Paracetamol

Rifat Mahbub

December stirs memories for Joyeeta. Memories that wrap her with the flickering, swirling, venomous tongue of an unerasable past. She hates it. She has been hating it since her childhood. She hates Eliot even more; why did he call April the ‘cruellest’ month and not December? Is this because December is the month of Christmas and the winter holiday, and he thought December would be the month to make all kinds of happy, cherishing, life-transforming memories? Falling in love, getting married, having a baby, landing a job to start in the new year, losing weight, detangling an unrelatable relationship—he surely thought the estuaries of happy memories would flow into the sea of life in December.

That was a December from a long-lost past, but see how memories seep through her unbuttoned cardigan, making her shiver into her bones! It was December 10th, her result day of the class VIII annual exam. Joyeeta knew that all the lies she cooked up and shared about her maths exam would be out. She knew she would not get the 80% required to obtain a science major; she would never be a doctor. It was not that Joyeeta was an expert liar who would lie as though she was a storyteller, but on that occasion, she lied to her parents and her private tutor: “I could not complete the additional theorem question. But I should get around 85.” Joyeeta’s father believed her and even promised that they would go to Cox’s Bazar for a week once the result was out. Her mother was not too sure. “What about the problem with compound interest? What about factorising algebra with double brackets? Did you manage to revise?” Her mother’s maternal instinct had some red alerts. But her father defused such alerts: “Our Joyeeta might not be the best of the students, but surely she will be in science.”

Each night of December before her result day, Joyeeta prayed at night: “O Allah, please make me invisible. Please make me die. Or make me a tree; let me somehow drown in the lake; please do something.” Nothing was heard; nobody made Joyeeta anything. She was one rowdy piece of a girl, physically. Her mounted breasts needed a bra, a chemise, and a piece of <i>orhna</i> to give her a shapeless silhouette. Even then, the pair of breasts unashamedly gazed at others. Her period was heavy, and there were months when all in her class knew that she had her period—the blood spots were evident on the back of her school uniform.

Joyeeta did not get science. “I couldn’t be fooled that easily. I knew all along”—her mother chanted the same for seven days without a break. Her father bowed and murmured: “Why did my daughter have to lie? What did I do wrong?” Years later, when Joyeeta was a PhD student in Edinburgh three years ago, she got a Facebook call at around 10 p.m. local time on December 10th to get the news from one of her male cousins in Dhaka that her father had a massive heart attack and he died before they could take him to the hospital. Joyeeta could not go—plane fare before Christmas was beyond her stipend purse. She also planned to submit her thesis the following February. Once again, Joyeeta wished, hoped, and prayed if she could be a Christmas tree or a patch of muddy snow—something but not a daughter who had just lost her father.

And then there was another December. She now cannot remember the year when this male classmate from her university back home called her “the queen of his heart”. Joyeeta could not believe anyone calling her ‘queen’ even if that was a fib. At times, fibs shape and save lives. Raihan and Joyeeta became a pair, like many others. They promised to live and die together, or, if not that dramatic, they pledged to complete their degrees to get decent jobs and to get married. One December, Raihan declared philosophically: “Love is a fistful of present moments. We have passed our present moments. Let us part and be in love forever. No love is love if that ends in marriage.”

Joyeeta’s heart turned into a neatly cracked pomegranate, oozing drops of seeded blood. It was December 31st. Joyeeta cleaned her room and dumped Raihan’s letters and cards in their kitchen rubbish bucket to start afresh in the new year. Standing on her grilled balcony, she saw the rubbish collector emptying the bucket, including the letters and the cards, into the garbage van. But when the van started moving, she wished to turn herself into a broken eggshell, a fin of a fish, or a sanitary pad to be with the letters and the cards. Nothing happened. She was a pomegranate, hard on the outside and bleeding inside.

Then, there were paper cuts in raw relationships. All intensified in December. When she started her first job in Dhaka, she and a bunch of her colleagues, all fresh graduates  went on a trip to Cox’s Bazar on December 25th to spend the Christmas holiday weekend. Before then, Joyeeta did not know that the sea could make or break life within a whirl of a second. A few months before the trip, she started to have a casual date with one of these newbies. Salman and Joyeeta worked on small projects, had coffee and lunch, and texted each other.

In Cox’s Bazar, She and her female colleague shared a double bedroom in the hotel. Salman opted for a single room—rich among the lot, while two other male colleagues shared another room. Or, he might have planned everything beforehand. After dinner, music, and adda at the beach, they all returned to the hotel around midnight, and Joyeeta found herself in Salman’s room. Did he want to show her something? Was she in need of a charger to charge her phone? Were these just excuses to be in bed? She could not be sure anymore. Joyeeta thought Salman was so professional in opening her up—she was proud of her virginity and of his experienced move to pull her thighs apart to be inside her. Looking back, she thought he was not really experienced or professional. She was 24, never had sex, and took Salman as her conqueror.

After a quick 15-minute sex and 30 minutes in bed, she tip-toed to her room, expecting her female roommate to comment on her moral looseness. To her surprise, she did not find anyone in the room. She did not realise that, like her, Rupa, her female colleague, had gone on some memory-making adventures with another male colleague. She was the one who returned like a terrified child; the world did not bother about her. But the following day, Joyeeta could not keep her eyes off Salman during breakfast. Less out of any kind of sexual attraction and more because she could not find any reason why she found him interesting to date and then to have sex with. He was handsome, but she never realised that most of his small talks were about video games and share-market investment.

Now, Joyeeta can’t remember very well, but she sure said something about her lack of social ability to pretend to be interested in the same conversations about a forever-upgrading gaming world or the market of money when the same topics recurred throughout the day—over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her male colleagues were offended; her female colleague meekly supported her. She had a fun time with her colleagues but had to sleep in her hotel room alone. Her other female colleague continued her adventure, but she could not drag herself to Salman’s bed. Salman tried a couple of times, sent her a series of erotic texts and photos, and, in the end, called her a “cold prude”. She was glad—she did not know how to get rid of him, so she was relieved he misunderstood her and left. Now, this is not a particularly sad memory. Still, every December, Joyeeta wonders why she had sex with Salman and why the memory returns.

Joyeeta looks around her living room. A cosy, comfortable space—a bookshelf stacked with neatly organised books. The Christmas tree at the corner of the room has twinkles, stars, mistletoes, lights, bells, and snowflakes. Its amber-warm light gives the room a low-key, intellectual, homey feel. Soon, her partner will be in, and they will have fish pies, boiled vegetables, and mulled wine. They will watch a movie, wrapping each other under one blanket. It is the beginning of the December holiday; she has finished her last working day. Joyeeta doesn’t know why medical science or the giant pharmaceutical companies do not invent a Paracetamol to weaken the clasp of memories that wraps her like a python in December.