DOMESTIC GODDESS AT THE ALTAR
Eight years on, I’ll be an astrophysicist, the Wandering One, hopping from planet to planet, in a monochrome self-propelled space suit. Bela didn’t care to look at me when she said this, or the rest of us cousins. Or if we were listening, engrossed in her cosmos peregrinations. Convinced of her dreams, she gazed into the decompressed universe, mused aloud about places and place values. We heard her tuck in a sigh as if gravity pulled her closer at that instant, so she might stay grounded whenever whatever happened on the edge of time.
She sunk deeper into the lawn chair. Summer dozed somewhere and the breeze, gentle but persistent, whispered an early autumn. Like ghost-steps— sudden, soft—the trees lining the periphery-walls shed their only possessions, allowing the leaves to linger in the air for a brief caress that starry night.
Spark cocked his ears, and growling a bit, went back to sleep at Jhuma’s feet. Niel measured the silences of the elders around the carrom table in the hall, punctuated only by Grandpa’s laughter. Looking at each of our faces, Karun wondered if we might be summoned inside for fear of the dew causing us to catch a cold. Yet, on the boundaries of our brief liberties, we were permitted to sleep outdoors that night, only a fortnight away from the unseen churning.
I’m sure Bela, even as she slept, had dreams of micro-gravity, an untethered float in the realm of stars.
Hey bride! Hey bride!
Bela, finding herself at the center of that churn, got teased as she emerged from the house, days later. Familiar pattern in our small spherule—town of four or five narrow streets laden with cattle, piles of trash and brick houses jostling with giant banyans and mango trees. Without exception, they erected massive wooden front doors, unfailingly intimidating. Inside, a cacophony of voices rose unabated around a pillared inner courtyard. Outside, the girls were easy prey, brittle, soft targets.
Who—is—it?
The girls asked. Bela, same as my age, made herself even more small, coiled inside the shell that we girls always carried about. From the claustrophobic grip of her former playmates, I struggled to pry her away.
Inside, a piper and a drummer created a din strong enough to drown out her dissenting voice.
The women in our household, decked in gold and with toddlers and doting husbands in tow, strutted about displaying the best of femininity and fertility. No one cared about dreams or what could be, what can be in a world if my cousin had a choice.
The house roared with priests’ mantras. Guests babbled. At the auspicious hour, some of us carried the eighteen-year-old bride, in layers of jewelry and heavy silk, to the center of a ring of spectators. The holy fire witnessed a transfer of ownership: the groom marked vermilion. It extended from the middle of her brows to the top of her head. Our grand-aunt, the matriarch, flayed her arms over her head, to rid her of any evil eyes. Lakshmi, herself! she exclaimed, in hushed tone to the other women, referring to the goddess my cousin was elevated to on her wedding day.
I noticed Bela intently watching the flames as they leaped and licked the ghee being generously fed to the fire, and wondered if she intended to return to this image of an ultimate sacrifice of her visions for herself in uncomfortable dreams.
Afterwards, the couple sat on a swing—broad plank suspended by chains from the ceiling and propelled lightly by us. She pulled me close, grinned for the camera, no longer looking like she’d been taken captive.
I couldn’t help but think of my chirpy caged mynah.
Eight years on, autumn was rude to us. None of the ushering, just a shifting of gears from summer to a harsh winter in which all our garden trees died a sudden death. Karun attributed the trees’ dying to some disease he’d heard the name of on BBC. Grandpa was no more.
I’ll have my lunch upstairs. Niel couldn’t help flaunt a life abroad which included a visit home to get a bride. A light lunch was necessary, he could eat with fork and spoon instead of his hands, and tap on his keyboard too.
Bela and I helped our mothers screen prospective brides for Niel from matrimonial columns in Sunday’s newspaper.
Bela’s baby took a nap snuggled in her lap. Her older boy toyed with a miniature plane embossed with the word Wanderer.
Jhuma flipped the pages of her wedding album.
