Conceptualising Space When You Share a Bed with Your Father

You’ve told white lies about how much money your family has for as long as you can remember. Not in extremes – no Saltburnesque poverty masquerade nor some throwaway line about travelling to Marseille to stay in the summer home. But for example, in the middle of May, when unseasonal rains lash the concrete roads across Pune, and the electricity goes off in the middle of the night, you tell your friend about the stifling, humid heat that left you breathless for a few moments before the hum of the generator subsumed the hum of the AC and your sweat dried in salt-waves across your skin.

The night the electricity goes off, the fan swings in lethargic circles for a few more minutes before coming to a halt. Thunder cracks the night open like a coconut; through the fluttering curtains the streetlit sky turns white. You’re lying awake and breathing slowly as the water in the air tries to coerce its way into your lungs. There might be something arcane, something powerful about this moment, the way the rain that began at 7 pm has turned into a deluge keening to swallow the world whole, except you’re sharing a bed with your father.

It’s a little difficult to find things poetic when you’re sharing a bed with your father.

This is not the usual state of affairs. Usually, you share a bed with your sister. Well, you shared a bed with your sister for eight years, and then you went off to college and then got a job in a different city and last week you visited home after a year, and home is still two-bedroomed, one-bathroomed, stacked in every corner with all the things your father hoards. A history of climbing out of poverty, demonstrated through archival chaos. When you return to claim a temporary bed in the house you feel the walls sucking in their breath, holding their bellies in, trying to make space for you to shuffle past. Spiders put out fresh cobwebs over your sister’s study table. A thin layer of dust coats the suitcase you dragged in as soon as you laid it flat on the floor.

You have been home a week when your sister catches the flu, and your mother asks you to swap rooms for one night so that she could keep vigil in case your sister lurched into the bathroom in a delirium past midnight. So you take your pillow and a thin blanket and trot over to the other room, where your father has built a pillow wall on the middle of the bed and is dozing intermittently with his phone rested on his paunch.

This night it has been raining. You make yourself as comfortable as you can. The mattress has a bent, though not broken, spring, and it digs into your side in a way it probably doesn’t dig into your mother, who is thin as a whip from diabetes. In your mind you’ve rebuilt the pillow wall into an actual wall, brick reinforced with concrete. Your father is snoring, the sounds of traffic seep through the windows, the air grows thick with moisture. The fan creaks when it spins and your head throbs momentarily as you stare at the shadows thrown on the ceiling, exhausted but too caffeinated to sleep.

Your fingers are in your panties, probing experimentally at your clit. You’ve developed something of a sex drive since you’ve gone away, and forgotten how little privacy there ever was at home even for the cheap pleasure of fulfilling it yourself. It takes you some time to get wet— you think about this boy you’re talking to, curly-haired, angular face; he bends you over on velvet sheets on some unrecognisable bed. Not you you, but You. The You in your head with hair a little lusher than you have, with bigger breasts and nicer skin and softer thighs and an ambiguous pretty face that you can never fully picture. This You he bends over, his hands pressing an arch into your spine, and he leans down to push your hair over your neck, whispering into your ear that he’s going to cane your ass and you’re going to take it like the good girl you are.

The electricity cuts out, thunder rumbles, and your father shifts, the rhythm of his snores broken, and you return to you lying on mismatched cotton sheets, sweat starting to pour down your shoulder blades, clammy armpits and thighs, your fingers pruned and frozen. You withdraw them, inch by inch, as your father turns himself to one side and then the other, half asleep. Your clenched hips relax, you rearrange your legs into a more respectable sleeping position.

The ache between your legs is not new and not much to bear. But there have been other aches, newer and much more burdensome, weighing on your mind.

The week you returned home they closed the airspaces in the north of the country, foaming at the mouth at the neighbouring country in retaliation to a terrorist attack in Kashmir in April. You remember picking apart the news articles in April along with the remnants of your cuticles. You have a friend from college whose home is near Srinagar, who’s home for the holidays, but she was not your first thought. Your first thought was a chill down your spine wondering if war would finally visit your home in your lifetime. You watched the videos and scanned the WhatsApp forwards and cringed and gaped at the AI generated posts people circulated and shared and added to Instagram stories and Facebook walls. You listened to the drumbeat of jingoism pick up frequency as May rolled in and armed retaliation began. Everyone was talking about Kashmir, but no one was talking of the Kashmiris other than the liberals online. When you finally texted with your friend you felt twice the guilt for your own fears, which are moulded more by the dismay of what war would do to the already limping job economy and how you, a student of anthropology and literature could expect to live the life you want, while she worried about getting her documents together to evacuate her home if bombs dropped too close.

