Where is your sindoor, Shaku. Why is the split in your brow bare? Where has the moon gone from the skies of your once vermilion forehead, Why does white cover your body? Why has color been washed of you - Or is it just me? Has my mind turned into a black-and-white organ. I read the morning newspaper, look up, the salt and pepper does not vanish. The curdled-blood colored floor has turned gray. The walls that once matched The color of the cerulean skies outside the windows has no color. Transparent, like water. Is this how the dead see? Does the brain lose all its pigment after death.
The cloud comes over the moon, like a pensive throw of your pallu, Over an exposed breast, intended to keep my prying eyes away, Parrot green, glittering like a freshly washed banana leaf the shines with beads of water, To hide a nipple that still pokes through the translucent chiffon, Protuberant, strong, like the moon that peeps over the shroud of the cloud. All your bodily strength poured into a tiny tip, Like a bullet, promising it would put a hole in my trespassing hand,
I come closer to you at night, while you sleep. I lift your pallu off your breast with one quick flip of the hand. You wake up, embarrassed that a gust of wind that must have funneled Its way down from the shaft of the open courtyard had left your bosom exposed. You look around to make sure no one had seen. The children are fast asleep. Let’s make love, Shaku. The children are all grown. Let’s make love, Shaku. The children are all grown.
Every girl dreams of a wedding full of joys Not memories of a dead father whose ghost still lingers in The study where he died, one fine day, his brain not Acknowledging death, insulated from the soft pain of it. No indications, no separations were made known to him Between the present and the past, a battle of tenses, As he slipped between them, between worlds, the best death One could ask for, a death as silent as a pin drop. A one-pound lock secures the bolt, heavier than his ghost.
He struggles to raise himself up on boneless arms, Having not been fed in years, his stomach grumbles, has no strength to give, While the shennais and the mrudangams bleat the coming of the wedding hour. What father would wish a moment such as this, Shut up in a death-room, between worlds, while his daughter’s muhurtam passed by.
You were the defiant one, Leela, he told her one day, just before Death came to him. He knew it was only a matter of time, Just like he knew the course of each one of his characters in his books, The times they would cry, laugh, lose, mediate or die, Just as predictable as their destiny in his head, So was his knowledge of his own demise. The ending act of his life’s Drama had been a long time coming. He could always smell the last pages. He sensed it and hence made it a point to speak to his children. Rid their minds of any resentment towards him. Any mistakes he had made as a father. As he looked at them, One at a time, a quiet wish settled in his heart that They were just plain characters of his books And he could tell where they were headed in life, who would Marry whom, who would life happily ever after. He would give them The best parts, the best endings, the best of everything a character could Ask for. He would play god with their lives, forgive all sins, Like he had been in being gifted such a painless death, so painless His soul disowns his own death and his defies the beckoning heavens.
Of course, the children just thought he was playing with them, They had no idea of the certainty in his heart that soon, They would not see him. Gravity, seriousness and the Utterly abstract idea of death had not yet been placed in their Burgeoning heads simply because there wasn’t enough room there, And he had only given them undue credit In thinking they would be able to comprehend the implications of his condition.
On Leela’s turn, he said to her (she was the special one in his eyes): You were the one who was not supposed to come. Your mother, Still too young to bear another human in her translucent-thin sublime stomach, Struggled with you in her womb for two nights as you grunted and muscled your Way into your rightful world, like an exorcised demon leaving a host body. First the maids gave up hope. Then the doctors - their pride in western medicine Giving way to skeptical shaking of heads.
But you came because of the strength only you knew You had in you. Nobody believed their eyes. There you were, Not a tear in the eye, not a complaint on your lips. A mute conviction Written in your atrous scolding eyes, angry for our lack of faith in you. It was then I knew you would grow to be a rebellious girl, It was not good news, not good for a girl in these changing times.
When you ran away with that Muslim boy, I knew you would not come back. Yours is a mind that is made of rope, thick and unwilling to give way. You would rather break in two than be pulled to a side. I knew that if I pushed you the one way, you would go the exact opposite, Like a stubborn cow, snorting and standing its ground in the middle of the main roads Of King Koti, while rick-shaws, buses, motors blared away their horns at you.
You earned your own right to life, who am I to take away your right to live? You were born a girl when I wanted my first-born to be a boy. Gone against my wishes, you always have. You have always Insulated yourself from order and a blind following of the elderly word. Who am I to stop you now? Go! Be happy with him. He smiled, and Leela thought he was finally happy for her. He swallowed his hurt and let it linger in his throat like Lord Shiva holding up snake poison In his pharynx to prevent it from reaching his gut. Three days later, the sadness Would slip into his heart, his face turning the color of Lord’s nape. Pavonated.
Now, his hands rise with the will to stop his daughter from making a second mistake. It was his wish, while he was alive, that she marry Shiva, his youngest brother. His late mother had willed that Leela go to no one else. The wealth of the family would remain within the family. Who knew, in those early times, the dangers of inbreeding. Genetics was just being discovered. Only hearsay, still. Would someone give up a Sacred word given to a dying mother for a rumors of tiny particles In a bloodstream that rejected the mixing of blood with kith and kin. Blood is thicker than water, but when like blood mixes, It produces children with horns on their heads, And eyes like the people on the other side of the Irrawady.
But anyway, that was before. Now, Shiva was a married man And hence the question did not arise. He would never allow his daughter Be married to a married man. Never send her to break another house. He didn’t have the strength to stop her. Nor did he have the will to give her Away in marriage. Which father could commit such a sin on his own daughter.
The feeling in his hands had slipped away many years ago. He must be dead, but he was not sure. Maybe death was such a state where the plans of the body were not Allowed to be carried out for the lack of a soul to fuel it. His Moris Minor lay rotting outside his window, dirt and dried Leaves of the many past seasons, plastered on its windshield, No petrol in its gut, like its master. Its death came just as quietly. And that’s why his book lay in front of him, unfinished, though he Could vouch for having written all these years, the ink vanishing on The pages each morning, when flammeous daylight broke into The room through a slight gap in the shutters.
Perhaps death was a state where you were Still around, lingering like a shallow wind, but you lose your ability to cause an Impact on the things of reality. Like this marriage. My own daughter About to take her seven steps. And I falter and fall in her path, Trying to stop her. Her feet pierce through my wind-shaped heart. She moves on, my hands still holding her feet, dragging me with her Round the fire, the fire a witness to my helplessness.
