The Metamorphosis of Noor: A Surrealist Short Story
Dive into a hauntingly vivid metamorphosis short story by Suchetna Bhattacharyya. Trapped between academic dread, intense sensory overload, and overwhelming isolation, a student experiences a deeply unsettling and surreal bodily transformation in the quiet heat of spring.
Sunlight beams in from the right side of the full glass window. The narrow, small balcony looks half-cleaned. Pigeons tear apart the net outside, entering and exiting through the long vertical grills, medium block–sized, thin, vainly protecting the inside. The master bed is placed on the left side of the balcony.
Noor, sleeping at the extreme left of the bed, tries to open her eyes at the sound of pigeons flapping their wings, trying to exit through the net, faintly vibrating the glass window. Her eyes shut again, accompanied by the ceiling fan’s carrying sound ; three layers at once, each making a different noise. The background noise goes ‘gshhh gshhh’. The middle one sounds like ‘khshh khshh’. The core noise carries both, stretching them while occasionally fading. The sound moves round and round, a monotone inside Noor’s ears.
After a while, a small ting notification on her phone lights up for a fraction of a second. Noor tries to wake up with a metal-burning smell. She feels something slimy and thin crawling slowly from the hollow middle of her collarbone up to the middle of her throat. The slimy, thin creature (Noor is not sure what it is) stops at the center of her throat gland. Its slime hardens, like a single stick of a coconut broom, and continues to slide upward, reaching the nasopharynx, tearing the flesh a little there, entering the inner side of the tongue. It slides along the tongue toward her front left incisor. Noor feels herself bite the top tip of it. The broken part has no taste, feels sandy for a moment, then melts immediately in the middle of her tongue.
Noor wakes up to see emails, WhatsApp texts, Instagram notifications, and other app alerts filling the top of her screen. She slides everything back and focuses on the mail from her professor.
“Hi Noor,
I was wondering if you can meet this afternoon for a discussion on the part ‘commodification of fetishes’. It might help provide a theoretical lens for your dissertation. Let me know.
Best.”
Noor’s groan almost turns into a soft snore. At first, she considers typing while still half-lying on the bed, the blanket on, the fan at its lowest speed. Spring brings sweat at the corners of her nose, the upper lip, where skin meets skin at the throat and cleavage. She touches the middle of her chest, rubs the sweat with two fingers, and looks at the liquid beads.
She gets up. She goes to the table at the right corner, diagonally placed at the other end of the bed, and blows out the last wax of two scented candles still holding their flame—mahogany and lavender.
After freshening up, she puts water in a pan and adds a carefully measured amount of sugar, rustling on the spoon. When the water begins to bubble, she lowers the flame, adds the tea leaves, lets it simmer quietly at the side of the pan, then pours it into her mug.
Outside the hall, the kitchen window facing the gas oven shows another window opposite. It remains dark inside because of the bright 11 a.m. sunlight entering the narrow lane between two apartment buildings. She notices no pigeon sitting on their window grill.
From another apartment building—built tightly, without space—she hears a boy calling out to another: “Bheepuu, O Bheppuuu.” She finds the sound funny. Maybe a teenage boy calling a younger one? The voice rises from the chest to the throat, then fades lightly, like a feather, almost in a countertenor style.
She carries the mug back into her small, faded, sunlit room with heavy curtains and sits in the middle of the bed, a pillow on her lap. Noor thinks of delaying the meeting. She hasn’t properly read the article or what it tries to say about fetishes and commodification. She only marked a question mark beside the word fetishes. That stuck. The rest didn’t.
Instead, she replies:
“Sure, will two pm be fine?”
She scrolls through WhatsApp messages, from friends, groups, online apps. She closes the app and turns to the song on her phone, “Famous Blue Raincoat.” She has been listening to it for the past four days in a loop, maybe ten or twelve times a day. She heard Cohen’s original version long ago and didn’t like it when she was nineteen. Four days ago, she doesn’t remember why, she revisited the song, first playing Aurora’s tribute, then Cohen’s old-age performance from the Dublin concert, and then his much younger version of the original.
