Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

  Pepper rushed in and out of the kitchen. Her brown nipples showed through the fabric of her dress. Her skin was smooth except for the round vaccination scar on her arm. I stuffed my mouth with red pork.

  We took a bus up north and walked down a winding lane to the beach. My mother pressed me into the walls of magenta and purple shacks when scooters whizzed by. The sun was hot, but we followed the breeze, the smell of fish from the market, the voices of men and women.

  The beach was long and empty, except for a single shack where hippies and locals sat under plastic umbrellas. The sand was golden and inviting, and we rushed in.

  The grains between my toes felt foreign, almost painful.

  A man from the shack asked us if we wanted to buy some water. Ma and Reza said maybe in a while and thanked him. He wore a T-shirt that was once imprinted with words.

  He sat down and lit his pipe. He said his name was Herman. Herman’s faded denim overalls were missing their metal closures, and he owned the only shack on Mandrem beach.

  Reza removed his clothes. He left them in a pile, where they would fade a few hours later in the sun. My mother followed suit and told me to join them. I looked at the stretch marks on her stomach, the way her bottom had a layer of sagging skin.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘What’s the big deal?’

  I watched them go into the water. Ma took an exaggerated breath and disappeared beneath the surface. I looked out at the sea, at the waves that kept coming in, the constant ebb and flow. It was hard to believe my mother was in there. I imagined her drowning, losing air. When she finally came up, the sound and force of her bursting forth from the ocean made my heart lurch. ‘Come on, Antara.’ It was Reza this time. He floated on his back.

  I stood up gingerly and pulled off my shorts. My T-shirt was next. I considered my underwear and decided it made little difference at that point. Using my hands to cover myself, I moved to the edge of the sea. Ma and Reza watched me. They seemed far away.

  I turned back and looked at our belongings on the beach.

  Herman’s eyes moved from my body to my face. ‘I’ll watch everything,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Herman took us to Old Goa, through the arches and stones, remnants of some other time and place. I scuffed my feet against the ground, hid from the sun in the shadows, and drank water so quickly my stomach expanded into a mound.

  At the Basilica of Bom Jesus, we saw the holy remains of St Francis Xavier.

  The body was in a glass coffin, desiccated beneath robes of gold and white. A portion of the cheek was missing, but otherwise the head had kept its form. Ma stared at the profile, the face of a man. It was a face of muffled details, the kind you saw just before your eyes fully adjusted to the dark.

  ‘His arm is missing,’ said Herman. ‘The Catholic Church wanted him for Rome. But he belongs to us here. This was where his people were.’

  ‘The Catholics were his people,’ I said.

  Herman shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t care about their baptism and their missions. People used to say he gave up Catholicism when he came here, that he started practising the local religion.’

  ‘But he’s a famous saint, the most famous in India.’

  He looked at me. ‘When he died, the Church wanted to take him, but the people here wouldn’t let them. They wouldn’t let him go. He was their saviour, not Jesus. Some people say that the locals tried to eat his body.’

  I considered the shrivelled face, the nose that seemed like it had been nibbled down.

  ‘That’s how loved he was. Years later, Catholic priests came in the night and cut off his arm to send back to Rome. And even after all that time, the wound still bled,’ Herman said. I imagined life pulsating beneath the brown parchment of skin.

  ‘Hey, girl, you like fish?’

  Herman was talking to me. I shrugged.

  ‘Come for dinner. I’ll make you some nice fish.’

  That night, we went to Herman’s shack with Pepper. He showed me how to pull the whole skeleton out of a pomfret. Then he presented the strange spine to me like a suitor with an offering. I ran my finger along the edge of bones, the skeleton that looked like a double-sided comb.

  ‘I’m surprised you swam today,’ Reza said.

  I felt my face redden and was glad the sky was dark.

  He smiled. ‘Don’t be shy. You’re beautiful, like your mum.’

