by Shruti Swamy
When she looked into the river she saw a face. The face in the water was dark-skinned like hers but had wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. She looked tired and sad, something in the eyes told her, dark but not dull, the small frown in her mouth, and she saw a sigh form on the lips of the face. The face looked like her mother’s face or her grandmother’s face, and yet she could find hers in it too. There was a moment where the two faces lay perfectly still on top of each other—and then the reflection was just her own again.
She let each feeling rush into her belly and lie there. He was there, knotted inside her and growing, in another month her skin would start to stretch to accommodate him as he grew lungs and fingernails, his little heart beating like a moth. She let dread wash over her, and love, and fear, and anger, she started to laugh though there was no cause, and she thought I must not be frightened now. She remembered the baby from her dream, the baby she held in her arms, she remembered her own mother. The feelings were a train, driving hard through the center of her, and when they blew clean through the other side, she felt empty of everything, except for him.
Mourners
You haven’t eaten anything,” Reggie says. They can hear Maya with the baby in the other room; the baby is crying, then being hushed.
“I’m not hungry,” says Mark.
“How now, gentle cuz?” Reggie says. She puts her hand on his rough cheek. Her face is sardonic as always, but there is kindness in it. Then Maya comes in with the baby, whose little cheeks are wet with tears. Seeing her father, the baby reaches her small hands out to him. Maya is wearing a sleeveless dress. Her eyes, thickly lidded, normally languid, now are red and tired.
“Will you hold her?” says Maya.
“No,” says Mark.
Maya looks at Reggie, who opens her arms.
When she learned Chariya had died, Maya immediately left her small apartment. It was windy in New York; she wore a coat and gloves and a scarf and a hat. Daylight passed. She walked by men and women and looked at them with just her face exposed. But from this small expanse of skin they could read her perfectly. Her mind was stunned, her body hungry, a hunger that frightened her. She slept in her seat with a hand over her mouth while her body flew west: she was dreaming of being fucked. It was Reggie who came to get her at the airport, looking rough in the unfussy clothes of a farmwife, holding Chariya’s baby in a carrier. Standing under the arrivals sign, Maya pressed tears back into her eyes with the heels of her hands.
Maya sits in the bathtub for a long time before she puts on the tap. It was Chariya’s room, her sea-room, where she had taken long baths, and where she had given birth. Blue tiles, blue walls, blue towels, and a flat, gray light coming in through the window. With her foot, she nudges open the tap, which floods heat. She looks at her body, wavering under the water. What use is a body? There is no milk in her breasts.
“Maya.” Mark’s voice. It comes from far away, and she lifts her head above the translucent surface, and closes the tap. Then the house becomes silent. He says again, “Maya.”
“What?”
“I—I left something in there.”
“What.”
“My reading glasses. Do you see them?”
“No.” Still she can feel him standing, pressed against the closed door. She says, “I found seven white hairs today.”
“Where?”
“At my left temple.”
“You’re young still.”
“Chariya is going gray.”
“Was.” From far away they can hear Reggie with the baby, cooing, the sound an animal makes. The sound of the baby’s laughter. She has been fussy, getting her teeth in. But the last few days she has sensed the change in the house and become quiet.
“Maya.”
“No,” she says.
Five or six, dusk gathers quietly outside until the room is filled with it. White moths spread their wings against the windows, but from the inside they are just their shapes: black. When the baby cries, Maya takes her and rocks her against her body. Soon the baby is sleeping. Maya and Reggie begin to talk about Chariya. From the other room Mark listens to the fall of their voices. They are tender as they speak about Chariya.
“She’d just cut her hair. Did you see it?”
“No,” says Maya.
“Short as a man’s. Like a French girl’s. It suited her.”
“People used to think we were twins. But she was older.”
“Couldn’t have been by much.”
“Five years.”
“Five? I don’t believe it. I thought Irish twins at least.”
