The Lost Ribbon

By Shobha Rao

If I were to tell Leela what I’d done, I know what she’d say.  She’d say, “No mother would do that.  No mother could do that.”  But then I look down at my arm, at the scar left by the cigarette burn, and think, “What do you know?”  Because what I know, what I won’t tell her, but what I will tell you now, is that I was long dead before I ever killed you.

Yet it’s all true: I took you, your moist eyelashes wide with curiosity, the tiny yellow ribbon in your fine hair bowed and alert, watchful, as if it were standing guard, and I wrapped my hands around your neck.  You blinked.  Then you smiled your toothless smile.  It was a hot, bright morning in September.  The sun shoved through the cracks in the door, past the edges of the curtains.  Everyone said it was a long and strange summer.  The days too warm, the clouds too thin.  The monsoons were so late that year that well into September the entire Punjab and the Northwest Frontier broiled, simmered indecently, the dust a mad dervish, crawling into even your earlobes in the long breathless nights.

I’d bathed you that morning using more water than usual.  I sprinkled your tender skin with a thick coating of talcum powder to protect you from the heat.  I dressed you in a freshly laundered bright pink frock.  I’d spread it carefully under a thick bundle of clothes the night before to press it, to make sure the pleats were crisp.  I’d picked the yellow ribbon because it was the closest color to white.  But none of it mattered.  Thousands upon thousands were dying that summer.  Entire villages were being laid waste in the crossings between India and Pakistan.  What did it matter if the ribbon was yellow or white?I tightened my grip, I willed myself to close my eyes, to keep pressing.  I felt the gentle curve of your windpipe, your brave and rumpled pulse, and I told myself, if you don’t kill her, he will.

The only question I ask myself now, after all these years, is why I closed my eyes.  Why?  I missed the last tiny breaths of the only life I’ve ever loved.  There are so many answers, or maybe there are none.  But I was afraid; I was afraid you’d recognize the act.  Know what I was doing.  And in some small corner of your silvery, still-beating, six-month-old heart, you’d scoff at me.  You’d say, “What makes you think I couldn’t have withstood the world?”  And I would’ve laughed and said, “It’s not the world we have to withstand, my Noora, it is ourselves.”

But all of that is ridiculous, of course.  You hadn’t spoken a word.  How could you?  Only the tiny yellow ribbon seemed capable still of speech, still upright, oblivious, delighted by the fineness of your hair, by the life it would never lead.  Besides, I know what you would’ve said if you could’ve formed the words.  You would’ve said exactly the same thing he said the first time he raped me.  You would’ve said, “Open your eyes.”

 

It’s funny though, the things we suffer and the things we remember about that suffering.  It’s almost as though our thoughts were pebbles skipping across a pond.  Take, for instance, that first time.  I was fourteen.  Now, when I think of that night, think of him pushing up my langa, smothering my face with his free hand, stuffing his fingers into my mouth to muffle my screams, I think of your grandmother’s paneer.  It’s just a flash, really, but the softness of the cheese, the taste of the wood smoke and the twilight in which they were prepared, the thin gold filigree of the cube of paneer breaking like skin, they all rush through me in this moment as if I were that pebble, flying through the air.  Then I hit the water again, and something is pushing into me.  Thin and hard and knife-edged, it pushed, pushed, until I cried out.  Then I think of something else, something quite ordinary, like how cold my feet are in the winter.  Or maybe how I should bring in the clothesline; it looks like rain.  That’s how memory works, skips like a happy pebble, even if the memory is so very far from happy.

Imagine if we remembered things exactly as they happened.  If the pebble just glided along the surface, then we’d remember every detail.  One after another after another. So imagine: after that first time, a slight sucking sound and then he turned over and went to sleep.  I lay next to him, too afraid to move.  There was something warm trickling between my legs and when I reached down my hand came up bloody.  But what made me wince was the awful tenderness.  That whole part of my body, below my waist, seemed quite apart from me.  A scared and collapsed and quivering animal, curled into a ball, knowing only one thing:  that nothing remained.  Nothing.  Nothing would come after.  Nothing had come before.  He began to snore, lightly, and the room felt close and thick and seething; the smell of his pungent underclothes hung in the air.  I rose quietly, my legs nearly buckling under my new and awful weight.  The door was padlocked from the inside but the small window was thrown open.  That was when I saw the stars.

They were horrible: those stars.

