I take a deep breath and force myself to calm down. I want to pull away and yet I don’t.
After a few moments, she lets me go and hands me the larger package. ‘Open it.’
Inside I find a pair of linen trousers and a matching tunic. A wide grin splits my face.
‘Go on, try them on,’ Fazal says.
I do. They’re a perfect fit.
‘Can I wear them during the day?’ I ask hesitantly.
‘Of course. I’m having a couple of other sets made up so you have enough. Do you like them?’
‘I love them. Thank you so much. I …’
‘You don’t have to thank me,’ she says, smiling at me as I jump and swing my legs about. The freedom of trousers is amazing.
I’m so happy; I rush over and give her a hug. But then, over her shoulder, I spy the wooden box.
‘Why have you brought that?’ I ask, dropping my arms and stepping back.
She lets out a long breath and looks at me in that direct way of hers. Without a word, she opens the box and lifts out the folded lace from it carefully. She holds it out to me.
I shrink back. ‘No!’
‘It’s your life,’ she says.
I shake my head. ‘It belongs to you.’
She shakes her head back at me. ‘It belongs to you.’
I expect a bolt of lightning to come down from the sky, tear through the ceiling and strike her down for this blasphemous talk.
But the night is still as she lays the memory lace carefully on the bed. She then unwraps the smaller package. The messy lace that I made earlier in the day emerges from its folds. She takes it and places it in the purple-lined box in place of my memory lace.
‘What are you doing?’ My voice is raised in horror.
‘This morning,’ she says, ‘you wove your dreams into the lace you were making. That’s real memory lace. This,’ she waves her hand at the lace on my bed, ‘is just something someone like Veda made to convince you that you have no control of your life.’
For a few seconds I’m stupefied. ‘But … it’s written … ‘ I begin. Then it hits me and I fall silent again.
‘All these months,’ I say quietly, ‘that’s what you were teaching me? To weave … ‘ I couldn’t say the words, ‘it.’
‘Yes.’
‘But …’
‘Oh Sifar,’ Fazal sighs. She only says my name this way when she’s frustrated. ‘You won’t be the first boy that our family has freed. My father was a free man.’
‘But … there are no free men. All men are bound by the memory lace.’
‘All this palaver about memory lace – it’s rubbish. Destiny isn’t written. It’s made.’
A vice of fear grips me. ‘Are … are you sending me away?’
‘No. But you are free to go if want to. Or you can stay – if you want to – as my companion or as my friend.’
‘I’m supposed to give you daughters.’
‘You’re not supposed to,’ she corrects me. ‘It’s something that both of us will decide, but in time. There’s no hurry. There’s so much we can do together, Sifar. I want to see the world. I’ve heard of places where men are treated like people. Don’t you want to see that?’
My legs feel like noodles and I sit on the bed.
‘If I can be free, does that mean Aza can have curls in her hair?’
‘Yes.’ She pauses before adding, ‘he can.’
Notes on the Collaborations
SWALLOW THE MOON
Kate Constable
Having never worked with an illustrator before, I was very excited, but also slightly scared by the notion of collaborating with Priya Kuriyan in a graphic story. I didn’t know what to expect, or how the process would work. What if I hated what she came up with? What if she couldn’t stand what I wrote? While we exchanged our first tentative emails (and I sneakily checked out Priya’s work online!), a vague image formed in my mind of a group of girls, walking silently through a dark forest. I sent Priya a very rough story draft, and when her first pictures tumbled into my inbox, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Her beautiful vision transformed a fairly dark piece of writing into something much more joyous and uplifting. The piece altered with each exchange, as Priya’s illustrations became more detailed and I edited out more words. For me, the process of cutting the words, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, as Priya’s work made mine redundant, was both confronting and wonderfully liberating. In the end, only about a quarter of my original draft remained, as together we built our story into something precious and filled with hope.
Priya Kuriyan
When I first read the piece that Kate Constable had written for the anthology, I literally got goosebumps thinking of how I would go ahead and illustrate the piece. There were paragraphs in her text that had such beautiful descriptions that I could immediately see the story in my head as I read along. I’m sure that if someone had peeked into my mind then, they would have seen a forest grow. I have to admit, it was also initially intimidating because I really hoped my visuals could match up to the beautiful prose. I had worked on collaborations with writers who wrote specially for comics before, but had never worked on a piece of long prose. I pondered a bit about how to go about it and it struck me that Kate had already ‘painted’ these scenes through her words and I should perhaps look at four or five of these scenes and build the artwork around those key ‘paintings’.
Looking back, I’m myself quite surprised by the fact that, in all, the two of us must have exchanged only a dozen emails discussing the story before the piece came into being. Kate was incredibly generous and trusting, letting me interpret the story the way I ultimately did, and I do believe that is what the true spirit of collaboration should be. I feel incredibly lucky to have been partnered with her.
