Pink Lights, Purple Bruises

By Mansi Dahal

/ Nonfiction /      

“What versions of yourself lived in that home that never lived anywhere else?” The writing prompt hangs in the air as I doodle in my off white notebook, feeling exposed in a classroom of fifty. My mind tells me I can't write here, fearing that my grip on the pen betrays my unresolved heartaches and my clumsiness—the mango juice on my flowery dress, nail polish on my beige romper, tteok-bokki on my parallel pants. Each time I tell myself, I will be careful about how I use my hands next time. And yet each time I cling on to another next time.

It feels strange to admit that older versions of myself question my present version. How could I not write about this prompt when my entire two years in New York have been shaped by a house I live in. Or should I say a building, a tiny room, a community. I do not know what I should call the International House situated at 155 Claremont Avenue, Upper West Side.

I remember moving into that building. After packing and unpacking, buying a new sim, setting a bank account, buying bed sheets and blankets, basically helping my brother set up an entire new life, I was going to New York. I had held all of my emotions inside me, not having had the chance to write about them amongst the hustle. Pratikshya, my friend, had packed me a tuna sandwich and kept three mandarins in a ziplock bag as I took a train from Harrisburg to New York.

My arms had become weak after dragging two suitcases all day. I broke two of my long nails and one suitcase’s handle. None of that seemed like a loss because the restless energy of New York somehow aligned with the restlessness I had inside me. I entered the tiniest room I would ever live in, looked around and wondered how I was supposed to live in that 2X3 space. A closet as tiny as a milk cartoon. The bed frame and a desk were the only furniture in the room and they could not be moved apart; tightly compressed in the opposite walls. I could barely walk without bumping my knees making blueberry sized bruises. Was I supposed to make this place home? I arranged three mandarins in the window and placed the ukulele I got as a departure gift from my colleagues before leaving Nepal. I used my phone to hit in thumb tacks and hung the Tibetan prayer flags.

I arranged my clothes in the tiny closet, tightened my bed sheet and took a shower in the communal bathroom after stretching the plastic curtain on both sides over and over. “I would never live in a dorm at this point in my life,” I had told Abbu, but somehow he convinced me how convenient it would be for me to live just ten minutes away from Columbia University. And it was. I told myself I came to New York to live a life outside this room, not inside, so did it even matter that much? 

Pratikshya came to visit me after a few weeks and got me a table lamp. I covered it with a pink shawl I had gotten as another departure gift to diffuse the rosy light and create an ambience for my writing. Slowly as days passed by, the book shelves started to be full with tons of readings I needed to do for classes. The scrunchies from Nepal were replaced by other scrunchies I bought at Duane Reads as I kept losing them. The shampoos were changed in the caddies. The razor, the toothbrush. One pair of boots and one sports shoe remained constant though. I had promised myself I would live a minimalist life because these arms are not too strong to move suitcases around. 

I met R (let’s call him that) for the first time in the elevator of this building and somehow we caught each other’s attention. “I have gone to Nepal,” he said. He told me that there was a Buddha’s statue in each hotel he stayed in. There was something funny about that; or should I say I was just charmed? Later I happened to sit with him in the dining hall. When he told me about the momo cart outside Columbia, I got so excited. He kept on saying, “I love momos,” something about him saying “momos” and not “momo.” The plurality somehow made his love for momos trivial for me. In Nepal it's always a momo party, it doesn't matter how many momos you make. He even asked me to get him “momos” when I would return back to I-house from Columbia. “One red sauce and one white sauce,” he said. I immediately texted my friend after, this guy has met me twice and demands me to bring him momos, why should I bother?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with his desire to eat momo when he was working from home. But I imagined myself bringing them to him in his own tiny room. And somehow after fighting patriarchy for all these years, that idea made me feel very submissive. I kept on imagining his 2X3 room for no reason. Of course, I didn’t take him momo and we stopped talking. But my caring self would question me, Why couldn’t I take a plate of momo to this guy who introduced me to this place, when introductions have the power to transform a place into somebody’s habit, a lifestyle, an escape?

