21 July 2011
Featured Story: Fires and Kites by Prerona Basu
It was his only wish. The treacherous lottery for divine recreation conducted somewhere in a far off galaxy had made Chura who he was. His daughter had witnesses how every morning he would dutifully visit the village latrines with a thick old brown brush in his hands, whose every bristle, due to severe overuse, seemed to recede away from one another in fear of contamination. There would be a black bucket waiting for him. Rajjo had secretly watched him stoop, his back raised to the heavens streaming with rivers of sweat, scrubbing toilets clean with a brush, whose every bristle, though performing the same task, though dipping in the same shit had avoided each other in an arrogant fear of contamination.
Mukti he had told her. Mukti , or the ultimate liberation, is what could be attained if she cremates his body at the bank of the river Ganga in Banaras. That was his only wish. She had worked night after night at a factory, sold her thick black ropes of hair to afford a trip with her father’s corpse from Mughalsarai to Banaras.
Amidst busy naked feet, dread locked white skinned sahebs watching in absolute awe from balconies above with eyes red either from smoke, hash or spiritual epiphanies, stray dogs smelling their way through rough roads punctuated with cow dung and huge piles of innocent logs of wood waiting to share the fate of the dead, sat Rajjo. She was admiring the rich red fabric and garlands of flowers that adorned Chura’s shroud. All the while the mighty Ganga glided her way, caressed the banks and moved on, just glanced momentarily at the perpetual human bonfire and moved on; her womb had place for everyone. She accepted whatever was offered and moved on.
Rajjo was waiting for her turn. Finally when large tongues of fire, as orange as the blazing sun above, licked Chura’s mortal shell and released great serpents of smoke which moved seductively towards the sky did Rajjo trace their movements and look up. Cheerful looking restless kites with faces up towards eternity, but shackled to the ground by thin white strings held by maneuvering hands of scrawny little kids, mingled with the ash filled chains of smoke. The kites shone their faces in an uneducated sense of liberation as it came in the way of the smoke. Papery colourful obstructions from Mukti.
“There is no Mukti in death father. In fact there is no death at all. Death is just a moment which joins two eternities. There is no release since leaving here is arriving there. There is no end. That which destroys us shall salvage us when we refuse to look at life as a path that leads to death. The fire which you think is liberating you now could have freed you then as well if you only knew how to direct it. Of what use is Mukti if you don’t live enough to savour it?” She left the unfinished fire and took some of it with her. Chura had chosen the way he wished to die. Rajjo now knew how she wanted to live.
PRERONA BASU is a student of English who graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, with a degree in English Honours in 2009 and later completed her Masters in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011. She enjoys writing fiction and has one of her stories selected in the Chicken Soup for the Indian Couple Soul series which is currently in the pipeline for publication.
Read more
Mukti he had told her. Mukti , or the ultimate liberation, is what could be attained if she cremates his body at the bank of the river Ganga in Banaras. That was his only wish. She had worked night after night at a factory, sold her thick black ropes of hair to afford a trip with her father’s corpse from Mughalsarai to Banaras.
Amidst busy naked feet, dread locked white skinned sahebs watching in absolute awe from balconies above with eyes red either from smoke, hash or spiritual epiphanies, stray dogs smelling their way through rough roads punctuated with cow dung and huge piles of innocent logs of wood waiting to share the fate of the dead, sat Rajjo. She was admiring the rich red fabric and garlands of flowers that adorned Chura’s shroud. All the while the mighty Ganga glided her way, caressed the banks and moved on, just glanced momentarily at the perpetual human bonfire and moved on; her womb had place for everyone. She accepted whatever was offered and moved on.
Rajjo was waiting for her turn. Finally when large tongues of fire, as orange as the blazing sun above, licked Chura’s mortal shell and released great serpents of smoke which moved seductively towards the sky did Rajjo trace their movements and look up. Cheerful looking restless kites with faces up towards eternity, but shackled to the ground by thin white strings held by maneuvering hands of scrawny little kids, mingled with the ash filled chains of smoke. The kites shone their faces in an uneducated sense of liberation as it came in the way of the smoke. Papery colourful obstructions from Mukti.
“There is no Mukti in death father. In fact there is no death at all. Death is just a moment which joins two eternities. There is no release since leaving here is arriving there. There is no end. That which destroys us shall salvage us when we refuse to look at life as a path that leads to death. The fire which you think is liberating you now could have freed you then as well if you only knew how to direct it. Of what use is Mukti if you don’t live enough to savour it?” She left the unfinished fire and took some of it with her. Chura had chosen the way he wished to die. Rajjo now knew how she wanted to live.
PRERONA BASU is a student of English who graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, with a degree in English Honours in 2009 and later completed her Masters in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011. She enjoys writing fiction and has one of her stories selected in the Chicken Soup for the Indian Couple Soul series which is currently in the pipeline for publication.
17 July 2011
Featured Story: Silent Witness by Anton Dsilva
The village was just like any other dry and hot South Indian village except for the fact that the evenings were cooler and the nights came earlier than they should. A mountain stood between the village and the western horizon, hiding the sun earlier than usual in the evenings. It was indeed a remarkable sight because the mountain was a loner. The mountain was not part of a chain. There was nothing between this mountain and the village except a small stretch of barren land marked only by thorny bushes.
Standing just two kilometers away from the village the mountain never looked intimidating to the casual observer when he gazed at it from a distance while traveling towards the village. Neither did it seem ominously tall when one looked up at it from Ranga’s idli(1) shop right across the bus stop. However, once one crossed the barren land after the village, one could not help but be totally in awe of the mountain that stood at a point blank range, hovering like a giant who can destroy the entire universe with a single swipe of his hand.
Kissing the clouds that blew across its peak, the mountain was an arduous climb, something that would take at least three hours even for the villager well acquainted with its terrain and who climbed regularly to collect fire-wood. For the occasional visitor from the city however, any ascent would take at least five hours. There was not much vegetation at the foot of the mountain, but it slowly got denser as one trod along the rocks and about half way through the climb, the vegetation again disappeared giving way to the barren rocks. At this point, a brook flowed offering water to the thirsty and the parched.
Hundreds of people climbed the mountain on a full moon night, or any other day marked auspicious on the Hindu calendar for that matter. Men flocked to the mountain with their wives and children in tow and with hearts hopeful that the goddess of the cave temple on top of the mountain would answer their prayers. There were also those who returned to thank the goddess for her blessings.
The monolithic goddess in the cave sat on a tiger. She had four hands and thrust her red tongue out.
“Thaatha(2), why are you still here? Is it not time for you to start climbing yet?” Asked Ranga to the old-man sitting in one corner of his idli shop.
“The shadows haven’t crossed the fields yet” said the old man.
“If I start now, the scorching sun will toast me alive and the vultures will have a feast.”
The old man relied on the sun to know when to start climbing. He had never used a watch in his life. The dog that was sleeping beside him got up and looked at him with ears perked up, but went back to its dreams realizing it was not the subject of their discussion.
The old man had lived in the village as an old man for as long as anyone could remember, and he did nothing but collect firewood for Ranga’s Idli shop in exchange for a free meal every day. Some called him 'Sakiliyan'(3) and some called him 'Vannan'(4). But he was too old be either presently. He collected tea dust, jaggery and peanuts from the shop during the week, and when an auspicious day arrived he climbed the mountain well before sunset and set up a small makeshift tea shop near the brook with a sheet of tarpaulin and some pieces of wood. To the unaccustomed climber who staggered his way to the cave, whatever tea the old man offered proved heaven sent and the peanuts were a bonus. There was good crowd at the shop till late in the night and he easily made at least three hundred rupees on every such outing.
Sometime after midnight, when the numbers of people climbing reduced to a trickle, the old man would signal to the dog to follow him and they would move to the side of the mountain that offered a fantastic view of the lands below and the lights of a distant city. Sitting safely on a flat rock, they'd enjoy the chicken curry and rice that he brought along, and then make their way back to the village.
“Get up friend. It is time for us to leave” he tapped his stick twice and the dog got up, seemingly in two minds - whether to stay by the idli shop, or follow the old man. Finally, it decided to follow the old man as it enjoyed the affection along with the food. The old man then, picked up his bag and started walking towards the mountain.
Soon they crossed the barren land and were climbing. Today, the old man seemed to be climbing a little slower than usual and he coughed quite a bit on the way. The dog ran ahead of him every now and then and waited for him to catch up.
“Don’t gallop like a horse, you stupid dog!” yelled the old man. The dog gave him a quizzical look and then ran up to him and licked his foot.
Then when they reached the brook, the old man took his own time setting up the shop, a task he would normally finish in less than ten minutes. Soon after, it was business as usual. People started arriving in droves and the old man served them hot tea and peanuts, giving an extra handful to the children and shouting at those who threw stones at the dog.
“How is business today thaatha? Why don’t you make me your partner?” Ramu, the local barber, who was passing by asked the old man. He then threw some biscuits to the dog. The dog liked Ramu.
“Yes that is right, I’m Tata(5) and you are Birla(6)’s son-in-law. We should start a business together” The old man replied with a smirk on his face.
Ramu made more than his usual monthly earning on a single full moon day at the temple. Almost every other parent wanted his kid’s head tonsured so that the gods would bless them with good grades in the exams. Some women also shaved their hair in the hope that this would please the divine powers enough to bestow common sense in their husbands. Thus Ramu being the only barber around had a long queue waiting for him.
Some time later, after the moon slipped behind the mountain, the number of people passing by dwindled, and the old man sat patiently waiting for a few more to reach the top. But the dog would not wait any longer as the whiff of chicken from the tiffin-box made it restless. And it slowly licked the old man’s toes and whined. The old man smiled at the dog and without bothering to fold his tarpaulin he took his tiffin box and moved to the flat rock overlooking the valley and opened it. The dog went along with him wagging his tail and waited for the old man to keep its share on the cold rock.
Instead the old man dropped the tiffin-box on the rock and sat stiff, resting his back on a tree and staring at the distant stars. The dog waited for him to pick up the Tiffin box, but he did not move. The dog then slowly moved close to the food that had spilled all over the rock and started eating, taking for granted that the old man was not hungry and therefore had given it all the food, his share too. It looked at him in between bites to make sure but he did not seem to mind and kept staring at the stars.
"Thaatha ... thaatha" yelled Raja Swami from the top. The dog looked at the old man expecting him to respond, but he did not. It looked in the direction the old man was looking, but there was nothing interesting in those stars.
Raja called again “Thaatha, have you gone deaf? I need some help. Too many people are here today.”
Raja Swami was the priest who stayed at the temple on top of the mountain all the time and he never wore a shirt. He applied the sacred-ash profusely on his forehead and chest and offered prayers in the temple on behalf of the people who gave him a lot of money and all kinds of fruits and grains and provisions. Whenever he ran out of provisions, he asked the old man to buy from the village and paid him twenty rupees for a trip.
Raja Swami called-out for the old man many times and he came down to the brook after twenty minutes. He stared at the old man for a brief while and then went back to the teashop, opened the box in which the old man kept the money and slipped everything into his yellow bag. He then called out to Ramu who was in the temple and hurried back to the top after not getting any reply from him. The dog, a little disturbed with old man's utter lack of concern, stayed by him the entire night braving the cold wind and waiting for him to get up.
Raja Swami and Ramu came down to the brook at dawn, much before people started to descend. They looked at each other for a while and then pushed the old man off the cliff.
Ramu looked at Raja Swami and said, "He has no one in the village. Who will bear the cremation expenses?"
The priest shrugged and said, “Okay, now you have two jobs in hand.”
The dog did not understand anything and stood there looking at them, not knowing how to react. It liked Ramu and went down to the village along with him.
The dog missed the old man during the weeks that followed and stayed by the idli shop most of the time. After some days when people began climbing the mountain again, the dog went up alone to the brook where it saw Ramu selling tea and peanuts. It happily wagged its tail, ran to him and licked his toes. And Ramu gave some biscuits to the dog. It was business as usual again.
Somewhere down below, vultures fought over a few pieces of bones.
Notes:
(1) A south Indian savory cake made from fermented rice and lentils
(2) An old man
(3) Person belong one of the most marginalized social groups/castes in India whose primary occupation is that of a scavenger
(4) Person belong one of the most marginalized social groups/castes in India whose primary occupation is washing clothes
(5) One of the richest men in India
(6) One of the richest men in India
ANTON DSILVA is a software consultant (just like every other second-person in Bangalore) by profession, aspiring to be a
professional writer one day. As a reader, he has been deeply impressed by the works of Kafka, Camus and Dostoevsky. He is currently working on an anthology of intertwined short stories that focus on the joys, thrills and perils of being part of the epic that is India.
Read more
Standing just two kilometers away from the village the mountain never looked intimidating to the casual observer when he gazed at it from a distance while traveling towards the village. Neither did it seem ominously tall when one looked up at it from Ranga’s idli(1) shop right across the bus stop. However, once one crossed the barren land after the village, one could not help but be totally in awe of the mountain that stood at a point blank range, hovering like a giant who can destroy the entire universe with a single swipe of his hand.
Kissing the clouds that blew across its peak, the mountain was an arduous climb, something that would take at least three hours even for the villager well acquainted with its terrain and who climbed regularly to collect fire-wood. For the occasional visitor from the city however, any ascent would take at least five hours. There was not much vegetation at the foot of the mountain, but it slowly got denser as one trod along the rocks and about half way through the climb, the vegetation again disappeared giving way to the barren rocks. At this point, a brook flowed offering water to the thirsty and the parched.
Hundreds of people climbed the mountain on a full moon night, or any other day marked auspicious on the Hindu calendar for that matter. Men flocked to the mountain with their wives and children in tow and with hearts hopeful that the goddess of the cave temple on top of the mountain would answer their prayers. There were also those who returned to thank the goddess for her blessings.
The monolithic goddess in the cave sat on a tiger. She had four hands and thrust her red tongue out.
“Thaatha(2), why are you still here? Is it not time for you to start climbing yet?” Asked Ranga to the old-man sitting in one corner of his idli shop.
“The shadows haven’t crossed the fields yet” said the old man.
“If I start now, the scorching sun will toast me alive and the vultures will have a feast.”
The old man relied on the sun to know when to start climbing. He had never used a watch in his life. The dog that was sleeping beside him got up and looked at him with ears perked up, but went back to its dreams realizing it was not the subject of their discussion.
The old man had lived in the village as an old man for as long as anyone could remember, and he did nothing but collect firewood for Ranga’s Idli shop in exchange for a free meal every day. Some called him 'Sakiliyan'(3) and some called him 'Vannan'(4). But he was too old be either presently. He collected tea dust, jaggery and peanuts from the shop during the week, and when an auspicious day arrived he climbed the mountain well before sunset and set up a small makeshift tea shop near the brook with a sheet of tarpaulin and some pieces of wood. To the unaccustomed climber who staggered his way to the cave, whatever tea the old man offered proved heaven sent and the peanuts were a bonus. There was good crowd at the shop till late in the night and he easily made at least three hundred rupees on every such outing.
Sometime after midnight, when the numbers of people climbing reduced to a trickle, the old man would signal to the dog to follow him and they would move to the side of the mountain that offered a fantastic view of the lands below and the lights of a distant city. Sitting safely on a flat rock, they'd enjoy the chicken curry and rice that he brought along, and then make their way back to the village.
“Get up friend. It is time for us to leave” he tapped his stick twice and the dog got up, seemingly in two minds - whether to stay by the idli shop, or follow the old man. Finally, it decided to follow the old man as it enjoyed the affection along with the food. The old man then, picked up his bag and started walking towards the mountain.
Soon they crossed the barren land and were climbing. Today, the old man seemed to be climbing a little slower than usual and he coughed quite a bit on the way. The dog ran ahead of him every now and then and waited for him to catch up.
“Don’t gallop like a horse, you stupid dog!” yelled the old man. The dog gave him a quizzical look and then ran up to him and licked his foot.
Then when they reached the brook, the old man took his own time setting up the shop, a task he would normally finish in less than ten minutes. Soon after, it was business as usual. People started arriving in droves and the old man served them hot tea and peanuts, giving an extra handful to the children and shouting at those who threw stones at the dog.
“How is business today thaatha? Why don’t you make me your partner?” Ramu, the local barber, who was passing by asked the old man. He then threw some biscuits to the dog. The dog liked Ramu.
“Yes that is right, I’m Tata(5) and you are Birla(6)’s son-in-law. We should start a business together” The old man replied with a smirk on his face.
Ramu made more than his usual monthly earning on a single full moon day at the temple. Almost every other parent wanted his kid’s head tonsured so that the gods would bless them with good grades in the exams. Some women also shaved their hair in the hope that this would please the divine powers enough to bestow common sense in their husbands. Thus Ramu being the only barber around had a long queue waiting for him.
Some time later, after the moon slipped behind the mountain, the number of people passing by dwindled, and the old man sat patiently waiting for a few more to reach the top. But the dog would not wait any longer as the whiff of chicken from the tiffin-box made it restless. And it slowly licked the old man’s toes and whined. The old man smiled at the dog and without bothering to fold his tarpaulin he took his tiffin box and moved to the flat rock overlooking the valley and opened it. The dog went along with him wagging his tail and waited for the old man to keep its share on the cold rock.
Instead the old man dropped the tiffin-box on the rock and sat stiff, resting his back on a tree and staring at the distant stars. The dog waited for him to pick up the Tiffin box, but he did not move. The dog then slowly moved close to the food that had spilled all over the rock and started eating, taking for granted that the old man was not hungry and therefore had given it all the food, his share too. It looked at him in between bites to make sure but he did not seem to mind and kept staring at the stars.
"Thaatha ... thaatha" yelled Raja Swami from the top. The dog looked at the old man expecting him to respond, but he did not. It looked in the direction the old man was looking, but there was nothing interesting in those stars.
Raja called again “Thaatha, have you gone deaf? I need some help. Too many people are here today.”
Raja Swami was the priest who stayed at the temple on top of the mountain all the time and he never wore a shirt. He applied the sacred-ash profusely on his forehead and chest and offered prayers in the temple on behalf of the people who gave him a lot of money and all kinds of fruits and grains and provisions. Whenever he ran out of provisions, he asked the old man to buy from the village and paid him twenty rupees for a trip.
Raja Swami called-out for the old man many times and he came down to the brook after twenty minutes. He stared at the old man for a brief while and then went back to the teashop, opened the box in which the old man kept the money and slipped everything into his yellow bag. He then called out to Ramu who was in the temple and hurried back to the top after not getting any reply from him. The dog, a little disturbed with old man's utter lack of concern, stayed by him the entire night braving the cold wind and waiting for him to get up.
Raja Swami and Ramu came down to the brook at dawn, much before people started to descend. They looked at each other for a while and then pushed the old man off the cliff.
Ramu looked at Raja Swami and said, "He has no one in the village. Who will bear the cremation expenses?"
