Part One

Ambika let her long hair flow down her left side, bending her head slightly as she worked her fingers through the few knots that had formed overnight. She gently oiled the waves that undulated with her breath as she softly hummed a hymn. Her husband lay next to her, breathing the deep rhythm of somnolence. The sky outside their bedroom window was still pitch black, scattered with the stars which foretold her destiny. The banana trees rustled as the breeze from the ocean, kilometres away, passed across the earth.

It was almost time for their first prayer of the day. Ambika nudged her husband awake and as he sat up, reaching through the fog of his last dreams, Ambika went to the kitchen to light the fire and set the water boiling for the tea. When she came back into their room, her husband had already washed his face and opened their pooja drawer. 

She lit the match and held the flame patiently to the cotton wick, soaked in the liquid ghee, until it caught. She joined her husband, gently and firmly pressing the palms of her hands together. And although she always prayed diligently, she also found place in her heart for the joy of this ritual, of these quiet mornings which she greeted with her the love of her life by her side.

Part Two

The bus stand to the field site was a half hour walk from her hostel. Miriam had to scarf down the breakfast left out for them to make it there on time. Some days, the meal would be edible: idli, sambar, puttu, pazham, kaddala curry. Other days, Miriam would have to choke down the bland potato curry with sickly sweet, store-bought bread. The one tumbler of strong chai poured out every morning was her one comfort, her one constant.

The first ten minutes of her walk were always pleasant. The sun would be still climbing its way above the horizon, the streets quiet, the shops closed, the dew and the breeze cool. Miriam would listen to her feet crunch satisfyingly along the dirt road and she would revel in the verdure of her world. But then, the sun would climb high enough to heat the road. The dew would sizzle, vibrate, evaporate, and the humidity would quickly become unbearable even so early in the morning. At the nape of her neck, in the small valley that curved down to hug her spine, above the waistband of her shift and the neatly folded sari, the sweat would begin to gather and soon her body would feel slick. The streets would fill with the calls of fishmongers, of grocers, the low hum of cattle led from one location to the next. Miriam’s head would buzz and cloud with the heat and the noise as the first wave of alertness passed through her. Every morning, as she felt the weight of drowsiness, she desperately wished she could turn around and return to the hostel, slip into her nightdress, back between the thin cotton sheets, and let the sweat evaporate as the fan beat the air above her. 

But the warden would glare disapprovingly. Single women were already suspicious enough on their own. Educated women who worked were even more so. An educated single woman who appeared to be skipping work? Unacceptable. And even if Miriam felt bile at the back of her throat, she knew how to pick her battles. And despite the grueling travel, she enjoyed her work. She enjoyed being in the field.

So, every morning, Miriam fought her heavy eyes and her longing for her bed, instead clambering onto the bus that would take her to her field site. Most days, there was a seat to sink into but even if there wasn’t, Miriam would fall into a deep sleep as the bus lumbered through Cochin, out past the sprawl of the city and into the neat rows of Ernakulam’s paddy fields. And after a while, depending on the panchayat she was assigned, Miriam would finally get down, off the bus, and find herself still a fifteen minute walk to the panchayat office. Sometimes it was an impressive building with two floors and an area for the panchayat president’s Ambassador car to park under an awning. Sometimes it was just the panchayat president’s home and Miriam would wait on the verandah, sipping thick hot chai and making small talk with his wife, his children.

Part Three

“I can’t believe her. I can’t believe she’d say something like that. To me. Does she even know me or understand me or even care? I’m her freaking daughter.”

Aadhya was flicking her cheap Bic lighter (the fifth one she’d stolen this year), her frustration increasing with each successive failure to light her cigarette. Lena nodded empathetically as she offered Aadhya a light from her own cheap Bic lighter. Aadhya inhaled deeply and exhaled with a half sigh, a half grumble. Who could say if it was the cigarette that cleared her mind or just the deep breath? She admired the lipstick stain she left behind on the filter. Perhaps, it was neither. Perhaps, it was this, a visual reminder of her independence, her distinctive stamp on the world that cut through the muddled confusion interrupting her higher thought processes. Then again, she thought as she held her cigarette downwards and flicked an ember near her dusty and worn shoes, perhaps it was the world around her that was muddled and confused and not her.