I met him again after a few weeks in the dining hall while he was waiting for his coffee to cool down in a corner. I sat with him and we talked for a bit. I was sarcastic the whole time, edgy, cool, my guards all the way up, not sharing anything about my life to him. I remember every detail of the conversation as the sun spilled over our shoulders and I questioned him, “Who uses ‘beautiful’ to describe New York?” He just smiled and said, “I don’t have a lot of words to describe New York.” But it was not at all true. He just wasn’t affected enough to respond with a comeback and I couldn’t point out why.

One day he saw me playing guitar in my insta story and asked me if he could play it for a bit. That was the first time he entered my tiny room, 713. The room was so small, he had to sit in my bed, there was nowhere for him to stand. I found the furthest corner of the room, by the window, and sat there. The lamp was on, soft pink covering both of us. He played John Mayer and sang, “I am a bad boy ‘cause I don’t even miss her.” I had never heard a voice so deep, like the Shepherd’s roots spread all over the desert. That moment I only saw depth in his voice and not him. How old was I when I learned to do that?

He handed me a moment that dissolved like saliva in my tongue. I looked outside the window, not yet belonging to the city, there was some sort of sadness in that moment but also pleasure. Two strangers in a tiny room, and a John Mayer song. The night narrowed down and he left when I asked him to. This scene keeps on playing in my head, each time I think about when I could have stopped everything from happening. Right there, that moment of “Free Falling” was when I could have stopped. But each time, I replay that scene in my head, I also think about how visceral it was, how this guy needed to be around a human being and I did too. I had just moved to New York one more time with lots of ambitions. I had left a house full of people to come to a void in that tiny room. I went to Columbia University without any preconceived knowledge about the philosophers and felt like I didn’t know enough to be there. Hence, there was a beauty in that moment, in his company that I would love to relive over and over. 

The other moment where I could have stopped it all was when we went to the jazz bar. “The saxophone, the base, the drum. Choose one instrument and pay attention to how that progresses”, he told me. And I did. Sometimes I paid attention to the hand movements of the drummer and other times to the strings of the bass. In that small jazz bar, where every musical instrument reverberated, he sometimes whispered in my ear if I wanted another glass of wine. The hairs in my body rose as his breath ran through my back.

In the hazy state of mind, I absorbed every note that was played. Music has made me the woman I am today but jazz was nowhere close to what I listened and connected to. It was old Hindi songs by Gulzar. Aanewala Pal Jaanewala Hai. When R asked me if I always knew I wanted to become a writer, I laughed. But instead of getting trapped in the nostalgia of every unstable second of my life, I told him, “No, not always.” I told him, it started with one poem that I wrote in my first intro to creative writing class in my undergrad. My first mentor Diane Seuss told me, “Poetry is the companion you want to choose for your life.” And here I was in New York all by myself  trying to become a poet. 

He told me he was jealous of people like me and that bass player, people with courage, people who decide to take a risk with their passion. “It’s very tough in this world that runs on practicality,” he told me. “I know,” I told him and felt joy watching him watch jazz. Time and again, he reminded me, “You can come hang out with me but that’s all. THAT’S ALL.” 

There was a command in that sentence and I hated that. I hated that he made me come into contact with what the truth was: that I was not really in control of this situation, the pacing, the tightening. What does “‘That’s all’” mean?” I wanted to ask him. He thought my heart could follow instructions not knowing my memory is a curse. He didn’t know I would remember every breath he took in my presence. That he was slowly stirring my world and I was letting him.

On the way back, we switched trains. He taught me how to change from the local train to the express and move like a New Yorker. A little tipsy from half the bottle of wine, we bumped into each other the entire time in the train. We bought slices of pizza and sprinkled oregano and red pepper from the big bottles he has on his shelf in his room. We sat in the lounge as he told me he had peed in the sink in his room. The men's bathroom is too far. He told me his neighbor probably hates him because he puked loudly one whole night. He didn’t bother to put his life together and I liked that. I let his grotesque life-stories pierce through my stubbornness. 

He started inviting me over for coffee in the mornings. On the fifth floor he grinded his beans and put them on a filter paper. It felt like a chemistry experiment. The smell wrapped around our bodies. I told him New York can make you feel lonely. When I said I have a love-hate relationship with this city, he didn’t understand that.  He didn’t understand that this city full of possibilities is also a city of dismissal. He didn’t understand how every poem I write in New York mourns the house I left to come to America. Every new room I live in mourns the ones I have lived before. He didn’t understand that somebody else will be laughing in this space where I have cried and over thought and over-written.

