The Belt

By Sanskriti Arora

Mother hands the girl a Molotov Cocktail. It is her most cherished, homemade bomb.

‘Take good care of it,’ she says.

“Oh, another one, I will have to find a place for it in my belt!” She looks down at the

belt wrapped around her abdomen nervously and tries to find an adequate zip to store it.

Mother is not worried, the belt she got her daughter has many zips. It is also broad enough to

 envelope her entire stomach, it even ambitiously reached to cover her chest with its khaki-

coloured rough fabric.

 “Perfect.” Her mother approves. The girl looks up and feels her forehead smoothen.

Her ears relax at her mother’s words.

“Wait!” Mother and daughter turn to see Father rushing towards them.

He is breathing heavily yet speaks with urgency. “Take this too!”

The girl weighs the slightly bigger bomb, a Time Switch, with both hands and tries to

repeat the task of finding a zip, but her father snatches the grey thing out of her hand and

smiles, “Let me do it.”

Both bombs secure, the Girl was now old and strong enough to carry the belt

effortlessly. She faces the airplane waiting for her. Ascending the steps of the winged vehicle,

she realises her eyes are teary. She whips her head to glance at her parents one last time but

gets distracted by a small figure waving at her while moving closer. She squints to decipher

whom she is gazing at and sees a man with grey hair, sporting a wholly black outfit running

towards her.

“It is papa,” informs her father, waving at his father with mirrored vigour.

“You forgot this!” Her grandfather yells from afar.

*

An electronic device’s sound somewhere breaks her dream with its relentless buzzing.

She wakes up with a jerk and registers the tightening of the belt around the fat of her waist,

she recalls falling asleep in a slanting position while sitting on her bed. She grabs the phone

and blinks rapidly to restore some moisture into her eyes.

“Hello,” she answered in a tired voice while squinting up at the sharp yellow light

illuminating the room.

“Where have you been?!” Her mother screeched into her ear.

“What do you mean, I accidentally fell aslee-” She cuts her off in a reprimanding

tone.

“No, no, I am not asking about your little nap. It has been a whole fucking day! You

sent me that voice note yesterday and just disappeared!”

“Voice note?” Her thoughts are as groggy as her voice.

The girl now senses the burning inside her eyes. She tries to get up from her bed, but

the belt tightens around her, pulling her back. All the while her mother is talking to her on the

phone, she stretches her hand, unable to reach the bottle.

“Well, your father, he has found out that his friend’s connections work in the agency!

How wonderful is that!”

‘Oh, yes, just send me their number,’ she is grateful her mother is not insisting to see

her face through the screen, she could not show her the lie in her eyes. ‘Shit, I am sorry, but I

have a class in 30 minutes, I have to get ready. I don’t know how I fell asleep!’ she laughs

emptily.

‘Ah, just one moment, your father wants to talk to you.’

‘Hello.’ A deep voice rings through the speakers. ‘Father, how are you?’

‘I am well, but why can’t I see you?’ He asks demandingly.

‘Hold on,’ the girl takes a deep breath after putting herself on mute and exhales it. As

soon as she sees her father’s dimpled smile, she feels warmth spreading through her. She

recognises that smile like her own. ‘Why are you sleeping at this time?” And the girl heard

her chest open to a tired feeling again. ‘I was reading in bed because of the cold and fell

asleep.’

Her father frowns, ‘This is why you should always sit on a desk to study, don’t I

always say that to her?’ He waited for the mother to agree with him which he knows she

would. She has not disagreed to the many things he has said in the past 20 years they have

been together, yet he still frames his statements like questions.

The girl feels the belt tightening, but she chuckles for him. “Yes, yes, but I

have to go now,” smiling a practiced smile. They all speak their goodbyes, and the last glitch

of the video call calms her down. She sighs as an artist does while taking off their wig after a

performance. Her father’s last line is always, “be happy, don’t worry,” and she feels like she

has failed.

The girl melts into her uncomfortable bed. She has created a small room for

herself, and in it she has created a wall. It stands right beside her bed where the light from the

lamp does not reach. She had tries tilting the lamp, almost every day, yet she cannot not see

the pictures she has pasted to the wall. The faces are hazy and dirty, she tries to remember,

she is unsure if they are her friends, or her dead pets. It all seems like a distant memory. Even

after squinting, the only thing she can notice is a grey layer covers the once shiny photos.

