The jumbled, discordant mess of the day was alike every day before it and filled me with a well-known pain as the dim lights of cars flickered past our own.
I had given up trying to convince my mother to let me stay home and study, I wasn’t in the mood to argue, and the dizzying tilted ache of my brain agreed. The world was technicolor, yet painfully dark, an unwelcome yet unavoidable experience.
“This is why I tell you to sleep, “ my mother trilled from the front, her excited voice a drill to my skull. “I can see your head lolling around, that difficult to stay awake, huh?” She giggled.
My mother, for all her accolades, had the empathy of a competitive fourth standard child.
I slumped further down into the seat, trying to avoid my mother’s sparkling chartreuse eyes. “I don’t want to s–” I began, then stopped as I felt the powerful urge to grab my brain out of my skull and twist it. It was a fairly normal feeling.
The lift to the theatre was a painfully bright blur. I watched as three men walked in, only to promptly traipse out, holding long, brown chairs and chuckling. “Aiyyo, did you see that girl?” one of them said in Tamil
“You’ll stay focused nilla,” my mother whispered as the men faded into the distance. “You’ll not be a paltry crackpot.”
The odds of me becoming a paltry crackpot were fairly slim. This trip was a breach of my daily routine, but it certainly wouldn’t disrupt my sanity.
And stay focused on what?
The theatre was comfortingly dark, the seats cozy and the air conditioner harmonious with the smell of Vicks. My brain began to soothe itself. That headache hadn’t been too bad, barely a prick.
I swum in the soupy semiconsciousness, my brain too dim to consider the consequences of sleeping at the wrong time, sleeping in public. Everything was fine now and would remain the same for as long as…as long as…
The screen before me fizzled, the words Troll (1986) flickering on the screen before the wires were expelled, turning the room brighter. I closed my eyes, yet the light remained, white and powerful, reddening my eyelids, sending pain shooting through my skull.
Potre will get you
I felt an uncharacteristic wave of relief. It was over, the movie had begun, that was just a nightmare formed from the depths of my dizzy brain…
Potre will get you
The words shared the same intonation.
“Mama,” I spoke, turning to the haze beside me, “mama, what’s a potre?”
The haze cleared.
The seat beside me didn’t contain my mother, it contained a short, plump little girl, red hairband so far down her head it reminded me of a necklace.
She turned to me and screamed.
Then, and only then did the screen before us buzz.
“My… My… “
The words were tinny, wavering in an inconsistent and slow crescendo, until they cleared up to the frequency of a school speaker.
“If anyone on this stage has found a young girl, about nineish, named Nilla Aadhavan, please bring her to the stage immediately.”
The voice was chillingly formal, its sharply British accent sending a spiral of dread through my heart.
I turned and the girl beside me was already far away, scampering up the stairs until she crawled out the back door and I wished to follow her. The place was full of people but that didn’t change the fact that someone in the crowd was looking for me, and I didn’t want to find them.
I stood shakily and took the girl’s route, whipping behind taller, bigger bodies (a notoriously difficult act, considering my height) and found myself outside, the door closing satisfyingly behind me as screams began to erupt from within the hall.
The girl was there, leaning beside the door, and my mother was beside her, holding her shoulders as she shivered against my mother’s stomach.
“I don’t want to die Mrs Lennox, I don’t want to die.”
My mother must’ve told the girl her name.
“Nilla,” she turned to me. “We’ve got to go. I’m sorry, girl.”
She thrust the girl away and, with hurried footsteps, we made it to the car park and then back home, my head even more of a colorful soup than before.
All I knew were three things: My name was Nilla Aadhavan, I was nine and three quarter years old, and my presumption about movie night being normal was utterly ridiculous to say the absolute least.