Mark thinks of the sisters together. They both stand at the edge of the lake. Chariya is not yet pregnant. One wades in and the other stays on the shore: one dark, the other darker. Then they are each other’s reflection. It is Chariya who floats up, arms and hair spread out, in the green water. She is wearing a blue bathing suit that makes the skin of her inner arms and thighs seem golden. When she wants to, she can look sublime, so happy. From somewhere he can hear Chariya laughing, and his heart leaps up. But then he realizes it is Maya. Maya as she begins to hum a song to the sleeping child, a lullaby that Chariya sang too. A lullaby for his daughter, but he accepts it as his. And sleeps.
The women are in the kitchen in the morning when Mark wakes. Reggie’s hair is wet, and Maya sits very quietly at the table, with the baby again in her arms. The baby examines a small apple that Reggie has given her. She doesn’t yet have the teeth to bite it. She keeps bringing it to her mouth. “Are you hungry?” says Reggie. She gives him a cup of coffee.
“Yes,” he says. Maya has dressed herself in a yellow sweater that was once Chariya’s, and a soft blue skirt. Reggie is in jeans.
“You were sleeping so deeply we thought you were dead,” says Maya.
Mark sits down at the table, facing Maya. Her bottom teeth are crooked. She has never had braces, like her older sister did.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“You’ve got a real wasp problem,” says Reggie. She points to the window.
“I thought I got them all.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“The cold will get them.”
“The cold won’t do anything. I’ll call someone.” Reggie is examining his face. He sees himself sitting barefoot in his shorts in his kitchen with these women, and feels ridiculous.
“No, I’ll do it,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
It is a task for later, for dusk. Reggie makes eggs. They sit at the table to eat. The baby has set down the apple and is pulling unhappily at her ear. She wears an austere white jumper, and with her dark cap of hair looks a like a tiny monk. Mark has seen a child’s skull once, in a medical museum, with all the adult teeth poised under the milk. The skull he saw was older, a four- or five-year-old child. But Mark sees there the skull of his daughter. Quiet bone, and growing, the teeth expanding, creaking like swollen wood as they push outward, slicing the gums. The double grin that lasts in death, while the eyes and nose and ears fall away, become dark holes. He lifts his eyes to Maya, whose chin rests on the baby’s head. As she turns her face to glance out the window, he catches his breath. For a simple, brilliant moment, she is Chariya, the cocoa-brown curve of jaw, her fierce eyes, with their curly lashes. He stays very still and looks at her.
“Stop it,” she says, feeling him, facing him, and starts to cry. “Can you please stop it?”
Will it rain? Rain trembles in the clouds, but the clouds never break. Mark is tired, Maya is tired, Reggie is tired, tireless. She is mending a burst seam of a coat, Chariya’s. Reggie squinting by the lamplight to thread the needle. Why bother?
But she must bother. She has seen Chariya wear the coat again and again. It is the seam that holds together the chest to the arm, under the left armpit, her waving arm. Chariya stands at the gate and waves, the sweater underneath showing yellow at the opening. Chariya’s dark face at the gate as Reggie reverses the car and backs down the drive. And Reggie called, “Careful, you
’ll tear the whole sleeve off.” But Chariya had no time to fix her coat—why else did she cut her hair so short? Chariya had no time to comb her hair. Chariya had no time to read a book she loved. Chariya had no time to go to Paris. Chariya had no time to take a nap.
The house is old and shifts on its haunches, settling. Reggie is not startled by the house’s noises, she lives just down the road in an old house of her own, but has slept here since death came. Not slept, but laid unsleeping in the room between her cousin’s and the baby’s, alert always for the mewling cries of the baby as she, hungry, wakes, and alert for Mark, moaning in his sleep, never words, only snuffles and grunts. She can see in his waking eyes the dazed confusion of a very young child. His cheeks dry and sallow as paper, the same cheeks upon which she had kissed her blessings on his wedding day, and kissed blessings against the soft cheeks of his bride.
