This Audacious Dust
Photo: Karan Madhok
Short story: ‘I could feed my children chicken and rice for a week, without having to shout at them for not wanting the fried bhendi they’ve been eating for the last three days. I could cover half a month’s rent with that money, for god’s sake! And you spend it on a wretched T-shirt that doesn’t even bear the colour of the sky?’
The afternoon is miserable upon my arrival, and I ring the doorbell in haste to escape it as quickly as I can. I ring it once. And then, having waited a good five minutes, once again.
A few more minutes pass before Parboti, that fat oaf, spills down the stairs to unlatch the other, smaller gate at the edge of the compound. I smile at her, as I always do, and let her tug me into the pits of the house as one does a guest visiting for the first time. She then vanishes into thin air, leaving in her wake a stubborn stench of tamul.
Left alone, I find myself magically armed with the broomstick, and so I naturally get to work. There is dust under my feet, like there is dust everywhere. Dust that wasn’t there yesterday. Dust that I had purged this house of, as if I were a sorceress. Perhaps it only finds the nerve to return in my absence. Perhaps it is only I who can save you lot from this ever-looming threat of your own burial.
I deal with the kitchen first, before the oaf appears again and gets in my way with her cooking. The rest of the rooms take up more time anyway.
I am tired by the time I find you, and the sordid stench of your unwashed body rises up my nostrils more blindingly than it should. You are crouched over the laptop screen, with your hair knitted together with leaves and twigs, your beard springing out of the dark of your skin like wild-grass. You are barefoot and bare bodied, unbothered by the dust. Perhaps you haven’t taken notice of me yet, for you don’t scramble out in the search for a T-shirt like you usually do.
Perhaps I do not wish to bother you either, and so I shrink up as tensely as I can and evade your sight. But then, it is only a matter of time before it will catch up to me.
You finally realize my presence when I turn off the restive ceiling fan. Your body twitches in protest. You turn to me, frowning at first, before you choose to break into a smile.
“Hello!” you say, and then, step out of my way.
I like the sound of that word, you know? Hello. No one ever really says it to me, aside from the voices answering my phone calls. I respond to you with my own “Hello!”, before crouching under your table to quell of what is left of this audacious dust.
I want to say ‘Hello!’ when I stroll into your bedroom with the broom in my hand. After all, why shouldn’t I? There is no tether shackling me to the whims of the oaf today.
By the time I’ve stood back up, you’ve left the room.
*
The weather today is more merciful, as the clouds keep the sun at bay. It had rained last night, and it shall rain again in a little while. The oaf, too, has left by the time I arrive. And it is you who rushes downstairs to unlock the gate. In the time I take my muddy slippers off, you have already returned to your laptop.
I want to say ‘Hello!’ when I stroll into your bedroom with the broom in my hand. After all, why shouldn’t I? There is no tether shackling me to the whims of the oaf today. But I stop myself and wait—perhaps for you to say it first. But you don’t, and after a long, discomforting silence, I instead meekly inquire if I can turn the geyser on.
By the time I’m done with the broom (and the bucket, and the mop, and the laundry) you seem to have forgotten all about your bath. I make haste in turning the switch off, lest your father arrives and makes a fuss over it. The oaf still hasn’t returned with your sister. Perhaps she has crossed her paths with that libidinous tailor, who dallies with any creature that moves. I’m sure that she is giggling on to his sooty gags at this very moment.
I wander back into your room to let you know that I am leaving, and then I mumble something about the marvel of warm water that awaits you. You nod, and respond with an indifferent “Accha thik ase,” and then abruptly, you stop me in my tracks.
“Mashi,” you say, “can you make me some tea before you go?” The words are a plea, not a command.
I nod and head towards the kitchen, quite aware of the soft sound of your bare feet behind me, echoing my own footsteps. The reek of your body has been soaked up by the hungry cotton in your T-shirt, and has evenly strewn itself in the air around me. I think of reminding you of your bath again, but I don’t. Perhaps, I don’t really mind.
“Tumi o ek cup khaiya jaiyo,” you insist. You too have a cup before you go.
Your fingers toy with your mobile phone. I pour an appropriate portion of milk into the saucepan for myself to supplement your own. The fat oaf shall return at any moment now. I suppose you know how territorial she gets with the stove.
This query is a command, one that stabs my breasts and leaves me with a few thoughts of my own. No wretched home in this para has ever owned a chair that could bear my weight.
By the time I’ve finished brewing the tea, you have returned to the laptop in your room again, and seem to have forgotten all about it. Nevertheless, I pour it into the checkered mug in which Parboti always serves you that urine you’re made to drink every day.
