Perfume Vial

“collecting memories?”

My younger sister Mia said pointing to the perfume vial in my hand.

“it’s a perfume vial”

“oh harry and Dumbledore stored memories in that”

Memories? I stood up and walked to the windowsill. Did emma too store a memory in that perfume vial?

Emma was my aunt who died a week ago. She had been living in the next door for a while now. She was not sick but unusually quiet. Infact it felt like she wore silence as clothes. Even if it were bombing outside, Emma’s room would still be the same, unusually quiet.

My mother told us Emma once had been a lawyer and lived in another city but she quit her job. She took up teaching at a nearby high school. I don’t remember much of her except once when she invited us over and I must have been six or seven that year.

After dinner I switched to “peter pan” on tv and she sat next to me.

“peter pan- oh I love it. Do you ?”

“you still watch that? Comeon you are too old for all that. How many times have you watched it? Thirty or forty?” my mother laughed at her

“well its my first time with sophie”

I fell asleep midst the movie. When I woke up Peter was biding bye to Wendy and Emma was wiping her tears. I sat up and she looked at me, laughed and said something I really don’t remember. But the way she looked at me with her big brown teary eyes was painful. I never saw her again until a few years back when she moved to our neighborhood. My mother told us Emma was growing old so she wanted to stay around the family. For a year she was fine. We would watch movies at her place. She would read stories or poems to me and Mia. Then something happened like the withering of blossoms. Suddenly stillness made acquaintance with her. Emma took to her bed and she wouldn’t leave her room. For days she wouldn’t eat. That is when I guess silence infested her.

Doctor was called and I overhead him saying that she was depressed and there was no other problem with her health. We tried to stay around more and get her books or flowers. She took no notice. Sometimes I would visit her and sit quietly in one corner of her room. I would read to myself. Only silence passed between us briefly interrupted by her occasional sighs.

One day I saw her pull a perfume vial from beneath her pillow. She removed the lid and sniffed. A tear rolled down the corner of her eye. She put the vial back and sat under those covers listless looking at her hands. I felt weird.

“emma? Is everything okay?”

“maps my dear, how tricky and complex”

I thought she was driveling but she was talking about the lines in her palms.

For the next few weeks she seemed to hold that vial close and sniff it occasionally. I was almost convinced that it was heroine or cocaine because the vial had a white liquid and never had I seen any perfume of that colour.

One morning she didn’t answer the door. I thought she was asleep but while I sat solving the algebra assignment in the class I felt uneasy. All kinds of weird thoughts crawled beneath my skin. I ran back home before even the class dismissed and I rang her door bell. I stood there for a while and I knew something was wrong. I called my parents. They hurried back home, the door was broken and there she was. She laid unconscious in one of the corridors. Her body was cold as ice. We rushed her to the hospital.

The doctors said she had passed out because she was weak and had been starving. Her health was failing and she needed special attention. It was a physical manifestation of her depression.

When Emma opened her eyes she looked different to me. There was a strange calmness in her disposition. She gestured me to come close. I lowered my ear close to hear her.

“my vial” she whispered.

“tell me the name? I will buy you a fresh bottle”

“no. my vial “

I protested because the hospital was not in close vicinity of our neighborhood but she was adamant that she only wanted her vial. So father drove me to get her stuff. The vial was still under her pillow and out of curiosity I removed the lid to smell Emma’s preserved treasure. To my surprise the white liquid in that bottle was not perfume but shampoo!! Yes an old shampoo called ICE which hardly anyone used now.

“shampoo? She sniffs shampoo? Why?”

Did she like that smell? Ofcourse she did that’s why she sniffed it. Was it like petrol or nailpolish remover to her? Intoxicating?

Well I was not quite sure why she preserved  that shampoo. When I gave her that vial she seemed happy and I helped her sit up. The brown of her eyes seemed to have faded. She looked old to me, much older than she looked the day before. The creases from her forehead had smoothed.

“emma its not perfume? Its shampoo?”

Her wide eyes dwindled as I asked her these questions. She tried to remove the lid but she was very weak to do that. So I helped her. She sniffed the vial and made a bleak sigh. Then she gave me that vial and rested her back.

“should I read to you? “

She nodded.

“it’s a poem by Robert Frost called The Road Not Taken”

When I finished reading the last line she was already gone.