I thought then of a ribbon I’d worn as a child.  It was white with a beautiful tendril of red and gold threaded along both edges.  I adored that ribbon.  It seemed to me the height of loveliness.  I wore it to school sparingly, only on Saturdays.  I washed and dried it myself, then ironed it delicately with a brass tumbler full of hot water.  Then I rolled it up neatly, with extraordinary care, and placed it under my pillow until the next Saturday.  And it was during one of those Saturdays, after our half-day of school, that a girl in my class – she was the prettiest of all of us -snapped up the ribbon when it’d untwined from my braid.  She waved it in front of me teasingly and laughed.  I tried to grab it but she ran off down the street.  I chased after her.  Already, tears stung my eyes so I could hardly see.  I saw only her blurred figure, weaving in and out of the narrow alleys.  Our town was not very big; its great moment had come when Pandit Nehru had traveled through on a Delhi-bound train.  My father had taken me to the station, raised me onto his shoulders, and as the train had sped past he’d pointed to one of the windows and in the midst of the roar of the gathered crowd he’d yelled, “See him?  There!  There!  He is our father.”  I wanted to say, “But I thought you were my father,” but even from above I saw his beaming face and decided against it.

Instead I watched the thin trail of smoke disappearing southward into deepest Punjab.  It looked like the ribbon I’d so recently lost.  I gave chase for over an hour.  She’d held it up the entire time, the white ribbon streaming and bobbing in the wind like a kite, like the long tail of a shining mystical bird.  I followed it until the girl disappeared into a small alleyway.  But when I turned into it she was gone.  She’d probably ducked into one of the homes, probably her own, and I was left standing, alone, lost. But before the fear overtook me – in the tiny moment before I began to cry – I had the strangest thought.  I looked around me at the narrow alley and the strange houses, asleep in the preternatural silence of the afternoon, and in that silence I heard my heart beating.  It was a quick and steady beating, a fluttering, and I thought, it’s the bird; it’s left me with its heart.  And though I’ve lost its tail I haven’t, I have not, lost its heart.

But on that night, at that window, looking at those horrible stars, I knew I’d lost both.

So you see?  It’s no good.  The pebble must skip.  Otherwise we’d die a thousand deaths before we got through a single day.

 

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.

 

I was with him- somewhere in Pakistan – for almost two years.  I sat in that darkened hut, watching the pattern of the sunlight as it slithered from one end of the room to the other, and waited.  In the beginning I was sure someone would come for me.  That they would find me locked up in that hut and take me away from him.  But no one came.  The days crept by:  he’d force himself on me every night, he’d sleep, I’d lie awake, he’d go away in the morning, I’d watch the light seep from the room, he’d return in the evening with four roti he’d bought for my dinner and my next day’s breakfast, and then he’d take me again.  My days were quiet.  I’d stopped crying after the first month or two.  The dark of the hut, the frail shafts of light, became more familiar to me than even my parent’s faces.How could it not: every night he killed them again.

He told me, when he first brought me here, that no one would ever come for me.  He’d say, with great confidence, “You’re probably assumed dead.  All the Hindu girls in your village are, you know.”Then he’d padlock the door, force himself on me, and say, “You’re lucky I found you.”  I don’t recall, for the first few months, having ever really looked at him. But then his pockmarked face began to slowly form itself in my mind; his breath on my neck was sometimes sweet and heavy with hashish, sometimes rancid with tobacco and rotten meat.His eyes were dark, with heavy eyelids and thick eyebrows, the whites of them clear in the mornings but smoky and yellowed in the evenings.  He had a thin, straggling beard – perhaps from his face being scarred – and once, when he came home, a bit of food was stuck in the hairs.  It startled me – in a way that nothing has startled me since – that I reached out and plucked it from his beard.  It seemed to startle him, too.  It’d been many months since he’d brought me to the hut and the tenderness of the act, the utter decency of it, was like a sudden spell of rain:  I no longer knew whether I belonged inside or outside that hut.

A month later I was pregnant.

On the night I went into labor the pain was so intense that I woke him in the middle of night and asked him calmly to get some help.  He looked at me suspiciously but then I must’ve paled because he returned a few minutes later with an old, wizened woman.  She was bent with age, and half blind because she kept screaming for light.  “How do you expect me to deliver this baby with this useless little wick?” she grumbled, pointing at the one candle he placed beside her.

“You couldn’t see if the sun dropped out of your wrinkled old choot,” he said.

She seemed not to hear him.  “Light, more light,” she shrieked again, “And more water.”

The pain continued until early morning.  I was delirious with it.  The pallet on which I lay was awash in blood.  And the old lady was foul-tempered.  She’d wipe down my brow and scuttle away to check the bleeding then emerge again to complain about being woken up in the middle of the night. “When I was young we didn’t wake the others just for this,” she’d hiss, her gnarled, leathery hands coming up like rain-drenched tree bark when she dipped them in the basin of water.When I whimpered with pain she peered into my face and laughed. “It’ll die, anyway,” she said, “I had thirteen myself.  Only three lived.  All that trouble for nothing.”Towards dawn there were a series of large contractions.  The old woman bent low and whispered again but the pain blurred her voice.  Only her breath reached me, moist and smelling of horse manure and wide, green meadows.  I nearly fainted from the pain when, from a great distance, I heard a tiny cry.  Yours.

The old woman wrapped you in a blanket and rested you on my chest.  “Your Noora is healthy.”

