I Want To Hold Your Hand.

Lucy

I kept thinking of the time we first did oil painting in my art class at school.

You could choose to paint whatever you liked. I was at a crossing point then, somewhere between my heady obsession with Fred Astaire – and everything beautiful, all the feminine, pretty things of the 1930s, swing music and dowsy pinks and roses and green carpet and painted, cracked mirrors – and my later obsession with The Beatles, when it was everything sharp and sixties, bright colour and pop.

There was this dress, this pink dress, rouched in the bodice with little white flecks of flowers, silky but not real silk, kind of costumey, a little cheap. I thought of it as ‘forties’. I don’t remember where it came from. I wanted to paint the dress, that shade of pink and the sheeny satin glow, with someone’s hand, and that’s all, just the hand held across the stomach in a kind of disembodied gesture, an anxious gesture I suppose, one of restraint and self-preservation, the hand holding back whatever was inside this girl in this dress.

But nobody would put it on. None of the other girls wanted to be inside the dress, in front of the rest of the class, looked at by the rest of the girls in their ordinary school dresses. Nobody would put on the dress so that I could take a photo to paint from, just for a moment. In the end the art teacher put it on, because somebody had to.

The painting was good.

I want to hold your hand, I called it.

Fear.

Lucy

I used to sing around the schoolyard, tunes from Fred Astaire movies.

Isn’t it a lovely day to be caught in the rain?

I’m stepping out, with mah honey; can’t be bad to feel so good.

Shall we dance? Or keep on moping? Shall we dance, and walk on air? Shall we give in to despair? Or shall we dance with never a care?

It was strange; before then I had never sung out loud, where anyone could hear me. I could sing with the choir, I could sing alone, but never to be heard. So frightened of the sound, my throat would catch up.

At some point later, I stopped singing again. I wonder now if I was happiest then than I have ever been. Why else could I sing?

Stereotypes.

Lucy

Some time in 2011-12

(He was young and kind, and a little puzzled.)

You don’t look like the kind of person who usually sees me for social anxiety… if you don’t mind me saying so.

I wondered what a person with social anxiety was supposed to look like. An image rose up: a chubby boy, pale, pimpled, the archetypal damp hands.

Suburban Train Line.

Lucy

Mumbai — February 2018.

Heroes hang out of the doorways, vying to be soonest on the ground, dangle their feet above the passing platform, waiting for the perfect moment to strike in their soft-soled sandals.

Hot polyester suits scratch buttock-to-buttock.

A eunuch slaps the shoulders of the first-class passengers, dark-eyed in khol.

A pure plaintive song somewhere behind me. A girl sings, untrained but sweet-voiced, holds out her hand, slim and fragile, turns — not a girl, a woman. But 35 or 50? Her face ravaged, eyes blind.

Sounds.

Lucy

Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.

The crows and sweeping seabirds; garden chirps.

The elevator’s high-pitched tune (Fur Elise?), and the banging of its metal gate, indecorously flung open and shut as residents shunted up and down the building.

The rise and fall of auto motors outside, the note of their rattling rumbling mumble changing always as they sped and slowed.

The call of a walla moving up and down the street, nasal, songlike, punctuated by the ringing of his bicycle bell.

From the Window Again.

Lucy

Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.

High above the call of the crows there came another bird’s sound — its long, high warbled note implied a sweeping, swooping seabird. It was several days before I glimpsed them from the window, their smooth sweep high above the crows, disdainful of the courtyard and its window cages. They circled the sky above the building-tops, settled only on high roofs where they would have a view across the sea.

A cat, white forepaws and a piebald behind, slunk across the top of a wall, paused, silent and still, to gaze into the garden below, continued, slipped under the barbed wire ringing the yard, and slipped precipitously down a tree to the ground. Later I saw him settled to his purpose, head down and ears pricked, crouched with latent spring in every muscle. He sat sentry over a corner of the red trodden-earth yard, eyes fixed on the shadowy border of deep green growth.

Anxiety.

Lucy

Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.

I had been afraid — some element of superstition had mingled with the dread that unaccountably, always, clung to my chest. The great barrel of metal, furnished in grey plastic, shaking and rattling with the vibrations of the air pressed against it, had seemed flimsy. Its breaking-up slowly, piece by quiet piece, under the force of its unnatural journey alone, had not seemed far-fetched. The creations of humanity inviolate — I could not believe in that myth in this lonely expanse of dark empty sky. We might slip away — the great violence of our breaking muffled and rendered silent by the cloud. Though as a child the noise and energy of a plane’s take-off had worried me, never had I felt so deeply disquieted by flight — a distress without urgency or focus, a heightening of my new natural state.

Morning Crows.

Lucy

Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.

From the windows at the back of the flat came the incessant craw of crows. They moved about the courtyard garden, seeming to fling themselves in short bursts, from window cage to rooftop to the curling wild boughs of jungle tree. Most of all, they liked the window cages, and each morning one would settle at ours as we had our breakfast and begin its craw, part warning-off to its mates, part entreaty for food. Ammama would feed them, scattering scaps onto a sheet of magazine paper across the bottom of the cage. Though we did not do the same, the birds came each morning from habit and in expectation, cycling through the windows of the buildings circling the court.

Our ancestors reincarnate, crows are believed to be — I was not sure this made me like them any better. I had made eye contact with a crow that sat on a roadside wall in our first day wandering the streets of Bandra — an attempt to show the bird I was unafraid, but it was me who turned away first, unnerved at a somehow deeper level than that of physical fear by the look in its round, dark eye.