Through the narrow lanes that ran between houses in our colony, I ambled out in the evenings after school. Brushing the muddy walls on either sides, I would settle at a point where I could leisurely peel off the white flakes. There I would spend hours and hours together until the sound of a black cat purring came my way (for I feared it) or the night sighed its arrival overhead. One night, on my return, I found that we had visitors at home. Mother quickly ushered me inside; they had come with the proposal of marriage.
“Where have you been?” mother was whispering in my ear. She pressed me against the kitchen wall and said “Go. Put on the blue embroidered sari.” Her face was beaming with pride; she could hardly contain her excitement.
In the bedroom, I slipped out of my frock, pinned it to a hanger and turned around to pick the blue sari. Only recently, mother had sewed the hemline with broad gauze fabric. Like the whorl of a flower, two thin golden lines ran along the length of the sari, they rose and fell in regular fashion. I took the sari into my arms, its silk fabric rushed through my palms to end up on the floor. There strewn before my rather long feet, was the sari and in its viscera, the backless blouse. Mother’s needlework had turned an innocuous piece of blouse into an impish piety; the sleeves had been rolled twice over and a sleek enamelled wire knitted on the borderline. Three crinkled straps in the back were loosely held by eye shaped hooks; the middle one preened with a butterfly knot whose frills tickled the wearer’s spine.
One must, above all, put on matching ear rings. I chose a pair of pendants that hung loose like two silver tear drops from my ears. For my neck, I had something special in my mind; I opened the green lacquered wooden cabinet that my mother was bestowed with at the time of her marriage. With a great eagle embossed on its face, two wing shaped metal latches on the side, and a crab shaped lock on the mouth, the wooden cabinet looked like the most daring gargoyle ever pulled off. It was majestic; one could press a naked palm on the eagle, and feel the pleats that interlaced its wings.
Ten minutes later, a slight knock on the door was followed by a loud bang. It was time. Stately, I sized myself up in the mirror. I stood intoxicated at the sight of the grand necklace with its fish scale like tail and an amethyst jewel propped in the middle of the pendant. I opened the door to let my restless mother in; she gathered the sari into folds and tucked neatly into the waistband. By now, I was a transformed woman; I was waving the loose end of the sari to show mother how the two peacocks rested limply on my haunches; then I flipped the end to rest it on my sinuous pelvis.
“Look mother. I look like a peacock. Don’t I?”
The guy had a narrow forehead, his thick eyebrows joined in the middle; his cheeks were pitted, perhaps a remnant of his teenage pimple days. His eyes had receded deeply into the sockets; he had powdered his cheeks, flakes of it clung to the earlobes. His hair line was receding and age had drawn two faint wrinkles on the forehead. He was sporting a French beard; he must have shaved in a hurry, for a fresh gash rimmed the left sideburn. He was consciously supressing a paunch; noticing that I had arrested my gaze around his feet, he uncrossed his legs and pushed them under the chair and knocked the tea cup on the way. It was a mess, there was no need for apologies of course; but the brief shuffle across the sofa gave me a chance to measure him up. He was short, thin limbed, going bald, underweight, and on the whole unimpressive.
Later that night, I returned to my frock. It had caught dry weed on the way. I rapped the frock in air to rid it off the dirt and weed. But the rapping had resulted into something else. I felt my toe ends precariously rested on the cold marble floor; with every rap, I rose up in air until I banged my head to the ceiling and instantly fell to the floor. A bruised knee and a swollen right foot could not deter me; I grabbed the frock and rapped hard, up and up I rose. Two hours later, I had decently mastered the art of frock rap; now I could descend with a swooping motion like a bird, I no longer fell with a thud.
Outside, the night was harshly cold; standing on the roof, a sharp shiver escaped my moonlit body as I rapped my way into the sky. As I ascended higher, my wrists grew weary and fingertips numb; I was beating my feet in air to control the incline of my ascent. Yellow fog lamps and glazing fluorescent lamp posts grew dimmer and dimmer as I ascended; then the ground beneath my feet metamorphosed into a dark creature with white spotty plumage. It was unbearably cold and serene in the sky; here and there, vehicles like grumpy torch heads, with their two eyes, gouged tunnels into the otherwise silent earth. Somewhere a series of white spots ornamented other haphazardly laid out spots; these ornamental lines ran parallel to each other, perhaps it was the railway track. Then as I ascended still higher, the horizon seemed to bend itself into the shape of a bow; beneath me, the bow shaped horizon coalesced into a great ball with a flat bed. And the flat bed grew dimmer and dimmer until it turned into a point itself.
By now, I was outside earth’s atmosphere. Stars, like pin pricks in the great dark canvass, seemed to draw me in; they seemed to say ‘we are just the portals, the pin pricks, behind us lies the real surprise’. I rapped very little now; the crescent moon’s gravity did the job for me. I was floating effortlessly, no more rapping the frock and no more beating the legs. But my euphoria did not last long. In this night, sky seemed to yawn secretly, for there was not a sound around me. The deeper I looked for a horizon, the more dejected I became, for there was none to be found.
And the stars no longer interested me. All the stars diminished one by one; they all seemed to shut their doors on me. All was gone; I felt cheated and clung tightly to my frock. Pitch blank darkness gripped me with one pale white dot receding in the shoreline beneath me. Around me was unfathomable darkness, I paused beating my feet, for where should I go from here? I was trapped in this abyss of agonizing cosmic scorn; it was as though, I had shrunk into the size of my eye lids and regrettably trapped myself in my own eyes. There was nothing around me; even the pale dot beneath me vanished. I wandered defencelessly like a ship whose beacon had been compromised in the recent battle; goodness me, the lighthouse has been compromised too.
In my mind, I wished to summon the crescent moon and thwack in its sharp head and say ‘where were you? Where are all the stars?’ and when I opened my eyes, they were all there. Perhaps the thought had conjured them up. Now I was gravitating closer to the crescent moon; last night was a no moon day, so the budding crescent was thin and fragile. It was about eight feet long; I was about five feet three inches tall and it was an encouraging thought already. I stretched myself neatly over the curved belly of the crescent; my back fitted snugly into the arched spine. The crescent was smooth as silk; I tethered my frock to the sharp pointy head and allowed myself a quick nap. With the sky dissolving around me, I fell asleep.
I woke up in the morrow to find a fiery sun whisking away its yellow languid stare; the pale white dot of last night had grown into a blue heavenly body. ‘What is marriage’ I thought ‘a petty social convention that unduly squeezes the participants together. It is like a heavy hammer thwacking the red hot iron mound until it lodges tightly into the chosen slot. I can imagine the blacksmith pausing between his thwacking, trying the fitment, and reheating the iron to red hot state until it fits. ’
Next morning, the mother, fidgeting with her broom under the cot, calls for the husband. Holding dirty web in her finger tips, she says to her husband “Our daughter seems to have left us. There are droplets of blood on the floor; she must have packed nothing but her frock” The husband points to the ceiling where a flake of plaster had been removed right above the blood spots on the marble floor.
Adjusting the frock under my head, holding the flakes of plaster together, I tell myself ‘No. I will not let the blacksmith work on me. Let the people of earth be reminded of me when they paint their walls with plaster.’
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