Maya Goel

The Sea Witch

The door opened with a sudden motion and I nearly fell inside. We stared at each other for seven shocked seconds, until she let out a wild little laugh and grabbed my wrist, dragging me indoors.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, her grip almost numbing my hand.

‘Well…’ I faltered. It should have been a simple question.

She raised her eyebrows and I thought she would cackle again.

‘How did you find me?’ she asked instead.

‘Actually, I didn’t,’ I said quickly, relieved that this much was honest. ‘I didn’t find you. I mean I found you but I wasn’t trying to find you. I mean it happened by accident. I was wandering around, knocking on doors, and then you opened…’

She didn’t look convinced. All I could do was stare into her willow-bark eyes, hoping that look would have the power it once did.

She seemed lost for a moment, then smoothed back tendrils of escaping hair as she busied herself making tea in the large expensive kitchen.

‘So, what do you do nowadays,’ I changed the subject with a smile.

‘Oh, nothing actually. I’m a housewife.’ She straightened her shoulders, forcing casual defiance, but somewhere in her expression I caught a mixture of shame, caution, and something else.

‘Oh.’

I always like to know where my students are in the years after they graduate. But the new line of work had taken me elsewhere, and I had lost touch with this pupil. The exquisite one. The star who always topped her class. The quiet, fierce child whose silence frightened boys. The shy young girl who, after twelve years in the same school, almost became my friend.

Her gaze shifted and I noticed for the first time that she looked worn. I thought she might be about to cry, but then she flicked her long braid over her shoulder and turned to wash the dishes. She used to detest housework. I offered to help and she refused. I would have insisted, but there weren’t too many: the kitchen was spotless.

She asked if I could stay and I confessed that I would be grateful for a bed—if it wasn’t too much trouble of course. I apologized for the sudden imposition and she assured me that it would be a pleasure. I couldn’t tell if she meant it. It’s not that I wasn’t delighted to see her—I was—but something about the way she held herself, smile frayed at the edges, grated against my nerves.

Then she turned the full force of her gaze on me, as if trying to communicate something and hoping I would get the silent message.

‘My husband will be home soon,’ she said. I nodded. She started to leave the room. Then, almost knocking over the delicately painted vase in the corner, she turned and flung her arms around my neck. I hugged her tightly.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she whispered. ‘But,’ she pulled her head back far enough to look serious, ‘you have to promise me.’

‘What?’

‘You cannot interfere.’ She sounded almost threatening.

‘Okay,’ I agreed, unsure whether to be alarmed. It sounded as though, more than her husband, it was my presence that worried her.

‘Where are you going next?’ she asked.

‘To the city.’

‘Can I come with you?’

I knew she hated cities.

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you!’ Her old buoyancy had returned.

She showed me to the guest room and, too exhausted to puzzle over this strange girl any longer, I fell into a satisfying nap. Three hours later, I awoke to the sound of boots thumping on the whining floorboards. The husband must be home. I lay motionless, straining to eavesdrop. Unable to make out their words, I fell back asleep.

***

Later that night, the thumping grew louder and was punctuated with muffled screams. I banged my fists on their locked bedroom door, heedless of promises. There was no way to get in. I called out, but my voice was drowned by the sound of heavy furniture being dragged across wood. Then there was silence. After waiting for what seemed like an hour, I must have gone back to my room.

But the next morning, I saw them together.

He was hunched over in a dressing gown, bare thin limbs dangling from its folds. Her neck was wrapped in a silk scarf, as if to protect him from the sight of what he’d done. They kissed tenderly. She cradled his face like a child’s. He whimpered, clung to her, and begged for something in a mumble. The glass vase sat broken in the corner. It wasn’t until she went to the bathroom that he noticed me, and then he started like a bow-legged faun and his eyes glazed over, staring.

Eventually, she coaxed him to get dressed and leave. I pestered her about what happened, where he went, how they could afford the house – but she refused to say anything. Finally, her coldness silenced me. Once I pretended to calm down, she allowed me to help.

We cooked enough for three meals, put half the food in the fridge, and left the other half wrapped neatly in cloth to keep it warm on the granite counter. It was only when she scrubbed the kitchen spotless again that I noticed dark stains on the walls. When I asked her what they were, she stared at me impassively and said ‘blood.’ I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

We did not talk much, but the quiet determination of her younger self had returned. I was surprised to see the suitcase already packed. It was not yet noon when we walked out.

