Mansion

It is a terrible thing to feel alone with so many people in this world. All one needs is just the one person to ease it all.

More than 7 billion people.

Around 6500 different languages.

What felt like ten billion voices.

An infinite number of colours.

So many more sounds of every possible tone and tenor.

The world overawed her.

Sara was supposed to grow out of it; the days of hiding under her plain white blanket were supposed to reduce. After a lifetime of therapy, she knew all the standard words of wisdom. 

Take one day at a time. 

Think of the entire world as smaller pieces to not get more scared. 

One foot behind the other, toe to heel. 

Ask for help and there are so many to offer.

These nuggets have sort of become like a set of prayer beads for her, always echoing in her mind. They do not help much anymore and she does not know if they ever did. Sara’s loneliness is her everyday state of mind and she cannot remember a time when it was otherwise.

At twenty-five, she lives alone in one of those big cities in which you can live without anyone ever asking your name. But then again, there is nothing remarkable about her. Limp dark brown hair, dim black eyes hiding behind thick glasses, drooping lips which rarely ever lifted up and slouched shoulders to disappear further into the melee of humanity. It was so easy for her to be invisible yet so many days, she just cannot get out of bed.

Her parents were apprehensive about her living all alone. As veterans of her agoraphobia, they were afraid about how she would cope, about who would drag her out of bed when it’s been more than a week, about whose shoulders would she cry on when the noises of the world overwhelmed her. But what Sara did not want to tell them was that her need to be alone extended even to her parents. Somehow, she managed to convince them that this would be a step in the right direction and they finally relented.

As a website designer, she has enough reason to hole up for days on end at her apartment. She rarely ever met her clients and when she had to, she would arrange meetings in a tiny cafe a couple of doors away. Thanks to the internet, she can order anything she needed online and get it delivered right to her doorstep. In effect, she designed her life to minimize human contact to the maximum extent. She convinced herself that this was the best possible to live her life. She even managed to convince herself that she was content.

It came to a point when it actually physically hurt her to step outside. But she was glad of her personal cocoon. Until one day.

It seemed like just another normal day. Sara had gotten up and made her breakfast of cold fruit and milk and ate it while looking out of the living room window; the one which gave her a view of the bustling road but without the scary noise. She was just contemplating which TV show to pig out on when her cellphone rings.

It was a particularly insistent client who was pushing her for a live demo of the first design of his home-wares website. She tries to dissuade him from meeting up without making it obvious just how debilitating it was for her to step out. But he would not back down and she reluctantly agrees to meet him in the cafe. She puts on her going-out clothes of an over-sized sweater, loose jeans and sneakers. With a big sigh, she covers up her hair with a tattered baseball cap and heads out.

In the café, she looks around for the client but cannot find him. It sours her mood even more and she slouches to her favorite table to wait for him. She takes a napkin and shreds it to tinier and tinier pieces, her mind on the impending conversation. She looks up when the doorbell rings and that is when she first sees him.

What catches her eye was not the athletic body but the slouch of his shoulders.

What captures her attention was not the bright eyes but the downward cast glance.

What stops her breath was not the wavy, luscious hair but the nervous way he kept fiddling with it.

What makes her heart skip a beat was not the handsome human who had walked in, but the impromptu realization that maybe she was not all that alone in being overwhelmed in this world.

As Sara continues to gape at him, he makes his way hurriedly to the table next to her and disappears behind the huge menu. When he finally looks up, she was still staring at him, a rush of completely new emotions running through her. Their eyes meet for a long, understanding moment which is broken by the intrusive air of her client finally barging his way to her table.

Throughout the meeting, she can feel his gaze on her as she runs her client dazedly through the website. Thankfully, he does not ask any questions and seemed reasonably happy with her work, if not a little confused of her stupor. He leaves and Sara is left alone at the table, her eyes on the grain-speckled marble top of the table and her mind whirling at the possible next step. However, before she could reach to any logical conclusion, the recently occupied chair is scraped back and she feels a rush of air as a body lowers itself onto it.

Scared to look up, she continues to count the flecks in the marble and manages to let out a tiny, ‘Hi’.

‘Hi. Ummm, how are you doing?’ comes back the hesitant reply.

‘I am okay…. I am Sara’ she says softly, her count reaching a hundred specks.

‘I am Rick’.

Sara finally manages to get up the courage and looks up to find his unwavering gaze on her, a hint of a smile on his lips.

With a rush of breath, she blurts out, ‘You have to tell me how to do that. How to look people in the eyes’. The moment she says the words, she claps her hand to her mouth, her eyes widening at the absurdity of her question.

But wonderfully enough, he understands and says eagerly, and not without a hint of pride, ‘It took a lot of hard work and a lot of practice. I can help you if you want.’

And so it started.

Rick was a perfume- tester by profession and had transformed his home into his studio to avoid stepping outside. 

Rick had been living in this city all his life. 

Rick was equally terrified of the world but an understanding therapist took him into hand and gave him a simple philosophy to follow to get over his reticence.

‘It’s only been a couple of weeks, but it's very simple, really. What’s the place where you are the most comfortable?’ he asks her, during one of their many meetings at the café.

