fic: ek hasina thi/being cyrus, pg-13.
This is a Bollywood film crossover fic I've been working on for a long time, ever since I got the idea in like 2008 or something. I finally found it on my hard drive and decided to finish it, because while it's not my most amazing work, I really enjoyed the idea and even enjoyed the execution of it.
corpse of our former self
ek hasina thi/being cyrus, cyrus/sarika, pg-13, 1,700 words. all characters belong to their original creators. this takes place after both films, so spoils both.
How broken does a person have to get in order to be fixed? I thought about this and various other things before I met her for the first time. It was quite an ordinary Delhi afternoon, hot and air filled with all kinds of particles, dust and pollution. Wasn't that how all remarkable encounters happen? On ordinary days, in every day places. Regardless, this was how I met Sarika and how she met me.
*
I never really slept like other people slept, rested and content, so that morning I needed to be woken up, shaken awake by something outside my own existence.
“One coffee, please,” I told the waitress, her big eyes meeting mine. She looked shocked and answered me quickly and coldly in Hindi.
“I'm sorry, my Hindi's a bit weak..” This wasn't exactly true, I spoke it semi-fluently but had never had any interest in learning the language that I didn't learn from smiling lips.
In orphanages you always hear the curses first, the Uttar Pradesh or the Maharasthra accent spitting out venomous things at you for being too loud, too unruly. I liked to think it wasn't my own English-speaking, English-thinking arrogance that was building a language barrier between me and every autowallah in Delhi, but rather the ghosts of days past, with their Hindi-speaking tongues. It was unfair, really - this was my problem, not theirs.
Now. Though in the past there remained a looming figure, a shape I escaped from, I had confidence in the future as myself. Just myself. I had climbed into my little escape pod and launched into the great unknown world without her and really, wasn't that what truly mattered?
“I said, tea's better. I'll bring you tea.” Her words sounded so grave I didn't argue and just shifted in my seat nervously as she turned her back and walked away. Relax, breathe, I have to tell myself sometimes. Nobody knows me. My tracks are covered.
Every time the waitress walked past me and my slowly diminishing cup of tea, she eyed me carefully, suspiciously. Did I remind her of someone she knew? A sudden panic hit me again as I thought about the name I would give her if she happened to ask. Every name I could think of seemed to be filled with different meanings, memories. I couldn't be Xerxes as the only voice in my head then was my sister's, endlessly manipulating my actions until I no longer knew whether it was me moving each of my limbs or her omnipresent will. Cyrus was a nice enough name but so full of darkness. I couldn't hide from that part of myself, or escape it, as I had left a fingerprint in the world as Cyrus, even if only in blood. More fingerprints remained, ones as John, Advi, Khavar, Rashid, Daniel. And none of the names ever lead back to me.
I ordered another cup of chai, just to see her reaction, see her expression softening as she further examined my features.
“Have we met before?” I asked her.
“I don't think so,” she replied, friendly but hesitant to make eye contact again. Shy, I thought. Perhaps I should be like that; another play I could try on.
“Maybe we'll meet again, then,” I said as I got up to leave, and maybe I sounded threatening to her, as she took a step back. I placed the money on the table, and walked away. When I turned to look back, she stood there, the money still on the table, staring at me.
I didn't know what to make of her; from her eyes, I could see the feeling was mutual.
*
Phir milenge, as they would say in Hindi, and we did meet again. Much, much later Sarika would tell me, in that voice she used to speak of the past that meant to go unspoken, this is how it begun back then. Him, in different places, casually everywhere she went. She was suspicious, scared, and yet something formed between them anyhow. It took her a long while to get any of the words out. I didn't pressure her.
So we met again, and things developed, as clichéd as it sounds, along their own route. It's difficult to say, even in retrospect, how and why and what sets off the course of action. We met, and then we began to meet less randomly, precise meetings we didn't quite want to call 'dates'. Maybe it was just the connection there, some kind of mystic sense of knowing that we were dealing with pasts of equal burden. Or almost equal burden; I still hide some things from her. I have to.
