Not in the Script: An Ahaan & Aneet Collection

The Lost Year

They moved me like luggage. The woman at the reception had palms like warm hearth, she took my single travel bag and told me the schedule in a voice that refused to be urgent. I told her my name, because names are small anchors, and she wrote Vaani Batra in a log book, slow and neat.

Day 14 — Two Weeks at the Ashram
White walls. Ansel windows. The trees here do not speak like the trees back home; they are taller, their language is slow. I wake often and do not know where to put my hands. Sometimes my hands are strangers to my pockets. Sometimes they are children with no memory of summers they have lived.

People call me by the name stripped down to syllables "Vaani", and it rests on me like a shawl that doesn't fit. I watch them busy themselves with chore, with candle, with prayers. The women here move like they are stitching air into calm. I try to mimic their stitches.

The nurses ask me about my routines. I answer with the days I can reach: "Wake up at 7. Morning walk at 10." I do not say I have knot-holes of blankness where hours fall through. I do not say that in the mornings I wake with a name on my tongue that is not mine, and the day takes its own verbs.

In the quiet of the evening, I take out the notebook, my catalogue. On good days I write down what I can remember: the color of his eyes, the feel of his curls between my fingers, the way his fingers strummed the guitar as if talking to an old confidante, how he would hum under his breath when he worked on a composition. On bad days I read the catalogue until the words cease to be letters and become small islands of light. I trace the pages with my thumb the way one traces the seam of a wound.

I write and write and write, clumsy as if with somebody else's fingers: Remember who you are. I am talking to someone who sometimes forgets to come back. I am leaving breadcrumbs with ink.

Day 25 — Survival
The ashram is built into a slope like prayer pressed into earth; rooms are small; people move quietly as if noise itself might be punishment.

I learned rules quickly because rules are a scaffolding for someone whose reality keeps shifting. Wake with the bell. Sit for tea. Walk to the prayer courtyard. Write the letter to myself every morning on the same page so there is a scratch somewhere to trace. They had given me a small room, with a desk, a single bed and a warm blanket. There are other people here with names that fold into the hymn of the ashram: Sister Meera, who hums the same hymn every morning; Prabha, the cook who brings me dal and tells me about the weather like it will steady me. They are kind like people at the edges of a pain. Their kindness is not curious, it is steady.

At first I tried to keep a mirror on my table. I taped a small note to it – You are Vaani. You write. You love Krish. It read like a list of instructions to a frightened animal. I would stand and look at the reflection and say the words and then wait to see what face would answer back. Sometimes a woman I did not know looked back, and I would be terrified because she had my eyes but not my soul.

The days were long and colorless. As a poet I used to exaggerate shade and light; here everything was grey in the soft way of things that do not promise surprise. I kept writing the same lines, as if repetition will stitch the edges of something that keeps unraveling.

There are notebooks here where the ashram asks residents to write their needs. I wrote, "Please help me when I am gone; please tell me story of my life if I forget." They wrote back in neat handwriting the things they would do: We will help you dress. We will remind you your name. We will read you poems. Their handwriting was gentle and made me feel like a child again and I hated that and loved it all at once.

I tied red thread to the doorknob of my room to remember to lock it. I hid a list of names inside the mattress so that if my memory wandered I could find markers. I left notes in my shoes. I labeled my jars.