At an unearthly hour, when the waning moon stopped casting its faint light through the windows and the cicadas ceased their endless hum, I woke up. The air held a silence so big that my ears perked when it heard a distinctive rustling sound. I knew then that it was her, stirring slowly from her bed in the next room. I dragged the blanket towards my face, covering myself like a cocoon, and lay in wait for her nocturnal excursion to my bedroom.
The faint chants of the prayer she was mumbling bore through my ears like the buzz of a bumble bee, a buzz that grew progressively louder until I knew she was in my room.
“When is my turn?” she whispered, “When are you taking me?”
I could imagine spit flying as she mouthed these words. Even with my eyes closed, I knew that she would stand still for a few moments, surveying me from a distance. A dozen hues scribbled mindlessly on the black canvas of my closed eyes, making me conscious of a dreary, unknown world that existed within my own head. Be brave, I chided myself, but curled up all the more. After what seemed like eons, I heard her shuffling back to her room, dragging her feet along behind the walking stick. Only then did I relax, allowing sleep to draw me back into its comforting cave.
When the day broke, I checked on her in her room, but my octogenarian mother-in-law did not exhibit any recollection of the previous night. She only voiced her perpetual aggravation that her bed sheet stank of urine.
“This room is stinking like a doghouse. Take this away…useless girl!” she mumbled as she flipped the bed sheet over with a jerk of her walking stick. This was her manner, barking orders to mask the ignominy of having to depend on me.
I washed the bed sheet and spread it out on the frayed coir clothesline that I had secured between the two mango trees in the courtyard. The trees were abloom with tiny mango flowers, the tender blossoms weighted down with dew. Transfixed, I sat under the tree for a while braiding my lengthy hair, my body lulled by the early morning sun and my heart brimming at the pristine beauty of the blossoms.
In no time, I rushed indoors as I heard her call out to me to get her bath ready. The rancid odour from the toilet bowl made it impossible to stand in the bathroom for more than a second, so I splashed an ounce of phenol to snuff out the smell. Once that was done, my mother-in-law would undress and sit on an elevated platform in the corner, impassive to my hardened hands as I oiled her and rubbed soap and poured hot water over her body.
Afterwards, while I bustled through the kitchen, skinning the fish and roasting it in the brick oven, she would sit in her unlit room and try to write in an old diary. But her hands shook so much that she could barely manage a line after hours of braving the tremors. Defeated, she would stare vacantly at the dancing motes of dust lit up by the beam of sunlight streaming in through the window. It was as if she was waiting for time to cease, or, I figured, waiting for darkness of the night so that sleep would blot out the reality of the day.
The day her son married me, she had wept out aloud, slumping into a heap in the corner of the room, her bloodshot eyes occasionally shooting daggers at me. She detested my long cascading hair and almond-eyes, the weapons, she alleged, I had used to ensnare her son into lovelorn ignorance. He had completely disregarded her pleas to leave me on account of my unsuitability, for I was considered by the villagers to be an augury of ill-fate. The time of my birth had made me a victim of a singularly infelicitous planetary placement; so ominous was I that my marital family was supposedly doomed from the day I entered their lives.
The tiny horoscope book containing my birth chart was in tatters, having been passed around for numerous consultations. Every single astrologer had ruled that I was beyond rescue, that I was as much bad news as the dark and violent thunderstorms that my birth month heralded. The day I was born, my own mother wept, something she continued doing throughout my growing years, ruing: My dear child, who will marry you?
My mother-in-law did not cry when her son, my husband, died. On a chilly night before our first wedding anniversary, he came home inebriated, after a reckless soiree at the local toddy shop, throwing up continuously until he collapsed. Later, we learnt that the toddy was adulterated. My mother-in-law wandered like a lost sheep through the days and nights that followed, not knowing how to grieve. I removed myself to my room, sobbing, guilty as hell, unable to face the world, cowering while the muffled voices in the other room discussed the verdict of the cowrie shells on the astrologer’s chart. The obvious problem plaguing the family, the root of all adversity, was me.
The relatives went away, one by one, finally leaving just the two of us in the house. And it was on one of the nights that followed that she began her excursions to my room. Sometimes she asked: “Is he here yet? Is he here for me?”
She was turning more and more delirious; apparently she thought she could catch me in the dead of the night, conferring with Yama, the God of Death himself, the two of us plotting her death. She thought it was her turn next.
***
On silent summer afternoons, ripe mangoes thudded down from the trees, swarming the courtyard, but she just looked away. The mangoes looked so juicy, I felt a cavernous craving for them, but when I peeled one and offered her a slice, she threw a fit. Their yellow sugariness was a reminder of happier times, she hissed, the tree was a synonym of her son, having been planted when he was born. She had expected him to thrive, like the tree. She forbade me from picking up the fallen fruits, letting them turn putrid so as to ground her in her sorrow. I realized that she was slowly submitting to the call of her own death, as yielding as the rotting mangoes on the ground that let slender worms burrow and gnaw and claim every bit of their juice.
