Something odd about odd numbers (Part-3)

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Click here to read Part 2

Click here to read Part 4

 At 3:30, she used to pace around the room in small-entangled circles – the shape of the number ‘8’

She used to count every single circle, until she reached thirty-eight, and then come back to sleep. I never bothered asking why.

At four, she would decide to shake things up again.

‘The bed is dirty. The maid didn’t change the sheets.’ She would complain.

‘It’s okay, love.  We’ll wash them in the morning.’

She wouldn’t protest, but she would pace around the room, anxiously. Then, in an attempt to feel better, she would toy with the tube light switches. She switched it on, and then off again.On, and then off again.

It disturbed me for a couple of weeks, but I knew better than to get up in the middle of the night and argue.

Thirty-eight cycles later, she would come back to bed.

‘You don’t want to wash your feet?’ I would ask.

‘It’s 4:07. Maybe later.'

At four thirty, she used to get up again and walk to the window to count the stars. It was beguiling to see her at work.

‘One, two, three, four…five twenty-six, five twenty seven…ah drat.’

And sometimes, when the clouds would hide some of the stars, she would wait, hoping to see an even number through the windows. She was different, but then, she was just finding her solace, like all of us.

This used to happen every single night. The first two weeks had been a lot of surprises, but by the end of the fourth week, I had grown accustomed to her activities. I was in love with someone disturbed. I did not know the cause of the disturbance, and I could not help her. I could just be patient. And so I was.

Sometimes, I would go to work in June, and come back in August. She used to flip through the calendar as if it were her favorite book. Time wasn’t her best friend. She often complained about clocks too.

‘I don’t like all the numbers in that circle.’ She would say. I had replaced all of them with their digital variants but she had a problem with them as well. In the end, she decided to stop all of them at 8:48 PM.

Four weeks isn’t long, I know, but I was in love, and I had grown accustomed to her. She had embraced my life like a tattered blanket covers a child on a cold winter night. I still felt cold, but she was all I had.  Her idiosyncrasies had become a part of my life, and any deviance from this new found version of sanity would annoy us both.