“Keep it in the dining room. I’m coming!” you declare when I come to you. I retrace my countable steps to perch the mug onto the table that I had only just been dusting. You arrive immediately, as if you’re my shadow, and then crumble on to one of the wooden chairs like a sack full of potatoes. I want to laugh but I don’t. Instead, I just hover around in front of you, with my own cup of tea in hand, not meaning to be a bother to the thoughts that surface from the lines on your forehead. You worry too much, you know? There is too much noise that your eyes hide away.
Despite my efforts, I catch your eye again.
“Why don’t you sit down, Mashi?” you ask me.
This query is a command, one that stabs my breasts and leaves me with a few thoughts of my own. No wretched home in this para has ever owned a chair that could bear my weight. At least no wooden ones padded with sponge. The floors, of course have pressed me to themselves. For I am as light as the dust that gathers on them. For I am just as easily banished. For a moment, I am drawn to crash onto the wood-coloured tiles underneath my feet and sully them.
But that too, I don’t do.
“Naa, thik ase,” I say.
I try to lean against the wall behind me and hold my spine upright. I press my lips to the teacup, which is barely the size of my own fist.
“I shall take offence if you don’t!” you chuckle, and your steel-ringed laughter is a more efficiently-enforced mandate.
I oblige and pull for myself the wooden chair, adjacent to your own. What if the fat oaf barges in right now? How would I explain to her this treachery?
I wonder if you would care for what I would have to say. Perhaps I could brew us some tea and ask you about this girl. Perhaps by the time we have emptied our cups, you would have promised to bring her along to meet me.
You let me know that you like the tea, and then, ask me about my daughter with a viscous sincerity. “Which class is she in now?” you enquire, puckering your lips then to softly blow into the mug.
I borrow from your own sincerity when I respond. I tell you how, despite only being in the sixth standard, little Mita has far more matured sensibilities than most children her age. I tell you how she helps out with the household chores, and looks after herself when I’m out banishing dust from people’s houses. How she walks home from school all by herself, and how I fear for her safety, now that the main road has been broadened, and the cars and motorbikes just zip through without a care. I tell you how she’s doing quite well in her studies. and how her teachers often praise her, but how she struggles somewhat with mathematics, and how I sometimes wish I could get her a decent tutor. I tell you of Mita’s love for badminton, and how our landlady, who never had any children of her own, dotes on her while the para’s kids play in her yard, and worries me a little with her jokes about Mita being her own daughter. I tell you about how terrorized Mita had left me last month, after a sudden bout of constipation had thrusted her into a state of light-headedness one night, and then had left her wholly unconscious. I tell you how Paptu, my son, had rushed her to the hospital that the Dharma Sangha runs nearby, and how we had waited almost fruitlessly for almost an hour, until one of the nurses—who lives in our tenement—had spotted us and rushed her to Emergency.
There are, of course, also things that I can’t bring myself to tell you. Like the fact that Mita’s father, my wayward drunk of a husband, couldn’t even find his way to the hospital until the next afternoon. I don’t tell you that, even after he did show his face, he had to be thwarted out of the waiting room by the attendants because he was reeking of the drink that he simply cannot do without, and was getting into jostles over the bill with the people at the reception. I do not tell you of the fury with which he struck me once we brought little Mita home after I told him not to worry about the money. I don’t mention how the poor, disgusted Paptu—foreseeing more violence—rushed out to go take shelter at his friend Anil’s place near the hockey stadium in Sawkuchi, and returned only two days later, his eyes bloodshot and tired, and with an inexplicable swell on one of his cheeks.
Nevertheless, by the time that we’ve emptied our cups—yours, large and checkered, and mine, the size of my fist—I have promised that I’ll bring Mita along the next time she has a day off from school.
*
Despite the merciless sun, I keep my promise. I have coaxed little Mita out of bed much earlier than she wants to on a holiday. I’m certain she will get along with your sister in the ways that you have assured me of. And so, I am light of heart. The oaf takes her time to unlatch the gate, and when she finally does, I smile at her, like I always do. And Mita smiles at her too—like I always do.
There is a sort of exigence inside your house today, one that I can sense by the way the dust quivers under my feet. First, I hurry into your bedroom—my daughter in hand—desperate to introduce her to you. But I only find your laptop pasted shut, and the air quite free of your pungent scent.
