by Avni Doshi
The men watch her, closing around the circle she has made. Marching, stomping, they’re like soldiers waiting for commands. She pulls them both closer, disappearing between their bodies. A sliver of red, a sliver of pink. I squint. I’ve lost sight of her. Namita is nothing more than empty space, a ghost dreamt into being.
I have seen this before. I have been here before.
The song changes or seems to change and I feel a tunnel in my ears open up. The night turns brighter and the glow unfurls on the ground around me. The grass sways. Tiny specks of life tremble on each blade, drops of dew, water and resin. Flowers grow amid the frightened verdure, amid the stone. Each bud is a revolving thing. I watch them turn, spinning like propellers, until they pop off into the sky like tops from when I was a child.
The moon is full, a mercury pool teeming with life, and little heads poke out to watch the dancers, calling down in their own language before diving headfirst into the grey.
Arms pass over me, as black as spider legs, knotting up my shirt, creeping over my stomach. Reza whispers something in my ear, but all I can see are his hands. Black hands, half human, half insect.
‘Drink water,’ he says.
I turn to look at his fangs and spindly arms. The jungle is lush, and soon the music changes, the sky turns darker. I see a snake slithering nearby. We watch each other. I want to speak but the words don’t come. I’ve lost language. The snake moves towards me, fully grown, waving its head, gnashing its teeth. It passes under the ground, and above, making its way between my legs, and for a moment I wonder if I am birthing it. I find my feet, stand, and follow it between the dancers. The snake weaves in and out in rings, growing longer. Soon, we are all caught, bound within. The snake keeps circling, round and round. It stops to look at me before disappearing, before turning into a moat filled with glistening liquid.
‘Antara, drink some water.’
I don’t remember how we leave or where we go, but I wake up lying beside him. The sounds are still on the surface of my skin. We are alone, but the room feels full. He lights candles and kerosene lamps, and we watch as thousands of creatures come in from the night.
The insects bang against the broken windows until they find the cracks. They circle the lamps, swarming around, drawing neon maps with their flight – moths and beetles. Their lacy skeletons tap the windowpanes. Glass is a cruel invention. It makes for a heartless prison.
In the morning, bodies are strewn around. They found their way in, the millions of moths, and perished in the warm room. The air is thick and heavy, and my heart sounds loud. I pick creatures out of my hair and from between the damp sheets. They lie around me, on their backs, their legs up in the air, ugly and dead in the light of day. Some are buried in the candles, preserved like fossils. I memorize the faint outlines of their bodies, deep within the waxy fog. They were alive when the wax hardened, as their world turned permanently white.
Reza looks at the insects. ‘It must be like suffocating,’ he says.
I realize he is naked.
I try to turn away but he kisses me, and his mouth, like a fishhook, drags me back, barely breathing.
We arrive at an opening holding hands. This provokes glances from those who are in the know about his past scandal and my future pretensions.
I was invited to be in this show but declined the offer. The curator in question likes to collect hungry unknowns around him – when they make it big, he demands they give him a work for discovering them. He also has a reputation for getting drunk and calling women cunts.
Reza stops in front of a large painting. Pasted on to the canvas are pages of books that have been taken apart. The frame is made of binding. The text is illegible but he lingers over it, leaning in, trying to read passages. They are pages from Márquez, an anthology of short stories, translated into French, Portuguese and Dutch.
The space doesn’t do the show justice. Overall, it feels sprawling, ill hung. The project lost steam at the end, the artists lost interest – they gave him old works from other commissions, tried to make it fit into the confines of his curatorial bind.
The curator is already into his third whisky. He slurs a bit when I congratulate him. His breath rouses some fear in my subconscious mind.
I remembered when he invited me to be part of the show. I received an envelope in the mail – a prompt from the curator, a point of entry – written out in his hand on a piece of paper torn from a notebook. It was a passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book I had never heard of, much less read: a man is losing his words, and he endeavours to remember them the only way he knows how – he labels everything he owns, covering his world incessantly in a mantle of language, protecting himself from the danger of the blank slate. He persists, until the futility of his project settles on him, that his work will be worthless when the value assigned to each letter eventually evaporates from his mind.
