Anya, the Artemis
Pungent smell of acetone mixed with the air readily as the spilled nail polish remover soaked the white linen bed sheet. The room was dressed in white. Stern, as snow that never melts. Regal, as pearls born from deep sea secrets. Silent, as sheets draping the dead. The carpet on the floor was white and plush, exuding an aura of luxury not at ease with the otherwise austere room. A large frame hung on one of the walls displaying a black and white photo of colorful flowers.
"Shit" exclaimed Anya, before realizing that acetone evaporates quickly. She decided to drop the sheets at the cleaners tomorrow. She glanced at the spilled nail polish one more time, deeply annoyed that her clean white bedroom dressed like a bride, was no longer crispy clean. The room next to the bedroom was the study, which actually could be called the dark room. Heavy drapes the color of blue almost as dark as black keep sunlight away through the day. The walls adorned a few mismatched pieces: a clock, shapeless metal art-piece, and an antique mirror with broken glass. There were no pictures of people, no images that could tell if anyone else lived here, or if there was anyone that Anya knew, was related to, or wanted to remember. A black functional desk and a few lamps were the only furniture in this room.
It was almost impossible to tell how long Anya had lived in this apartment, or how long she had planned to stay here. She did not seem to have any friends or visitors, barring the cleaning lady that came to clean the house every Wednesday. She traveled frequently. Whether she worked from home or went to work outside the house was still a mystery to me. Still, Anya’s existence was not as unnoticeable as it appears from my description. She was famous. A well known name in the world-of-world-wide-web. If she hadn’t been famous, I would not have known nor fallen in love with her, and wouldn’t have left everything behind to find her.
For the past six months I have stalked her, pursued her through emails and letters, and tried every possible way to gain her attention. I cannot say I’ve failed completely, but until I see her in person, I could not sleep through the whole night.
*****
Porch with grills, and me
When I lived on the second storey of the 3-storey ancestral home in one of the older districts of that big city called Kolkata, I looked down at the world from the grilled porch. Porch with thick iron grills painted the strangest shade of green. The grills were to prevent kids from leaning over, but more importantly to prevent thieves from climbing into the house from the porch. My mother had made optimal use of the grills by tying ends of nylon ropes to them and converting the porch into a washer man’s drying zone. The array of taut multicolored nylon ropes of various thicknesses hung above that looked like a maze of yarn sprawled across a sky painted with whitewash beaten and sheared by a regular monsoon.
On the days my mother didn’t occupy the porch for weekly linen drying, I liked to sit on the old wicker chair and watch people walking by the street below. I could sit there for hours, occasionally smoking cigarettes and throwing the burnt butts into the drain by the side of the street below. The drain was not supposed to be open since the new municipal corporation had been working on covered drains for years. Yet at many places, the drains were open. The spot where I threw my cigarette butts was easily recognizable, accumulated for days and weeks before inching forward slowly, giving away evidence about how clear and efficient the drain system really was.
I had grown used to the ugly drains, just as I had grown used to the nylon clothes lines, the pealing-off whitewash, my mother’s occasional curses thrown at me for being an unemployed extra-mouth-to-feed, the spats between my grandmother and my mother (that could be heard from the kitchen on the ground floor to the topmost floor of the house), the unbearable heat of the mid-days, and my unwavering, un-diminishing, mine-only, alone-ness.
As a college-educated (with poor grades) twenty three year old man living with his parents at his grandparents’ house in a city of four million unemployed youth, I was not considered an anomaly. But, as the only one in this neighborhood that did not want to play cards at the community fitness center or share a smoke with the other unemployed men just hanging out, certainly made me an outsider, and the "creepy guy".
Despite living in this huge mess of a city, very little ever changed in my life. Or for that matter in the lives of everyone that lived around me. The year was 2008. Economy was booming in this part of the world since the past many years. Money was pouring into the big metropolises in the South, but this city remained relatively untouched. Kolkata had become an investor’s hell. Paralyzed by mindless strikes by labor unions, a government that was more interested in preserving its pseudo-ideals than fulfill the promises it made before the last elections, this great city of the past had crestfallen into the lap of poverty and been renamed by many as : the dying city. I was one of the millions of unemployed youth. Our dreams seemed distant and difficult to believe in any longer.