The priest shrugged and said, “Okay, now you have two jobs in hand.”
The dog did not understand anything and stood there looking at them, not knowing how to react. It liked Ramu and went down to the village along with him.
The dog missed the old man during the weeks that followed and stayed by the idli shop most of the time. After some days when people began climbing the mountain again, the dog went up alone to the brook where it saw Ramu selling tea and peanuts. It happily wagged its tail, ran to him and licked his toes. And Ramu gave some biscuits to the dog. It was business as usual again.
Somewhere down below, vultures fought over a few pieces of bones.
Notes:
(1) A south Indian savory cake made from fermented rice and lentils
(2) An old man
(3) Person belong one of the most marginalized social groups/castes in India whose primary occupation is that of a scavenger
(4) Person belong one of the most marginalized social groups/castes in India whose primary occupation is washing clothes
(5) One of the richest men in India
(6) One of the richest men in India
ANTON DSILVA is a software consultant (just like every other second-person in Bangalore) by profession, aspiring to be aprofessional writer one day. As a reader, he has been deeply impressed by the works of Kafka, Camus and Dostoevsky. He is currently working on an anthology of intertwined short stories that focus on the joys, thrills and perils of being part of the epic that is India.
15 July 2011
Featured Story: Sita’s Hypothesis by Swarnalatha Rangarajan
The solitary Ashoka tree in the scorched vana jabbered away to Sita who listened patiently with her arms wrapped round its trunk. The ancestral voices of the surrounding forests joined the tree’s dirge.
From afar the deep-throated waves of Sethusamudram emitted a guttural chant, all outbreath. Tuning in to the mood of the reckless ocean, Sita could sense earthquakes in its dark belly that were waiting to manifest and tip the balance. The sea’s angry rumble did not augur well for events waiting to manifest in its indigo depths. The giant waves kept up their frenetic chorus. “Not a blade of grass will remain! Everything will be on fire!” They repeated these words again and again until the cautionary message entered the collective psyche of the five elements.
It was midnight and the night wanderers, the nishachara, paid their obeisance to Sita and quickly passed by without disturbing her. The night was warm, warmer than it should be at that time of the year. Sita noticed that the leaves of the Ashoka tree were not willing to open their stomata. The night air was heavy with noxious exhalations, the odours of charred vegetation and rotting human flesh from the battlefields where Rama and his army were battling the asura hordes of the obstinate Ravana.
Sita caressed the tree with her long, slender fingers in an attempt to calm the cascading waves of agony that the tree was emitting through its strong kinaesthetic field.
She understood the emotion. It was a collective fear channeled from the voices of the wilderness in the surrounding hills and forests.
Sita closed her eyes and meditated. The inevitable would anyway happen. The coronation at Ayodhya and the panorama of happy reunions of wife with husband, mothers with sons and brother with brother were all foregone conclusions which did not interest her. In her mind’s eye she saw a barren, lunar landscape where the five elements had withdrawn their creative potential. The blue-hued Rama would reach for the Brahmastra when he found Ravana’s severed heads growing back in hydra-like fashion. The mighty weapon would blaze forth with the luminosity of a thousand suns creating a landscape of erasure. However the drama would not end at that point since this was not the real climax – the decisive battle between good and evil, polarized as Rama and Ravana, sung and celebrated by future generations of humans in epic grandeur as the Ramayana. Even the lotus-eyed Rama was not aware of what lay beyond the immediate battlefields of Lanka. The true horror would descend after Rama’s sleep was ushered in by the hurricane-blast arrow of the Lord of Lanka. While the avatar slept, centuries would roll forward bringing to the forefront the powerful monster with a hundred heads — the Shatakanta Ravana. And she, as Prakriti, the material cause of the earth, would be forced to respond. Sita wondered if the bards would record this twist in the epic and devote a chapter to Sita’s intervention. Would the epic be called a Sitayana which would record her struggle to maintain a sense of balance? She had been through these ordeals as long as she could remember, defining and redefining the material conditions needed for survival on the planet.
Sita shuddered at the recollection of Indrajit’s deadly astra employed in the battlefield a few days ago. Future generations would invent a new name for it — radioactivity. Its dull green fire shrouded the earth for many miles extending beyond the battlefield before it targeted Lakshmana. Rama had thrown away his weapons in grief. The loyal Hanuman promptly abducted Ravana’s physician, Sushena, to extract the secret of the life-reviving Sanjeevini herb from him. However, when Hanuman arrived in the fragrant Valley of the Flowers, the herb refused to reveal itself to him. Its plant spirit, cool to touch like watery jade, appeared before Sita pleading for the boon of invisibility.
“Your dharma is to heal, O Sanjeevini. Then why do you go against your innate nature?” Sita had wondering asked the herb, marvelling at the way its presence was rejuvenating the Ashoka vana.
“I speak not in selfishness or an attitude of denial, mother. If the humans learn the secret of my innermost essence, they will use it for their own contorted ends. Mother Ritambari, the keeper of all harmony, you most know this!”
The plant spirit continued, “They will patent my jiva, extract my innards and meddle with my genetic coding. The rich and famous among them who can afford to buy me will live for a longer duration and chase the dream of immortality.”
Sita closed her eyes and reflected; the plant spirit was speaking the truth. Sita saw strangulated water bodies and denuded forests giving way to a barren, blasted urban wilderness. A new avatar of rakshasas roamed the earth exercising a powerful grid of control. These transgenic humanoids would colonize the earth like a swarm of locusts and secure their longevity in ugly, climate-controlled, steel citadels.
She smiled wearily at the plant spirit and said, “Your wish will be granted but fate has decreed you to play your role in the battlefield. You cannot escape from that!”
And true to her promise, the eagle-eyed Hanuman went blind while searching for the plant in the midst of the riot of colours in the Valley of Flowers. He closed his eyes and meditated on Rama. The solution to the problem came to him in a flash, as swift as a rama bana, an arrow from Rama’s bow. He uprooted the entire Dronagiri mountain and headed towards Lanka without for a moment noticing the gaping crater-like hole he had made in the febrile Himalayan terrain.
Leaning against the Ashoka tree, Sita witnessed the scene and foresuffered it all. Hanuman had set a new trend.
The tree had become a close friend ever since Ravana imprisoned her in the Ashoka vana, which in the good old days had been a leafy retreat resonant with the morning songs of Krauncha birds. The salubrious garden on the mountain top in which Ravana had imprisoned her had now been reduced to a dull brown patch of earth with a few trees that bravely resisted the onslaught of the raging war. The profuse rama bana flowers with their blood red blossoms had also disappeared. Ravana’s maidservants had wondered long at the exotic blooms which magically sprung up when Sita set foot in the vana. Looking at the configuration of petals, stamens and pistils that resembled a human being carrying a bow, they cried out, “Look don’t these flowers resemble her husband, Sri Rama?” They unanimously conferred the title, “Rama’s bow” on the exuberant blooms.
The tree brought her news from the world of humans and nature. She would listen very carefully to these little narratives coming from the tree because the authors and contributors were often other- than-humans. It was only the other day that the tree gave her the deer’s version of the story of Sita’s abduction.
“I wonder why Mother Sita allowed that poltroon of a Ravana to carry her away! She duped the world into thinking that she is an ordinary woman easily enamored by trivial things like a golden deer. She also gave us a bad name. After the epic is written, deer will always go down in human history as vain creatures who lead virtuous women astray. We will become the favourite targets of hunters who are already ill-disposed towards us.”
Sita would wince as she listened to these narratives. These gentle creatures had an insight into her true identity.
The deer was right. There was no logical explanation for the unfolding web of events. The stage was already set and the sky father gods requested her to step into the allotted role. She had tried reasoning with them but they gave her a catalogue of reasons to choose from old karmic links, thoughtless boons granted by male Gods, the secret mission of avatars, evolution arising from purification of the earth-bound life. It was a long list and Sita grew tired following the logic.
“Leave me out of all this!” she had cried, raising her hands in mock supplication.
They smiled at her and said, “Man’s destiny is bound to the earth’s. The gods who come down to the earth are not exempt from it. You wield the axle of dharma! Ritambari, you are the underlying order — the warp and weft of this universe. When you are the accommodating space of all that happens on earth, how can you ever think of excusing yourself from all its drama? Moreover, the ending will be happy. It will usher in an era of prosperity and development for men and women in the golden era of Rama’s rule, the Rama rajya!”
Sita had chosen not to respond to this tall talk. As she disappeared into the hammered golden light of the fading dusk, a Sky God called out mischievously, “The rain will fall regularly in the land of Rama. Now that should make you happy!”
Sita knew that it was time to assume a human form and enter limiting human time. She preferred being in the deep time of mountains and rivers in which the world was created afresh every moment. Embodied in a human form, Sita felt trapped in a world that was not created spontaneously like the silent lotus of incomparable beauty growing from the navel of the divine dreamer. It was a world of strange miscegenations fashioned by human demiurges who no longer believed in the quest for wholeness. As Shatakantha Ravana would later point out to her with a swagger, “Prakriti, you are dead or altered beyond recognition! You are not hidden so you do not need to be unveiled. Goddess no more, you are only a construction, movement and displacement. You are no longer the primordial mother, the dream of oneness, the teeming womb of the universe, the matrix, origin or the perennial site for replenishment.”
But she couldn’t let things fall apart. The Sky Gods were right, everything was hers. There was absolutely nothing to let go of. It was an amusing thought.
A gentle, prayerful voice interrupted her reverie.
“Mother! You know your power. How can you allow this to happen?”
Sita didn’t know quite how to handle the question. The old woman kneeling near the trunk of the Ashoka tree quivered with the intensity of her question.
“Goddess!” she cried out, “I recognized you from afar. These demonesses who guard this sacred grove are stupid! Don’t they know that they are trying to imprison one who is as free as the wind?”
Sita kept her silence. After all today was Vijayadashami, the day when Rama was destined to self-actualize his epic role. She had to wait in patience till the moment summoned her.
She gathered her long flowing tresses into a tight knot and buried her face in her knees pretending to drop into slumber.
“Goddess!” the persistent voice did not allow her to sleep.
Sita lifted her head and took a close look at the woman. Though crisscrossed by a hundred wrinkles, her face shone like polished ebony. She was surely a tribal from the neighbouring hills. But someone clearly distinguished! It was not the impressive gold loop that she wore as a nose ring that caught Sita’s eye but the clear eyes that glistened like precious gems in her furrowed face.
She continued in her throbbing voice, “You are the force in the wind, the wetness in water, the heat in the fire, the quickening of life in the soil, the vastness of space. How can you allow yourself to be imprisoned by these nitwits who don’t recognize you?”
Sita recognized her. It was Shabari, the Bhil ascetic, who plucked and tasted plum after plum before offering them to her beloved Sri Rama.
Sita hushed her and stole a nervous glance at Ravana’s female dakinis specially hired to guard the Ashoka vana. Luckily they were lost to the world. There had been a generous flow of strong liquors and good food after the bloody battle yesterday.
Sita beckoned the old woman to her stony seat.
“What brings you here to Ravana’s harsh kingdom, O wise mother!? Have you come to have a darshan of your beloved Sri Rama?”
Shabari fell silent for a moment and then asked, “When the child is in distress, whom does it go running to seeking solace?”
Sita gazed into the eyes of the old woman, as limpid as the waters of the Manasarovar lake in the early hours of the Brahmamuhurta. She knew why Shabari had come. In those calm patient eyes, Sita saw the agony of an entire community pushed to the fringes of civilization.
The old woman continued, “We gave our lands to water their cities. Now they have destroyed our homes. We have no where to go. Our forests are gone. They set fire to them to build their cities. We have become orphans! Will all this be set right after the grand moment when my Lord Sri Rama will take you back to Ayodhya in a triumphant procession?”
Sita patted the old woman affectionately and said, “All in good time, wise mother! There will be a new earth for you to rejoice in.”
Shabari trembled like a withered leaf and asked, “Is there going to be a mahapralaya? I can feel it in my bones. The new earth that you speak of can come only after a great deluge which will wash away the corruptions that fester on this earth?”
Sita replied with a smile, “You speak of the cleansing amniotic waters of life, wise mother Shabari! But the titillating part of the Ramayana story is always the test of fire — the agnipariksha.”
Sita’s face lit up with an inner fire as she uttered these words.
Shabari folded her hands and said, “Goddess, the past, present and future of the trichiliocosms cannot be concealed from you. Forgive Sri Rama for what he is going to demand from you. The God of Fire will hang his head with shame for having to witness you entering his holy flames!”
Sita laughed again. Shabari for a moment imagined that she saw a pair of dhamshtra, sharp fangs where pearly teeth should be.
Sita voice grew deep as she said, “Wise mother Shabari, the event you predict is the second Agnipariksha. The one I speak comes prior to that and is more exacting; it is a test in which I will have to delve deep into the poison fires to quench them. The bards in times to come will conveniently ignore this ordeal by fire.”
Shabari’s face wore an expression of deep understanding as she knelt down before Sita and said, “Please allow me to be by your side when this happens.”
“So be it!” said Sita as she set about preparing herself for the events of the day. She sat cross legged, her fingers touching the earth in a bhu sparsha mudra. She offered a silent prayer to the divinity within her burning like a flame. Closing her eyes, she told Shabari, “I have a lot of samskaras to burn before I meet Ravana. I am going into a yoga nidra. Hanuman will come here during the course of the day bringing the news that Rama is wounded in the battlefield. Tap me gently on my right shoulder, wise mother and do not be afraid to find me in altered form.”
Sita leaned against the Ashoka tree and plunged into the depths of her ancient, primordial mind. To Shabari she appeared asleep but Sita’s consciousness hovered around the razor sharp state of deep awareness. The sacred syllable on which she meditated took her through the contracting and expanding loops of the earth’s history in the last four and a half year billion years of evolution. Maid, mother and crone — Sita beheld the triple goddesses’ reflection in the clear waters of her mind. The changing kaleidoscope revealed her youthful body, ethereal and gaseous, that was enveloped in the radiant energy of the celestial bodies, distant stars and cosmic winds; the pattern changed to reveal a nebulous beauty gradually solidifying into the solid, green nurturing lap of the dazzling, diverse earth sangha; the pattern soon reorganized itself, changing colour and form to become a dry cupreous earth battered by deluging oceans and storm surges.
As she gazed deeper, Sita found these reflections blurring and throwing up a free vortex of whirring images – her original face. She watched with terrified fascination the panoramic play of evolution, whose essence was the bubbling karmic cocktail of life which oozed, mutated and spilled over in perpetual motion. The sacred pranava enveloped everything in this passion play. The play which was authored in both comic and tragic modes had actors from the council of all beings ranging from stardust to cyborgs And she as director, had issued cue cards to mark the entrances and exists of innumerable births, mass-extinctions, rebirths, catastrophes and other perennial becomings. She saw her own fruiting, evolving, decaying body with passionate dispassion and saluted her essence that flowed through bodied life forms uninterruptedly as the vital mystery of life. Sita arrived at a deep luminous calm in the midst of the spinning inner vortex where there was no fear.
She opened her eyes when she felt Shabari’s gentle tap on her shoulder. Her eyes first fell upon Hanuman’s puzzled face. His stood in his customary bent position, with tail lassoing the sun and hands folded in salutation but there was bewilderment in his eyes. Shabari looked more composed; Sita noticed that she was chanting a hymn to Kali.
“How is my lord?” asked Sita springing up her seat with a warrior-like gait.
Hanuman eyes brimmed with tears as he reported the events of the day in a choked voice, “My lord Sri Rama was struck unconscious by Ravana’s evil astra. The valiant Laksmana is paralysed. There is chaos in the battlefield. Ravana has gone into hiding and his elder brother, the monstrous Shatakanta Ravana, has taken charge. Nobody knows how to deal with him. He is neither a demon nor a human being. His body glints like burnished gold and his energy is indefatigable. Even the rakshasas give him a wide berth. His weapons are mighty, they say. Once directed towards their targets, they become hurricanes of fire and scorch everything around for miles and miles. The rumours are that…”
Sita raised her hand and bade Hanuman to stop.
“The fear I detect in your voice does not become you, O son of the wind! Even if the Ravana you speak of is Kalki the destroyer himself, I want to have an audience with him. Lead me to him!”
Hanuman fell on his knees and said, “Mother! Forgive this humble servant. My brains are addled and the strangeness of the world in which I find myself makes me behave in strange ways. But tell me this divine mother. Why do you look so fierce and why have you taken on this terrible form discarding all your beauty? I have often heard my Lord Sri Rama say that your beauty is superior to the idea of beauty itself. The reason poets in the country have run out of their stock of similes while attempting to describe you. Gentle mother, your compassionate face as gentle and fair as the sharad moon, why does it blaze in anger like a meteor? Your lotus-like eyes always demure and full of compassion, why are they blood-shot? Your bejewelled tresses, braided and coiled like the holy Adishesha on whom my lord rests in his ocean kingdom, are now let loose like a sheet of torrential rain. Your skin as soft and radiant as a kimsuka flower has become scaly and dark in hue. You appear to be the formidable Kali who dances her dread dance of creation in the glow of the burning corpses, creating life afresh from things that decay and rot. Who are you divine Mother? You appear to be my mother Sita and at the same time you appear not to be her!”
Sita raised her hand to put an end to Hanuman’s impassioned musings and proclaimed,
“Don’t bind me with the strangle rope of duality, Hanuman. Lead me to the battlefield.”
The battlefield resembled a still life painting. The air was heavy with the stench of death. A wake of rapacious vultures swooped down to inspect the mortalities but refused to eat the decaying flesh. Rama’s body was unscarred and it appeared that he was in a deep sleep. Loyal Lakshmana lay at his feet, his limbs frozen in a strange paralysis. Ravana’s asuric hordes had also fled the battlefield. The heavy brooding silence in the surrounding sentinel-like hills was complemented by the heaving gong-like clamour of the sea.
Sita moved in silence followed by Shabari and Hanuman utterly unmindful of the terrifying carnage all around.
Shortly there was a metallic whirring of wings and the smog-covered firmament parted to reveal a shining bronze citadel-like structure gravitating towards the battlefield with great speed.
“The war is going to begin and Ravana will appreciate meeting me alone. Why don’t both of you take refuge in that enclave near the rampart and watch the proceedings?” said Sita feeling the rush of adrenaline in her veins.
The citadel on wheels was trying to land. Sita started waking toward it and was greeted by a shower of arrows disgorged from a tiny aperture in its gleaming structure.
Hanuman roared with anger and would have pounced on the unseen bowman but for Shabari’s restraining hand.
“Remove the notion that your Mother Sita has to be protected. Can’t you see that she revels in putting on disguises? Now she has taken her original cosmic form to fight the war with Ravana, who is again only an appearance. When she is the raw clay out of which everything is baked in this earth, can there be any question of winning or subduing her, O son of the Wind?”
Realising the wisdom in Shabari’s words, Hanuman restrained himself.