It is not very often that you leave the house during this time of the day. At least not in the three months since your mother tracked me down and signed me up to be the banisher of dust in your household, for a pay of twenty-five hundred rupees a month. I suppose twenty-five hundred is a fair rate. I work at four more houses in this para, and those folks don’t pay a pice over the standard two-thousand. I don’t suppose anyone in this para really does. And moreover, their children have never said Hello to me. Not even once.
Passing by her room, I notice that your sister hasn’t returned yet. In fact, the oaf hasn’t even set out for the bus stop. I take in hand a broomstick and leave Mita to loiter around the house. I am only done with the kitchen when the bathroom door swings open, and you emerge, like a prophet. I see now that it is the restlessness in your body that has flooded the house with urgency. I also see that you have neatly trimmed your beard and cut your hair down to a length that makes you look delicate. Even in your haste, you smile at me, and then say your “Hello!” like it is a sacrament. And then of course, you smile at Mita too, and your “Hello!” is even louder.
When you’re gone, you leave a soapy whiff of sweetness in the air. Slowly, I feel everything calming down.
Parboti confirms that you’re heading out, and that too to go meet a lover. Some girl your mother doesn’t approve of. She tattles to me about your skirmishes that have now become a nightly ritual. The oaf says she herself doesn’t approve of the match. But I don’t suppose her disapproval can go on to burden you. I can assure you that it shouldn’t.
“What have you done to my T-shirt, Kela?” you bark, and I feel something icy shoot through my veins, and then through Mita’s. My eyes try desperately to seek out the cause of your accusation. But I suppose my vision betrays me in such dimness.
I wonder if you would care for what I would have to say. Perhaps I could brew us some tea and ask you about this girl. Perhaps by the time we have emptied our cups, you would have promised to bring her along to meet me. You know, my Paptu is just as old as you. Perhaps he is a little older. I had him when I was sixteen, and he was such a rosy child! Plump, and dimple cheeked and smiling. Sometimes, when I look at him now; at the slip of a thing that is his slender body; I wonder how a boy can change so profoundly.
Back then, his father was a steady man, if not a good one. He was diligent with his work, driving old Naren Barman’s trekker along Lokhra-Paltan Bazar route from morning till evening. But then the government put a bar on the use of all the maroon trekkers in the city, and Barman simply chose to not continue with the business after that. It was then that the drink took root in my husband. Now, it is no longer a secret in the para that he is a tired, drunken fool.
God would never forgive me if I blamed our son for the way he is. The other day, I found a packet of bidis inside Paptu’s pillowcase. We had skirmished then, in the way the oaf tells me you do with your mother. And in the end, I slapped him across the face, and he spat a curse at me before running into the dark of the evening. Pray tell! Did I maybe cross a line?
But then, a woman’s love is not the same as a ten-rupee pack of bidis. There is merit in a woman’s arms. When wrapped around you, they form the lake from which you drink to really become a man. And moreover, I suppose if your mother were to look behind the books on your bookshelves, and stumble upon your ever replenishing stock of cigarettes, and that little pouch filled with what must be ganja, she too would be right to slap you across your face.
But don’t worry. Not a word will ever escape my lips.
My ruminations are suddenly interrupted. I hear you shriek out the oaf’s name from your bedroom.
“Parboti! Oi Parboti!”
There is an outlandish ire in your voice. It frightens me. Perhaps this is what the oaf had been talking about.
“Parboti! Koi asos bal! Come here right now!”
The profanity is delivered in your supple voice, but I can’t bring myself to picture it falling out of your mouth. And honestly, neither can I muster the nerve to bear witness to it.
I crawl down to the spot on the floor where your feet dangle. Here I am drawn, perhaps, to the musty scent that they expel, one quite different from that of your sweat. A more well-defined and full-bodied reek.
The oaf seems less frightened of you than I am. Frankly, she only seems a little weary. “Yes Babu, is something wrong?” she asks, quite clearly more out of compulsion than concern, toiling into your room with her swollen feet.
She passes me by, crossing the threshold between the dining room and your own. I feel a tense tug at my waist, and then am dragged pitilessly into your presence. When we’re both inside your bedroom, I notice that the tether that ties my waist to the oaf’s own, has lassoed my daughter in too. The three of us now stand lined up before you like criminals.
You are underdressed, more underdressed than you were when you had stepped out from the bathroom a few minutes ago. Your towel is knotted loosely around your waist and your belly is beaded with drops of your bathwater. Your dark breasts, like eyes, are glaring back at us with a throbbing urgency. And yet, you do not scramble for a T-shirt upon taking notice of me—or even of my little Mita.
