Yasho’s vomit had striking shades. They could belong in an autumn painting, auburn and amber, unbridled and pastel. Her vomit unfurled on the floor and it drew out a map. It tucked away particulars about her, information that was hers to know. Like script must the illiterate, the fluid she spouted mocked her. Yasho stood in her apartment room, where the midday sun left not a nook unlit, slightly swaying despite having her feet squarely apart. Her fingers clutched at the clothes she wore, she needed the reassurance of no longer being naked.

She had woken up in blinding daylight butt naked. It was unusual, wrong. It felt disorienting, like a terrible hangover. There was a sense of violation too, and a significant inkling of doom. Her insides ached, as though its contents were scooped out in chunks. But that couldn’t be! She lay staring at the walls. They were washed in white, her creepers on the windowsill did not cast their shadows, there was too much light, it meant the morning was long gone. What was the time? What day was it? 

Yasho had scrambled around in her room like a dog sniffing danger. Blood and urine had pooled around her feet, red and yellow, a sordid sunset sky. There was a woman in the mirror and she had cuts on her skin. Yasho shrank from her sight. She had the smell of a stranger. In the shower, water couldn’t absolve the cold grip of horror. But the cuts on her skin opened out like the edges of a thick flower, vivid. The ache left her in a perpetual gasp, a slow choke.

Vee watched her from the doorway. He appeared quietly like a ghost. Yasho was lying belly-down on the bed. She was watching the autumn vomit brown and turn crisp. She heard Vee’s breath, and the rise and fall of shirt over chest. She heard his lips part and seal a few times, and the flurry of words fleeing from his tongue. Vee set out to scrape the vomit off the floor. A bit latched on to the bottom of his jeans. It left a sickle shaped stain––moldy yellow on faded blue. When he flushed her vomit down the toilet, they both hoped that the rumbling of water would go on and the quietness they couldn’t fill would never return.

Investigation was how Vee attempted to cope. He scrutinized the apartment, looking for signs of scuffle. The blemishes and stains on the walls and floor were sedulously scanned. The ripped clothes found were further shredded. Evidences were collected and arranged on a white handkerchief, he examined them with a forensic eye––a button, a hair clip, three strands of hair, one grey, a torn piece of blank paper, a bright yellow thread. The button was Yasho’s, so was the hair clip and hair. Vee held the strand of thread against light, like it was a martial arts stick. “Do you have something this yellow and bright?” asked Vee, those were his first words in hours. He was a child playing police-police, and Yasho wondered if he would ever stop to sit with her.   

~

The murkiness in Yasho’s head was called trauma-related-memory-loss. But if Yasho were to report the assault, the doctor said it wasn’t necessary to remember anything about the assaulter or assaulters––swerving to the plural with a commiserative drop in pitch. The doctor was a middle-aged woman who spoke Malayalam marinated in English. She had manicured fingers that tapped the surface of the table after she uttered bitter words.

“Wounds in the vagina are not shallow, so there will be bleeding for the next few days.” Tap. “Your body needs rest, it has been through a lot. Where are your families… are you two married?” taptap.

Cold had wrapped around Yasho’s ankles clamping them with each other. She worried that her two legs may have merged into one and she might have to be wheeled out. An air purifier hissed out floral scents into the sterile air of the consulting room; it contrived an odor that was particularly of corpses in coffins. It reminded her of Nikki’s uncle, an ex-Indian military man. He had his coffin lined with so many flowers that his body clearly longed for room. Flowers had stuck out of his unshaved ears, leaving the man look morbidly comical. When Vee put his arm over Yasho to anchor her focus back to the doctor, the flowers from Nikki’s uncle’s coffin settled around the doctor’s bobbed hair. The haloed woman ably summoned a smile to her lips, and unsettled the predominant look of concern writ on her face.

