by SJ Sindu
The days march toward the wedding. Grandmother starts to feel better. She still can’t move around much, but she sits and watches her shows. Sometimes she sits in the kitchen and croaks instructions to Amma while she cooks. When it comes to food, Grandmother is lucid. The onions have to be cut smaller, fried longer, with more oil and spices. “Smaller,” Grandmother cries. “Don’t take that out yet. Put in more curry powder.” Amma grinds her teeth and puts up with it. At Grandmother’s instructions, Amma stays in the kitchen most nights and during the weekends.
“You need to spend time with her,” Amma tells me. “She needs something to occupy her time.”
I dig out two pairs of knitting needles and yarn from the recesses of my old closet, along with a how-to-knit book from the eighties. A blond woman with gigantic teeth and a workout headband smiles on the cover. The pages are crisp with too many spilled beverages.
I give Grandmother the thickest needles I can find. I try to start stitches in bulky, fuzzy blue yarn while she squints at the directions.
She puts a betel leaf packet in her mouth and reads while chewing. “Knitting soothes the troubled spirit. To make a purl stitch, the needle is inserted through the front of the stitch, then must be brought forward and over the yarn.”
When I get the stitch down, I show her. I stand behind her and guide her arms and hands like she’s a human puppet. When I was little, Grandmother knitted blankets, scarves, sweaters, even dresses and gloves. She bought the warmest wool she could find in Sri Lanka, and sent the finished pieces to us through relatives and friends traveling to the US. I hated wearing the brightly-colored sweaters and dresses. My American classmates made fun of me for looking like a FOB.
Grandmother catches on to the stitch slowly, but her fingers still remember how to hold the yarn with tension. We knit to the beat of her chewing and spitting. Her hands tremble as she knits. Without me behind her, guiding her movements, she quickly forgets the stitch and tangles up the yarn. When I look up, she’s trying to pick apart a knot with her shaking fingers. I take the yarn from her as gently as I can and put it aside. She coughs. I stand behind her and give her a fresh ball of yarn, guiding her hands as they cast on stitches.
When Amma comes home and finds us knitting, she says, “This is how it should be. You should be learning to have responsibility, not running around with friends like a little kid.”
I stare at the fuzzy blue yarn we’re working with and hold the tension with my fingers.
“You’re not going out again,” she says.
“I’m twenty-seven. You can’t really stop me.”
She fiddles with the zipper of her purse. “As long as you act like a kid, I’ll treat you like one.”
“She’s twenty-seven,” Grandmother says. The yarn slacks around her fingers.
Amma hitches up her purse and storms up the stairs.
•••
Laila Aunty comes by that night. No Appa in sight. Amma is washing dishes and sees Laila Aunty’s Lexus pull up in the gravel driveway.
“She’s alone,” Amma says. She hurriedly wipes her hands on a dishrag and runs up the stairs.
I’m painting on my laptop, coloring over my sketch of the flamenco dancer from El Jaleo. Grandmother is knitting a bright red scarf, wavy at the edges where she’s dropped and added stitches.
I open the door before Laila Aunty has a chance to knock. She clasps her purse in front of herself. She’s wearing a kurta that sparkles when she moves.
“I came to see Grandmother, dear. Is your mother home?”
Amma comes down the stairs. She’s changed out of her home clothes and into something she normally wears for work. She and Laila Aunty step around each other on their way to the living room.
Laila Aunty bends down and kisses Grandmother on both cheeks. Grandmother doesn’t seem to know who Laila Aunty is, but she smiles and makes small talk anyway.
Amma sits silently on the sofa. She stares through the sliding glass doors at the vegetable garden that needs weeding.
“How are you, dear?” Laila Aunty asks me. “You must miss Krishna.”
I close my laptop. “He’ll visit soon.”
“Let me make some tea,” Amma says.
I start to get up to follow her but she waves me down. She goes to the kitchen.
“Have you drawn anything new?” Laila Aunty asks. “Any pictures of Sri Lanka?”
I’ve drawn a woman with no arm. I shake my head.
“I wish you’d paint a canvas for us. We need something to hang in the den.”
Vidya used to paint for Appa. They still have some of her paintings hanging in their house.
“I’m not that good,” I say.
Amma brings tea for each of us.
Laila Aunty takes a sip and closes her eyes. “I miss your tea.”
Amma drinks hers in silence.
“At university your mother used to make tea just like this,” Laila Aunty says. “Our whole floor would visit our room in the evening instead of going to the cafeteria.”
“The cafeteria was very far,” Amma says.
“And they only gave plain tea. One of the girls in the hostel had an uncle who had a farm nearby. He brought us milk so we could make tea.”
“It’s sad what happened to him.”
“What happened?” I ask.
Amma wraps her hands around her mug. “He was killed in the riots.”
I know about this. The riots that started the Sri Lankan war. I’d read about it in college.
“It was what?” Laila Aunty says. “Third year of university?”
“Third year. We were about to go home for vacation. I had a train ticket for the next morning, but the security guards came to the hostel that night and told us to get to the inner rooms. They had some rooms that were in the middle of the floor that were hard to get to. They said there was a mob heading toward the university.”