The continuous shower of arrows caused rivulets of blood to flow from Sita’s dark-hued body. Laughing boisterously she advanced towards the enemy her large, defiant eyes whirring in circles. Bellowing loud, she stripped the corpses of their flesh and made a garland for herself out of the skulls. The bones she picked clean and fashioned them into anklets. Her harsh laughter reverberated fearsomely in all directions. With lolling tongue she shook the blood droplets dripping from her arm and the moment they touched the earth they became rakta bijikas, seeds of blood which spawned innumerable other copies of her dread form. The bijikas roamed the battlefield feeding on the mortalities left untouched by the vultures. The field was wiped clean in a matter of seconds. Sita laughed again. Her voice was as aggressive as the ocean at the time of Pralaya.
The door of the citadel opened and Ravana emerged carefully making sure that his hundred heads were not unduly traumatized while crawling out of the narrow exit door. Ravana looked human. His powerful muscular body was devoid of any armour plate. He stood tall at eight feet and focused his hundred pairs of eyes unblinkingly at Sita. There was no anger, no rapaciousness or combustive emotions lurking in those depths.
“What brings you here Ravana?” thundered Sita preparing herself for the final onslaught.
Ravana stretched himself and advanced a couple of steps with a steady gait. He addressed Sita in a deep metallic timbre, “Sita in costume dress! Cut the crap, lady! You can’t scare me with your show of blood and gore. I don’t know fear. Even if you want to convince me that you are a goddess you will fail because I don’t understand what devotion is, can’t figure out what it is to tremble with fear and awe before the holy of holies. Of if you think I am kinky and will be turned on by a woman with blood-stained fangs, there too you don’t score a point, because I don’t need women. I don’t have sex instincts. Well, you must wonder as to what brought us together?Well it is business! Let us talk business. I need you—to be more specific, your resources, not the sundry baubles that you have but precious stuff like thorium and uranium — the crown jewels of your treasure chest. Treasures you have tucked away from my panoptic surveillance by the sheer virtue of your illusory powers that hide and camouflage the material of your gross world. I need to grasp your few remaining mysteries. I need to ravish you lady!”
Sita set aside her anger and looked intently at the young man in front of her. It was difficult to brand him evil since he didn’t have a concept of dharma. As distant and icy as the comets, he was a creature of vacuum bored with the outmoded paradigms of good and evil. She had come ready to slay a demon but this creature didn’t deserve the honour of that rite.
Ravana nodded his hundred heads in affirmation. He had tapped into her field of mental energy and knew what she was thinking.
“That’s right lady!” he said, “Don’t waste time in trying to kill me. I am a telomerase miracle. My cells will never grow old and moreover my genome mapping is so perfect that my body can never be subjected to decay like the putrid flesh of these poor critters lying all around. I am no kin to that old dotard, Ravana who lusts after you.”
“Then why are you here, o hundred-headed monster?” demanded Sita baring her fangs.
“It is a matter of sheer convenience lady. And mind you, don’t call me a hundred-headed monster. My hundred heads can process, store and weave in information pertaining to several galaxies. My sudden entry into your archaic time was spurred by sudden serendipitous retrieval of one precious nugget of information sitting inside an optical jukebox which was connected to my sixty ninth central processing cranial unit. And yes, although I cannot feel emotions, I felt an unrecognized drive in me to see you who are considered to be the master fictive construct of our times — the primordial mother whose milk nourished our ancestor races who were free from genetic tinkering. Perhaps it was all about seeing you as an interactive mirror, as an ambiguous Other against which I both recognize and measure myself.”
Sita chuckled and said, “You are in the infancy of consciousness, O Ravana! Bounded in your monadic illusion of separateness you forget that you are one in essence with me. Like the millions of creatures who have sprung from my lap, you too are a holograph of the universe with my maternal signature etched on your core. Your genetically altered being is nothing but a new wave which breaks on the shores of manifestation; the ocean remains ever itself.”
Ravana’s response was brusque and minimal. “You forget that the self-replicating cells in my body were generated by computers. You can be no mother, midwife or wet nurse to hyper-evolved beings like me. I am running short of time. You have an hour to willingly submit yourself to my probes. If not, I am afraid I will have to use my sophisticated weapons which will scorch everything on this land in nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit flame. You will die, so will your so-called two million plus species. As for me I have acquired lifespan escape velocity. My lightning swift citadel is immune to all frailties of your flesh and it can transport me to a distant planet which I can colonize and mould according to my needs.”
Before Ravana could complete reciting from his inventory of threats, a bolt of lightning descended like Indra’s vajra setting the entire landscape on fire.
Ravana did some quick computations and the powerful geo-surveillance optoelectronic rods embedded in his heads alerted him to the situation.
“Lady, you are finished!” he proclaimed without excitement or trepidation, “Underwater Methyl hydrate has been ignited. Triggered by volcanic activity in the ocean bed. More than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of this gas has been released. Your all-too human children are to be blamed for this. They have been pushing the buttons over the centuries. This gas will raise the planet’s temperature by at least 13 degrees Fahrenheit, according to my calculations. So in addition to fires, you will have floods courtesy ice caps melting. Messy scenario! Isn’t it? The time has come when you can prove to me now that you are the essence. Step into these hellish fires and quench them. If you do so, I will acknowledge you as the sole creatrix and magna mater. ”
The hungry flames were fast devouring everything. Sita knew that it was time to act.
She gave the unperturbed Ravana a piercing look and quietly asked, “Are you challenging me to undergo a test of fire?”
The demon laughed and mirthless tears rolled down his hundred cheeks.
“I am dead serious! But for the fact that I can never be dead” he said enjoying his word-play.
Sita summoned the seven-tongued Agni, who rose from the waters of the seething cauldron of the Sethusamudram. The Rig Vedic seer who named him the “grandson of the waters” — Aapam Napat, after witnessing flames which surfaced from oil seepages in water was prophetic.
Red-faced Agni who was seated in his bejewelled chariot had the cold detached look of an executioner. The fiery horses that yoked his chariot revelled in the uncontrolled dance of flames that enveloped the whole place.
“Why did you summon me O Prakriti? Don’t you behold my divine design in these calamities that will summon this earth to its end?
“O Chosen priest of the gods, oblation bearer, radiant one, dispeller of darkness, is it not your dharma to protect this earth?” asked Sita her face all ablaze with anger.
“O daughter of Janaka, don’t you recognize that I come as a destroyer at this point in your history when everything has come full circle. In these times of pralaya, even water takes on my dread form and destruction becomes my dharma. So don’t expect me to rescue you or furnish a testimony for your nurturing powers!”
Sita’s dark-hued face took on the hard brilliance of a diamond. Her voice rose above above the hiss of the sulphurous ocean and the crackling of the wavelets of fire.
“ O vain God of Fire! Apocalyptic scenarios don’t threaten my imagination. Know me as the regulatory force of this universe. Know that I have maintained the temperature on this earth’s surface for hundred of millions of yugas despite Surya increasing his heat and the vayu mandala changing its composition. Know that I am the force that stabilizes the salinity in the great oceans. If I had allowed the salt concentration to rise, the seas would have long been emptied of life. If I had allowed the prana in the oxygen levels of the vayu mandala to drop below a certain level, large animals and flying insects would not have found the energy to survive and if I had allowed the levels to increase slightly, trees, herbs and all vegetation would have started burning. Everything on this planet, including you, O Shining Fire God, has evolved inside my life systems. Whenever something tries to harm the rest of life, the rest of the system will undo or balance it any way it can.”
Having uttering these words, Sita closed her eyes and plunged into the burning ocean. The black waves tossed her body with violent motion; Hanuman and Shabari watched in concern as she became a tiny speck that disappeared into the seething furnace of waters. However the waters parted in a matter of seconds to reveal a Sita whose dimensions challenged the arc of vision. The sun and moon were her eyes; the firmament her resplendent face, the flowing rivers her tresses, Mount Kailash and Mount Meru her breasts, the spreading deserts of the world her loins, the minerals and ores her limbs of insuperable strength and the surviving species of the plant kingdom her green raiment. A lotus of incomparable beauty grew out of her navel. A radiant smile bloomed on her full lips as she emptied the dark contents of the flaming ocean into her throat.
Agni prostrated before the blue-throated goddess and transformed himself into the digestive fire in her that destroyed the poison she had imbibed from the ocean.
Ravana made a clumsy move to salute her. Fumbling awkwardly he retrieved a byte of memory stored in his hundredth head under the file name “The Great Oral Traditions of Planet Earth” and intoned:
May those born of thee, O Earth,
Be for our welfare, free from sickness and waste.
Wakeful through a long life, we shall become bearers of tribute to thee.
Sita smiled, acknowledging the ancient lines from the Prithvi Sukta.
The ocean lost its fury and anointed her feet with its chrysoberyl waters. The drama was over and the danger past. As Sita resumed her human dimensions, the ocean king parted his waters to reveal the bridge of stones painstakingly laid by Rama and his monkey friends.
Sita smiled in anticipation of the small drama which awaited her. The gentle rain which the heavens were sprinkling would revive Rama and bring the ten-headed Ravana back from hiding. Lotus-eyed Rama would later proclaim that he fought the war not to save her but to protect dharma. Struggling to camouflage the anguish in his soul, he would declare before all and sundry, “Sita, let not the world insinuate that Sri Rama’s wife is unchaste, having spent ten long months in the palace of Ravana! Let Agni deva pronounce your purity! Only then can you return to Ayodhya as my queen.”
And Agni, who would hasten to be a witness in the ordeal dictated by Rama, would again learn a lesson or two about her incendiary potential. Scorched by the fire of her chastity, Agni would be forced to shift shape into a shower of delicate jasmine flowers.
Sita laughed aloud.
The epic twist amused her.
Fire ordeals, myopic husbands and queer rakshasas were, after all, signposts in this epic journey of disintegration from the one to the many and the returning impulse of reintegration from the many to the one. Bards recreating the epic in different times and places would express concern about humankind’s straying away from the ancient, fundamental relationship to the centre. As antidote to the sense of disconnect in the human psyche, they would compose paeans to the unconditional love that would heal the primal wounding of an unresolved past. The wise among them would recognize the Ramayana heroine as the all-pervading center and also as their own body. The less enlightened would search for her in the periphery fields heavily marked by duality, hyperseparated as good and evil. All representations and misrepresentations about her would, nevertheless, lead to the implanting of a source seed in human consciousness and for the first time, the children of Prajapati would understand the interrelationship of parts and interdependence of systems.
This was her hypothesis. Sita wondered if it could be included in the alternative Ramayana traditions under the title Sita’s hypothesis in a new chapter called Prithivi Khanda — the earth song. The Phala Shruti, the accrued merit for the listener, would be many years of abundant dwelling in the hallowed Rama rajya where the rains fell on time and everyone lived in peace and harmony.
Sita’s laughter echoed in the hills and valleys of Ravana’s kingdom. Hearing it, Ashoka, the sorrowless tree, rejoiced and the crimson rama bana flowers emerged from their long underworld sleep.
SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. She was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University where she took a course in advanced fiction writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Zuban’s 21 under 40, Penguin's First Proof and South Asian Review. She is currrently working on her first novel.
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From afar the deep-throated waves of Sethusamudram emitted a guttural chant, all outbreath. Tuning in to the mood of the reckless ocean, Sita could sense earthquakes in its dark belly that were waiting to manifest and tip the balance. The sea’s angry rumble did not augur well for events waiting to manifest in its indigo depths. The giant waves kept up their frenetic chorus. “Not a blade of grass will remain! Everything will be on fire!” They repeated these words again and again until the cautionary message entered the collective psyche of the five elements.
It was midnight and the night wanderers, the nishachara, paid their obeisance to Sita and quickly passed by without disturbing her. The night was warm, warmer than it should be at that time of the year. Sita noticed that the leaves of the Ashoka tree were not willing to open their stomata. The night air was heavy with noxious exhalations, the odours of charred vegetation and rotting human flesh from the battlefields where Rama and his army were battling the asura hordes of the obstinate Ravana.
Sita caressed the tree with her long, slender fingers in an attempt to calm the cascading waves of agony that the tree was emitting through its strong kinaesthetic field.
She understood the emotion. It was a collective fear channeled from the voices of the wilderness in the surrounding hills and forests.
Sita closed her eyes and meditated. The inevitable would anyway happen. The coronation at Ayodhya and the panorama of happy reunions of wife with husband, mothers with sons and brother with brother were all foregone conclusions which did not interest her. In her mind’s eye she saw a barren, lunar landscape where the five elements had withdrawn their creative potential. The blue-hued Rama would reach for the Brahmastra when he found Ravana’s severed heads growing back in hydra-like fashion. The mighty weapon would blaze forth with the luminosity of a thousand suns creating a landscape of erasure. However the drama would not end at that point since this was not the real climax – the decisive battle between good and evil, polarized as Rama and Ravana, sung and celebrated by future generations of humans in epic grandeur as the Ramayana. Even the lotus-eyed Rama was not aware of what lay beyond the immediate battlefields of Lanka. The true horror would descend after Rama’s sleep was ushered in by the hurricane-blast arrow of the Lord of Lanka. While the avatar slept, centuries would roll forward bringing to the forefront the powerful monster with a hundred heads — the Shatakanta Ravana. And she, as Prakriti, the material cause of the earth, would be forced to respond. Sita wondered if the bards would record this twist in the epic and devote a chapter to Sita’s intervention. Would the epic be called a Sitayana which would record her struggle to maintain a sense of balance? She had been through these ordeals as long as she could remember, defining and redefining the material conditions needed for survival on the planet.
Sita shuddered at the recollection of Indrajit’s deadly astra employed in the battlefield a few days ago. Future generations would invent a new name for it — radioactivity. Its dull green fire shrouded the earth for many miles extending beyond the battlefield before it targeted Lakshmana. Rama had thrown away his weapons in grief. The loyal Hanuman promptly abducted Ravana’s physician, Sushena, to extract the secret of the life-reviving Sanjeevini herb from him. However, when Hanuman arrived in the fragrant Valley of the Flowers, the herb refused to reveal itself to him. Its plant spirit, cool to touch like watery jade, appeared before Sita pleading for the boon of invisibility.
“Your dharma is to heal, O Sanjeevini. Then why do you go against your innate nature?” Sita had wondering asked the herb, marvelling at the way its presence was rejuvenating the Ashoka vana.
“I speak not in selfishness or an attitude of denial, mother. If the humans learn the secret of my innermost essence, they will use it for their own contorted ends. Mother Ritambari, the keeper of all harmony, you most know this!”
The plant spirit continued, “They will patent my jiva, extract my innards and meddle with my genetic coding. The rich and famous among them who can afford to buy me will live for a longer duration and chase the dream of immortality.”
Sita closed her eyes and reflected; the plant spirit was speaking the truth. Sita saw strangulated water bodies and denuded forests giving way to a barren, blasted urban wilderness. A new avatar of rakshasas roamed the earth exercising a powerful grid of control. These transgenic humanoids would colonize the earth like a swarm of locusts and secure their longevity in ugly, climate-controlled, steel citadels.
She smiled wearily at the plant spirit and said, “Your wish will be granted but fate has decreed you to play your role in the battlefield. You cannot escape from that!”
And true to her promise, the eagle-eyed Hanuman went blind while searching for the plant in the midst of the riot of colours in the Valley of Flowers. He closed his eyes and meditated on Rama. The solution to the problem came to him in a flash, as swift as a rama bana, an arrow from Rama’s bow. He uprooted the entire Dronagiri mountain and headed towards Lanka without for a moment noticing the gaping crater-like hole he had made in the febrile Himalayan terrain.
Leaning against the Ashoka tree, Sita witnessed the scene and foresuffered it all. Hanuman had set a new trend.
The tree had become a close friend ever since Ravana imprisoned her in the Ashoka vana, which in the good old days had been a leafy retreat resonant with the morning songs of Krauncha birds. The salubrious garden on the mountain top in which Ravana had imprisoned her had now been reduced to a dull brown patch of earth with a few trees that bravely resisted the onslaught of the raging war. The profuse rama bana flowers with their blood red blossoms had also disappeared. Ravana’s maidservants had wondered long at the exotic blooms which magically sprung up when Sita set foot in the vana. Looking at the configuration of petals, stamens and pistils that resembled a human being carrying a bow, they cried out, “Look don’t these flowers resemble her husband, Sri Rama?” They unanimously conferred the title, “Rama’s bow” on the exuberant blooms.
The tree brought her news from the world of humans and nature. She would listen very carefully to these little narratives coming from the tree because the authors and contributors were often other- than-humans. It was only the other day that the tree gave her the deer’s version of the story of Sita’s abduction.
“I wonder why Mother Sita allowed that poltroon of a Ravana to carry her away! She duped the world into thinking that she is an ordinary woman easily enamored by trivial things like a golden deer. She also gave us a bad name. After the epic is written, deer will always go down in human history as vain creatures who lead virtuous women astray. We will become the favourite targets of hunters who are already ill-disposed towards us.”
Sita would wince as she listened to these narratives. These gentle creatures had an insight into her true identity.
The deer was right. There was no logical explanation for the unfolding web of events. The stage was already set and the sky father gods requested her to step into the allotted role. She had tried reasoning with them but they gave her a catalogue of reasons to choose from old karmic links, thoughtless boons granted by male Gods, the secret mission of avatars, evolution arising from purification of the earth-bound life. It was a long list and Sita grew tired following the logic.
“Leave me out of all this!” she had cried, raising her hands in mock supplication.
They smiled at her and said, “Man’s destiny is bound to the earth’s. The gods who come down to the earth are not exempt from it. You wield the axle of dharma! Ritambari, you are the underlying order — the warp and weft of this universe. When you are the accommodating space of all that happens on earth, how can you ever think of excusing yourself from all its drama? Moreover, the ending will be happy. It will usher in an era of prosperity and development for men and women in the golden era of Rama’s rule, the Rama rajya!”
Sita had chosen not to respond to this tall talk. As she disappeared into the hammered golden light of the fading dusk, a Sky God called out mischievously, “The rain will fall regularly in the land of Rama. Now that should make you happy!”
Sita knew that it was time to assume a human form and enter limiting human time. She preferred being in the deep time of mountains and rivers in which the world was created afresh every moment. Embodied in a human form, Sita felt trapped in a world that was not created spontaneously like the silent lotus of incomparable beauty growing from the navel of the divine dreamer. It was a world of strange miscegenations fashioned by human demiurges who no longer believed in the quest for wholeness. As Shatakantha Ravana would later point out to her with a swagger, “Prakriti, you are dead or altered beyond recognition! You are not hidden so you do not need to be unveiled. Goddess no more, you are only a construction, movement and displacement. You are no longer the primordial mother, the dream of oneness, the teeming womb of the universe, the matrix, origin or the perennial site for replenishment.”