***

After a long and grimy bus ride, we checked into a simple hotel boasting scenic seaside views. Our conversational exchanges during the day were light, cheery, trivial. She did not offer any information about her past and I didn’t probe.

I am not usually given to flights of fancy. I hadn’t read any fantasy since my teenage years. But that night, sleeping next to her on the queen-sized bed, I dreamt that we were journeying through a black and white film-scape. Some demonic force was after us. Then we were running—she was faster—I could not keep up—the thing was close behind (was it a giant wall of mist?)—I tripped and fell and told her to give up: we weren’t going to make it. But as the stubborn child she always was, she reached into her bra and pulled out a crystal vial. Then she tipped it back and swallowed the contents. ‘Trust me,’ she said. A pattern glowed on her arm like some ancient runes. And then I was instructed to cling to her as we took off into the air.

The dream turned to technicolor: we flew onward tailed by a thunderstorm filled with raging cackling laughter, and then everything dissolved. The next scene was in a fairytale palace, where she lay on an immense feather bed, looking as though she might sleep for a hundred years. Or a thousand – whatever the rules say about people like that. Translucent elf-like folk tended to her anxiously. A giant tree loomed outside, and for some reason, her life was tied to the life of this tree. If it fell, the kingdom would crumble.

I awoke with a renewed sense of guilt, emptiness, and yearning for I do not know what.

The next few days passed in a blur: I cannot remember what we ate or saw or how we spoke to each other. When we reached the big city, she stayed in my apartment on the outskirts. She would stare at the city lights for hours every night, mesmerized. I didn’t tell her about my work, but she followed me in secret one day and figured it out. Part of me thought she would leave. But part of me wasn’t worried; as always, her mystery was bigger than mine.

In her suitcase was a scattering of clothes and a queer collection of diaries. I longed to open one but resisted. It’s not that I respected her privacy—such boundaries were meaningless—but I was clinging to the last few rules that governed normal society. Her society was not normal. The world we shared was more surreal, brighter at the edges. I could barely remember how things had been before.

Those were happy days; we took long walks on piers, laughing until our stomachs hurt, painting each other’s nails an atrocious fuchsia. We swam and buried ourselves in hot sand and built castles that we decorated with broken shells, waxy leaves, and pieces of sea-green glass that had been rounded to smooth pebbles beneath the waves.

She went through a phase of obsession with the artist Yves Klein. I encouraged her to paint, but she had little patience with her own lack of skill. When I suggested writing, she told me ‘Words are too wordy. They trap emotion. Not set it free.’

Despite being near the outskirts of the polluted city, the ocean was a clear cerulean expanse, apparently unruffled by human life. For all its rumbles and crashing waves, it emanated a vortex of silence that I could touch in her presence. At times I wondered about descending into this solipsism: as if our own two selves were vast enough and deep enough to compensate for abandoning everything outside. But I could not resist the spiraling flight.

One night, I awoke to moonbeams streaming through the skylight. There was something strange about that brightness: like high noon cast in silver and shadow. I climbed out of bed and went to the living room to check if she, too, was wide awake. The cot where she slept was outlined in a sharp silhouette against the painted white wall, her sheet and blanket twisted around each other in a crumpled pile. The bed was empty.

I made my way to the door with a calm sense of purpose that surprised me, as if I knew exactly where she would be. It was cold outside. I returned to pick up my coat, then stepped out and came back again to take the blanket from her bed, before going downstairs onto the deserted street. The beach was a familiar 20-minute walk away. But on this lustrous night, it felt like taking a new route. Dim defiant stars crackled just out of the moon’s reach, making the air twang. The horizon, usually shrouded in a yellow electric haze, looked thicker and bluer than normal.

During that solitary walk, I realized that the present tense is immense. It is everything, stretching in every direction. If each moment is ‘now,’ then now lasts forever and time is infinite. The unending expanse of brightness piled on darkness and shadows draped over light assured me that that night was an infinity.

When the long shoreline loomed closer, I scanned the beach in sudden panic: it looked empty. What if I had been wrong? If I was, then all that silence, peace, the sense of epiphany, would be untrue. Nothing special would have happened. I could not bear to be thrust back into bleak reality.

Finally, a hunched protrusion interrupted the smooth stretch of soaking sand. All despair evaporated. I expected her to startle when I approached, but she did not betray the slightest surprise. Her face was an expressionless mirror. But a faint current rippled beneath that fragile glinting skin.

I sat next to her and she shivered, so I spread the blanket over us both. She buried her head under it and was soon shaking with uncontrollable sobs. I stroked and comforted her as best I could, but it went on for what seemed like hours, the relentless heartbreak.