“I just can’t talk about it anymore or even think about it,” Aadhya said a bit more to herself then to Lena. “Do you want to drive out to that ice-cream place by the river?”

Lena laughed, “You mean, the one where Angel works?”

Aadhya wrinkled her nose, “Fuck. I forgot he works there now. Goddammit. Why? Why does Angel have to work there?” she whined.

“I know, I know…” Lena consoled her. “But maybe he’s not working today. Let’s drive by and see who’s behind the counter. If it’s Angel, we can go get some other food or smoothies or something.” Lena stubbed out her lipstick-less cig. 

Aadhya smiled at her. “See, this is why we’re friends.”

Aadhya and Lena clambered into Aadhya’s parents’ minivan. Aadhya punched the radio button, turned up the volume, and smiled wryly to herself in the rearview mirror, nicotine in her nostrils. Always on the quest for sensation, newness, a good story to tell. Did that make her a Don Quixote or an Amelia Earhart? They both had tragic, endlessly interesting deaths, so how different could they be? Aadhya knew these were questions she’d only be able to answer at the end of her life, utterly useless to ponder right now, today, so she put her hand on the back of Lena’s headrest, swerved out of the parking spot she had meticulously parked in despite the utter lack of other vehicles, and hit the accelerator, leaving only the reverberations of a terrible sound system and an angsty teenage anthem behind. 

Part Four

Ambika took one hand off the pestle to tuck a stray strand back into her long braid. She was almost done grinding rice for the week and as she rhythmically moved the large stone back and forth, she thought of the tea and book that awaited her after this chore. Every Sunday, her husband would put aside two books for Ambika to read and think about and discuss with him on Saturdays when he only worked a half day. Delicious books. Every spare moment she could find between the household chores and the yard-work and taking care of the children, Ambika would sit at the small wooden table under the window, a cup of chaya in one hand, a book in the other.

Her father used to send her packages, books neatly stacked and slightly dampened from their long journey from a place in Malayasia she could approximate on a map but could never pronounce. For Ambika, he never sent clothes and he never sent money. He only ever sent her books. His only vessel of fatherly love.

Ambika sloshed water across the mortar and pestle, methodically cleaning it with a cupped hand. The gods worked in mysterious ways – that on her father’s passing, she would marry a man who loved the power of the written word even more, who  sharpened Ambika’s curiosity and intellect. What were the chances? She smiled at her good fortune. She must have done something right in her past life. 

Ambika neatly put away the mortar and pestle. She lifted the bowl full of ground rice and lentils that would sit and rise overnight, placing it on the step above the work area. Taking the broom, a collection of dried coconut leaves from the trees which grew in the far corner of their small plot, Ambika vigorously sloshed water across the concrete square of the outdoor kitchen area. Business completed, tapping the broom briskly, Indira gathered the corner of her sari and picked up the bowl with batter, making her way to her tea and books.

Part Five

Aadhya stared across the table at Chris G., one of three Chris’s in her third grade class. He was picking his nose and eating the dried mucus, unaware of Aadhya’s attentions. Disgusting, she admitted to herself, but still. He was funny and he was cute and Aadhya like liked him. Not that she would ever, ever say that to anyone out loud. From her observations, Chris G. fell somewhere on the lower end of the social hierarchy among third graders and girls definitely thought he was too weird to be cute. Aadhya wrinkled her forehead in concentration, less on the lump of clay in front of her which became more shapeless the more she fiddled with it and more on how to garner the romantic interests of Chris G.

Defeated by art class and Chris G.’s indifference, Aadhya walked down the hall back to her third-grade classroom, one hand trailing along the wall beside her. Carefully stepping from black tile to black tile (the red tiles are lava, remember?), Aadhya eavesdropped on the hushed secrets that were being exchanged by Emma and Katie behind her.

“I don’t like like him,” Emma whispered with a giggle. “Ew, Luke probly has cooties too, but you can’t tell anyone that we kissed.” 

