‘I’m sure she’ll do well there. I mean, have you seen her latest collection? It’s insane! Literally insane!’
‘Literally?’ Uday asked, straightfaced, ‘It’s suffering from a mental disorder?’
But Shibani was in a different world now, one inhabited solely by Aisha’s handbags. ‘They featured a few pieces in this month’s Vogue and ermagawd, Avantika, they’re so gorge! There was this one bag? With a huge sunflower print? I nearly drooled all over the page! And so … unique, the sunflowers were all blue? I mean, you never find a yellow bag in any of her collections, but can you imagine? Blue. Sunflowers. I just had to take a picture, see?’ She whipped out her mobile phone and brandished it at Avantika. ‘But it must be damn expensive, you know? Because they had written “price on request” and nobody says that unless it’s a very pricey thing?’
Avantika looked up from the press release. She felt a strange sense of disquiet, the kind you get when you’re standing on the edge of a precipice and looking down. There is a quiet certainty that things could go terribly wrong any moment, if only you took a step ahead. But that is nothing, mere background noise drowned out by a clear voice in your head telling you what a great idea it was to take that step.
Wordlessly, she took the phone from Shibani’s hand. On the screen, a small purse with a print, of yes, blue sunflowers. She zoomed in to the handle. A second later, she gasped.
‘I know, right?’ Shibani said happily, ‘You think Dhruv could get me a discount? I mean he’s her brother and he’s working here and I’m practically his boss so—’
‘Shibani. Fuck off.’
Shibani gave her an affronted look. ‘God, Avantika, how rude!’
‘Sorry, yes … now, could you please go away? I need to think.’
As Shibani walked away in a huff, Avantika took a deep breath and sat down very, very slowly on a chair. She didn’t want to say or do anything to dislodge the idea that was forming in her head. Sunflowers. Of course. She didn’t realize her mouth was open, but she must’ve looked strange sitting there unblinking, because Uday was giving her a very concerned look.
‘You okay?’
She nodded.
‘Your eyes have gone very wide. Are you sure you’re fine?’
She let out a breath and blinked a few times. Her head was spinning. Sunflowers. Jesus fucking Christ.
‘Fine, fine,’ she whispered, raising her fingers to her lips, ‘I’m an idiot.’
1991
Avantika poked her head out of the wings and stared. So many people! The school auditorium was brightly lit and filled with parents and students and teachers, all sitting in their seats chatting and laughing, waiting for the show to start. And in just a few minutes, she’d be on the stage, facing all of them. The thought made the inside of her stomach wriggle. She gulped and scanned the crowd for Aai and Baba. They had to be somewhere out there, they had dropped her backstage just half an hour ago, but no, she couldn’t spot them.
She looked at her costume. A bright yellow sunflower face with a green unitard and green gloved hands for leaves. She was supposed to wave every time the ‘All We Need Is Love’ bit came in the song. They had practised in every lunch recess for the past month, but she still felt a little nervous. Maybe not a little. Oh no, now she had to go to the toilet.
Scurrying about in her green socks, she went to find her class teacher, Miss Bharucha, to ask her where the toilets were. She found her in one of the dressing rooms behind the stage, strapping on a pair of cardboard wings to Archana Anand, who was dressed as a sparrow. They were surrounded by half of class 3A, all of whom were dressed as assorted birds, animals, trees and clouds.
‘Hold still,’ Miss Bharucha was telling Archana, ‘I have to do five other birds after you.’
‘Miss, miss,’ Avantika said, tugging at her saree.
‘What?’
‘Miss, I have to go to the toilet, Miss.’
‘Now? The curtain will open in five minutes, Avantika!’
‘Miss, please, Miss!’
Miss Bharucha looked heavenward in despair. She had five pairs of wings to strap on, a missing sunflower to replace and a tree with a sudden case of hiccups. This was not turning out to be a very good afternoon.
‘Okay, but make it quick,’ she said, before pointing Avantika towards the toilet and warning her thrice to hurry up, not lose her way back and not soil her costume on the toilet.