  Reza drank beer and palm feni, and Herman told us of his plans to buy an old Portuguese house in the south and turn it into a spa. He teased Pepper, asking her to run it for him. She laughed like she was shy and he asked her to dance.

  My mother smoked Herman’s pipe, and we watched crabs scurrying across the beach in the dark. I pointed to each one as they ran sideways before disappearing into holes in the sand.

  I sank into my mother’s arms, feeling the skin around her stomach through her kurta.

  ‘In my stomach,’ Ma said, ‘you were smaller than one of those grains of sand.’

  I nodded. It was a day when I could believe it was true.

  Cradled in a jute charpoy, Reza covered himself with my mother’s shawl. It veiled his nose, and he inhaled its smell.

  I knew what he could smell.

  Reza watched me as I stood up and danced with Herman. In the shack owner’s arms, I let my weight go. Slowly, slowly, slowly, Herman bent me and my head drifted back. When I looked up, Reza was there, upside down and unmistakeable, watching us. Above, the sky was milky with stars.

  Sometimes my mother would come to my room at night, slip into the bed beside me and press her cold feet against mine. Then she would play with my hair and tell me what a lovely woman I was becoming.

  On occasion, she asked to see my body parts. She would stare at them and compare them with her own; her breasts were bigger than mine, but my waist was smaller. She would comment on how my positive attributes were a symptom of age, declaring with certainty that my ugliness would surpass hers when I reached my forties.

  It was a warning not to get too comfortable with myself.

  Things were always changing, and I was only as good as my physical appeal, which would disappear, as hers had.

  I had the distinct feeling that she was pleased to tell me these things, to know that I would suffer as she had – and her consolation came from seeing that the hurt would continue and I would not be spared.

  When I look back on those days, I wonder did she ever see me as a child she wanted to protect? Did she always see me as a competitor or, rather, an enemy?

  Those teenage years were the closest I came to hating her. I often wished she had never been born, knowing this would wipe me out as well – I understood how deeply connected we were, and how her destruction would irrevocably lead to my own.

  When Reza disappeared one morning after nearly six years in our home, we assumed he had gone to get his camera fixed. He was anxious, overexcited, and said that it was time for him to go back in the field. In America, towers were falling. In India, the parliament building was under siege. Ma and I were dismayed whenever we turned on the news. We saw a world in shambles, but he saw a new beginning. The world was changing, he had known it before anyone else – in the future, violence would be captured in its sharpest details. We were paralysed in our misapprehension, and he scoffed, called us stupid, and said we needed to understand this as an opportunity.

  A few days later, he left, never to return.

  Sometimes I think Ma started deteriorating after that day.

  I always wondered what my mother loved so much about him, and why she continues to love him. Perhaps it’s the feeling that stays, rather than the person. He made her happy for a time, and because she recalls only the larger drift of things, the minutiae no longer matter.

  Reza Pine was never a mentor for me. He was sloppy, and never had the discipline required to make art.

  In any event, I was who I am long before he made his appearance.

  We decide that Nani and Ma should live together, at least f
or a little while. Both women agree, but I remain nervous.

  I call Nani. Ma is managing as far as I can tell, but my grandmother is evasive when I ask questions. She tells me to focus on my life, that everything is fine. I believe her until I receive a call in the middle of the night from Ma’s petrified maid. She reports that my mother has taken to wandering again, bewildered, unaware of who she is. Nani’s house seems to be confusing her more.

  ‘Where am I?’ she often asks. ‘And where is Antara?’

  She looks for me and imagines she’s forgotten to pick me up from school. She tries to dress herself and rushes out from the dark corridor into the empty street. There are only the few who make beds on flattened cardboard boxes, and they stretch and scratch and watch her as she disturbs the quiet. Where she goes, there is no distinction between day and night, and the logic of time and age has no sway over her fear.

  Sometimes she cries out that she wants us back, she knows we are together and she wants us back, and when they ask who, instead of Dilip and me she speaks of Reza Pine.

