Her Other Self

Sometimes it ached, her left side. A dark phantom pain shrouded in shadows, emerging occasionally, to pinch her gleefully, making her gasp in pain, before departing. There really was no medical reason for it, her doctors assured her. But still it persisted.

When the memory of the pain would fade, Ajala would throw herself into life, lustfully, filling herself with its smells and sounds and sensations. Too many sensations, her parents would say, disapprovingly. And in their middle aged, tired eyes she would glimpse the layered shadows of a million what ifs. Those ghostly hopes were what drove her away from them, and now she only saw them once a year or so. And when they would meet, they were like strangers, drifting in an agonizingly polite dance, answering each other’s simple questions, deliberately staying away from anything that was important.

Often she would catch her mother off guard, staring at her with her eyes screwed, deliberately blurring her focus, trying to see past her. Right through her. As if shimmering right over Ajala’s shoulders lay another world, wreathed in sunlit shadows, with a population of one. The one whose name was not to be taken, ever.

The one who was docile and loving and gentle. Totally unlike Ajala’s live presence, her grasping greed for life, clawing viciously for survival. And, with a peculiar gladness her mood would lift. There was a part of her that reveled in her parents’ silent suffering, their gentle mourning of the other. All that mattered was that she, Ajala, was alive.

It was Ajala who woke up each morning, and gratefully sucked in the morning air before it thickened with sickening pollution. And it was Ajala who caressed the bulbous head of the car’s gear-shift as it throbbed steadily in the mid-morning traffic of the city. And it was Ajala whose fingers traced the grainy leather stretched tight over the metal, feeling the life force bursting out of her.

And it was that almost demonic lust for life that made her exist in an orgy of sensation. She used everything, men, women, sex to reaffirm her life and the other’s death. She remembered the last man she had been with. Married, with two children, his wife heavy with the third. She remembered one morning in particular.

He looked over to the window where the early morning light ribboned in gentle streams, and pooled at her feet. The green silk robe she wore had flapped open, as she closed her eyes and thrust her nose outside to smell the city. Every little ounce of it. He had never met a woman like her. Not beautiful, but there was something about her. Something that made him falter and dream. He was stupid enough to say, "I can ... can leave her you know. We had an arranged marriage after all. And I so badly want to be with you. I ... I love you I guess," he said with dawning wonder.

For a moment she looked at him, speechless. Then she threw her head back and laughed. A laugh he had never heard ever, from her or anyone. Gathering her robe around her bare breasts, she grabbed her clothes and went into the bathroom to dress, ignoring the incessant knocking on the door, his teary please.

She emerged, stopping in front of him. Raising her hand she cupped the side of his face tenderly, gently, almost as if she did not see him. Then she tapped his cheek lightly and stepped out of his life forever. Silently. Just like that.

Usually she did not have that problem. She lived in that glamorously seedy underbelly of life that throbs in every big city. Parties, clubs, fashionable liquor, smart conversation and frequent flings. Flings that started and ended with friendship, with generous doses of sex layered in between.

Tonight she glittered, lit from within. Her dark skin glowed like incandescent silk, the curly jet hair escaping from its fashionable twist as she danced. She danced away the memories of that morning when she had left someone’s life forever. She liked her life uncomplicated by emotion, oneness, bonding. She shuddered in revulsion at those words. She had hated them, it now seemed forever. Glancing sideways through her hair, she smiled at her partner—a friend of a friend of a friend-- and managed to drive all other thoughts away.
And then it came, a tidal wave, fifty feet high, a tonnage of pain. “What is it?” he asked concernedly as Ajala gasped and then holding her side stumbled out of the club. "Damn," he whispered in frustration, but did not go after her. He had known her, off and on, for about a year now and knew that was a sure way to ruin his chances. The in-between period of their friendship was almost there. He could feel it, taste it. He didn’t want to risk that delicious anticipation by following her out.

The relative coolness of the night slapped her in the face as she weaved outside. She slumped against the outside wall of the club, holding her side. It was deserted, the streetlights casting weird filigreed shadows. And somewhere beyond those shadows she knew she was being watched.

Tears of pain made her eyes glitter like wet ebony, flat and rich. "Go away. Do you hear me. You are not here. You don’t exist. I do. Leave me alone." The silence mocked her. It almost seemed as if it pulsed with soundless convulsions of laughter. Her voice broke, as she shouted one last time, "Damn you leave me…alone."

She hated these times when the pain invaded her suddenly. She had been living with it for close to 28 years now, but she was still not used to it. And those damned doctors, telling her she was a hypochondriac. What the heck did they know? It was real, this pain, this feeling of being watched ... stalked.
For days after each attack, she lived in a daze, waiting for the pain to return. It was like being dunked under water and held there, chest bursting, struggling to conserve the precious air trapped in her lungs, willing herself to remain alive until, she could surface again. Surface, to drink in the air, nuzzle her way back to normal life. As normal as it ever could be.

Why did she always do it in the dark? The man, her dance partner from a few nights before, wondered idly, hearing the sinous rustle of silk as her robe fell to the floor, and then the snap of the bed-side lamp heralding the sudden plunge into total night. It was not that she was modest. Yet unfailingly, every time she would switch off the light, like some kind of mating ritual, unleashed by the sharp click of the lamp.

Rain spilled from the heavy clouds above, like from an over saturated sponge. Leaking listlessly from above, it shrouded her world in wetness. The man from the night before had left early in the morning. Nothing affected the white heat of lust more than the cool, rain-laden breeze of morning.