*
Eventually she told me how I resembled him. But even then she was very careful, as though I was the kind of psycho he was (and then I think to myself, I'm probably worse - but I'm getting better, aren't I?), who would lash out at her if she didn't do what he wanted. She was vague, describing his eyes and how mine were softer, more human. She was very careful, and I was very careful, and just like this, with silk gloves and pillows all around us, we began to discover each other and those little things we'd worked so hard at hiding all this time.
Because really, fear was our everything in the end. Fear of ourselves, fear of loneliness, fear of being found.
“I'm not afraid of rats,” she said. “I'm not afraid of anything anymore.”
Then she smiled at me, maybe in effort to make herself believe, or maybe I was the weaker party there, with all my fears wrapped in more fears. Either way, the connection or the attraction or the illusion of power she seemed to have over herself made me so overwhelmed I kissed her.
I wouldn't call it love because in my family, love is an emotion you pretend to have in order to survive. But then, perhaps that's why I needed Sarika. Just to survive on something we could both pretend resembled basic human caring.
*
And so months went by, and we had to move out of Delhi, so we moved together. The wedding ceremony was at a temple, ceremonious and unofficial, but in her god's eyes enough to live under the same roof. It felt odd to share my living space with somebody, as I was so used to my schemes covering every surface, malicious planning scaling the walls, but that was in the past, so everything around me was the bare minimum of things. Her things overlapped with my things, the little altar she set up, the picture frames and books she read. They made everything feel so regular, so normal that I was almost starting to believe in not just the present, but the future also.
Us. Normal. Well, I was always an optimist.
*
I can never forget the first choked question, her breath erratic after she shakes her hand away from mine.
“Have you ever killed a person?”
We never discussed the numbers or the how. She told me about him and I told her about my sister, and her story was of deceit where mine was of something even I didn't know. So I pushed the focus on Sarika's end instead, and held her as her tears stained my t-shirt, when she thought she was so torn apart she'd never be put back together. Trying to give her a sense that everything would be all right in the world again.
*
You don't fuck over a person who's been fucked over and killed because of it, so I understood my boundaries and eventually she opened hers. She was beautiful in bed, no longer stiff with fear but full of playfulness and the sex stripped me of my remaining anxieties.
And then my sister found us.
*
The car park outside our colony was not noteworthy in the least, but I could sense another presence. Coming up the staircase, I could hear voices - Sarika's calm but stern Hinglish in contrast with my sister's angry English.
"Don't give me that shit," she told Sarika. "When is Xerxes coming back? You don't even know him. You don't know shit."
"I know everything I need to know," Sarika replied.
I ran and I hid, like the coward that I still was. My sister left, after seeing the side of Sarika that few lived after witnessing, and wisely considering herself lucky for the fact, she never came back.
*
I still felt as if the fear had been set in my bones, planted there permanently because my sister was always out there, and so long as I lived, she wouldn't die.
Sarika held me, and now the vulnerabilities had shifted to my end, and I was the mess that needed fixing.
In these moments I told her so many of the things I'd still kept inside, and she told me more. More blood and guts came spilling out in our confessions, until the corpse of my former self was nearly entirely dissected in front of her.
She looked at the remains and kissed me. It occurred to me that all the while I'd thought we were fixing each other, we weren't. We were just avoiding being fixed by being together.
A continuation of a game we'd called life. A psychologist's field day.
Love, I guess.
*
“We're not killers,” Sarika told me. “That's not who we are.”
I tried to believe this lie, this categorisation we made because we had no excuses; we'd only had motive. We stood in a different category than our victims, we told ourselves, when the fact was, we were the same shit as the rest of the humanity, same cruel pitiful wrecks that we killed and that are out to kill us.
“We're not killers,” I told Sarika during her darkest moments, when the fact is, we were.