Despite the fact that one is lying on the table right in front of you, waiting to be worn.
You are quiet at first. And then you turn to the oaf, gathering the T-shirt in your palms, as if it were a flag, or a shroud, or a curtain, between the two of you. Your eyes, I see, have reddened, and there is a vein that has swollen out from under the bush of your beard. It seems to be convulsing. You unfold the apparel rather ceremoniously. Then hold it up for all to see. It is a simple cotton T-shirt. Pale. Unimpressive, in fact. Not quite the colour of the sky, although that is what the person dyeing it must have been going for.
“What have you done to my T-shirt, Kela?” you bark, and I feel something icy shoot through my veins, and then through Mita’s. My eyes try desperately to seek out the cause of your accusation. But I suppose my vision betrays me in such dimness. I suppose Parboti’s betrays hers as well, for I sense her squint her eyes to get a better look at whatever it is that is in your hands.
“What?” she finally mumbles, and you let your fingers gather along the thickly hemmed edge of the cloth, as the rest of it falls onto your wrist to make way for the answer.
Guided by your accusing fingers, we start to see things a little more clearly. Along the lower edges of the T-shirt, the cloth seems to have soaked in the colour red as hungrily as it probably would the sweat off your body. Parboti seems relieved at the sight, and cuts herself loose of the tether that tied her to me—and to my daughter.
“I don’t do the laundry anymore, Babu,” she reminds you with a coy lightness in her voice. “Why don’t you ask Kanika?”
My name is a sharp dagger in her betel breathed mouth. And you turn to me, ex sperated—rising from your leather chair like a monarch, and groaning “Ki je bal korte thako na tomra!” You then ask me if I know how much the T-shirt costs. About three hundred? I want to estimate out loud. But I don’t, for I can sense that you wish to answer your question yourself. You then utter a staggering price, which, if I were to speak frankly, seems too much for a T-shirt. Especially one that is as pale as this. It costs half of what your mother pays me in a month, you know? I could buy myself three nighties to wear through this punishing summer, and the next. I could feed my children chicken and rice for a week, without having to shout at them for not wanting the fried bhendi they’ve been eating for the last three days. I could cover half a month’s rent with that money, for god’s sake! And you spend it on a wretched T-shirt that doesn’t even bear the colour of the sky?
You tell me that your father had only just bought it for you, and that you had only worn it once. I think I even hear you ask me if my own father—or even my father’s father—could ever buy a T-shirt like this one.
But I cannot really attest to that, for most of what you have said is a haze. I look at Mita from the corner of my eye. At her tepid, tiny body. I see her eyes widened; her palms quivering. What must she be thinking of her mother? What might she be thinking of you? For your every sentence is prefaced by profanity, either a Bal, or a Kela, or something that must mean similar things in English. And all I want to do is banish my daughter from your presence, from this house, in fact, like I do each grain of sand from the filthy, filthy floors of this home. But my feet, they do not move; and my jaw seems to have been stitched shut by some unbreakable fibre, perhaps by the tether that the fat oaf had broken free of so easily only moments ago. Each word you say is a note to a song that is slightly off-key, and I can assure you that none of this is as trivial as it might seem to you.
The song concludes with the fling of your wrist, a motion no different from those that the conductor of an orchestra makes to coax and silence the sounds that men and women armed with their instruments are capable of producing. That’s right: I too know of orchestras! Just the way I know of the word Hello! The T-shirt pierces through the air above little Mita’s head—like an arrow meant to strike her in the eye—and then crashes onto the dining room floor that I have only just mopped.
By the time I have picked it up, the door to your room has been slammed shut.
*
The summer seems to have taken root in its most hard-hearted form in the para, and I am surely relieved to step into the shadow of your house. Perhaps the only silver lining to these summer months is that the road that has been dug across the para’s breadth—the one which takes me from my tenement to your house, and to the four other houses between us in which I work—doesn’t turn to muck and start slurring as is does during the rains. Nevertheless, I take my slippers off before I climb up the stairs.
Paptu had gone to Anil’s for the night yesterday. And my husband hasn’t been home for three days now. When they cut the power in the evening, and everyone else in the tenement, oppressed by the summer heat blaring into their homes, stepped out and gathered in the landlady’s yard to chat, I stayed inside and glared into the darkness. And the darkness glared back. And so, I spent the night thinking about yesterday’s events. Of the redness in your eyes, and the fury of your breasts. And then the way your mouth curves up like a fragment of the moon when you smile at me, and say Hello!