Avantika padded off in the direction Miss Bharucha had pointed in. The toilets were a long way from the stage, away from the dressing rooms and the backstage area. She passed the props and sets of the plays the older classes would put up after theirs, some of their cast practising lines to each other and a few hassled-looking teachers. Everything loomed and in the semi-darkness, she bumped into a number of people, leaving one of her petals looking quite rumpled in the process.
Finally, she found it. A clean whitewashed room with speckled tiles, a giant mirror on one wall and three toilet cubicles. There was someone inside one of them, so Avantika went into the one next to it. She had just about finished and was feeling very pleased with herself for not getting anything on her costume, when she heard the sniffling. It appeared to be coming from the cubicle next to hers.
Cautiously, she stepped out of the cubicle and washed her hands in the basin. The sniffling continued. Avantika didn’t know what to do. Miss Bharucha had asked her to hurry back. But someone was crying in there.
‘Girlie?’ she asked cautiously, ‘Why’re you crying? Don’t cry.’
There was silence for a moment. Then a voice, a very familiar voice, said:
‘A… Avantika?’
It was Laxmi! But what was she doing crying inside the toilet? She was also in the show. She should be getting ready right now.
‘Laxmi? Why’re you crying? You’re scared or what?’
‘N… no. Y… yes. N… not like that.’
‘I’m also a little scared. It’s okay. Don’t cry.’
More sobbing. Avantika looked at the door to the toilet. Miss Bharucha would be so angry if she was late. But Laxmi would be late too. They’d both get punished! No, no, she had to do something.
‘Laxmi, Bharucha Miss said the curtain is going to go up in five minutes. Please come out.’
‘N… o! I’m… not coming… out!’ Laxmi was sobbing now.
‘Are you scared of going on the stage? My mother said, when the curtain goes up, they switch off all other lights and you can’t see the people sitting in front of you.’
‘I’m… not scared… of the stage!’ Laxmi whimpered, ‘I don’t want to come out because Miss Bharucha says I have to be a sunflower!’
Avantika was confused. What was so bad about being a sunflower? Okay, it was hard to remember when to wave your hands, but it was nothing to cry about. She knew how to help Laxmi with that.
‘Don’t worry, I’m also a sunflower no,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you when to wave your hands.’
‘I don’t want to be a sunflower! They’re… y… ye… yellow!’
There was a fresh bout of weeping, this time with loud, gasping sobs.
‘So?’ Avantika asked. ‘You don’t like yellow colour or what?’
She waited for an answer but there was only silence. She put her ear to the door of the cubicle.
‘Tell me no. What happened? I’m your friend, na?’
Then a very small, terrified voice whispered from the other side:
‘I’m… afraid… of it.’
Avantika blinked. She felt like laughing. Afraid of yellow? How can anyone be afraid of a colour? How dumb. Shee. Anything, Laxmi was saying.
‘Why are you afraid of it?’, she asked, ‘It doesn’t … do anything to you.’
‘I know … but I’m still scared,’ Laxmi’s words sounded muffled. As if whatever she was feeling was too big to fit into them. ‘Every time I see something yellow, my stomach feels funny and I can’t breathe. I can’t go near it. I can’t touch it. I can’t be a sunflower. I can�
�t, I can’t, I can’t!’
And with that, she started crying so badly, Avantika’s own stomach felt funny. She felt like running and finding a grown-up and telling them everything so they could help Laxmi. But if she went near the stage right now, Miss Bharucha would just push her on the stage without listening to anything she had to say. That’s what grown-ups did. They never think that you could have anything important to say to them. They never listen. No, grown-ups wouldn’t be able to help. She would just have to manage on her own.
‘Don’t cry, Laxmi. Please don’t cry?’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be a sunflower. If Miss Bharucha can’t find you, then she can’t make you a sunflower.’
