Chapter 12: Khai

I decided to die on a Thursday.

The decision was not dramatic. It was not the theatrical decision of films — the woman standing on a ledge with the wind in her hair and the city below her and the music swelling. It was a quiet decision, a bureaucratic decision, the kind of decision that arrived at the end of a long process of paperwork, the last form signed in a stack of forms that had been accumulating for weeks. The paperwork was the insomnia and the voices and the drives to Mumbai and the lies and the food I was not eating and the weight I was losing and the particular, progressive erasure of the person I had been, the person who sold properties and ate dosa at Vaishali and laughed too loudly and believed that love was the answer to every question. That person was gone. The person who remained was a collection of symptoms held together by inertia, the biological machinery continuing to operate while the consciousness that was supposed to direct it had abdicated.

The voices had reached a consensus. This was unusual — they almost never agreed, the Prosecutor and the Defender maintaining their adversarial positions while the Committee offered cultural commentary and the Narrator provided detached observation. But on this Thursday — a Thursday in May, hot, the particular Pune May heat that made the air visible, that made breathing feel like drinking warm water — on this Thursday, they agreed.

There is no way out of this except one.

The pain will not stop. It has not stopped in three months. It will not stop.

You are a burden. To Maitreyi, who feeds you. To Jhanvi, who cries about you. To Nikhil, who covers for you at work. To your parents, who don't know. You are the thing in the room that everyone walks around.

The only act of generosity you can perform is to remove yourself from the room.

I did not argue with the voices. I did not deploy the Defender's counter-arguments. I did not summon the rationality that, three months ago, would have recognized these thoughts as the particular distortion of a mind in crisis, the thinking of a brain that was drowning in cortisol and sleep deprivation and the particular neurochemistry of obsessive heartbreak. I did not recognize any of this because the voices had become my reality, the way water became the reality of a fish — not noticed because it was everywhere, not questioned because it was the medium in which I existed.

I planned. The planning was calm, methodical, the particular calm of a person who had made a decision and who was now executing it with the professional thoroughness that Kamala-ma'am would have admired. I chose pills — not dramatic, not violent, the method that was available and that was, in its own way, gentle, the method that said "I want to stop" rather than "I want to destroy," the distinction that mattered to me even though it would not matter to anyone who found me.

The pills were in the bathroom cabinet. A collection — the sleeping tablets that my doctor had prescribed three weeks ago and that I had not been taking because the voices said the insomnia was deserved, the paracetamol that every Indian household stockpiled in quantities sufficient for a small hospital, and the anti-anxiety medication that the doctor had also prescribed and that I had also not been taking because taking it would have been admitting that I was anxious and admitting that I was anxious was admitting that I was not fine and I was fine, I was fine, I was always fine.

I waited until Friday night. Maitreyi was with Tanmay — their anniversary, a dinner in Koregaon Park, the kind of evening that produced Instagram photos of candlelit tables and wine glasses and the particular performance of romantic happiness that social media demanded. Jhanvi was at a friend's birthday — a house party in Aundh, the kind of party that ended late and that produced the particular Jhanvi energy of messiness and drama and the morning-after stories that lasted longer than the party itself.

The flat was empty. The flat was mine. The silence was complete — not the open silence of the balcony but the sealed silence of an empty flat on a Friday night, the silence that was the sound of a person who had chosen to be alone because the aloneness was necessary for what she was about to do.

I sat on my bed. I arranged the pills on the bedside table — neatly, in rows, the particular organisation of a person who was, even in the act of ending her life, unable to abandon the instinct for order. The sleeping tablets: white, round, small. The paracetamol: elongated, coated, the shiny surface catching the light. The anti-anxiety pills: blue, tiny, almost invisible. Together, they made a collection that was colourful and tidy and that looked, if you did not know what they were for, like a display in a pharmacy.

I wrote a note. Not long — I did not have a speech, did not have the theatrical farewell that films demanded. I wrote:

Mai — I'm sorry. Not for this. For the lying. For the way I stopped being the person you kept trying to save. You were the best friend I ever had. The paranthas saved me longer than you know.

Jhanvi — be kinder to yourself. The boys are not the point. You are the point.

Amma — I know we never had the conversation. I know we walked around the furniture. I love you. The furniture was the conversation.

Papa — you left first. I'm just following the tradition.

Manav — this is not your fault. This is not anyone's fault. This is a malfunction. The machine stopped working and the repair was not possible. I loved you. I still love you. I will love you in whatever comes after this, if there is an after.

