The house on the corner of a nameless street in Uttam Nagar wasn’t a particularly beautiful house. The dusty black tile on the wall adjacent to the main gate read Chopra’s. An ageing, three-storey house, it was narrow and long — only fifteen feet wide on its front and some sixty feet in its length, and tall — as if three giant shoe-boxes stacked over each other, with an opened one on top, the terrace nobody was ever seen on.
Akshita banged the black iron gate shut. It wasn’t like her. She never stepped outside the house without first hugging her mother goodbye. She lived life with the belief that all her human interactions could be her last. It was one of the many things she’d learned from her yoga practice. Soon as she was out on the street, she realized what she’d done wasn’t needed. The heavy drilling in the house next to theirs made her walk faster. Only a few moments before, she’d shouted at her mother. She was usually composed in her disposition, almost always joyous, unlike her brother. She made a mental note to call and apologize.
Mrs. Chopra had been overworked for a few weeks because of her mother-in-law’s deteriorating health and motley of guests coming over almost everyday to visit. Her temper was growing shorter by the day. Akshita was going to stay the night at a friend’s place — supposedly to prepare for a presentation at work. At a time like this, it seemed outrageous. “What if she dies tonight?” Mrs. Chopra had cried. It was not as much an actual fear as a tactic to stop her from going. But Akshita knew better, and in any case, she was too much of an optimist to think her dear grandmother could die. She was the only one who didn’t participate in the family’s pessimism regarding the grandmother’s health.
As soon as she left, Akshar texted: It’s alright, Aksh. You’re allowed your moments of frustration. Mom will forget this. You have a good time at Mansi’s. And don’t forget to write your poem!
Every Saturday morning, the siblings would decide upon a prompt and give themselves until Sunday evening to write a poem. This ritual had started on an impulse — nothing they thought they’d continue. But after they were pleased with the first two times, they held on to it. Otherwise she was so busy with her work as an intern at Hindustan Times, and he with his post-grad that their schedules didn’t allow them to see much of each other.
Before they grew up — and it happened all of a sudden, at once, as if they were kids until after they’d graduated from school, and one unremarkable day, they just grew up — and became preoccupied with work and sex, they were together almost all the time. They were in the same class throughout their fourteen years of school. They shared everything with each other: homework, fun facts, Fun Flips, KitKats, report cards before they showed it to Mr. and Mrs. Chopra. Whenever friends in school complained about their siblings, they felt odd. By middle school they realized their bond was special because they’d shared a womb.
As they became teenagers, a chasm opened between them. Akshar withdrew as Akshita’s circle of friends grew. With waving hair, a dimple on the left cheek, and athletic legs, she swanned while he grew taller and thinner, as though stretched by the invisible hands of sky and gravity. Once his voice cracked, he started favoring writing over speaking.
After making his bed for the night, Akshita would sit, speak, and laugh with Mr. Chopra when he returned from work. She would entertain his drunk ramblings, listen to his favorite Mohammed Rafi songs with him, make him chai after dinner. Akshar either ignored him completely or, if they did happen to exchange more than a few words, the conversation inevitably plunged into conflict.
Alone, they’d wonder how two humans sprung from the same blastocyst — raised by the same people under the same roof — could have such different responses to the life around them. But as they crossed their teens, having breathed for two decades in the other’s presence, their extremities settled. Akshar still kept to his room and Akshita still went out every day but the intensity of his melancholy and her mirth mellowed. They weren’t sure if this was good or bad. They didn’t think about it much.
They were two halves of an apple. They had their differences and acknowledged those — Akshita’s side was rich and red whereas Akshar’s pale and green. The bruises on them were at different places and of different depths. The shape was fuller at her side, crooked at his. But at the end, their taste was similar, and their core had the same seeds.
As Akshita grabbed a seat in the empty, evening metro, she took out her cell phone, saw Akshar’s text, and smiled. This week’s prompt was: One of us _____. They could choose any phrase to fill that dash and use it as the title for the poem, setting its theme. One of us is sick, green, fat, bespectacled, burdensome, blue, mad, a thief. One of us can dance, sing, think, eat, sneeze, run, listen, tolerate, chase. Or one of us cannot love, cry, live, laugh, be loved, believe, cough, be happy, punch, drink, blink, breathe. Wearing her earphones, she played a Beethoven string quartet which immediately made her think of death, and subsequently her grandmother. She opened her notes app and typed: One of us is going to die.