LITTLE RED SUIT
Justine Larbalestier
I grew up immersed in fairy tales, from the very first picture books that were read to me to Angela Carter and Tanith Lee’s retellings, which I fell in love with as a teen. The very first stories I wrote were fairy tales. (You can find one here: http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/03/18/the-toughies/)
‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has been retold countless times, but I always wondered why the hood was so important, so I decided to explore that question in a blasted hellscape future, with a red hood that was more of a spacesuit than a riding outfit.
Anita Roy and I came into this anthology late, so there wasn’t time for a true collaboration. Had there been time I would have liked to have written an epistolary story with her, sending letters back and forth across continents, and possibly across time. We were, however, able to do a very useful collaborative activity: we read and critiqued each other’s stories, improving them enormously. Thank you, Anita!
COOKING TIME
Anita Roy
Justine Larbelestier and I both came into this project – as writers – late in the day. I was at a writer’s retreat at Sangam House just outside Bangalore, and she was over on the other side of the world in America, but it took only a couple of email exchanges to realise that we shared the same sense of humour – the fact that one of Justine’s books is called Zombies Vs Unicorns was a pretty good indicator of that! (And in case you’re wondering: Zombies. Du-uh!)
The idea for my story came out of my obsession (shared by my eleven-year-old son, Roshan) with two TV serials: MasterChef Australia and Doctor Who. But I soon realised that time-travel stories are an absolute nightmare to plot, because – in the immortal words of the Tenth Doctor – ‘People assume that Time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, time-wimey stuff.’ At various points, my sanity was rescued by excellent advice not only from Justine but from my co-editors, Kirsty and Payal. Without them, the plot would have disappeared up its own Black Hole, possibly causing a rift in the space-
time continuum and destroying the known universe. It’s a risky thing, this writing business. But, with fellow travellers like these women alongside to help steer, I am glad to be in it.
ANARKALI
Annie Zaidi
When we were first introduced over email, Mandy Ord and I did not discuss any specific ideas. I was toying with ‘dystopia’ but the worst I could imagine was already in the world – both our worlds! – which was hardly speculative. It was just depressing.
Then I was in Melbourne and meeting Mandy for lunch. We chatted about work, gender, etc. More friends joined us. I don’t remember how we got talking about walls but I have a memory of the brick façade of the restaurant and saying something about walking through a wall. The very next thought was: Anarkali!
One of the great classics of Hindi cinema is Mughal-e-Azam, a film about Prince Salim (a historical figure, later a Mughal emperor) falling in love with Anarkali (a fictional character), who was walled up alive as punishment. The story has never ceased to trouble me and I promptly shared it with Mandy. We agreed that we wanted to shift the narrative – make her a rebel rather than a victim, focus on power rather than beauty. And then we were walking through walls.
Mandy Ord
I met Annie Zardi briefly when she was visiting as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. As our interactions after that became entirely electronic, it was wonderful to be able to place a three-dimensional person in my mind’s eye when talking to Annie on the computer screen. I feel like this initial meeting made our collaborative process stronger, not to mention that the idea for our story originated from that one rushed lunch in a small Melbourne café.
During the meal and after much discussion, Annie was inspired to tell the tragic story of Anarkali, a young and beautiful Indian dancer from the Mughal period who was buried alive between walls during an ill-fated love affair. Annie told the story with such flair and passion that I was immediately fascinated. More intriguing was the notion that Anarkali may have been a real person and not just a character based on myth. It was an easy decision between us to chose Anarkali as our story and we delighted in the concept of re-imagining a future for her.
Over many weeks and a constant flow of emails Annie Zaidi and I researched and discussed ideas for the story structure, the visual language and the notion of historical accuracy. I loved the collaborative process and was delighted with how rewarding it was to work with Annie.
CAST OUT
Samhita Arni
Alyssa Brugman and I started having a conversation about feminism and cultural differences. At the time of writing the story, I was very intrigued by how capitalism and consumerism had co-opted the feminist movement, and also by how technologies – like birth control – in the West had empowered women but in India had become a means of perpetuating gender differences, with even educated women choosing to abort girl children. (The economist Amartya Sen estimates that more than a hundred million women are ‘missing’ in India.) I remembered listening, as a young girl, to a friend telling me that her mother had found herself pregnant with another girl and had chosen to abort the baby. We had then imagined an alternative life for that baby – and ‘Cast Out’, in part, was inspired by that memory.
WEFT
Alyssa Brugman
Samhita and I were both interested in the interaction between feminism and consumerism. I consider myself a feminist, and I often struggle with the choices I make in my day-to-day life, and the ways I buy into a version of how women ‘should’ be, or what our cultures tell us we should aspire to. This is what I wanted to explore in ‘Weft’.
THE WEDNESDAY ROOM
Kuzhali Manickavel
‘So you had never met before.’
