Sulaikha's Daughter

There are some people I want dead. I know... I know it’s mean to be speaking like this. After all they have all come to take part in my wedding. My uncle, whose shirt barely conceals the business plans going on in his stomach; his son who always came home in the summers and who found great philanthropy in drawing water for all the neighbours, women all of them, who assembled after the dawn prayers to collect water from the only well which didn’t bare the marbles children threw off on and off in a year’s squabbles; my uncle’s wife over there, complaining of the injected watermelons, the annachis* whose appetite seems to be unsatiated with each day of filling up the trenches they dug around coconut trees in the beginning of the summer...

There are some people I wouldn’t mind gone forever either. My aunt over there, the one younger to my mother, who invented complex conspiracy hatched by my mother and me to gobble up family wealth every time I smile at one of my cousins, her hands are today forever occupied by those earring that she is wearing; that cousin of mine who is giggling with some friend of hers in the corner – I don’t know what she discusses, but she always giggles, at times in group, but at times alone and with the corners of her eyes curled as though she knows what I have done.

What have I done? It’s not important. It’s the first day of the four day long wedding events. That is important. Yet, not everyone thinks of it the same way.

My eldest uncle is not here. He will not attend this wedding. ‘After all’, he constantly asked, ‘what is the hurry for a wedding?’ he asked when he first learnt that my mother was getting eager to get me married off. Days passed and the other uncles, two of them, two of my aunts, and my mother herself was at it. Finding boys from distant relatives, running through newspaper matrimonials, informing the real-estate-broker-cum-marriage-broker-cum-second- hand-vehicle-broker Avaranka, preparing horlicks and chicken samosas, egg bondas and nescafe. Boys came, boys left, some said education was a problem, some found their nuclear families wanting in the care and joy they might be able to able to give for a girl from a “big family”, some thought being only girl child would create logistic-emotional issues. No one said I am dusky, no one said I am short. No one spoke of the post-marriage deficit they would face if they marry a girl whose father was no more to get the son-in-law a job, a share in the local jewellery, a car for taking her home every two weeks... people are generally kind, you see.

As days passed my eldest uncle stayed more and more away from our house. The few times he came, he turned sour. ‘Sulu’, he would call my mother, ‘it’s a bad time. Don’t do it now.’In those moments his eyes would constantly shuttle between the floor and my mother's ears.

My mother, his brothers, my mother’s younger sister, all would go in unison – ‘we need something to forget about it’.

The day the son of the timber merchant through Avaranka confirmed his willingness to marry me, my eldest uncle turned up in his Tavera, his face wrinkled than usual, his voice getting caught in his lumpy throat. He didn’t take off his slippers. ‘Sulaikha’, that was the first time he ever addressed my mother like that, ‘how can you forget Babu. He lived his life there’, he refused to sit down, his mundu was half up, his right toenail pressed against the marble floor, his fingers trembling, shivering, his silver ring with the white stone from a goat’s gladders come out loose often. ‘God will not forgive this. By God, I will carry this injury to my grave.’ And then again, trying to stop his sobs bursting out into maddening loudness, 'he was my son, he was like your son...my son'.

He knew if he stayed there anymore he would howl like a child. He hurried out, broke a slender branch off the bottlebrush planted in the west corner of the courtyard, hurried back in, ‘here’, he raised it up to my mother, and broke it into two. ‘It’s over’. I was watching all this standing by the edge of the half open door. I think he took notice of me as he was leaving. I think he stared into me, deep into me, and then hurried out. Were his eyes accusing me, or were they just asking for a word, ‘not now, mother, let some time pass’.

As my mother came back, and I know the corner of her eyes, her nose and her lips were moist, she too stared at me, like her questioning eyes, her flat nose, her restless lower lip would all melt and ooze into my eyes. She stared at me, her hands supported on the sharp edges of the wooden door, her head slowly sliding against the door, her ears feeling the depths and protrusions of its woodwork.

Did she know too? She must know. She is my mother. But... I never wanted him dead.

Babu was not disgusting, though there were times I wished he was stabbed by someone in a wayward fight in the streets, or he met with an accident, or went to coma for the rest of his life. I had just pushed him that evening. I have pushed him many times even before. Like the first time he dropped my mother and her younger sister at the hospital to see a relative’s new born baby and came back alone. I hadn’t gone, though I would have loved to see that baby. I had swelling in my right feet, the right corner of my forehead was aching, and I used to get a feeling that something, some invisible body of nerves, was exiting my feet every now and then. He sneaked into my room that day, and before I could turn and see him, his lips were pressing against my neck, and I could feel his lower body scraping against my chilling bowels.

I pushed him away, and I think he hurried out. I just lay quiet in my bed.
He was persistent. May be he loved me. May be. In the siesta hours when the house was asleep and the old woman from the neighbourhood washing clothes at the well, he would come in, regularly. First there were kisses. And I think he did love me. In the raging monsoon when the sky flashed and the house was on guard against burglary, he would sneak in, and fondle with my breasts, grip them hard, pull it to a corner, as he stiffens, his foreheads on a battlefront running in his head. As my lips curled at its corners and my eyelids shut half and my eyes rolled upwards to avoid looking at him, seeing him all the way, as his eyes glistened, his feet froze, I would pull his hair, in the hope that they would come out, in the hope that he would bald, that no girl would ever look at him, at his pumped triceps, and that his triumphant cheer would disappear, forever.

That day when the skies were still heavy and hanging he insisted that I go to the pumphouse in the evening, when the house would be busy savouring the monsoon masala mix tea, and that he would be waiting there. I told him no, several times. He was insistent. In such moments his lips would loosen up, his eyes would droop, he wouldn’t speak. I hated those. I always wanted to see him defeated, insulted, laughed at; but I never liked seeing him in the dusky light of a tragic hero. I wouldn’t allow him that triumph, that advantage of claiming that he actually did love me, but I turned him down. I wanted to see him, in his devouring savagery, in his disgusting stiffness and tremble.

I agreed to go to the pumphouse.

Later, in the pumphouse, when he made an attempt to pull up my green skirt with the golden borders, I said 'No'. He was a persistent boy - in his grasps and grip, yet I said no. But he was at it, my forehead cheeks lips ears neck all were constantly kissed, kissed again and again that I couldn't open my eyes, so strong so fast so frequent. But below I could feel him, his fingers digging deep, my back bruised against the mortar walls of the pumphouse. He was a persistent boy. I had to push him. What else I could do. Did I shout? Did I make a scene? I just pushed him. Into the weedy pond that turned green in the daylight and sparkled in the night. That very pond where he taught me to swim.

That night he didn’t come back. Nothing out of the usual. The next day his body came up floating, his feet clothed in green slippery weeds. His red checkered shirt couldn't contain his pale stomach bulging out.

And to God shall we all return. Strange souls roam the monsoon dusks. The pond was accursed anyways, offlimits at noons, dusks and later. He should not have gone swimming there.

Let’s not dwell on it now. After all, it was tragic. He won. As they kept his body on display my eyes were stuck at the fifty paise coin they balanced on his puffy stomach...

Whatever.

Tomorrow is the mailanchi** night. Tonight I am sneaking into the mosque graveyard. It’s not that far from here. And I am not afraid of ghosts. I want one leaf of the henna plant growing by his grave to colour my hands. I have heard that the plant has grown really well.

After all, Babu was a nice boy.






*annachi: derogatory for Tamil migrant labour
**mailanchi: mehendi