The Lost Ribbon

 

They left, telling me they’d be back in two days.  I couldn’t decide what to do.  I thought of running away with you when they came for me and knocked down the door, but what then?  I hardly even knew where I was.  How could I make a living for us?  Besides, what if he found us?  Then I considered staying.  I remembered that feeling of sudden rain; maybe I could remain in the hut and continue on as I had for the past two years.  I thought about the days since I’d arrived there, and the long hours of watching thin columns of sunlight stride across the room like armies, and the lonely nights of waiting for him to be done, to sleep, so I could lie awake, listening to his snoring, and think of your grandmother’s paneer, to be like that pebble skipping across time.  But then you came, and everything took on a brilliance, a meaning, so that even when he smothered me, tugged at my hair in his throes, slammed his body against mine, I listened.  I listened for you.  I listened for your breathing.  For you were alive, you see. And I, Noora, after that first time, was dead.

I had to keep you; I decided we would stay.

But remember what I told you:  suffering is strange.  That very night he came home and threw the four roti on the ground.  “Did anybody come here,” he growled, “Tell me.  Tell me the truth.”

I held my hand steady as I reached for the roti.  “No, no one.”

He eyed me; his gaze followed me around the room.  He lit a cigarette.  “There’s talk that Indian soldiers have been snooping around here.  Knocking on doors.”  He reached over and grabbed my arm.  “You remember what to do if they come around, don’t you?”

“I remember.”

“What?”

“Tell them you’re my brother.  And that our parents died in the riots.”

“Good girl,” he squeezed my arm tighter, “And make sure they don’t see her.”  He blew out a band of smoke, his yellowed eyes burrowing into my own, and then he took the cigarette from his mouth and pushed the lit end into my arm.  The sizzle reached me before the pain.  He smiled.  “Just so you don’t forget,” he said.

 

The next morning I woke on the edge of a peculiar dream.  I was at a river crossing.  I could see clear to the other side.  There was even a boat, as if that would make things easier.  Oars, too.  But something kept insisting, insisting, and the throb of insistence was like the river.  I woke up and looked down at my arm.  Such a tiny crater.  Perfect and round and raw where he’d put out his cigarette.  Raw in the way that cinnamon is raw.  The sizzle when the tip of his cigarette had touched my skin was simply papad in hot oil, just like that:  common and unconfusing.  Wound seemed too magnificent a word for it.

I looked at you, asleep in your makeshift cradle.

In the end it was the burn of the cigarette, really.  Even when I ignored it, went about the morning as if nothing had happened, it kept throbbing and throbbing until I peered down at it – as if it were a raucous child in the quiet of a twilit temple – and said, “Shh.”

But it wouldn’t hush.  Not for a minute.

Here’s what it told me:  that he would hurt you as he’d hurt me.  It is easier to look at death than at pain.  In one the grief lingers and then passes with time.  In the other, it is relentless.  It is unerring.  And it throbs – said the burn – like me.

Funny, isn’t it?

And so I looked at you and I looked at you and I held you and I held you and then I killed you.  I killed you.

 

Leela has been gone for sometime now.  Married and moved to Delhi.  I never told her any of this.  Why?  This is not a story for the young. But on one of our last nights sharing tea, a few days before she was to be married, she sat cross-legged on my bed, as she always did, and teased me about the piles of lentils.  “Come now, Auntie, you must tell me, why do you count those lentils, night after night?”

I thought at first that I would only smile, like I always did when she asked me that question.  But then I thought of that ribbon.  Lost so many years now.  I could still see it twirling in the wind.  What happened to that girl?  The one who stood in the silence of a summer afternoon and felt her heart beating.  Who decided it was the heart of a beautiful white bird, left with her for safekeeping.  Where is that girl?  That heart?

“They’re so tiny.  There must be thousands.  Look, even your hands are shaking.”  Leela took my wrists and turned them over.  And there was that cigarette burn, throbbing.  Throbbing. All through these years.

“You must tell me,” she persisted.

“Because,” I finally said, “It distracts me.”

“From what?” she said, “Besides, there’s television and shopping for that.  You could even buy a radio.”

“None of those are loud enough.”

“For what?” she laughed.

I looked at the piles of lentils.  It takes it me exactly thirty minutes to count out 986 lentils.  That is what I give myself every day:  thirty minutes.  “The sound,” I said, “of throbbing.”

 

It’s raining tonight.  The candle is burning out.  The piles are nearly complete but my eyes grow heavy.  I’m slower today, more tired.  But just as I’m nearly finished the candle goes out.  If only I could’ve had a few more moments of light.  There’s nothing to be done so I cover my creaking joints with the blanket and try to sleep, and I feel my eyes warm with tears and I think, as I listen to the rain beat down, that maybe this time the tears are not for you, Noora.  Maybe this time, just this once, they’re for me.

Shobha Rao is currently a student of fiction in the Master of Fine Arts program at San Francisco State University.  Her work has been published by Gorilla Press and in the anthology Building Bridges. In 2013, she was awarded the Gita Specker First Place Award for Best Dramatic Monologue by the San Francisco Browning Society.