That Yellow Evening

For the past few months every evening had brought with it not only a sense of thickening gloom but an impending doom. I always prided myself on never getting bored. I always had something to do, and something to think. Especially the latter. My mind and thoughts had always been my best friend. But now, they had turned their back on me. Without them, I would have been merely alone. But with them taunting me, I was in a haunted hell.

I am not quite sure how it all began. But soon twilight would bring up a new story in my head. Sometimes it was an imaginary tale of losing a loved one to a ghastly end. Sometimes it was strange sensations in my body that I imagined to an extreme, again meeting a ghastly end. I was usually quite disconnected to my body, and thus prone to psychosomatic symptoms. I knew that. But now, I started noticing every little sensation, and it was not pretty.

Sometimes I was able to see the humour in it. Once, I was working on my laptop, in a lobby. Spiralling staircase started next to me and led to the floors above, all of which I could see if I looked up. I was busily typing away, and suddenly felt tingling sensations passing from my left to right arm. This had come many times, like the spraying of fine water. This time it was extremely visceral, and I panicked and decided that I needed to go to a doctor. Just then rose the smell of disinfectant, and a voice came from above accompanied with a face peering down at me, “Sorry Ma’am, I was just cleaning the wall, I think I sprayed you”. I was relieved and could laugh at myself.

But I vividly remember this one day- the twilight with yellow skies. It threw upon the earth the same jaundiced colour. What was so oppressive and depressing about a twilight yellow sky? Was it merely my state of mind being reflected, or was there more to it? Was it the intolerable singularity of it? Was it because it seemed that the sun was ill and just giving up, diminishing slowly and drowning, rather than going away in a throne of pink, red, purple and orange? Was it the unnerving stillness that the yellow sky leant to twilight, in place of its turbulent splendour? They both made me weep, one with its sickness and the other with its beauty.

I did what I did when faced with such a scenario- I checked Facebook. The lack of notifications didn’t unnerve me and I scrolled idly through the newsfeed. I knew this was an unproductive escape leading to a hopeless land, but it was habit. This barren desert with its endless sands of information was better than being locked in my mind.

But suddenly, a piece of information leapt to the fore. Like it often does. But I didn’t yet know what this word would morph into under the grip of my current mind: Earthquake in the northern parts of India. This was the second time I thought of Earthquake that day, though I couldn’t recall what the first one was.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breath and felt dizzy. Was it an earthquake here? I remembered that sometimes the earth moving expresses itself as dizziness in us. What was that sound? I felt that the building was shaking and about to crumble. I cowered under the table and sat there frozen and claustrophobic. I panicked about me being on the 10th floor of a building and cursed Mumbai, this stupid city of sky scrappers. We were definitely not prepared for an earthquake- it would be chaos! Mumbai would be debris and garbage. Tall buildings would crumble like lego blocks. The middle class would be under rubble. The slum dwellers wouldn’t see a poetic justice and instead would perish too, as buildings toppled on them.

I’d be trapped under this table, and who knows when help would arrive? Would I survive? Under the weight of a building, alone, unable to breath, with no food. The thought made me numb for a while, my heart racing. I tried desperately to take deep breaths. As I mildly calmed down, I could peek at reality long enough through the haze of imagined fog and realised there was no earthquake right now. I crawled out from the table with a determined face and filled up 5 bottles with water. I prepared a small box with nuts and sugar. I put my phone and the battery-charger, to charge. Today was the 8th of December. Most bad things had happened to Mumbai, and often in many parts of the world on either 8th or 26th. It was going to happen today.

I put together my disaster pack safely close to me before lying down on the bed. I wasn’t going to sleep. It would be safer if I were awake. I kept the light on and switched on my laptop, but to no avail. The platitude of “live life as though this is your last moment” was clearly uttered by people who had never experienced the terror of it, or were above it all. This state of mind was not very conducive to either work or entertainment. It was also exhausting. My body was in a constant state of flight or fight. But I didn’t dare close my eyes. Or I knew earth would roar. I suddenly remembered a yellow evening from childhood, when Earthquakes had struck Latur-Osmanabad and was felt in Mumbai. Ah, that was what had reminded me of Earthquake today, the first time.

“If I am awake, I’ll be safe and nothing will happen”, I kept muttering to myself. It really felt like the most rational thing at the time. I was going to be awake till the darkness left. What I truly hoped was for it to leave me.

I stayed vigil; long after the yellow skies had gone, until the sky opened up again with a faint orange. Light was breaking through, providing fleeting reprieve from the night that I knew would return, catching me off guard whenever it wanted to. But for now, I could sleep.