“Where is Aro?”
“I’m sorry, who?”
“Mom, stop being funny!”
The look on his mother’s eyes only won Achet a silent scoff followed by a distinct familiar smirk as if she was poking fun at his question. “Come on!” He challenged her passivity. Despite feeling her annoyance through her hasty maneuvers in handling the cutlery, he kept pestering her. Achet went on repeating Aro’s name until there was a thud and then a harrowing silence. His mother banged her head on the kitchen wall and her hitherto troubled face turned stoic as if she was devoid of all sentience. Next, he watched her grin as she wiped her palms in her apron. At that moment he had a strong sense of déjà vu. He had gone through the exact same situation multiple times. The death stare and the half arc smile kept getting more and more intense. She started laughing hystarically, shrieking and howling time to time. He had no nerve to pacify her vehemence when he was the only one who caused it. His thoughts started running amok reprimanding him for prodding a deep repressed memory in her. Before he could make head or tail of the sitch, he noticed a few drops of blood dripping down his mother’s face. He hastened towards her only to discover a train of red stream running through her blood shot eyes. She was still giggling when he took a step back in a desperate attempt to escape the horrifying sight but before he could realize that it was a damp, unsteady wooden ledge he was standing upon, the platform beneath started shaking only to hurl him from the fifth floor of their building.
“Oh my God! What the hell was that?” Achet broke into cold sweats. He loosened up the neckline of his sweatshirt for giving himself a little breathing room. It was almost six in the evening. He had apparantly fallen asleep while watching a video about inexplicable anomalies in real life. It was his new found interest and he invested a good chunk of his time reading or thinking about it. He had gone deep into the philosophies of time dilation, The Mandela Affect and many cases of reality and space distortions. He would imagine getting caught up in a time warp someday or slipping into an alternate reality. A part of his brain was drifting away from the vast actualities that he was a part of and pushing him towards the unknown. As much as it intruiged him, this fixation was taking a menacing turn. The more he learnt about these glitiches, the more his mind became a chamber of paranoid thoughts.
Achet jumped out of his bed.
“Where is Aro?” He asked.
The woman sitting in front of the TV flipping channels on the remote did not ask ‘who?’ He was relieved to a certain degree.
Achet had often imagined waking up in a world where his brother suddenly stopped existing. Despite being a young adult, he would cry in his sleep thinking about his fourteen year old little Aro disappearing without a trace. Growing up in a broken family, they only had each other.
What if one day Achet slips into one of the open cracks of reality and finds out nobody has ever heard of Aro?
What if one day everyone collectively forgets about his little brother?
What if they call Aro a figment of Achet’s imagination?
How was he going to deal with such a situation?
How would he bring his brother back?
Getting no response from a screen-obsessed mother, Achet headed towards Aro’s room. The room wasn’t locked so he pushed the door open. The bed was neatly tucked and clothes all arranged in order. He heaved a sigh of relief and said a silent prayer with half closed eyes.The kitchen sounded busy. There was clattering and rattling.
Aro must be cooking!
“Is it pasta?” Achet called without getting inside the kitchen.
Silence clasped him in a rib crushing intensity.
“It’s pasta, right?”
No answer from the other end.
“Hey, come out!” His demanding voice roared out.
Two cats came running from the kitchen and made a flight out through Aro’s open window.
Achet hopelessly watched his mother, still glued to the TV screen paying no heed to Achet’s world falling apart. She was calm as though she had accepted every ounce of the reality. Her psyche wasn’t in splits to create fictional scenerios. He remembered the bloodshot eyes, the screams and the wails he had seen and heard. The last he saw her cry, it was four or five years ago. One outburst of hyteria had left a lifetime of drought in her eyes. This dichotomy had always left him staggered. It’s like she had accepted the fact that Aro would never answer. He wished to get at least one reaction from her. He wanted to bawl and howl in her arms like a toddler. In another desperate attempt to get his mother talk to him, he brought up Aro again. He started sobbing but she had turned into a stone.
Aro..
Aro..
Tossed about in the midst of a wild storm, Achet did not bother collecting himself. He let his body drop to the floor and his eyes kept looking at picture of a sweet little boy hanging on the wall right above the TV.
AarohanTiwa (2006 – 2020)
The sound of some random daily soap saturated the living room. The mother had raised the volume to battle the biting silence.
Achet’s unsculptured heart pulsed with a crude memory of Aro singing him a lullaby filling him with a deep sense of reality; elemental but paramount.
Nirmali Medhi