“I can arrange all the help that you need”, the doctor said, “it is important that you follow through with it Yashodhara. It is crucial to process your feelings. Do you understand?” Yasho did not. The feelings the doctor insisted that she process had ceased all movement. They were lodged frozen, layers of cryptic slabs in the middle of her chest. If she were to swallow sword it wouldn’t pass. Breath barely did.

Before confirming that there indeed was rape, the doctor had opened and shut her latex skin fingers a couple of times, offering a kind smile. A nurse had widened out Yasho’s legs, and positioned them at equal angles to dunk her in precise misery. The teal hospital gown Yasho was given was slid up till her knees, that way only Yasho couldn’t see her privates while everyone else in the room could. Humiliation seeped into her bones, and Yasho jittered. With every touch and prod, she separated like vulnerable wet paper. Yasho was nettled at being a specimen; her whole existence had shrunk to the mold of a victim, and severely undistinguished. She had lived her life with every intention of not becoming a negligible rape beat buried in the newspapers, or a dot in the rape statistics. It was a massive insult.

~

People at the clinic would have assumed that they were to-be-parents but for the substantial misery manifest on the two faces. Vee held her hand like a bystander would a patient’s, not like lover. They walked out of the gynecologists’ in step with each other. Yasho’s thoughts were although paces behind, inept at keeping up. Her calibrations had come undone; she wouldn’t hear a truck before it hit her. Actually, that was not entirely true. She would hear the truck just when it was about to hit her but she wouldn’t be able to move. No, she wouldn’t want to move––out of exhaustion, not a want for death. Yasho liked to believe that she was the sort to gouge out an eye for an eye; however, there was the excuse of memory loss and she was advocating it to stonewall retaliation. The rapist could be anybody, where to start?

The lack of rage was bewildering. Yasho had always counted on blinding rage as the aftermath of rape. She believed magnificent rage like Kannagi’s, who in the legends burnt down the whole city of Madurai, would see anyone through to justice. It was disconcerting that she was not deserving of such passion. Yasho was eleven when she felt a funny caress on her nascent chest under a hospital pharmacy counter alongside her father buying medicines. What she thought she saw in the dim lit space was a baby’s fist. She craned her neck over her father’s waist to see the baby but there was none. She was puzzled, and it took her the time it did her father to pay the bills to realize that it was an adult man’s pee-pee and not a baby’s fist. On their way out she told her father about it and saw him lose all his composure at the hospital staff for not employing enough surveillance. As she watched her father look everywhere for the deviant man, what she saw beneath his fury was helplessness at failing to stall his child from becoming a girl because then she would board a moving machine that prepared girls for rape. A conveyor belt that presented targets for assaults, while it menacingly moved towards a black hole that would suck her soul out. She hadn’t felt rage then too but a pitiable sense of betrayal and also a perverse pride in growing up like a boy would perhaps at the first sprout of moustache.

The traffic fumes in the humid tropic air tasted sooty; Yasho thought its bitterness aided her mood, vile as it was. The taxi they found from the clinic was one that had withstood the test of time and worlds apart from the sterility of the clinic. The driver was a fairly prickly man who insisted on having the All India FM Radio on full volume. He critiqued and commented as the news host divulged information of great import and was disappointed when his passengers barely reciprocated his heat. As much as he was an ardent partisan of the government, he was also of the Kerala post-monsoon potholes. Organs in Yasho jumbled at every jerk of the car. Kidney for heart, liver for brain, signals running helter-skelter, fooled on a mission. Later, she would remember it not as pain but abject degradation. As though an incorporeal bully had been twisting her up for fun like kids that kept their toys bent out of shape, the weird Barbie. The driver threw glances in the rearview mirror; perhaps she had let out a wince. She could show him the wounds on her body and satiate his curiosity. May be he would gawk at the gore and want her out of his car. If victims of rape were bunched into a caste, where would their rightful positions be?