But she couldn’t let things fall apart. The Sky Gods were right, everything was hers. There was absolutely nothing to let go of. It was an amusing thought.
A gentle, prayerful voice interrupted her reverie.
“Mother! You know your power. How can you allow this to happen?”
Sita didn’t know quite how to handle the question. The old woman kneeling near the trunk of the Ashoka tree quivered with the intensity of her question.
“Goddess!” she cried out, “I recognized you from afar. These demonesses who guard this sacred grove are stupid! Don’t they know that they are trying to imprison one who is as free as the wind?”
Sita kept her silence. After all today was Vijayadashami, the day when Rama was destined to self-actualize his epic role. She had to wait in patience till the moment summoned her.
She gathered her long flowing tresses into a tight knot and buried her face in her knees pretending to drop into slumber.
“Goddess!” the persistent voice did not allow her to sleep.
Sita lifted her head and took a close look at the woman. Though crisscrossed by a hundred wrinkles, her face shone like polished ebony. She was surely a tribal from the neighbouring hills. But someone clearly distinguished! It was not the impressive gold loop that she wore as a nose ring that caught Sita’s eye but the clear eyes that glistened like precious gems in her furrowed face.
She continued in her throbbing voice, “You are the force in the wind, the wetness in water, the heat in the fire, the quickening of life in the soil, the vastness of space. How can you allow yourself to be imprisoned by these nitwits who don’t recognize you?”
Sita recognized her. It was Shabari, the Bhil ascetic, who plucked and tasted plum after plum before offering them to her beloved Sri Rama.
Sita hushed her and stole a nervous glance at Ravana’s female dakinis specially hired to guard the Ashoka vana. Luckily they were lost to the world. There had been a generous flow of strong liquors and good food after the bloody battle yesterday.
Sita beckoned the old woman to her stony seat.
“What brings you here to Ravana’s harsh kingdom, O wise mother!? Have you come to have a darshan of your beloved Sri Rama?”
Shabari fell silent for a moment and then asked, “When the child is in distress, whom does it go running to seeking solace?”
Sita gazed into the eyes of the old woman, as limpid as the waters of the Manasarovar lake in the early hours of the Brahmamuhurta. She knew why Shabari had come. In those calm patient eyes, Sita saw the agony of an entire community pushed to the fringes of civilization.
The old woman continued, “We gave our lands to water their cities. Now they have destroyed our homes. We have no where to go. Our forests are gone. They set fire to them to build their cities. We have become orphans! Will all this be set right after the grand moment when my Lord Sri Rama will take you back to Ayodhya in a triumphant procession?”
Sita patted the old woman affectionately and said, “All in good time, wise mother! There will be a new earth for you to rejoice in.”
Shabari trembled like a withered leaf and asked, “Is there going to be a mahapralaya? I can feel it in my bones. The new earth that you speak of can come only after a great deluge which will wash away the corruptions that fester on this earth?”
Sita replied with a smile, “You speak of the cleansing amniotic waters of life, wise mother Shabari! But the titillating part of the Ramayana story is always the test of fire — the agnipariksha.”
Sita’s face lit up with an inner fire as she uttered these words.
Shabari folded her hands and said, “Goddess, the past, present and future of the trichiliocosms cannot be concealed from you. Forgive Sri Rama for what he is going to demand from you. The God of Fire will hang his head with shame for having to witness you entering his holy flames!”
Sita laughed again. Shabari for a moment imagined that she saw a pair of dhamshtra, sharp fangs where pearly teeth should be.
Sita voice grew deep as she said, “Wise mother Shabari, the event you predict is the second Agnipariksha. The one I speak comes prior to that and is more exacting; it is a test in which I will have to delve deep into the poison fires to quench them. The bards in times to come will conveniently ignore this ordeal by fire.”
Shabari’s face wore an expression of deep understanding as she knelt down before Sita and said, “Please allow me to be by your side when this happens.”
“So be it!” said Sita as she set about preparing herself for the events of the day. She sat cross legged, her fingers touching the earth in a bhu sparsha mudra. She offered a silent prayer to the divinity within her burning like a flame. Closing her eyes, she told Shabari, “I have a lot of samskaras to burn before I meet Ravana. I am going into a yoga nidra. Hanuman will come here during the course of the day bringing the news that Rama is wounded in the battlefield. Tap me gently on my right shoulder, wise mother and do not be afraid to find me in altered form.”
Sita leaned against the Ashoka tree and plunged into the depths of her ancient, primordial mind. To Shabari she appeared asleep but Sita’s consciousness hovered around the razor sharp state of deep awareness. The sacred syllable on which she meditated took her through the contracting and expanding loops of the earth’s history in the last four and a half year billion years of evolution. Maid, mother and crone — Sita beheld the triple goddesses’ reflection in the clear waters of her mind. The changing kaleidoscope revealed her youthful body, ethereal and gaseous, that was enveloped in the radiant energy of the celestial bodies, distant stars and cosmic winds; the pattern changed to reveal a nebulous beauty gradually solidifying into the solid, green nurturing lap of the dazzling, diverse earth sangha; the pattern soon reorganized itself, changing colour and form to become a dry cupreous earth battered by deluging oceans and storm surges.
As she gazed deeper, Sita found these reflections blurring and throwing up a free vortex of whirring images – her original face. She watched with terrified fascination the panoramic play of evolution, whose essence was the bubbling karmic cocktail of life which oozed, mutated and spilled over in perpetual motion. The sacred pranava enveloped everything in this passion play. The play which was authored in both comic and tragic modes had actors from the council of all beings ranging from stardust to cyborgs And she as director, had issued cue cards to mark the entrances and exists of innumerable births, mass-extinctions, rebirths, catastrophes and other perennial becomings. She saw her own fruiting, evolving, decaying body with passionate dispassion and saluted her essence that flowed through bodied life forms uninterruptedly as the vital mystery of life. Sita arrived at a deep luminous calm in the midst of the spinning inner vortex where there was no fear.
She opened her eyes when she felt Shabari’s gentle tap on her shoulder. Her eyes first fell upon Hanuman’s puzzled face. His stood in his customary bent position, with tail lassoing the sun and hands folded in salutation but there was bewilderment in his eyes. Shabari looked more composed; Sita noticed that she was chanting a hymn to Kali.
“How is my lord?” asked Sita springing up her seat with a warrior-like gait.
Hanuman eyes brimmed with tears as he reported the events of the day in a choked voice, “My lord Sri Rama was struck unconscious by Ravana’s evil astra. The valiant Laksmana is paralysed. There is chaos in the battlefield. Ravana has gone into hiding and his elder brother, the monstrous Shatakanta Ravana, has taken charge. Nobody knows how to deal with him. He is neither a demon nor a human being. His body glints like burnished gold and his energy is indefatigable. Even the rakshasas give him a wide berth. His weapons are mighty, they say. Once directed towards their targets, they become hurricanes of fire and scorch everything around for miles and miles. The rumours are that…”
Sita raised her hand and bade Hanuman to stop.
“The fear I detect in your voice does not become you, O son of the wind! Even if the Ravana you speak of is Kalki the destroyer himself, I want to have an audience with him. Lead me to him!”
Hanuman fell on his knees and said, “Mother! Forgive this humble servant. My brains are addled and the strangeness of the world in which I find myself makes me behave in strange ways. But tell me this divine mother. Why do you look so fierce and why have you taken on this terrible form discarding all your beauty? I have often heard my Lord Sri Rama say that your beauty is superior to the idea of beauty itself. The reason poets in the country have run out of their stock of similes while attempting to describe you. Gentle mother, your compassionate face as gentle and fair as the sharad moon, why does it blaze in anger like a meteor? Your lotus-like eyes always demure and full of compassion, why are they blood-shot? Your bejewelled tresses, braided and coiled like the holy Adishesha on whom my lord rests in his ocean kingdom, are now let loose like a sheet of torrential rain. Your skin as soft and radiant as a kimsuka flower has become scaly and dark in hue. You appear to be the formidable Kali who dances her dread dance of creation in the glow of the burning corpses, creating life afresh from things that decay and rot. Who are you divine Mother? You appear to be my mother Sita and at the same time you appear not to be her!”
Sita raised her hand to put an end to Hanuman’s impassioned musings and proclaimed,
“Don’t bind me with the strangle rope of duality, Hanuman. Lead me to the battlefield.”
The battlefield resembled a still life painting. The air was heavy with the stench of death. A wake of rapacious vultures swooped down to inspect the mortalities but refused to eat the decaying flesh. Rama’s body was unscarred and it appeared that he was in a deep sleep. Loyal Lakshmana lay at his feet, his limbs frozen in a strange paralysis. Ravana’s asuric hordes had also fled the battlefield. The heavy brooding silence in the surrounding sentinel-like hills was complemented by the heaving gong-like clamour of the sea.
Sita moved in silence followed by Shabari and Hanuman utterly unmindful of the terrifying carnage all around.
Shortly there was a metallic whirring of wings and the smog-covered firmament parted to reveal a shining bronze citadel-like structure gravitating towards the battlefield with great speed.
“The war is going to begin and Ravana will appreciate meeting me alone. Why don’t both of you take refuge in that enclave near the rampart and watch the proceedings?” said Sita feeling the rush of adrenaline in her veins.
The citadel on wheels was trying to land. Sita started waking toward it and was greeted by a shower of arrows disgorged from a tiny aperture in its gleaming structure.
Hanuman roared with anger and would have pounced on the unseen bowman but for Shabari’s restraining hand.
“Remove the notion that your Mother Sita has to be protected. Can’t you see that she revels in putting on disguises? Now she has taken her original cosmic form to fight the war with Ravana, who is again only an appearance. When she is the raw clay out of which everything is baked in this earth, can there be any question of winning or subduing her, O son of the Wind?”
Realising the wisdom in Shabari’s words, Hanuman restrained himself.
The continuous shower of arrows caused rivulets of blood to flow from Sita’s dark-hued body. Laughing boisterously she advanced towards the enemy her large, defiant eyes whirring in circles. Bellowing loud, she stripped the corpses of their flesh and made a garland for herself out of the skulls. The bones she picked clean and fashioned them into anklets. Her harsh laughter reverberated fearsomely in all directions. With lolling tongue she shook the blood droplets dripping from her arm and the moment they touched the earth they became rakta bijikas, seeds of blood which spawned innumerable other copies of her dread form. The bijikas roamed the battlefield feeding on the mortalities left untouched by the vultures. The field was wiped clean in a matter of seconds. Sita laughed again. Her voice was as aggressive as the ocean at the time of Pralaya.
The door of the citadel opened and Ravana emerged carefully making sure that his hundred heads were not unduly traumatized while crawling out of the narrow exit door. Ravana looked human. His powerful muscular body was devoid of any armour plate. He stood tall at eight feet and focused his hundred pairs of eyes unblinkingly at Sita. There was no anger, no rapaciousness or combustive emotions lurking in those depths.
“What brings you here Ravana?” thundered Sita preparing herself for the final onslaught.
Ravana stretched himself and advanced a couple of steps with a steady gait. He addressed Sita in a deep metallic timbre, “Sita in costume dress! Cut the crap, lady! You can’t scare me with your show of blood and gore. I don’t know fear. Even if you want to convince me that you are a goddess you will fail because I don’t understand what devotion is, can’t figure out what it is to tremble with fear and awe before the holy of holies. Of if you think I am kinky and will be turned on by a woman with blood-stained fangs, there too you don’t score a point, because I don’t need women. I don’t have sex instincts. Well, you must wonder as to what brought us together?Well it is business! Let us talk business. I need you—to be more specific, your resources, not the sundry baubles that you have but precious stuff like thorium and uranium — the crown jewels of your treasure chest. Treasures you have tucked away from my panoptic surveillance by the sheer virtue of your illusory powers that hide and camouflage the material of your gross world. I need to grasp your few remaining mysteries. I need to ravish you lady!”
Sita set aside her anger and looked intently at the young man in front of her. It was difficult to brand him evil since he didn’t have a concept of dharma. As distant and icy as the comets, he was a creature of vacuum bored with the outmoded paradigms of good and evil. She had come ready to slay a demon but this creature didn’t deserve the honour of that rite.
Ravana nodded his hundred heads in affirmation. He had tapped into her field of mental energy and knew what she was thinking.
“That’s right lady!” he said, “Don’t waste time in trying to kill me. I am a telomerase miracle. My cells will never grow old and moreover my genome mapping is so perfect that my body can never be subjected to decay like the putrid flesh of these poor critters lying all around. I am no kin to that old dotard, Ravana who lusts after you.”
“Then why are you here, o hundred-headed monster?” demanded Sita baring her fangs.
“It is a matter of sheer convenience lady. And mind you, don’t call me a hundred-headed monster. My hundred heads can process, store and weave in information pertaining to several galaxies. My sudden entry into your archaic time was spurred by sudden serendipitous retrieval of one precious nugget of information sitting inside an optical jukebox which was connected to my sixty ninth central processing cranial unit. And yes, although I cannot feel emotions, I felt an unrecognized drive in me to see you who are considered to be the master fictive construct of our times — the primordial mother whose milk nourished our ancestor races who were free from genetic tinkering. Perhaps it was all about seeing you as an interactive mirror, as an ambiguous Other against which I both recognize and measure myself.”
Sita chuckled and said, “You are in the infancy of consciousness, O Ravana! Bounded in your monadic illusion of separateness you forget that you are one in essence with me. Like the millions of creatures who have sprung from my lap, you too are a holograph of the universe with my maternal signature etched on your core. Your genetically altered being is nothing but a new wave which breaks on the shores of manifestation; the ocean remains ever itself.”
Ravana’s response was brusque and minimal. “You forget that the self-replicating cells in my body were generated by computers. You can be no mother, midwife or wet nurse to hyper-evolved beings like me. I am running short of time. You have an hour to willingly submit yourself to my probes. If not, I am afraid I will have to use my sophisticated weapons which will scorch everything on this land in nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit flame. You will die, so will your so-called two million plus species. As for me I have acquired lifespan escape velocity. My lightning swift citadel is immune to all frailties of your flesh and it can transport me to a distant planet which I can colonize and mould according to my needs.”
Before Ravana could complete reciting from his inventory of threats, a bolt of lightning descended like Indra’s vajra setting the entire landscape on fire.
Ravana did some quick computations and the powerful geo-surveillance optoelectronic rods embedded in his heads alerted him to the situation.
“Lady, you are finished!” he proclaimed without excitement or trepidation, “Underwater Methyl hydrate has been ignited. Triggered by volcanic activity in the ocean bed. More than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of this gas has been released. Your all-too human children are to be blamed for this. They have been pushing the buttons over the centuries. This gas will raise the planet’s temperature by at least 13 degrees Fahrenheit, according to my calculations. So in addition to fires, you will have floods courtesy ice caps melting. Messy scenario! Isn’t it? The time has come when you can prove to me now that you are the essence. Step into these hellish fires and quench them. If you do so, I will acknowledge you as the sole creatrix and magna mater. ”
The hungry flames were fast devouring everything. Sita knew that it was time to act.
She gave the unperturbed Ravana a piercing look and quietly asked, “Are you challenging me to undergo a test of fire?”
The demon laughed and mirthless tears rolled down his hundred cheeks.
“I am dead serious! But for the fact that I can never be dead” he said enjoying his word-play.
Sita summoned the seven-tongued Agni, who rose from the waters of the seething cauldron of the Sethusamudram. The Rig Vedic seer who named him the “grandson of the waters” — Aapam Napat, after witnessing flames which surfaced from oil seepages in water was prophetic.
Red-faced Agni who was seated in his bejewelled chariot had the cold detached look of an executioner. The fiery horses that yoked his chariot revelled in the uncontrolled dance of flames that enveloped the whole place.
“Why did you summon me O Prakriti? Don’t you behold my divine design in these calamities that will summon this earth to its end?
“O Chosen priest of the gods, oblation bearer, radiant one, dispeller of darkness, is it not your dharma to protect this earth?” asked Sita her face all ablaze with anger.
“O daughter of Janaka, don’t you recognize that I come as a destroyer at this point in your history when everything has come full circle. In these times of pralaya, even water takes on my dread form and destruction becomes my dharma. So don’t expect me to rescue you or furnish a testimony for your nurturing powers!”
Sita’s dark-hued face took on the hard brilliance of a diamond. Her voice rose above above the hiss of the sulphurous ocean and the crackling of the wavelets of fire.
“ O vain God of Fire! Apocalyptic scenarios don’t threaten my imagination. Know me as the regulatory force of this universe. Know that I have maintained the temperature on this earth’s surface for hundred of millions of yugas despite Surya increasing his heat and the vayu mandala changing its composition. Know that I am the force that stabilizes the salinity in the great oceans. If I had allowed the salt concentration to rise, the seas would have long been emptied of life. If I had allowed the prana in the oxygen levels of the vayu mandala to drop below a certain level, large animals and flying insects would not have found the energy to survive and if I had allowed the levels to increase slightly, trees, herbs and all vegetation would have started burning. Everything on this planet, including you, O Shining Fire God, has evolved inside my life systems. Whenever something tries to harm the rest of life, the rest of the system will undo or balance it any way it can.”
Having uttering these words, Sita closed her eyes and plunged into the burning ocean. The black waves tossed her body with violent motion; Hanuman and Shabari watched in concern as she became a tiny speck that disappeared into the seething furnace of waters. However the waters parted in a matter of seconds to reveal a Sita whose dimensions challenged the arc of vision. The sun and moon were her eyes; the firmament her resplendent face, the flowing rivers her tresses, Mount Kailash and Mount Meru her breasts, the spreading deserts of the world her loins, the minerals and ores her limbs of insuperable strength and the surviving species of the plant kingdom her green raiment. A lotus of incomparable beauty grew out of her navel. A radiant smile bloomed on her full lips as she emptied the dark contents of the flaming ocean into her throat.
Agni prostrated before the blue-throated goddess and transformed himself into the digestive fire in her that destroyed the poison she had imbibed from the ocean.
Ravana made a clumsy move to salute her. Fumbling awkwardly he retrieved a byte of memory stored in his hundredth head under the file name “The Great Oral Traditions of Planet Earth” and intoned:
May those born of thee, O Earth,
Be for our welfare, free from sickness and waste.
Wakeful through a long life, we shall become bearers of tribute to thee.
Sita smiled, acknowledging the ancient lines from the Prithvi Sukta.
The ocean lost its fury and anointed her feet with its chrysoberyl waters. The drama was over and the danger past. As Sita resumed her human dimensions, the ocean king parted his waters to reveal the bridge of stones painstakingly laid by Rama and his monkey friends.
Sita smiled in anticipation of the small drama which awaited her. The gentle rain which the heavens were sprinkling would revive Rama and bring the ten-headed Ravana back from hiding. Lotus-eyed Rama would later proclaim that he fought the war not to save her but to protect dharma. Struggling to camouflage the anguish in his soul, he would declare before all and sundry, “Sita, let not the world insinuate that Sri Rama’s wife is unchaste, having spent ten long months in the palace of Ravana! Let Agni deva pronounce your purity! Only then can you return to Ayodhya as my queen.”