Between the spaces of their giggles, Aadhya felt the first (not last) sharp stabs of jealousy that would plague her for the rest of her life, shaping her good decisions, driving her bad decisions, leaving her in apathetic stupors. Standing quietly in line outside the classroom, her eyes trained on her sloppily tied shoes below, Aadhya catalogued all the ways that she’d never be like Emma. She’d never have those beautiful blond curls that were tied in pigtails one day, neatly braided another day, in a beautiful French braid, pinned back by rhinestoned bobby pins, bouncing free and spilling past her shoulders. No, Aadhya’s hair was black and weighted down by the coconut oil Amma rubbed into her scalp despite her best evasions. Aadhya also hated the sensation of her hair pulled in unnatural directions. Inevitably, one braid would have more hair than the other and she’d spend the entire day unconsciously tugging on them until they unravelled in record time (thus, why Amma, who loved braiding and plaiting Aadhya’s coconut-oiled, black hair, quickly gave up on the fruitless venture).

Multiplication tables now. She’d never have Emma’s perfect smile, or dimples, or blue eyes, or that gentle floating way Emma walked from all those ballet lessons. Aadhya’s teeth were crooked and she knew she couldn’t wish dimples into existence and she knew her eyes would always stay a muddy brown (not black like her father liked to insist) and her uncontrollable desire to break into a run and clamber up trees with complete disregard for her brown skin which scraped and chafed against bark made it difficult for her to float like an angel.

Aadhya looked around the classroom until she made eye contact with her teacher. Satisfaction. She was the first one done as she almost always was. Every once in a while John J. would be the first to flip over his worksheet a few seconds before Aadhya, but she was convinced that he very rarely got 100% whenever he did. Unlike her. As her teacher walked down the aisle to pick up Aadhya’s worksheet, she filed away the last and final reason why she’d never be like Emma – Aadhya didn’t have parents like Emma. Emma’s father was tall and handsome, always laughing and shaking hands. Emma’s mom smelled like flowers and was even prettier than Emma, with bouncier hair, and bluer eyes, and an even cloudier way of walking. At Girl Scout meetings, Aadhya would enviously watch them: the perfect mother and daughter duo, adored by all, whose authority was accepted by all.

Every day as she rode the bus home from school, Aadhya would diligently remove every notice for parent-teacher conferences, crumble up invitations for the smaller classroom get-togethers that Amma wouldn’t miss or ask after, and hide them beneath her books and folders and pencil case to throw away as soon as she got home. Although Aadhya knew she’d never be good enough or pretty enough or graceful enough to be Emma, Aadhya did alright at school. She had friends in class and in her Girl Scout troop and on her soccer team. But it was a tenuous hold. Even if she didn’t understand why it was this way, Aadhya knew in her bones, in the way her entire body seized and froze, that the mere presence of her parents marked her. Nothing of her parents matched the other parents – not the way they dressed (her mother had a strange penchant for tying scarves around her ponytail), not the way they smelled, not the way they talked. The moment her parents walked into a room, it was all Aadhya could see – her parents’ differences, the way the other parents would avoid them, how everyone could now see that she  was different too.

I’m not different, she’d scream inside. It’s them. How could you so easily forget I’m like you?

So, every day, Aadhya would ignore the gnawing sensation she felt every time Amma asked her what happened at school today, every time she threw away the fist-sized wads of tree pulp, every time she missed her parents at awards ceremonies and classroom celebrations but felt immeasurably relieved nonetheless. 

Aadhya pushed down that gnawing sensation that she could not fully understand as a child, deep underground for a long while, until years later, it fully bloomed.

Part Six

“Miriam!” 

Miriam turned around, her eyes lighting up as they landed on Elsa’s irrepressibly curly black hair and Bhavani’s neatly plaited, ever-oiled hair. 

“Edi, where are you going so quickly?” Elsa teased her, as she and Bhavani crossed the dusty road that separated the women’s hostel from the main campus. Miriam frowned at her playfully and turned on her heels.

“Da! Look at how she’s running away from us!” Bhavani laughed as they ran to catch up with Miriam, intertwining their arms with Miriam’s more unwilling extremities. 

“Da, Miriam, what is the problem here? Why are you making that sour face?”

“And why won’t you talk to us?” Elsa rejoined. Miriam pulled another face at the partners in crime, refusing to open her mouth, refusing to let them have the satisfaction. But Elsa and Bhavani were relentless, stabbing little needle after little needle, knowing one of their pinpricks would eventually hit the trap door latch and Miriam’s not-so-secret-secrets would come tumbling out in an unstoppable deluge.

“Edi, Elsa, who was that we saw just now?”

“Where?”