The professor finally fixes the time at 2:30. Noor wants to explore the song more, to play the original again, but a mail notification interrupts, followed by messages from her sitar class group. Then the online delivery notification comes. She puts the phone down and gets up to collect the order.
While placing clothes from the cupboard onto the middle of her bed, Noor turns the geyser on in the hall washroom. She chooses a light pink, threaded white crop shirt and black trousers, to go with her jute bag and violet jhumkas with silver hangings at the ends. She takes off her faded blue night T-shirt and black shorts and goes to the toilet, wrapping a towel from chest to hip.
She places the towel carefully on the right side, where the hanger is. Then she turns on the shower in her small toilet, opening only the hot water tap. After a moment, steam starts rising from the floor. Noor feels the heat lessen along her shoulders, scapula, back, and waist. The water grows more comfortably warm against her body. She lifts her face toward the shower and lets the thick drops fall onto it. She covers her face with liquid soap and rubs it vigorously, then slows down, closing her eyes to resist the droplets. Her hands move down to her inner breasts and cleavage, where she feels the heat of sweat slowly relaxing. She lifts her right breast slightly, letting the water run over it. Her shoulder-length hair is tightly knotted back with a scrunchie, now half-wet. Noor slides her right hand from her temple to her scalp, feeling the slight stickiness between the strands. She doesn’t want to wash it with shampoo today. She turns off the tap. The splattering stops. The thumping noise from the upper floor fades, and the side neighbour’s doors—opening and closing—become audible again.
Noor dries her body carefully, starting with her hands and finishing with her shaved legs and feet. While getting ready, she pulls the heavy curtain fully shut, noticing the pigeons still confused inside the thin balcony, trapped by the torn net. Her flatmate once said there had been a pigeon hanging from her own room’s window net, caught by a thread around its throat. She moisturises her body and face properly, then wears the ironed cotton shirt and polyester black trousers. She pairs them with an oxidised, thick, rounded bangle and the violet jhumkas. She pauses for a second, deciding whether to wear eyeliner. She decides against it and sharpens her eyelashes lightly with mascara instead. She combs the front of her scalp neatly, letting the left side of her hair fall easily to the right.Her bag is already packed. She picks up the printed article lying on her messy bed—the unwrapped blanket, pillows, a cup on a wooden coaster, a steel glass with cigarette butts, and other things she doesn’t notice anymore. She switches off the light and fan. The screeching stops suddenly. Noor slips into her black block-heeled pump shoes. She locks the door with a pull of the handle, ignoring the forceful shrieking sound it makes.
Before entering the campus ground, outside the thick brick walls, Noor carelessly lights a cigarette. The smoke touches her front teeth and deepens inside her throat with a strong taste. She clears her throat and sees the light brown lipstick stain on the butt.
The trees outside wave in the dry air, their faded green catching a tint of brown. A shovel rasps cement from the footpath and dumps it into a sack. Noor will have to come back to the same spot again, lighting the same cigarette after the meeting.
Her heart beats a little faster on seeing that it’s exactly 2:30. To reach the professor’s office it will take another five or six minutes. Anyhow, she inhales the smoke quickly, forgetting to let it go sometimes.
At one moment she softly bites the yellow butt of the cigarette and feels the soft bite against the hard, sandy, thin texture of her left incisor again. It feels warm in the tooth. She takes a few pulls from the last part and crushes it with the toe cap of her shoe. Carrying the scorching heat on her face and hair, she enters the campus, filled with lush green.
Without noticing, she passes the garden and the small pond and reaches the narrow lane of the office building. Lazy cawing floats from afar. The walk is not tiresome, but the stairs are.
After reaching the first floor, she stops to catch her breath and senses small liquid droplets along the sides of her nose. She wipes them with the side of her palm, then reaches for her neck. Without touching, she notices the cold sweat from her bra pressing into the flesh of her breasts. Noor doesn’t want to enter the office gasping. So she takes one or two steady gulps of air before going in.