  The Governors give up their flat after news of the wife’s affair becomes public in Pune. New neighbours move in, an English couple with a child and a Filipina nanny they bring with them from Singapore.

  The wife introduces herself with a plastic container of madeleines that the nanny made. Her name is Elaine and her daughter is Lana, and they both have Cockney accents. The little girl has blue eyes – a blue I thought had only belonged to Kali Mata until now. A blue that makes me think of love, forests and the smell of rotting flesh. Elaine has dyed her hair the same colour as her daughter’s but the top of her head shows four-centimetre roots of dark brown. She asks me within seconds if I am planning to have children.

  I wobble my head a little.

  She laughs and says she feels lucky that she has a daughter, daughters are amazing, girls are so good, except when they’re teenagers, then they can be little bitches. She mouths the word ‘bitches’ so Lana can’t hear, but Lana is watching her mother speak. I smile at Lana and wave, and she gives me a shy grin in return.

  Elaine pats her daughter’s head as though she is proud of her for that minor show of etiquette, and says she’s cherishing her daughter now, while she can, because later everything changes, later it becomes all about men, prom dates, make-up and walking down the aisle, because the mother doesn’t walk the daughter down the aisle, it just sounds wrong. It’s always father and daughter, like a father–daughter dance where good old mom is missing, a milk-carton mom.

  I nod while she speaks, and tell her I don’t know too much about fathers since I didn’t have one.

  Dilip appears at the door just then with a pink rubber ball and hands it to Lana. I don’t know where it has come from, and stare at him. Lana smiles at him widely. Elaine thanks us and says she’d love to have us over soon.

  ‘You’re always so intense,’ Dilip says when they’re gone. ‘It’s okay to keep it light sometimes.’

  I begin to draw again, but it doesn’t fill my days and I drift outdoors to escape the boredom. Sometimes I visit Elaine for lunch. Lana plays nearby, talking to herself at various volumes. Her mother smiles generously.

  ‘Only children talk to themselves,’ she says.

  I watch them kiss and tickle each other and wonder what my own child would be like. I’ve always thought I would have a boy, even though the idea of a girl is more interesting. I sense my attachment to a daughter would be more profound, but maybe my feelings for her would pierce a little too sharply. I’m not sure if that particular pain would suit me.

  Lana wears a pink hairband and socks with unicorns. She likes to pick her nose and taste what she finds there.

  I visit my mother every day when Dilip is at work. I tell her things that no one else knows because I am sure she won’t remember.

  I tell her that I don’t like the way Dilip puts the chocolate in the refrigerator.

  Every night after dinner, he helps himself to a square piece.

  He says he likes to change the taste in his mouth.

  I asked him why he likes to store it in the fridge.

  He had a ready list: ‘It lasts longer. My mom kept it like that. And I like it cold. Don’t you?’

  He gave me the unfurled paper packaging. I looked down at it in my hand.

  Soy lecithin. Nocciola.

  I shrugged as though it didn’t matter, but of course it does. Cold chocolate is harder to break. It makes a sound when it cracks in half. Cold chocolate takes longer to melt. It can never be eaten in stealth or in large quantities. I eat whole rows of chocolate straight out of the cupboard without anyone knowing. The bars in the fridge are not nearly as accommodating.

  ‘That’s obscene,’ my mother says.

  I tell her about how I packed a small handbag, took my passport and some jewellery, and left him one morning. How I sat in my car all day and bit my skin raw, only to return home in time for dinner. He never knew.

  *

  Dilip has been complaining of migraines, weakness and restless legs. His palms sweat whenever he drinks red wine. I make an appointment with a doctor and Dilip’s blood reports are dismal. Anaemic, low vitamin D, B12 deficient. The doctor looks at me for an explanation.

  I ask the doctor if these deficiencies are the reason for his symptoms. The doctor asks me where in Pune we live. I tell him. He says one of his nieces lives in that building, and that Dilip needs supplements.