The next summer, just when the green mangoes matured into yellow ripeness, my mother-in-law passed away. Three days crawled by, and it was the time for the most important post-funeral ceremony - feeding the departed soul. A clutch of relatives and passers-by from the village assembled in the courtyard, waiting for the spectacle to unfold. I ferried an array of sadya dishes from the kitchen to the courtyard for the ceremony. The priest then placed a banana leaf in the centre of the courtyard and spooned all the dishes onto it. Soon the leaf was replete with food, each dish carefully positioned in its rightful place. As he started intoning mantras in a continuous loop, the priest crouched on the ground several steps away and clapped his hands vigorously. That was a gesture to invite the departed soul to materialize from the otherworld and partake in the sadya I had made ready.
I looked up towards the sky for any indication of crows – a cluster of black specks that would spot the feast out of nowhere and come gliding down to swoop up morsels. Crows, who, still disbelieving their luck at this invitation, would raise a cacophony with their shrill crowing whilst fending each other off with their beaks and wings. I always delighted in this part of the funeral ceremony. There was something peculiar, a camaraderie I shared with crows; I considered myself their veritable personification. Why, folks always took offense at our presence. Nobody ever hesitated to shun us as bad omens; we were, as a rule, cussed at, or shooed away.
But today, those abominable ravens were going to be venerated and fed, elevated to a divine rank, for one among them was the bearer of a soul, my mother-in-law’s soul. These crows must be altruists, I thought; for how else can we explain their magnanimity to house the souls of folks who had once tried to stone them? Crows must surely be a forgiving lot, like me.
"Which of these did she love the most? Avial? Puli inji?” the priest asked me, pointing to the assortment of dishes.
“Pappadam,” I said, as I recalled her fondness for the crisps. I pictured a loner crow among the crowd of crows, who would lay a claim only on the pappadam. That would be my mother-in-law, coming to eat the last meal that I would prepare for her in this lifetime.
We crouched in wait near the sadya, feeling increasingly pensive as minutes crawled by. The sky was clear and the noon sun was unduly harsh. But there were no crows in sight! Ordinarily, the crows would materialize out of nowhere for even the tiniest scraps of leftovers. But today, there was not even a trace of them!
Folks were tired by now, and as they sidled about, wiping the sweat trickling down their faces, they began exchanging meaningful glances.
They whispered:
“Where have all the crows disappeared today?”
“Is this an omen?”
“Surely, some otherworldly intervention… how else can you explain the absence of crows?”
“You mean... this is the mother-in-law’s revenge?”
“Ha..seems so. The poor old woman was dreading her end right from the day this girl came into her son’s life.”
“Hush! I feel sorry for the girl though, to be the bearer of a wretched fate!”
And though I’ve heard them a thousand times over, these insinuations were still as mutilating as a stream of arrows. In spite of my resistance, tears filled my eyes as if they had a will of their own, slowly blurring the crowd into oblivion, and reducing their chatter to vagueness. For endless moments, all I could discern was a clear sky, and a forsaken feast.
The commotion was getting louder. Little children were cupping their mouths with their palms, hollering - caw, caw! mimicking crows. Assorted women were making a racket with rumbling hand-claps. Look over there, look, look; they started nudging me. As I looked across the courtyard, I saw, on the clothesline between the mango trees, a solitary crow. Dropping all my restraint, I grabbed a pappadam and sprinted towards it, waving the pappadam with all the earnestness of a mother encouraging her toddler to eat, as if the appeasement of this crow alone would evaporate all the miseries that had amassed in my life.
But the crow, perhaps frightened by the clamour, perhaps stubborn, winged towards the higher branches of the mango tree instead. With its curvy talons perched on a branch, the crow started pecking greedily at a ripe mango for the longest time, as if the sweet rush satiated some elusive, long-forgotten, happiness.
“Is this an omen” - the crowd began to whisper with wonder as they watched, rapt - “unspoken tidings....a new beginning?”
As if to deepen the mystique, the crow flew away in a flash, in the same unexpected manner that marked its arrival.
I suddenly found my knees wobbly. Oblivious to the crowd and their deliberation of this unusual omen, I slid down to the ground under the mango tree, rubbing my numb feet. Lost in various thoughts of my own, I reached for a fallen mango, stroking it, pressing it, bruising it, until its tingling scent rose sharply in my nose. The scent made me giddy, flooding me with memories of cravings that I had long avoided, and suddenly, it was no longer possible for me to resist the sweetness of its yellow innards.