And Agni, who would hasten to be a witness in the ordeal dictated by Rama, would again learn a lesson or two about her incendiary potential. Scorched by the fire of her chastity, Agni would be forced to shift shape into a shower of delicate jasmine flowers.
Sita laughed aloud.
The epic twist amused her.
Fire ordeals, myopic husbands and queer rakshasas were, after all, signposts in this epic journey of disintegration from the one to the many and the returning impulse of reintegration from the many to the one. Bards recreating the epic in different times and places would express concern about humankind’s straying away from the ancient, fundamental relationship to the centre. As antidote to the sense of disconnect in the human psyche, they would compose paeans to the unconditional love that would heal the primal wounding of an unresolved past. The wise among them would recognize the Ramayana heroine as the all-pervading center and also as their own body. The less enlightened would search for her in the periphery fields heavily marked by duality, hyperseparated as good and evil. All representations and misrepresentations about her would, nevertheless, lead to the implanting of a source seed in human consciousness and for the first time, the children of Prajapati would understand the interrelationship of parts and interdependence of systems.
This was her hypothesis. Sita wondered if it could be included in the alternative Ramayana traditions under the title Sita’s hypothesis in a new chapter called Prithivi Khanda — the earth song. The Phala Shruti, the accrued merit for the listener, would be many years of abundant dwelling in the hallowed Rama rajya where the rains fell on time and everyone lived in peace and harmony.
Sita’s laughter echoed in the hills and valleys of Ravana’s kingdom. Hearing it, Ashoka, the sorrowless tree, rejoiced and the crimson rama bana flowers emerged from their long underworld sleep.
SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. She was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University where she took a course in advanced fiction writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Zuban’s 21 under 40, Penguin's First Proof and South Asian Review. She is currrently working on her first novel.
10 July 2011
Featured Story: Gurmukh Singh’s Legacy by V Ramaswamy
Note: this is a translation of the original Urdu short story, “Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat” by Saadat Hasan Manto.
At first there were one or two incidents of stabbing. Now there were frequent reports from both sides of fighting, in which, besides knives and daggers, kirpans, swords and even guns were frequently used. There were also some reports of country-bomb explosions.
Nearly everyone in Amritsar thought that these communal riots would not last for long. They thought the atmosphere would return to normal as soon as things cooled down. Several such riots had taken place in Amritsar before this, but they hadn’t lasted very long.
The mayhem of fighting and killing would last for ten or fifteen days, and then it would become peaceful. Consequently, on the strength of past experiences, people thought that this fire would extinguish itself and turn cold. But that didn’t happen. The fury of the riots just grew by the day.
The Muslims who lived in Hindu neighbourhoods began to flee. Similarly, the Hindus who lived in Muslim neighbourhoods left their homes and belongings and began looking for sanctuaries.
But in everybody’s opinion this was only a temporary arrangement, until such time as the air was cleansed of the poison of riots.
Miyan Abdul Hai, retired sub-judge, believed, one hundred per cent, that conditions would improve very soon. That was why he was not too worried. He had a eleven year old son and a daughter of seventeen. There was an old servant who was close to seventy. It was a small family.
When the riots began, Miyan-sahib had stored quite a lot of rations at home. It was a matter of some satisfaction for him that if, God forbid, conditions became a bit too bad, and shops and the like were closed, then there wouldn’t be any difficulty at least as far as food was concerned. But his young daughter, Sughara, was very worried.
Theirs was a three-storied house. It was quite tall compared to other buildings. From their roof, nearly three-quarters of the city was clearly visible. For some days now Sughara had seen that there was fire, whether near or far, somewhere or the other. Initially the clanging of the fire engine could be heard, but now, even that had stopped because fires were erupting all over.
At night now, it was entirely something else that was visible. In the dense darkness, huge flames rose, as if the gods were emitting fountains of fire from their mouths. Then there were strange noises which, joined together with the “Har Har Mahadev” and “Allahu Akbar” cries, became very frightening indeed.
Sughara never spoke about her fear and panic to her father because once, sitting at home, he had said that there was nothing to be afraid of, that everything would be fine.
Whatever Miyan-sahib said was usually sound. That was of some consolation to Sughara. But when the electricity was cut off and the water taps ran dry simultaneously, she told Miyan-sahib of her anxiety and, with trepidation, expressed the view that they should go to Sharifpur for a few days, where all the Muslims living nearby were gradually moving to. Miyan-sahib did not change his decision and he said, “There’s no need to worry unnecessarily. Things will improve very soon.”
But things did not improve very soon: they worsened by the day. The neighbourhood where Miyan Abdul Hai’s house was located was bereft of Muslims, and God’s ways were such that Miyan-sahib suffered a stroke, as a result of which he was bed-ridden. His son, Basharat, used to frolic in all kinds of play indoors, all by himself, running upstairs and downstairs. He now sat close to his father’s cot and began to sense what was happening.
The marketplace next to their building lay desolate. Dr Ghulam Mustafa’s dispensary lay blissfully closed. A little further away was Dr Guranditta. Sughara saw through the shutters that there were padlocks on his place too. Miyan-sahib’s condition was extremely worrying. Sughara was so anxious that she lost her cool.
She took Basharat aside and said, “For God’s sake, you must do something! I know that going out is dangerous. But go … go and call just anyone. Abbaji’s condition is very critical.”
Basharat went, but he returned very soon. His face had turned as pale as turmeric. He had seen a corpse on the crossroads, all bloody, and just nearby, a crowd of people looting a shop.
Sughara hugged her terrified brother and, invoking patience and gratitude, sat down. She could not bear to see her father’s plight now.
Miyan-sahib’s right side was completely paralysed, as if it were lifeless. His speech had also been affected and he communicated mostly with gestures which meant, “Sughara, there’s nothing to worry about. By the grace of God, everything will be fine.”
Nothing turned out right. The Ramadan fasts were about to end. Only two days remained. Miyan-sahib believed that the air would be completely pure before Eid. But now it seemed that the very day of Eid would be the day of apocalypse, because from the roof, clouds of smoke were now visible from virtually every part of the city. Sughara and Basharat could not sleep even a wink at night because the sound of bombs exploding was so terrifying.
In any case, Sughara had to stay awake to nurse her father. But now she felt as if these explosions were taking place inside her head. Sometimes she looked in the direction of her nearly-dead father, and sometimes at her brother who clung to her. There was the seventy-year-old servant, Akbar, who may just as well not have been there. All day and all night, he lay in his room, coughing away and spitting out phlegm.
One day, driven to exasperation, Sughara screamed at him, “What are you made of? Can’t you see the state Miyan-sahib is in? The truth is that you are a thankless parasite! When it’s time to be of service, you lie here, with asthma as your excuse. There have been followers who have even sacrificed their lives for their masters!”
Having unburdened her heart Sughara left. Later she felt remorse and regretted that she had shouted at and scolded the poor man. When she took the dinner plate that night to his room, she found it empty. Basharat searched all over the house but he was not to be found. The door leading out was unlatched, which meant that he had gone to try to do something for Miyan-sahib. Sughara prayed fervently to God to grant him success. But two days passed and he did not return.
It was evening. Sughara and Basharat had seen several such evenings, when the merriment of Eid unfolded, when their eyes used to be focused on the moon in the sky. The next day was Eid, only the moon’s confirmation of that remained. How restless they used to be for this sign! If the moon in the sky was covered over with a tuft of cloud, how frustrated they became! But now there were clouds of smoke in all directions.
Sughara and Basharat climbed up to the roof. Far away, in a few places, people’s shadows appeared like stains upon the buildings. But it wasn’t clear whether they were gazing at the moon or at the flames erupting and spreading across different places. The moon too was so obstinate that it shone through the cloak of smoke. Sughara raised her hands and prayed for God’s blessings to restore her father’s health. Basharat felt frustrated that because of this trouble a nice Eid had been spoilt.
Daylight had not entirely disappeared. That is to say, evening’s ink had not yet become clotted. Miyan-sahib’s cot was laid out in the untidy courtyard. He lay on that, his eyes cast on the distant heavens. Who knows what he was thinking. After gazing at the Eid moon, when Sughara went close to him and did her salaam, he replied in gestures. As Sughara bowed her head, he lifted the arm that was unaffected and patted her head affectionately. When tears dropped from Sughara’s eyes, Miyan-sahib’s eyes too became wet, but by way of consolation, with great difficulty, he uttered these words with his nearly-dead tongue: “God Almighty will make everything fine!” At that very moment there was some knocking on the door. Sughara’s heart stopped beating. She looked towards Basharat whose face had turned white like paper. There was knocking on the door again. Miyan-sahib said to Sughara, “See who it is.”
Sughara thought that perhaps it might be the old man Akbar. At that thought her eyes brightened. Clutching Basharat’s arm, she said, “Go and see, maybe Akbar’s come.” Hearing this, Miyan-sahib shook his head in rebuttal, as if to say, “No, its not Akbar.” Sughara asked, “Then who else could it be, Abbaji?” Miyan Abdul Hai strained his tongue and tried to say something. Just then Basharat returned. He was very frightened. His breath came in gasps. Pulling Sughara away from Miyan-sahib’s cot, he said softly “It’s a Sikh!”
Sughara screamed out, “A Sikh! What does he say?” Basharat said, “He says, ‘Open the door!” Trembling, Sughara pulled Basharat and clutched him tight. Sitting down on her father’s cot, she looked at him, devastated.
A strange smile formed on Miyan Abdul Hai’s thin, lifeless lips. “Go… its Gurmukh Singh!” Basharat shook his head in defiance, “It’s somebody else!”
In a voice full of decisiveness, Miyan-sahib said, “Go, Sughara, it is him.”
Notes:
kirpan: a ritual dagger that members of the Sikh faith are always supposed to carry.
salaam: paying respect to and taking the blessings of elders.
About the author: Saadat Hasan Manto was born in 1912 in India. He was a prolific story-writer in the Urdu language. Manto's stories look at the lives of the underdog, the infamous and the outcast, and expose the dark secrets in society. Manto lived through the times that saw communal madness and the partition of India, and he has portrayed that period in its tragic human dimension. His name is still largely unknown internationally, though he should rank with writers like Chekov and Maupassant. Manto had written thousands of stories but only a few hundred have been translated into English. He died in 1955 in Pakistan.
Translator: V RAMASWAMY lives in Kolkata, India. His translation of the early stories of the Bengali anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra, The Golden Gandhi Statue from America, was published in 2010.
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At first there were one or two incidents of stabbing. Now there were frequent reports from both sides of fighting, in which, besides knives and daggers, kirpans, swords and even guns were frequently used. There were also some reports of country-bomb explosions.
Nearly everyone in Amritsar thought that these communal riots would not last for long. They thought the atmosphere would return to normal as soon as things cooled down. Several such riots had taken place in Amritsar before this, but they hadn’t lasted very long.
The mayhem of fighting and killing would last for ten or fifteen days, and then it would become peaceful. Consequently, on the strength of past experiences, people thought that this fire would extinguish itself and turn cold. But that didn’t happen. The fury of the riots just grew by the day.
The Muslims who lived in Hindu neighbourhoods began to flee. Similarly, the Hindus who lived in Muslim neighbourhoods left their homes and belongings and began looking for sanctuaries.
But in everybody’s opinion this was only a temporary arrangement, until such time as the air was cleansed of the poison of riots.
Miyan Abdul Hai, retired sub-judge, believed, one hundred per cent, that conditions would improve very soon. That was why he was not too worried. He had a eleven year old son and a daughter of seventeen. There was an old servant who was close to seventy. It was a small family.
When the riots began, Miyan-sahib had stored quite a lot of rations at home. It was a matter of some satisfaction for him that if, God forbid, conditions became a bit too bad, and shops and the like were closed, then there wouldn’t be any difficulty at least as far as food was concerned. But his young daughter, Sughara, was very worried.
Theirs was a three-storied house. It was quite tall compared to other buildings. From their roof, nearly three-quarters of the city was clearly visible. For some days now Sughara had seen that there was fire, whether near or far, somewhere or the other. Initially the clanging of the fire engine could be heard, but now, even that had stopped because fires were erupting all over.
At night now, it was entirely something else that was visible. In the dense darkness, huge flames rose, as if the gods were emitting fountains of fire from their mouths. Then there were strange noises which, joined together with the “Har Har Mahadev” and “Allahu Akbar” cries, became very frightening indeed.
Sughara never spoke about her fear and panic to her father because once, sitting at home, he had said that there was nothing to be afraid of, that everything would be fine.
Whatever Miyan-sahib said was usually sound. That was of some consolation to Sughara. But when the electricity was cut off and the water taps ran dry simultaneously, she told Miyan-sahib of her anxiety and, with trepidation, expressed the view that they should go to Sharifpur for a few days, where all the Muslims living nearby were gradually moving to. Miyan-sahib did not change his decision and he said, “There’s no need to worry unnecessarily. Things will improve very soon.”
But things did not improve very soon: they worsened by the day. The neighbourhood where Miyan Abdul Hai’s house was located was bereft of Muslims, and God’s ways were such that Miyan-sahib suffered a stroke, as a result of which he was bed-ridden. His son, Basharat, used to frolic in all kinds of play indoors, all by himself, running upstairs and downstairs. He now sat close to his father’s cot and began to sense what was happening.
The marketplace next to their building lay desolate. Dr Ghulam Mustafa’s dispensary lay blissfully closed. A little further away was Dr Guranditta. Sughara saw through the shutters that there were padlocks on his place too. Miyan-sahib’s condition was extremely worrying. Sughara was so anxious that she lost her cool.
She took Basharat aside and said, “For God’s sake, you must do something! I know that going out is dangerous. But go … go and call just anyone. Abbaji’s condition is very critical.”
Basharat went, but he returned very soon. His face had turned as pale as turmeric. He had seen a corpse on the crossroads, all bloody, and just nearby, a crowd of people looting a shop.
Sughara hugged her terrified brother and, invoking patience and gratitude, sat down. She could not bear to see her father’s plight now.
Miyan-sahib’s right side was completely paralysed, as if it were lifeless. His speech had also been affected and he communicated mostly with gestures which meant, “Sughara, there’s nothing to worry about. By the grace of God, everything will be fine.”
Nothing turned out right. The Ramadan fasts were about to end. Only two days remained. Miyan-sahib believed that the air would be completely pure before Eid. But now it seemed that the very day of Eid would be the day of apocalypse, because from the roof, clouds of smoke were now visible from virtually every part of the city. Sughara and Basharat could not sleep even a wink at night because the sound of bombs exploding was so terrifying.
In any case, Sughara had to stay awake to nurse her father. But now she felt as if these explosions were taking place inside her head. Sometimes she looked in the direction of her nearly-dead father, and sometimes at her brother who clung to her. There was the seventy-year-old servant, Akbar, who may just as well not have been there. All day and all night, he lay in his room, coughing away and spitting out phlegm.
One day, driven to exasperation, Sughara screamed at him, “What are you made of? Can’t you see the state Miyan-sahib is in? The truth is that you are a thankless parasite! When it’s time to be of service, you lie here, with asthma as your excuse. There have been followers who have even sacrificed their lives for their masters!”
Having unburdened her heart Sughara left. Later she felt remorse and regretted that she had shouted at and scolded the poor man. When she took the dinner plate that night to his room, she found it empty. Basharat searched all over the house but he was not to be found. The door leading out was unlatched, which meant that he had gone to try to do something for Miyan-sahib. Sughara prayed fervently to God to grant him success. But two days passed and he did not return.
It was evening. Sughara and Basharat had seen several such evenings, when the merriment of Eid unfolded, when their eyes used to be focused on the moon in the sky. The next day was Eid, only the moon’s confirmation of that remained. How restless they used to be for this sign! If the moon in the sky was covered over with a tuft of cloud, how frustrated they became! But now there were clouds of smoke in all directions.
Sughara and Basharat climbed up to the roof. Far away, in a few places, people’s shadows appeared like stains upon the buildings. But it wasn’t clear whether they were gazing at the moon or at the flames erupting and spreading across different places. The moon too was so obstinate that it shone through the cloak of smoke. Sughara raised her hands and prayed for God’s blessings to restore her father’s health. Basharat felt frustrated that because of this trouble a nice Eid had been spoilt.
Daylight had not entirely disappeared. That is to say, evening’s ink had not yet become clotted. Miyan-sahib’s cot was laid out in the untidy courtyard. He lay on that, his eyes cast on the distant heavens. Who knows what he was thinking. After gazing at the Eid moon, when Sughara went close to him and did her salaam, he replied in gestures. As Sughara bowed her head, he lifted the arm that was unaffected and patted her head affectionately. When tears dropped from Sughara’s eyes, Miyan-sahib’s eyes too became wet, but by way of consolation, with great difficulty, he uttered these words with his nearly-dead tongue: “God Almighty will make everything fine!” At that very moment there was some knocking on the door. Sughara’s heart stopped beating. She looked towards Basharat whose face had turned white like paper. There was knocking on the door again. Miyan-sahib said to Sughara, “See who it is.”
Sughara thought that perhaps it might be the old man Akbar. At that thought her eyes brightened. Clutching Basharat’s arm, she said, “Go and see, maybe Akbar’s come.” Hearing this, Miyan-sahib shook his head in rebuttal, as if to say, “No, its not Akbar.” Sughara asked, “Then who else could it be, Abbaji?” Miyan Abdul Hai strained his tongue and tried to say something. Just then Basharat returned. He was very frightened. His breath came in gasps. Pulling Sughara away from Miyan-sahib’s cot, he said softly “It’s a Sikh!”
Sughara screamed out, “A Sikh! What does he say?” Basharat said, “He says, ‘Open the door!” Trembling, Sughara pulled Basharat and clutched him tight. Sitting down on her father’s cot, she looked at him, devastated.
A strange smile formed on Miyan Abdul Hai’s thin, lifeless lips. “Go… its Gurmukh Singh!” Basharat shook his head in defiance, “It’s somebody else!”
In a voice full of decisiveness, Miyan-sahib said, “Go, Sughara, it is him.”
Notes:
kirpan: a ritual dagger that members of the Sikh faith are always supposed to carry.
salaam: paying respect to and taking the blessings of elders.
About the author: Saadat Hasan Manto was born in 1912 in India. He was a prolific story-writer in the Urdu language. Manto's stories look at the lives of the underdog, the infamous and the outcast, and expose the dark secrets in society. Manto lived through the times that saw communal madness and the partition of India, and he has portrayed that period in its tragic human dimension. His name is still largely unknown internationally, though he should rank with writers like Chekov and Maupassant. Manto had written thousands of stories but only a few hundred have been translated into English. He died in 1955 in Pakistan.