When I return to the apartment where I am a paying guest, the landlady hands over a piece of paper on which she has written down the phone calls I have missed, the names listed in order. Each letter tilts perilously backwards, as though it is gazing up at the sky, and I wonder how long it took her to train her right hand to do what the left should have been doing. Kali Mata’s name is the only one there. She has called me four times in the past few days.
I crumple the piece of paper in my hand. Back in my room, I begin to tear it into smaller and smaller pieces.
I hate Kali Mata. I don’t know why, but I do.
I hate the questions she asks me on the phone. If I am eating well. If I have enough money. I hate talking about my art, trying to put it all into words for her, when at the end she only comes back with more questions.
I hate hearing about Pune. I left so I would never have to hear about it again.
I hate that her name is following me around, written on scraps of paper every day, again and again, sometimes Kali Mata, sometimes Aunty Eve, while my mother is forever absent. It would be easier if I could just kill her off, in story at least – tell everyone that Ma is dead.
So I do. I start spreading the lie, slowly at first until it catches like wild fire. I receive sympathy and condolences. Reza stares at me for a long time when he overhears me telling the news to his friends. My stomach bubbles inside. I have prepared a more elaborate version for him. But he never asks. He just looks back to the book he is reading. In another breath he is reabsorbed into that world, and I am relieved by his nonchalance but confused about why it has also caused me a little pain.
Reza has several fake library cards. He takes out books and doesn’t read them. Instead, he opens to random pages and blacks out words and sentences. Then he leaves the books around the city, on street corners and in the hands of beggars.
I steal things every time I leave his apartment. The library cards. The insects. A single photograph, a three-by-five, a little bent, of his face. The only photograph of him that I can find in his collection besides the wedding portraits.
‘Are you in love with anyone?’
We lie on his bed in the afternoon. The summer is high, and I drift in and out of sleep.
‘No,’ I say. ‘You?’
‘Many people.’
I have grown to like the craters on his body. I try to picture him in love, but I have never experienced it myself, and the image I conjure is deprived of detail and colour.
He breathes through his mouth when he naps, and mumbles occasionally. I wrap my arms around his chest and bury my face in his clavicle. His saliva wets my hair as I fall asleep.
When I wake up, I am still in the dark pit of his skin. There is stubble at his throat. He is awake, I can tell by his shallow breaths. The sun is still high in the sky and blazing through the windows, turning the backs of my eyelids into kaleidoscopes.
It’s hot. I struggle to fill my lungs.
I count the distance between us with my fingers. Through his shirt, I see pockets of hair, a paunch from the whisky he sips throughout the day. He watches as I inch forw
ard to close the gap. There is no coercion between us. Nothing is done to fill the silences. I know I am somewhere between desire and doubt.
I lift my leg and bring it around his hips.
He wipes something away from the inside of my eye and kisses me. His saliva is always brassy. I scratch the dark creases around his elbows. His skin is tough as hide.
Reza and I have been sleeping together for several months now. We never speak of it, but it happens regularly. Reza doesn’t care much for foreplay. It always hurts when he pushes himself into me. We kiss a little to cover the croaking sound in my throat.
I remembered being surprised when Reza left us, surprised by how deeply we had soaked him up and how completely he then evaporated. Had he been there at all? Had we imagined it? Was it possible for a person to be a part of every moment and yet not leave behind any trace?
I looked for footprints, but there were none. Was it possible we didn’t have a single photograph? Ma and I were not the types to indulge in picture-taking, but there were images of us. I realized, then, that he had always been behind the camera, capturing what he saw in his eyes, but we had never captured him.
When he disappears a second time, in Bombay, four years after we had run into each other in the gallery, I am not surprised.
