Disclaimer: I don't own these characters. Someone else does. JK Rowling etc.
Author's note: I was away for a while. First, role playing SWTOR. Then, I got a new job. Parvati's story continues.
14: My name is Parvati Patil
One year later
'My name is Parvati, Parvati Patil,' I tell myself again, and again, 'My name is Parvati, Parvati Patil.'
My hands are deep in the water, filled to the brim. I feel myself sinking down and down into the depth of desperation. I am drowning again and again, into the murky water. Foams surround my arms to the elbows, and threaten to creep up, up, up. I imagine when the foam reaches my head it will wash my memories away, like a sand castle tumbling into the laving waves. Am I by the sea? the damp, cold sea?
'My name is Parvati,' I tell myself. If I pause, for a moment, I feel some of my memories begin to slip away. I forget names. I know the numbers. I run through the names again and again in my head before I sleep. Hanna, Hanna Abbot, not Hannah. Padma, Padma Davies, not Patil. I keep forgetting my niece's name, or was it a nephew. I think I remembered it yesterday when I went to bed. But the memories trickle away bits by little bits.
'My name is Parvati,' I tell myself. If anyone remembers me in the world, I have hope. But I have already begun to forget myself. And my existence slowly evaporating before my eyes, like -
"Hey! You!" It's the manager. "If you're finished with the dishes, go on back and unload the potatoes! Quit stalling, girl!"
I pull my hands out of the dishwater, the soap bubbles clinging to me, desperately trying to wipe me away, I suppose. I dry my arms on my sides. Jeans. I am wearing jeans, that I haven't washed since, I don't know, since I got lost in the world, I guess.
"Yeah, yeah!" I call back. He doesn't know my name, the man who runs the small fish-n-chips joint that looks like a franchise, but isn't. I pat my jeans, making sure I have my pack of cigarettes in my back pocket. Sometimes I forget the light, but I think I've got it stuffed into the carton. At least, I hope so.
Since the world forgot about me, and since I've begun to slowly forget myself, I've been trying to keep some basic functionalities in check. Things I can do on rote. Always leave the house with my keys, my wallet and my smokes. Always do the three locks on the doors when I come home. Always water the sunflowers when I get up in the morning. And never ever feed them after midnight... no, that was something else. I forget.
Outside, London is chilly, and not so foggy as mucky. There's a slight dampness, like a passing rain that I've just missed (lucky me!) and the animal that drives the delivery has dropped the crate of potatoes a few paces away just to make my life a little bit more miserable.
It's been four hundred and twelve days since I woke up in a gutter outside King's Cross station, with a news paper over me.
That's about an year, a month, and a half, I think. It's not that I'm becoming addled in the head, along with the encroaching darkness of memory loss; it's because, from what I've gathered, I might have been passed out a couple of days before I woke up. It hasn't been all downhill since then. I've actually regained some memory.
At first, I couldn't really remember even my name. I called myself something else. Mary Edgerton something, I believe. But then again, that didn't help either since no one seemed to know this Mary, as well. The police didn't know what to do with me, and after a few days they dumped me in a shelter. It's been a long and desperate crawl out of that den.
Sometimes, I dream of some family I left behind. I probably had parents who are looking for me, but I've already exhausted the phone books to the greetings of strangers. I wonder what happened that day, so many days ago. I imagine that I came out of a home and a family, and a life with friends. Then, I entered the world, as a bum.
Good job, Parvati!
I began piecing my mind together, with toilet paper, at first. Then when I fished out a pencil and a notebook from the garbage can, I began writing them down.
Parvati Patil. Padma Patil, or Padma Davies. Hanna Abbot, who dropped the H in her name. Lavendar Brown, Zebediah Blaizini, Horrible Slughorn... I don't think I've got the names right for some of them. Some names revoke faces, others memories, while some I am completely in the dark about. But I think I've written them down in my notebook back at my room. Oh, yes! I do have a room of my own, now, in the nice cozy place called Hackney.
I fish my pack of cigarettes out of my back pocket, shimmy one fine long menthol ... oops. I think I've left my lighter somewhere. My name is Parvati Patil. I might have left it in the meat locker when I went in to look for the ham that was threatening to go stale.
I don't want to go back in, yet. The Manager is probably looking for me again. He's impatient when I'm late with hauling the potatoes into the storage, but he's not impatient to get them out of storage, I can tell you that.
Damn, it's about to rain again. Something in me feels like it's going to rain, again.
Sometimes, I imagine that I can block the rain. Sometimes, when I'm drenched from head to toe, I imagine that I can suddenly get myself dried. I imagine, maybe, that I can just put up my finger like this, and then say some magic word and conjure a light. That would be awesome.
I try snapping my fingers.
"Aba Cadabra!" I whisper, giggle to myself.
No, that's wrong. That word sounds phony. I know it's phony. Just that it sounds ridiculously phony. Like some parody of a word more ancient and deeper than time itself. There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man who once went in search for a fountain of eternal youth and a mythical city of magical wondermen who lived in a vast and complex city. They created paradise. And then they began to turn on themselves. The traveler only finds ruins of a maze like mess. He finds a beastly figure of a man, a man like an animal. The traveler gives up in despair, only to hear his beast-man say, "I remember… three thousand years ago." Somewhere in the vast space of emptiness, my memory is waiting for me. Perhaps 'I forgot' means that it is just somewhere in between, only hidden.
"Incendio," I whisper.
I am not even surprised, when a flickering flame appears at my finger tips. It feels natural. I should know this, it was only buried. I stare at the flame, and it gives me warmth, even though it's just a little thing that dances in agony from the small sizzle of rain drops. It refuses to die.
I lean forward and light my cigarette. Ah, bliss.
"Parvati?"
I am startled to hear a voice in the back alley; more so as someone calls my name. Someone calls from the end of the alley. From the darkness. My heart pounds.
I strain to see into the shadows, as a figure emerges. Clickety clack of heels on the pavement, crunching over broken glass. Someone emerges. A woman. About my age.
"It's me, Lavender!"