Since my friend Monika was killed, I have experienced several, sometimes overlapping, stages of knowing and being. I share them with you now with reluctance. Because they are intimate and private, and intimacy and privacy were stolen from Monika, along with her life. I share in order to alter the dominant public narrative in my own small way. I share because Monika cannot speak for herself.
Shock: At first I am numbed into silence by disbelief, horror. Monika, ethereally beautiful, sweet, vibrant, extraordinarily gifted in the world of scent, sought by perfumeries around the world, a woman on the verge of becoming.Just a month earlier she had promised to create a special scent just for me. “By the way,” she asked, “What is the name of that Japanese pottery art you posted on Facebook?”
“Kintsugi,” I say. “The art of repairing broken pottery in such a way as to render it even more beautiful than before it was broken. It’s the name of my new poetry collection.”
“So beautiful,” she sighed. “It could also be the name of your scent.”
Fear: I listen for hours on the phone to my women friends trying to articulate their pain. I struggle to soothe. I am afraid. I want to gather them all and place them in protective custody. As I pack for an upcoming trip to Portugal, I drive my mother crazy with a litany of instructions born of fear. Lock the gate after your morning walk. If you nap, lock the grills on the veranda and the front door. Don’t open the door to anybody you don’t recognise. Keep the dogs near you.
Anger: The press coverage makes me want to put needles in my eyes and break glass. I rail against the cloak of invisibility thrown over the deadly harm of women. I rail against the man-poet who once wrote to me, “Are we arguing of a chthonous structure within which all women are subjugated to all men?”
Haanh, did she go clubbing? the cop asks.
I question my position on the death penalty. Vengeance is what I want, on behalf of all women so brutally taken.
And yet. I’ve taught poetry to such killers, maintaining that a prison is as much about rehabilitation as it is about consequences. My captive students learn from me that art must transcend, and in order to transcend the artist must be able to slip into the skin of the other.
I am also angry that I will never have my designer scent. Grief is not high-minded when it counts its losses. Everything hurts. I am a grief in process. I plant new jasmine in my garden after the funeral.
Distance: Go, says my mother, we will be fine. Change the channel, reclaim power, says Suman, a mutual friend, the night before my departure. I agree in my head, but on the flight, I imagine the plane falling out of the sky. By the time I reach Porto, sorrow has set in. With it comes emptiness. The emptiness we feel when the gods desert the bodies they formerly inhabited.
Remembrance: I scan photos on my cellphone. Look, there she is at my book launch, at Elsewhere, laughing with her women friends. Monika could reinvent herself according to her mood. In each photograph she looks a different, fascinating creature. She loved cats.
Do you see? The point of Monika is not her death, it is her life.
“Women feel safe here in Porto,” says my host.
We used to feel like that in Goa.
Proximity: Lisbon. I am in the fashionable Chiado district. Chiado is a Monika kind of place. I enter a shop that sells essential oils and am drawn to a tester that says Iris. The scent is fragrant, fragile. In my mind’s eye, I see Monika, sphinx-like, smiling her half-smile. I buy it. For the rest of the day I carry Monika with me. At the shop of a young
Portuguese designer, I choose a scarf I think she would like and wear it.
I thought I wanted distance, but I don’t. Because only when I step into my heart, even as it is breaking, do I feel true. This is Kintsugi. This is how you fix what is broken.
(One of several women-authored pieces published this weekend in tribute to Monika Ghurde)
Multilingual essayist, fiction writer and poet of Goan origin