The fair had a series of shops lined up attached to each other like pearls on a necklace. Cylindrical wooden sticks guarded the square shaped casements that had resin cloth wrapped about the top and sides. Some of the dwellers stood by their stock outside, some performers blew wafts of fire skywards; some navigated a thin rope suspended between two wooden pillars with just a horizontal stick in their hand. I was standing before a turbaned old man’s shop; he was selling swords that were made of thin sheet of wood wrapped in metallic gold paper. With a pouch made of coconut yarn and a handle that had a bar pinned to it, the sword set appealed to my senses. My brother and his friends took a call; we all bought a sword each. It cost us three rupees.
My maternal grandmother, a fine woman, possessed the rarest of qualities. Pale yellow complexion, her wrinkled skin puckered into folds at the elbows and ankles. I and my sister would sit by her and dig deep burrows into the blood rid folds of her skin; one of us would gather the wrinkles together in the hollow of thumb and forefinger, while the other would dig into the soft mushy folds with a pointed finger. Her arms and legs were ghostlike; so slender that they appeared brittle. She was so lean that the cotton sari she wore bore the features of her kneecaps before her. For her headdress, she loosely shrouded with her sari’s end. Beneath the drape of melancholy, she beamed with a radiant heart that knew only to love. I was about thirteen; she had lost all her teeth save a couple of front ones. Skin on her cheeks, as if threatened to be hollowed, receded into her skull, leaving gaping impressions of the years of decay.
She plucked at her headdress’ ends firmly before her neck in a tight lock as if to save herself from ominous forces about her head. Beneath the curve of the leaf that her headdress made, she would peer as a larva would, with those dead set eyes as if the poor thing, larva, had been caught nibbling at the leaf overhead. She had a narrow forehead as if squeezed from the sides, and it elongated above the powdery eyebrows in a slope over the pursed wrinkles to meet the first strands of the white hair.
She had a way with kids; she dissuaded us from committing notoriety, and remonstrated my mother for beating us up, an aftermath of notoriety. On one of the days, I brandished my golden sword at her ‘this is my paternal grandfather’s’ I swore and she censured me for bringing it out into the open. The golden metallic sheet granted it an air of mythical trait, but I could not fathom how she took me seriously. She rose up on her frail feet and admonished me, for she thought it would attract attention of the neighbours and the police. Naughty as I was, slipped out of the house, flung the sword hither and thither, broke into a wild roar of praise for the victims whose blood I was about to devour. I slashed it in air, gashed the skin and stuck into the chest of many a warriors; all invisible to the world at large. As if this wasn’t enough, I proceeded to dig the nose of my golden sword into the ground, a token of rare acquiescence, for the men I fought were brave and courageous. In the process, I shredded my wooden knife, peeled away the metallic cover; only the thin wooden sheet was left at the end.
She died the next year. To this day, I cannot say if she pretended or really believed that the sword was for real. Was she mollycoddling my ego? was she purely innocent?
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