She tried to offer an explanation. ‘It’s all vanity.’

‘Hmmm?’

‘Why are you kind to me?’

‘I’m not being kind. I’ll always be here for you. You can tell me anything,’ I whispered.

‘I’m not crying over him,’ she confessed. ‘It’s because of vanity. The guilt I’m supposed to feel is overshadowed by this huge self-centred obsession that I can’t get rid of. All these years have been in careful service to that image I painted. That I would give everything of myself. And no one could ever see it, there was no audience. But now you’re here. I’ve been thinking of you all these years. And then you came, just like that. And then I take a hammer and smash the painting in.’

Her bitterness softened. ‘I have so much love to give, I don’t know what to do with it. But this ego feeds off of it – maybe I just love myself more than anything else?’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘You know, I didn’t love him at first.’

‘Why did you marry him?’

‘I told you, vanity. I wanted to defy expectations.’

‘You certainly achieved that’ I laughed mirthlessly. It hadn’t occurred to me that I played a role in trapping her – in curating the image of the perfect wild, rebellious, sensitive girl. That, too, had to be broken. And yet, image was everything to her.

‘Later on, I think I did love him.’

‘What?’

‘You don’t know how gentle he could be.’

That night was still vivid in my mind, one of the worst nights of my life. But in some ways, perhaps it was also one of the best. I hadn’t felt anything so keenly in over a decade. I don’t know if it was her, or them together, that punctured the reverie. It let me out.

She sniffed loudly and I grew exasperated at the stream of self-pity. ‘Why are you blaming yourself? Especially for that…that thing!’

‘Because I abandoned someone who needed me for his life.’

Perhaps it was vanity after all.

I wanted to tell her that her egoism was juxtaposed with a sense of self so fluid that it could no longer recognize its own boundaries. But I didn’t dare. And I knew what she would say. Empathy came naturally to her because it was so easy to step out of herself—and she knew it because she had carefully constructed that self. Yet, as I thought this through, something was missing. All my attempts to pin her down only further obfuscated this creature.

Exhausted, she slumped under the blanket. We held each other as if shielding our intimacy from the world, cradled by the night’s vastness. Icy waves lapped at our feet, diatoms twinkling in their froth. When we kicked and splashed, starry crests of bioluminescence rippled outwards.

We made our way home just before dawn. It occurred to me that I had never seen the red moon setting at this hour. We did not speak of that night again. But the memories that haunted her offered to become my ghosts too.

And then began the string of lovers.

***

It was like taming horses. She would find arrogant men, independent, spirited, insecure. And she’d break them all in.

The nice ones, whom she called ‘good eggs,’ were held at bay. The misogynists were drawn close with sweetness, and then punished. In the end, they didn’t get what they came for. She held her body aloft, darting around them like a prize, allowing herself to be objectified and demanding total submission in return. She once told me that she was a virgin and intended to remain one.

I often wondered what it would take to be her equal. When there were women, she always treated them with care. Occasionally, she even admitted to having crushes on them. But in the end, she didn’t want the underlying equality that complicates a power dynamic between two women. She didn’t have the heart to subjugate her own kind. Perhaps this is why she never tried to hurt me. The men made for better sport.

And yet, she seemed dissatisfied, bored. She wore vulnerability on her sleeve, like strings dangling from a fake bow. As if pulling on them could unravel something, but it didn’t. I cannot say that this was just an act—any more performative than the performance that was her life; that is all of our lives. She crumpled authenticity in her fist. And then she used it as paint.

While she was out hunting lovers, I started reading her diaries. I was prepared for many things. But what I did not expect was that, in all those years since high school, she should write about — me.

Every dark, brutal fantasy had me as its spectator. The characters who abused her and whom she abused in turn were paper cutouts: one-dimensional, disposable, and indistinguishable from one another. I, too, felt thin and translucent at times, with no part to play but the invisible audience. I did not enjoy being so devoid of agency. And yet, it was oddly flattering. As if it was all for me. A queen had invented a life woven around the prospect of my gaze. I hadn’t understood what she was trying to tell me all along.