Your fingers are in your mouth, though your mind is now on money. Your parents have invested in you the money they never invested in them, and now you need to produce returns. Money: rent money, grocery money, savings, everyone thinks you now need to have investment-type money, safety-net money for when your current precarious job/blessing unravels, self-development-through-travel-and-pole-classes money, self development so you can keep up with the networking circles money, what-are-you-going-to-do-next money, maybe you should start thinking about an arranged marriage – no, financial independence type money, getting your nails done money, getting your nails done so the curly-haired man can kiss you while you rake your hands down his back money, your fingers taste like metal, like a pile of coins tipped on your tongue and you want to stuff them deeper down your throat, instead you settle for checking your father’s breathing, pull up the wall between your bodies, and lower your hand back into your pants.

You stroke yourself quietly, not preparing for an orgasm. Your core muscles usually catch in anticipation to the series of spasms that roll down to your thighs. When you’re alone, your back arches, and you make strangled noises you barely recognise as your own.

These few days though you have swallowed so many opinions and so much of your fear along with these noises that you are bloated and puffy, unable to digest the easy xenophobic dogwhistling that comes to neighbours and friends among whom you’ve lived for eighteen years of your life. When your mother introduced you to her friend she launched into a story about how you had participated in a H— rally; you try not to cringe and grit your teeth around the memory of standing shoulder to shoulder with your friends, everyone buoyant and angry and desolate at once, cloaked in keffiyehs and masks, demanding justice for a people whose nation has slowly been wiped out of existence. You have a reading list, a list of organisations to which you donate, communities built around the politics of your time that smell the blood in the air and know your skin is always on the line; instead, you laughed with your mother and her friend and said you only went for the food.

Nuanced conversations need space for a dozen ideas to sit at the table. But the small spaces you’ve wedged yourself into back home demand linear explanations, the ability to laugh off an opinion backed by nothing more than political bombast and rhetorical flourish and finds ideas like epistemic violence and decolonial praxis pretentious and out of touch with reality. They arrest people for grimacing publicly these days. In an eerie inversion of Orwell, you wonder if your parents would report you to the Thought Police if you turned radical in full view.

You’re not wet enough to come, but the smell of sex is rising off you like a vapour under the blanket, and the windless, warm room is suffocating. Your knee, recovering from an ACL tear, and complaining because you haven’t had enough space in the house to do your physio, twinges without warning. The spring in the mattress tries to lodge into what it presumes is a hole in your spine. As you adjust yourself on the bed you think of the way everything and nothing has changed since you were six or twelve or eighteen and it felt like the walls were closing down on you instead of you growing up. You didn’t have an informed political opinion at eighteen. Then you left home and had too many. Now you’re paring the edges of your arguments, and they are too sharp for this home, and sometimes you feel like it’s your fault for honing a tongue no one asked you to whet.

But news pours in through every means you can think of whether you want it to or not. Your socials are flooded, your friends-in-adulthood are archivists of the present, and you were always a voracious reader. You cannot unhinge your jaw and regurgitate years of actively absorbing Kanafani and Fanon and Ambedkar; you cannot close your ears to the lived experiences of the many people you met when you left home. What you have learned about the ways of the world linger like muscle memory even when you fall short in your efforts while coping with survival.

Still stroking. The pace of your thoughts – skipping from word to word while the rain outside abruptly turns into a storm and a breeze dances the curtains aside and cools your feverish forehead – matches the rhythm of your fingers at last. You move through the fragments of the last few days, the bits of the outside world you shut at the door of your sister’s room before you two settled in to watch another bullshit nepo-baby movie released on Netflix: protests in South India about the NEP’s language policy, cases filed across states requesting stays on the administration of the Waqf Act, the circular, boorish bullying online following escalation of tensions with our neighbour, the Trump administration policies causing geopolitical earthquakes, the endless, endless death and destruction in Gaza.

When you’ve had these conversations with friends in a different city, the foreboding has always been tempered by a grim determination that, under the circumstances, we’re all doing our best, and the fact is we do not yet have the stomach to die for revolution but we are building one as best we can. Our individual efforts are worth something.

But there is something desolate in this tiny space, unable to control the quicksand spiral of your thoughts, where every worry about the world is hollowed by worry about yourself. They hunt in daylight now. A small part of you is worried you were a fair-weather radical— but no.

You will fix this, these short days at home do not unmake you, you are not crushed by this lack of space and these shallow breaths do not sap you of energy. Soon the expansive world of slight personal freedom will beckon again, and you will say goodbye godbless to your parents, I’ll see you again the next time I can get annual leave, take your haunted expression, a brief bout of homesickness, and the pinging news apps on your phone and board the train.

You come, not viciously, and not because you have satisfied a lust, but because you’ve been rubbing your clit and your body is tired and has given in. The dopamine rush is a reluctant pump in your brain, but instantly your thoughts are muffled by a veil of sleepiness.

These thoughts will clamber through the cracks of this schizophrenic life again. You smell like sweat and sex and you’re still holding up the wall in your mind. Your father snorts and turns over, facing you. Even though his eyes are closed you turn your back to him, and cry, because you’re young, and this is the world you’re inheriting.