Chapter 3 (Broken Wristwatches)

Leaning against a glowing billboard at the subway station after work on a Wednesday evening, June pulls out her notebook and scratches the tip of her pen against the rustic-brown pages of her leather journal. She writes about the sandwich she ate at her work today – Mediterranean, cheese-less, slightly sour on the tongue, and the wrong amount of dry. She writes about how she was up before dawn, before the Sun embossed its thin slits into a wavering pattern on her curtains, leaving a tiny gap through which she saw a fluffy, green luna moth clasping onto the silver base of the water storage tank visible outside her window.

And then, with a gusto of embarrassment sealed back by her thin pouting lips, she slams the pages back shut, tracing her fingers through the green-colored route glowing on the billboard, waiting for her maglev. There was a time when June never ran out of things to write, but there were only so many ways that one could churn the same sentences, the same descriptions, the same characters before stories turned into a repetitive, dreadful routine. June is embarrassed that she cannot find a way past this to bring back the vigor with which writing stories once took hold of her.

Writing had been her safe place. She used to act like she didn’t notice when people repeated words she’d just said, looking for clarification, because they couldn’t understand her the first time, or the way people blamed her accent on her different cultural background when her accent, jumbled sentences, and stutters had nothing to do with any of that but everything to do with how scrambled her brain was. Writing used to be the only thing that brought structure to the rambling madness of language and speech; simple ideas that had so many ways of being told, such that their meaning would waver away, were not captured by the power of how June decided to write them down. A bold sense of control over her own life.

After all, the entire collection of everything she’d ever written had been for her. She’d tried writing for other people. June had once written a short story that a few people in one of her college classes were allowed to read as part of a long assignment. They’d all said that the protagonist was unlikeable, self-centered, and a narcissist. June had written the protagonist after herself, disguised by a different name but revealed by her own emotions. She’d stopped writing anything for others, then, remaining secretive of the worlds, people, and actions she created. To share her writing and stories with others would be an act of plagiarizing herself.

Or is the point of writing stories just that: plagiarizing oneself onto pages that will remain long after we all perish?

But that’s ironic, June thinks, because sometimes pages and bodies find the same twisted ending. Ash.

June watches the outlines of the moon ebbing away under the horizon, increasingly shrouded by a verdant line of swaying trees in the gentle, early-morning summer wind. She looks up and wonders whether there is a story worth telling here, while she’s waiting on a subway platform for her maglev, on a day when the moon sets after the Sun’s risen high in the sky.

She opens her journal. Three sentences and a frustrated scribble later, June notices an ant on her page and remembers the day she’d decided to kill an ant for the very first time.

June was in school, maybe in the first grade. She didn’t like that the school forced her to braid her hair, or how it made her wear a set of pants and long-sleeved shirts that made her feel like a burning, blazing furnace under the heat of a scorching sun in the perpetually year-long summers of the city she grew up in. It felt like harboring a revolting parasite that sank its fangs deep into her bones. The uniform itched all the time. Rolling up one’s sleeves meant a demerit point. Untucking one’s shirt meant another demerit point. Maybe the purpose of the uniforms had just been to facilitate the existence of a point-based demerit system.

The school itself was a nine-storied, dull, brown building meant to hold June back from the world outside, for the sound of distant traffic and the sight of pigeons, crows, and sparrows outside her window were much better suitors of her attention than her homeroom teacher. Her homeroom teacher’s name had been Mrs. Bhat – a short, stern lady who liked wearing glasses so magnified that her face behind them appeared as a small pimpled rectangle with two scathing, tiny black beads for eyes. Mrs. Bhat taught all eight subjects from Maths to English, sometimes even equating a ‘two by two is four’ to the synonym for ‘multiply,’ and sometimes rubbing in the history behind the foundation of their country into the identification of their country on a map.

What June recalled about Mrs. Bhat was not her venomous ability to straggle her stretch over these different subjects or the six, desolate hours of June’s life, but how the boys in June’s class would make fun of Mrs. Bhat and her wide hips. Would it fit through the door? Would it fit on the chair? They’d wonder. June didn’t like Mrs. Bhat, but she disliked the boys in her classroom even more, prompting her to pick fights with them. Sometimes she’d sit on top of the boys, punching them with the power of a six-year-old, or sometimes the boys, who were a little bit older than her, would sit on top of her and try to smother her. After all, not only did torn sleeves have the same effect as rolled-up sleeves, but they also didn’t incur any demerit points. A win-win if one were to discredit the detention that would follow.

Amongst all the boys, there was one specific boy she’d hated the most, Smeet – the one who’d pushed her into killing her first ant. Smeet was taller, older, and dirtier than June. He’d throw his lunch at her, and she’d throw her lunchbox back at him. He would call her out for always reading on the bus, and she would throw all her books out of the bus window one day in an act of protest. He’d push her into a locker, and she would paint on his. Smeet and June were at loggerheads as two opposing factions in their classroom. If Smeet were to ask all the boys to jump out of the school window, June was pretty sure they’d follow him. As for June, the other girls stayed wary of her, calling June out for being too brash and unkempt. But June saw no point in caving to the boys at her school who’d ridicule Mrs. Bhat just because she had wide hips, or would mimic and ridicule Mr. Sunil’s stutter, or would walk around smugly with the attitude of aristocrats. June was firm in her belief that first-graders were anything but aristocrats.