He said he hadn’t reached the hate part yet. I felt like we were two wounded pigeons in the same nest. We didn’t address the hurt but our feathers were drenched in blood. We didn’t flap our wings. We were letting it dry as the cold air entered from the window. Two birds, drinking coffee. I finished mine first and he was still waiting for his to cool down.

He said in India, where he’s from, everything just moved smoothly like a domino. Here, he had to think where he would have lunch. He said he had been thinking about that since midnight. Was he tense then? I can’t remember now but he definitely told me the stories of the day he moved in at I-house, how there was a flood in his house in Jersey and they ordered a boat. He turned his phone on and showed me photos. I rotated them from all angles. 

After returning from operas, he would come to the lounge on my floor to eat his falafel sandwich and ask me to give him company. He would warn me to never get chicken sandwiches from the Bahamas Deli. “Always get a falafel sandwich and ask them to make it extra spicy,” he would utter, making a big bite and capturing my attention in a way he didn’t think about. One day I had an online class where we were discussing The Catcher in the Rye. He asked me to sit in the lounge of his floor and sat next to me throughout the class. As a student of economics, he wasn’t used to getting in touch with his emotional selves and memories in his classrooms. He reached towards my state of mind again by saying, “It’s scary to be in your classes, they make you face all your fears as a human.” 

My room, his room, the lounges on our floors, the dining hall, the terrace—ah how the sound of the rain dispersed and I had a flash vision of a life I would never have, every empty and overflowing space in this building was stained with his memory. Once I started to sense a drift, the pink hue in my room burned my skin. For months I held a kind of emptiness close to my heart knowing something would be provoked soon. You can only stretch an intimacy for so long. I am trying to re-learn that. I am trying to not just give and give. 

One of the last conversations I had with him was in his new room on the fifth floor. The room where I had helped him move in. I was a part of the mess of his old room and the arrangement of his new room. The conversation turned more into a kind of a plea that I didn’t know I was capable of. During that plea, I could feel my presence simultaneously in both his rooms. 

His face resembled hurt wet petals, off white and loosened in his old room. A cold, opened bottle of red wine rested in the window. He asked me to taste it and I slipped my fingers around the green glass. I am sure he used a blade to cut the wrap. He saw the lavender hues of my nail polish. But I could only see his floor where his gray socks were scattered. There were loose papers where he solved some math sums. I arranged his books on the shelf, and threw four caps of coca cola bottles in the trash can. I picked up  the bottle of melatonin. “Do you need them?” I asked him. “On the nights I can't fall asleep,” he said. On the nights I couldn’t fall asleep I wrote poems about him and titled them I Know Everything That’s in Your Drawer. A part of me wanted to make all of his memory disappear except for the day his fingers knew how to create music. But I couldn’t do that, not even in my poems because what was he without everything he had gone through, without his dented petals that had decayed and were  ready to be destroyed. Shed them all, I wanted to tell him. Let the new buds grow till then I will hold a handful of water in my palm.

In this new room, I had helped him put his clothes on the hanger and arranged his books on his shelves. After we moved half of his stuff from the old room into the new one, he pulled up a chair, sat next to the window and said, “I know what will be the first song played in this room.” He pressed play on Spotify and it went, New York I love you but you are bringing me down. He told me how he was trying to have a singular focus on his life and not just socialize. He talked to me about how he went to Washington Square Park to play chess and I imagined him slouching a little, sitting in that tiny stool. He talked to me about his personal statement and I wondered what he would write there that I still didn’t know about him. 

As I entered that room, which happened to be my last time in it, I feared my own fragile state of mind more than what he had to say. It doesn’t matter what the conversation was; what matters is that it was that room in that building. He was lying in his bed with a band-aid in his nose. He had picked his pimple and there were cotton balls in the table covered with spots of blood. A lot was said and felt that day. But the most difficult phrase that came out of my mouth was, “Do you not like me?” I took a long breath after. Then asked again. “Do you not like me?” One more time. “Do you not like me?” I asked thrice. 