Laxmi’s sobs turned into sniffles as she seemed to consider this. Encouraged, Avantika continued. ‘You wait here only. Don’t go out. Once our show is over, I’ll … tell Miss Bharucha I have to do number 1 again. Then I’ll come back here and take you outside. You tell her … you tell her you got lost. You couldn’t find the stage. Okay?’
She heard Laxmi blowing her nose on a hanky. ‘O… okay.’
‘Okay, bye. I’ll come back quickly, okay?’
Avantika turned to leave, when she heard Laxmi call out from the cubicle.
‘Avantika?’
‘What?’
‘You won’t tell anyone, no? How I’m scared of … that colour?’
‘No, no.’
‘Godpromisemotherswear?’
‘Godpromisemotherswear.’
A couple of minutes later, a frantic Miss Bharucha saw Avantika get in line behind the two other sunflowers and heaved a sigh of relief. 3A’s dance performance to All We Need Is Love by The Beatles was declared a massive success by the audience. Critics claimed that an additional sunflower would’ve added some extra zing to the proceedings, but it was generally felt that the hiccupping tree made up for it, as a subtle symbol of the director’s postmodernist angst.
Twelve
Avantika sped down Lamington Road on her scooter, her head buzzing. Laxmi had been terrified of the colour yellow. She had to find out if the phobia had continued into adulthood, because if it had, then it could only mean one thing: the body that had been discovered, that had been cremated, the body that was wearing a yellow t-shirt, wasn’t Laxmi’s. And if she was right about the other thing she’d discovered … but no, that was just conjecture at this point.
She pulled into Laxmi’s lane and parked amidst the row of bikes outside her building. Racing up the stairs, she considered what she was about to do. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a masterplan. But still, she had to give it a shot.
She rang the bell of the Swaminathan residence. A few moments later, Laxmi’s mother opened the door.
‘Oh—’
‘Hi, Aunty—’
‘Come in, come in, what a surprise—’
Avantika followed her inside, refusing her offer of coffee, and smiled in resignation when the woman ignored her protests and brought out a cup of filter coffee anyway. She sipped it in silence for a moment, while Laxmi’s mother sat on the sofa next to her, quiet and unsure.
‘You must be wondering why…’ she said, just as Laxmi’s mother asked, ‘So what brings you—’
They both smiled awkwardly.
‘I came to see how you’re doing, Aunty,’ Avantika replied.
Laxmi’s mother smiled sadly, a smile that was three-fourths a sigh.
‘I’m … better than before. I don’t really know … if I can be better than this now.’
Avantika kept down her mug on a side table next to the sofa. ‘When I told my mother what had happened, she was quite … shaken. I think a part of her must’ve imagined what it would be like if something like that happens to me.’
‘It is a terrible blessing, you know, being the mother of a daughter,’ Laxmi’s mother sniffed, ‘your heart is filled with so much happiness. But it is always mixed with fear. Your whole life you spend waiting, scared, that one day, something bad, something horrible will happen to your baby girl. How could it not? How could something so beautiful, so precious be given to you for nothing? How can this much happiness not have a price?’ Her voice caught for a moment. ‘Your mother is lucky. She has not had to pay it.’
Avantika put a hand over hers and gave it a comforting squeeze. Laxmi’s mother gasped, as if willing herself not to cry. Her lower lip quivered. Avantika shook her head, hating herself for what she was about to do.
‘I’m sorry, Aunty,’ she began. ‘But I was … I wanted to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Laxmi’s phobia of yellow—’
The woman gave her a startled look. ‘You knew?’
‘Yes … she told me when we were in school.’
‘We had told her not to tell anyone. We never talked about it. You know how people are … her father was worried she wouldn’t get any good marriage proposals.’
Avantika swore inwardly. Fucking marriage proposals. If you were a young Indian woman, they were held over your head like a sword ever since you hit puberty. It seemed everything you were allowed to do or not allowed to do, could be traced back straight to the damn marriage market. Don’t eat all those cakes, you’ll put on weight and then nobody will want to marry you. Put on some more weight, Indian men like their women curvy, if you stay so skinny, nobody will want to marry you. Don’t stay out too late, don’t wear those clothes, don’t wear too much make-up, get a whitening facial every week, smile more, wear happier colours, don’t be so career-minded, learn how to make round-round chapatis, don’t tell anyone your deepest, darkest fears—or nobody will fucking want to marry you. We may as well live in Victorian England. She took a deep breath. Focus, she told herself, focus.