Perhaps I owe you an apology. Perhaps you owe me one, too.
You have reclaimed your place on the leather chair today, and the beard is already starting to spring out from your pores. There is no trace of the foamy sweetness that you had reeked of just yesterday. The cruel beast that had possessed it too seems to have been banished by the gentleness I know you harbour in your breast. Although you haven’t spoken yet, it is almost as if I can already tell that you’ve been through an exorcism and have returned to your godly ways.
“Hello!” you declare the moment your eyes get a hold of me, and you even raise a palm to wave in my direction. I am certain now that I have been too harsh with you. After all, was it indeed not my fault that the T-shirt soaked in the colour of the sun, instead of the sky? Should I not have been more careful, and kept its wayward aspirations in check?
Perhaps I should just invite you over for lunch one of these days. If I did, would you come? Maybe when my husband is away, so that piggish drunk doesn’t drum up some sort of chaos.
“Hello!” I reply and then get to work. I crawl down to the spot on the floor where your feet dangle. Here I am drawn, perhaps, to the musty scent that they expel, one quite different from that of your sweat. A more well defined and full-bodied reek.
You seem more jovial than usual, frequently looking away from the laptop screen and into the smaller, brighter one in your palms. The clutter of text messages being typed out and received brims in the air, and then over to the rest of the house. I wonder if it is your lover that you’re speaking to, for there is that sincerity with which you type out the words. The same one that had coloured your face when you had demanded that I bring along Mita to play with your sister. Perhaps you’re truly in love. And perhaps, then, it is wrong of your mother to have disapproved of the union. Perhaps I could have a better estimation of the whole situation if you would only tell me something more about this girl. What on earth does she look like? She is a Bangali, I suppose? Or at least Oshomiya? I’m sure that she is! You have enough sense to not go chasing the skirts of cunning women. I am tempted to interrogate Parboti, but I have no intentions of indulging her in any gossip about you. God knows that oaf can knit stories out of thin, thin air.
The sun is as unrepentant when I walk up to the terrace. The oaf has readied the day’s laundry into a carefully fashioned pile. I shove my arms into the depths of it, and let my fingers feel out your mischievous T-shirt, nursing it out, as one nurses a newborn out of its mother’s womb. The sun lights up the cotton in my palms, and I see the truth more clearly now. Much more clearly than I had in the dimness of your room and spirit yesterday. I see now that your fury wasn’t remotely unfounded. The red has gathered deeply at the waist, like blood drawn from the dark, warm insides of your body, or like carelessly scattered vermillion. Or perhaps it had seemed to you like your lover’s blood, drawn, and then splattered onto you by your mother’s hands. I swear to you that I’m not like your mother. I do not care who you come to love, as long as I can witness that cheer in your face the way I have today. The streaks of red are persistent. Stubborn, in fact. But who’s to say that I am not? I do not care for any other thing, and I scrub away at the stains for an hour. By the time that I am done, the sterile scent of soap has gathered in its every thread, and my nighty seems to have soaked up the stench of your body.
The sun still blares its own fury upon me. But I suppose that I am now grateful to it. It is only a matter of minutes in which it shall coax all wetness out of your T-shirt, and by evening, you can slip it on and visit your lover. But perhaps, you should first stop by to take a bath.
*
Today marks the fourth month since I have been put in charge of expelling dust from your house. Perhaps I will have more time to spend here then, now that I have been banished from one of the four other houses where I used to cook and clean. Sankar Ghosh’s wife, that hag, demanded that I spend two extra hours at their house every day, now that her daughter-in-law is with child. When I told her I couldn’t, she simply told me I needn’t come to their house anymore.
Perhaps I should ask your mother for a raise, but I doubt that she’ll give it to me. After all, she is already paying me more than the standard rate. Moreover, I don’teven have to cook in your house. I suppose I could, if she would want me to. In fact, I would love for you to taste my cooking—especially my murgir jhol. I am a cook of somewhat good repute in this para, you know? But would Parboti ever let me take her place? I still don’t understand why you folks keep her around. I have tasted the things that she takes all those hours to cook, and I can assure you that they’re ordinary at best.
Perhaps I should just invite you over for lunch one of these days. If I did, would you come? Maybe when my husband is away, so that piggish drunk doesn’t drum up some sort of chaos. Don’t worry, the pig stays away for most of the week. There is some Muslim whore in Hatigaon that he goes and shacks up with. All his friends, they know this. You know, I have not let him touch me ever since I found out. Although he obviously strikes me when I don’t. But still, I don’t give in. And he grows weary, and succumbs to the sleep that is ever-knocking on the doors of his body.