And we only truly knew one thing for certain: that we couldn't afford to kill each other. Not now, and not ever. We'd finally gained something we didn't want to lose.
corpse of our former self
ek hasina thi/being cyrus, cyrus/sarika, pg-13, 1,700 words. all characters belong to their original creators. this takes place after both films, so spoils both.
How broken does a person have to get in order to be fixed? I thought about this and various other things before I met her for the first time. It was quite an ordinary Delhi afternoon, hot and air filled with all kinds of particles, dust and pollution. Wasn't that how all remarkable encounters happen? On ordinary days, in every day places. Regardless, this was how I met Sarika and how she met me.
*
I never really slept like other people slept, rested and content, so that morning I needed to be woken up, shaken awake by something outside my own existence.
“One coffee, please,” I told the waitress, her big eyes meeting mine. She looked shocked and answered me quickly and coldly in Hindi.
“I'm sorry, my Hindi's a bit weak..” This wasn't exactly true, I spoke it semi-fluently but had never had any interest in learning the language that I didn't learn from smiling lips.
In orphanages you always hear the curses first, the Uttar Pradesh or the Maharasthra accent spitting out venomous things at you for being too loud, too unruly. I liked to think it wasn't my own English-speaking, English-thinking arrogance that was building a language barrier between me and every autowallah in Delhi, but rather the ghosts of days past, with their Hindi-speaking tongues. It was unfair, really - this was my problem, not theirs.
Now. Though in the past there remained a looming figure, a shape I escaped from, I had confidence in the future as myself. Just myself. I had climbed into my little escape pod and launched into the great unknown world without her and really, wasn't that what truly mattered?
“I said, tea's better. I'll bring you tea.” Her words sounded so grave I didn't argue and just shifted in my seat nervously as she turned her back and walked away. Relax, breathe, I have to tell myself sometimes. Nobody knows me. My tracks are covered.
Every time the waitress walked past me and my slowly diminishing cup of tea, she eyed me carefully, suspiciously. Did I remind her of someone she knew? A sudden panic hit me again as I thought about the name I would give her if she happened to ask. Every name I could think of seemed to be filled with different meanings, memories. I couldn't be Xerxes as the only voice in my head then was my sister's, endlessly manipulating my actions until I no longer knew whether it was me moving each of my limbs or her omnipresent will. Cyrus was a nice enough name but so full of darkness. I couldn't hide from that part of myself, or escape it, as I had left a fingerprint in the world as Cyrus, even if only in blood. More fingerprints remained, ones as John, Advi, Khavar, Rashid, Daniel. And none of the names ever lead back to me.
I ordered another cup of chai, just to see her reaction, see her expression softening as she further examined my features.
“Have we met before?” I asked her.
“I don't think so,” she replied, friendly but hesitant to make eye contact again. Shy, I thought. Perhaps I should be like that; another play I could try on.
“Maybe we'll meet again, then,” I said as I got up to leave, and maybe I sounded threatening to her, as she took a step back. I placed the money on the table, and walked away. When I turned to look back, she stood there, the money still on the table, staring at me.
I didn't know what to make of her; from her eyes, I could see the feeling was mutual.
*
Phir milenge, as they would say in Hindi, and we did meet again. Much, much later Sarika would tell me, in that voice she used to speak of the past that meant to go unspoken, this is how it begun back then. Him, in different places, casually everywhere she went. She was suspicious, scared, and yet something formed between them anyhow. It took her a long while to get any of the words out. I didn't pressure her.
So we met again, and things developed, as clichéd as it sounds, along their own route. It's difficult to say, even in retrospect, how and why and what sets off the course of action. We met, and then we began to meet less randomly, precise meetings we didn't quite want to call 'dates'. Maybe it was just the connection there, some kind of mystic sense of knowing that we were dealing with pasts of equal burden. Or almost equal burden; I still hide some things from her. I have to.
