O Mother, Please Send My Father Across

It was all a dream, Murli’s breath like rotten fish on top of her tongue, the balled-up grey dead mass of it settled at the back of her throat like stale phlegm, his beedi stained tongue wriggling around on top of her tongue, his hand under her blouse, fumbling, scratching, his nails yellow and black and green the sight of which made her vomit, his puss-filled-bandaged hand on top of her breast, the nail digging into her nipple, the dirt in his nails mixing with her blood, in her blood, the blood cool in the thick heat of the dark room, sweet, mixing with the scent of the vomit dried on the floor, she had dreamt it in the night, writhing like a dying fish, a pool of yellow sweat, unable to scream for all the phlegm in her throat, the fat tongue in her mouth, the eyes in the window… 

     The eyes were from a long ago dream, black, a darkness darker than the black heat of the room, a self-eating darkness, turning inwards, two holes in the dark, like the memory of the snake’s fangs on Amma’s black skin, two eyes watching her, watching itself, two eyes like holes in the heat, she could slip away, like vapour, like smoke, like the silver mist over the river… the river black in the night, black and shining, winking, winking like the silt around it, silver and loose, a million glinting eyes winking in the black night, the air ripe with the sour promise of raw mangoes, teasing and winking from the branches, among them the glinting brown eyes cat-like of Munna, sitting on the branch naked, his long cat-like body shining fluorescent, blue and violet, in the dark night. ‘Ladki,’ he whispered to her, ‘Want a mango?’, his words tinged with the stale scent of a beedi, fishy. In the river, there were fishes as small as a dot, dark and invisible, holes in the river, moving eyes. The big fish did not swim, they stared at her, their mouths sending a bubble up the surface of the water, which burst with a quiet pop, waiting for her answer. Pop-pop-pop.

     ‘Muniya?’ she asked.

     ‘Not ripe yet,’ Munna said and laughed, revealing a scurvy mouth with wiggling teeth like maggots. With each shake of the shoulder, a ha up and a hee down, the teeth dropped down, raining, raining like mangoes too impatient, too ripe and restless, dropping with a pop-pop-pop. As they dropped and popped down, the night black rats gathered them up and scuttled away, an undulating shadowy tide, whispering, an underground mousy susurrus, like the restrained gossip, sisak-sisak, of the leaves in the night wind, conspiring. Amma had said it was rubbish, that the aam tree was aam, spirit-less, spirits having no cravings for the mango. It was all make-belief, make-be-leaf, just whispers, conspiring. But this changed when she saw Munna’s body, the penis chopped off, dangling from the tree. And now, he was sitting beside it, kicking it absentmindedly once in a while, so that it went swinging, a sawan swing scene. Muniya began to sing now, bellowing in the night-quiet: Amma, mere baba ko bhejo ri, ki sawan aaya… Mother, please send my father across, now the rains have come… and with her voice, the rains came down. Quiet at first, trickling down her forehead, down her back, like sweat, mixing with the sweat into a vaporous headache. But soon, as Muniya’s bellowing grew more hysterical, stretched and cracked, the rain gained violence, sheets after sheets crashing down on the earth, dham dham dham dhadham dhadham dham. There was no song in this rain, nothing sacred, no rhythm, no melody, it was the roar of primaeval war drums, the shankhnaad breaking out of the sky’s raging core, bloodthirsty, furious. The mango trees were screaming in anguish as their branches convulsed, epileptic, suicidal, wanting to break free, but the roots unyielding, circling tighter and tighter around their ankles, cutting off the blood, then cutting into the skin, circling tighter and tighter, till they were bleeding, they were bleeding and screaming, their blood washed out by the rain. 

     The earth was bleeding. Pools of blood, pools of filth running down the mango grove, running down the fields, running down the streets, running down to the river, running down. She looked at Munna hanging on to the branch, swinging in the rain, the noose getting tighter and tighter, choking, screaming out into the rain: Amma, mere bhaiya ko bhejo ri… 

     She knew that the flow of the dream, the black river, with the pop-pop fish, with the mango carcasses, with the winking stars in its belligerent waters, was running down to the void, the shunya, that was inside her, the void that she was made to cover with her saree and petticoat, her red bangles and black bindi, the red dye on her feet and the toe rings which cut into her skin, the shunya that was a red field with Amma’s corpse lying among the bent down barley, the teeth-girdled void inside her stomach as she watched her running towards the mango grove in her shit-stained sari, the blouse torn off, running to the branch that was no longer weighed down by Munna’s incomplete body, the void that no baba, no bhai, no mama could cross, a bottomless pit (what could sawan do?), the shunya spelled out by the noose around Munna’s neck, the shunya Murli was trying to prod with his puss-filled fingers and his puss-filled organ, the shunya that was a dream, the void that was this dream, this dream that was a void, flowing, rushing down, into the night, to where?