Only a fool would be surprised.
The dull sadness that I carry for a little while remains a private one.
I return to Pune without the degree I had left for, making a strange kind of art that concerns my family. I spend my first year back working on a sculpture of dried mango skins preserved in formaldehyde, which I use as a base to print hundred-rupee notes. A video of me cutting and eating all the mangoes in one sitting is recorded to accompany the work. The project fails due to errors in mixing the chemical solvents. I develop a rash on my arms that takes two months to fully heal.
When I finish, Ma crosses her arms around her body as though she is covering a wound. I feel better somehow, lighter. My stomach yawns and rumbles. ‘Is that everything?’ she says. ‘I’m warning you, I want to know everything, or I’m going to tell Dilip what kind of person you are and what kind of art you make. I always knew having you would ruin my life.’
Inside my chest I can feel an alarm going off, my heart shuddering in its cage. But the movement remains trapped there – everywhere else I am frozen still. Ma’s breathing is rapid. A bead of sweat appears at her hairline and rushes down the side of her face. The room is unbearably warm.
‘Say something, you bitch,’ she says. ‘Are you deaf and dumb?’ Her voice falters into a mewl. Before I can react, she is crying into her hands.
I behold my mother – how did she come in? Don’t I usually lock the door? I wish I had, or I wish Dilip had locked me in. I wish I wasn’t such a hoarder, with objects and people.
Why did I invite her here when all I want to do is expel her? Why didn’t I tell Dilip everything when I had the chance? Why didn’t I destroy the picture? I thought I had – I was sure I had done that already. Did I look at it and wrap it back up in the butter paper? Was the thought of parting with it for ever too difficult?
So what if he knows? We are about to have a child together. I am safe. I must be safe. Motherhood is the safest place I have ever known. Our little family is my fortress.
But relationships are fragile. I think of Dilip, sitting across the table from me every night, watching me eat meat in a mirror, disappointed.
Dilip, knowing that every day I gaze into the face of another man, a man whom I loved, even though he’d loved my mother first. He would have no choice.
She could try to be a little forgiving. A little forgiving of the daughter who has suffered at her hands and has been there for her regardless. I have told her, isn’t that enough, I have come clean and shared what I never shared with anyone, and still she threatens me. She threatens my marriage in my own house. While I sit in my marital bed. In the presence of my unborn baby.
I look down at my hands. They’re trembling.
A drill outside switches on and the sound rises up into the room like an angry swarm of bees. I have an urge to close the window or escape through it. I sit back into the moment and everything, even the sound, begins to slow. If I go out of the window, I’ll lose everything. My self, my baby. And Ma, she is still crying. What if I push her out?
I open my mouth and suck in air. I am safe. ‘How could you?’ she whispers, heaving.
‘Okay,’ I say. I stand up slowly and steady myself. The volume of blood in my body has increased, and sudden movements make me see stars. I must be safe. I have no choice.
Ma looks startled and stands up too. ‘Okay?’ she sniffles.
‘Okay, I’ll tell you whatever else you want to know.’ I pick up my phone from the table and dial our driver. ‘But first, we have to have breakfast. I’m pregnant, remember?’
She looks at my stomach and nods, and leads me out into the living room.
I set the table with biscuits, bread and jam. I send the maid to ask the neighbours for some sugar. Within twenty minutes, the driver rings the doorbell. He hands Ila a familiar red box.
‘Give it to me,’ I say. She hands it to me obediently.
I cut the ribbon and pull away the cover. Below a sheet of butter paper sit two-dozen Mazorin biscuits. I push the box towards Ma. She glances inside. Then she picks out two that are stuck together. Placing them into her mouth, she sighs.
Her descent into the abyss is fast. I spoon sugar into her afternoon tea and stir. Dilip has a conference call with the US office and comes home after dinner. Ma doesn’t notice him walk through the door. She is smiling, staring at the empty space in front of her.
