Tanvi Khatri. Journal. October 23rd through November 1st.
Oct 23. I tried to move the mirror today. I gripped the frame on both sides and pushed and pulled and it didn't move. It's heavy — much heavier than it looks, the way old solid wood is heavy. But it's not physically impossible to move. I know it's not. So why can't I move it.
I stopped trying after ten minutes. My hands were shaking. I don't know why my hands were shaking.
I covered it again with Mrs. Rane's shawl.
I am going to call Babulal tomorrow and I am going to be very direct and I am going to tell him to come and remove this mirror or I am going to move out. I can be direct when I need to be.
Oct 25. Babulal did not answer my calls. Three calls, two WhatsApps. I left a voicemail. The voicemail said: 'Please call me back. I need to speak with you about the flat. It's urgent.'
He read the WhatsApps. Blue ticks.
He did not reply.
Work has been intense this week. The Diwali campaign brief came in and it's a big one. I stayed late three days.
I have been sleeping badly. Not nightmares — just not sleeping deeply. I keep surfacing at three, four in the morning and lying in the dark and listening to the building.
Last night at three fifteen I heard something.
From across the room.
From the mirror.
A sound that was very quiet and very brief and which I am going to describe accurately: it was the sound of someone exhaling. Not loudly. Not dramatically. The small, specific breath of someone who has been holding very still and has allowed themselves, briefly, to relax.
I did not move. I lay in my bed and I looked at the covered mirror in the dark and I did not move for a long time.
Then I got up and turned on all the lights and sat on the kitchen floor with my back to the wall and watched the mirror and waited.
Nothing happened. I sat there until dawn.
I am very tired today.
Oct 28. Something is happening to my face.
I know how that sounds. I know what it sounds like when someone writes that sentence. But I need to write it because I need to say it somewhere outside my own head.
I have a particular face. I have lived in it for twenty-six years. I know its geography the way you know the layout of your childhood home — not by looking, by inhabiting. I know where my jaw is tight, I know the lines my forehead makes when I'm concentrating, I know the way my face arranges itself when I smile in photographs versus when I'm actually happy.
This morning in the bathroom mirror — the small one over the sink, not the other one — I looked at my face and for four seconds I didn't recognize it. Not because anything is physically different. Because the arrangement was wrong. The expression on it was not one I had put there.
It was the expression of someone paying very close attention.
To something inside.
I made a deliberate face — I opened my eyes wide, I raised my eyebrows, a clear and chosen expression — and my face went to it, and then when I relaxed, the arrangement went back to the other thing.
I stood at the bathroom mirror for fifteen minutes making deliberate expressions. Each time I relaxed, the same resting expression. The close-attention one. The one that is not mine.
I need to talk to someone. Not Poorvi — she'll panic. Not my mother — she'll make me come home. Not my colleagues.
Mrs. Rane.
Oct 31. I don't remember Tuesday.
I remember Monday evening — I came home from work, I heated dal, I sat at the table. I remember going to bed.
I do not remember Tuesday.
Asha at work asked me today (Wednesday) about the Tuesday morning check-in. She said I had attended the check-in and had given input on the campaign brief. I have no memory of this. She showed me the meeting notes. My name is there, with attributed comments.
The comments sound like me. The phrasing is mine.
I was there on Tuesday. I functioned on Tuesday. I simply don't remember it.
I am going to Mrs. Rane tonight.
I am going to tell her everything and I am going to ask her what she knows and I am going to listen without editing what I'm told.
I am writing this down first because I want a record of what I know and think right now, before whatever happens next happens. Because I am starting to suspect that the version of me that writes in this journal and the version of me that moves through the day are not — are not entirely the same person anymore.
And I want the version who writes to leave something for the version who reads.
