Gul’s braid was the longest it had ever been. It had been long in her youth, reaching to her waist when she stood, but not to the extent that she could curl up in bed, catch it between her thighs and bring it beyond the navel. The hair making a hairpin. The length so just but kind. She generally wore it coiled around her neck, and everywhere she went – to the beach, campus, market – people looked at her and touched their own hair: slyly patting their buns, smoothing their tresses, tapping the bare spot near the forehead. There was envy, adoration and dread, and Gul didn’t mind – such was living under the gaze of long, bright candlesticks hanging by their wicks, each wick wont to curl in its own flame – until she encountered those who looked relieved. They altered her step, the few who refused the prowl of the finger, confident of having just enough on their heads to suggest little else. Nothing that could whip air out of a confession or hoist temple beams; no brazen game of tug of war.
At times, done with the day’s retrieving and often thinking about time – time riding off, riding time like a moss, time as hidden mortar and pestle sense—she stood in her garden on a cooler evening, her braid adorned with a weave of red chilli peppers. Two long sections of jute string folded and knotted together at the top to form four strands. A pepper placed horizontally over the two middle strings and under the outer strands. The inner strings pulled up and the next chilli fitted under, then the strings pulled down to the outside. The middle strings again pulled up, another pepper added under, the strings dropped to the outside. The tight pattern repeating in a delicate dance of the fingers. Marigolds towards the end and a simple utterance: flesh is bird, flesh is curd, word is hair and flesh.
Arth helped her friend, a local artist, put up photographs in a new gallery. The space was part of a laterite fort on a hilltop on the outskirts of town. Built and destroyed, rebuilt, ruined and abandoned by numerous rulers since the 16th century, it offered a grand view of the Arabian Sea and had recently received a facelift. The new look, questioned by a few but widely accepted, greatly offended the artist, who went on and on about the differences between reconstruction, restoration and preservation – how one couldn’t go around sticking new noses, changing tiles or setting the stained-glass calla lilies not with traditional lead but Tiffany-style, with copper foil; how there were rules for these things. That a lower arch had been added at the fort’s entrance, along with gaudy motifs and poorly painted elements that made no historical sense, frustrated him and made him wish for dereliction instead.
The photos in the gallery could have brought some comfort, for they recounted the functions served by different sections of the fort over time, but he was too caught up. Farther away from the images of the cistern and prison and closer to the hospital wing, Arth stood gazing at a door with a coin slot. Her lips tinted with the wake of a dawn ship but her head unwashed.
You’ll never guess what a friend of mine adopted on her birthday, she said, cutting in.
What? he said.
The frame wasn’t right, so he moved closer to correct it.
Do you smell something? he said.
Of course she could smell it.
And this tends to the chronology? he said.
She turned to him and smiled. A tsunami siren.
Luni threaded her needle with a long strand of hair and stitched a landscape. She had set the rice to soak and now she worked on a handkerchief fixed in an embroidery hoop with a bowl resting next to her feet on the floor. In the bowl were small rings of black threads that had been untangled, rinsed in milk and water, then dried. She sat by the window of her home and stitched. Outside the window, the sea spread out at a short distance – blue-grey because her hands were rubbed clean; the rice was soaking and there were hidden snaps between the buttons running down her breasts that kept the gaps safely closed. She had to keep it that way while working.
The television played loudly in the background for company. She followed a faint outline on the soft cotton – a sketch familiar to any child: a range of perfectly triangular mountains, a small sun, clouds, a house beside a stream, rocks and tall trees. The barred windows formed eyes and a toothy smile. Teeth were important. Teeth and hair, hair and teeth: two things Luni believed most sacred to a woman. She had taught her daughter how to take out knots in the dark; watched her bite to fill both thirst and hunger – a gnaw on the bone, a slow paring down or a dense, smooth chunk of deciduous plunder. She’d raised her on the story of the thieves who tore locks off bad girls and glued them together to make dolls for peace. Those pretty little pocket mascots that got shipped to every ravaged place on earth, packed in boxes with a dress change, hung from keychains.
Pausing her stitching, Luni touched the place for snow. It was the simpler peace she wanted – not handed over or solving, but encrusted with the exhaled breath. Blood rush to the cheeks and a marvellous whitening – she’d only encountered such a scene in movies and photographs, but one day she and her daughter would go there. And there were ways to keep this desire close: shaking her hair over her knees while wearing black, threading wool through a comb, inhaling camphor, sucking on shaved ice and adding snowcaps to the mountains in the embroidery along with a snowman. Charcoal eyes, a carrot-shaped nose, sticks for arms, a muffler and a dotted smile.
A film she had seen several times before began to play on the screen, and Luni’s ears grew alert to the swift shift in terrain. A camel would be shot in the slums of Mumbai. The house would drown in vinegar. She sat up straight and, without turning around, at the right time, lightly cocked her head and mouthed along to a dialogue: saala ret ka jaanwar yahan samandar mein kaiko marne aaya? Why did the desert animal come to the sea to die?
She bent down and selected another string from the bowl. Moistened its tip with her tongue and kept it between her lips for a while, gathering a trace, tasting across the inevitable spectrum – love, loss, loneliness – with an estrangement of an appraiser, but sometimes there was something else, something reserved from her or cleverly sheathed, something adamant – with a collar? – that moved in a fifth kind of way, a shuffling up slowly, in little waves – and when that happened, Luni rushed to spit it out.
Excerpted with permission from Glass Bottom, Sonali Prasad, Pan MacMillan India.
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