Translator: V RAMASWAMY lives in Kolkata, India. His translation of the early stories of the Bengali anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra, The Golden Gandhi Statue from America, was published in 2010.
06 July 2011
Featured Story: She's in the Band by Louella E. Fortez
From the black hour of three a.m. we stepped past the glass doors and into a playground of light: the blinding fluorescent beams nailed high on the ceiling, bathing the slick tiles of the floor in white light, the steady glimmer of the restaurant’s signature colors, red striped on yellow. Too much brightness in the span of a few seconds, but it was ridiculous to troop in with sunglasses perched on our noses. Even the revolving chairs shone a glaring blue. On second thought, it was probably a good idea to have donned those glasses; the girl behind the counter, a navy cap with the shadowed stamp of the famous bee mascot, she had been smiling a wide, toothy grin as we let ourselves out of the van, one, two, three dudes then one girl, just a rowdy group back from a party or probably driving through for the weekend, we seemed. But three feet away from her, we hit her with the truth: the red cracks on the whites of our eyes, the bruised, dark crescents under our respective stares. We stank of booze, and it was Sonny’s fault, thinking that it was cool to pour beer on himself, spray it around the stage, on us, before pitching the bottle to the audience, and it was a miracle he didn’t fry the wires, the amp. The audience howled, loved it. Booze and cigarettes, and the latter we’re all guilty of, and we weren’t so young anymore. On shows such as tonight’s — last night’s — out-of-town blitzes in cramped town halls or in the open-air stage underneath the stars, we torched our lungs blackened, shriveled lungs with no less than two packs. That we felt like wet turds afterward was the agreement, and it showed on our battered faces, lined, pale, eyes bleary, spines slumped. No wonder the smile, and it was a lovely smile, that smile dropped significant watts as we stood before Counter Girl. We looked like thugs to her, thugs who’d driven in the black hour of three a.m. to attack a family restaurant, seize all that was behind the counter.
From behind the cluster of us three guys, a soft thump of heels walked around us. The sudden grunt of the air conditioner on the end blasted a gust of her scent to us: faded shampoo, generic soap, and the rare combination of oil and sweat that combined into a fragrance, a perfume. There was the dark tinge of cigarettes, the beer that had been sprayed on her dress, now a dry smell but still with a cloying hint of moist sweetness. She wasn’t the leader of us, no, but she was a girl, and wore the shy version of a smile: lips together, dimple deepening, cheeks lifting and warmth leaping to her black onyx eyes, cast down then the fluttering up alternately. Her hair was a tumble of brown splashed with rainbows, all colors of the rainbows, and the lateness of the hour, plus the sweat she’d shed from the performance had smudged her eyeliner but it was still on her eyes, hazy black lines. But her lipstick remained a clear stamp of red, matched to her dress, a short bit of fabric with a skirt that swung around her thighs.
“Hello,” she said to Counter Girl,” do you have breakfast?” The screen behind her showed only the regular items, tight shots for the mouth to water at the anticipated crispness of chicken at first bite, the sprinkle of cheese of the glistening red sauce piled on the spaghetti, the sweet juice squeezed out of the hamburger when bitten.
Counter Girl’s smile jumped to two hundred megawatts, and she said yes, they were available but depending on the order, would take between five to seven minutes to prepare. No problem, and we all fished for our wallets. The lone girl in our group, she took all our money, fanning the bills in her hands, fingernails tipped red as her dress. She urged us to sit, go, anywhere, she could handle the order and the wasted among us breathed relief at that. I stayed by her side. I wasn’t that wasted but there was already the looming evil throb of a headache at its early stages.
“I’m starving,” she said, leaning over the gleaming silver counter while our orders were prepared.
“You didn’t have anything,” she had been too tensed to wolf down any of the sandwiches Nina had prepared, wrapped in silver foil and packed in a Tupperware that came with a handle, like a bag. Nina, despite the contract’s decree about providing us food, always made me bring sandwiches along, or maybe pastries. Nothing was good enough when she wasn’t around, and told me she slept better knowing that I had food from the house, made by her own hands. That and because she wanted me to never forget.
We settled into a comfortable silence after that. There was no need to fill the air with words, no need to listen to her voice replying, asking. It was the kind of quiet felt between good friends, or long-time lovers. Gone was this need to express, to assert, to check. You just knew that person was around, at your side, the warmth radiating from her dashed with that nice, clean scent. It was a respite from the floral spice that clouded my apartment: the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen, and sometimes, even the car. It made Nina smell like fifty, told her so and she said colognes, eau de toilette, lips curling in a sneer, weren’t right for her age anymore. She was twenty-eight.
“I’m changing my order from juice to coffee. You?” I turned to look at her as she asked the question.
“I need the sugar, but go ahead,” and so she called for Counter Girl, changing her order. Counter Girl nodded with that bright smile, as if it was the best thing she’d ever heard.
I wasn’t that too crazy about her at first, thinking that her colorful hair resembled a parrot’s, and the eye make-up and lipstick were a little extreme at eleven a.m., the hour she had walked into our studio the first time, the heels of her little boots click-clacking across the floor. She was a friend of a friend of Rod’s, who did guitar and backing vocals. A smiled crossed her face as Rod introduced her around before he pulled her aside.
We’ve been in the music scene for a while. Sonny, lead vocalist and guitar, had been a neighbor since ten, and every afternoon after school, we trailed to our respective houses and wore out the turntable with Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, to mention a few. Then it became cassettes, the brown tape ending up in snarls from too much play on our car radios, the volume turned up, way up and the windows rolled down. From listening and memorizing lyrics, we navigated to playing the instruments: guitar, bass and drums. I liked the long elegance of the bass, and how it was such an underrated instrument unless played by the right hands. You had to know the instrument, love the slender line of the fingerboard, carved like an elegant neck, the sudden, upturned flare of the strap button, which reminded me of a woman’s hip cocked teasingly. Worship the bass, and it only played the notes, dark, deep with the tinge of smoky sexuality.
We didn’t want to be a duo, so in college, we recruited Rod, who had lightning fingers. That was lucky. With the drummer, we weren’t. Our line-up changed so often that we’ve decided against putting our faces on posters, just the flared rays of the north star penned in black on an expanse of glossy white paper, the symbol of our name.
Over the years, we saw countless drummers, all leaving for reasons that included creative differences to something as ridiculous as being worn out from all the playing. That was what our last drummer explained, and it was fortunate we didn’t lose gigs because I knew how to play the drums too. But John Bonham I wasn’t; my hands belonged to the bass.
Then Rod, through a friend of a friend, mentioned this person, Addie, that was her name. She was “good, real good, you gotta sit down when she starts bangin’ those drums, she knocks you off your feet,” according to him and I longed to return to the bass. “Get anyone, I don’t care,” I said, and so Addie came: rainbows in her hair, red on the lush pout of lips stolen from Liv Tyler, wearing something lacy over a shirt, shorts and boots. Hers were the longest stretch of legs I’ve ever seen. She was long everywhere else: hair, neck, arms, torso. She couldn’t be a drummer, she was nothing else but Rod’s hard-on and Jesus, we’d be losing time practicing just so we could help him stroke it, I hissed to Sonny as we stood on the other end of the studio while Rod and Addie talked, he was giving her instructions. She stood with her hand in her pocket, hip cocked to the side. “Who wears that much make-up at eleven fuckin’ a.m.?” I demanded to Sonny and he just shook his head, listen, let’s see, that’s all. It isn’t like final or anything. And so we helped Addie carry the drums, gleaming red, which was her favorite color, she thought to mention, to me of all the other guys and what was I supposed to say? It was the summer, the sun was on the ground, and we were carrying drums in a studio that only had two fans for air. All this effort for some wannabe rocker-drummer, but we settled into the couch, salvaged battered from a garage sale, and watched. Listened.
We watched the swoop of her arms, drumsticks in hand, movement that echoed a conquering hawk’s flight towards a prey.
We listened to her beat the drums with a force wrenched from the dark pit of her soul, repeated bombardment that I swore dented, even cracked the drums. White spark played in her eyes.
We had a new drummer.
The rapping of her fingers summoned me back to restaurant, where we stood by the silver counter she was now drumming on. On her face was that familiar spark, the quirk of that smile, the flash of her dimple. Counter Girl laid our food on the tray. “I’ll just get your drinks,” she said.
“You don’t stop playing,” I gestured at the counter.
“Why stop when it’s so good?”
Addie unwrapped the small carton of the peach mango pie and nibbled. I watched her, watch pink bloom on her cheeks as she wiped the flakes of her lips with her fingertips. “What?” but there remained the spark, the smile. I shook my head, “Nothing,” and she offered me a bite. “No. Go ahead,” I told her just as Counter Girl started laying the drinks on another tray.
It was a little heavier, the tray piled with local breakfast fare of longganisa with garlic rice, egg topped by dry yellow yolk on the side. But she’d have no trouble making her way to the table, while the tray with the drinks required some balancing act. Rod had ordered both coffee and upsized pineapple juice, Sonny two large Cokes. Addie’s coffee and my juice. The drinks were wobbling pools of brown and yellow, sloshing to the side despite my careful steps forward.
Addie distributed their orders, getting sleepy thanks for the bother before she slid on the bench beside Rod. Rod nearly swam in the pineapple juice, his head pitching forward, fast, before he caught himself, rubbed his eyes. It was three-fifteen, the sun wouldn’t be up for another couple of hours. I sat, folding my legs, bumping Addie’s knees. “It sucks to be tall,” I muttered, getting a packet of sugar, shaking it before pouring the white crystals to the juice. “Sorry.”
Another round of quiet, broken only by more packets ripped open, the whispered rush of sugar, more sugar down our drinks, the plop of cream in the others’ coffee. Addie, who’d subsisted on coffee and cigarettes since the previous afternoon, winced at the bitterness that flooded her mouth at the first sip of her fresh cup. “Jos, may I?” and so I offered her my pineapple juice, which she glugged until it was halfway down the cup. I looked at the red crescent of her lipstick on the cup, and she apologized, quickly rubbing it with a tissue. “We wouldn’t want Nina to think you’re stealing her lipstick,” she said, laughing. It was a silver tingle to the ear.
The heavy throb in my head had finally receded into a dull but manageable beating and so I continued eating, listening the quiet around us. We all had the same order, two pieces of sausage with a cup of garlic rice. Addie forked the meat, then guided it to her mouth for a small bite. She still took sips from my juice, sorry about that, she went, but I let her. Wasn’t into juice too much, had only wanted it for the sugar kick on a system winding down from a hard night of cigarettes, music, sweat and crowds.
Silencing the growl in our stomachs at last, the topic of tomorrow night’s — now tonight’s — gig came up. A concert with other bands. Our call time was four but the show wouldn’t start until seven. “There’s no way we’d be awake earlier than three,” Rod sighed. Ours had been a long week of shows, guest appearances and we’ve yet to be signed by a major label. But the underground buzz, as much as we’ve begun to hate the long drives to out-of-town shows and the early, way early call times, was more than good. Something was being done right, I thought, glancing at Addie, seeing the white light from the fluorescent fall on her rainbow hair. Her black gaze met mine and she let me hold it for a few seconds before she looked away, then a quick flutter of her lashes back at me before directing her attention somewhere else.
Sonny was complaining about the drive back, he wanted to stay a while, catch a few z’s.
“I can drive,” Addie said, adding she’d driven to Baguio and back before in one day, when the sky was a showcase of pink and orange shafts as it flared a final protest before enshrouded by night, and then back, the sky still awashed with stars, and they were her only light aside from the twin beams from the headlights. And we were only less than six hours outside of the Manila, Baguio was farther. Yeah, she could do it, she nodded, as if to confirm with herself. Sonny agreed, yeah, thanks for the offer.
Then her eyes slammed into mine again. But Sonny continued to ramble, “I owe you, thanks so much,” and she had to turn away from me to look at him, “It’s no big deal.”
So we’re back in the van, Addie cupped in the driver’s seat while Rod and Sonny crashed at the back, crammed in the tight gaps between the equipment so I had to go in front with her. Nothing new with her being in the driver’s seat and me as a passenger. It was our habit to drive early into the studio and meet there, the sun a faint disc in the pale horizon of a fresh morning. She had a nicer car, shiny and faster, so that’s what we used when hitting the nearby fast-food joints, with the windows rolled down, music shattering the tranquil morning in the smog-choked city. We sang our own concerts, but I let her sing alone, where she deepened her voice in a somber growl like Kurt Cobain’s, singing “Come As You Are,’ her favorite. Her dark, smoky voice spun a spell that made me forget everything, well almost everything, except the rainbow-haired girl in the wind-whipped t-shirt, singing her lungs out. It wasn’t complete without our cigarettes, and I would hold two sticks in my lips, feeding them with the blue-tinged flame from the lighter before handing one to her. She puffed, releasing a steady stream of smoke, enjoying the cigarette to the last beat of the song before it was time for another one.
I got ready with our cigarettes, reaching into the pocket of my shirt for the crushed pack that held only two sticks. “We’d better save them,” and she agreed, we’ll smoke later then.
She’d just burned another CD, all her favorites, she said, and was now rummaging in the front for her bag but I remembered her tossing it to the back before we left earlier to eat. She sighed loudly, started the engine instead. “It’s here,” I grunted, straining my arm to reach deep and low for the small thing nestled next to Rod’s foot.
“They’re really out, aren’t they?” Addie flicked the light on, eyes on the rearview mirror. As if in reply, Rod and Sonny began a snore duet. We looked at each other and laughed. She took the bag from me, rifled through it and retrieved the flat square case of the CD. “I’m bad, being they’re asleep and all, but I can’t drive without music,” she said, putting the disc on the slot then pushing a button. Then the van urged forward, slowly, gradually picking up speed. Addie thought we should roll the windows down.
“You’ll get cold,” I asked, for sitting down had shifted her dress higher up her thighs.
“Singing will keep us warm. Jos, it’s Siberia in here, come on, roll them down,” she said.
“But your hair. Girls are always fussing with their hair.”
“I don’t care,” Addie shrugged, “Besides I like Broom Hilda.”
Suddenly, a long, familiar drawn-out wail came on. Gordon Gano. Addie’s finger jammed on a button, turning it up. I swore I felt an electric thrill rush through her body, and she seemed to glow a pale amber, the light tracing the line of her. A sudden, golden warmth went through me, sharp and precise, flattening me to the seat with its force and Addie, seeing the song take over me, laughed.
“On count of three,” she said, “one, two, three…”
We shouted about why we couldn’t get just one kiss, that it’s one of the things we wouldn’t miss. Or one screw? Why couldn’t we get just one screw? We knew what to do, but something was stopping us from making love. Addie bobbed her head hard, her lips curled in the rock-star snarl while I air-guitared.
Someone from the back, Rod or Sonny, groaned, “Shut up.”
We answered with hooting laughter, laughter that echoed into the night, the rumble in my chest tinged with her silver tingle. I let the pleasure of the laugh spread in me, spreading in the pathways of my body before converging at the center of my chest. It had been a long time, years, since laughter had seized me like this. And maybe because it was such a long time ago, I never forgot that last time.
It had been in the dark, the faint moonlight hanging out the window, with a woman too. A bedside lamp switched on, illuminating Nina, the tousled tresses of her dark hair framing the small oval of her face, her eyes glittering with play and love, back then I was so sure it was there for us. Away from the somber confines of a gray suit matched with a blouse the shade of jaundiced yellow as decreed by the bank, she was free and young, no worries etched on face.
We laughed the loudest in bed, the mattress dipping from our combined weight and springs squeaking as our bodies rippled. Sheets tangled around our legs and our legs around each other’s, we talked about the ridiculous and the inane, each sending us into hyena howls that we quickly smothered because the walls were thin and next door was a Bible-clutching, Jesus-obsessed woman with a spatter of gray on her helmet bob, always ready with her cataract-flecked glare whenever we walked past each other in the complex because of the sin we lived in, and worse, reveled in. And that just made Nina and I cling to each other with the desperation of lovers whose nightmare was to part.
A game we liked to play was Starfuck, celebrities we could fuck, according to Nina. We had to cite several celebrities we want to sleep with, and the partner got to choose for you.
So given the choice among Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Ethan Hawke, Robert Pattinson and Zac Efron, who will I let her sleep with?
“That’s not the question,” I said, “why the hell’s Zac Efron on the list? I can understand the vampire dude, though too pretty for my taste. Ethan Hawke’s a little weird too.”
“Come on,” she mock-punched me on the chest, “who can I sleep with?”
I’ve always thought she was most beautiful with her dark hair tangled in the snarls after sex or sleep, the remnants of a dream still resting on her eyes, giving me a hooded gaze. She was up with her cheek pillowed by her palm.
“You mean, just sex?”
“Well yeah, but hopefully dirtier,” she deadpanned,” “Like rock-star sex. Loud, you know, screaming, maybe even a bitch-slap..” A far-off, dreamy quality laced her voice towards the end before laughter overwhelmed her, her shoulders shaking, her face red. I enjoyed watching her like this, loved it, but she was insistent, kept on prodding, “Come on. Who’ll you let me sleep with?” I pushed her hair away from her cheek, tucking it behind her ear.
“You’re weird,” and to that, she said, “You love it,” then, “So who? Tell me who I can fuck with a clear conscience.”
“Ethan Hawke,” and when she made a sound of protest, I added, “Reality Bites, baby, the movie that embodied the angst and uncertainty of Generation X. And he was in Dead Poets Society, which is about the only guy drama flick I can stand. Doesn’t he have a book?”
“Books,” she corrected, “ Okay, Ethan Hawke it is. And you?”
“Sure, I’d sleep with him. He’s too cute to pass up. If he was good enough for Uma then he’s good enough for me.”
“Not you, you moron. Who’s the celebrity you’d like to bang?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, hit me with it,” She sat up, drawing the sheets and tucking them under her arms. I hated to disappoint her but, “I have no idea.”
“Really? In a world, heck, in the century you live in, the name Angelina Jolie has never crossed your mind? Lara Croft?”
I shrugged. Nina looked as if the world had just been yanked from under her, “Really?”
“Pick someone for me, then.”
“First chick you thought of losing it to,” she was quick to recover from the shock, “First celebrity chick you thought of losing it to. Go.”
The name of my first love fell: “Liv Tyler.”
“Liv Tyler,” Nina tasted the name, enjoying the slow roll of the l’s, the soft purr of the r. She licked her lips, a slight crease between her eyes a signal that she was thinking it, seriously considering it. “Yeah..yeah. Just think what those legs can do twice. And those lips. That mouth,” Nina said, lifting her lips as if for a kiss only to retract from their pursed rosebud shape. “I’d do her. Like I see her in the street, I’d do it in the street with her,” she thumped me on the shoulder because she liked that, doing guy things like punching me on the shoulder because she knew it made me laugh, knew that I thought she was the cutest, simply great, amazing and all those good things that came when you’re floating with that person in the cloud nine of love. She went, “Yeah, good choice,” punching me on the shoulder again before lunging at me, the springs shrieking in protest at the sudden force of our combined weight and so we laughed again, laughter that rose over the strained shouts about hell and damnation from next door.