     The black river came to a halt at the dried-up vomit puddle, out of which she emerged into the dark room once again. Her body felt slimy, putrid, a mix of semi-digested rice, sweat, and the rotten substance of death. Murli’s hands pressed tight around her neck, and her neck gave away, turning to sludge, Murli bent down and licked it up, his tongue abrasive, spiky, leaving scars for flies to lay their eggs on. Her breath started to go and she could hear the thrashing of her heart in her ear. But she repeated to the beat of her thumping heart, it is all a dream, a dream, a dream… It was all a dream, but it wasn't hers alone. It also belonged to Amma. It was a dream passed on to her, the only dowry Amma could muster, her inheritance. The dream belonged to Munna too. It was the dream that Amma spun out in the thick heat of the dark room, spinning and spinning, the thread of her word laced with her saliva, the strings of saliva that would purse her lips as she kept mumbling in the dark, spinning, her words indecipherable, a chant, a plea, crying out into the night, Munna, Munna, Munnia, Muniya… it was the dream that Amma had spun out in the dark night as the man whom they never called Baba filled the air of the room, humid with his sweaty appetite, heavy with his piggish grunts, filled it with the scent of his beedi which would make Muniya sick, filled it with the sight of grey tufts of hair pushing out of his ears, filled it with a heaviness that sat in their stomachs for days, stones in their chests, grey, a shame that stalked them and enwrapped them, entered their bodies, evacuated their innards, rendered their guts hollow, an all-consuming parasite, till they were all-sludge, putrid and shameful, wobbly and shapeless, shadows, shunya, the dream that rose above this scent, these sounds, this heaviness, a light weightless dream, that her eyes caught a glimpse of, as she had stood there watching, her two eyes glinting in the window… 

     Outside the window, Muniya and her counting the teeth that they had found this week, buried in the silt around the river, buried in the sand like shells, hollow, heavy with the weight of their own insouciance, their own lack, a self-inflicted negligence, dropping out of mouths and scuttering around in the sand. Sometimes, they found worms inside them, pink and white and sometimes green. They compared the shapes that they found, Muniya claiming her finds to be sharper, while she rubbed hers against her thumb till it turned raw, certain of their supremacy. Sometimes, she kept them in her mouth, swirled them around, the taste of dirt, metallic, sour, she sucked at them like at the stone of the jamun. Now, Murli’s teeth shifted around in her mouth, scuttling down her tongue, into her throat, tasting of gutkha and anger, scuttling down her body, digging, puncturing the skin, searching for the arteries. A group of three scuttled down and lodged into her vagina. And all she could think of was the teeth around the river and the necklace of teeth Muniya made for Amma, the same necklace which she ate one tooth a time after each meal, her self-prescribed medicine… 

     Outside the window, Muniya and she were watching her, with a grey feeling in the pit of their stomach, as Murli laid claim to each part of her body and signed it off with the mixture of her own blood and his own dirt.

     Outside the window, Muniya and she became two eyes, superimposed, simultaneous, one, a palimpsest of dreams and bodies and voids and eyes. Melted into one. He and her, she and him, her and her. Peering in at her mother and her mother, dreaming, drifting out of the window through the holes their eyes burned through the darkness. Peering in at herself.

     The dream of I…

I, Amma, Muniya, breathing in the dark. Our bellies swell out in a rhythm. Up, down, up, down. Muniya is not Munna now. She won't be Munna again till morning. When morning comes, she will have to leave herself beside me, wrapped up neatly on the pillow, leave this dream that Amma has spun for us and cross the shore. But it is still night now. Amma is telling us the story of a king who lost all his kingdom, all of whose children died at his own hand by some cruel accident of fate, all of whose wives died of grief, all of whose citizens died of the plague, and all of whose army died at war. Now, what could such a man do in this world? He wandered around the ghost of his kingdom, dreaming. Muniya and I do not believe this story, we contend that such a man should die, would die. And can’t death be a dream? Amma asks. 

I wake up. Murli is shaking, he is done. He turns around and goes off to sleep. I look out of the window, the sun has started to come up. I repeat to myself, it is all a dream, a dream, a dream…