Reggie drags the thread through the fabric. She is doing her work by sense not sight, following the fabric’s curve by instinct. What a violence mending does, the needle piercing and piercing. It is a good coat, a fine coat, one that held Chariya’s body for years, even when the belly was swollen with baby and the button could not reach its hole. Finished, she breaks the thread with her teeth and drapes the coat around her own shoulders.
When evening comes Mark ties a scarf around his mouth and takes the poison out. The sky is beautiful, hanging very low down, thick with cloud, and all the trees darken into large shapes in the yard, the apple and lemon trees and the oak. He follows the channel of wasps to its source. Even in the dim light, he can see the nest resting in the space between the roof and the wall of the house. It seems to radiate light, pale as it is, like a moon. Wasps should be killed at dusk, after they have finished their day’s work and they are returning home. But last time he hadn’t been ruthless. The smell of the chemical sickened him. The wasps were soundless, drugged on fumes. They were dizzy and frightened and didn’t try to sting. He felt sorry for them, and had gone back inside.
Now, he watches the last of the wasps fly in. It is fully dark, but his eyes have adjusted. His hands are cold. Before the chemicals coat the nest and dry, a few emerge, flying weirdly, almost drunkenly, then dropping. He sprays and sprays. The rest are trapped in that house of theirs. They die quietly. The bitter smell is all around him, though he tries not to breathe it in.
Mark walks away from the nest and takes a mouthful of evening, gulping it. The air is sweet and cool, and the stars are coming out. It is only five-thirty. Inside, they have turned the lights on. The house looks cheerful. He has never stood outside his house, just like this, in the dark, alone, looking in. It feels pleasant and comfortable to be cold outside, peering in like a robber, or a child looking into a neighbor’s house. He can see Reggie moving around in the kitchen, but not Maya. He removes the scarf, and the cold air enters his lungs. He can feel it in his chest. For a moment he is awake with it, he has finally woken up. He holds his breath. He is so close to it, to feeling joy, the joy of the body. But it is moving away from him. He cannot reach it. The poison in his hand, the dead are dead. The held breath bursts out of him, and is gone.
The top of a tiny white tooth appears in the baby’s lower jaw, like the tip of the moon trying the horizon. It is not centered but set slightly to the right. The baby touches the tooth with her fingers. A familiar taste, almost ugly, taste of red. At first there is the pure surprise of newness, where there is no fear. But fear comes. She was once soft, all of her soft. Now there is some hardness stuck in her, pushing out from her. She can feel voice building up in her lungs like heat, voice building and building until it spurts from her mouth. Her sound is a comfort around her, the yellow-orange glow she builds. The tooth in the mouth, and where has mother gone? Mother and not-mother. Mother came when she called, and lifted. Mother tickled and wept. Mother laughed. And father used to kiss gently but with scratch. Now he doesn’t kiss her. She reaches and he turns away. Her voice builds and builds and then a coolness comes in her throat, and she quiets. She bats up her fists and feet and kicks, feeling the limbs working below. There is silence at the center. It is courage, the baby. It is the courage to live in an expanding body, with limbs lifting outward, with teeth pushing up, with hands and mind growing finer, with eyes settling on color, with body unbending from the earth and standing upright, balancing perilously on two legs, and then moving forward, walking, running forward, teeth loosing, filling, knees scraped and healing, voice gaining depth and sureness, hips and breasts accruing, skin darkening, stretching, blood slipping out from the thighs, and death always, always, at the back.
Arms go around, arms lift. When the woman looks at the baby in her arms, the baby looks back at her with her color-shifting eyes, gray now, in the kitchen light. The irises are immense, like cat’s eyes, with hardly any white, the mouth impossibly gentle. Reggie doesn’t want to bless the baby because what good have her blessings done? She moves ice along the hot gums. It clicks against the nub of tooth. They are calm, the woman and the baby. Their silence is mammalian and warm. The woman can smell the milky skin of the baby, the baby can smell the humble soap and hand salve of the woman. It is she, perhaps, who should seek the blessings from this child, who will come to her when she, Reggie, is old, carrying an armful of fragrant lilacs. Placing the lilacs in a vase, as the old woman moves around the kitchen preparing tea. And the old woman draws strength and pleasure, yes, from the fragrant sight of the flowers, but more from the young woman’s strong, happy body, the length and gentleness of her limbs, the shine of her dark face.
