NINE LIVES

Once she fell from the steps, a fuzzy ball of hair and clothes; we gathered a crumpled story from between two faraway worlds, white-red saree patterned with snow and blood. And the chasm in her forehead wouldn’t define the irrelevance of our attempts to measure its discontents with our cries. Stitch me up. I’ll be fine. Her blue-grey eyes swirled with smoke billowing out of villages, what they’d done to the women; but Comilla was nothing more to us than the way she’d say dhoinna for coriander. It would seem nothing could take her after she delivered six pairs of feet to walk that earth; not the cunning of history, nor hunger playing on the ribs of the tin shack she’d come to live in. And nothing of her ulcers; she’d picked up far too many pieces of smashed teacups, stomached enough of that daily dose of love to die glutting on what we’d smuggled into the hospital for her as she teetered on the verge again – an extreme bout of dysentery. That one last wish. And radishes, of all things! Then years of hallucination, when cows walked the electric cables outside the window in her room and a beggar in the rice sack would be invited for lunch every day; though she’d always correctly recognise the unpaid daily labourer in my mother. Even the day she spat blood, crooning a childhood song to our ‘last’ prayers, her eyes refused to break a centuries-old ice with her man, barely able to stand her feline air, though it truly seemed to be plunging into another world this time. He left the room without a word; she landed on all fours, as ever. It’s only after he died that she fulfilled the prophecy of her ninth and last life. 

POPA’S PLANET

Sometimes he brays 
Rolls in the dust 
Sometimes 
Then you notice him 

Otherwise 
You only see his ears 
On the head of the planet 
But he’s not there 
 

-Vasco Popa 

That summer, the weight of my uncle’s death still drooling in the wind, I returned home and brought myself to grieve a friend as well – Pearly, the overgrown child-cop, murdered by and buried with, his naive honesty. So it was. Homecoming and its ritual counting of absences. I remember the keen silence of talks with my father, our words like sparrows growing sparse against a darkening sky, the clatter of a plate coming to a halt on the floor; and I by his bedside, watching light tighten its grip on his wrists as he went on to add the occasional emphasis on his phalanges in the act; hammer that one nail on the head now when it had become possible to be reduced to tears simply wishing to recognise something one has known from the womb.  

There were moments when I bit back words I thought would’ve been nice to say but lies do not ease the reckoning wearing thin into something as delicate as venom, the grand nonsense of an exposed backstage. And somewhere, it dawned. The child-face of his terror, empty shell of his world – a colour or name someone had eventually escaped; family, neighbours, colleagues gone, especially one whose friends had apparently bludgeoned him to death after having dinner with him – misapplications that landed you up with the wrong forebear. And to remember how he had waited for me to acknowledge the joke and laugh, life unspooling from its skein into an inconsolable smile on his face, and mine, barely turned towards a racket of crows against the grey sky, monsoon on their edgy wings, mourning one of them blown to bits just then in a searing blue crack of air.