----------------------
sadya = a feast
pappadam = a thin, crispy cracker
avial = medley of vegetables cooked in yoghurt
puli-inji = ginger chutney
==============================
Published in: Reading Hour Magazine
The faint chants of the prayer she was mumbling bore through my ears like the buzz of a bumble bee, a buzz that grew progressively louder until I knew she was in my room.
“When is my turn?” she whispered, “When are you taking me?”
I could imagine spit flying as she mouthed these words. Even with my eyes closed, I knew that she would stand still for a few moments, surveying me from a distance. A dozen hues scribbled mindlessly on the black canvas of my closed eyes, making me conscious of a dreary, unknown world that existed within my own head. Be brave, I chided myself, but curled up all the more. After what seemed like eons, I heard her shuffling back to her room, dragging her feet along behind the walking stick. Only then did I relax, allowing sleep to draw me back into its comforting cave.
When the day broke, I checked on her in her room, but my octogenarian mother-in-law did not exhibit any recollection of the previous night. She only voiced her perpetual aggravation that her bed sheet stank of urine.
“This room is stinking like a doghouse. Take this away…useless girl!” she mumbled as she flipped the bed sheet over with a jerk of her walking stick. This was her manner, barking orders to mask the ignominy of having to depend on me.
I washed the bed sheet and spread it out on the frayed coir clothesline that I had secured between the two mango trees in the courtyard. The trees were abloom with tiny mango flowers, the tender blossoms weighted down with dew. Transfixed, I sat under the tree for a while braiding my lengthy hair, my body lulled by the early morning sun and my heart brimming at the pristine beauty of the blossoms.
In no time, I rushed indoors as I heard her call out to me to get her bath ready. The rancid odour from the toilet bowl made it impossible to stand in the bathroom for more than a second, so I splashed an ounce of phenol to snuff out the smell. Once that was done, my mother-in-law would undress and sit on an elevated platform in the corner, impassive to my hardened hands as I oiled her and rubbed soap and poured hot water over her body.
Afterwards, while I bustled through the kitchen, skinning the fish and roasting it in the brick oven, she would sit in her unlit room and try to write in an old diary. But her hands shook so much that she could barely manage a line after hours of braving the tremors. Defeated, she would stare vacantly at the dancing motes of dust lit up by the beam of sunlight streaming in through the window. It was as if she was waiting for time to cease, or, I figured, waiting for darkness of the night so that sleep would blot out the reality of the day.
The day her son married me, she had wept out aloud, slumping into a heap in the corner of the room, her bloodshot eyes occasionally shooting daggers at me. She detested my long cascading hair and almond-eyes, the weapons, she alleged, I had used to ensnare her son into lovelorn ignorance. He had completely disregarded her pleas to leave me on account of my unsuitability, for I was considered by the villagers to be an augury of ill-fate. The time of my birth had made me a victim of a singularly infelicitous planetary placement; so ominous was I that my marital family was supposedly doomed from the day I entered their lives.
The tiny horoscope book containing my birth chart was in tatters, having been passed around for numerous consultations. Every single astrologer had ruled that I was beyond rescue, that I was as much bad news as the dark and violent thunderstorms that my birth month heralded. The day I was born, my own mother wept, something she continued doing throughout my growing years, ruing: My dear child, who will marry you?
My mother-in-law did not cry when her son, my husband, died. On a chilly night before our first wedding anniversary, he came home inebriated, after a reckless soiree at the local toddy shop, throwing up continuously until he collapsed. Later, we learnt that the toddy was adulterated. My mother-in-law wandered like a lost sheep through the days and nights that followed, not knowing how to grieve. I removed myself to my room, sobbing, guilty as hell, unable to face the world, cowering while the muffled voices in the other room discussed the verdict of the cowrie shells on the astrologer’s chart. The obvious problem plaguing the family, the root of all adversity, was me.
The relatives went away, one by one, finally leaving just the two of us in the house. And it was on one of the nights that followed that she began her excursions to my room. Sometimes she asked: “Is he here yet? Is he here for me?”
She was turning more and more delirious; apparently she thought she could catch me in the dead of the night, conferring with Yama, the God of Death himself, the two of us plotting her death. She thought it was her turn next.
***
On silent summer afternoons, ripe mangoes thudded down from the trees, swarming the courtyard, but she just looked away. The mangoes looked so juicy, I felt a cavernous craving for them, but when I peeled one and offered her a slice, she threw a fit. Their yellow sugariness was a reminder of happier times, she hissed, the tree was a synonym of her son, having been planted when he was born. She had expected him to thrive, like the tree. She forbade me from picking up the fallen fruits, letting them turn putrid so as to ground her in her sorrow. I realized that she was slowly submitting to the call of her own death, as yielding as the rotting mangoes on the ground that let slender worms burrow and gnaw and claim every bit of their juice.
