Broken Hug

The Green Notebook

The guava tree welcomed Rohan home once he stepped into the yard and sat on the concrete boundary surrounding it. Should I open the notebook? Should I read its contents? No, it’s someone else’s personal thoughts.

After a wash, he warmed the leftover food and ate it at the sitting room itself, recalling the Saturday Charoen had sat here and the little conversation they had had together.

   Finishing his dinner, he went to his study and switched the television on. News after news followed but his concentration seemed to ebb away. He could only see the green notebook floating in front of his eyes. Reaching downstairs, he picked up the notebook.

He called up Charoen and asked her what she was doing.

“About to hit the bed.”

“Oh. Good.” Fanning himself with the notebook, he said, “You know, you have left behind a notebook in the cab.”

“Oh,” she uttered in surprise.

“I spied it when I was getting out of the cab. I’ll give it to you the first thing tomorrow.”

“Thank you for noticing it.” A pause. “Well,” she continued, “before it actually gets lost one day, why don’t you read it? That way at least it will remain in someone’s mind.” A slight laughter accompanied the voice.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Ok then, I’ll do that.”

“But you will surely find quite a few errors.” She said, and he could hear laughter on the other side.

“Good night, Charoen,” he said.

“Good night.”

She called in no time.

“Hello. I’m Fai. No more Charoen,” she said and Rohan could see her face with a  slight tinge of seriousness.

“Ok.”

Resting his mind on this conversation, he opened the notebook to the first page.

The first note:

Dear Diary

A five-year old girl, in a room of her own. Father is at work, and it is summer vacation from school.

Mother has yet to return from the market. I sit on the floor, head bent, black hair fallen in front and covering her face. A drawing exercise book, and some crayon pencils lie scattered around her. I am colouring the tree trunk red. A few branches spread out, looking shaggy, and without much leaves. All around the tree and above, the sky is white, and it is yet to be draped in colour. On the right side of the tree are pairs of arcs, their ends joined. They are birds flying in a group; and there are seven such arcs, seven birds flying in fellowship, in love, flying on wings of happiness, wings of smiles. From out of the window, sparrows’ chirpings fill the room, and sometimes the cawing of crows in a chorus rises above the chirps. A sound, like a soft groan, sometimes breaks in, probably from a pigeon brooding somewhere close, under the ledge of the window, or from a jutting buttress. And out from the road, the sound of a passing vehicle reaches the ears like a low rumble. But I only stare out of loneliness. 

Second note:

The silence of the empty house greets me; it waits for my return every day from school; and it waits with anxiety clutching at its heart. Its heart is as human as yours and mine. The house loves to listen to my footsteps, it feels safe, and it feels secure when this young lady returns home. It waits for the click of her key into the Godrej lock. It loves to see her at the door, loves to see half of her, for when she has barely opened the door, the left half of her body can be seen. It is the first sight of me, and the silence almost screams with joy, like a child seeing her mother or father after some hours, and its heart skips a beat.

The house likes my smile, and it likes my hair, the smooth hair falling till my shoulders. A certain aura of freshness returns to the house. The sad walls are not lonely anymore, and their yellowness – paleness – vanishes, because the glow in my eyes warms the walls.

The walls warm the entire house, the curtains smile, and so do their leaves. The light-brown sofa-set gradually wakes up to the warmth. The warmth nudges the divan, touches the showcase, and the four pairs of African children standing inside it with a crying expression in full swing. The warmth from the showcase touches the painting on the wall, and the painting makes the white and the chestnut brown mustangs play with each other, and it allows the wind to gambol with their manes.

The warmth skips with me up the stairs, warming the steps, and warming my study table when I rest my bag on it. Here my cupboard smiles too, and also the clothes as I take out a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, and fresh underwear. And the white tiles of the bathroom too glow everyday as I step inside. The various taps glow, as well as the soap-dish, and the cake of sandal soap.

The kitchen does not feel itself left out. It likes to see the lady pottering about, washing cabbages, and potatoes and the onion under running water, and lighting the gas stove, putting the utensil on the stove, pouring soya cooking oil, opening the fridge, and taking out the ginger and garlic paste from the sachet, and putting that too. The chopped onions follow, before all are stirred together. 

Third note:

My journey has been, you may say, like the train in the amusement park. My parents had met quite casually. Chatchom had gone to get some photocopies done in The Photoshop at Sukhumvit Soi 18. Chatchom was quite friendly with the proprietor, an Indian and that day he found, on stepping inside the spacious room, the proprietor was absent. Instead a young lady sat at the table. He told her about his work to be done, and he casually enquired about the owner. The lady said that he had cough and cold, and had added that she was his daughter. They began chatting, and when he came another day that same week, the lady was in the shop but with another lady called Reki around her age. The proprietor’s daughter introduced Reki to Chatchom, and they hit off very well. They fell in love in no time. They went for movies, and they went for walks; and then one day too soon Reki insisted that they get married in that month itself, but Ranjan wanted the marriage to take place on the third month, but with Reki’s insistence they got a court marriage done within a month.

Soon their daughter Charoen was born. But Charoen would be startled out of her peaceful sleep with hot words exchanged between her parents. Their yells would reach from the other room, yells between a female and a male member of the house, and with whom she had the strongest bond. The words punctured with enough heat in them flew all over the house, resting on the sofa. They could also be seen curled up on the divan. The heated words also found a place under the bed; but they could not conquer the little girl’s room, leave aside the window.

Chaoren had been gradually growing in the atmosphere of dislike between her parents, and this made her reticent, and it made her withdraw into her shell, and she began avoiding her friends in school. And it also made her sit all alone in one corner of the canteen at the last wooden bench where no one usually sat because this was close to the boundary wall of the school overlooking a marshy piece of land where a few land monitors had made their territory.

But suddenly her father got a transfer to Chiang Mai, and Charoen, a class nine student by then was taken out and admitted into a new school in there. This aggravated her situation because whatever known place she had, whatever place she could identify herself with were wrenched out.

But the family returned after three and a half years because her father got a transfer back to Bangkok, and Charoen was admitted into the Kingston College as a first year student. But the situation of the house was no better, the relationship between Chaoren’s parents went on scaling a mountain of unlove.

Her father had night duty to attend to, and would leave the house around seven in the evening, and return around seven in the morning. And thus Charoen had no way to see her father. The college bus came at six-thirty in the morning to pick her up, and when she returned, her father would already leave for work.

Charoen’s mother had the whole house to herself the entire day, and she gradually started going out to while away her time, and to bring some colour into her life. Then very soon Charoen’s father’s best friend began coming home. A month ago, Charoen’s father returned from work around seven in the morning, and as usual he first went to the study table in the bedroom. While keeping his pen and other stationeries, his eyes espied a folded piece of paper on the table underneath the stapler. He opened it and read:

Chatchom, I’m leaving home with Chet-Phorn, your friend. By the time you read the letter we will be flying away to Singapore. Sorry, we were not made for each other. Reki.

That was a month and ten days ago.

The class was told to write a short story, and my story was based on this.