Jaya: Chronicle of an Anonymous Death

I was born at the darkest moment of the night. The time before the night lightens for the first glimmerings of dawn.
The time that is totally still, waiting...always. And now I drift here, in this darkness. A darkness that makes the
hour of my birth seem like day. So thick, so impenetrable, so comfortable. Effortlessly, I turn in this womb of
death and I am happy. Happy? Just a word that I always wanted to really understand for so long. A goal never
attained.

Rather strange really, for goals were all I had once. Succeedworkhardowellneverfailcannotfail, a mantra always
at the back of my mind. Study, study, study.
Study till I cannot remember what I look like, what other people
see. Study so I can't hear the whispers following mearound. StudyJayastudy - the addictive cadence of a running
train. Time's running out, Studystudystudy.

How tenaciously I had clung to life...how pathetically. In a burst of clarity I remember now, how that other
womb that had thrust me, crying, to meet the world. I believe now that I had cried with good reason, fighting a
primal awareness of the life that would be mine. No matter how I struggled, it wrapped its coils around me.

Looking back, I see the tears never shed, the necessities
gone without, so that I would live. My mother, abandoned by her husband, even as I swelled her belly. No proud
father to attend my entry.

My attendants? Just gloom and a desperate hope that I might wipe the tears of the past for the woman who was
my mother and for my grandparents.

The dusty, colorless town of Mirzapur had put its stamp on my mother, until it and she had become one, indistinguishable. Just suited to be a housewife, now forced to work. Oh, the shame! Married to her drab, uninspiring, dull, dull work.

Just as I am to this plush, beautiful dark. This velvet roughness, so black it's almost bright...and so dense.
Wait...I must explore this further. I twist this body that I cannot see. Does it even still exist? This body? Or is it
just a phantom? I do not care. I think of it still, am still conscious of it, this remnant of the being I used to be. Not
who I am now. Who am I now? What am I?

Who knows? I know what I was. Despite everything, I knew who or what I was. Abandoned child, singular
hope, sad melodrama, pathetic but real. Always real. Come make fun of me, I would silently implore; show me
that I exist. Make fun of my stringy, oil-soaked hair, my old-woman clothes, my thick framed glasses. Want me
to be your court jester? Hear me, hear me sing (my rickety, off-key voice wrapping readily around sad songs),
but show me that you hear me. Feel sorry for me, let your pity ooze through. Poor abandoned child, poor, poor
Jaya. You, all of you, let me know I am a person. But what now? Who am I now? Can I even call myself Jaya?

A whisper, a dream, a nightmare, a thought that stirs in someone's mind? A feeling that streams down my
mother's cheeks as she stands in the bedroom where I once slept?

The fragments of the being I used to be, forces me to be curious. "Who's out there?" "Where am I?" My voice
wraps around me, takes me in its folds. The dark is too thick for it to break through. Do I even have a voice
anymore? And if I do, whom would it reach anyway? I am here alone. Is it going to be forever? I do not know. I
do not know...how often do I say it here? And yet there is no desperation. Somehow, I know that somewhere,
in some dimension,are seething all the answers that I have longed for. But you know what? I do not even care.
To put it clearly, I have all the time in the world. Or...all
the time not in the world.

Time. Forever. What does that mean? Words that try to harness the power that can never be captured. But how
I had once tried to use those tools. The words, the books I had poured over. I knew that one day I would make
it. I had to make it, for my mother, for my grandparents, and to show that man. I would work in the government,
be an officer with all its attendants of money and power.

Power, a strange, delicious concept. Power legitimately earned
nothing in life's free I was told) and I would show him, oh, would I show him. Get even with him. And with those
children of his. And I would share that triumph with the people who had brought me up. 'The people. Those
people.' Already I lose the ties of blood that had always been. Strange!



Now, here I am, adrift in the dark, and I am content. My birth into this dimension has been much more
excruciating than my birth into the place called 'world.' These latest birthing pains had taken my life, such as it
had been. The cancer had eaten at my body. That which one day would have let me bear children now lay in
some unknown land-fill.
The children, unseen and unknown, to whom I had promised a real childhood vanished into thin air. The agony
had grown unbearable, as the parasite, surrogate child took sustenance in my womb. It grew and fed, greedy and
hungry.

Until finally, after months of battle, it ate me up alive. An agony which in my new stasis I cannot even
comprehend. I cannot, because all I feel now is this soft, thick darkness. I had heard and read that people went
through tunnels, saw lights. I saw nothing. Felt nothing. Nothing.

Like a cloud but darker. Like a caress but deeper. Like a vision but
forever. I drift. My consciousness is acute, yet somehow numb. Now, from some unknown place, I see images.
Disjointed; but they tell a story. I see tears. I see fire. I see my body contort as flames lick at it. I see an empty
house that used to be mine. And I can see, actually see,emotions. I see the darkness that fills the women's
hearts. The women...my mother and her mother. In the smoke that lifts from my pyre, they see my birth and my
life, and my death. Like a fragile wisp of smoke, perhaps the crackle of the dry wood. My life.

And further away, the man who had been but an instrument of my birth. He feels some sadness too, but also
bewilderment and even anger. Anger because I had not signed over to him the house my grandfather had left me.
I never really existed for him, but the house did. It was real to him. It had value. So, I gave that heap of stone
and mortar to the
woman who had given me life.

And the smoke fades away from me. And the darkness becomes more absolute. Again, I feel like I must
question. How reluctantly I shed the skin of my mortality. For the first time here, I really panic. The darkness
fails to soothe me.

"Where am I? Tell me. Who, what am I?" My voice echoes in my ears. There is no one else here. No one to
ease my passage into this life, or death, or after-life. And what does it matter anyway, what I call this place, this
state. My voice reverberates inside my head, hammering into my consciousness. Still nothing...nothing but
stillness and silence.

"There is no one here, Jaya, only you," I tell myself. For the first time I am alone, totally, wholly, absolutely alone.
Through those years of privation and hard work and jeers and pity, I had never, ever been alone. Lonely, but
never alone.

Wait. Then whom had I been speaking to here? Who had been this unseen
confidant I feel compelled to speak with? Who? No one but me here. Me,
myself, just me. My eyes close against the dark. I move my hand until it grips the other. I must know whom I
talked with. I must know. I concentrate, harder, deeper. And I connect.

The darkness explodes. And everything dissolves. The ravaged body I had clung to disintegrates. The hands, the
feet, the eyes the mind that had felt a part of me even here, evaporate. And there is nothing. And there is
everything. And now I know everything there is to know. I....