‘No.’
‘And you live in India and she lives in Australia.’
‘Yes.’
‘Like, Masterchef, othersideoftheworld Australia.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘And you’ve never written a graphic short-story type thing before either.’
‘Right.’
‘So let me get this straight. You got together with this person you’d never met, who lives in Australia, and you wrote a graphic short story together.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Wow.’
‘I know.’
Lily Mae Martin
Kuzhali Manickavel and I began emailing back and forth but the story didn’t form straight away; distance made it hard for us to build up common ground to work from. But when Kuzhali began to have ideas about the story, the visuals came quite easily. I was really drawn to the dark and whimsical ideas of Kuzhali’s story and she was very clear what she wanted the main character to look like. Which is very helpful with a long-distance collaboration! I’m really excited about this story, it challenged me as an artist. I learnt a lot about how to communicate the way I work and how to put visuals with the words and words with the visuals.
CAT CALLS
Margo Lanagan
Vandana Singh and I didn’t really do much more than become Facebook friends and make alarmed noises about the deadline to one another. I wanted to write a story about an issue that concerned girls of both India and Australia, and ‘street harassment’ was just coming to my attention as a term covering all those moments of public confrontation and humiliation that girls and women of both cultures endure. I also wanted to show girls doing something positive to confront the issue, and so I researched what action older women had taken and devised the collective gesture that my heroine and her classmates make. I hope this story doesn’t look too much like wishful thinking.
ARCTIC LIGHT
Vandana Singh
My ruthless work schedule prevented me from having more than a few early email exchanges with Margo Lanagan. However I have been an admirer of her work for a while, and that was certainly an inspiration to me as I went from a too-long first draft to an edgier, more realistically grim second draft. An Australian character in the first draft didn’t show up in the final story due to space limits, but she is waiting patiently for her story to be told another day.
APPETITE
Amruta Patil
The title of this anthology triggered instant synaptic activity for me. What does a gaping mouth look like with stars and galaxies and the components of our planet spinning inside? As it turns out, the image placed me deep in the turf of Indian mythology. The deity Vishnu and his avatar Krishna had both flashed their open mouths to reveal the multiverse inside – predictably causing much confusion and light-headedness among their audience.
Keeping the worlds-in-your-mouth idea, I decided to explore appetite – not gluttony or greed, but the desire to ingest life itself – through the eyes (and expanding form) of a young woman. Universally, the idea of appetite has been a gendered one. In stories old and new, feminine hungers are tame and measured; seldom does one encounter heroines with large belly or tremendous appetite for food or, indeed, for anything else. Coral turns her oddness to advantage, and learns that the trick to to make the most of living is not to hoard the goods, but to dissolve the outlines that separate you from the world around.
THE BLOOMING
Manjula Padmanabhan
COLLABORATIVE WRITING, A HOW-TO GUIDE
The answer is very simple: be so lucky as to get Kirsty Murray as your partner. *grin*
Our method was to approach the project as a story-length version of the party game known to me as ‘Consequences’, and to Kirsty as ‘Exquisite Corpse’. We alternated writing passages of the story and, just to spice things up, we neither discussed the plot in advance nor any of the characters, setting, general theme … you get the idea? Yup. We flew blind into a hurricane of words and emerged with a story.
We also agreed to write it as a play. Why? Because one of the nice things about a script is that the writer can reduce descriptions to short, terse stage directions while the characters run amok, insulting one another, throw
ing tantrums, making up again and spouting hot, tasty dialogue all the way. After the piece was written, we were able to trim away excesses, explain plot points and remove confusions. Or try to, anyway! ‘The Blooming’ is a wild ride and readers need to strap themselves in securely once the curtains open.
I am not at all interested in collaborations so I wasn’t looking forward to it. I am grateful to Kirsty for making it so enjoyable. She’s that rare person who can be warm and friendly while also being really brilliant at everything she does. It was good fun.
Kirsty Murray
Working on ‘The Blooming’ with Manjula made me realise that when you start weaving a story with someone, threads will connect you to each other across time and space, across oceans, continents and cultures. I’d admired Manjula’s writing for years, so when she suggested we play a writerly version of a game called ‘Exquisite Corpse’ I was a little daunted. Would I be able to keep pace with such a formidably clever and talented author? Each of us wrote a section of the playscript without knowing the other’s intent. We didn’t discuss the story at all but sent each other a ‘surprise’ section of the manuscript every few days, bouncing scenes, characters and dialogue back and forth across cyberspace until the story had formed itself. The strangest thing was to discover that sometimes our thoughts were interconnected, even though we’ve never met. Symbiosis, imprinting and clones aren’t exactly mainstream ideas but they came to us simultaneously and found expression in our collaboration. Truth is stranger than fiction and every thought you conjure connects you to someone else.
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean Page 11