‘We were very little, when she told me,’ she said, ‘she was very scared at the time.’
Laxmi’s mother looked distraught. ‘Her … episodes. I remember. At first, we thought it was for attention, you know? Children do that sometimes. Her father … he’d force her to hold yellow things in her hand. He said it would drive the fear out. She used to scream and scream…’ Her eyes brimmed over. ‘My poor girl … she’d scream and cry and clutch on to my saree and beg me to make him stop. But he … he never listened to me.’
Avantika felt her own eyes moisten, even as her fingers clenched with rage. She forced herself to stay calm. ‘Didn’t you … didn’t you take her for counselling or something?’
The woman wiped her eyes and gave a strange half-laugh. ‘In those days, where was all this counselling and things? And who to ask? If we asked around, people would think that there was something wrong in our daughter’s head. And then—’
‘…nobody would marry her,’ Avantika finished, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
Laxmi’s mother looked away. ‘Later, when she went to college, we heard of this psychiatrist in Jogeshwari, so we took her to him. He told us it’s called xanthophobia. It’s not that common, but common enough for them to have a name for it. He gave her some exercises and they had sessions for about a year or so. It helped, a little. But … all those things when she was a child, it … it just … she was never comfortable around yellow things.’
‘Did he, did the counsellor say what may have caused this … xanthophobia? I mean, phobias usually happen because of some traumatic events or something, no?’
A guilty look crept over the woman’s face. She said nothing.
‘Aunty?’ Avantika pressed on, ‘It’s okay, it’s just me—’
The look turned to one of resignation.
‘She was very little, two, maybe three, and I, I had taken her to a garden, to play, you know. We were walking among flowers and then I met someone I knew—an old school friend. After ages, you understand? I had just stopped for a chat, when Laxmi … she wandered away. It couldn’t have been more than two minutes, I swear! She hadn’t gone very far also, just a few feet away, among a row of flowers, I could see her, she was in my sight. And then, and then, I heard her scream—’
&nb
sp; Avantika’s throat felt dry. ‘What happened?’
Laxmi’s mother made a funny little sound, halfway between a sob and a giggle.
‘She had gone and touched a flower and there was a big honeybee on it, and it, it stung her!’
‘Oh,’ Avantika said frowning at the anti-climax. It must’ve hurt like anything, but that’s it? A honeybee?
‘Poor child, she cried so much she got a fever. But it wasn’t my fault, I swear, it was just two minutes! Who would’ve thought her entire life would be spoilt by such a small thing!’
Maybe what had actually spoilt her life wasn’t so much a bee-sting, but having parents who made a simple phobia seem like the end of the world, Avantika thought. But she kept her thoughts to herself. Aloud she asked, ‘What flower was it, any idea?’
Laxmi’s mother’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember. ‘Wait, wait, I know. It was a—’
‘Sunflower?’
‘You know, I was going to say marigold, but I think you’re right.’
I can’t be a sunflower, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!
Avantika clenched her jaw, her ears full of little Laxmi’s cries. And then, she looked at the broken woman sitting before her. Her eyes with their faraway look, as if she wasn’t really here, but somewhere in a happier past. The grey wisps of hair that once used to be a thick, shiny braid, her daughter’s beautiful inheritance. The wrinkled hands, clutched tightly in her lap. And the look of irreversible pain on her face. Suddenly, she couldn’t bear to be in this place a minute longer. She stood up.
‘I have to go now, Aunty. Please take care of yourself.’
Laxmi’s mother followed her to the door. ‘Be careful, dear,’ she said, pointing to the helmet in Avantika’s hand. ‘For your mother’s sake.’
Avantika nodded and left, filled with a deep sense of melancholy.
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