*
Eventually she told me how I resembled him. But even then she was very careful, as though I was the kind of psycho he was (and then I think to myself, I'm probably worse - but I'm getting better, aren't I?), who would lash out at her if she didn't do what he wanted. She was vague, describing his eyes and how mine were softer, more human. She was very careful, and I was very careful, and just like this, with silk gloves and pillows all around us, we began to discover each other and those little things we'd worked so hard at hiding all this time.
Because really, fear was our everything in the end. Fear of ourselves, fear of loneliness, fear of being found.
“I'm not afraid of rats,” she said. “I'm not afraid of anything anymore.”
Then she smiled at me, maybe in effort to make herself believe, or maybe I was the weaker party there, with all my fears wrapped in more fears. Either way, the connection or the attraction or the illusion of power she seemed to have over herself made me so overwhelmed I kissed her.
I wouldn't call it love because in my family, love is an emotion you pretend to have in order to survive. But then, perhaps that's why I needed Sarika. Just to survive on something we could both pretend resembled basic human caring.
*
And so months went by, and we had to move out of Delhi, so we moved together. The wedding ceremony was at a temple, ceremonious and unofficial, but in her god's eyes enough to live under the same roof. It felt odd to share my living space with somebody, as I was so used to my schemes covering every surface, malicious planning scaling the walls, but that was in the past, so everything around me was the bare minimum of things. Her things overlapped with my things, the little altar she set up, the picture frames and books she read. They made everything feel so regular, so normal that I was almost starting to believe in not just the present, but the future also.
Us. Normal. Well, I was always an optimist.
*
I can never forget the first choked question, her breath erratic after she shakes her hand away from mine.
“Have you ever killed a person?”
We never discussed the numbers or the how. She told me about him and I told her about my sister, and her story was of deceit where mine was of something even I didn't know. So I pushed the focus on Sarika's end instead, and held her as her tears stained my t-shirt, when she thought she was so torn apart she'd never be put back together. Trying to give her a sense that everything would be all right in the world again.
*
You don't fuck over a person who's been fucked over and killed because of it, so I understood my boundaries and eventually she opened hers. She was beautiful in bed, no longer stiff with fear but full of playfulness and the sex stripped me of my remaining anxieties.
And then my sister found us.
*
The car park outside our colony was not noteworthy in the least, but I could sense another presence. Coming up the staircase, I could hear voices - Sarika's calm but stern Hinglish in contrast with my sister's angry English.
"Don't give me that shit," she told Sarika. "When is Xerxes coming back? You don't even know him. You don't know shit."
"I know everything I need to know," Sarika replied.
I ran and I hid, like the coward that I still was. My sister left, after seeing the side of Sarika that few lived after witnessing, and wisely considering herself lucky for the fact, she never came back.
*
I still felt as if the fear had been set in my bones, planted there permanently because my sister was always out there, and so long as I lived, she wouldn't die.
Sarika held me, and now the vulnerabilities had shifted to my end, and I was the mess that needed fixing.
In these moments I told her so many of the things I'd still kept inside, and she told me more. More blood and guts came spilling out in our confessions, until the corpse of my former self was nearly entirely dissected in front of her.
She looked at the remains and kissed me. It occurred to me that all the while I'd thought we were fixing each other, we weren't. We were just avoiding being fixed by being together.
A continuation of a game we'd called life. A psychologist's field day.
Love, I guess.
*
“We're not killers,” Sarika told me. “That's not who we are.”
I tried to believe this lie, this categorisation we made because we had no excuses; we'd only had motive. We stood in a different category than our victims, we told ourselves, when the fact was, we were the same shit as the rest of the humanity, same cruel pitiful wrecks that we killed and that are out to kill us.
“We're not killers,” I told Sarika during her darkest moments, when the fact is, we were.
And we only truly knew one thing for certain: that we couldn't afford to kill each other. Not now, and not ever. We'd finally gained something we didn't want to lose.