One day, she’d gotten off her bus and was walking towards her school building, when she’d fallen into a small pit, only that June knew there was no possibility for her to have actually fallen, and the only reason why she found herself bleeding from her knee joints, her elbows, and the right side of her head was that Smeet had pushed her and fled. She was so certain of this that, when she cried and called out his name at the top of her lungs, to the dismay of other children, teachers, and adults walking past her, she was sure that Smeet had somehow bullied the entire school into silence and into not coming to her aid. And maybe, all these people walking past her, who even bore horrified faces of alarm, agreed with Smeet because why else would they not come to help a six-year-old first grader bleeding in a pit?

After three minutes and thirty-seven seconds that she watched passing on her broken wristwatch, June got up and brushed the dust away, the blood beginning to dry up a little. Crushed below her was a small line of dead ants. June had never killed an ant before, and while a single ant was the size of her fingernail, the experience still jarred her because she had never seen herself as capable of killing anything. So a fatal sense of morality cruised into her little mind and spurred a shipwreck. June realized that she, like these ants, would also be crushed one day: gone with everybody around her just getting by, unbothered on the way to school, ignored and obsolete. Their lives were meaningless. June had more in common with ants than she had with the people here.

Suddenly, an even more fatal sense of wonder had hit her. June wondered what else she could get away with on that day, without people finally asking her why she was bleeding and whether she needed help. At recess, she began jumping on merry-go-rounds while it was still moving, climbing out of window ledges to feel the wind, running away from their school parade at the end of the day to feed a stray cat she’d seen lurking around in the parking lot for her school buses. As expected, the boys in her class and the teachers dismissed her acting out as just something they expected of her.

Which is how, on that day, a bleeding, six-year-old who’d killed her very first ant discovered that she was free to do anything she wanted to do. And no one would ever care.

June lets the ant slide onto her finger and watches it trace the edges of a tiny scar she received when she burned a couple of pancakes cooking for the very first time. She places the ant on the billboard, the sound of the incoming maglev ringing through her ears. A strong gush of wind precedes its arrival as she begins stepping closer to the tracks.

“It’s you,” a shrill, shaken voice says. June turns to her right and finds a profusely sweating woman in a loose, oversized T-shirt imprinted with a frog holding a teacup. The woman is wearing blue track pants that look like she ran right out of a hospital. Her hair is green, curly, and strikingly home to a horde of twigs and feathers. She’s scrawny, her veins pop against her fair skin, and she looks like she hasn’t had a meal in days.

“I’m sorry. How can I help you?” June remarks, struggling to breathe. The woman reeks. Her eyes widen, and her face bears a forlorn look of contempt, even hurt. She creeps closer to June, her hands testing June’s limits by creeping forth as if to grab June. June starts raising her own hands, just in case.

“It really is you,” the woman says again, her voice breaking, mellow, tinging with grief.

“I am afraid you have the wrong person,” June says, craning her head as the maglev comes to a complete stop. The doors do not open. Not yet.  

“No!” the woman screams, her attitude transforming. A wave of rage crosses over her strangely recognizable face. “No! Do you not remember me? Do you not remember Norman?”

“My dog?” June asks, bewildered.

“Your dog? No! It’s okay now. I am here for you. I am here for you. Norman is okay now, and so are you. I am here for you,” the woman starts crying. June is unable to stop the woman before she cups June’s face, almost tenderly. That touch. It’s familiar. “I am here, June,” the woman repeats.

“Please get away,” June says, pushing the woman away with force, taken aback.

The woman guffaws, like a car engine struggling to turn on. Her guffaw is mixed with broken sobs. Watching the woman cry makes June want to cry, and June doesn’t understand why she’s shedding tears for someone she doesn’t know.

The guards nearby notice the commotion this woman is causing and begin heading toward them. “Fuck you! Who the fuck do you think you are to demand anything from me? After what you did to me? You don’t even bloody remember, do you? Do you! I remember. I remember for both of us. I remember the asshole you are, you motherfucking bi-” the woman cuts off as two guards jump in between the woman and June, one of the guards eyeing June curiously.

“Are you okay?” the guard asks. June nods, a little shaken.

“Fuck you! I remember!” the woman continues screaming, trying to jump past the guard.

“Better get on that, then,” the guard says, as the maglev doors open behind June.

“I’m sorry, but I have never met you,” June says to the woman, separated by two guards, before walking into the maglev.

“Oh, June, but you have met me. You have and you will again!” the woman screams.

As the doors shut and the maglev begins moving, the eyes of other baffled passengers on her, it dawns upon June that she doesn’t remember telling the woman her name.