Lakshmi, herself! she exclaimed, breaking the silence of the room. Then, realizing she had been too carried away by her own wedding images, blushed red. Same as the color of her newly adorned vermilion that shouted loud on the parting of her hair.
STITCHES
There was a grandmother’s bag, Thakurmar Jhuli, from where emerged stories, a sleeping princess, four suitors, a golden band, a silver magic wand. Little girls went to sleep listening to our mothers reading those tales. Above our sleepy heads were hand-fans, on which coasted dreamy little mushroom clouds of color deftly painted on palmetto slates stacked and stitched together. Waved gently to bring in a whiff of breeze, they blew away, even if for a few minutes, the gigantic worries gathering over us.
When we grew up, we stowed away our little dreams in distant lands when we sewed. In tandem, we threaded our mouths shut, like the one-horned animal and fantasy floral appliques we affixed on cloth; only the sounds of the machines and eyes measuring the shadow of the decanter kept just outside the windowless room, changing size and course, before finally obliterating itself.
That was the time we girls rose from our treadle machines, the metal plate just above the floor stopping, stunned into silence from the force on it all day.
Stacking our days’ worth of baby frocks onto the lady’s table, we went to the washroom in the backyard, once a cowshed, just a mirror on the shelf above the sink.
I watched those little dreams return to the girls’ bearings as they took turns in front of the mirror. Dusk-light tinged their faces as they wore make-up for secret escapades with connoisseurs of their dreams, away from prying eyes of parents toiling away making a living, never to know. When the girls were finished, they looked around for approval, but I didn’t dare spare the thoughts that honestly whirled in my head (they either looked too old for their years, or too juvenile in their efforts); instead, I nodded, applauded. Their endeavor, I was sure, was just a staircase to their dreams taking shape in places where the boys worked, and from where they came to hunt for brides.
We emerged, always to the lady’s perplexed face, and without acknowledging the payments she made to us on per-day-basis with as little as a nod, we marched out to where our rickety cycles stood in perfect columns, and pedaled towards destinations of our choices.
Mine wouldn’t be too distant—a right turn towards the erstwhile colonial cemetery and then cycling by the high red-brick walls of the ramshackle rice- mill, and then the narrow lane home.
My dreams included an education and a teaching job.
At nights, on the terrace of a quiet house, I viewed the winking stars in a galaxy ever-expanding with possibilities, carrying little bits of giants. I thought of girls who had been plucked off the firmament, girls who had found dreamless, sleepless nights in loving arms. Remembered those who had eloped, but had returned from marital homes piled in nightmares. One of the girls had chosen to truncate her life—hers was a dream too distorted to last ever after.
Though times were difficult, like a furnace every next day we girls fanned our dreams, grew elegant and sturdy plumes on our limbs meaning one day to fly. We imagined fledglings, wouldn’t stop trying even if some plummeted to the ground.
Soon after graduating from college, I took up a teaching career elsewhere.
That last night before leaving, the terrace seemed to unfurl a glittery veil above my head. Stitched together was an array of stars on a fabric of black, an applique of a golden moon. I amused myself imagining a tiara for a princess- in-waiting with the sprinkling of silvery meteor shower that happened past midnight.
In the new city, I still cycled, on Sunday afternoons, upon the sunset-hued beach nearby.
When I pedaled, I felt light and fluffy as a bird, on wings of dreams, like the sew-girls.
The wheels kept turning, marking a neatly-penciled line, drawing courses of lives.
Mandira Pattnaik’s work has appeared/forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2021, Timber Journal, Dash, Miracle Monocle, Passages North, International Short-Short Magazine, and Watershed Review, among other places. Her fiction received nominations for the Pushcart Prize 2021, Best of the Net and Best Microfictions 2021. Mandira’s work was placed Highly Commended in the 2021 Litro Magazine Summer Contest and CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest 2020. Her fiction has also been included in anthologies and translated. Find more about her writing at mandirapattnaik.wordpress.com
SPOT IMAGE CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA
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