by Aekta Khubchandani
The narrator needs to prove her hurting and wants to make sure that the reader feels it too. How else would you believe her?
A white man cradles a cat like a baby. Her limbs face upward, straight and unmoving. Her eyes don’t move either. You think it’s a stuffed animal or toy. It’s not. The man shows you his lovely cat. She seems very obedient and quiet while he holds her and places her in a small basket. To show that she is real, he laughs before pinching her private part. The cat widens her eyes but doesn’t make a sound. You see all of this on a video shared on social media. It doesn’t alter the horror.
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Think about the color of fear.
A dictionary meaning of fear— something that chokes you, leaves you gasping for breath but doesn’t kill you. Fear is the subtext in this white-man-cat-story.
Or [the color of] fear washes over when you walk by the Hudson waterfront and take the exit that leads you home, you see the face of a white man in a big black car calling you out, screaming at you. Or next day when you walk by the Hudson waterfront and you take the exit that leads you home, that big black car honks loudly and flashes its headlights on; you’re overcome by fear. This one syllable emotion can trigger past trauma. It is also capable of creating new trauma. The color of fear is a powerful white. Dictionary further informs you that fear is associated with words like unpleasant, danger, threat, anxiety, sudden attack and safety concern.
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You think about the color of crying. Why did the cat not cry or scream? How much fear does it take for you to give up on crying? You remember your childhood. Crying hadn’t helped or your memory [like your skin] is muddy. You must’ve lived in fear. Color is defined by its intensity and opacity. Tears are translucent, made of salt and emotion. Still, when you think of the color of crying you think—blue. You’re most alone when you’re crying. Your body becomes small, bends inwards. Like a comma or an apostrophe. You become a punctuation. You’re not even a word with energy. No one cries with their back straight. A photograph of you crying is a memory of defeat. You lived a helpless childhood. Blue floats between alone and lonely, empty and repetitive like the sky. You’re used to this feeling.
The cat must be used to fear or that man must be used to exercising his privilege. Or it is both these realities.
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How much space can a word hold in a sentence? How much space is dominated by fear in your life? Fear is both a noun and a verb. The reaction to fear is death because a part of you dies after this. How much has the cat died by this point in the story? When you read cat or recollect her story, the graphic memory of [your] assault plays in your head. Going by this, you and the cat have less of yourselves than you did a few sentences ago.
This is why crying seems like a temporary solution— a pretend act of letting go. Empathy must blotch a huge part of blue. When you understand things, you know more about the flawed world, the privilege of being a man. You were physically small, once. You’re diverted by how small the cat was. You were an age of eight or six. You liked how your brother was treated. You wanted that treatment for yourself. You went to the bathroom and tried to pee like your brother.
After crying and pouring yourself out, you're tired to feel anything, even fear. You wonder if the cat resonates with this. It’s been raining for two days. There’s no account of the sun. You’re reminded of that big black car with tinted windows. Crying/cry is both an adjective and a noun. How much space does crying hold? You question if your body has enough water after relentless crying. Was the cat once beaten until she was bruised blue? The commonality between fear and crying is grief that the [form of] body gets consumed with. Whether you cry or fear, your body becomes a vessel containing grief.
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You’ve known the power a man [gender] carries throughout childhood. This story is heavy with the weight of white. You fill yourself another glass of water. You want water to hold your body and nothing else. You drink on behalf of the cat. You couldn’t see the white man in the car. Is the white man in both stories [metaphorically] the same? You sip through the crying until you can’t.
If a bad thing happened and no one recorded it, did it really happen? Can trauma be enough evidence? I leave that for the reader to sit with. I’ve revised this story a few times now. I’ve moved the beginning, middle, and end to see what could happen. But I knew it had to start with the white man cradling the cat like a baby. The order of happenings is a reflection of the hierarchy of power [of gender, race, privilege]. There’s a lot of thinking that the narrator engages in. Trauma lives in the [relentlessly thinking] mind but it is a response to people and their behavior. I’ve used the speculative lens to process these thoughts and emotions— what is fear, how small can crying make you feel, how small did you feel when you were physically small [re: a child]. That informs the gender privilege. It’s introspective— the story. The narrator needs to prove her hurting and wants to make sure that the reader feels it too. How else would you believe her?
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Aekta Khubchandani is an Indian poet and writer. She is matriculating her dual MFA in Poetry & Nonfiction at The New School, NY. She teaches creative writing to students of High School of Economics & Finance with WriteOn NYC. Her fiction “Love in Bengali Dialect”, the winner of Pigeon Pages Fiction contest, is nominated for Best American Short Fiction Anthology. Her poems were awarded the winner of honorable mention by Paul Violi Prize. Her work is featured in Passages North, Epiphany, Jaggery Lit, Kitaab Singapore among others. She has performed spoken word in India, Bhutan and New York.