There wasn’t much laughter after that, but she still stood by me with some of the choices I made, though she wasn’t really approving. She sang the chorus of go, go ahead, make your music, let others know about it, but with our sporadic gigs leading to bills always paid late, Nina began playing a different beat. That was the first shake-up in the relationship.
And then our name started buzzing in people’s lips, a few press releases came out and the crowd, they were wowed, roared in approval at our renditions of their favorites, all angst and rock and the squeal of guitars, the mad pounding of drums but once we played the first note of one of our originals, there was a clamor for the front of the stage, hands intent on grabbing a piece of us, shirt, guitar pick, whatever. Whatever we threw was grabbed, fought over as if it was the last food around and there wasn’t enough, and the audience functioned on the basest instincts, animal. We got more shows, a lot of them out-of-town, and Nina, her face pulled into a pout thrown with the crease of annoyance veeing her eyebrows, she sat at the foot of the bed, watching me throw things into a duffel bag. She complained about those out-of-town shows, she couldn’t come with me, there was the bank the next day and the bank paid the bills so could I at least keep in mind to book gigs in the city? At least she could drop off after work, never mind the frantic run to the bathroom and jamming a toothbrush in her mouth the next day because the sun was up, way up and the bank was a forty-five minute drive without traffic. She couldn’t see us, see me when performing out-of-town. And those shows, they were often on Saturdays and she whined like a child denied of a candy, a doll, all that lacked was the stomp of her foot on the floor, she whined that it was the weekend, we’re supposed to be together, doing it at every corner in the apartment, being a couple and loving being that. But no, it was the band this, the band that. Come on, Jos.
That was the second.
The third one, Nina thought that since I was always out late with the band this and the band that, then hell, she’d be like that too. Drown herself with work or head off to the bar with her co-workers, she still had a life after all, it wasn’t all about me, it wasn’t all about us. I’ve always wanted a band, music, well, she’d always wanted what it’s like to get drunk in the middle of a work week, to practically crawl home on all fours, in her gray and sickly yellow suit, because the drive had drained the use of her legs, she could only crawl out and Jos, since you’re hardly around now, the least you could do is toss coffee down your throat, three cups of black, so black they must be battery acid, keep yourself awake so there’s someone to wake me up when vomit sputters out, there’s someone to clean the sour puddle of food bits and stinking unmistakably of alcohol, Red Horse beer, to be specific, on the floor. Nina thought my being with the band was revenge, about what she never said and I knew it wasn’t anything close to that, it was just all about music, making it and spreading it. But if she’d done those things to keep me chained to her side, then chained to her side I was, but it wasn’t enough, oh no. She wanted a text every hour on the hour about my whereabouts and when I was home at last, she grilled me about the female attendance in the shows. Did anyone flash you? Did she have nice tits? Did you like it? Why do you go so far away when I do it plenty of times, no song and dance required. How nice to have all those nubile women laid out before you, hoping to God for at least an eye-fuck, you bastard. Who are they? Who is she?
It didn’t stop there.
I longed for quiet, away from Nina’s resentment, her shrillness. So I started going to the studio early, and that was when Addie came, walking with an easy, cocky stride on the floor in her little boots, a smile on her red Liv Tyler lips. I didn’t think much of her the first time I saw her, but I did notice those lips: red, full, probably marshmallow-soft when kissed. And I did think about those lips in a kiss with me. But there was Nina, and despite having become a stranger, there was still that old pull of the heart, a heart that bore the years and good moments, but now so rare.
There was the scent of the new morning, a crisp but gentle chill flavored with dew-tipped leaves and flowers, the warmth of the sun hinted with summer. Gordon Cano’s voice had long faded, the music from the CD softened to a whisper, and the Gin Blossoms were vowing not take advice from fools, that everything was cool `til they hear it from you. Our throats were raw and scratchy from all that shout-singing and there was no place to pull over for a drink, but there were the cigarettes I’d saved. Two in my lips, then the lighter, as usual, routine making movements precise and efficient, quick. We’re on a bumpy country road, paved on some areas, earth and rocks on most so Addie couldn’t take her hands off the wheel. “Go ahead,” she told me, turning her head slightly, and so I guided the lit cigarette to her, felt the warmth of her lips on my fingers as they closed to hold on to the tip, puckered as if for a kiss. With the wheel in her hands, she thrust us deeper into a nowhere but only just for a little while, a short while before we burst onto the highway, meeting the first rays of the new day stretching across the horizon.
A heavy weight rested on the lids of my eyes but I kept watch on Addie, who was blinking repeatedly, the red cracks in her eyes clearer but she refused my offers to take over the wheel. “I’ll be fine, I just need coffee, that’s all,” she said in between puffs, smoke trailing after every word, “but we’re so close, I don’t want to stop,” she looked at me, “do you want to stop?”
I watched the sun falling on her hair, the long line of her nape revealed as her hair blew with the wind, it would be all tangled and soft and she didn’t care. Only music, only the drums, playing and never stopping because doing it was good. “No. I don’t want to stop.”
She kept her eyes on the road as she nodded, “Me too,” and as if to make sure I heard, understood, she glanced at me, pulled the cigarette out and said, “Me too, I don’t want to stop,” her voice barely above a whisper, her voice a velvet stroke to the ear.
“Addie,” came from the back, it was Sonny, yawning, “Addie, I’ll owe you big, but would you mind dropping me off at my house? I hate to ask, but I don’t trust myself behind the wheel at the moment.”
“Sure thing,” Addie answered, “So I’m taking the van back to the studio?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll crash at your place, that okay?” Rod was asking Sonny. Sonny must’ve nodded because Rod murmured, “Okay, cool. Thanks.”
Addie took a deep drag of and asked me, “Do you want to go to the studio?”
The high-pitched beep from my cellphone answered for me. Pulling it out of my pocket confirmed it. Nina was making breakfast, banana pancakes, she said, my favorite. She hoped I’d get home soon. Traffic wouldn’t be so bad now, but it was just a few minutes past five. Maybe a flat tire. Something. Anything. But Addie just nodded, staring straight ahead when I cleared my throat and told her, “Nina’s waiting.”
That was all I could say, and there was nothing else left to do but torch my lungs even more. Nina didn’t forbid smoking but she didn’t appreciate its smell in the house. I took deeper drags.
The shortest drive in the world followed. Addie took a left, turning towards the city. The rest of the images were a blur: buildings racing for the sky, cars and buses rolling to and fro, street vendors unpacking their wares, blatantly ignoring the MMDA van parked just a few feet away, where the traffic enforcers were chatting, rubbing their eyes. I rolled up my window when hit with the stink of soured garbage scattered on the street, gas and sweat from pedestrians with skins bearing the darkness of the sun walked by. Nina took another turn, another one, and more, and soon she was guiding the van to Sonny’s street. She couldn’t remember which house so I had her drive to the end, pointed and she pulled over there, woke up Sonny and Rod.
“Is Liz going to yell at me?” Rod asked Sonny.
“Liz is not Nina,” Sonny turned red, “Sorry, Jos, it just slipped out.”
“Just go,” I flushed because what was said hadn’t been too far from the truth, “See you later.”
They trudged out, shuffling to the gate where Sonny rang the bell. Addie waved goodbye and then steered the van out of the street, turned another, then more until we were on the highway leading to my place. Another beep from my cellphone. Nina was getting hungry, she’d be done in a bit. I slipped the phone back in my pocket.
No traffic again. It was all smooth-flowing and easy, just when you least wanted it. Sighing, and because there was nothing I could do, I leaned forward and pressed the button of the CD player, selecting a random track. Gordon Gano’s wail came on.
“I’ll turn here, right?” Addie asked, hesitating as she looked at me. I gave her a nod.
The fading, familiar street signs had always been home, comfort and love. I waited for that old, electric zing of anticipation, that hot burst of energy, to pull me since home was so close, very close and soon it would be all about that, comfort and love, Nina opening her arms, me pressing a tired kiss to her lips and the slow shuffle of our feet towards the door, hips bumping because we had all the time in the world.
But none of that, none of that thrill. None of that even as Addie pulled over in front of the apartment. I blinked at the sight of the building. Nina and I lived in the first, facing the street. I heard the sounds of breakfast, the swoosh of water, the soft thump of china laid on the table and silver rubbing against the other as Nina set the table. I knew I would see her darting back and forth through the window but I kept my eyes on the road before me.
“Here we are,” Addie’s voice broke out.
I turned and there she was, looking at me, her eyes no longer lined with red but black mirrors that shone with a watery sheen. They locked on me, and the truth hit me hard: I couldn’t go. I couldn’t imagine turning away and leaving her, not when there was no thrill that pulled me, only a memory of faint laughter from a long time ago, in a darkness that obscured everything else. That’s what I had all those years, the memory of good times and they were no longer enough. No more.
The sun was gold on Addie’s cheek, made the rainbows of her hair molten, softer. The fragrance of morning, sun and dew-tipped leaves and flowers, that perfume: shampoo, the fading sweetness of generic soap mixed with her. From the stereo, volume still low, Gordon Gano demanded again and again why he couldn’t get just one kiss, just one kiss?
Addie took a final drag before flicking the butt to the street, no longer facing me. And if I didn’t do anything, it was a sight I’d have to get used to: her back, Addie away from me. No.
The cigarette fell from my hand, spilling gray ash on the ground. I had to see if she would, I thought, and that was all, I had to see if she would, and so my hand rose to the rumpled rainbow of her hair. She turned to me with her black mirror eyes, a tremor in her red lips.
When she held my hand to her cheek, I knew her silken touch at last. She whispered my name, one incantation that banished all else that I knew, everything suddenly rendered unfamiliar: the new ringing of the cellphone, the sudden quiet falling from the house and the doorknob clicked to unlock followed by the long, slow wail of a door opening. I knew only of this moment with my hand on her cheek and the faint stirring of a familiar warmth.
LOUELLA E. FORTEZ’s fiction has appeared in Philippine Graphic and in Sawi: Funny Essays, Stories and Poems on All Kinds of Heartbreak while her essays and other non-fiction pieces have been published in national newspapers, magazines and in the anthology In Their Own Voice: The Art of Being and Becoming. She writes about her love for food and travel in www.louellafromanila.worpdress.com. She teaches at the Language Learning Center of Miriam College.
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From behind the cluster of us three guys, a soft thump of heels walked around us. The sudden grunt of the air conditioner on the end blasted a gust of her scent to us: faded shampoo, generic soap, and the rare combination of oil and sweat that combined into a fragrance, a perfume. There was the dark tinge of cigarettes, the beer that had been sprayed on her dress, now a dry smell but still with a cloying hint of moist sweetness. She wasn’t the leader of us, no, but she was a girl, and wore the shy version of a smile: lips together, dimple deepening, cheeks lifting and warmth leaping to her black onyx eyes, cast down then the fluttering up alternately. Her hair was a tumble of brown splashed with rainbows, all colors of the rainbows, and the lateness of the hour, plus the sweat she’d shed from the performance had smudged her eyeliner but it was still on her eyes, hazy black lines. But her lipstick remained a clear stamp of red, matched to her dress, a short bit of fabric with a skirt that swung around her thighs.
“Hello,” she said to Counter Girl,” do you have breakfast?” The screen behind her showed only the regular items, tight shots for the mouth to water at the anticipated crispness of chicken at first bite, the sprinkle of cheese of the glistening red sauce piled on the spaghetti, the sweet juice squeezed out of the hamburger when bitten.
Counter Girl’s smile jumped to two hundred megawatts, and she said yes, they were available but depending on the order, would take between five to seven minutes to prepare. No problem, and we all fished for our wallets. The lone girl in our group, she took all our money, fanning the bills in her hands, fingernails tipped red as her dress. She urged us to sit, go, anywhere, she could handle the order and the wasted among us breathed relief at that. I stayed by her side. I wasn’t that wasted but there was already the looming evil throb of a headache at its early stages.
“I’m starving,” she said, leaning over the gleaming silver counter while our orders were prepared.
“You didn’t have anything,” she had been too tensed to wolf down any of the sandwiches Nina had prepared, wrapped in silver foil and packed in a Tupperware that came with a handle, like a bag. Nina, despite the contract’s decree about providing us food, always made me bring sandwiches along, or maybe pastries. Nothing was good enough when she wasn’t around, and told me she slept better knowing that I had food from the house, made by her own hands. That and because she wanted me to never forget.
We settled into a comfortable silence after that. There was no need to fill the air with words, no need to listen to her voice replying, asking. It was the kind of quiet felt between good friends, or long-time lovers. Gone was this need to express, to assert, to check. You just knew that person was around, at your side, the warmth radiating from her dashed with that nice, clean scent. It was a respite from the floral spice that clouded my apartment: the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen, and sometimes, even the car. It made Nina smell like fifty, told her so and she said colognes, eau de toilette, lips curling in a sneer, weren’t right for her age anymore. She was twenty-eight.
“I’m changing my order from juice to coffee. You?” I turned to look at her as she asked the question.
“I need the sugar, but go ahead,” and so she called for Counter Girl, changing her order. Counter Girl nodded with that bright smile, as if it was the best thing she’d ever heard.
I wasn’t that too crazy about her at first, thinking that her colorful hair resembled a parrot’s, and the eye make-up and lipstick were a little extreme at eleven a.m., the hour she had walked into our studio the first time, the heels of her little boots click-clacking across the floor. She was a friend of a friend of Rod’s, who did guitar and backing vocals. A smiled crossed her face as Rod introduced her around before he pulled her aside.
We’ve been in the music scene for a while. Sonny, lead vocalist and guitar, had been a neighbor since ten, and every afternoon after school, we trailed to our respective houses and wore out the turntable with Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, to mention a few. Then it became cassettes, the brown tape ending up in snarls from too much play on our car radios, the volume turned up, way up and the windows rolled down. From listening and memorizing lyrics, we navigated to playing the instruments: guitar, bass and drums. I liked the long elegance of the bass, and how it was such an underrated instrument unless played by the right hands. You had to know the instrument, love the slender line of the fingerboard, carved like an elegant neck, the sudden, upturned flare of the strap button, which reminded me of a woman’s hip cocked teasingly. Worship the bass, and it only played the notes, dark, deep with the tinge of smoky sexuality.
We didn’t want to be a duo, so in college, we recruited Rod, who had lightning fingers. That was lucky. With the drummer, we weren’t. Our line-up changed so often that we’ve decided against putting our faces on posters, just the flared rays of the north star penned in black on an expanse of glossy white paper, the symbol of our name.
Over the years, we saw countless drummers, all leaving for reasons that included creative differences to something as ridiculous as being worn out from all the playing. That was what our last drummer explained, and it was fortunate we didn’t lose gigs because I knew how to play the drums too. But John Bonham I wasn’t; my hands belonged to the bass.
Then Rod, through a friend of a friend, mentioned this person, Addie, that was her name. She was “good, real good, you gotta sit down when she starts bangin’ those drums, she knocks you off your feet,” according to him and I longed to return to the bass. “Get anyone, I don’t care,” I said, and so Addie came: rainbows in her hair, red on the lush pout of lips stolen from Liv Tyler, wearing something lacy over a shirt, shorts and boots. Hers were the longest stretch of legs I’ve ever seen. She was long everywhere else: hair, neck, arms, torso. She couldn’t be a drummer, she was nothing else but Rod’s hard-on and Jesus, we’d be losing time practicing just so we could help him stroke it, I hissed to Sonny as we stood on the other end of the studio while Rod and Addie talked, he was giving her instructions. She stood with her hand in her pocket, hip cocked to the side. “Who wears that much make-up at eleven fuckin’ a.m.?” I demanded to Sonny and he just shook his head, listen, let’s see, that’s all. It isn’t like final or anything. And so we helped Addie carry the drums, gleaming red, which was her favorite color, she thought to mention, to me of all the other guys and what was I supposed to say? It was the summer, the sun was on the ground, and we were carrying drums in a studio that only had two fans for air. All this effort for some wannabe rocker-drummer, but we settled into the couch, salvaged battered from a garage sale, and watched. Listened.
We watched the swoop of her arms, drumsticks in hand, movement that echoed a conquering hawk’s flight towards a prey.
We listened to her beat the drums with a force wrenched from the dark pit of her soul, repeated bombardment that I swore dented, even cracked the drums. White spark played in her eyes.
We had a new drummer.
The rapping of her fingers summoned me back to restaurant, where we stood by the silver counter she was now drumming on. On her face was that familiar spark, the quirk of that smile, the flash of her dimple. Counter Girl laid our food on the tray. “I’ll just get your drinks,” she said.
“You don’t stop playing,” I gestured at the counter.
“Why stop when it’s so good?”
Addie unwrapped the small carton of the peach mango pie and nibbled. I watched her, watch pink bloom on her cheeks as she wiped the flakes of her lips with her fingertips. “What?” but there remained the spark, the smile. I shook my head, “Nothing,” and she offered me a bite. “No. Go ahead,” I told her just as Counter Girl started laying the drinks on another tray.
It was a little heavier, the tray piled with local breakfast fare of longganisa with garlic rice, egg topped by dry yellow yolk on the side. But she’d have no trouble making her way to the table, while the tray with the drinks required some balancing act. Rod had ordered both coffee and upsized pineapple juice, Sonny two large Cokes. Addie’s coffee and my juice. The drinks were wobbling pools of brown and yellow, sloshing to the side despite my careful steps forward.
Addie distributed their orders, getting sleepy thanks for the bother before she slid on the bench beside Rod. Rod nearly swam in the pineapple juice, his head pitching forward, fast, before he caught himself, rubbed his eyes. It was three-fifteen, the sun wouldn’t be up for another couple of hours. I sat, folding my legs, bumping Addie’s knees. “It sucks to be tall,” I muttered, getting a packet of sugar, shaking it before pouring the white crystals to the juice. “Sorry.”
Another round of quiet, broken only by more packets ripped open, the whispered rush of sugar, more sugar down our drinks, the plop of cream in the others’ coffee. Addie, who’d subsisted on coffee and cigarettes since the previous afternoon, winced at the bitterness that flooded her mouth at the first sip of her fresh cup. “Jos, may I?” and so I offered her my pineapple juice, which she glugged until it was halfway down the cup. I looked at the red crescent of her lipstick on the cup, and she apologized, quickly rubbing it with a tissue. “We wouldn’t want Nina to think you’re stealing her lipstick,” she said, laughing. It was a silver tingle to the ear.
The heavy throb in my head had finally receded into a dull but manageable beating and so I continued eating, listening the quiet around us. We all had the same order, two pieces of sausage with a cup of garlic rice. Addie forked the meat, then guided it to her mouth for a small bite. She still took sips from my juice, sorry about that, she went, but I let her. Wasn’t into juice too much, had only wanted it for the sugar kick on a system winding down from a hard night of cigarettes, music, sweat and crowds.