Vee had decided to be as still as a rock, like the man in the story who played dead to fool the bear. She was the bear. He was worried that she would explode at the slightest trigger. Yasho would have liked to explode. However, if anything, she was rapidly solidifying. Circuits within were congealing, sealing shut. Muffled brain voices frothed, like sewage water in clogged pipes. She would have liked for triggers to work and detonate the jam within. At a junction, the driver halted. A Hindi-speaking girl with golden unwashed hair carrying a sleeping baby sprayed soap water on the front glass and began to scrub. The driver chided the girl in furious Malayalam for the service imposed and refused to pay. The girl simply moved on, stone-faced. She was immune to such forms of rejection. It was not worth knowing how much rejection it took the girl to achieve immunity or whether a similar equation would apply to rape. How much rape is too much rape? Certain questions can only be rhetorical. Yasho was too sapped to bother with them.

When they got home, Vee, the rock, paid the driver and stepped out. He came around to open her side of the door too, something he never did ever for anyone. The brittle chivalry made Yasho nauseous, and the climb to the second floor imaginably harder. The stairway narrowed in on her, it did. She was forced to squeeze her way up like a rat. Faint stench of vomit still lingered in the home air. The light had dimmed, the walls had dulled, the creepers on the windowsill reluctantly allowed their shadows albeit hazy. Yasho slumped on the bed. Vee sat with her, at last. Like insistent army ants, muted words formed bridges between them, one atop the other forming absent phrases that led from nowhere to nowhere. They carried sensations of nameless dull and an aversion for life, like DNA of the grief-ridden. Those mute bridges tied the two lovers like a laced up corset, constricted but gracious.

~

For dinner Yasho refused to order in, and made an elaborate recipe that involved chicken and rice. The smells of spices like bounteous mothers sprung up and walked about straining for order, picking after imps. Vee played music meant to be louder than thoughts. The sounds of metal clashed the nighttime breeze and the curtains rocked, oscillating from delight to dismay. Once the food was savored, the dishes washed and urbane waste management requisites met, Yasho and Vee sank down in the balcony amidst Yasho’s creepers and listened to the neighborhood dogs invoking their ancestors. The night consumed the surrounding houses one by one until a streetlight was left alone on duty. In its light the trees appeared broody, their undulating forms sagged onto the ground. Not many knew that the seemingly pacific branches were compulsive eavesdroppers, like resolute grumps, their pores pried and passed judgments. Yasho thought she heard an owl. Apart from the occasional animal sounds, the silence of the night became implacable. Vee quivered in sleep. A rush of longing propelled out of her and wound itself around him. In sleep he looked emaciated, darkness ate into parts of him. It made the incredibly sad night sadder. Dipping their crowns, the trees seemed to agree.

Once Vee too fell asleep, utmost seclusion took over and supplied the freedom to crumble. Yasho enquired to the broody trees about her rapist. They must have seen him. Or them, she remembered the doctor switching to the plural. The leaves turned away from her with a deliberate cock, clearly choosing reticence over solidarity. They did not tell her who he was or where he lived. She was free to deduce things on her own was the advice offered. What could Yasho do to that sort of nonchalance but shrug? Thoughts about her rapist rekindled the lack of rage. However the possessive pronoun kindled enough revulsion to last until death. Her rapist. She felt a wild urge to know if he had raped anybody else, a rival sister or a bunch. That would mean they would have to say our rapist, as though he were an endearing pet. Yasho pondered over it. She might renounce a lover to another woman but a rapist, her rapist? She would wage wars for him. He was all that she had, a token of hatred to eternally condemn.