There is a certain mirth within the walls of your house today, an air that lightens the burdens of one’s chest when inhaled. Your mother is at home. And so are your father and sister. In the kitchen, the oaf is clamouring about with her pots and pans. When she sees me, she tells me to be rush with the broom and the mop. It seems that both of us have more vital tasks at hand. It is your sister’s birthday, she tells me. Little Aadrita has turned twelve and there will be guests at home by evening. Your mother too enters the kitchen, and convinces me to stick around for longer than I usually do. “It’ll be a great help” she tells me, and of course I assent, for like I told you, I do have some extra hours now to spend in your company.
I am quick with the broom, and the bucket, and the mop. The laundry today shall have to bear neglect. But again, you are nowhere in sight. Parboti tells me you’ve gone out to buy a last-minute gift for your sister, and perhaps, to arrange for cake and some decorations. “Nothing grand,” your mother clarifies. “Just dinner for a few of her classmates and cousins.” She tells me that it’s obvious that I’m invited, and echoes your insistence that I bring Mita with me as well. But all that, of course once I have freed myself of my present role as the oaf’s assistant.
As she executes her tasks today, the oaf carries on her face that pompous sense of authority. Once your mother melts out of the kitchen, she orders me to chop up a great pile of onions, and busies herself with the slothful motion of peeling garlic, one clove at a time. I am tempted to ask your mother if I should cook something too. But I can only imagine how the oaf would retort.
Restlessly, you empty out its contents, taking no notice of the blood trickling down your fingers. Blood that is the colour of the stains that I had scrubbed away, crouched like a captive under your rage—and then, the sun’s.
I do not instantly notice your arrival. Perhaps the tables have turned, even if they have only for a moment. But I do note that you make no efforts to keep yourself out of the line of my sight. The kitchen is not oblong, or too large. I guess it neither is one that could be called small. But it is small enough to break one’s concentration when a body as large as yours is following them around. And so, when my eyes do finally catch up to it, the first thing that anchors itself onto the beds of my attention is what you’re wearing.
It is the T-shirt. The one that you had flung to the floor and let shatter into pieces. The one whose fragments I had picked up carefully, and pasted together until no one could see the cracks that had formed on the fabric. It seems to fit you a little more tightly than I had imagined it would. Nevertheless, it looks good on you—almost respectable, I guess. For a moment, I wonder if you had gone out for a secret tryst with your lover under the garb of getting your sister gifts. Oh, if you would only visit the barber a little more often!
Your hands are full with grocery-bags. There are vegetables and party sized bottles of Thumbs Up and Sprite. The most prominent, of course, is a jet-black polythene bag that seems to carry the heavy weight of something dead. It is evident that the burdens have strained the little flesh that is pasted on your wrists—despite your otherwise spherical build—and it is almost peaceful watching you relieve yourself of them. You then turn to me and smile, and mutter a little “Hello!” but you do not seem to have the strength to wave. Turning to the oaf, you crack a joke which I do not understand, and ask her if she is done peeling the garlic and cutting the tomatoes. You tell her that you’ll need quite a few tomatoes as well, and then leisurely stroll out of the kitchen.
It is then that the oaf tells me that you will be cooking dinner today! Or, at least, you will cook the meat that you have brought in that polythene bag. I cannot help but chuckle a little. Why don’t you leave this up to me and the oaf, and go take rest? The oaf seems disinterested in my amusement, or perhaps she has just grown weary of the garlic cloves. She heads out to the balcony to stuff more tamul into her rotten mouth.
You return, not much later, cheerful and unwashed, with the T-shirt already gulping on the sweat that the heat from the burning stove has drawn from you. You perch upon the counter an ugly Bluetooth speaker, and soon it starts blaring some strange worded sounds, which perhaps do amount to meaning in a different language—perhaps, a garbled form of English. Had Mita been here, she could’ve confirmed it. You laugh first, and then mouth at the words from the song, as you hastily pick out a large metal cauldron from one of the shelves and tear open the black polythene with the tips your long-nailed fingers.
Restlessly, you empty out its contents, taking no notice of the blood trickling down your fingers. Blood that is the colour of the stains that I had scrubbed away, crouched like a captive under your rage—and then, the sun’s. Although perhaps it is not my place at all, something inside of me trembles for a moment, and then quietly awaits the passing of a sentence.