“I like you,” he said, “but…” followed with some sentences. Why/Where/How, it didn’t matter to me. Sometimes it happens like that, you can’t tell what happened. Surprisingly, his answers haven’t stayed with me over time. What has stayed is that image: him lying with a band-aid, his tender looking sweater and my earrings next to him. I had removed them somehow while talking and placed them on his side. A tiny room held so much sadness it made me feel like I was an abandoned swing. 

That night I did not sleep in my bed; I did not stay in that building. I threw a toothbrush and face wash in my tote bag. Gloves. Laptop. A book. I stormed out of my tiny room. You should never beg for love but if you do, you should not stay in your room and cry the night away. I took the 7 train to Queensboro plaza. People in that train had no idea now I will also just be a girl in his stories. One day he will stalk my insta and show it to another girl, that once upon a time we used to go to smalls and broadways together. Once upon a time, it felt like this would go on forever. Once upon a time, I hung his yellow jacket in a hanger and told him that it was better than his green one. Even though he was colour blind and I am not sure he understood what colour I meant. 

I wanted to numb a part of my memory. I could not imagine myself walking into that building. And it wasn’t just the walk, the whole act of walking next to a bunch of boys smoking, (one of whom could be him, the could was so terrifying), taking the elevator, walking through the hallway, entering my room, turning my lamp on and lying in the bed. All of it. I am not surprised that I did not have the courage to see him. What surprises me is that I did not have the courage to see the building. 

As days passed, I stopped going to the dining hall, I stopped attending events, I stopped saying Hi to people inside that building. 

I felt betrayed by a company that used to be beautiful. R showed me how beauty could transform, how it wasn’t stagnant, how it flowed, how it was destroyed. I’d been part of something that once felt beautiful, but R showed me beauty can shift like sand, how it slips through your fingers and sometimes vanishes completely. As the days stretched out, I drifted away from dining halls and skipped glances in the narrow hallways. I decided I’d rather live all by myself than try to know any other person there.I  wanted to leave without finding even a flicker more of beauty in this place. In fact, I started to resent beauty. 

There were days when I walked past him. There were days I saw him hang out with a bunch of boys he judged. I saw him living the kind of life he always told me he was afraid of living: smoking cigarettes and being indulged in the community gossip.

I was hurt not because of what conversation I had with him that day in his room. But because each time I encouraged him to meet people, he came at me, “singular focus,” he reminded me and now I felt like my part in his life was done because he found newer people. I-House had offered me the chance to walk with a Nepali flag at some fancy event whose name I never bothered to learn—mostly out of anger at that place, I declined.

“You are the first person in this building I have gotten this close to in a long time”, he had told me. “I don’t want to know many people. I don’t want to just socialize without having a purpose in my life,” kept repeating in my head.  He had told me that he was scared of getting close to people. Of course I felt happy that he was able to overcome his fear, but also a tad bit lonely, and misunderstood. 

He found some other people to process his thoughts with and I was replaced. I didn’t have a say in the decision, what our relationship could turn into. It was what he wanted or nothing. As months passed, I saw him taking charge of various community events, bantering with girls, trying to make a dominant social presence in the dining hall. 

I unfollowed I-house on instagram because each time I saw him, my heart would sink. And I still am trying to recognize why. Seeing him with ten other people in that space chatting and laughing would remind me how I used to be there and now there’s somebody else. Why was that feeling of displacement making me feel horrible? I felt embarrassed to accept that and share it with my friends. What if what I was feeling was too much? And what if somebody told me that?

There were a lot of times when he had come to my room, dragged my chair, updated me about his life, taken my lip balms saying he needed one. When my emotions became formless it wasn’t just my room where his presence haunted me. Memories in every part of this building became unbearable. How could the memories be more unbearable than the fact that he still lived there—than the chance of seeing him every time I entered that building?

I slowly turned into a woman I hadn’t seen myself become before. After summer, when I changed rooms and the few people I knew left the building, I don’t think I spoke a single word to anyone for months. I sometimes wondered what people thought of me—if they mistook my silence for pride, or mystery. Quiet, always in my room, moving through the hallways with a kind of careful hesitation I couldn’t unlearn.

I rant about his presence in this building even now, not really knowing the glimpses I see of him are from the present or the past. But what I am not able to tell them is how this space used to be about him and me. Now, it’s about him and everybody. I am by myself. Sometimes I wonder if his room still has my laptop support, sticky notes that I left at his door, a poetry foundation’s copy where I had written, “Dear R, One day I will leave New York and stop talking to you but please please please buy my book maybe you will find something familiar.” Do they remind him of anything?

