Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

  I knew Kali Mata was different from me because of the colour of her eyes, not the difference in our skin. Her eyes were a speckled shade of blue, and her pupils formed prominent black dots in the middle. I was sure the world would look different through those eyes, and I didn’t think she could have dark, ordinary days.

  ‘The world outside is moving on without you,’ she said.

  I considered this, but wondered if I had ever belonged there, with everyone else.

  Once, I snuck out to buy a single cigarette from a shop down the road. The shopkeeper pitied me for my eyebrows and gave me an extra one for free.

  I stood on the balcony before the building was awake. The awnings were inhabited by pigeons, carpeted in their fuzzy excrement. Hiding in a corner, I lit my cigarette.

  Two storeys down, across the way, through an open window I saw an old man undressing in his bathroom. He let his clothes fall to the floor in a pile. He was thin, just skin and bone, and his penis was shrivelled to the size of a nub. I extended my arm and approximated his member across the distance. Barely as big as my nail. He turned on the shower and water spilled out as though from a hose. His buttocks sagged like empty sacks.

  That night, I drew him as I remembered him, still under the water, his arms hanging by his sides.

  The time of day Baba died escapes me. So does the season, but those details have been carefully documented by his followers.

  The entrance of the flat was dark as always, as though we wanted people who came to the door to imagine that unhappy hermits lived within. I don’t remember what the note on the table said, but my mother’s scrawl looked anxious and unconsidered. Something seemed to be crawling down my back, and I shuddered. Was this the first time I was alone in the house? I walked by the mottled mirror that hung beside the front door, never looking directly at my reflection but aware that the mirror was seeing me, doubling me, even when I had my back to it. The porous tiles of the kitchen floor looked murky, as though it hadn’t been mopped that day, but when I stepped in, I felt that it was still damp, maybe even a little viscous from the insect repellent that Kashta mixed with the soap.

  I found two boondi laddoos in the fridge and fitted them neatly in my mouth. After that, I paced up and down the small living room, stopping only to eat all the cheese with the red cow on the label, and the curd balls that came wrapped in wax, until my stomach bubbled with trapped gas.

  A red rocking chair sat beside the quiet telephone. We called the chair red, but it was really maroon, and it didn’t rock but slid back and forth. The woven cane that constituted the seat was worn and tatty, and it was my favourite piece of furniture in the house, though I never sat on it any more because of a dim memory of having caught my finger in its mechanism when I was little. The mirror was still behind me, taking the back of my body in, and I didn’t dare turn around.

  Ma walked in wearing crumpled white. She was mussed, almost chalky in some way. I backed away from her at the sight of her face, and my spine pressed against the dining table.

  The hard wooden edge lodged in my back. I felt it was separated from my bones by only a bit of stretched-thin skin. There was no pain, just a meek sensation, buffered by the padding that covered me. Sometimes my blood flowed loud enough to awaken my whole body, but at other times I felt I was wearing a suit I could unzip and step out of to reveal my real arms and face, the skin I was hiding underneath. I had gained thirteen kilos since turning eleven. Kali Mata thought it was hormones.

  Ma opened a high cabinet where she kept some alcohol and, standing on her toes, took out a bottle of Teacher’s whisky which had been kept only for male guests. Opening the bottle, she smelled the contents and closed it again. I could tell by now that she had been crying. Not recently, but maybe that morning. Her nose was greasy with a collection of blackheads.

  ‘Baba died today,’ she said.

  Technically, it was at some point the day before, but they waited to do the cremation in the morning. There were disagreements among his followers. Some had wanted to have an autopsy done to determine the cause of death, while others had deemed it unthinkable to cut open a deceased deity. If he had wanted to be cut open, he would have left instructions, they argued. Some had thought a Hindu priest should be consulted, but Baba hated priests and that idea was dismissed. Others had wanted to embalm the body, at least for the time being, so his many devotees could travel to see him one last time.

