Bloody Hell

I have a strong urge to break a window and run away into the darkness of the night. The only trouble is that my tiny room does not have a window for me to break. It is warm and stuffy in here. My senses have become accustomed to the smell of my sweat and decomposed blood that hangs in the air inside my cell. I spend time listening to the rats scurrying about the room. My wrists itch because of all the gash marks the handcuffs leave on them. There is so much I have learnt to control…

I feel blind. I haven’t seen sunlight in a very long time. How long, I can’t tell. I can’t tell one day from the other. According to my sense of time, I must be about 500 years old by now. Every passing minute feels nothing less than an hour. It feels like I am on a bad trip of DMT. My lungs feel contracted and my heart feels like it has stopped beating. I have lost all sense of touch. Being strapped and tied to a place for so long has rendered me immobile. My speech is fast losing coherency. All I can utter are half-formed words and unfinished sentences when he visits me.

I don’t remember how I got here. All I remember was waking up in this wet, damp room, bound to the iron pipes that run along a side of the wall, with him breathing so unimaginably close to my face that I could hardly distinguish mine from his. Then, there were his hands, rough and coarse, and him, climbing onto me like children on mango trees during the summer. I remember crying out for help, shrieking and shouting until my voice cracked, knowing, however, that there was no one who could hear me. No one, other than that man whose face I shall never know. All that my memory shall ever hold of him will be his hands, groping and scratching at my naked body, and his cold, mirthless laughter that drowned the sound of my useless protests.

I hardly protest anymore. He feeds me in what seems like a few hours before his visit. He probably wants to make sure I have the strength to scream and shout and make him feel powerful. It would hardly be pleasurable to torture the lifeless woman that I otherwise am. Nonetheless, the food hardly gives me the power to protest. All I can maintain is that steady stream of tears every time he violates me. I fear that they are fast drying up.

I think there is another cell near mine. I can hear his thundering footsteps and the cries of a woman who must be as old, or as young, as I am. I can hear them---that mirthless, maniacal laughter interspersed with cries of help that once used to be mine. I can hear them as I fall in and out of consciousness. I am tired. I just want to sleep.

Soumi Sarkar

UG III