The first stain gathers over the left side of your belly. It has only been ten minutes since you’ve entered the kitchen, and we are only halfway through the second of your eerie sounding songs. In fact, you have only just washed the dead birds till now. Could you not have restrained yourself for just a moment, and asked me for a stray rag to wipe your hand with? Could you not have changed into something more expendable? Something over which you hadn’t stripped me of my dignity, in front of my daughter?
The second stain comes in the next five minutes, a wayward streak of curd meant to marinate the meat, which glides slowly down a finger, and then is smeared across your chest, as if it were ointment. I am done with the onions by then, and you ask me if I can get along with the tomatoes, extending an even larger bag filled to the brim in my direction. I cannot help but accept them. For, by the way that your levelled hips sway to the ugly sound escaping the speaker, I am more than convinced that if you were to be put in charge of them, whatever it is that would inevitably ooze out of the tomatoes would end up splattered across that wretched T-shirt.
For the first time in these four months, I am irked by the oaf’s absence.
It is the third, most legible stain that pierces into me, like the arrow with which you had tried to strike little Mita with that day. “Just a bit of food colour,” you chirp; turning towards me with your entire body as you rip open the little sachet that appears from within the container. I nod and try to feign a smile as you sprinkle a full pinch into the marinade, and then pick your phone up from the countertop to have another glance of your recipe on the internet. The song stops, and the sound of a woman’s voice—even chirpier than your own—takes over with promises of a “Restaurant styled butter chicken.” Of course, you fast forward to the bit about which you’re clearly puzzled, and it is then that in the backlit brightness of your cellphone screen that you realize that you’ve gotten more than just a bit of the food colouronto it.
“Ehhe!” you exclaim, and clutch onto the hem of your shirt; your fingers sullying the exact spot from which I had scrubbed away that stains of my own carelessness. You then use the cloth to wipe the screen clean, the red powder mingling eagerly with your sweat. If anyone were to lay their eyes on you right now, it wouldn’t take them much effort to picture you stabbing the life out of something entirely innocent.
“Eita khaiya dekho,” you chirp again, offering me a taste, as if you are a little boy, and I, your mother. My eyes fall upon your bare feet. The dust and gunk that have gathered under them certainly do not bother you at all.
The evening has gotten much closer than you had imagined it would, and mercifully—or perhaps unfortunately—the oaf has returned from her break. It is she who has fished out the sparkling white container from within your mother’s chaotic cabinets. It is she who has handed it to you with no intentions of extending any supervision, only because you demanded that she does.
By the time the colour dries, I have lowered my head and have stopped keeping count of the times you’ve massacred your insipid T-Shirt. And then comes an hour in which I wish to rush out of this foul, hot kitchen, and go gather my daughter in my arms. But I don’t—perhaps because Parboti is keeping an eye on me, or perhaps because I simply cannot. In my lowered, or maybe severed head, I hear the sound of mustard oil spitting eagerly on to you in response to the meat you drop into the korai, piece by bloody piece. I hear you gripe about a brick of butter, and sigh about some spices. I hear the sizzle of the garlic, the crackle of the onions. I even hear, with utter clearness, the soundless melting of the tomatoes that I have chopped.
I do have to give this to you: By the time you near the end of your culinary experiment, the whiffs that rise from the korai are a pleasure to the senses. And yet, perhaps because they have been stirred into the repulsive stench of your sweat-drenched T-shirt—or perhaps simply because I cannot bear to look you in the eye—I feel rather nauseated. In a few minutes, your shadow gathers up my body, and then my face.
“Eita khaiya dekho,” you chirp again, offering me a taste, as if you are a little boy, and I, your mother. My eyes fall upon your bare feet. The dust and gunk that have gathered under them certainly do not bother you at all. And yet, the sight and stench leave my vision blurry, as my eyes rise up the length of you thin-trunked legs, and finally settle on your torso. There is not an inch of the sky left on your T-shirt. The stains have conquered all of it by now, like grey clouds heralding in a senseless rope of rain. The colours, I suppose, are no longer pale. There is a rich yellow somewhere, and a fuming black somewhere else. There are even sprinkles of green that perhaps can never be accounted for. Your waist bears the impression of your own palms in the red inked, drench of food colour. Or perhaps they are your lover’s hands, embracing you in the most indecent of ways?
“Why did you ruin the T-shirt, Babu?” I cannot help but sigh, as I take the bowl of chicken gravy from your greasy hands. You chuckle, and then turn around to switch the stove off. Silence prevails in the parts of the kitchen, that were only now being oppressed by the sound of your pots and pans and the things within them.