Not more than half a mile away, having read Akshita’s title in a text, Akshar lay on his bed, also listening to the first movement of Beethoven’s string quartet No. 14 Op. 131 He’d recently discovered it through Wagner — whom he greatly admired — who had declared that this movement reveals the most melancholy sentiment expressed in music. He resonated with the autumnal quality of the piece. After having stared at the empty page of his notebook for many minutes, he finally wrote the words One of Us is Already Dead.
During the pauses between the movements of the quartet, he could hear laborers hammering down the neighboring house. He found it strange every time he walked home from college. Ever since he was a child, he’d fantasized living in the hills where people have houses that do not touch. Now, since they had a corner house, and the one next to them was being demolished to be built from scratch, he thought his house didn’t touch any other. But it only unsettled him. Don’t you think it makes us vulnerable? he’d asked his father. Mr. Chopra had brushed it away, calling it an irrational fear.
Mrs. Chopra, being the fearful person she was, couldn’t brush away that supposition. The hammering of the laborers would make her anxious through the afternoons. Every night she’d pray for the house to stay intact. She did not like their house. Rail-gaadi-ka-dabba, she’d call it often. They moved here after Akshar and Akshita were born, and since then it irked her that their house was like a train compartment, one room after another, with a kitchen and a shared bathroom at the very end. If you were to open all the doors, the neighbors on either end could communicate using either sign language or screams. She wanted to live elsewhere.
Mr. Chopra did too, more so than her. They had been planning to buy a house in Janakpuri for a long time — they thought it’d be much quieter, the streets much cleaner, the people more educated, a park nearby, birdsong, and above all, it’d be closer to his work. Mr. Chopra wouldn’t have to cross the Uttam Nagar Terminal, so infamous for its traffic that autowallahs anywhere else in the city would straight up refuse any passengers heading that way just to escape the junction. Janakpuri, for them, was Shangri-la. There were many hurdles in the way of reaching that place of peace. First, it’d take at least two crores to buy there, and it’d still only be a flat. In this house at least the other floors weren’t occupied by strangers. Mr. Chopra hated the thought of crossing strangers on the staircase. He’d say things like: The walls of houses made by property dealers crumble in a couple of years, this house we built ourselves or It’d be difficult to live in a place someone else lived in before or, his favorite, The lady in the apartment across the hall would fart and I would smell it!
Mrs. Chopra saw all of that only as an excuse to not move away from his brothers. But to the twins it seemed that he was slowly coming around to the idea of living away from the rest of his family. Mrs. Chopra herself had a reason to not move out. She didn’t want their share of the property to go to the other two brothers and she knew it would happen if they were to move out of that house. Every time Mr. Chopra would mention that they should seriously think of moving to Janakpuri so he wouldn’t need to wrangle with the monstrous traffic, she’d get red and speak in her characteristic bitterness how she wouldn’t give up her share of the house even if she had to live here alone. I would not leave a single penny that belongs to me. She was willing to live in a house she disliked, among people she detested, in order to not let injustice, as she put it, happen to her and her children.
Between the space from one movement to another of the quartet, Akshar could also listen to Dida’s whimpering and his mother’s ragged voice. Mrs. Chopra had been tending to her for four full months, depleting her own health in the pursuit of fixing her mother-in-law’s. Seeing her nurse Dida, Akshar had softened to his mother. Yet he never felt she was allowed her moments of frustration.
They all knew Dida was going to die sooner or later. They’d even been praying for it now on most mornings. Dida had herself declared she wanted to die. She would often call Akshar or Akshita, whoever was around, and ask them to strangle her, or throw her down the balcony, begged them to bring a match and set her on fire, or to bring a brick to split her head apart. Once Akshita had joked, “Let me get two, so I can split yours and you can split mine.” They had expected her to scorn, scold for such insolence, but Dida gestured to go ahead and bring two bricks instead.
The day had settled into its night clothes when Mr. Chopra entered the house. Akshar usually recognized him from the light clank of the keys dropped on the glass table, but that day he was crushed under the sound of cello. He noticed only once Mr. Chopra came into his room. Akshar smiled but received a taunt in return — something about his turtle posture. He tried to ignore it as he figured it must be the traffic that put him in a bad mood. It wasn’t unusual. But then, for no apparent reason, he continued and told him: You and your mother are the reason I drink.
