By Shivani Sivagurunathan
In 100 years, I would not have existed. No scrapes of memory in some grandchild, no idealization of my legacy by a future fan—I’m not leaving footprints. What the hell, there are digital breaths and tokens, everyone has them, but does Sandrine really think—bloody Magellan, there she is, the moment I think her name, she manifests. She’ll not want to remember me, that’s for sure.
“What?” she says, sauntering up to me in her way. I used to like the swaying of her hips. Now, I can’t take her body seriously. She’s becoming more of a cartoon, can I say that?
“Want to go out for lunch?” I ask with zero passion.
She knows it’s my attempt to remain on the planet, to pretend I have things to do, that I’m basking in fullness. I’m waiting for her head to shake. Then the dropping of her face. The perfect disappointment.
“Let’s go,” she says, almost jovially.
The gummy evening breeze heavy with post-rain mud reaches my nose, tickles the stray hairs of my moustache.
Well, if she wants to go, we go. Not my place to refuse.
We walk out of the house, side by side, as though she’d choreographed it. The car, it turns out, is ready for us. Engine on. Even the lights for the stormy weather.
“Get in,” she says in her nicest voice.
I get in. She gets in.
She steps on the accelerator. Off we go into the purple storm.
I keep my side eye on her so she’s a shadowy presence. It helps me to know she’s there yet not fully there. Sort of how it’s been with us, on-off lovers for centuries (karmically), for ten years, potentially forever.
We speed past the turning into the town centre, past our favorite Mexican restaurant, the McDonald’s we utilize on our ‘off’ days.
“You know, Perry, there was once a time when none of these things even existed,” she says, her geologist brain rearing its dusty head again.
She’s going to start her sing-song about deep time, how the land we walk on was once desolate, unpeopled, just rock.
“Serious Buddhists have known all you’re saying before the people you read started saying it,” I reply.
“It’s not a competition, Perry.”
“You have been making competitions for a long time, Sandy, so let it slide this time?”
The sky has taken on serious shades of purple, so serious in fact they have morphed into midnight blue. This is no afternoon. It’s a freak slice of time. We can’t say what it is. I don’t like the look of the clouds. They seem to be tumbling into each other, like waves in a violent ocean, all dark and nightly.
“Who’s right then, Perry, the geologists or the Buddhists?” There’s almost no bitterness in her. So it seems.
The sky looks horrible. I’m not scared. I’ve made my peace. This planet ends. People end. Relationships definitely end.
“Last night I dreamed the best, most frightening dream I’ve had in a long time, Sandy. I’d made one of those gorgeous mandalas, you know, the Buddhist ones. I made it on the doorstep of our house.” I trace the sky for the dark red I saw in my dream. It’s not difficult to find. “Anyway, then a great big storm came and blew the whole mandala away. I woke up.”
The car slows down. It comes to a stop. Sandrine pulls up the handbrake. “There was a time when that kind of stuff impressed me. It’s a great relief to know I don’t care what Buddhist philosophy you spout.”
It’s a shame she thinks it’s philosophy. It’s a shame she’d thought it was meant to impress her.
“Things don’t come and go just like that, Perry. They shapeshift. The earth is a great recycler. Don’t you know?” She laughs. Something cynical and hot has entered her voice.
Fat drops of rain start to beat on the car. It’s hard not to feel encased by water, trapped by her.
“You’re too fixated on your theories, Sandrine. You’ll never step on my mandala. You’ll never dare to destroy the bigness of what I have been offering you because you can’t even bloody see it, Sandy.”
Lightning splits the sky in half. Sandrine has taken most of my moments, my images, my raw, slimy feelings for years and at the end of the day, it all goes to dust so what must be the point of it?
I want my mandala so fucking pristine and stunning that its destruction will be the loveliest, sunniest, creepiest, wonderful-est pinnacle of my existence.
“Let’s go out into the storm,” I say, “I want to dance in the rain before I have to die.”
Sandrine turns towards me. Tears make her eyes look like beautiful conscious puddles.
“I think I have danced too much in the rain with you, Perry. I have no more dance left.”
I don’t think she ever had a dance, but there’s no point telling a deaf woman this.
I get out of the car, slam the door shut, open my mouth and drink in the storm. In 100 years, no one will know me. In 100 years, no one will know that I, Perry Singham, stood out in the monsoon storm and dared to open his mouth.
Sandrine knows. Sandrine sees. Precious Sandrine.
* * *
Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian author. Her first novel, Yalpanam, was published by Penguin Southeast Asia in September 2021.
Her poetry collection, Being Born (Maya Press) and her book of fiction, What Has Happened to Harry Pillai?: Two Novellas (Clarity Publishing) came out in 2022.