She claimed that she didn’t like writing, but after all these tragic fantasies, in the last notebook was a loose page that she must have written after we moved in together:

Certain gusty moon-filled nights can only be gifted to us by the sea. The sea has no story. Language at best skirts and skims its foam. Riding a crest or pushing depth, salting its waters with enchantment, words but brush the meaning they spawn with gesture and wave. This bright equinox at summer’s high turn, bracing against the wind blowing autumn ashore, the shimmer-coloured surface draws you into the coldest of nights. The windows must be left open no matter what. Burning your bottom on the radiator, the view from your bed is worth its ice. It reminds you of those dark green leaves with downy silver undersides that glint like white flowers covering the trees at dusk. It looks nothing like them. For a moment, you are annoyed with the poets who reduced the sea to metaphors. But you are one of them. And this ocean can take it. Its star-dusted expanse, like the sky, stains everything. Today you learned that the sky is as deep as the sea. It holds a different night. And something that can never become day. Not glass, but rumpled mercury.

It should have been the night the whales sang. You told me that humpbacks used to visit these shores. Where are they now? In those days, a breaching whale could shatter light.

It was so different from all the other entries. Imperious, raw, but gentle. I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or herself, but I remembered the week leading up to the autumn equinox. She would brave the cold while I huddled under a blanket on the shore. Then we burned ourselves on the radiators in my room. I told her stories of whales and ships; she grew enchanted and embellished them until the humpbacks entered both of our dreams. All the other characters were sent home.

***

The long and short of it is that we lived like that for years. We made our peace with not knowing each other’s pasts. She eventually outgrew the fantasies, fits and flirtations. I did not mind her lovers, but I was glad when they stopped. Something changed after she found out that I had read her diaries. It was as if her desire for an audience had been fulfilled, and yet remained empty because I did not react in the way she wanted. I still do not know what she wanted from me, but whatever it was, she discarded the need for it. We both fell in love with the life we had, gloriously alone, together.

I gave up my job a month after she followed me in secret. It had paid well (unlike teaching), so there was enough to support us both. We opened a small shop together, making fragrant soaps and candles. Neither of us knew we’d be so good at it. We had barely interacted with the people in our neighborhood – I used to keep a low profile even before we met – but now, our products became surprisingly popular.

I do not know what became of her husband with his soft, almost-beautiful face. I occasionally feel a pang, but it does not last long. The restless ache that constricted my throat when I first saw her is now gone.

It is not as if the nightmares never return. But when they do, we walk along the beach, hand in hand. She pretends to be a witch singing softly to the moon. And on those rare nights when luminous creatures glint in the waves, we swim away from shore, launching ourselves further and further out to sea.

Three years ago, I wondered if the question of mental health was like being gay: it took centuries of struggle to bring it to the surface; and when people finally came around to accepting it, they slapped on a label, put it in a shiny new box, and discarded the old carton. So that they could move on to the next urgent thing.  

I was thinking about the difference between America and India: how sexuality was compartmentalized into categories in the West, whereas here, desire flowed in the streets. That’s terribly orientalist of me, of course – essentializing the East and West in such simplified terms. But it’s my famous professor who came up with this distinction.

Madness is also compartmentalized with a plethora of diagnostic terminology – yet it’s a part of everyday language – many of us jokingly take pride in being a little crazy. I wondered why I had never heard of an asylum in India – we have them of course – but I don’t remember ever noticing one. Asylum has a different meaning too. It’s famously granted in houses of worship. If you wander the streets completely mad, but worshiping your god, no one will bat an eyelid. Mira dressed as a beggar, left her husband the King, and sang the poems she composed to her beloved Lord Krishna all day. And no one tried to lock her up, except possibly her in-laws. Everyone else became her disciples.

So, does this mean that, in those days, there was space for more things than sanity? Just as there was space on temple walls for women having sex with each other, their bodies openly entangled in ancient stone: in a society that pretends to throw tantrums at such unspeakable thoughts? But maybe that’s precisely it: there was space for the unspeakable. Because not everything was about words.

We know that words empower and we also know that to define is to limit. Power and limits: is that what this is about?

Of course, it’s always more complicated. They say it’s dangerous to romanticize the past. It’s probably also dangerous to entangle queerness and mental health in this way – there are already enough stereotypes.

However, what queerness and mental health seem to have in common, to me, is an inarticulable complexity. A sense of excess. A refusal to be contained. Vast, yet particular. As palpable and restless as seawater.

Maya grew up on an organic farm in the rainforest, where she lives with her parents and many dogs. She has an MPhil in Anthropocene Studies (University of Cambridge) and a BA in English Literature (Ashoka University), and now wants to pursue marine biology – studying dolphins and whales – and hoping to be immersed the languages of different disciplines. She is currently working on a nonfiction novel about academia, female friendship, queerness, science and art, and what moss can do for a broken heart.