She turns away from the wall. The silence around her is rising like water in a

glass tank. She is sitting inside the tank with water enveloping her ears, unable to reach the

sounds of the outside world. Her ears could reach inside her and hear the thumping in her

brain, and eyes, and then her neck, all the way down to her belt.

The way to her friend’s house is very far, hundreds of meters away from hers. She

maps out the route to her house from her bed. First, she would have to roll over and meet the

light, she might even have to look out the window. She will definitely have to change her

clothes and stare at the suitcases under her bed screaming at her to go home, and then the

items her friends gave her would join in, confused, the girl would then close the door to her

room and lock them in. She will be an hour late to reach her friend’s house. She would act

until she is tired or sleepy, and she would return to the room she has created for herself and

lie in her uncomfortable bed.

She texts her friend a message of vowing an illness. She, instead, decides to go the

garden her friend had showed her the week of her arrival in the city. The garden stood out in

her memories because of the pond situated among the trees. A path was cut in it for people to

walk on. The girl has never walked on the path, she prefers to sit on the bench and observe

the path and the buildings that stand beyond the fence. The buildings consist of offices and

various shops. She liked to observe the people going in and out of the offices, always in a

hurry, to her, they seemed to be on the right path.

She reaches the garden and occupies her usual spot, the stone bench with the clearest

view of the dark pond. She and her friend chose the same bench the first time they came here.

She had looked at her new friend, a doctor, and at a woman typing at her laptop at similar

bench and saw similar worthiness. She did not see a belt on either’s waist. While looking at

herself, she only saw the belt and the tick, tick, tick, of the Time Switch. All of the air in the

garden was being drained by a ticking bomb. Today, she thought the Molotov Cocktail was

particularly loud. They took their chances to shine, she is aware of that.

As the belt tightens, due to her posture, she starts to think of her life in a backward

motion. This is her favourite hobby, but she will always answer “reading! Yeah, I love

reading,” when asked by a stranger. The bus ride was pleasant, she had wished to melt into

the seat and never get up, but besides that, it has been a good day. Albeit yesterday was an

even better day! Her classmate had presented their project on ‘Legacy,’ their chosen topic.

She has also selected that topic, she wished to tell people about her belt, to share with them

her favourite bombs, to see if they will reveal theirs. They never did, but her new particularly

chatty peers gave her hope.

“The pond,” she had asked her friend, “how deep do you think it is?”

Crunching popcorn hastily, this was her third packet, but she needed it. Her friend

questioned her about her diet, but she didn’t understand that she needed this.

“I don’t know,” she replied, dully, scrolling through her phone.

“No, but how deep can it be, really?”

“I think it is shallow, because it would be dangerous to have a deep-water body in a

public-” The girl cut her friend off.

“How do you know?” she stared at her intensely. The friend seemed baffled at being

asked such strange questions.

She answered smartly, “Well, why don’t you go and find out?” She rolled her eyes

and went back to the activity on her phone.

The girl smiled slowly, “Maybe, I will.”

As she stares at people working beyond the fence, unblinking, memories of

her childhood resurface. The day she had punched her father in the stomach in a mock fight

and felt his belt around his abdomen, similar to the one she wore now, albeit his was tighter,

she realises. She had asked him why he had worn a belt on shorts, but he only recalls him

stuttering to give an answer and then returning to his room. She can’t remember if he ever

played with her freely again, but he always got her everything she wanted.

She sits with her mouth agape at the sudden nostalgia. The memories add on to the

weight of her belt, as she stands to walk back home. She forces her legs to move towards the

path that people often walked on around the garden, yet they drag her towards the pond. She

stares at the still darkness of the surface of the water. No beings live in the water body.

On an impulse, she jumps. She only wished to find out the depth of the water, yet her

damned belt drags her body to the very ground the pond was dug over. She tries to shrug the

belt from her waist. She shuts her mouth tight to save her breath, but it was all futile. She surrendered to the water.

By Sanskriti Arora