a blue baby in a red house

by Shrutidhora P Mohor

When Fanny tells you at breakfast that the red house at the corner is being pulled down, giving you the side eye, the vapour of hot coffee like a screen between the two of you, you pretend to not hear her, you seem to focus on the screen for news, you don’t know why but your world is tinted a pale blue, a pale pink, and you are fidgety and there is a bug in your throat, itchy, scaly, and you are clearing your throat and shaking your head, you half-smile at her the way you would at a semi-known local grocer, and you believe that you are composed enough, but then you are suddenly rushing, you have refused second servings of everything you otherwise prefer, your table mat is stained by careless spillovers of food items and with caffeine coating your throat, your tie half-done, the knot sideways, the shirt sleeves uneven, you step out, tripping on stone chips scattered halfway on the sidewalk and only when you are standing there, in front of the grandeur of demolition, your time as a young adult, carefree, light-hearted, your time as a youthful hopeful heart, callow, casual, excitable, your first time of everything, with all its sparks and shadows, has been exposed before you, and you are no longer a man with a good job and a good home and a good wife in a good apartment, but a man-child, watching a 3D film on yourself, its background score a slow staccato, its filters auto-generated, its silence as deafening  as its music, and the more you watch and listen, the more you are transported to the there and then, you can recall why exactly you are there now and once your awestruck eyes have adjusted to the skeleton before you, you venture to climb on the rubble and step inside the theatre where once you have been both the protagonist as well as the audience, sometimes choosing your spot, at other times, the empty spot calling out to you to occupy, to fill up, to take over, and at the bottom of the place where there used to be the staircase, you station yourself but it’s damn difficult to stay steady, there is a stream of mosquitoes trying out the soft calf on your legs, and there is the see-saw bed of stones and stone chips and the workers are right on top of your head, sitting on a narrow parchment of what used to be the roof, their dusty, scratchy legs dangling like carrots in the air, but your focus is none of that, because you need to retrieve what you know you have left behind there, lost years ago, and you haven’t stopped asking yourself why you hadn’t stepped in some day before they began pulling this down, and you want to rummage through the furniture and push back curtains, draw out files and thrust open cupboards, but that’s no longer possible, the furniture is long gone except for a cane chair table set, all black by now from years of dirt, there remains only one curtain, moth-eaten, smelly, behind which you would hide during birthday parties, that inevitable part of playing the dark room, its chief attraction being bumping into friends and distant cousins, and scaring the shit out of each other, the files left behind are termite palaces now, a partially broken cupboard kicked around until its curved sides look like careless bulging bellies, and you risk cuts and falls to stand in front of it only to find a grotesque you on its concave mirror, and you jump out of your wits upon seeing yourself, you are embarrassed, you steal a glance, no, the workers haven’t seen you, so, with renewed energy, you trudge along inside.

You plan to walk through the debris to what used to be your bedroom.

You remember where exactly you had placed it. Inside the glass wardrobe fixed to the wall.

You manoeuvre your way in, twisting your ankle more than once.

At this time, a worker calls out from somewhere up, Hey you! What do you want?

You pause, wondering whether to tell them that this used to be your place.

But before you can decide, there is another figure risking her life and walking into the gaping hole of the bedroom, a quarter of its ceiling waiting dangerously to cave in, the rest already broken down.

It’s Koya.

And in an instant, your mind is on a spin, from your first date (you look good in denim) to the first hearing (the teeth-y lawyers, always delighted with divorce cases), from the first anniversary cake-cutting (twelve months of waking up with you, mmmuahh) to the first baby shower (life will change soon!), from shared sunsets (our silhouette kisses on the gram) to your ugliest fights (oh yes, that’s typical of you, what else can one expect from an abominable, lowly character like you!), the collapse, the descent into hell, the falling apart, the quietness of inevitable decisions (it’s best to stay separately), court papers, more court papers, lawyers who officially divided you into two opponent camps, the impropriety of private questions (when was the last time…), the tearing apart of the kernel of conjugality, the scrutiny by a hundred eyes, or so it seems, when everyone was convinced that your extra-marital affair was responsible for the absence of a second child with her, so what if you have just lost one, and your lawyer would juggle his words and fling his papers to establish how that would risk Koya’s health, and hence was out of the question, and one day the court would prove your commitment, the other day her struggle to keep the marriage alive, one lawyer up today, the other one triumphant the next day, one assumption a fact, one fact twisted, one more suppressed, another one drowned in the gutter of lies and charges, the drag, the hopelessness, the weariness, the angry tears leaving muddy marks all over the body, and then one day, the verdict, and you are free, and you pick up your last few things and sign the property papers and rush to tell Fanny that you are free, free at last, patient Fanny, waiting for years, and you are tired but happy, happy and relieved, and it’s the end of your bad life, your unfree life, until one day you remember that inside the glass wardrobe in your former bedroom, Koya and you had kept an imprint of your newborn’s palms, tiny pink palms, a family tradition of preserving handprints through generations, palms which waited to be picked up all the while that you bulldozed each other’s points in the court, and by the time the judge was considering the threadbare details of your naked marriage and inching towards his decision, the little body had emptied itself oozing blue, its life drained on a strainer, its last few gasps in the empty home while Koya and you littered the courtroom with dirty words, its tiny organs inside, none of which the doctors had found functioning fine, still, frozen, and when the judgement came, several months after this fatal day, the lawyers from both the sides already having pounced on the infant’s lifeless body as “one more evidence of…”, all that you wanted to do was to run away, get rid of the home that had housed such suffering for both, escape the rubble of memories, and the rabble of allegations, run, run as fast as you can, and so you did.

The red house at the corner survived for a year or so after the judge pronounced his verdict until the promoter took charge of it.

It’s all but gone by now, bricks showing their shark-teeth at you, manned by workmen and their ruthless hammers and axes and pole-splitting drill machines, and inside that demolished heap, is a pair of tiny, helpless hands, fingers curled up, nails light blue, the skin as thin as muslin, a premature blue baby whose survival was questionable right from the moment of its coming, but who, it was hoped, would salvage the unhappy, anemic marriage.

Koya and you, face to face, and a pair of faded blue palms in between.

You are mirrors to each other, you have always been mirrors to each other, in love and in war, now you see her blue, she sees you, but these blues are ink-y blues, smudged blues, abused blues, and amidst all that blueness, you realise, perhaps at the same time, that it is a little too late.

The glass wardrobe mounted on the wall has been splintered and thrown aside in pieces just the other day, informs the indifferent workmen, grinding betel leaves on their coarse brown hands and pouring the dust into their large, dark mouths.

Photo of Shrutidhora P Mohor

BIO: Shrutidhora P Mohor (born 1979, India) has been listed in several competitions like Bristol Short Story Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Retreat West competitions, the Winter 2022 Reflex Fiction competition, Flash 500.