All those years ago while she tiptoed into the state of maturity, her rapist must have had his own prodigious peaks. Yasho wanted to presume that he had been watching and waiting, like a plotting mosquito. Premeditating the violence, even priming for it. She wanted her rapist to have been convinced that his life’s purpose was to rape her. The event of her rape ought to be marked off in his life as an unsurpassable momentous milestone, not an impersonal, off-handed act of uncouth itch. The trees sighed, poor gullible woman, they muttered. In the dark, Yasho’s quashed smile looked more like a crease that appeared on a fallen shriveled fruit than anything else. It contained the quality of suggestive impudence, the futile supremacy of a heroic martyr. The only thing more humiliating than being wrecked is longing for the wrecker’s regard, the trees wanted to tell her. When they put the axe to you, you triumph by agreeing to irrelevance, and retreating into the folds of collectiveness. To preserve the dignity of spirit, you renounce your need for dignity and parts of what makes you. Like sea stars, thought Yasho, when predators grab their limb, they discard that limb and swim to safety. Like trees, snapped the trees and shivered their branches. That would have spooked anybody watching, but nobody was watching. Yasho was thoroughly alone and preoccupied with the matter of her spirit’s dignity. Her initial honest take on the matter was that it was silly tree talk. Even when her utterly deflated ego revealed tendencies of seeking consolation in the numinous idea, she fought it. But perhaps it was the solitary nature of the night and the twisted state of affairs––it could have been the detection of a hint that had already been there, like spotting a feral black cat rooted in the thick of the night, its lemony gaze transfixed and all knowing––Yasho went back to the dread she had long hours ago left behind in the mirror.

There was an absence to that woman in the mirror but she was not vacant. She was peculiarly magnetic. There was stillness to her, like an alert deer, and yet she was quite steely. In the nightlight hinting the approach of dawn, the woman stood in Yasho’s mirror, bare in flesh, patient and plain in sight. Compelling red blood trickled from a scar on her throat. The blood was burning hot and yet one might think the woman was icy to the touch. Yasho traced a path from wound to wound to wound. Each uniquely shaped, ghastly inscriptions. Possibly the rapist had left clues in couplets of violence. Or they may be the covert confessions of the deviant man, men––the rush of dominance, the delirious insecurity and the perpetual tribulations of hate. Yasho wandered like a lover in the throes of adoration, devoting to every inch of the woman, lingering and looping. She steadily claimed the degradation of her person and volitionally reduced herself to flesh. When reduced to flesh, Yasho thought, we were to be the effect of it; we were to denounce the need for dignity. The trees outside beamed. Yasho was splayed open, the familiar terrains of her front bottom were marred, pain and pleasure coiled in her depths like mating snakes, appalling yet aberrantly arousing. The insult of rape sank itself deep; Yasho subscribed to it. She retreated into the woman in the mirror, a stock of female flesh. At a pinpoint in the middle of her chest, an immaculate brew bubbled and sputtered until it burst forth and coursed through her veins. Rage, surging and orgasmic. The eleven-year-old girl who mistook an adult man’s pee-pee for a baby’s fist, witnessed in wonder. She crowned Yasho with an intricately woven wreath of unnamable gloom and faded away.

At the first spill of light Yasho would clasp her eyes shut. Dawn would still barge in unsparing, as merciless as they were. ‘The machine is moving’, they would say and snapping their fingers they would order everyone to get to business. The grief, honed and cajoled over the hours of darkness would suddenly seem susceptible and trivialized by the brisk light. Like unsanctioned street vendors, one must then have to bundle up the unresolved inconveniences and clear out for the more important things. Yasho would press her head against the cool floor and tuck her arms between her legs, looking like a human turtle wallowing in the depths of gloom, hoping that the day would pull back if she declared no interest. The day would still come along and scamper into chaos hauling her scattered self. It would scoop her up in its callous palms. She would be expected to do away with her unnamable gloom and instead dispense coherence and crispness of thought. The day would skewer her into a victim but point out that she better puff up into a survivor lest be jettisoned. But before that, when the sounds of the nagging day were still indistinct and distant, there would be a small window of time for Yasho to drift into a dream.

Anagha Unni

Anagha Unni is a writer based in Kerala, India. Her short story The Unfading Inscriptions was long listed in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize'24. Some of her works have appeared in magazines like Eclectica and The Bombay Review. Anagha is also a documentary filmmaker with a few awards to her name and the founder of One Little Earth, a venture that advocates sustainability.

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