The next summer, just when the green mangoes matured into yellow ripeness, my mother-in-law passed away. Three days crawled by, and it was the time for the most important post-funeral ceremony - feeding the departed soul. A clutch of relatives and passers-by from the village assembled in the courtyard, waiting for the spectacle to unfold. I ferried an array of sadya dishes from the kitchen to the courtyard for the ceremony. The priest then placed a banana leaf in the centre of the courtyard and spooned all the dishes onto it. Soon the leaf was replete with food, each dish carefully positioned in its rightful place. As he started intoning mantras in a continuous loop, the priest crouched on the ground several steps away and clapped his hands vigorously. That was a gesture to invite the departed soul to materialize from the otherworld and partake in the sadya I had made ready.
I looked up towards the sky for any indication of crows – a cluster of black specks that would spot the feast out of nowhere and come gliding down to swoop up morsels. Crows, who, still disbelieving their luck at this invitation, would raise a cacophony with their shrill crowing whilst fending each other off with their beaks and wings. I always delighted in this part of the funeral ceremony. There was something peculiar, a camaraderie I shared with crows; I considered myself their veritable personification. Why, folks always took offense at our presence. Nobody ever hesitated to shun us as bad omens; we were, as a rule, cussed at, or shooed away.
But today, those abominable ravens were going to be venerated and fed, elevated to a divine rank, for one among them was the bearer of a soul, my mother-in-law’s soul. These crows must be altruists, I thought; for how else can we explain their magnanimity to house the souls of folks who had once tried to stone them? Crows must surely be a forgiving lot, like me.
"Which of these did she love the most? Avial? Puli inji?” the priest asked me, pointing to the assortment of dishes.
“Pappadam,” I said, as I recalled her fondness for the crisps. I pictured a loner crow among the crowd of crows, who would lay a claim only on the pappadam. That would be my mother-in-law, coming to eat the last meal that I would prepare for her in this lifetime.
We crouched in wait near the sadya, feeling increasingly pensive as minutes crawled by. The sky was clear and the noon sun was unduly harsh. But there were no crows in sight! Ordinarily, the crows would materialize out of nowhere for even the tiniest scraps of leftovers. But today, there was not even a trace of them!
Folks were tired by now, and as they sidled about, wiping the sweat trickling down their faces, they began exchanging meaningful glances.
They whispered:
“Where have all the crows disappeared today?”
“Is this an omen?”
“Surely, some otherworldly intervention… how else can you explain the absence of crows?”
“You mean... this is the mother-in-law’s revenge?”
“Ha..seems so. The poor old woman was dreading her end right from the day this girl came into her son’s life.”
“Hush! I feel sorry for the girl though, to be the bearer of a wretched fate!”
And though I’ve heard them a thousand times over, these insinuations were still as mutilating as a stream of arrows. In spite of my resistance, tears filled my eyes as if they had a will of their own, slowly blurring the crowd into oblivion, and reducing their chatter to vagueness. For endless moments, all I could discern was a clear sky, and a forsaken feast.
The commotion was getting louder. Little children were cupping their mouths with their palms, hollering - caw, caw! mimicking crows. Assorted women were making a racket with rumbling hand-claps. Look over there, look, look; they started nudging me. As I looked across the courtyard, I saw, on the clothesline between the mango trees, a solitary crow. Dropping all my restraint, I grabbed a pappadam and sprinted towards it, waving the pappadam with all the earnestness of a mother encouraging her toddler to eat, as if the appeasement of this crow alone would evaporate all the miseries that had amassed in my life.
But the crow, perhaps frightened by the clamour, perhaps stubborn, winged towards the higher branches of the mango tree instead. With its curvy talons perched on a branch, the crow started pecking greedily at a ripe mango for the longest time, as if the sweet rush satiated some elusive, long-forgotten, happiness.
“Is this an omen” - the crowd began to whisper with wonder as they watched, rapt - “unspoken tidings....a new beginning?”
As if to deepen the mystique, the crow flew away in a flash, in the same unexpected manner that marked its arrival.
I suddenly found my knees wobbly. Oblivious to the crowd and their deliberation of this unusual omen, I slid down to the ground under the mango tree, rubbing my numb feet. Lost in various thoughts of my own, I reached for a fallen mango, stroking it, pressing it, bruising it, until its tingling scent rose sharply in my nose. The scent made me giddy, flooding me with memories of cravings that I had long avoided, and suddenly, it was no longer possible for me to resist the sweetness of its yellow innards.
----------------------
sadya = a feast
pappadam = a thin, crispy cracker
avial = medley of vegetables cooked in yoghurt
puli-inji = ginger chutney
==============================
Published in: Reading Hour Magazine
No comments:
Post a Comment