“Arey Mashi,” you laugh. “Now that you have wrecked it the way you have, I cannot really wear it outside, can I?”
The doorbell goes off loudly to announce the arrival of the first of your guests.
“I have to go take a shower,” you mutter, and rush out of the kitchen with absurd urgency.
*
I leave the contents of the steel bowl untouched, and descend the stairs quietly. Your mother—who is welcoming a soft lipped man at the gate—holds me hostage for a moment, and draws from me the assurance that I shall return with little Mita within the next hour. I nod for the sake of nodding, and then dash along the rotten road that leads me from your house to the tenement in which I live, and of course, to the three other houses in which I also cook and clean. I do not stop until I see the warm light of the bulb that glows in the courtyard of the tenement. Paptu opens the door for me. On the bed lies my husband, who must have returned from his whorehouse in the afternoon, and is now snoring away. I slowly gather him in my arms. The room, as always, is silent, and the walls turning a putrid brown, as is their evening custom. There is never any rain here and never any sunlight—for both windows have been curtained thickly at my husband’s behest.
In fact, there is no sound at all when I lock myself inside the dark, grey cubicle which is our loo, and pour cool water over myself, as if it were the ritual washing of my own corpse. No sound at all of bucket or mop. No loud ring of the doorbell. No rustle of a broom.
I do not see the demon in the darkness. Do not see his pockmarked face. I only breathe him in. He smells the same way that he always does; like sweet scented honey that has gone rotten to the core.
After a moment at the threshold of the room, Paptu chooses to run off into the evening. I picture him, melting into the motley crew of boys at who converge every evening, near that ghumti at the mouth of the gully. Lighting up bidi after bidi, and sighing like his father does so often.
Mita lies in deep sleep on the same bed as us, unbothered by the reckless motion of my body. And even if she were, I don’t suppose I would care. I let my hands coax my husband out of his own sleep, and press him to my breasts for the first time in what seems like years. Perhaps even honey that has gone bad doesn’t cease to be honey. Or perhaps honey never goes bad at all. And so, I let my mouth have a taste of him. Of the light beads of nectar that have formed on his forehead.
There is nothing of you that remains in my nostrils. No arrow with which you can ever strike me again. Nothing that will bring me to wipe the floors of your house.
But at the precise moment, he comes entirely to his senses and breaks free of my clutches, as if I were a wraith, flinging me to the foot of our bed.
“You stink like a pig, Madarchot!” he barks. He rises from the bed and looks around, frantically. “Where is my phone?” he barks again, and doesn’t wait for me to join the search. When he finds it—tucked carefully under his pillow, lest I, or someone else gets their hands on it—he follows Paptu out into the now darker evening, slamming the door behind him.
I sit there for a minute, or perhaps an eternity, searching for reason in the stillness. My eyes struggle to make sense of the way Mita is still lying there, unmoved, flat on her face like a corpse.
Then I hear the blow of the neighbour’s conch and exhale. I understand clearly now. Pressing my cotton nighty to my nose is evidence enough that the revolting stench of your body has nested in the crevices of my own for far too long. That my body has consumed greedily all that yours has expelled as waste. And so suddenly, I feel stark-naked. I see now why you scramble for your T-shirts the moment you lay your eyes on me. I understand now why you wish to hide yourself in plain sight. But there is nothing I can do but slip out of my blighted nighty and stake a claim in your urgency, flinging it to the floor like the conductor of an orchestra—or simply, like you.
But strangely, there is no sound at all when the two collide. The fabric and the floor. Nothing really crashes into the other the way it so often does inside the walls of your house, in mirth as well as in fury. In fact, there is no sound at all when I lock myself inside the dark, grey cubicle which is our loo, and pour cool water over myself, as if it were the ritual washing of my own corpse. No sound at all of bucket or mop. No loud ring of the doorbell. No rustle of a broom.
The silence is only broken when Mita knocks on the wooden door and calls to me with longing.
I wrap myself with my gamsa and step out, and I see that she is lying on the floor, toying with my phone. I slowly gather her in my arms, and let her breathe me in. It is only when she tightens her hold around my waist that I know that I am free.
***
Ayaan Halder is a poet, author and Doctoral research scholar at the Department of Law, Gauhati University, Assam (India). His works have been published in various national and international platforms such as Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, The Wire, The Little Journal of Northeast India, Kitaab Magazine, Littera Magazine, The Chakkar and Poems India. His work mostly revolves around the coexistences and contestations in the day to day lives of indigenous and diasporic populations in India's Northeast. You can find him on Instagram: @_inkslinger__.