Sara does not even need a second to think before she says, ‘My apartment.’

‘Alright. All you need to do is imagine that every road, every place, every corner of this world is just an extension of your apartment’.

She looks at him confused, ‘What do you mean? I need to imagine that I’m rich enough to own the entire globe and every place is just another room in my mansion?’

He gives out his musical laugh and says,’ Yes, exactly! For example, this café is just one of your dining rooms. Maybe the one you use when the sun is out. The diner next door is for more casual meals. You know, when you're too lazy to cook and too exhausted to walk further. The fancy place down the road is for when important guests are invited for dinner. Maybe when the Queen comes over!’

She doubts the effectiveness of this, but Rick insists on demonstrating. The next month is spent by him dragging her to a whirlwind of new places, most of them being full of people. The shoe store is her shoe wardrobe with people coming over to ‘borrow’ some of the footwear. The clothes store is her extended wardrobe which she lets out to hire to random strangers. The restaurants are all different dining rooms and the bookstores are all part of her enlarged library.

Slowly, she realizes how much this little trick helps her face the world. Wanting to test if it was only Rick's presence which made it easier or her own will, she even goes on a few solo experiments of her own. She walks into a makeup store hesitatingly one day, and imagines the perky counter girls as a few girlfriends of hers, eager to give her a makeover during a fun sleepover. Somehow, with all the story making in her head, she forgets how nervous she gets around people and ends up purchasing all of the products she tries on.

She starts to love these little trips with Rick and sometimes wonders if he enjoys it as much as she does. Seldom, she even finds herself doodling his name and dreaming about him. However, she always shakes it off, telling herself that he is just helping her, just how his therapist helped him.

But a few instances sometimes shake this belief of hers. Lingering touches. A few secret stares. Inside jokes. Little things like this which keeps her awake at night, spinning yarns about epic romances. But she always puts such thoughts at the back of her mind, reminding herself that the most important priority is to get over her shyness first. Yet, she could not help but using her newly bought makeup whenever it was time to meet Rick.

One day, they agree to meet at their café and he comes in with a solemn look on his face. This was so unusual for him that she asks him what was wrong.

‘I just came back from the hospital after a routine checkup’, he says with a forlorn look in his lovely eyes.

A spasm of fear runs through Sara’s core as she asks, ‘And?’

‘They found a tumor. It’s cancerous and I will need surgery’.

Sara sits back in horror, her entire world crumbling to ruins before her. Tears rush to her eyes and in that moment, she realizes how much she has come to care for the person sitting in front of her. Forgetting her usual reticence to human touch, she grabs his hand in hers tightly.

‘It’s going to be okay. They said that they can get it all and that the chances of remission are very minimal. Minimal. Hah, doctors use such funny words. Whatever happened to tiny, and small and all the usual suspects? Do you think they teach you this in med school? Minimal. Remission. Benign..’, he rambles on for some time before saying with heartbreaking doubt, ‘Sara.. Will you come to the hospital before I go in?’

Sara lets go of his hand in a single instant and drops her eyes to the now-unfamiliar grain-speckled marble. ‘Ummm.. I don’t like the smell of hospitals. And there are so many people. So many germs too...’, she murmurs.

The chair scrapes back and Sara feels the cold air of loneliness hitting her before she dissolves into tears.

She sits there for a long time, her tears falling freely and fully. Finally, she shuffles back to her apartment and shuts herself up in her bedroom. She continues to cry, convinced that she had seen the last of Rick and mourning his loss by recollecting everything they had done. She recounts the million times he had come to her rescue, the innumerable times he made her laugh, the hundreds of stories they spun together about her mansion, the dozens of time he held her hand reassuringly when the crowds of the world suffocated her. With him in her mind and her eyes all dried out, she falls asleep out of weariness.

The next morning, she wakes up groggily and pads to her kitchen for breakfast. She finds her fridge empty and frowns. Making up her mind to go to the diner for breakfast, she goes back to her room for her purse. When she finds it, she heads to the door and when her hand is on the doorknob, she is hit with a phenomenal realization.

She was ready to go out into the world, without Rick and without needing any stories about her mansion.

She sits down on the floor when the enormity of this hits her and covers her mouth with her hand to stop it from trembling. Her mind races at the implications and she feels the uncontrollable need to laugh gleefully. Her immediate thought is to call Rick and stops at this thought. 

Rick.

Without any more hesitation, she rushes outside and hails a cab to the hospital. Inside, she prays that she is not too late and when the car stops, she shoves a wad of cash at the driver and stumbles outside. She races to the receptionist and gets the details. All the while in the elevator, she trembles with expectation and hopes with all her might that he had not already gone into the Operation Theater.

She gets out of the elevator in a flurry and right there in front her, is her very own Rick reclining on a wheelchair, an indifferent nurse at the handles.

She falls down in front of him and breathes out, ‘Oh, thank God! I thought I was too late. I’m so sorry about yesterday. Of course I will be there for you, I'll be here till you get out.'

He smiles his special smile at her, but his eyes are still doubtful. ‘Did you imagine that the hospital is part of your huge mansion?’

A wonderful, sunny smile, as big and wide as the world breaks out on her face. ‘No, I did not.’