Content Warning: suicide
When Mita was fifteen, her best friend had climbed on a chair, thrown a nylon sari over the ceiling fan, then kicked the chair to die.
She remembers that day like a concert where the strobe lights pulsate and sweep through the audience, obscuring the writhing mass in darkness while illuminating a patch here, then there. It happened four decades ago and a continent away, but she still knows this: she refused to eat the mutton curry her favorite aunt had labored over that day; she would not visit the home of her best friend; she had huddled into her own bed, too shocked for tears.
She had finally gone, two weeks after the suicide. She took two girlfriends, all known to the dead girl to varying degrees, but Mita had been The Only Best Friend. The grieving mother, a stern librarian whom they addressed as Aunty, did not greet them from the other end of the marble hallway. Aunty sat surrounded by elderly relatives from Calcutta, her hair uncombed and sari disheveled, and she waited for them to come near enough to be touched, before she howled, Why have you come, today? Why, why come at all? You weren’t there when she needed you, not one of you, were you?”
Mita sips on golden Darjeeling tea on her balcony in Printers Row as she watches her son walking the dog in the street below. It is a wintry Chicago morning, the kind where the sun glints briefly on the snowbanks before they puddle to slush. The dog, Bhairav, is small and feral, an animal rescued from the shelter two years ago, still distrustful of people and unpredictably ferocious. Mita watches from twelve floors above. Sam is patient with the little dog, picks him up and smiles an apology at the owner of the huge Labrador as Bhairav lunges to attack.
Sam is the child born late in her life; a kintsugi of pure gold to piece together the shards of a marriage. A child gilded by parental failure . . . did he even stand a chance? Mita’s ex-husband has remarried in Texas. Their daughter is now twenty-six, ten years older than Sam, spinning a faraway existence in Berlin. Everyone seems further away in the lockdown.
When her daughter left the United States, she told Mita, I am not Sam’s mother, Ma, you are. I don’t have to parent him and I am so sick of this.
There are things that Sam still tells his sister, things Mita would rather not know. It was a call from her daughter eleven months ago that propelled her into her car, driving to Sam’s school in the middle of a workday, so that she knew, much before the call came from the principal, about Sam’s expulsion for underage drinking. Mita had time to stack her arguments to attack the school for such excessive consequences for teenaged hijinks—plus, it was a band trip overnight to Michigan, a retreat that should have been better supervised by the music teacher, surely—and she had her outrage aligned with just enough contrition.
Then the principal told her a boy had died. Drowned in the lake. Intoxicated. The blood-alcohol concentration so high that death was due to respiratory arrest.
The dead student was one of Sam’s closest friends, a boy whom Mita could clearly conjure up, alive, eating at Mita’s table as he had done so many times over the years. She saw his face again, ringed by curls when he was so much shorter than she, then the more angled face of the teenager he had grown into. The principal said: It was Sam who had the fake ID and bought the liquor.
Sam, just seventeen, so secretive. There was a time when Mita could guilt her daughter into finding Sam in the middle of the night wherever he was, force open doors, track phones. She once found him in a state so inebriated he could have been in a coma.
Now her daughter is in another country, and Sam is like a corralled animal in this apartment. Sam is hers to bring back from a sadness so profound that he called Mita from his car ten days ago, sobbing into the phone, saying he was sorry he had fucked up so badly, sorry for everything, sorry he couldn’t go on. She had talked to him for almost three hours, not letting her own panic subsume her words, the evening smudging into deeper night as she slowly reeled her child back home.
She had not said—not even once in that conversation—that she knew what it was like to lose a friend. Not even when Sam told her that his friend had wanted to die, to walk into the frozen waters in a stupor, and Sam had known this.
Mita closes the door to the balcony as she sees Sam heading up with Bhairav. She curls up on the couch, as if she has not moved at all, and picks up the book she was reading.
The back cover has the picture of a man, bearded and handsome, his face in profile. This Indian novelist shot to fame for a controversial book which Mita found noteworthy only in giving offense. Four years ago, he had written about his failed suicide attempts and recovery in a book about healing. It had propelled itself to the top of the New York Times best seller list. Then, within a year of that book’s publication, his daughter killed herself.
This book in Mita’s hands is a fictional conversation between the dead girl and her father. There is an intensity of sadness—Mita recognizes that—but she is appalled that this writer published this book at all, and that a publishing house marketed it as anything but macabre, and that the reviews have all been laudatory.
She wants to write to this author right now, tell him that the risks of even reading about suicide are well known, from as early as that novel published in the eighteenth century—what was the title again?—which led to a spike in suicides among European young men. She wants to tell him that after her best friend received her failing Board results, the girl killed herself in Delhi, killed herself in the exact way they had so casually discussed. Then a middle- aged man killed himself in a copycat suicide a block away, and although he and her friend barely knew each other, a risqué TV news segment aired about the connection between this man and her friend, and a reporter asked Mita whether her friend had been pregnant. Her mother had said, using the crudest language possible, THIS, THIS is why girls were married off at puberty so that whoever you fuck is no longer our problem.