“News wasn’t as easily spread, no. We didn’t know that the riots had already started in Colombo.”
“They put some Sinhalese boys in charge of protecting us. But some of them wanted revenge, too.”
“Some of them threatened us.”
“So we took our things and ran.”
“We took our tea.”
“We did take our tea.”
“We went and stayed at this farmer’s house, the one that used to give us milk. But the riots spread fast, so we had to move on.”
“We couldn’t bathe for a week. Remember? It was just a bunch of us girls, no.”
“You wouldn’t believe the smell.”
Amma tucks her legs underneath her and leans forward. Their voices are high-pitched and loud, almost argumentative if you weren’t listening to the words.
“We finally found a barn near someone’s house that we hid in, but the family found us. It was a nice Muslim family, and they hid us in their daughters’ rooms.”
“Remember Meena?”
“Meena was a girl on our floor.” Laila Aunty lowers her voice. “She had her period during the riots.”
“She smelled like you wouldn’t believe.”
“We snuck her out to the river to wash herself. But when we were bathing—”
“We heard men’s voices. We were so scared.”
They giggled and wiped at their eyes.
“We snuck off in our wet clothes, hair still wet—”
“Shampoo still on—”
“Eventually the farmer who first took us all in, he arranged for a tractor to take us to Kandy so we could take a bus home.”
“They came for him after we left,” Laila Aunty says. “They took him out to his field, and burned him.”
“Burned all his cattle, too.”
“We didn’t find out until after we made it back to Jaffna.”
Silence rang in the space betw
een their voices.
“So sad,” Amma said.
“Our parents were so worried when we got back.”
“Your father, too,” Amma starts to say. She cuts herself off.
Laila Aunty puts her teacup on the coffee table. It’s dainty and ceramic. The tea set for guests.
“Well,” she says, standing.
“Thanks for coming.”
Laila Aunty starts to move toward Amma but then stops. Instead she kisses Grandmother on the cheeks again and leaves.
When she’s gone, Amma washes out her teacup by hand in the sink. She doesn’t say anything.
“Why did she come?” I ask.
Amma stops scrubbing the cup. “She has regrets.”
That night I dream that I’m on a bus in Sri Lanka, trying to get home to my family. We get stopped at a security checkpoint. While we’re all getting searched by army officers, our bus explodes. A woman with no arm falls on me. She shields me from the flames and shrapnel. She’s so heavy I can’t breathe. I crawl and crawl but she lies on top of me, holding me down.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, I draw the scene. I can’t capture the way the woman crushed me, but I can feel it, all over.
It’s one of the best sketches I’ve ever drawn, but it’s not what Laila Aunty meant when she said she wanted a painting to hang on her wall.
•••
I go to the rugby house that weekend. I pretend not to hear Amma mutter to herself as she pulls on her gardening gloves and steps outside. Grandmother stands on the deck and holds the railing. I pull on my sneakers and leave before either of them has a chance to say anything.
Tasha and Jesse aren’t up when I get there. Tasha’s black curls poke out of the rainbow quilt when I knock on the door, and through the open window I see her drag herself to the door.
“Hey you.” She leans heavily against the door and wipes her eyes with little squishy sounds.
I follow her inside and throw my duffel bag on the floor next to a pile of Xbox controllers. Someone shifts in her bed. All I can see is a pale forehead.
“I’ll make you some coffee.” Tasha pushes me into the olive kitchen.
I sit down at the rickety table with mismatched chairs. She putters around the kitchen, pulling coffee and filters from cabinets. The coffee grinder screams a high-pitched wail and the smell of ground coffee fills the room. She makes coffee in a French press, carefully pouring it into two mugs shaped like boobs. She sits down at the table with me.
Black coffee. The mug is yellow with red swirls and a great big red nipple. I’m not a fan of black coffee. I always add sugar and creamer and Amma drinks hers with condensed milk. I blow on it. The air steams up my glasses.
Tasha’s already halfway through hers. “I just got these beans.” She closes her eyes and breathes in the smell.
“What time are you guys going to practice?”
“Rugby season’s over for Boston Women’s. Last night was our alumnae game at Wellesley.”
I sink further into the chair.
She rubs at her temple, then scratches a tattoo on her neck. “Good thing, too. I think I have a concussion.”
“So no rugby.”
“Nope. But,”—she holds up a finger—“the MMA tournament is starting.”
“MMA?”
“A friend of mine runs it. A bunch of dykes and trans boys fighting in basements for cash. It’s terrific.”
“Like Fight Club?”
“We don’t talk about Fight Club. Want to join?” She reaches out and touches my hair, which is finally long enough to put into a ponytail. “Do you ever think about short hair?”
“I do have short hair.”
“I meant shorter. Like mine.” She pulls at her curls, stretching one two-inch piece out from her head.
“My mom would kill me.”
“You’re twenty-something years old. Why the hell are you afraid of your mother?”
She lifts up her hand. I feel the air move around my head before she touches me.
