Book Excerpt: Clearly Invisible in Paris

[The following is an excerpt from Koel Purie Rinchet's debut book, Clearly Invisible in Paris.]

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It was barely two weeks ago while Violet was airing out her studio that she saw Neera silently swaying upside down outside her apartment window. She was so serene and calm that no one on the street noticed a woman suspended from the fifth-floor, not that there were many people outside save the Tunisian fruit seller, who was finally busy selling fruit now that the farmers’ market was shut. How long had she been dangling like that? Once Violet comprehended what she was seeing, she didn’t wait for the lift. She legged it, taking two or three stairs per stride. Rosel walked in seconds after her. Together, they gradually pulled up the five hundred-thread-count sheet, wrapped like a lifeline around Neera’s ankle. They should’ve called the pompier or the ambulance or some professional, but instead they went into emergency mode, not stopping to think what would happen if the sheet came undone while hauling Neera up. Once Neera was lying safely on the bed, with her head resting on the said sheet of salvation, she started laughing hysterically, a genuine guttural laugh that showed no sign of stopping. The other two didn’t join in. The laughter eventually subsided and she offered an explanation that only made sense in The World According to Neera.

Apparently, after consuming a handful of ineffective painkillers, Neera had bundled herself tightly in a sheet—she had read somewhere that inconsolable babies felt comforted in swaddling cloths because they mimicked the womb. One end of her sheet had still been annoyingly tied to the vertical post of her four-poster bed, where the random Scandinavian lover from the night before, a Japanophile and self-taught master of some erotic spiritual art form called ‘Shibari’, had tied it in an impossible-to-open knot. As he had been binding her, he’d said, ‘You’re about to lose your ego to serenity at the knife-edge of danger.’ The bondage, the sex, his presence had only made her feel more alone and she had shooed away the almost-lover before he had even come. Then, she’d used the free end of the sheet to wrap herself in it, curled up tightly in a swaddle and waited in foetal position for the promised consolation of not being born yet.

When she had no longer been able to tolerate the pain in her heart, she had wanted to throw it out of the window and, since it was inside her chest, logically she’d have to throw herself out with it. So, in her woozy state, enmeshed in her sheet, she’d managed to stand up on her four-poster bed next to the south-facing window and had leapt over. The sheet had unravelled around her like something out of an aerial acrobatic act as she’d plummeted down. Her right foot, however, had got entangled in the sheet, while the other end had remained firmly tied to her bed.

(Excerpted with permission from Clearly Invisible in Paris by Koel Purie Rinchet.)