Heavy sheets of rain darkened the outside of the window, creating a dim mirror on the inside. She lifted her forehead away from the cool smoothness and looked into it. Was that her own face she saw or the other’s? Jumping up in horror she looked at her face that was not quite her own. “What are you doing here? Leave me alone, damn you.” Her voice shook, threatening to overpower her. Was it a trick of the light that made it appear as if the woman in the mirrored window smiled? A secretive, knowing smile? Suddenly, a large hole bloomed on the forehead of her other self, as the heel of the red pump thrown at her shattered the glass. Abruptly the rain stopped, and the mirror disappeared.

"Oh God! Why is this happening to me?" she whispered, before shouting, leave me along. You’re dead, damn you. Dead. And I hate you like I always hated you."
For the rest of that Sunday she did not look into any mirrors, not when she took her morning pills, not when she brushed her teeth, not when she passed by glassed in store-fronts on her way to and from the corner market.

And still the ache persisted, not striking or strong, just always there. Perhaps because tomorrow she would have to go with her parents to the cemetery. “Damn it. Why can’t I just tell them I can’t go.” For a moment she debated that, then gave in to her own warring conscience. “The bitch is dead and she is never coming back What the heck?” For the first time in days she smiled fully, at the thought of the damp, dank ground that entombed the other.
And so the next day, taken off from work, she stood at the well tended plot, with the epitaph, “Most beloved daughter, we miss you so much,” carved into granite. She remembered that mirror-shiny granite headstone. It had come from her father’s bonus fifteen years ago. Instead of paying for a school trip to Europe for Ajala, it had replaced the worn, cheap headstone that had stood there before. She still could not bear to look at it, fully.

Her parents stood on either side of her, lost in their contemplation of their other daughter. She had seen movies where the surviving child, engulfed her parents in a tight embrace, willing them to drink from her strength. A strong family moment of bonding wrought by loss.

But there they stood, three people separately, whom a long ago death had torn apart forever. Each caught up in their own dark emotions. She could see her mother look at her sideways through tear drenched eyes. As if asking why she was alive. She smiled widely, and sensed her parents look at her with horror. Unconsciously she scuffed the earth around the plot, almost as if she was kicking her. "Lie there bitch and just stop harassing me," she mouthed quietly.
Every year on this date they visited this site together. At other times during the year, her parents would visit the spot alone, especially her mother, tending the plot, planting flowers, leaving little gifts. She had been her, ‘most beloved,’ daughter, after all.

"You show no respect to her at all," her father accused her, his face shadowed with tormented grief. At that, she laughed loudly, "respect? Yeah, I should respect that little leech ... that parasite ... just because she is dead."
The night was a dark, open wound. And in it she swirled helpless, trapped in its malevolent suppurating liquids. She could not even open her mouth to scream for help. For if she did, those vile fluids would drown her lungs and silence her forever. So she swam on, hoping to save herself ... or to silently give in and drown.

Wait! A rope dangled before her temptingly. She grasped hold of the lifeline and exhaustedly made her way up. Far above her head she could see the lip of the huge wound she was trapped within. And no matter how she tried, it stayed just beyond her reach, the slight glimmerings of light outside it, teasing her mercilessly.

She felt her arms begin to slip. Sheer exhaustion? Or was the rope getting slippery ... and yet rough at the same time? She felt the scales of the giant snake rasp against her palms, felt its silent, ferocious hiss as the arrow head swooped down to devour her ...

She could not even scream, the terror was so great. The man in bed with her that night, uncomfortable with her muffled whimpers and heightened breathing, and the sweat that bathed her body, shifted restlessly and, pretended to be asleep. Weird psycho bitch! This was the time last time he would see her. Morning could not come soon enough, just first light, when the trains and buses would start running. He timed his departure against the beating of his heart.
"Why did I live?" She asked herself that question often. It could so easily have been her who died. For the first time she wondered, what the nameless one would have been like if she had grown up instead of her. Perfect no doubt! Perfect, like she, Ajala, had never been.

"I don’t even remember her but I am sure she was a bitch," she said aloud. "Oh, she had such a sunny, happy disposition," her mother would muse. Conversations about her patient suffering, even as a three year old, smiling at everyone, would make people cry in remembrance. Always happy, while Ajala threw tantrums and dragged her along, flinging them both against the floor and the walls. Almost maniacally until her parents stepped in.

The operation was done to ease her suffering ... their suffering… of course. Her parents knew there was a chance that only one would survive. Perhaps they had wished, no she was sure they had, that it had been the other one. Perhaps that was why they had erased her name from conscious memory, so that sometimes, the trick of the light would make Ajala look like her. A certain intonation in her voice would make her sound like the dead one. Perhaps, when Ajala flashed a rare, guileless smile, they could pretend she was the other one.

In old newspaper cuttings, she could still see her own baby self, swaddled in bandages, where the intricate surgery had cut away her sister from her. Freeing her from sharing her flesh and her lungs with another.

She had always hated her for that even more than she hated for being sunny and loved and bright and happy. All the things she, herself never was. And she loved the fact, that the parasite was dead, and she, Ajala, the fussy, selfish, dark and willful one was alive.

Then why did she feel stalked? Why did she feel vacuously smiling eyes, with penetrating missiles of hate and resentment watching her every mood? Why did she wake up in nightmarish sweats chased by dark fears? Why was she, very so often, brutally attacked with deathly pain, leaving her gasping and weak? Why? There was no medical reason for it, because, she, the nameless one was dead, wasn’t she?