Silencing the growl in our stomachs at last, the topic of tomorrow night’s — now tonight’s — gig came up. A concert with other bands. Our call time was four but the show wouldn’t start until seven. “There’s no way we’d be awake earlier than three,” Rod sighed. Ours had been a long week of shows, guest appearances and we’ve yet to be signed by a major label. But the underground buzz, as much as we’ve begun to hate the long drives to out-of-town shows and the early, way early call times, was more than good. Something was being done right, I thought, glancing at Addie, seeing the white light from the fluorescent fall on her rainbow hair. Her black gaze met mine and she let me hold it for a few seconds before she looked away, then a quick flutter of her lashes back at me before directing her attention somewhere else.
Sonny was complaining about the drive back, he wanted to stay a while, catch a few z’s.
“I can drive,” Addie said, adding she’d driven to Baguio and back before in one day, when the sky was a showcase of pink and orange shafts as it flared a final protest before enshrouded by night, and then back, the sky still awashed with stars, and they were her only light aside from the twin beams from the headlights. And we were only less than six hours outside of the Manila, Baguio was farther. Yeah, she could do it, she nodded, as if to confirm with herself. Sonny agreed, yeah, thanks for the offer.
Then her eyes slammed into mine again. But Sonny continued to ramble, “I owe you, thanks so much,” and she had to turn away from me to look at him, “It’s no big deal.”
So we’re back in the van, Addie cupped in the driver’s seat while Rod and Sonny crashed at the back, crammed in the tight gaps between the equipment so I had to go in front with her. Nothing new with her being in the driver’s seat and me as a passenger. It was our habit to drive early into the studio and meet there, the sun a faint disc in the pale horizon of a fresh morning. She had a nicer car, shiny and faster, so that’s what we used when hitting the nearby fast-food joints, with the windows rolled down, music shattering the tranquil morning in the smog-choked city. We sang our own concerts, but I let her sing alone, where she deepened her voice in a somber growl like Kurt Cobain’s, singing “Come As You Are,’ her favorite. Her dark, smoky voice spun a spell that made me forget everything, well almost everything, except the rainbow-haired girl in the wind-whipped t-shirt, singing her lungs out. It wasn’t complete without our cigarettes, and I would hold two sticks in my lips, feeding them with the blue-tinged flame from the lighter before handing one to her. She puffed, releasing a steady stream of smoke, enjoying the cigarette to the last beat of the song before it was time for another one.
I got ready with our cigarettes, reaching into the pocket of my shirt for the crushed pack that held only two sticks. “We’d better save them,” and she agreed, we’ll smoke later then.
She’d just burned another CD, all her favorites, she said, and was now rummaging in the front for her bag but I remembered her tossing it to the back before we left earlier to eat. She sighed loudly, started the engine instead. “It’s here,” I grunted, straining my arm to reach deep and low for the small thing nestled next to Rod’s foot.
“They’re really out, aren’t they?” Addie flicked the light on, eyes on the rearview mirror. As if in reply, Rod and Sonny began a snore duet. We looked at each other and laughed. She took the bag from me, rifled through it and retrieved the flat square case of the CD. “I’m bad, being they’re asleep and all, but I can’t drive without music,” she said, putting the disc on the slot then pushing a button. Then the van urged forward, slowly, gradually picking up speed. Addie thought we should roll the windows down.
“You’ll get cold,” I asked, for sitting down had shifted her dress higher up her thighs.
“Singing will keep us warm. Jos, it’s Siberia in here, come on, roll them down,” she said.
“But your hair. Girls are always fussing with their hair.”
“I don’t care,” Addie shrugged, “Besides I like Broom Hilda.”
Suddenly, a long, familiar drawn-out wail came on. Gordon Gano. Addie’s finger jammed on a button, turning it up. I swore I felt an electric thrill rush through her body, and she seemed to glow a pale amber, the light tracing the line of her. A sudden, golden warmth went through me, sharp and precise, flattening me to the seat with its force and Addie, seeing the song take over me, laughed.
“On count of three,” she said, “one, two, three…”
We shouted about why we couldn’t get just one kiss, that it’s one of the things we wouldn’t miss. Or one screw? Why couldn’t we get just one screw? We knew what to do, but something was stopping us from making love. Addie bobbed her head hard, her lips curled in the rock-star snarl while I air-guitared.
Someone from the back, Rod or Sonny, groaned, “Shut up.”
We answered with hooting laughter, laughter that echoed into the night, the rumble in my chest tinged with her silver tingle. I let the pleasure of the laugh spread in me, spreading in the pathways of my body before converging at the center of my chest. It had been a long time, years, since laughter had seized me like this. And maybe because it was such a long time ago, I never forgot that last time.
It had been in the dark, the faint moonlight hanging out the window, with a woman too. A bedside lamp switched on, illuminating Nina, the tousled tresses of her dark hair framing the small oval of her face, her eyes glittering with play and love, back then I was so sure it was there for us. Away from the somber confines of a gray suit matched with a blouse the shade of jaundiced yellow as decreed by the bank, she was free and young, no worries etched on face.
We laughed the loudest in bed, the mattress dipping from our combined weight and springs squeaking as our bodies rippled. Sheets tangled around our legs and our legs around each other’s, we talked about the ridiculous and the inane, each sending us into hyena howls that we quickly smothered because the walls were thin and next door was a Bible-clutching, Jesus-obsessed woman with a spatter of gray on her helmet bob, always ready with her cataract-flecked glare whenever we walked past each other in the complex because of the sin we lived in, and worse, reveled in. And that just made Nina and I cling to each other with the desperation of lovers whose nightmare was to part.
A game we liked to play was Starfuck, celebrities we could fuck, according to Nina. We had to cite several celebrities we want to sleep with, and the partner got to choose for you.
So given the choice among Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Ethan Hawke, Robert Pattinson and Zac Efron, who will I let her sleep with?
“That’s not the question,” I said, “why the hell’s Zac Efron on the list? I can understand the vampire dude, though too pretty for my taste. Ethan Hawke’s a little weird too.”
“Come on,” she mock-punched me on the chest, “who can I sleep with?”
I’ve always thought she was most beautiful with her dark hair tangled in the snarls after sex or sleep, the remnants of a dream still resting on her eyes, giving me a hooded gaze. She was up with her cheek pillowed by her palm.
“You mean, just sex?”
“Well yeah, but hopefully dirtier,” she deadpanned,” “Like rock-star sex. Loud, you know, screaming, maybe even a bitch-slap..” A far-off, dreamy quality laced her voice towards the end before laughter overwhelmed her, her shoulders shaking, her face red. I enjoyed watching her like this, loved it, but she was insistent, kept on prodding, “Come on. Who’ll you let me sleep with?” I pushed her hair away from her cheek, tucking it behind her ear.
“You’re weird,” and to that, she said, “You love it,” then, “So who? Tell me who I can fuck with a clear conscience.”
“Ethan Hawke,” and when she made a sound of protest, I added, “Reality Bites, baby, the movie that embodied the angst and uncertainty of Generation X. And he was in Dead Poets Society, which is about the only guy drama flick I can stand. Doesn’t he have a book?”
“Books,” she corrected, “ Okay, Ethan Hawke it is. And you?”
“Sure, I’d sleep with him. He’s too cute to pass up. If he was good enough for Uma then he’s good enough for me.”
“Not you, you moron. Who’s the celebrity you’d like to bang?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, hit me with it,” She sat up, drawing the sheets and tucking them under her arms. I hated to disappoint her but, “I have no idea.”
“Really? In a world, heck, in the century you live in, the name Angelina Jolie has never crossed your mind? Lara Croft?”
I shrugged. Nina looked as if the world had just been yanked from under her, “Really?”
“Pick someone for me, then.”
“First chick you thought of losing it to,” she was quick to recover from the shock, “First celebrity chick you thought of losing it to. Go.”
The name of my first love fell: “Liv Tyler.”
“Liv Tyler,” Nina tasted the name, enjoying the slow roll of the l’s, the soft purr of the r. She licked her lips, a slight crease between her eyes a signal that she was thinking it, seriously considering it. “Yeah..yeah. Just think what those legs can do twice. And those lips. That mouth,” Nina said, lifting her lips as if for a kiss only to retract from their pursed rosebud shape. “I’d do her. Like I see her in the street, I’d do it in the street with her,” she thumped me on the shoulder because she liked that, doing guy things like punching me on the shoulder because she knew it made me laugh, knew that I thought she was the cutest, simply great, amazing and all those good things that came when you’re floating with that person in the cloud nine of love. She went, “Yeah, good choice,” punching me on the shoulder again before lunging at me, the springs shrieking in protest at the sudden force of our combined weight and so we laughed again, laughter that rose over the strained shouts about hell and damnation from next door.
There wasn’t much laughter after that, but she still stood by me with some of the choices I made, though she wasn’t really approving. She sang the chorus of go, go ahead, make your music, let others know about it, but with our sporadic gigs leading to bills always paid late, Nina began playing a different beat. That was the first shake-up in the relationship.
And then our name started buzzing in people’s lips, a few press releases came out and the crowd, they were wowed, roared in approval at our renditions of their favorites, all angst and rock and the squeal of guitars, the mad pounding of drums but once we played the first note of one of our originals, there was a clamor for the front of the stage, hands intent on grabbing a piece of us, shirt, guitar pick, whatever. Whatever we threw was grabbed, fought over as if it was the last food around and there wasn’t enough, and the audience functioned on the basest instincts, animal. We got more shows, a lot of them out-of-town, and Nina, her face pulled into a pout thrown with the crease of annoyance veeing her eyebrows, she sat at the foot of the bed, watching me throw things into a duffel bag. She complained about those out-of-town shows, she couldn’t come with me, there was the bank the next day and the bank paid the bills so could I at least keep in mind to book gigs in the city? At least she could drop off after work, never mind the frantic run to the bathroom and jamming a toothbrush in her mouth the next day because the sun was up, way up and the bank was a forty-five minute drive without traffic. She couldn’t see us, see me when performing out-of-town. And those shows, they were often on Saturdays and she whined like a child denied of a candy, a doll, all that lacked was the stomp of her foot on the floor, she whined that it was the weekend, we’re supposed to be together, doing it at every corner in the apartment, being a couple and loving being that. But no, it was the band this, the band that. Come on, Jos.
That was the second.
The third one, Nina thought that since I was always out late with the band this and the band that, then hell, she’d be like that too. Drown herself with work or head off to the bar with her co-workers, she still had a life after all, it wasn’t all about me, it wasn’t all about us. I’ve always wanted a band, music, well, she’d always wanted what it’s like to get drunk in the middle of a work week, to practically crawl home on all fours, in her gray and sickly yellow suit, because the drive had drained the use of her legs, she could only crawl out and Jos, since you’re hardly around now, the least you could do is toss coffee down your throat, three cups of black, so black they must be battery acid, keep yourself awake so there’s someone to wake me up when vomit sputters out, there’s someone to clean the sour puddle of food bits and stinking unmistakably of alcohol, Red Horse beer, to be specific, on the floor. Nina thought my being with the band was revenge, about what she never said and I knew it wasn’t anything close to that, it was just all about music, making it and spreading it. But if she’d done those things to keep me chained to her side, then chained to her side I was, but it wasn’t enough, oh no. She wanted a text every hour on the hour about my whereabouts and when I was home at last, she grilled me about the female attendance in the shows. Did anyone flash you? Did she have nice tits? Did you like it? Why do you go so far away when I do it plenty of times, no song and dance required. How nice to have all those nubile women laid out before you, hoping to God for at least an eye-fuck, you bastard. Who are they? Who is she?
It didn’t stop there.
I longed for quiet, away from Nina’s resentment, her shrillness. So I started going to the studio early, and that was when Addie came, walking with an easy, cocky stride on the floor in her little boots, a smile on her red Liv Tyler lips. I didn’t think much of her the first time I saw her, but I did notice those lips: red, full, probably marshmallow-soft when kissed. And I did think about those lips in a kiss with me. But there was Nina, and despite having become a stranger, there was still that old pull of the heart, a heart that bore the years and good moments, but now so rare.
There was the scent of the new morning, a crisp but gentle chill flavored with dew-tipped leaves and flowers, the warmth of the sun hinted with summer. Gordon Cano’s voice had long faded, the music from the CD softened to a whisper, and the Gin Blossoms were vowing not take advice from fools, that everything was cool `til they hear it from you. Our throats were raw and scratchy from all that shout-singing and there was no place to pull over for a drink, but there were the cigarettes I’d saved. Two in my lips, then the lighter, as usual, routine making movements precise and efficient, quick. We’re on a bumpy country road, paved on some areas, earth and rocks on most so Addie couldn’t take her hands off the wheel. “Go ahead,” she told me, turning her head slightly, and so I guided the lit cigarette to her, felt the warmth of her lips on my fingers as they closed to hold on to the tip, puckered as if for a kiss. With the wheel in her hands, she thrust us deeper into a nowhere but only just for a little while, a short while before we burst onto the highway, meeting the first rays of the new day stretching across the horizon.
A heavy weight rested on the lids of my eyes but I kept watch on Addie, who was blinking repeatedly, the red cracks in her eyes clearer but she refused my offers to take over the wheel. “I’ll be fine, I just need coffee, that’s all,” she said in between puffs, smoke trailing after every word, “but we’re so close, I don’t want to stop,” she looked at me, “do you want to stop?”
I watched the sun falling on her hair, the long line of her nape revealed as her hair blew with the wind, it would be all tangled and soft and she didn’t care. Only music, only the drums, playing and never stopping because doing it was good. “No. I don’t want to stop.”
She kept her eyes on the road as she nodded, “Me too,” and as if to make sure I heard, understood, she glanced at me, pulled the cigarette out and said, “Me too, I don’t want to stop,” her voice barely above a whisper, her voice a velvet stroke to the ear.
“Addie,” came from the back, it was Sonny, yawning, “Addie, I’ll owe you big, but would you mind dropping me off at my house? I hate to ask, but I don’t trust myself behind the wheel at the moment.”
“Sure thing,” Addie answered, “So I’m taking the van back to the studio?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll crash at your place, that okay?” Rod was asking Sonny. Sonny must’ve nodded because Rod murmured, “Okay, cool. Thanks.”
Addie took a deep drag of and asked me, “Do you want to go to the studio?”
The high-pitched beep from my cellphone answered for me. Pulling it out of my pocket confirmed it. Nina was making breakfast, banana pancakes, she said, my favorite. She hoped I’d get home soon. Traffic wouldn’t be so bad now, but it was just a few minutes past five. Maybe a flat tire. Something. Anything. But Addie just nodded, staring straight ahead when I cleared my throat and told her, “Nina’s waiting.”
That was all I could say, and there was nothing else left to do but torch my lungs even more. Nina didn’t forbid smoking but she didn’t appreciate its smell in the house. I took deeper drags.
The shortest drive in the world followed. Addie took a left, turning towards the city. The rest of the images were a blur: buildings racing for the sky, cars and buses rolling to and fro, street vendors unpacking their wares, blatantly ignoring the MMDA van parked just a few feet away, where the traffic enforcers were chatting, rubbing their eyes. I rolled up my window when hit with the stink of soured garbage scattered on the street, gas and sweat from pedestrians with skins bearing the darkness of the sun walked by. Nina took another turn, another one, and more, and soon she was guiding the van to Sonny’s street. She couldn’t remember which house so I had her drive to the end, pointed and she pulled over there, woke up Sonny and Rod.
“Is Liz going to yell at me?” Rod asked Sonny.
“Liz is not Nina,” Sonny turned red, “Sorry, Jos, it just slipped out.”
“Just go,” I flushed because what was said hadn’t been too far from the truth, “See you later.”
They trudged out, shuffling to the gate where Sonny rang the bell. Addie waved goodbye and then steered the van out of the street, turned another, then more until we were on the highway leading to my place. Another beep from my cellphone. Nina was getting hungry, she’d be done in a bit. I slipped the phone back in my pocket.
No traffic again. It was all smooth-flowing and easy, just when you least wanted it. Sighing, and because there was nothing I could do, I leaned forward and pressed the button of the CD player, selecting a random track. Gordon Gano’s wail came on.
“I’ll turn here, right?” Addie asked, hesitating as she looked at me. I gave her a nod.
The fading, familiar street signs had always been home, comfort and love. I waited for that old, electric zing of anticipation, that hot burst of energy, to pull me since home was so close, very close and soon it would be all about that, comfort and love, Nina opening her arms, me pressing a tired kiss to her lips and the slow shuffle of our feet towards the door, hips bumping because we had all the time in the world.
But none of that, none of that thrill. None of that even as Addie pulled over in front of the apartment. I blinked at the sight of the building. Nina and I lived in the first, facing the street. I heard the sounds of breakfast, the swoosh of water, the soft thump of china laid on the table and silver rubbing against the other as Nina set the table. I knew I would see her darting back and forth through the window but I kept my eyes on the road before me.
“Here we are,” Addie’s voice broke out.
I turned and there she was, looking at me, her eyes no longer lined with red but black mirrors that shone with a watery sheen. They locked on me, and the truth hit me hard: I couldn’t go. I couldn’t imagine turning away and leaving her, not when there was no thrill that pulled me, only a memory of faint laughter from a long time ago, in a darkness that obscured everything else. That’s what I had all those years, the memory of good times and they were no longer enough. No more.
The sun was gold on Addie’s cheek, made the rainbows of her hair molten, softer. The fragrance of morning, sun and dew-tipped leaves and flowers, that perfume: shampoo, the fading sweetness of generic soap mixed with her. From the stereo, volume still low, Gordon Gano demanded again and again why he couldn’t get just one kiss, just one kiss?
Addie took a final drag before flicking the butt to the street, no longer facing me. And if I didn’t do anything, it was a sight I’d have to get used to: her back, Addie away from me. No.
The cigarette fell from my hand, spilling gray ash on the ground. I had to see if she would, I thought, and that was all, I had to see if she would, and so my hand rose to the rumpled rainbow of her hair. She turned to me with her black mirror eyes, a tremor in her red lips.
When she held my hand to her cheek, I knew her silken touch at last. She whispered my name, one incantation that banished all else that I knew, everything suddenly rendered unfamiliar: the new ringing of the cellphone, the sudden quiet falling from the house and the doorknob clicked to unlock followed by the long, slow wail of a door opening. I knew only of this moment with my hand on her cheek and the faint stirring of a familiar warmth.
LOUELLA E. FORTEZ’s fiction has appeared in Philippine Graphic and in Sawi: Funny Essays, Stories and Poems on All Kinds of Heartbreak while her essays and other non-fiction pieces have been published in national newspapers, magazines and in the anthology In Their Own Voice: The Art of Being and Becoming. She writes about her love for food and travel in www.louellafromanila.worpdress.com. She teaches at the Language Learning Center of Miriam College.
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