And then something else happened, something completely alien. One day I found an obsession. It was her. She was Anya, the Artemis they said. The queen of dreams, the fantasy of the sleepless. There were more than a million hits on her website every month. I used to think of her exactly as she used to appear to me every night. Yet every time I saw her, she would have changed her appearance. If one day she was a Mediterranean dame with dark eyes and wavy brown hair, the next day she would transform into a straight haired Latina with heavily mascara-ed blue eyes, and full botox-ed lips. If one day she was a moon-face recluse, the next day, she was a starry-eyed vixen. I eagerly waited for her next transformed look, and wondered what she had up her sleeve. I was ashamed to be smitten by her. After all, she was not even for real. Or in more accurate words, she was just an actor, of sorts. She was part actor, part story-teller, an extremely beautiful story-teller. To call her just beautiful would be a gross understatement, for her beauty was unparalleled in the part of the world I was familiar with.
She called herself Anya. Her stories were like lullabies for grownups. They were soothing stories, funny stories, twisted stories, cute stories, love stories, hate stories, but always mesmerizing stories. Her stories were almost always about someone very similar to me, and almost never about herself. Slowly and unknowingly I became addicted to her stories. She had this wonderful capacity to make me feel rescued from my trapped life, like a permanent dream suddenly happened to me and I never had to wake up to face reality again. Unfailingly, I returned to her website everyday as she became my sleeping-pill.
With time I wondered more about her. About the person that she was in real life. About how she really looked without the hair extensions and the fake eyelashes and the overdone makeup. To my every email she had replied, yet I had found nothing about her that I wanted to know. One day she came as Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt. She is supposed to be the protector of young women, and men. She told me a story about the young man living in the dingy part of town, unemployed and lonely, a social misfit that could neither survive in his circumstances nor abandon the town. Artemis, the self-made Goddess that she was, paved a secret way to get him out, into a world that was waiting for him.
That was the day I had fallen in love with her.
*****
The Secret
This is the day I have been waiting for all my life. I would spare you the details how I managed this as they are of no significance in this story.
As only lovers would know, I felt like the most fortunate idiot in this world, totally incapable of controlling his emotions or be consciously aware of what was happening, as I stood outside Anya’s house waiting for her to open the door for me. It is strangely funny that I had been waiting for this moment for months, and now that it was happening before me, I was not fully convinced this was real.
Then the door opened and my momentary trance was broken by the smell of acetone. She took me by the hand and led me inside the door. Her face, older than I had thought, was even more beautiful in person. Her golden tresses were more golden, her delicate fingers more delicate. Her mouth, was as soft as I had imagined.
That night, she led us through our love-making. I, a 23-old virgin from East India, was as incapable as a lover, as was she in concealing her surprise when she found that out. Later, she slept in my arms. I watched her sleep, a rare orchid draped over a bed, crispy white as a bridal-dress. There was no other moment in my life that I remembered as more beautiful, and I closed my eyes to etch the picture for ever in my heart.
An hour later, I was still awake, for some reason. A certain uneasiness was creeping up to me. The precise reason I may not know, but what I knew was that it was only going to grow within me. Anya, the woman that I was endlessly attached to, was still a huge mystery for me. Whether she would want to see me again was also a mystery to me. She had answered most of my questions with a smile and small incomplete answers that night, and she had carefully steered clear of anything that would reveal her full identity. I tossed with this uneasiness for a long time, and what time I finally fell asleep, I do not remember.
I woke up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. I walked across the room into the bathroom. Attached to the bathroom was a huge closet full of Anya’s clothes. Her dress-up clothes for her story-teller videos. Without even thinking I walked into the closet. The first thing I noticed was a suitcase that looked like it was in the process of being packed. Then I saw a small black booklet over a big packet. The booklet was a passport. I picked it up and open it. It belonged to Anya – the photo confirmed. The name said "Anne Bellenger". ANNE – so that was her name. Then I opened the big packet under the passport. Inside was another passport. The photo was that of Anya (or Anne?). Her name was printed as "Palmira Haswell". Which one of these was her ?
I opened both the passports and laid them out side by side to compare the two photos. Both the photos seemed to be of Anya, or Anne, or Palmira! Or were they? My heart was beating so fast I could swear it could be heard outside of me. I focused on the two photos trying to figure out if they belonged to the same person or not. It seemed possible that they were two different persons.
All of a sudden my uneasiness had turned into suspicion, and fear. Had I fallen into a secret trap, unsuspectingly? Should I leave this house right away before she woke up in the other room? Or should I confront her directly? Either way, my life had already fallen into pieces.
I walked back towards the bedroom.
**************************
Concluding part next week!