It wasn’t needed, what he said. Mr. Chopra knew it soon as he stepped out of Akshar’s room. But he was in no mood to acknowledge that. After washing his face, he went to Dida’s room, gave her a glance, then went to his own room, disappointed. He knew he would regret it if she died that night. The woman who’d brought him to this world. And she was going to die — if not today, tomorrow. Still, the only time he would go to her room was when he was drunk. Other times he’d say he doesn’t like the look of suffering.
Reached safe. Back to my usual state. Haven’t talked to Mumma yet, but will. Hope Dida is not too unwell. Akshar received the text as he was about to end his poem. Without caring to finish, he removed his earphones, got out of bed, and walked to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and closed it without examining its contents. He glanced at the photograph affixed on the refrigerator door. Him and Akshita when they were kids. In the past years, he’d thought countless times that they were so identical when they were young and how different they’d grown up to be — in physical appearance, specifically. Apart from sharing a womb, they also shared the root of their name — Aksh. Mr. Chopra, once a literary man, had chosen the name for his twins. Aksh: axis. The center point of his life — his world would begin to revolve around them. Aksh: eye. His two children — his two eyes. Aksh: law. Two people he’d abide by. Aksh: gamble. He’d never be afraid to bet on them because he was sure to win. Aksh. Akshar. Akshita.
But he did not win. He broke all the promises he’d made to himself. He succumbed to whisky within three years of their birth. For a decade he drank everyday. And he drank like a merman, without caring for the sun. Almost destroyed his marriage. Lost his health, half his business, love for literature, most of his patience, immunity, and the little finger of his left hand. But things were better now. Not good, but certainly better than before. It’d been six years since he’d cut heavily on drinking and although the pinky lost while pulling the shutter of his shop down didn’t grow back, his general health had mostly recovered.
Although Mr. and Mrs. Chopra still fought, the intensity and the frequency had decreased. For people in their forties, they showed little maturity. Akshar and Akshita had learned to cope with their melodrama. They wondered if they’d be as close to each other if it wasn’t for the dysfunction in their parents’ relationship. Akshar’s phone vibrated again. Go check on her?
He was already in Dida’s room — the walls more damp, more depressing than any other, because the floor above had a bathroom in that area and the water piping was damaged. Mrs. Chopra had gotten their floor renovated a little over a year ago and the whole place looked much newer, but the walls of Dida’s room had started peeling even before the final cleaning day. They’d decided to get the walls covered with PVC channels to hide the damp walls, but while Dida was sick, and constantly visited by relatives, they couldn’t go ahead with it.
Akshar looked at the wooden temple. It felt unusual to him. Possibly because Mrs. Chopra, on Dida’s request, had bathed the gods and changed their garments. It could also be the new bright blue bulb, he thought. Then, inevitably, his sight fell on what he was trying to avoid all along: Dida. She lay there on her bed, swollen. He edged closer to her and put his hand on her forehead. He felt as if he was touching the cold backbone of a fish. He ran his fingers over her thinning hair. Sitting beside her on the bed, he kept looking at her, and soon found himself wishing to draw out the extra water swelling her body. With some conjuration, light her eyes up, put her in shoes, stand her up so she could visit pious places again, and after the journeys have her return with joy and mythologies in her palms and have her tell him stories of men and miracles. He looked at her legs, hard as buffalo horns, unmoving, her beaten spirit and sanguine tongue, swollen into speechlessness, unable to tell him a damned thing.
He wept quietly for a long time, staring at her, not wiping his tears. Then he told her he would miss her. Dida had raised him and Akshita when Mrs. Chopra used to leave home because of Mr. Chopra’s inclination to violence under the influence. He murmured she was the best grandmother in the world. In her broken motorcycle voice, Dida told him he was the best grandson. It made his tears bigger, hotter, perennial. Mrs. Chopra came in and told him that he should stop coming to this room if he was so prone to crying — her tone a strange mix of contempt and consolation. The only way she knew how to talk. He continued to sob and thought: what if he was merely using Dida’s suffering to reach catharsis? His attachment to her as a drill to penetrate through the ice inside him. He’d had this thought before. What if he was actually crying over something else? He couldn’t understand. He continued to cry. Dida raised her heavy hand to wipe his tears. That made his sobs more violent.
