Itch 1

 No doubt I have healed the wounds because I have thought about it so much. 

- VS Naipaul 

Itch

I woke up with an itch in my stomach. My mother used to shout at us, how many times do I have to tell you to close the door behind you, and fumigate the entryway with mosquito spray, If they ruin one more night I am leaving... It is true that a mother’s wisdom takes decades to seep in. The mosquitoes were ruining my life. I couldn’t get a single night of uninterrupted sleep. Nothing worked, no net, no spray, nothing. I shut the windows well before dusk and suffered the suffocating pre-monsoon humidity, I sweat profusely, only to be woken up with mosquitoes in my ear, taunting me.

My stomach was itching in my sleep and I tried to ignore it because, and this is common knowledge, that an itch only itches if you scratch it. But it is also true that once you let that word itch enter your mind, you may as well have started scratching, and without knowing it, I had started scratching my stomach. To my knowledge, I had just been swatting around for mosquitoes around my face. But quickly I realised that there were none there. It seems absurd now to think that a mosquito would have bitten me at the centre of the stomach, completely covered by my nightshirt when all my extremities had been exposed, the blanket barely on my body. When I first stirred, I thought I was back home. I quickly came to know that I wasn’t, and there was an itch that was trying to get my attention, urgently, and so it did not matter where I was. I was trying to get it. I had both my hands on it, really covering the entire surface, diaphragm to crotch, left to right, but any easing of the sensation was illusory, and my stomach kept itching, pulling me out of the half-formed space of half-sleep into the solidity of the night.

I didn’t care why my stomach was itching. I just wanted to go back to sleep. And so I went at it like a beast. The usual technique was not getting me anywhere, and so I angled my nails inwards, really scratching, trying to catch this thing that seemed to keep slinking away from my reach. When I scratched here, it would pop up there, when I scratched over there, it would turn up somewhere completely different. I had had similar experiences before in which my body and mind had played games with each other, but this was crazy. I woke up fully and sat up in my bed.

I looked down at myself, hazily lit by the night light, in shock, like you would look at someone who had slapped you out of the blue. My mother was severely allergic to many things and mildly allergic to more things still, and so she had a rash or inflammation on her skin at all times. She would often remind me that the allergies had developed later in life, and that I should be very careful, which showed a lack of understanding of how conditions pass down familial lines. Maybe I had eaten or smelled, touched or inhaled something that had caused this itch. Was this how it felt like to be my mother?

Who can blame me. It was too much to bear. My stomach was throbbing with the itch that with every breath gained strength. I was scratching like an insane person, probably screaming too. The two girls that lived with me were shy and liked to make themselves invisible so I did not have many qualms about behaving in an unruly way. I guess I didn't know that I was screaming. The itch was so intense. In terms of intense experiences, the itch that night is the most intense. My stomach was on fire, I was scratching with my hands like claws, trying to excavate the itch out of my body. By now, I had realised that the problem was that the itch was actually under the skin and not on it, like these things usually happen. 

I went up to the mirror to assess, maybe there would still be a hint visible from the outside. All I remember seeing was my cut up torso, with gashes from my fingernails crisscrossing my skin. The itch was rising in pitch, I could hear it screeing. I closed my eyes, and focused on the weight at the pit of my stomach. I tried to follow the sound to its source, and hovered my hand over my torso like a metal detector. I was focusing hard, and the itch started playing along, following my hand under my skin. I made a loop, it made a loop, I stopped, it stopped. Whenever I glided the hand outside the frame of my stomach, it would stark throbbing at the edge. It was breathing deeply, following the steps I had learnt from the therapy DVDs lying around the house.

In a moment of confidence, I pounced at it with my thumb and index finger, just above my belly button. I dug in with my nails. A cut always hurts a lot more than you imagine it will, I shrieked and opened my eyes. When the dark spots cleared away, I saw that a pearl-sized chunk of flesh had come undone from my stomach and was dangling from under the nail of my index finger. The wound hurt in the place the excavated flesh.

Believe it or not, the itch had escaped from my grasp, it was still inside somewhere, strong. Scratching works as distraction, you create a painful experience to take your mind off an itch, and here I had created a perfect one, the cavity did continue to hurt, but there was still the itch, undefeated. I put my fingers in my mouth, salty and mineral from the sweat and blood, and dabbed saliva over my wounds. Outside the sounds of the town were shifting. It must have been around three or four, because the drunkards were gone by now and the sounds of the pack dogs had started coming up. They hunted for rats and other garbage vermin in the night. A nightjar was calling like a metronome. We used to watch TV late into the night back home. We would watch all the soaps, one after the next, barely able to keep them separate in our minds.

I lay down again on my bedsheets, out of sorts and damp with sweat. When you’re so tired, it's nice to let go of the little things and the moist bedding and the rank smell felt good under me. The itch had migrated to the very base of my stomach, and I had one finger plugged into my belly button, which was somehow helping, and was basting the rest of my stomach with saliva with my other hand. I closed my eyes. Sharp static filled my mind.

It is difficult to sustain a feeling for such a long period of time. And so, as I lay there that night, the itch did start to shift. In the beginning, you may say you feel a certain way about a certain someone, and in the middle, you end up saying something a little contrary to the set up, without really knowing it, or without anyone clocking it, and later still, you say something completely different. At some point, because my fingers were already wet, and little scenes of hushed affairs had fallen on my mind, and the itch had started gnawing lower and lower, I ended up with my fingers inside myself.

When I woke up late the next day, I found three dead mosquitoes, bloated with blood, one to the left of my stomach and two to the right. There was a wet t-shirt wrapped around my stomach. When I unwrapped the t-shirt, I saw the gashes and cavities I had created overnight, clammy in the centres and curling dry at the edges.