Bamboo

Pragya had lost the desire to speak after her incident in the forest. No one seemed to trust her words anyway. She could not will back her conversation or good humor. She would laugh politely if someone told a joke, or find a small voice to breathe “thank you”or “no.”But a spirit inside her had died.

She would listen idly in the paddy fields to the chirpy noise of her Aama and aunts gossip. She concentrated on her work. Only Buwa seemed to mind.

“Bhoot got your tongue,”Buwa would say laughing. His bamboo switch would lay claim to her arms, back, chest, stomach, thighs. Each time she looked at her painful crimson welts, Pragya could hear the hissing swoosh of the switch as it made its mid-air journey. She could hear the crack of the instrument against her papery skin, like a foot on dead leaves.

 

One day the women were discussing an old friend of Pragya’s, Sanjita, who’d been accepted to a prestigious college in Delhi.

“She was always such a smart girl,”said an aunt.

“And so beautiful, so poised,”said another.

“Pragya, have you heard anything from her lately? You two were so close as children,”said Aama.

Pragya had not heard from Sanjita. The girl had left the village for high school without even a wave goodbye.

Pragya felt the sting from a deep-buried memory…Sanjita, her skin young and smooth, her boisterous curls tied up in two red ribbons…whispering, “When we’re old, we’ll go to high school together and get boyfriends. Then leave them when we go to college in India!”…the girls shrieking, their laughter like dice rattling inside a tin cup.

Pragya offered her mother a silent shrug.

Buwa had been dozing under the spare shade of a small tree, or so the women thought. But he’d seen the shrug. He came for Pragya, his lean limbs struggling with the weight of carrying the rest of him, evidence of too much whiskey the night before. He dragged his daughter to the roadside and yelled, “Lie down!”Aama followed behind the pair, a dull sickle still in hand. Her eyes were red but she said nothing.

“Lie down! Face down!”Buwa said. Pragya did. Buwa kicked her all along her small body until his feet were grisly, brown, and cracked, like the bison meat they had drying on their hot tin roof. Then he whipped with his bamboo switch her so severely she could not sit down for a week.

Later Aama dressed her daughter’s wounds by candlelight. She silently bound them in old cotton scraps. The women were never able to meet each other’s gaze.

 

Buwa seemed to be aging at a rapid pace. He was absent more and more from the paddy field, favoring his bed and some beer or whiskey over any sort of labor. This was fine news for Pragya during the day. But at dusk, when the work-day ended, Buwa expected his daughter to read to him. She was to invent specific voices for each character and use proper intonations fit to Buwa’s liking. She was lashed if she failed and the violence was more intense when Buwa was drunk.

The pair slowly made their way through the collective works of Charles Dickens. Pragya loved the books and would get lost in their worlds. She became Oliver in Oliver Twist and adopted a voice akin to her father’s, thinly veiled, for the role of evil Fagin.

She loved Dickens’dark sense of humor in A Tale of Two Cities. She glanced up at her Buwa’s face as she read, “The whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanizing and softening to behold in action.”But the irony seemed to float, like dust in the light, over her father’s head. He stared unblinking into the wall next to his bed.

Pragya’s favorite book was Great Expectations. Once she stumbled upon a particularly touching passage and could not help but shed a tear. She did not dare brush it away because then Buwa would notice and the punishment would surely be dire.

It read, “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

 

Pragya was twenty when Aama told her that Buwa was dying.

“The doctor came,” the words breaching through Aama’s sobs, “and he says it is a matter of weeks. What will we do without your Buwa?”

Aama took Pragya in her arms for the first time in years. The bulging meat of her mother’s body pressed against her gaunt one repulsed Pragya. But she stroked her mother’s back until Aama’s tears had soaked through the shoulder of Pragya’s white shirt. The wet patch formed a translucent window through which a map of old scars was visible—the lines intersecting like roads.

“He loves you, Pragya,”said Aama. “Everything he did, he did out of love.”Aama dragged a finger across the bottom of her nose, collecting its stringy mucus. “He has loved these nights of reading. In fact, why don’t you stay here today, while we go to work, and read to him? He would love that.”She offered her daughter a weak smile, patted her cheek, and bustled out into the misty Nepalese rain.

 

Buwa was sleeping in his bed, but his eyes flapped open the instant Pragya rapped on his open door.

“Would you like me to read to you?”she said and he nodded once. His skin was jaundiced and smooth as a child’s. Even his eyes were a mucky yellow. The color reminded Pragya of dog urine.

She grabbed a book from his pile on the floor—Bleak House—and sat in her usual hard-backed chair, a few feet from her Buwa’s decaying body. She read, “It was one of those colorless days when everything looks heavy and harsh—”

“Pragya,”Buwa interrupted. He struggled to speak. “Water.”

His muscles had atrophied and he was unable to bring even a small cup to his lips. She poured some water into his mouth and returned to her chair. She did not pick up the book.

A storm had developed—the boom of its thunder the loudest noise Pragya had ever known.

A gust of wind came, suddenly, carrying with it a load of rain and forming a puddle on the floor beside the open window. Pragya went to the window, closed it, stooped with a blanket that she retrieved from under the bed so she could soak it up.

But she did not clean.

She had this eerie, familiar feeling. The feeling of hearing a childhood song after decades but remembering every word. The feeling of someone watching you from afar and without even looking, knowing they are. She felt the heft of the blanket in her hands. It was a scratchy, gray wool.

Her father lay next to her, looking straight ahead. He lacked the energy or muscle to even tilt his head slightly to the right.

Pragya felt an urge, then—a calm realization. The bulky blanket felt almost weightless, like another pair of hands was helping her to lift it. She felt a push against her back: two hands, more bone than flesh, and so cold they burned.

The blanket was over her Buwa’s face. He moaned, the small noise stifled by the heavy  knit.

Maybe hours passed with the blanket held tightly against her Buwa’s face. She watched the man’s chest fall and rise, fall and rise. It reminded her of a red balloon he’d brought her once from the city. The gift was a limp, rubber tube and smelled a bit like the inside of a book.

“Thank you,”she’d said, confused but eager to stow this curious city thing in the flower-print box where she kept her treasures—cracked buttons, pretty candy wrappers, Coca-Cola caps.

“No, Pragya. It’s a balloon. You blow it up. Look,”her father had said, laughing. He plucked it from her tiny hands and put his mouth to it. He breathed and it inflated. He breathed again and it grew a little more. It had seemed so miraculous, this little red balloon, starting out so small and her Buwa stretching it so effortlessly with swells of recycled air.

Now Buwa’s chest had stopped moving. He’d passed the threshold of death and she’d not even noticed, like the bud in the ground that is green one day and a flower the next. She felt regretful she’d missed the moment he’d left. She’d been lost in a day dream.

Pragya tucked the blanket back under the bed and returned to her chair. She licked a calloused finger and flipped to a page near the end of Bleak House. She read aloud— to the rain, to the wind, to the paddy field and the seedlings struggling to push through their dirt roof…

“I have never known the wind to be in the east for a single moment since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name. I remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the east now, and he said, no, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter on that very day.”

 

Eliza Calvin recently graduated from University of Massachusetts Lowell with a degree in English. She currently resides in Lexington, Massachusetts.