The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER IX

He lay on the couch conclusively still. The air outside was damp, and it railed inside the house through the open door, the cotton-sky outside dark, sharp.

A cloud of torpor of his life surrounded his eyes, the lids shut against the bright peels of the walls. It was magic hour. The silence, mingled with breeze, terrified the insides of the building and thundered like that of a roar of a dinosaur.

He then opened his eyelids slowly, his eyes rolling around the white once like a fish in a bowl, looking at the cold light of the night. The quietness began to thrust itself upon his body, the discomfort making him shift and turn. He hoped at this moment, his father would have another nightmare, and would scream in fear and pain, and he would have to go and tend to his old man. He hoped that it'd start raining outside so he could listen and concentrate on the beat of the raindrops drumming the roofs and roads. He hoped his mother would walk in at any moment, from the sky or from outside the house— all shiny and white and scold him for not sleeping on time.

He hoped anything but this still hour that kept him awake to a point that he wished things upon himself he shouldn't.

He wished his father wouldn't have given him his first copy of the novel— Waterland by Graham Swift that kept him reading and understanding the world. He wished his father would've never given him those letters addressed to Charles, the Frenchman, whose wife and two children lived in an Ashram somewhere on a hill in India. He wished that his mother had never read to him as a child, the poetry of the gone and celebrated that made him understand her more than he should have.

Rumi knew too much, too well. There was no going back from that, no point to turn around and even stare. If anything, cursing under his breath, he wished he knew more of what was swept under the rug of his parents' lives. He wished they never met. He wished he wasn't there.

Now he raised his hands from his stomach, and reached out his open palms to his face, covering not only his eyes to hide tears, but to rebound the sounds of his unquiet wailing. When he breathed in, he hiccuped and then let out a long, hot air through his mouth, the saliva dripping from one end, his face scrunched up and lost in some other world— to which the doors had remained closed. The world was flooded with his emotions now. The tears slipped in from the edges of the shut windows and twirled down his temples, through the side-locks of his distraught face, tickling his earlobe and soaking the seat-cushion where his head lay.

He wished he could have made everyone stay, some sorcery that would've helped him in casting a curse on the world he lived in outside— some spell to make the hands of the clock stop, the ticking of its rotation, the revolution of life, all that existed at the same time, the measurement of the universe.

But Rumi knew that whatever one hoped for in the future, was an uncertain image of a lost, broken past that could never be restored. A part of his family history resurrected and re-examined. The impossibility of paddling against the current of flow, swimming in circles.

We are the same, he thought. We are all the same, he said it then. Why?

Why does a candle wish to melt?

Why does a firefly wish to burn?

He felt anger at first, a rage so bright, so powerful, it could light up a city. It all waved into each other and formed a massive tsunami— all of what he felt built up had crashed onto itself and it evaporated into thin, smoggy air.

He hadn't felt enough for his dead mother, and the dying father who lay asleep (or questionably dead) in the other room. He promised himself to labor towards his father's love, to understand him. To fill in the gaps that he felt in himself.

He often thought of his mother as his rock— strong and still. But if she was rock, his father was water— strong and violent. Eventually, the rock had worn out to give him the way.

The overbearing tension and lack of emotions that filled the room between the life-givers were left blue for too long. And all he remembered of it was feeling humiliated by the reversal of roles. It grew and clamoured and turned so intense that it became the anchor of his relationship to them. Them. And everyone else that came around. It became so powerful, his love for them became inarticulate and unthinking. He never wanted to give them enough thought, even as a grown man.

Nothing could ever replace those questions, those doubts, the incessantly silent childhood that drew him insane.

He grew still, and for a moment even ceased to breathe, afraid to break the quiet. He lay in the crumble of his own misery, a pool of his sorrows soaked beneath his body, and he felt parts of him sink further, looking for an end. He imagined that the stillness and solitariness would let everything sink into synchronization, the way things are supposed to be, naturally.

Rumi realized that he didn't need to be in the presence of his nurturers to feel full. He loved them so much that it had begun to spin itself into something new, something whole and immaculate, with stains smeared across, gashes in his heart and fog on his mind, innocence and purity filled his body. Nothing else mattered. The world was a less important space.

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