The watchman is watering plants below. Decomposing leaves release their tannins; the puddles are dark as tea.
I clutch the ledge of the balcony. The inside of my body tears apart.
I’ve already prepared my bag. Dilip is shouting from the door. Kashta kneels beside me, coaxing my chappals on to my feet, but my toes are swollen and don’t fit inside the leather rings.
Ma smiles at me, my happy goldfish. She stands by the window and paces a little back and forth. I have a passing thought that she won’t be safe alone. I call Nani and tell her to come over.
Our driver is nowhere to be seen. Dilip hails a rickshaw. The rickshaw-wallah has dark grooves around his eyes and tattoos marking his arms. He raises his hand in salutation. The watchman turns and water sprays from his hose, catching the edge of my clothes. Cold water trickles down the warm, tight skin of my ankles.
On my lap, I can see the mound that is my stomach moving. It already doesn’t belong to me, this creature. It already has a mind of its own. I try to imagine myself without the mound. I can’t remember that person. I wonder what my body will look like now. Will there be a hole at the centre? Will I be a fleshy doughnut? The thought makes me feel nauseated. Or maybe it is the return of the pain. Suddenly, I don’t want to let it go. It should stay with me, inside me, for ever. I watch it for a moment, before turning my face out of the rickshaw and vomiting.
*
Afterwards, they tell me it’s a girl. Rather, I hear them say it to each other. The doctor to the nurses, the nurses to Dilip.
‘A girl,’ they whisper.
They speak to each other as though I am not there. In hushed tones, so I am not disturbed. Then I realize the baby is in the room. It occurs to me that they are whispering for her now. I can’t tell from Dilip’s face if he is happy or alarmed.
They watch my face as I hold the baby for the first time. The child has the sweet smell of amniotic fluids on her face. She looks serene – she has passed through something dark and come into the light. The light is halogen, and moths knock against the bulbs.
I don’t feel anything much as I hold her, but when they take her away I know something is missing.
They all wait for me to say something. I know I should express joy, that if I don’t they will think I’m disappointed to have a daughter. A bigot. The scum of the eart
h.
I want to assure them I’m not disappointed, but I can’t show delight either. Maybe I’m too tired. Maybe it is the continuing urge to stuff the little bundle back inside of me, like meat into a sausage skin.
I’m hungry.
I stare at the girl’s little face because I don’t know where to look. Her head is round. She looks like no one, but when her eyes are closed she could be a sleeping cat. I don’t much care for cats. Or for people who resemble animals.
I try to smile, but all I can muster are the blank eyes of relief. Relief that the pain has stopped. Everything that comes now is just an aftershock.
The baby has trouble latching on to my nipples. No one mentioned that this could be a problem. I begin to think I am the first woman in the world to have substandard nipples. A nurse tries to help. She tucks some tissues into her pocket and goes to work on me. She is plump with dark skin and wears a white dress with blue buttons. Her hair is captured in a braid but the curls rebel. She handles the dead weight of my breasts.
I can’t decide what is more difficult, the labour or the feeding. Of course, the pain of contractions has no earthly comparison – but it ends, eventually. Now, the hours of feeding stretch before me.
This is only day one.
My breasts are double what they once were. My vagina is a crime scene.
Did this happen overnight, or have I always been slightly misshapen? Lines like silver thread appear. Or were they always there? Maybe I just could not see them. The nipples darken and become as large as saucers. The skin cracks and bleeds. At night, I place strainers over them to avoid chafing.
The next day, the baby sleeps in a bassinet near my bed. Her hair is black, and her skin is yellow due to a mild case of jaundice. I wonder if she is sickly, but don’t have the courage to ask. What if the answer is yes? I will be to blame. When the baby yawns, her mouth opens wide and I see the edge of her pink gums.
Purvi comes with gifts that day. She brings toys for boys and girls. She says she wanted to be prepared for any outcome. Clothes, too, in metallic wrapping, the sizes on the labels ranging from six months to one year.