  I ask him about Dilip’s sweaty palms. ‘What about them? Will that also improve with supplements?’

  The doctor rests his hands on the table and says I should get a second opinion if I want.

  On the way home, we stop at the pharmacy. Bottles line the shelves with different colours and logos. I pick one up and look at the back.

  ‘I wouldn’t take that one,’ the shop owner says.

  ‘Why?’ The picture on the front is of a rugged man with one leg on a log of wood. It seems like just what Dilip needs.

  ‘That form of B12 isn’t bioavailable.’

  I stare blankly at him.

  ‘It isn’t methylated.’

  Dilip rubs his eyes.

  ‘Here,’ the salesman says, pulling another bottle from the row. This one is purple with multicoloured DNA strands lined up like a field of flowers. ‘This is a better choice.’

  I ask him why any brand would sell a B12 supplement that isn’t bioavailable. He says he doesn’t know. He is looking around the shop, past Dilip and me. I sense he doesn’t want to answer any more questions.

  The following week, I realize I hate everything in our house.

  I buy a new desk and chair without telling Dilip, and begin drawing again. The first day, I am sweating and my hands smudge the paper. Successive attempts are easier. I feel far away from the portrait but I am unsure of how to start something new. Drawing takes up only an hour of my day.

  I look up other fanciful projects that I’ve listed in notebooks and spreadsheets, but they no longer make sense. Relevance dries out of ideas, leaving them brittle.

  The small square space of my working life, distant from the world and other voices, feels oppressive today. I wish there was a way to carry my work out of this private room and into another place, where it can bang against other people’s ideas and bodies.

  I call Purvi. It’s been some months since I’ve seen her and she is surprised to hear from me. She says she misses our walks at the Club. She’s learning how to play bridge and mah-jong, and has made a lovely new group of friends in my absence.

  I tell her I am not sure what to do, that maybe I’ve lost my imagination.

  She says she never thought my work required much imagination, that it was copying an image over and over again.

  I explain that I mean another kind of imagination, the kind that invents a world where my work matters. But the days seem endless and bright, so time doesn’t seem to move.

  I ask her if she thinks I should get a job. I hear the smile in her voice when she answers.


  ‘I don’t think it’s so easy to get a job nowadays, and you haven’t had a real job in years.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ I reply, but the realization moves through me like a tremor. If tomorrow I need one, I may not be able to get it. I will have no way of supporting myself if Dilip leaves me.

  But why would he leave me?

  But if he does leave me and I have to go back to my mother’s house, how will I support myself? Nana is gone, and Nani isn’t capable of taking care of me the way he would have. Where will I work?

  Perhaps Purvi can ask her new friends if they have any leads. I mentally run down a list of all the people I know and knock off the ones who don’t look upon me kindly.

  And then there’s Ma. I will have to look after her as well. There is no telling what her medical bills may be as time goes on.

  I rush to the small safe Dilip installed in the closet and punch in the code. The door swings open and I pull out a stack of velvet cases.

  Some jewellery from my family, some from his. A watch his father bought him.

  A silver rattle that was his as a child. Some American currency and gold coins.

  How much would this be worth today? I consider getting it valued, but it is already three o’clock and Dilip could well be home by five thirty.

  I think about every decision I’ve made until this point that has brought me here, and I wonder how much is because it was easy.

  I call Purvi again and ask her for the number of her jeweller to estimate how much my things might be worth.

  She tells me I sound bored. ‘Maybe it’s a good time to have a baby.’

  A baby.

  She laughs and I laugh in return, filling the silence with sound. A baby. A baby will take up time and space, a baby will fill the day. A baby will tie me irrevocably to Dilip, turn me from a wife to a mother. Maybe I’ll be sacred then. He can never leave me once I have his child. He will never want to.

  Relief bursts in me.

  At night I come to bed without my clothes on, and while we have sex I whisper in his ear that he can come inside me because I’m expecting my period, even though I am not.