I am, I know." Rupa went on as if she hadn't heard her response. "I can see it in your face."
"I have a fairly nice looking face Ma. I don't think reflections of your marriage failures shine on in my nonexistent blackheads."
Rupa bit her lip. "Why are you being so harsh? I spent all afternoon cooking your favourite food..."
Raima slammed her spoon on the plate. "Oh I am deeply indebted. Didn't your frilled chicken group turn up this afternoon?"
"I only spend time with them as it gets horribly lonely at home..."
"So who asked you to quit your job? Why do you have to scrounge your ex-husband's neck about alimony every bloody morning?"
"I do that for you Raima. For your education, for your marriage..."
"And your string of pearls and emerald and jade of course come at no cost." Raima looked her in the eye. "I wonder why you had to give birth to me if this hellhole of a life is what I have to lead. Or did he say no to an abortion?"
As she cried into her pillow that night, Raima vowed it would be the last night she would live to see.
--
Should she wear her pair old ragged jeans? Or wouldn't they bother to wash blood stained clothes?
It was early the next morning and Raima had decided to jump off the terrace of the building opposite their house. It was a newly built mall with fancy glass layers...It wouldn't do much good to its reputation to reek of a suicide so early in its career but oh well, she couldn't be bothered.
Maybe she should write Ma a sorry letter. She repented all she had said over dinner the previous night. Ma had only been trying to build bridges and she had strewn all the bricks into the canal. Oh my, she could be poetic even in her last hours. Would that set a brighter tune to the melody she would hear when Jesus came to call?
She hoped she would be forgiven on Judgment day. I didn't really have an option, she would tell God. He would understand.
Raima climbed down the stairs to her mother's bedroom. There, suspended from the rather cobwebby silver fan, was Rupa.
~~
Edited by debby - 15 years ago
Cricket