I put the note on the table. I picked up the first row of pills — the sleeping tablets. I held them in my palm. The weight was nothing — the weight of a few grams of compressed chemicals, the weight that was inversely proportional to the consequence, the tiny physical mass that carried the enormous metaphysical weight of ending a life.

I put them in my mouth.

I swallowed.

The taste was chalk and bitterness — the particular taste of pills taken without water, the dry swallow that scraped the throat, the taste that was the last taste, the taste that would be the final sensory experience of Ananya Sharma, twenty-seven, real estate consultant, heartbroken, tired.

I swallowed the second row. The paracetamol. The coating dissolved quickly — the shiny surface giving way to the chalky interior, the particular betrayal of a pill that looked smooth and that was, inside, rough.

The third row. The blue pills. Small enough to swallow all at once. The final row.

I lay down. I pulled the blanket over me — the brown blanket, the cosy one, the one I had wrapped around myself the night Manav broke up with me, the blanket that had been my companion through the insomnia and the voices and the crying and the particular three months of destruction that had led to this bed, this night, these pills.

The darkness came. Not immediately — there was a period of waiting, the particular interval between swallowing and effect, the interval in which the body was still functioning normally while the chemicals worked their way through the bloodstream, the interval in which I lay in my bed and looked at the ceiling and felt, for the first time in three months, calm.

The calm was real. The calm was not the absence of pain but the presence of resolution — the particular peace of a person who had made a decision and who was no longer fighting, who had stopped the loop, who had silenced the voices not through recovery but through surrender. The Prosecutor was quiet. The Defender was quiet. The Committee was quiet. The Narrator said, softly: She's done.

I closed my eyes. The darkness was warm. The brown blanket was around me. The note was on the table. The pills were in my blood. And I was — for the first time in three months — not waiting. Not waiting for a text, not waiting for a call, not waiting for Manav to come back, not waiting for the pain to stop, not waiting for the morning. Not waiting for anything.

The darkness deepened.

And then — and this was the part that I would later struggle to describe, the part that the prosecution would use against me and the defence would use for me, the part that the courtroom would debate as if it were a legal question rather than a human one — and then the darkness was interrupted.

A sound. Keys in a door. The particular metallic sound of an Indian flat being opened — the double lock, the chain, the door that always stuck slightly because the frame had warped in the Pune humidity.

Jhanvi.

Jhanvi, who was supposed to be at a party in Aundh. Jhanvi, who was supposed to be there until late. Jhanvi, who had come home early because — as she would tell me later, in the hospital, with tears streaming down her face — because the birthday girl's boyfriend had shown up and everyone was being couple-y and Jhanvi couldn't stand it, couldn't stand watching other people's happiness when her own life felt empty, couldn't stand the particular torture of being single at a party where everyone was paired.

Jhanvi found me.

She found me on the bed, under the brown blanket, the pill bottles on the table, the note beside them. She found me with my breathing shallow and my skin grey and my body beginning the process of shutting down, the process that I had initiated and that the pills were executing with the particular efficiency of pharmaceutical chemicals that did not know or care about the context of their deployment.

Jhanvi screamed. The scream was — and I know this because I heard it, heard it from the darkness, heard it through the chemical fog that was wrapping around my brain — the scream was not the dramatic scream of her usual crises, not the Jhanvi scream that accompanied boyfriend breakups and work arguments and the daily drama of her existence. This scream was different. This scream was primal. This scream was the sound of a human being who had walked into a room and found something that the human brain was not designed to process: the body of a person they loved in the act of dying.

After that: fragments. Hands on my body — Jhanvi's hands, shaking me, pulling the blanket off. Voices — not the internal voices, the real voices, Jhanvi on the phone, "ambulance, please, my friend, pills, she's taken pills, please come fast, Kothrud, please." Movement — being lifted, the particular sensation of a body that was being acted upon rather than acting, the passive physical experience of being carried. The corridor. The stairs. Bright light — the ambulance, the paramedics, the particular competent urgency of medical professionals who did not know my name or my story but who knew that my breathing was slow and my pupils were dilated and my body was failing and that their job was to reverse the failure.

The last thing I heard before the darkness became total: Jhanvi's voice. Not a scream this time. A whisper. Close to my ear, her breath warm, her tears on my cheek:

"Don't you dare, Anu. Don't you fucking dare leave me."

And then nothing.