“Come out, come out wherever you are”, Priyanka’s sing-song voice drifted through the wooden door, making Riya quiver with excitement. As the voice grew fainter she let out a relaxed sigh, urgent danger abated. She took in her surrounding, not that there was much to it. She was hiding inside the middle rack of the wooden cupboard, neatly tucked in the little space along with the few clothes in it. She smiled, feeling comfortable. It was the first of many times she would hide there.
She spend many lazy afternoons in there, thinking about school, her friends, ice-cream and dolls. The rack came to mean different things to her. She saw it as a safe haven, where no one heard or saw her, a place where she could think, laugh, cry and simply be herself. With time, the thoughts she shuffled around changed but she was still drawn there.
Riya never stopped growing but the rack refused to grow with her. Now she had to move out the clothes in the racks to fit herself in it. She would tuck her legs under her and hug herself, making her body as small as she could. With the door closed, bathed in the darkness, she felt safe. She was a caterpillar, waiting to turn into a butterfly and this was her shell, the place that would transform her. It would always be her home.
After finishing off with school, Riya started college in her hometown, which meant she didn’t have to stay away from home. But she had outgrown the rack, finding it hard to breathe in there. Unable to access her hidden world, she felt home-sick in her own house, stuck in a world she couldn’t leave. She felt forlorn and lost, exiled from the only place she longed for.
That’s when she stopped eating. She couldn’t, knowing that the more she ate, the farther she was from there. She was again small enough to fit in, though once there she found herself in tears, like shattered fragments roughly collected and left in the cupboard, unnecessary and forgotten. But she was home, she was safe. Her friends and family were concerned about how small she had gotten, how famished she looked, but of course they didn’t understand.
Some nights, she found her sleep interrupted by the whispers, “come out, come out wherever you are”. She would search for the source, only to find it to be the cupboard, her cupboard, calling out to her. She spend some nights there, lost in the whispers she shared with the rack. They were best friends that knew each other more than anyone else could. She refused to admit that the cupboard scared her, the scratchy whispered calls, the dark small spaces, the leering feeling.
One day, they found her inside the same cupboard, brittle, bleary-eyed and dead. The doctors said she may have suffocated to death, that maybe she fell asleep and the limited oxygen in the cupboard had run out. No one knew why she was in the cupboard, or if her anorexia had anything to do with it. All anyone saw was a little girl lost in a cupboard.
Adithya Murali
19
heartbeats of the lost soul 
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