Pungent smell of acetone mixed with the air readily as the spilled nail polish remover soaked the white linen bed sheet. The room was dressed in white. Stern, as snow that never melts. Regal, as pearls born from deep sea secrets. Silent, as sheets draping the dead. The carpet on the floor was white and plush, exuding an aura of luxury not at ease with the otherwise austere room. A large frame hung on one of the walls displaying a black and white photo of colorful flowers.
"Shit" exclaimed Anya, before realizing that acetone evaporates quickly. She decided to drop the sheets at the cleaners tomorrow. She glanced at the spilled nail polish one more time, deeply annoyed that her clean white bedroom dressed like a bride, was no longer crispy clean. The room next to the bedroom was the study, which actually could be called the dark room. Heavy drapes the color of blue almost as dark as black keep sunlight away through the day. The walls adorned a few mismatched pieces: a clock, shapeless metal art-piece, and an antique mirror with broken glass. There were no pictures of people, no images that could tell if anyone else lived here, or if there was anyone that Anya knew, was related to, or wanted to remember. A black functional desk and a few lamps were the only furniture in this room.
It was almost impossible to tell how long Anya had lived in this apartment, or how long she had planned to stay here. She did not seem to have any friends or visitors, barring the cleaning lady that came to clean the house every Wednesday. She traveled frequently. Whether she worked from home or went to work outside the house was still a mystery to me. Still, Anya’s existence was not as unnoticeable as it appears from my description. She was famous. A well known name in the world-of-world-wide-web. If she hadn’t been famous, I would not have known nor fallen in love with her, and wouldn’t have left everything behind to find her.
For the past six months I have stalked her, pursued her through emails and letters, and tried every possible way to gain her attention. I cannot say I’ve failed completely, but until I see her in person, I could not sleep through the whole night.
*****
Porch with grills, and me
When I lived on the second storey of the 3-storey ancestral home in one of the older districts of that big city called Kolkata, I looked down at the world from the grilled porch. Porch with thick iron grills painted the strangest shade of green. The grills were to prevent kids from leaning over, but more importantly to prevent thieves from climbing into the house from the porch. My mother had made optimal use of the grills by tying ends of nylon ropes to them and converting the porch into a washer man’s drying zone. The array of taut multicolored nylon ropes of various thicknesses hung above that looked like a maze of yarn sprawled across a sky painted with whitewash beaten and sheared by a regular monsoon.
On the days my mother didn’t occupy the porch for weekly linen drying, I liked to sit on the old wicker chair and watch people walking by the street below. I could sit there for hours, occasionally smoking cigarettes and throwing the burnt butts into the drain by the side of the street below. The drain was not supposed to be open since the new municipal corporation had been working on covered drains for years. Yet at many places, the drains were open. The spot where I threw my cigarette butts was easily recognizable, accumulated for days and weeks before inching forward slowly, giving away evidence about how clear and efficient the drain system really was.
I had grown used to the ugly drains, just as I had grown used to the nylon clothes lines, the pealing-off whitewash, my mother’s occasional curses thrown at me for being an unemployed extra-mouth-to-feed, the spats between my grandmother and my mother (that could be heard from the kitchen on the ground floor to the topmost floor of the house), the unbearable heat of the mid-days, and my unwavering, un-diminishing, mine-only, alone-ness.
As a college-educated (with poor grades) twenty three year old man living with his parents at his grandparents’ house in a city of four million unemployed youth, I was not considered an anomaly. But, as the only one in this neighborhood that did not want to play cards at the community fitness center or share a smoke with the other unemployed men just hanging out, certainly made me an outsider, and the "creepy guy".
Despite living in this huge mess of a city, very little ever changed in my life. Or for that matter in the lives of everyone that lived around me. The year was 2008. Economy was booming in this part of the world since the past many years. Money was pouring into the big metropolises in the South, but this city remained relatively untouched. Kolkata had become an investor’s hell. Paralyzed by mindless strikes by labor unions, a government that was more interested in preserving its pseudo-ideals than fulfill the promises it made before the last elections, this great city of the past had crestfallen into the lap of poverty and been renamed by many as : the dying city. I was one of the millions of unemployed youth. Our dreams seemed distant and difficult to believe in any longer.