The office is still, with a wooden rectangular table in the middle. Some books on body and performance lie scattered on the far right of it. The walls, as Noor has always seen, are still painted a faded, monotonous yellow, the scorching sunlight making them look duller than ever.
Noor’s adjusted eyes suddenly catch a brief glance of a new artwork hanging behind the professor. It is in a big glass frame, filled with dried-out yellowish-brown leaves, with white spots all around them. Noor has seen these leaves lying on the street all year long in this city. Once, a peer told her these white spots appear sometimes because these trees give birth to these leaves every year after winter. Her shoulders give a light shiver for a second, but she quickly turns her eyes away from it and toward the professor.
He asks her to sit for the discussion. Behind his grey beard and the mix of black and grey hair, piercing brown eyes peek out. He asks her, “So, how do you find the artwork?” She doesn’t know what could be an exact reply to that. She gives an amused smile and says, “What is this creepy thing? Instead, you can hang good artwork on the wall. You know, like those of beautiful women, men, nature, and all.”
He gives a full laugh, wrinkles appearing beneath his eyes and cheeks, saying, “People would stop coming to my office if I did that. They would say bye from the door.”
Before Noor can think of an answer, he shifts his low voice to a grounded tone. “Let’s get into this article. Have you read it?”
“I did give a read to the article. I am not sure whether I understood it or not.”
“That’s fine. We can discuss it, and after that you can give it another read.”
He starts describing proto-capitalism, mercantilism, and the coming of capitalism, and its process of fetishising commodities. However, Noor’s brain slips between his light baritone speaking and the artwork.
Noor, now glancing at it again, understands that the frame is backed by a dark maroon foam board, and the brown leaves are stuck onto the foam. She sees a couple of lizards inside the foam board, crawling up toward the leaves, slowly transforming into non-living, black, metallic, thin-sized shapes. Their faces and tails are no longer recognisable. They appear as thin black metallic sticks, trying to crawl back and dissolve into the foam.
At one moment, Noor realises the professor is waving his hand back and forth, his faded voice explaining something with too much eagerness and effort. His fingers are long, like his nails, shaking slightly between wrinkles. At one point, he asks, “Are you getting it?”
Noor mumbles some explanation. He dismisses it with frustration and tries to make it clearer. She looks up at the leaves again, surrounded by the black thin metallic creatures, now resting on the back.
Darkness rests in her kitchen area. Noor boils the milk and puts some dark chocolate bars into it, stirring until they dissolve into the liquid. The thick brownish texture satisfies her, and she puts the oven on a low flame, suddenly snuffing it off. She forgets to turn off the oven and, barefoot, goes to the balcony.
From the balcony porch, a narrow lane of stairs slips further down. Noor follows the stairs in the darkness, a faint smell of gas lingering in her nose. Steam rises from the hot chocolate she holds tightly between her fingers.
Noor faces a dusty path, more like a forest, but without any green leaves or trees nearby. Dust and haze blur her sight. She sees smoke rising from somewhere. She follows it and sees a pillar of leaves burning like a lit-up fire. The wind carries away some fire-caught leaves afar. Noor tries to get hold of an ablaze leaf between her fingers, but it slips away with the wind.
Noor suddenly realises her clothes — the light blue midi dress she is wearing. She used to wear this at home as a teenager when she would go to the terrace at night. Noor’s eyes turn from the dress to the fire again, which has blown off by now, looking like a sandy pyramid resting in the dusty darkness.
Bursts of bass sound fill the studio on her campus. One of her friends is editing and mixing two sorts of electronic bass with drums, which sounds more like a running train. On a big table, papers, sketches, a laptop, and notebooks remain scattered, some coloured papers lying on the carpet floor.
After scrutinising for a bit, Noor rubs the already dissolved sweat from her forehead. Outside the door, a purple dusk light emerges with the sound of birds screeching and flying around everywhere.
