MARJATTA WAS ONCE THERE, standing in line. This was the unwritten part, with no context really. She was wearing a red dress and talking to someone. It was like a scene from a documentary. The light framed her in the stairwell; her brown hair was unusually shiny. A block of text typed out in Times New Roman was superimposed beside her, so that you could read it against the wall, something like a biography. All of it was known to me, but there had been some kind of glitch, because two words were out of place, the Sanskrit words dukkha (दुःख) and apta (आप्त), which I later learned, upon reviewing old library dictionaries, meant something like “suffering” and “reliable.” Reliable suffering? Was that what she embodied?
Truth be told, the last time I had seen her, she had been standing in the frozen foods section of a supermarket, talking in an almost frightened tone to a lanky man who bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor Dharminder Phillipe and was all dressed in green. She was talking to Dharminder the way women talk to their men: “And don’t forget this … ” and so on. Dharminder just stood there tall and strong and somewhat boyish. Maybe women like men like that, men like Dharminder, men who are quiet as a rule but make the occasional ironic joke and in the end lift some box over there, or bring a package here, men who pay, who assist, and who don’t ask questions. After seeing Marjatta with Dharminder, I forgot all about her. I mean, did I really want to stand beside her in a supermarket, hearing her say, “Please don’t forget”?
The thought did occur to me that I should go see her perform on the summer stage. To be her admirer. Just the idea of admiring someone amused me. Whether I went or not, I’d probably be seeing her somewhere and I would feel good after seeing her because I always felt good after seeing Marjatta. Whatever it was that she offered me, it was at least something else. She loved a cup of masala chai. She was masala chai. That’s all she ordered. Not a latte, never espresso; masala chai. Once I saw her order it at the bar, and thought, but only to myself and happily: you are my dukkha and my apta. In the winters, she drank it warm. In the summers, with ice.
north! 