  ‘Embalming is only for communists,’ Ma had said. The majority agreed that it would be irregular, not in the tradition of his forebears, and that he should be cremated as soon as possible. The last group won out, and a pyre was built for Baba in the ashram. The gates were thrown open for one day and many entered without knowing the reason why. Ma was present for the washing of the body and the changing of clothes. She said they split his skull from the back so his head would not explode in the fire.

  Afterwards, they stood in a line, Baba’s paramours, and offered consolation and blessings to the crowd. One man started shouting that they should all throw themselves on to the pyre. He was subsequently removed.

  Standing next to Kali Mata, Ma had felt a sense of pride.

  ‘I realized that it’s no small thing,’ she said. ‘To be the lover of a great man.’

  I told her that to me it looked small, cheap even, and was definitely nothing to brag about.

  She grabbed me by the arms and shook me before slapping my face.

  ‘You’re a fat little bitch. Have some sympathy! I became a widow today!’

  The word ‘whore’ came out of my mouth but it was mingled with a scream as I rushed into her body, knocking her over on to the floor. I sat on her chest and wrapped my hands around her throat, squeezing until the veins appeared under her eyes.

  When I let go, she coughed and gasped for air. I looked down at her face.

  ‘Fat little bitch,’ she repeated.

  When I wasn’t eating, I had an urge to put other things in my mouth. My fingers, my hair, the plastic buttons on my school uniform. Forty-five minutes after eating, I was hungry again, though my stomach was not limber enough and food would ferment inside me. I spent sleepless nights with gas trapped in my rib cage, days of diarrhoea and constipation. Sometimes blood appeared in my stool. Sometimes the acid from my stomach appeared in my mouth.

  At times, Ma was desolate at the sight of me, but otherwise she insisted a child should eat whenever she was hungry.

  On days when the latter was true, she would take me for ice cream if I begged long enough. After school, I sat at the counter and slurped a vanilla milkshake at Uncle Sam, a fifties-style American diner hidden at the back of a five-star hotel. The vegetarian menu had fried potato cubes and pizza speckled with jeera. Families lined up for the pale, eggless ice cream that had mostly melted by the time it reached the tables. The white leather seat covers had turned a shade of distressed grey, but the walls, with vibrant flags and strange memorabilia, looked as though they had been put up yesterday. The jukebox didn’t take money and played only Bryan Adams songs, and a miniature model of a classic Cadillac turned on a revolving platform near the cash register. Uncle Sam looked down on everyone from a picture at the front of the room.

  ‘If this was a church, Mr Parekh, that’s where the altar would be,’ a waiter said to the ursine manager. Ma and I glanced up at Uncle Sam.

  The manager shook his head. ‘This is no church, Reza, and that lady wants two choco-sundaes.’

  Our choco-sundaes were brought over without a tray. The waiter put an extra bowl of gleaming canned cherries next to me. I looked up at him. His palms were darker than the rest of him. His hair was overgrown and flopped over his pockmarked cheeks.

  I tried to make the ice cream melt so I could eat it quickly, helping it along with the back of my spoon, pressing down on the little creamy mountains. The waiter leaned against the wall while I worked on the sundae. He looked between Ma and me, smiling occasionally.

  ‘It must taste good,’ he said, watching me take
my first gulp.

  I nodded and took another mouthful. Saliva burst in my mouth. The cold liquid warmed to the temperature of my body.

  ‘What does it taste like?’

  My mouth was full and I couldn’t answer. I swallowed, but the sweet, milky liquid coated my throat and I coughed.

  Ma laughed. ‘I’m sure you’ve tasted it before.’

  He shook his head and rubbed the front of his uniform with his blackened hand. No visible trace was left where he touched himself. I watched, mesmerized by the strange pigmentation.

  ‘Food doesn’t taste like that for me. Look at her face. It’s something different for her.’

  I looked up at him and saw he was looking at Ma, and it occurred to me that they’d had an unspoken exchange while I had been eating.

  ‘My name is Reza Pine.’

  We introduced ourselves, but the manager called out to him through the room of voices, the sounds of adults and children. He refilled the bowl of cherries before he went away.

