Old Nights
by ANURADHA PRASAD
Christine Shan Shan Hou, dream triptych, collage on paper, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
OLD NIGHTS
ANURADHA PRASAD| MAY 2023 | Issue 23
It was an amber-colored bottle. Held against light and shaken, you could see the swirl of the sweet red sticky liquid, how far up or how far down it was. The bottle was made of glass when as children we knocked it down from its high shelf. It fell crashing to the floor making a star of glass shards. A heel shrieked. It was hard to tell blood from syrup.
Sleep came easily in those days. Sleep was a soothing, heavy balm. Waking up from it, my body was silken, warm, stretchy, dreams a faraway jostle of night memory. My body was child.
The night, like so many things, frightened me and I readily and without question closed my eyes to it. I learned early that night is to be shut out. Night is danger. Night is the realm of the unseen, the ones trampled in the light of day. Night is the head of a crow, hard-beaked and velvet-feathered.
I was a sensitive one. The world was too big, too bright, too harsh, too loud. Nothing about the world felt good or true or right. I needed immense beauty and truth and found it nowhere for a long time. I made myself tighter and smaller, an almost black hole swallowing itself up.
I could look life squarely only in art, in retrospect, from a distance. I could not stand on the hot tin roof of life. I hovered at its periphery, a scrawny and brown-limbed ten-year-old.
As I sought a living experience without living it, my hands grew accustomed to the weight of books and my eyes to the lightness of night. Its long exhalation of silence, its quiet companionship to turning pages. It was not escape. It was staring into the eyes of beautifully crafted storms.
I was a midnight’s Cinderella until I began to inch further into the night. Its dark waters of solitude. A descent into interiority and a vast space with elastic seams. This night was my refuge, the only space and time I could safely occupy. The wickedness of the unfettered suited me. I was ninety percent night indigo. You could hear the crackle of stars in me.
Once they had stared into the abyss from where storms burst forth, my eyes never quite closed.
I was awake. I am awake.
There’s a violence in sleep’s rejection of you. I turned right. I turned left. I lay on my stomach, on my back. Unanchored and in the wake of mutinous sleep, I was awake to too many night things: motor purring, gate opening, key turning, drunk legs stumbling in.
Sweet sixteen, sleepless sixteen. The once-broken and bled amber-colored bottle returned. Now as a magic potion of sleep. Two caps of it. Some nights half a bottle. I turned into a collector. I collected pills like they were something precious. The bottle of pills rattled uneasily. Sleep knew the deception and fled. Right, left, on my stomach, on my back: that old drill.
Everything needs rest. Without pause there is no play. Sleep is that inner invitation, an inner pull of gravity to the core, the underworld. Ascent after all is possible only after descent. Without it, I could not wake up to a new day, a fresh start. I had to ride the wave of a stale story with no respite.
Insomnia is the privilege of the solitary. Lacking that privilege, I exercised great economy in movements to avoid waking the sleepers: one drunk, one angry, one a mere child. It changes the pattern of breath. My breath tip-toes, it limps, whispers a song. It climbs a high summit but does not quite know how to climb down. I didn’t know how to interpret these breaths, the ragged drag in them.
At some point, between the drunken man and the disappeared man, I slipped into a crack. I fragmented and pulled away from a body I never fully inhabited. I am disembodied. Like night things. I barely hear the deep howl birthing in the hollow of me.
If I unravel again, I hope to do it better. There’s a half-hearted, pitiful wretchedness to my unraveling. I could’ve been an icon, a patron saint, something cultish to lost youth instead of merely a has-been insomniac.
Sleep ventured and yawned with the light of dawn and at other strange hours. It acquired a different quality in my twentieth earthly year. It made an introduction: a demon who had escaped the dreaded night. I fell into her or she fell on me. Not all falls are made equal. We fall differently every time. The depth, slant, the being of it in relation to who we are at any moment changes and determines how we fall. For twelve years I fell into paralysis instead of sleep.
On the verge of sleep, I was hijacked to a different place. Move. I couldn’t. Wake. I couldn’t. Scream. I couldn’t. Even as I moved, woke, screamed, I couldn’t. I felt awake but nailed to the bed. I couldn’t reach the surface but I had not left the surface. It felt like my soul had left me and I could not move or wake up until it was home again. I was immobile and thrashing.
My earliest memories of tales: Little Red Riding Hood and the elephant god Ganesh’s beheading. The girl who crosses the threshold, defying her mother and the god of thresholds who guarded his mother while she bathed. I played various versions of these roles at different times in my life. The consequence is a legacy of pain, pleasure, and story.
It was to this god that I turned. I tucked a little idol of Ganesh under my pillow, this chimeric being and gatekeeper of in-between spaces. Through the paralysis, hands reached for him and wrapped around the metal of crown, trunk, and folded legs after what seemed like a long struggle. I buoyed in that place of suspension.
Escape seemed futile and I stopped trying to flee. I learned to inhabit this in-between space, the echoless chamber. I grew curious. Faces of deformed strangers would appear. At the end of a spiraling tunnel, I often saw the face of a dark-haired woman, her hair bouffant, done in the 80s style. She was out of reach. She was a puzzle to be solved. I waited to fall.
It was Navaratri. The nine nights of the goddess. A festival celebrated at the crossover of seasons.
The last of the nine nights, as I hung in this strange place, a woman appeared before me. It was me, yet not me. Her hair was long and frizzy, almost a halo. Her skin was luminous and it shivered, just her skin, with rage. Wide eyes, dark pupils. Clad in a red-bordered white saree, she turned and ran into a crowd of women in similar red-and-white sarees, chanting as they carried Durga on her palanquin. She did not look back. The paralysis fled with her. Was she the deep howl that lay buried in me and now free?
The most natural of biological functions is today revered and dreaded, somewhat tamed but unpredictable as the wild often is.
As night drips into deepening darkness, I lay on the threshold of consciousness and the impregnable depths of unconsciousness where even night dwellers stir with care and quiet. Uncertain wings flutter in my body, not knowing if I will be received into the arms of that subterranean world or if I will be shunned. I forget that night and I had once sauntered together, careless and free, made a life of it. It is now sacred ground, sleep a ceremony.
Somewhere a night bird sings. Its song is raucous. It belongs to a bar full of drunks. A bat—its webbed wings open in broad glide—shoots out, its movement sharp, abrupt, awake. The moon is a bright-eyed witch.
The science of it is I live with a crepuscular and I am a diurnal. The nocturne lives in us both, an unruly cave animal. The sages did not say this: The night, once you know it, never leaves you.
Anuradha Prasad is a writer living in Bangalore, India. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature. She writes short fiction, essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, The Bangalore Review, Borderless Journal, Muse India, and Usawa Literary Review.
Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and artist of Hakka Chinese descent. Their publications include The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing (After Hours Editions 2021), Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Poetry 2017), and “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016). Their artwork has been exhibited at White Columns and Deli Gallery in New York City.