Mrs. Chopra barged into the room again and pleaded Akshar to go back to his. She was a woman of worry, Mr. Chopra a man who lacked patience. She constantly searched for something to fulfil her need to worry. He tried to avoid any disquiet. The couple had been fighting more than usual lately. She was frustrated at the unavailability of his brothers and their wives to tend to his mother’s sickness. Why did she have to be the sole caretaker? Despite living in a joint family, the older brother and his family, living upstairs, and the younger brother and his family, living downstairs, barely came to see Dida. Everyone knew any day could be her last. Instead the two families had gone together on a trip to Mussoorie. It had fuelled her frustration. Mr. Chopra didn’t like that either but he didn’t see any point obsessing over it. He wasn’t drinking for a few days so he chose to step into the fight with her. He could blame it on her if he ended up drinking. For four days, they’d been sleeping in different rooms.
Mrs. Chopra had always been scared to sleep alone. She shuddered at the slightest sound, and regularly dreamt of the roof falling over her. She’d been sleeping with Akshita these last four days but that day after dinner, she spent an anxious hour and a half alone in her room before she finally went to their marital bedroom and fell asleep on the other side of the bed. Mr. Chopra woke up to find her. For a moment he was agitated, but as the moment passed, he sighed and went back to sleep.
Past midnight, Akshar walked to Akshita’s room. Having developed a sudden urge to read The Hollow Men, he removed their copy of Eliot from the shelf. The image of the room was so intrinsic to the image of his sister in his mind that without her, it seemed devoid of everything. He wondered what it would be like if she were never to return from her friend’s house, or wherever she was. Brushing that thought aside as infantile and futile, he returned to his room with the book.
As he read the poem for the third time, he got stuck on the shadow falling between conception and creation. What is the way the world ends? he texted Akshita to see if she would remember the famous, final lines of the poem. Noticing the time, he thought he ought to be getting a call. He had recently met a woman in the metro, a gynecologist. Akshar was, in one of his friend’s words, a ladies’ man, in another friend’s words, a man burdened by his savior complex, and in one of his lover’s words — someone he’d held through her panic attacks, helped through her end-term dissertation — a manipulative bastard. Akshar resonated with none of these labels. He was amused by how someone’s perception of you could change depending on whether you allowed them to own you or not. He knew, through the kind of person the gynecologist was, or what he had understood of her, that things would end the same way with her. He would be reduced to a manipulative bastard.
She had been calling him around this time every other night. She worked alternate night shifts in AIIMS. She’d usually start with I just delivered a girl or I have to go for a delivery after this so we’ll have to rush this call depending on her will to have a conversation. On days they spoke for longer, during pauses in their conversation and the deadness of December nights, he could hear the screams of women in labor.
The gynecologist was telling him how a baby had died earlier, a few moments after delivery. Then, without a pause, she said: “I never thought I could fall in love with anyone — especially with someone so much younger than myself — I feel so defeated.” He felt a sudden tremor. It was nothing romantic, but he was amused at its timing. Then he heard a faint crack. When she told him she loved him and would want to see him again soon, he told her he’d like that as well. “Hold on for a minute,” she said. Someone had called her for an emergency. He felt another tremor. By now he was sure it wasn’t merely a feeling within, but something physical outside of him. He heard a thunderous crack as if a rupture in concrete. His heart, on instinct, started beating faster.
Dida, in her bed, which was widely prophesied to be her deathbed, was half-asleep. Faint mumbling of Rama Rama escaped her lips when the wooden temple and the portrait of her husband dangled along the wall, shattering on the floor. The ceiling caved in. In the other room, Mr. Chopra opened his eyes as the window-glass behind him smashed to confetti. Mrs. Chopra was still dreaming of tall buildings when the chandelier, followed by tonnes of concrete, fell on her. The two floors above came crashing down, and took with them the two floors below. Within a hundred quick heartbeats, everything left of the house was enveloped by a cumulus of dust.
Before the dogs in the neighborhood barked and people rushed to their balconies, and three police gypsies and an ambulance arrived with their blaring alarms, there was a beat of silence as the debris settled. Amid that beat, Akshar’s cell phone vibrated with Akshita’s reply: Not with a bang. The phone call with the gynecologist still hadn’t disconnected. The only sounds that could be heard amidst the rubble and smoke were the faint whimpers of a newborn.