  1995

  I already knew that sex smelled like fish and ice cream, but the first time I had sex was for a packet of imported Big Red gum. The boy in question would chew a piece and blow cinnamon breath on my face. He was sixteen, lived in the building and had pimples on his forehead. He’d watch me as I played badminton with his younger sister. We did it close to his flat, on the landing between floors. After the first time, it felt easy.

  Thirteen years old. I was wearing women’s sizes, and my feet fitted into Kali Mata’s sandals. The liftman pressed himself against the wall of the lift when I entered. I shouted whenever my mother spoke to me. We were rarely in the same room any more. Something about me was expanding, taking up too much space, sucking the air out of closed areas. No one wanted to be around me for too long, but I didn’t mind and hated them all in return anyway.

  My father and his wife had returned from the US.

  Three years had turned into six. They called to tell me that she was pregnant. I refused to take their calls and Ma had to give me the news.

  I had started to suspect that someone else was living in my body, taking up temporary residence and making herself at home. She was opening me up from the inside, causing the appearance of stretch marks and discoloured skin. Hair had appeared in greater quantities where I didn’t want it, and I couldn’t keep up with the demands of depilation. And I was eating for a multitude, it seemed, satisfying a bottomless hole of hunger.

  No one told me this was the age for these feelings, and even if they had I would not have believed them. No one told me that it would take years to accept my body at all, to feel that I knew where it began and ended. At that moment, the scale of existence was unfathomable. I could remember a time when I slipped through narrow cracks, when I could sit on my grandmother’s knee without producing a groan.

  And the confusion I felt within myself was nothing compared to the changes I witnessed from the outside world. Men looked at me in a way I hadn’t noticed before. Had I been oblivious all this time? Or did they see this other woman living in my body too?

  Women also were different, or perhaps I could read some shift in their eyes. The swelling of fat above my waistband elicited a reaction. Was it disgust? I knew there was anger. In fact, anger was the one discernible thing we all shared, and the one thing I could name. The world seemed forcefully, endlessly angry with me. Men for the desire I produced. Women for my inability to contain this new body.

  Humans grow up flagrantly, messily, and no one was afforded the choice of looking away. Sequestering me for those in-between years might have helped – going into a cottony cocoon and emerging a completed woman.

  I descended further into gloom when Reza told me that my skin might never clear up. He walked in just as Ma was taking a sterilized needle to a whitehead on my chin and said that his skin had erupted when he was about sixteen and now, some fifteen years later, had still left its mark. He pulled off his faded T-shirt to illustrate. His body was taut, slim, but covering the planes of pale skin were colonies of keloid, scars that had never gone away. ‘I hope that doesn’t happen to you,’ Reza said. I looked once more at his spotted abdomen. ‘You’re a girl,’ he said. ‘It’s worse for girls. Guys with bad skin can still get laid.’

  My teeth clenched at this double damnation. I felt the other girl inside me rising.

  He spoke again, as though he had read my mind. ‘It isn’t fair, of course, that this should be the case. But it’s true, regardless.’

  Our friendship with Reza developed slowly, over the course of afternoons after school. He did odd jobs, mainly things with his hands. The pay at Uncle Sam was not very much, but Reza brought us home the cakes and confections that didn’t sell. During work hours, he was supposed to wear gloves to hide his hands. He often disobeyed.

  Reza detested the job, but at the end of the month he got a thin envelope from the bank with unblemished notes. They reminded him of his mother, how she took pride in making sure the currency in her wallet was flat and fresh, how she tried to use up the faded bills as quickly as she could. She believed that crisp notes were the currency of the rich, like choice cuts of meat, tender greens or sweet mangoes. But by the time money reached his mother, it had passed through many hands.

  Ma brought Kali Mata and me to the restaurant one afternoon. We sat at a table and kept drinking water because Kali Mata didn’t eat anything with artificial colouring.

  ‘We should order something,’ Ma said.

  The manager stared at us as we pretended to read the laminated menu cards.

