Stuck.

“Gridlock. Bottleneck. Logjam. Stalemate. Congestion.”

Aparna muttered these words under her breath, as the comforting breeze of her car’s air conditioner caressed her forehead. She loved thinking of synonyms. All her life, she sought to make little word-trees. Maybe that is why she taught Verbal Reasoning at Career Launcher.

She sighed and fiddled with the radio in her car. Static, crackle, and then silence. Her dated Wagon R had zero capacity to quell her boredom. It did nothing that new, cooler cars did. And she was too stingy to “posh it up”, as her friends often told her to. Her dad gifted her this car before he passed away. She wondered, again, if he had a feeling that she would never make enough money to buy a car of her own.

A few impatient honks from behind punctuated her train of thoughts. She rolled the window down, put her coiffured head out, and shouted, “Motherfucker, are you blind? Where the fuck should I go?” The maroon Honda behind her honked back with more ferocity. She cringed at her own choice of words. Career Launcher would fire her if they witnessed this trite and clichéd exchange.

In front of her, an autorickshaw with the words “Welcome Back” in elaborate yellow cursive strokes.

Welcome back to yet another day, with yet another Bengalurian embouteillage. Bottleneck, in French.  

This unattended French word catapulting its way into her car caught her by surprise. A pang of guilt, deep in the twists and turns of her gut. Half-written novels often tend to resurface announced, shooting out of the depths of repression – taut arrows ready to pierce one’s bubble of denial. Aparna closed her eyes and murmured, “Set in Paris, the story of a young writer who falls in love – with a language.”

She remembered with a sad smile how she had written 6000 words in a week, walking around White Town in Puducherry. She remembered, with crimson embarrassment how the editor at Penguin had scoffed at the half-written manuscript and called it “unimaginative and, frankly, indolent”. She also remembered how she threw the manuscript into a municipality dustbin outsider the Penguin office. She also remembered how she has not written a word since.

She opened her eyes. Hot tears that were struggling to fit inside her tiny eyes were slowly clouding her vision. She no longer saw the autorickshaw welcoming her back; she did not hear the Honda honking; she did not flinch when a TVS Scooty inched close to her sidemirror only to shut it so they could go ahead; she did not curse when she heard a cloud burst in the skies above, promising to make the embouteillage even worse.

All she knew is that she was stuck in an embouteillage…of words – an adjective riding a motorcycle with a noun hugging it close, lovers on a little joyride; a verb and an adverb sitting hand-in-hand in a sedan, a young and exhausted couple; a conjunction squeezed in between a noun and a pronoun, a happy family in a colorful autorickshaw; and a crowd of synonyms and antonyms stuffed in a bus, each one waiting to fulfill its destiny. All of them were waiting to move.

Aparna pressed her right hand firmly against the heart of the steering wheel. She honked.

Nothing moved.

She howled.

A blood-curling, spine-tingling, hair-rising howl that got drowned in the beeps, blares, blasts, and tootles of peak Bengaluru traffic.

The frightened words howled with her.