U by Suchismita Karmakar
Trigger warning for self-harm
the slight sour smell of a winter night was what U quietly loved. it churned up the idea of droplets of orange juice clinging to the interstices between space and air. a tactile taste. a velvety, cushiony citric abyss. the tree, an Indian laburnum, in front of her their the balcony would sway its zeal into the breeze wafting up U's hair, bringing in the familiar smell of cinnamon and mint leaves from the potato curry Maa must be preparing. wasn’t it supposed to be a waxing moon? why does it seem to evanesce into the dark quagmire? into the enticing onyx contours of the night-time world she they U was irresistibly drawn to.
Ushasee stood up from her table, stretched herself and cracked her knuckles. if she could, she would rather have cracked open words and refilled them with new meanings. she had never thought writing would be so disconcerting. autobiographical, yes but only quasi. she had already slashed her name to a single letter, a foetal syllable, an almost, like an unsent letter or Plath's ‘ich’, but she did not know what to do with her pronouns. if she wanted to publish it, maybe someday, it must be ‘she.’ she knew the kind of questions that are levelled at you when you pick up something gender neutral to represent yourself, it doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or trans or an ally. but publication wasn’t on her mind now. it wasn’t everyday Ushasee unhooked her mosquito net, switched on the repellent, pushed open her window overlooking Jessore Road and sat down beside her rusty, grey almirah to write at 03:16 a.m. she had an urge to become a non-entity without pronouns or genders or olfactory sensations which were her last tether to home. she wanted to metamorphose into vacuum.
but one day that wasn't enough. U went down the steps of their 9/A apartment, the ninth and interior most apartment of their complex—it was like spiralling down Dante's frigid ninth nucleus of treachery. whatever U chose to do they would have eventually ended up betraying themselves. at least that is what Ushasee thought. but when U skipped down the steps, all they wanted was to feel the sour cold claws scarring their face like Johnson Tsang’s ‘A Quest for Spring,’ the piercing breeze must scratch away U’s impoverished confidence, loneliness and insecurity, re-fill empty quavers with painful love. for even the absence of love is a yearning for yearning, a vacuum of meaning defined by suction, a void of accidental being, a question mark without any letters or symbols to indicate it, a lexical gap. the laburnum animating the breeze was U’s lexical gap, an existence in the language of nature that had no human equivalent. like U, the laburnum had no pronouns, didn’t care for pronouns. U aspired to this innate nonchalance. they knew the tree would recognise them and love them. U knew things that no one else in the whole world knew. or at least they thought they knew. U could plug in lexical gaps through this psychic way of knowing. U was the presence, the letter, the symbol, the design. the aspiring human equivalent to the tree. both complementing and completing each other in their own way.
and just as the design and the designated, the denotation and the connotation, the signifier and the signified are irrationally yet irresistibly attracted to one another, so was U to the laburnum by a magnetic pull, unfathomable and unholy. and with that heavy globe of responsibility of being a presence rooted in space and time— a deadweight U had to bear every day, every infinitesimal moment of their routine up and down College Street— a sisyphian U embraced the tree's light shadow from the streetlamps as if it could galvanise their inert existence. however, contrary to popular opinion, trees and shadows and lexical gaps have a volition of their own. not only to remain as the lexical gap, as the vacuum but tempt the presence to dissipate into it. and all of a sudden U felt the urge to metamorphose into a non-entity, melt away into the laburnum's shadow with a mute eureka.
the eureka was interrupted by the sound of U’s parents lovingly calling her to the dinner table and back to reality. love was something U could bear no more after her parents had really begun loving her. that was after the accident. Ushasee paused. she could hear the crows and sparrows. not too long since first light, she thought. she stared at the word accident and wondered how far she would have to go to get back her parents’ love. but it wasn’t entirely acceptance she wanted. it was a sick contorted logic of revenge. if she ever published this piece, how many of the readers would understand?