Mita had learned to value silence.
She wants to tell this author to stop writing about suicide, to stop talking about it at events around the country, that suicide is as contagious as any virus spreading around the world. In the weeks before Mita’s friend killed herself, they had walked through many streets, going for long walks past reservoirs and water tanks and gurdwaras and temples and mosques, stopping only for snacks and to light a smoke. Their topic of conversation was how they would have to kill themselves if they failed the Boards, failed in the only exam that would guarantee college placements and give them a shot at making something of their dismal middle-class lives. They both knew about the many ways to end it all from news reports: brides who doused themselves in kerosene over dowry demands, jobless lower-caste youth seeing no future, farmers whose livelihoods were impacted by genetically modified foods.
Sometimes, after a bad fight with her mother, Mita would sit in the toilet for hours, looking at the bottles of bleach and phenyl and thinking of the liquid burning like fire down her stomach.
Her best friend had known this, for they commiserated about domineering parents and faithless boys and impossible exams, and there was only one escape portal in their teenaged minds. If Sam is now watching 13 Reasons Why, or anything suicidal online, Mita doesn’t even know how to ask.
Mita glares at the picture of this famous author with his smug half-smile, and she snaps closed her MacBook. She will not write to a man who is Pita in the book—who the hell addresses a father as Pita? Pita the all-knowing patriarch, showing off his vast erudition as he and his child lob complex tropes at each other, engaged in an enraged ontological tennis match.
Mita understands that suicide is made honorable in some traditions; the Japanese, and certainly the Indian. She can think of a number of Bollywood movies where the raped woman kills herself to save the family honor. A Bollywood actor is in the news now for committing suicide. But Sam does not know these movies, he watches Bollywood rarely, and tires of reading subtitles. Mita wonders if this writer’s daughter was also dressed in bride-red for the funeral pyre, like her friend was, as virgin Hindu girls are, for the honorable finale by fire.
The door clicks open as Sam walks in wordlessly. Bhairav stands patiently as he is wiped down, then shrugs out of his thick doggie coat and launches himself into Mita’s arms with excited yelps. Sam shuts his bedroom door behind him as Bhairav wriggles free from Mita’s embrace.
When she walks into Sam’s room, he is lying on his side, his head buried into a pillow. She wonders if it is too early to try another therapist, if the online sessions are having any effect at all. Not now, Ma, says Sam.
She wants to tell him that he will forgive himself. He will stop seeing a body fished out of the waters, or that half-drunk glass of water by a kicked-over chair. That his friend may appear in a nightmare, and lying in his darkened bedroom lit by the faint street lamp shining through the gap in the blackout curtains, as strange shapes loom up from the ceiling, the floor, the walls all looming up, he will see his friend again, and he will sit up shaking, then firmly ask his friend to go away.
Mita shuts the door behind her as she leaves.
She is deep in sleep when she hears the balcony door slam shut. Mita grabs her hoodie and jumps up, seeing white snow skim past dark windows, and she realizes that the polar vortex has hit, did she leave the balcony door open?
Her heart starts to pound as another thought powers her feet past the kitchen and out the door. Bhairav is yelping at her feet, distressed, running with her out into the eddying blizzard. Mita stands on the balcony, twelve floors over the dog park, straining to see a form splayed out below like a dark snow angel, she gasps in the cold air and strains to look, her head swiveling to all possible points of a projectile arc.
She sees only snow. The bushes bending with white weight.
She pushes open Sam’s door and he is there, gently breathing. He mutters, Get off me, as Bhairav tentatively licks his face. The dog settles close to the boy’s fingers gently stroking the soft hair at his nape, then Sam’s fingers still into sleep again.
Mita is shaking as she walks back to the living room. She feels nauseous, she wants to hurl out all the poison churning inside her. She picks up the book she is reading and marches out to the balcony, and with the snow settling on her hair and eyelashes and numbing her toes, she flings the book like a shot putter, with all her might, until it falls open below, a dark punctuation on the blank page of snow. She stands there, breathing, imagining the words already bleeding into unreadable black lines, blurred by the talons of a blizzard which has only just begun.
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the novel Shambala Junction, which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, as well as Rules of Desire, a collection of short stories. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, among others. She is a Contributing Editor for Jaggery and teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and at the Graham School at University of Chicago. www.dipikamukherjee.com
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS & LOGO CREATED BY KELCEY PARKER ERVICK
HMS is an arts & culture nonprofit (Hypertext Magazine & Studio) with two programs: HMS empowers adults by teaching creative writing techniques; HMS’ independent press amplifies emerging and established writers’ work by giving their words a visible home. Buy a lit journal (or two) in our online store and consider donating. Every dollar helps us publish emerging and established voices.