Of course I have thought about leaving this building a gazillion times in the middle of a semester. Pratikshya kept on reminding me that I have got good financial aid and why would I want to leave a place so close to Columbia for a guy? Right, a decayed petal is the last thing I wanted to become in this lifetime. So I didn’t leave this building. I repeated to myself, just till I finished my MFA. I decided to drag myself in this building for the next year and a half and then I would never come close to it.  

Each time somebody asked me where I live in New York, I wanted to lie and make things up—Bushwick, Jackson Heights, Astoria—anywhere but not the International House. Each time I told them the truth, I heard, “Wow you pay so little money, that’s unheard of in New York” or “My parents met at I-house!” or “It must be so fun to have a bar there and all those social events.”

I sank in discomfort to see other people’s gaze enter this building and my room. How dare they perceive a lifestyle of mine without knowing how unbearable memories have become for me? Once upon a time, I knew a guy here intimately and now I don’t. I never said that to anybody. Sometimes you betray the language by knowing the exact words yet not owning them. 

Now it’s been more than a year of me staying shamefully bitter about this building and ruthlessly wanting to leave. But over the two years, I have to accept that I have formed my own rituals of writing here. How I wake up and draw the curtains, water my plants, light an incense, warm a cup of water and watch the raspberry tea change its color to a hue of red-tulips. I read for a few hours and then write. I sit in the same chair in the same position every morning to tie my boots and go to Dear Mama Cafe. In the earlier days, I had to wake up and immediately leave this building, so Dear Mama started as an escape but now it has become a source of endless pleasure where the baristas recognize me and offer me free drinks.  

The books in my shelves have only increased and now they overflow to the top of my tiny fridge and the window’s edges. The Taal DVD that I found in a gold jewelry shop from Queens lies on the shelf. The A/C unit that R brought to me from his friend’s house, full of sweat, is still on the floor of my room covered with dust. It reminds me not everything was awful with him. Some of them were moments of pure joy, a kind of joy no boy had given me before. Now, when my heartbroken self has changed into a little less heartbroken self, who is still in touch with that heartbroken self, I have understood the simultaneity of things in life even better. We can be in the most serene place of the world yet feel a kind of restlessness because of a recent loss. We can be thrilled with starting somewhere new yet miss the warmth of an older place. An experience can leave you weeping yet you can accept how it had once made you glowy and giddy like a ballerina on her toes.  

The versions of myself I have hated, lived with, and eventually accepted within these walls are my close companions. Moving to a bigger, newer space will feel like stepping into an unknown realm, away from the intricate mesh of memories that define this place. I wonder what it will be like to exist without the constant presence of these insurmountable echoes.I will never again be the version of Mansi that this room once witnessed, and R doesn’t know that, even after a year, the clearest memories I carry of this place are still the ones touched by him.

I finish taking notes in class and share my response with fifty students. I never imagined I’d own and share such an experience so publicly. Glancing around, I say, “I hope nobody here lives at I-House.” The room erupts in laughter. I continue, grappling to explain how my tiny room in that building has shaped my relationship with New York. It’s why I joined dance classes, frequented Barnard’s library, and established a weekly writing routine with Rebecca. I-House compelled me to seek refuge outside its confines; it became both a container for my external experiences and a crucible for my internal ones. But where, really, is the line between the container and the content?

A few days later, I ran into D at the train station after a poetry reading at the KGB bar. D, who I used to be friends with at I-house, greeted me with familiarity. As we journeyed back to I-house together, our conversation meandered through the past year. At one point, he remarked, "Oh, you were totally missing for the past year.". I held my breath. How prominent must my personality have been for him to remember me from those first five months? And more than that, how did he remember my absence for the entire next year? How did he remember the hole, the void, the blackout, the container that I sprung out from?

When F returned from Brazil, another old friend from my early days at I-house, he hugged me in the cafeteria and said, "Oh, you have different hair." "Right," I replied, "the blonde's gone now." At that moment, I wanted to cry, thinking about the Mansi that existed before she met R. Mansi, who hadn’t been betrayed by a beautiful company. I wanted to cry because how dare these people remember me despite my constant efforts to erase myself from this building.