Noor takes a glance at her friend, who is sitting on the carpet floor with her laptop on her knees. She takes a side beside her and, with a half-smile, asks, “Hey, I didn’t know you would be busy now.”
The friend looks up with screen-tired eyes. “Arre no no, I was just doing this editing for a friend’s short video.”Other people in the lab wave and smile at her. Noor puts on a big smile, particularly to no one but everyone around the room.
With the constant bass music going on, the friend asks, “What happened? You look happy today?”
Noor doesn’t reply to that. Instead she listens to the end product of the mixing. Then she says, “Do it, then let’s have the bogus canteen chai after that.”
Taking the glasses from her eyes, the friend replies, “Yup, let’s do that, man.”
WhatsApp notifications come from Noor’s hometown friends. She exhales long and tells her friend, “I don’t know how to reply and text people all the time to their five-six messages from the morning.”
Her friend gives a brief laugh. “Is it a guy?”
— “Yes. My friend from school. He recently got a job and shifted elsewhere. He wants me to give updates about my eating, meeting people, and calling at night. Can’t fulfill friendship demands, I guess.”
— “Lol. Sounds less like a friend and more like a daddy.”
Noor gives two sparring taps on her friend’s shoulder, which turns into a play fight.
The friend then tells her, “Uff, let’s go yaar. Can’t concentrate.”
Noor jumps from the floor to stand, holding her friend’s hand.
The evening spring breeze makes Noor’s body feel light as she walks home. She rubs the little sweat beads from her nose. Running the tap water, she waits for a while before washing her face with soap. The slightly warm water gives a good little rush.
As she goes to her room to dry her face, the messy bed scattered with notebooks, a pen, a laptop, and a water bottle catches her eyes. She distracts herself from the view and goes on drying the water strands from her face.
Switching the light off, Noor goes to bed for a while. Facing the window as she lies down, she keeps the laptop aside at the corner of the bed. The fan is still making the sound. Noor does not want to fix it. That habitual monotonous sound with her own breath keeps Noor’s eyes open in the dark room.
She glances at the corner table. Dry blue orchids from the vase are falling onto the table. There is a copper Shiva idol on one corner of the table. The flowers fall in front of the idol. The faded yellow light from the window falls on the table, makingthe copper Shiva idol shine at times.
Noor takes off her cotton top to feel the fan breeze on her half sweated chest. She feels her nerves tighten from the shoulder to the back and the chest. Noor tries to rub her shoulder and neck with her finger touch for a bit.
The open window of the opposite flat gives her a glimpse of a one year old baby, probably a girl. She is wearing a white frock and trying to catch something with her two hands. Her mother picks her up from behind and shows her something. Noor looks and sees that the baby is looking at some pigeons sitting on the wire.
Probably the baby is trying to say something to her mother but Noor cannot hear it from here. She drowns her attention in that baby’s skin and eyes.The mother switches off the light. The window goes dark again.
As Noor tries to close her eyes she feels a weird sensation. Her shoulder and neck nerves give a sudden relaxation. The front tooth incisor is probably looking for something to bite. Noor gets a tingle that it wants to bite her own arms, face, leg, foot and fingers.
She slides up her leg and looks at her baby toe nail. The nail has grown slightly, giving a black shade at the tip. Noor gazes at it for long. She then slightly rubs her eyes to see clearly.
A shiny mold of black and grey is growing in the nail. Then it gradually rises up from her feet to her legs, thighs, hip, covering her stomach, chest and breast. Noor touches the mold with her finger and feels a metallic texture.
It rises slowly in a zigzag way and covers her face and hands.
In desperation Noor tries to open her mouth and get her tongue out. She realises her eyes are too covered with that metallic texture. She cannot feel her tongue for a little while. Only then she understands that her tongue has converted into a slime creature which has become so tall and flexible that it can touch any part of her body.
Noor feels light headed by the fan sound. Before closing her eyes she takes a last blurring look at the fallen dry orchids. Only the musty earthy smell lingers on her.
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