And then something else happened, something completely alien. One day I found an obsession. It was her. She was Anya, the Artemis they said. The queen of dreams, the fantasy of the sleepless. There were more than a million hits on her website every month. I used to think of her exactly as she used to appear to me every night. Yet every time I saw her, she would have changed her appearance. If one day she was a Mediterranean dame with dark eyes and wavy brown hair, the next day she would transform into a straight haired Latina with heavily mascara-ed blue eyes, and full botox-ed lips. If one day she was a moon-face recluse, the next day, she was a starry-eyed vixen. I eagerly waited for her next transformed look, and wondered what she had up her sleeve. I was ashamed to be smitten by her. After all, she was not even for real. Or in more accurate words, she was just an actor, of sorts. She was part actor, part story-teller, an extremely beautiful story-teller. To call her just beautiful would be a gross understatement, for her beauty was unparalleled in the part of the world I was familiar with.
She called herself Anya. Her stories were like lullabies for grownups. They were soothing stories, funny stories, twisted stories, cute stories, love stories, hate stories, but always mesmerizing stories. Her stories were almost always about someone very similar to me, and almost never about herself. Slowly and unknowingly I became addicted to her stories. She had this wonderful capacity to make me feel rescued from my trapped life, like a permanent dream suddenly happened to me and I never had to wake up to face reality again. Unfailingly, I returned to her website everyday as she became my sleeping-pill.
With time I wondered more about her. About the person that she was in real life. About how she really looked without the hair extensions and the fake eyelashes and the overdone makeup. To my every email she had replied, yet I had found nothing about her that I wanted to know. One day she came as Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt. She is supposed to be the protector of young women, and men. She told me a story about the young man living in the dingy part of town, unemployed and lonely, a social misfit that could neither survive in his circumstances nor abandon the town. Artemis, the self-made Goddess that she was, paved a secret way to get him out, into a world that was waiting for him.
That was the day I had fallen in love with her.
*****
The Secret
This is the day I have been waiting for all my life. I would spare you the details how I managed this as they are of no significance in this story.
As only lovers would know, I felt like the most fortunate idiot in this world, totally incapable of controlling his emotions or be consciously aware of what was happening, as I stood outside Anya’s house waiting for her to open the door for me. It is strangely funny that I had been waiting for this moment for months, and now that it was happening before me, I was not fully convinced this was real.
Then the door opened and my momentary trance was broken by the smell of acetone. She took me by the hand and led me inside the door. Her face, older than I had thought, was even more beautiful in person. Her golden tresses were more golden, her delicate fingers more delicate. Her mouth, was as soft as I had imagined.
That night, she led us through our love-making. I, a 23-old virgin from East India, was as incapable as a lover, as was she in concealing her surprise when she found that out. Later, she slept in my arms. I watched her sleep, a rare orchid draped over a bed, crispy white as a bridal-dress. There was no other moment in my life that I remembered as more beautiful, and I closed my eyes to etch the picture for ever in my heart.
An hour later, I was still awake, for some reason. A certain uneasiness was creeping up to me. The precise reason I may not know, but what I knew was that it was only going to grow within me. Anya, the woman that I was endlessly attached to, was still a huge mystery for me. Whether she would want to see me again was also a mystery to me. She had answered most of my questions with a smile and small incomplete answers that night, and she had carefully steered clear of anything that would reveal her full identity. I tossed with this uneasiness for a long time, and what time I finally fell asleep, I do not remember.
I woke up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. I walked across the room into the bathroom. Attached to the bathroom was a huge closet full of Anya’s clothes. Her dress-up clothes for her story-teller videos. Without even thinking I walked into the closet. The first thing I noticed was a suitcase that looked like it was in the process of being packed. Then I saw a small black booklet over a big packet. The booklet was a passport. I picked it up and open it. It belonged to Anya – the photo confirmed. The name said "Anne Bellenger". ANNE – so that was her name. Then I opened the big packet under the passport. Inside was another passport. The photo was that of Anya (or Anne?). Her name was printed as "Palmira Haswell". Which one of these was her ?
I opened both the passports and laid them out side by side to compare the two photos. Both the photos seemed to be of Anya, or Anne, or Palmira! Or were they? My heart was beating so fast I could swear it could be heard outside of me. I focused on the two photos trying to figure out if they belonged to the same person or not. It seemed possible that they were two different persons.
All of a sudden my uneasiness had turned into suspicion, and fear. Had I fallen into a secret trap, unsuspectingly? Should I leave this house right away before she woke up in the other room? Or should I confront her directly? Either way, my life had already fallen into pieces.
I walked back towards the bedroom.
**************************
Concluding part next week!
Comments
It was beautiful. It was imaginative, and unpredictably wild. I like the little nuggets you throw in, be it about the lonely unemployed man in Kolkata or his inexperience at love making. It is good because of an original storyline.
What will make it even better is a slightly better structured sentences (in some points, not all). Waiting for part two :)