the humiliation of conditional love. the humiliation of a choice. the humiliation of being given a tacit order to obey, which was nothing but a provision for retribution lest one fails to obey. U could now feel the humiliation of looks and cares and benign gestures she had received ever since the day U had lost her left arm below the elbow. Kiran and Raghav knew, and Ritu had her doubts, but otherwise no one had even suspected how she had orchestrated it all. that terrible pain, blood, undefinable pain– and then nothing. if it wasn’t for Kiran and Raghav– but now it was just a frayed memory like the frilly edges of the hem of an apron. an appalling idea, to say the least. but clever. and look, it had worked. but the shower of a sudden love only accentuated the neglect that had been her constant companion since the day she came out to her parents. a simple accident was all it took for her to bask in her parents' love and glory again and all that was worth half a limb. as for the heteronormative couple, they knew no other way to console their guilty conscience but to love their daughter child whom they had forgotten for a while. sometimes amnesia is a deliberate disease.
but for U this love was asphyxiating, almost inescapable. this superfluity of love needed to be offset by someone or something, and what better way can it be offset but by indifference to her existence, not hatred because even hatred is centripetal with weapons at the ready. but indifference is that treacherous friend who wouldn’t even come at your cremation. not unless they could stab you again. indifference is just to exist as deaf, dumb, blind as the three monkeys of the father of our nation, perhaps even more. isn’t that what we have become? granite rocks. creaking furniture in a middle-class household. Maa’s faith. immovable. but also sterile. and who was more indifferent than the laburnum, unmoving and immobile since U used to climb up the balcony grills or hang and play about it. indifferent as U was growing up displacing the tree's kind, living off the natural world, sponging off its resources as ecology suffered in flames. in fact, even now, U realised, the tree was stoically indifferent as she stood attempting to embrace its shadow. epiphanies like these were but a cumulative episode of revelation. thus, to U a tree was revealed.
whatever you think, a revelation is never passive. it demands a price because everything is a quid pro quo in this pro-mercantile world of markets and taxes and revenue. and especially if you’re a woman, a brown queer from a house with leaking roofs and patches falling off the wall, a family that her economics textbook labelled as the ‘lower-middle class socioeconomic bracket’ from a global south nation with ambitions. your existence is measured out not in coffee spoons, but graphs and profits accrued. U was nothing but profit that the universe would extort for the farce of a revelation so evident U had to pinch herself for not having realised it before. whatever she did, the world would remain indifferent to her. her parents' love was a war indemnity that she had never asked for, and what she had indeed asked for was something they remained oblivious to.
Ushasee led U into the tree’s subterranean silhouette, willing magic realism to enfold the narrative, evanescing U as the waning moon into a shadowy woollen quagmire. a travesty of justice. Ushasee crumpled up the paper and threw it away. beyond the window, the sky lightened with a screech for another diurnal farce. Ushasee didn’t want to be that treacherous friend to U who'd setup the narrative in such a way that U would always end up betraying herself. letting others treat her poorly, not give her her due. letting others define her as a he or she or they. dictated by the terms of others. axing away parts of her body. betraying her body, her self, her essence. one realises this justice is treacherous when one finds a frigid U casually hanging by their throat or dissolving into the laburnum, allying with the natural world like Sita or Yeong-hye. mythological or literary, whichever culture it might be, the gender other has a long history of welding in with nature, for nature too has so often been betrayed by human greed and lechery. Ushasee opened the small compartment of her drawer and stared at the almost illegible scrawl. the address of a hospital that practiced gender reassignment surgery. beside it was a blade. she looked at her clammy, disfigured wrist and counted the number of times she had betrayed her self. backspace. their self, their body. even now a treachery in language was underway. a renegade world and a renegade humanity condensed into a complete whole. but nothing is complete and perfect, only angular, irregular, jagged and piercing, meant to chafe and U is only an ornament to this design, a mere letter, not even a complete proper name, thoroughly dispensable and possessing a meaning that is slashed and sacrificed over and over again.
Image by saturnus99 for Pexels
Suchismita Karmakar (she/they) is a postgraduate student of English Literature at the University of Calcutta, India. Her poetry has appeared in Otherwise Engaged: A Literature and Arts Journal (Summer’24 Vol.13) and is slated to be published in March by Zhagaram Literary Magazine. When not musing upon life, she scribbles away in frustration.