  Reza took a sip from his flask. ‘No, don’t worry. I’ll bring some cake over tonight if you want.’

  Reza Pine is difficult to sketch because he always spoke in terms of fluid reality. The truth was subjective, something he had little interest in, and experience continually altered itself as memory. He had picked up some of these ideas from his encounters with Baba and they had shaped him when he was still a young man. It was the reason he never found a place in the world of photojournalism and had to use his skills as a photographer elsewhere. Ma had never met Reza in the ashram, but people had mentioned his name.

  ‘I feel like I know you,’ she said. She touched his leg as she spoke.

  ‘Then you do,’ he replied.

  I rested my cheek on Kali Mata’s black-clad shoulder.

  When Reza described himself as an artist, my first instinct was to mistrust him. What did it mean, to be an artist? He was the first I had ever met.

  He said property developers in Pune were like war profiteers, exploiting the territorial instincts of men. He drew them in charcoal, gnarled figures walking around with urine dripping from their shrunken penises, marking off sections of the city with their stench. He drew anywhere, on paper or walls. It made no difference. But his hands, always black, were familiar to me.

  ‘It’s dirty work,’ he said.

  He was born to a poet who kept a shop to support his family. His father was his hero, a genius of Urdu verse, a man Reza could not remember but always memorialized.

  Reza acknowledged he himself was something of an outcast with the press and the artist community in Bombay. It had to do with an incident that occurred during the 1993 riots in Bombay.

  I said I had never heard a name like Pine. Not with a name like Reza, anyway.

  He smiled at me and I looked away.

  Reza had almost become an NRI. When he was very young, his family moved to Canada. When they arrived, there was ice on the ground.

  His father thought a name like Shaikh would never do. He went outside of their one-bedroom apartment in the Portuguese ghetto of Montreal and read the sign. Pine Street, it said. From then on they would be known as the Pines.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They deported us,’ said Reza. ‘They thought my father was a communist.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  *

  In 1992, Reza Pine, a young photojournalist, travelled to Ayodhya in no
rthern India to witness the demolition of the mosque and the rallies to celebrate Rama’s birthplace. In Bombay, violence erupted in the streets of his city, and all was alight with flames. Bottles thrown into windows, shopkeepers terrorized, women beaten, raped, and children forced to watch.

  Hindus killing Muslims, Muslims killing Hindus, unleashing a savagery that was dormant the day before, awoken with inflammatory words.

  Communal violence was easy to dig up. The foundations had been laid by history. Reza saw how easy it was to kindle the kernels of fear, how the fear could be patted down but would eventually find another food source.

  He met the men, the individuals who made up the mob. They wore their colours with pride and, standing side by side, admired the artistry of their violence.

  He spent nights wondering if what he had seen was real, or if it was a film set – staged, framed in the cruel cut of a camera’s lens, single moments that were the beginnings and the ends of an ongoing terror.

  The rioting calmed after a few days. There were pieces to pick up.

  In Bombay, bodies were burned, the evidence slowly interred. Life resumed its normal pulse, and the process of forgetting began immediately. Some people laughed, standing idly in the street, enjoying the midday sun.

  In the new year, a fresh bloodletting began. The curfew was reinforced. The city was made up of locked doors and darkened windows. Reza lived with his widowed mother in her flat near Bombay Central, where the cries were close enough to hear, as though they would turn the corner and be upon him. Otherwise, the roads were deserted and no one dared leave home. It was understood, an unspoken truth, that if you were caught, there would be no one to save you. No guard, no police. No, today there was no power higher than your attacker – he ruled the city. Bombay was not your own, not now, perhaps not ever again, and from this day forth you would walk in the shadows.

  But something was different. The rich and powerful were beginning to tremble as the mob attacked buildings in Breach Candy and Nariman Point, the long footpaths and shady streets, the regal homes where wealthy and beautiful people went when they left their leisure clubs and five-star hotels. Faceless and unnamed men moving in groups, flying their saffron flags and shouting their slogans, charging through the places where the women travelled only in chauffeur-driven cars and the windows always overlooked the sea.