“This is Shesha’s office,” he says as I walk to the dusty aisle with white curtains and purple ink pots. Notes are everywhere, on tissue paper, and signs are on makeup wipes, with Mac wine lipsticks still apparent.
Rishi is a man of black and white. His suits are hand-tailored by one of the finest designers in Lalitpur.
“Your writing is consistent with Shesha's. I want you to finish her series as a ghostwriter to get your deposit.”
The ground beneath me sank when I heard her name for the first time. I knew I was being interviewed for a writing position, but I had no idea I'd be given the chance to wrap up Shesha's series. The series that everyone is waiting for.
After the office tour, I asked to see Shesha. Rishi’s smile shrank, and his face tightened.
“Shesha hasn’t moved since the accident. There’s very little to no chance that she won’t. Aani looks after her.”
Aani is Shesha’s nurse. She bathes her every noon with sterile water and changes her back to white cotton fabric. She sends transparent tubes into her left veins through a sharp silver needle, carefully avoiding the bubbles.
Rishi’s house feels like a choir room. The walls here have lips that whisper swiftly as you breathe. The red velvet carpets in the staircase could slip you anytime and crack your skull. The mirrors have secrets that you’d never know, and the pool, well, the pool, is covered with a neon tent and rusty nails.
I walk into Shesha’s office, with a walnut-toned wooden floor and scattered notes covering half of it. Her walls are scarlet red with gold wallpaper. She has a typewriter at the edge of her desk, near the window, which hasn’t been touched for a decade.
I move the pile of papers to check the typewriter. The papers have been written in a hurry with a red ink pen with purple undertones. It is a pile of notes, a manuscript, that reads,
I wore a red dress, burrowed shoes, and a broken watch as I walked into the bar—to find the perfect publisher. I found Rishi there, in a black tie, holding a glass of 600-dollar wine.
I might have found my boss’s journal.
Right across the door of her office is her bedroom—a dark room with mahogany flooring and only a large window for the light to creep in. Aani wipes her hands and face every morning before she changes her tubes.
After drenching myself inside Shesha’s head and probably invading her privacy, I walk to the kitchen. Rishi pours me a glass of wine as I see a picture of Shesha, Rishi, and a little boy I'd never seen.
After a whole day of reading about Rishi’s relationship with Shesha, I don't think I have the energy to ask about the little boy with running shoes.
Rishi’s eyes immediately tear up as he sips his red wine. His fingers clutch the glass as hard as he can, leaving the hallucinating fingerprints.
“My son, who drowned in the pool last summer,” He says.
It has been seven weeks since I started staying the night at Rishi’s. We never talked about the son again.
I reach for the pile of journals and glance at the last few pages. It reads,
“When I got pregnant with Sanu, I felt Rishi loving me more. I noticed him getting home early and loading the pantry with vitamin capsules. He kissed me like he pitied me. Like he only loved me for the baby.
After six months, I looked huge. My face puffed up, and my ankles swelled. I was no longer the Shesha he loved. I was the mother of his child, whom he loved.
He turned 5 last month. My son is five years old. Or maybe he was. I drowned him today.”
My stomach sinks as my heart struggles to escape my chest. I tilt my head toward the window to catch some air. There’s Shesha. Staring at me. In the reflection. Through her bedroom, with her spine erect.
I can’t feel my feet, nor my skin, nor the blinding tears in my eyes. I breathe a little when I see Aani holding Shesha’s chin to support her erect spine.
After Rishi returns home after work at 8, I run through the red velvet-covered staircase and sprain my ankles. Rishi runs at the same pace to hold me and carry me to the guest room. As he lays me down on the bed with gold Kashmiri sheets, I press my lips against his, tasting Rishi.
For this fraction of time, he’s mine. Only mine. Until I saw Shesha standing outside the door—the door that Rishi and I were too busy to lock.
“I saw her, Rishi. She can stand. She can walk. She can do more than move her eyes.”
Rishi rushes to see Shesha on her bed, still attached to her tubes. I hold Rishi’s hand and take him to her office, despite my bruised ankle. Unsurprisingly, the journals are nowhere to be found.
We rush to Shesha’s room again.
“I know you can move. I saw you. In the window. Outside the door. Tell Rishi you killed your son.”
I spot the journal under her bed and read it out loud to Rishi.
Rishi’s rage catches Shesha’s neck. She doesn’t utter a word. Before she says anything, she suffocates to death.
I fall on her mahogany brown floor and see a few more papers in the journal. I do not intend to read any more of her journals, but my eyes catch the word “epilogue.”
Rishi has gone to get Aani and call the paramedics. I continue reading.
“I wrote this to get over my son’s death. To continue writing my series, I thought of introducing a villain into a story. And to get into the villain's mind, I have to practice writing the opposite of how I've always felt. What if I were the villain? How would I feel if I were the evil in my own story?
I couldn’t save Sanu, as he was drowning in the pool. What if I am the killer? Maybe I should drive through the tree and kill myself.”
I feel dizzy from reading the different plotlines of Shesha’s journals. Why did she behave in a vegetative state if she had wounded herself?
Questions swim in my mind as I see another piece of paper with fresh ink.
“Rishi found the journals long before you did. Rishi did not read the epilogue. He still thinks that I killed my baby before. That I was too jealous of him for loving the baby more than me. I'm feigning to be in a vegetative state so he won't kill me again. I was going to run tonight. But I saw you kissing him. I rushed to my room to write this epilogue.
I rushed to tell you that Rishi crashed my car. Since I'd already written that I would crash my car, Rishi knew what he had to do to make it look like an accident. I pretended to survive the crash and get into a vegetative state so that I could survive. Rishi is my killer.”
Twice, I say, as I look at the writer’s body.
