Bulbuli

  Tw // death, suicide

Bulbuli was my cousin. She lived in the village bordering mine, and we met every other day, or atleast once a week till I lived in the village. We remained fairly close even after I shifted to the town. Trips to her house were frequent. We were in the same class, I studied in the fancy convent - courtesy of my working parents, while she was left in a half-walled broken school beside my house, because her absentee jobless father and a dead mother could not afford much. She used to come over to our place after her school was over and we used to play all sorts of games. We had a small mandir, called "gukhai-ghor" in Assamese, which had a small verandah. One of us used to take the verandah as a make-shift house, while the other used the concrete slabs attached outside our living room. The leaves of the money-plant near the gukhai-ghor served as currency. We made small pots and pans from mud which often cracked but we played with them anyway. There would be all sorts of invitations and parties and serving fake food on mud plates. We used to hop around playing "kut-kut" as well.

Makeshift houses and playing with mud soon gave way to hormonally charged crushes on boys. Teenage came with it's share of drama in school, and we used to gossip for hours whenever we met. Bulbuli had a number of boys crushing on her, while I was attention-deprived. She used to tell me about the boys asking her out (or whatever the village provided in the name of dating). We used to walk around her village and she would show me these boys - some even came talked to us sometimes. It was fun, me watching out fearfully as she made us walk in laps through the streets around their houses. 14 year-old Bulbuli was smart, pretty and bold. These boys feared her. 

Bulbuli lost her mother to suicide when she was a child. Her dad being an asshat, married twice after that, the second one couldn't tolerate his atrocities and left, and he married a far younger woman a couple of years ago. Bulbuli was taken care of by her aunt, who was sent off to Delhi by her brothers, with a man they barely knew for a week. The brothers did not inform anybody before sending her off. The man claimed to love her. The aunt died a couple of months after she left. She was the strongest woman in our entire family. She could work like no other, had the strength of two men. She and my mother were close. She kept talking to my mother over the phone, complaining of her deteriorating health, while my mother could not do anything besides give medical advise through the phone. We did not know her address, and nobody tried to bring her back. She died. We didn't even get to see her body. 

 After her aunt left, Bulbuli had to take up the responsibility of the entire household. Her grandparents were old, her father was drunk bastard, and there was nobody else. She still managed it all with her grandmother, who became her only source of support, until one day soon, the grandmother decided she had lived enough, and died. Bulbuli was devastated. The state she was in was unforgettable. A wailing mess, she cried "I am alone now, Deha, grandma left me now I'm alone here". 

One day, she fled. An elder cousin had taken her to Guwahati to get her work at some sales-level job which she couldn't do because she was 17 and had no idea how things in the city worked. But she fell in love with a nice guy there, and both of them decided to run away and get married. She was 17. He ran a small fast-food joint. Later she told me that her newly married stepmother couldn't tolerate her and had conspired to get her married with weird old uncles. So she fled.

I didn't see her for almost 3 years after she got married. The last time I met her was in 2020, when her grandfather passed away. She had always tried to keep in touch, though. She used to message me over Facebook. I didn't recognise her because it was her husband's account she texted me from, but we kept in touch. When I met her last year, we got to talking like before. She told me she was preparing to apply to be a jail warden and has started running to prepare for the physical exams for the police. Also that her in-laws were good people. I was happy. She looked happy. The husband looked happy. 

It was a month ago the news came. She had apparently committed suicide. I did not know why. She had landed into a prostitution trap, got caught and brought home, and was disowned by her father, who was the only surviving immediate family she had. I am still clueless about the role the husband's family played - no one seems to know anything. Eveyone has a different story. The one which is constant is that it was suicide. Everyone has a different version of how it happened and when. I won't go into the graphic details different versions have set, but I've been getting nightmares for days. Nobody apparently cared to get the actual details of the event and how she fell into the prostitution-ring.

I am still to fully come to terms with the situation. I lost a friend I knew for 18 years in 2019. I lost another friend with Bulbuli. She and I grew up together. We played together, ate together, built mud vessels together, crushed over boys together. We had our childhoods intertwined. At this point I'm not sure what to write or say. I want to apologise to her, but I don't know what I could have changed. She had endured a lot of trauma in her life - a mother's suicide, the mother figure of an aunt being snatched away when she was 13, consecutive death of her grandparents, an absentee father and later the stepmother. Nobody could fully comprehend the complexity of her life and what led to her decisions and later, her death.

It's difficult talking about it. It will always be difficult to talk about it.

Bulbuli, wherever you are, rest in peace. You deserved better.