“I’ve always wanted to cut my hair short,” I say.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Jesse appears around the bend of the hallway. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes and pours herself a cup of coffee. “Are you joining the tournament, Lucky?”
A blond man with high cheekbones stumbles in, his shirt crumpled and his boxers twisted. He looks odd in the house, against the corner of the rainbow flag just above his head.
The man walks to Tasha and puts a hand on her neck. He was the one in her bed earlier. I stare at my coffee and wish it had sugar and cream. I hear him say, “Hey, baby,” and something that sounds like a kiss.
Tasha coughs, and when I look up, the man has moved away. He’s standing by the fridge, his face crumpling the way that Nisha’s does when she’s angry.
“I’ll call you later,” Tasha says to him. “You should probably go.”
He wraps his arms around himself and walks into the living room.
“Straight men can be so needy,” she says.
When he leaves, Tasha teaches me the basics for the tournament while Jesse watches and plays on her phone.
Tasha rolls up one arm of her T-shirt. “Punch me.”
“What?”
“Punch me. Go on.” She spreads her legs and tilts toward me. “Go on.”
I make a fist and throw my weight at her, unfocused and wobbly.
“Harder. Come on.”
I punch again, less wobbly this time.
“Again. Go a little harder each time. Rotate with the motion.”
I visualize punching. I picture the muscles in my shoulders, my back twisting back and snapping forward, the power flowing through my arm. I punch again. Again, again, stronger and stronger until Tasha has to widen her stance.
She feels her arm where I just punched. “Not bad, twinkle toes. You may even give me a bruise.” She moves behind me and puts her palm flat on my right shoulder blade. “The power comes from here. Rotate with it.”
“I was rotating.”
She doesn’t move her hand from my back. “You can punch a lot harder than this.”
“I’m trying.”
“Maybe we need to get you angry.”
“I’m already angry.”
She turns and gives me her other arm to punch. “Not angry enough.”
I picture Nisha, her wedding, the way she gets excited about her bridal clothes and how she cried in the car and asked me to run away with her. I haven’t heard from her since. I punch, harder and harder, rotating out from my shoulder, again again again.
After a while we have to escape to the deck to let the sweat freeze on our faces. We’re all down to our boxer briefs and sports bras.
Tasha makes me chug a bottle of water before handing me a PBR. She tries to convince me to cut my hair.
“Stop pestering her,” Jesse says.
“Look at her. She wants to.”
I text Kris: Should I cut my hair?
He responds: You hate your hair.
We gather in the kitchen. Tasha spreads out her buzzer and guards on the table. “Ready?”
I screw my eyes shut. The cold buzzer tickles my head as it runs back and forth, the vibration running through me, slipping down under the pit of my stomach. Hair falls around me. My head feels oddly light. Tasha pulls out scissors and works on the top, biting the tip of her tongue in concentration. Pieces of hair cling to the sweat on my forehead and work their way inside the collar of my T-shirt. Finally, she steps back, throws up her hands and says, “Done.” Jesse swats at my back and neck.
My head spins when I stand. I stumble into the bathroom and stop at the mirror. My ears stick out like naked baby birds stretching out their new necks.
Tasha is behind me, arms crossed over her chest.
“So? How do you feel, Mulan?”
I rub what’s not there on the back of my head. I look like a woman I might stare at from across the room.
My reflection grins.
Tasha’s fingernails dance on my neck. “You look good.”
•••
By the time I pull up to Amma’s doorway, a migraine beats a soft pulse behind my left eyeball. Amma’s car is missing, but Nisha’s is in our driveway. Nisha opens the door before I have a chance to put my key in the lock. She stands there motionless, her eyes widening slowly.
“Hey.” I try a smile. “Can I come in?”
“Your mom’s going to kill you.” But she’s starting to smile. “You’re going to be dead for my wedding.” She puts a hand on my shoulder and bends down with the force of her laughter. I wonder if she’s forgotten about crying, about asking me to run away with her.
Grandmother’s in her chair in the living room, watching the TV, blankness stitched on her face. A bit of drool hangs from the side of her mouth. I wipe it off with the hem of my shirt. She turns and looks at me, her eyes blank.
“It’s me, Lucky.” I take her hand and rub the back of it. “Lucky.”
She plucks her hand out of mine and touches the tip of my hair like it’s made of glass. “Lucky, you’re a boy.”
Nisha sits on the edge of the couch armrest and smirks. “You don’t look half bad.”
“You need to marry her,” Grandmother says to me, nodding her head.
“Marry who?”
She doesn’t answer. She looks out the sliding doors to the deck. I open the doors so that the musty indoor air can circulate. Grandmother breathes in the wind that rushes in, lets it fill her up. She sits straighter. She’s probably been in the chair all afternoon. I should’ve come home earlier. I’m the only one who helps her walk around when she wants to. I’m the only one who wants her to be strong.
I offer her my arm, and help her stand and hobble to the deck. The weather’s unseasonable warmth swirls around us.
Grandmother slowly turns back toward the living room. “I can’t hear the baby.”
•••
When Amma’s car pulls into the driveway, I hide upstairs. Nisha’s already left. Grandmother still sits in the living room.