“Noora?” I asked.

“That’s her name.”

“Noora, Noora” I repeated.  I liked the sound, but I’d never heard that name before.  “What does it mean?” I asked her.

She smiled for the first time and it was then that I realized she only had two teeth in her mouth.  All that time with her – as she held my hand and bent over my face – and I’d just noticed.  “Noora,” she said, still smiling though the smile didn’t reach her eyes, “means light.”

She turned and opened the door and it was the first time, since I’d been in the hut, that it was unlocked.  She swung it wide and something like apology swept over her face.  “One of them only lived for a day.  A girl.”  She paused and I thought she might sigh but she didn’t; she wasn’t a woman who sighed.  “Smart, too,” she said, “She knew a day of this was more than enough.”

 

Though I ache to remember details about them now, I tried in those first few months after you were born not to think of your grandparents.  What was there to think about?  They burned like everything else.  He found me sitting on the stoop of our ruined house.  I don’t know what I must’ve looked like, but he said I was so covered in soot and ash that if I hadn’t blinked, he wouldn’t have known I was there.

And so that is how I think of you, Noora:  born in the blink of an eye.

He ignored you, mostly, in those first few months.  I was grateful for that.  The hut filled with the warm, fecund scent of old milk and damp wool and he hardly seemed to notice.  Only once, when I was feeding you, did he look over and say, “They’re mine, not hers.”

 

You were six months old when the soldier knocked on the door.  It was locked, of course.  I huddled with you in the corner, hardly breathing.  But then a youthful voice called out, “Hello, hello.  Anybody there?”  There was a pause, some shuffling.  I gripped my hand over your mouth to keep you from crying.  “No need to be afraid, madam,” the voice continued, growing firmer, more assured, “My name is Gopal Das.  I’m from the Indian Army.”  I eyed the window then the door.  What if he’d sent goondas just to beat me, or to take you?  I placed you in the cradle I’d fashioned out of old blankets and a bit of straw.  Then I rose and tiptoed quietly to the slit in the window.  He was very young, hardly older than me.  But he was wearing a military uniform with red badges across his chest.  “Open the door, madam,” he said. “You’re safe with me.”

I should’ve never opened that window because you see, Noora, he said I was safe.  He never said a thing about you.

I opened it and indicated we were inside; he was delighted to see me – as if I were his long lost sister – and he grew breathless as he told me to wait, to not make a noise, and that he’d be back with his senior officer in no time at all.  He practically skipped away from the hut, his baton raised, and returned an hour later with an officer with even more red badges on his uniform and a middle-aged woman in a white sari and glasses, with a large black mole on her chin as round as her face.  “Here she is,” the young soldier proclaimed, beaming like a child.

The middle-aged woman saw you in my arms and her expression soured.  She glanced at the senior officer.  He nodded.

“The father,” she began, pointing towards you, “Is he Muslim?”

I nodded.  I held you closer.  I wanted to tell them everything, all at once – how your grandfather had herded us into one of the bedrooms and locked the door.  How they’d torched the house, smoke and then flames seeping under the cracks and through the walls.  How I’d snaked out of the window, too small to fit your grandparents.  How your grandmother, just before my head disappeared through the window, had taken my face in her tear-streaked hands and said, “You are my heart.” How he’d straggled behind the other rioters because his kurta shirt had got caught in the gate that led from the house. How that’s how I’d come to be here, with you, because of something as simple and as heartbreaking as a piece of cloth caught on an iron gate – but the words wouldn’t come.

“The child,” the woman said, “She cannot come.”

“Where?”

“Back to India, of course.”  Her voice was slow and measured, and yet I struggled to understand.

“But why?  She’s my daughter.”

“But she’s a citizen of Pakistan.  She’s a Muslim.”

I glared at the two soldiers.  They were looking at the ground.  Then I looked at her.  How could she say such a thing?  A woman, and a Hindu?  Her mole grew blacker and I stared at it and stared at it and then I spit at it.  The woman jumped back.  “Then I won’t come,” I said.

There was a silence.  A crow flew overhead and I heard it’s cawing. The older soldier finally spoke.  He took a step towards me.  His voice was low and deep like the night sky.  “You must, beti.  Now that we have found you, you must return to India.”

“I won’t,” I said, “Not without my Noora.”  By then you’d begun to whimper, as if you knew what was to come.

The woman scowled.  She pushed up her glasses:  she cupped the edge of the right lens and lifted them gingerly off of the bridge of her nose then tucked them, with great care, higher on her face.  If you can hold those with such tenderness, I wanted to say, imagine how I hold my Noora.  “You have no choice,” she said, “There are governmental treaties we must follow.”

“What treaties?  What governments?”

“Between India and Pakistan.”

“But this is my child.”

“She’s a child of Pakistan,” the old soldier said solemnly, “And you, my dear, are not.”

 

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.