“In front of that coffee shop back there, the one with the delicious unniappams?”

Elsa reached across Miriam to pull Bhavani’s hand along with the full weight of her exaggerated recall of events. 

“Ah! That’s right, Bhavani, how could I forgot so quickly, so easily. I am such an idiot, I don’t know anything and I am failing all this wretched exams. But no, no, there is one thing I do remember and that is certainly who was just outside that coffee shop back there.”

Miriam felt the heat rising to her face, white hot in the humid heat of the afternoon, the sweat itching as it slid down the nape of her neck. Elsa and Bhavani chattered on, Miriam shifting ever more uncomfortably in her sari, mind racing to think of all her possible answers to their inevitable questions, weighing the equally inevitable consequences that would ripple uncontrollably outwards if she let her secret out.

Love in that time was a very dangerous thing.

Part Seven

Where to go, where to go, where in the world was there a place for Ambika to go? She was so weary of the tears, her eyes rubbed red-raw, her sinuses hollow, her head aching. And still, they came. 

The gods had taken him from her. They had taken him from her. Her heart squeezed and her body squeezed and it felt like she was in labor again, but it wasn’t a child that passed through her. It was the grief. The grief. God, the grief. How could the gods have been so cruel? To give her a taste of true love, the warmth of sunshine, only to snatch it away. Even his energy was gone from her, her mind swiping at the emptiness of what remained. She beat her chest in the cold bedroom, opening her mouth to let out another silent wail.

A fool, she had been a fool to think that she could live a happy life. Her childhood, miserable. Her youth, miserable. The years of her bloom, miserable. Five years, five years of joy. Ambika had thought that five years would have been enough to erase the memory of the truth, that she was sentenced to nothing more than dukhum, dukhum, dukhum. 

A widow. A fool and a widow. A fool and a widow with two children. How was she to go on? Where was she to go? Oh, though the pressure in her ribcage told her that she still loved him, in the quiet of that morning in that cold bedroom, she also cursed him. 

Part Eight

There was a sadness in seeing Aadhya with him. No matter how hard Miriam tried to push it down to the corners of her heart and her consciousness, the sadness sat in her throat and it sat in her chest. Her daughter was her. Despite the manifestations of Aadhya’s rash and reckless streaks, when Miriam looked at her daughter’s face, a strange mirroring of her own face that still unsettled Miriam.

Miriam was sad because she knew that Aadhya would never feel the shock of being caught in a torrential downpour with the love of her life, the shock of  being transported into their favorite movies, the leading stars in their romance. Her daughter would never walk with her husband through a church, through a temple, bowing to deities with fullness in their hearts, of bowing together in front of lighted candles, diyas with flames quivering in liquid ghee. Aadhya would never be able to live in the language, the culture, the melodramatic upswings and downswings of her upbringing.

So, Miriam felt sad and though she tried to rein it in, it sometimes slipped out from between her two, now thinner lips. Sometimes, the words would tumble out while she was on the phone with Aadhya and she would hear the almost inaudible hiss of silence as Aadhya bit back her words. Sometimes, Miriam would be in the midst of sharing a funny story and the words would slide in between her sentences and she would watch Aadhya bite back again. And though Miriam knew that this push and pull only hurt the two of them, she never could find the right words to say. Perhaps it was because her mother too was this way. 

Part Nine

There was a heaviness that lay among them now. The grief, the thought of an even deeper grief narrowly avoided, had reverberated through them and changed their chemical compositions, just slightly enough so that they never quite experienced happiness the same way again. It was as if they were afraid to anger the powers that be (Aadhya could never quite believe in anything beyond after – her memories of the other side were of black void) by looking too closely at the event. Much more than Aadhya, the family had felt the shadow of that blackness, falling suddenly over them like the shadow of a bird crossing over the sun on a cloudless day and they had shivered as it had flitted over them, mercifully passing them by. Aadhya? At the time, Aadhya could think of nothing else but of how badly she wanted to die. Life was a haze for a long time after.

Much later, Aadhya became aware of the anchor that tugged at her heart, sometimes dragging her back to that grief. Her happiness always felt weighted, the guilt sometimes overwhelming. Yet despite the many tears she shed, she could never bring herself to any equilibrium, the anchor never quite hitting the coastal shelf underneath. Though she often wondered why, she never did find out.