The Lost Ribbon

 

I’m an old woman now.  I’ve been living in this government-run hostel for single women, near Khalsa College on Grand Trunk Road, for over forty years.  Most of the girls living in the hostel are students at the college.  They are all so beautiful, these girls.  Their faces are clear, bright with plans for the future; I can hear them giggling as they tease each other about the boys in their classes or swoon over the newest film hero.  They’ll be gone in a year or two, married off to pleasant boys, and they will take up a job, have children, they will settle into the many small and sweet intricacies of family life, and I will still be here.  Sometimes, in the mess hall, I sit in the same far corner I have sat in for many, many years and stare at their resplendent faces.  What am I looking for?  Something like morning light, I tell myself.  The lantern glow of untouched skin.  My lost girlhood, perhaps.  But it is all untrue, Noora:  I am looking for you.

Some time ago, the girl in the room next to my own took a liking to me.  Her name was Leela.  She knocked on my door one late evening a few months ago, well after most of the hostel had gone to sleep.  The knock startled me; no one had knocked on my door for months and I wondered whether someone had unintentionally banged against the door as they passed.  But then I heard the knock again, this time more insistent.

I rose slowly.  I was not yet asleep. In fact,I was quite busy.  I’d gotten into the habit – every night, even now, even if the electricity has gone out and I have to do it by candlelight – of counting lentils.  I keep them in a plastic tin, these lentils.  Most of them are either yellow toor dal lentils or dark brown channa lentils, but my favorites are the rare pink and orange masoor dal lentils.  So smooth and delicate, almost wisps – nothing like the fat and coarse channa – and their color, Noora!  Like a sunrise.  Like the hidden, singing insides of seashells.  Like your fingertips.

Most nights I count them and put them back in the tin.  On other nights, when I’m not feeling well, I place them in little piles, separated by color, and watch as each of these piles grows and grows.  It’s mysterious to me, and awfully troubling, when the number changes from one night to the next.  I think, someone is stealing them!  Even if there are more lentils than in my last count I feel strangely betrayed.  As if they are conniving to split apart, to haunt me, to be unruly, like children.  No, there must be exactly 986.  Four hundred and eleven toor. Three hundred and seventy eight channa. And one hundred and ninety seven of my beloved masoor.

I was almost done counting the masoor – at 154 – when I heard the second knock.  I opened the door and made out Leela’s face in the dark hallway, wrapped in a woolen shawl.  We’d passed many times in the mess hall but had rarely spoken.  She was smiling.

“What is it, beti?  Can’t you sleep?”

“No, it’s not that, Auntie,” she said, her voice bright against the shadowed hallway, “I was making tea on my hotplate but I’ve run out of sugar.”  She stepped inside my room with a bold stride.  It was then that it struck me:  the boldness of these girls.  They were all – each one – just like the girl who’d stolen my ribbon.  Weaving through the streets, laughing, the ribbon fluttering like a sail behind them.  Unafraid of the seas into which they sailed.  Leela eyed the room.  Her gaze passed over my hemp rope bed, my tiny suitcase provided by the Indian government, and the pile of lentils on the floor.  “Why, Auntie,” she laughed, “What a strange time to make dal.”

I only smiled.  She left with the sugar and came back a few minutes later with two mugs of tea.  Then she sat cross-legged on my bed, as if we’d known each other for years, and said, “So tell me, Auntie, how did you come to be here.”

I smiled again.