That night they all eat at the table, they drink wine. It is not good wine, but it doesn’t matter. They begin to tease one another, and tell jokes, jokes to shock one another into laughter. Laughter tastes funny in their mouths, mixed with the bitter taste of the wine, then they warm to it. They tell stories of old lovers. Maya rests her bare feet against the legs of her chair, Mark looks at those feet: he would like to become a dog and lick them, and the fat bones at her ankle. A lover who only wanted to fuck in the bathrooms of moving trains, a lover who called for his mother as he came, a lover aroused by the sound of running water. A lover who always kept on his socks. Chariya: Mark would never say it. Crying after she made love, tears beading the small corners of her eyes. But not sad, she said, wiping her face and laughing. Not sad.
“I slept with a white man who kept asking me to talk to him in Hindi.”
“Did you?”
“Well, I don’t know Hindi. So I just started saying the names of dishes in Indian restaurants.”
“That’s bad!” says Reggie. “What did he do?”
“He came.”
The baby tires. Maya takes her and changes her and puts her to sleep. She stands tipsy in the dark room looking at the child with night-sharpened eyes. The child is curled, her fists, her feet, pulled tightly into herself, impenetrable in sleep. She looks fierce in her crib, giving the profound illusion of self-sustenance. Asking nothing from the young woman who looks down at her, and yet, the question posed anyway. Will she fly home with sleep knotted in her throat, go to work, and have drinks in bars, never marry, mourn alone? Will she remain in the company of these mourners, as the child grows more and more substantial and lovely, and learns the breadth and depth of her loss? She cannot face this question. She wants to wake in her apartment and shake this dream off herself like a wet dog, take a shower, drink strong coffee, and sit in the bright possibility of morning. But morning will never come to her like that any longer. Each morning she will wake with the metallic stain of absence on her tongue.
In the kitchen Reggie helps Mark put away the dishes. But she is suddenly exhausted, and all at once, the light in the room becomes white at the center and expands. The hand grasping the plate loosens and the plate shatters against the blue tile. She leans against the counter, until Mark’s arms come around her and she slumps into the bulk of him, half-awake, half-dreaming, apologizing through furred lips. She can smell his swallowed tears but does not have the strength to feel
pity. There is a bright buzzing in her body, the sound of a train. He lifts her above the shards of the plate, stepping carefully around them with his feet in only socks, calm, murmuring to her as he would to a child, saying she’s very tired, she needs to rest. She has not been carried since she was a girl, Mark does it easily. For all her solidity and tallness she is light in his arms as he brings her to bed. He inspects each callused foot for embedded slivers of china, and when he finds none, asks her if she wants some water. No, she says, waving him away. She says sorry. “Sorry for what?” She doesn’t answer. Sleep hovers above her eyes with milky thickness. Then she has passed through it, without a dream to soften it.
“Did she drink too much?” Maya standing in the doorway.
“She hardly had anything. She’s just tired, I think.”
“Should we call a doctor?”
“She’s alright. Let her sleep.”
They return to the kitchen and pick up the broken plate, Maya collecting the fat shards in a bag, Mark vacuuming the kitchen’s corners. When the task is finished they leave the dishes where they are and open another bottle of wine. This bottle is better than the first, the bitterness is interesting to hold on the tongue. Maya’s teeth get a bluish tint from the wine, Mark can see it when she smiles.
“I remember the first time I met you. I didn’t like you.”
He is too tired to take it gamely. “Why not?”
“You seemed too golden. A little arrogant.”
“I’d never been hurt before.”
“But it’s not better this way. You’re not better. I wish you hadn’t been hurt.”
He says simply, “No point in wishing.”