That Tuesday afternoon, I decided that I needed to inject more life into the whole situation and attempt the orange souffle. A trial run. The recipe, that was now 97% dust, called for oranges from Saifullah’s fruit stall, and so that was where I was going, no time for messing around.
It must have been a gradual change, from the Russell Market that was mentioned in old recipe books to it’s final degenerate state, a cesspool of innards and urine with some parrot feathers and dead fish evenly dispersed through it all. There was a shimmer of charm somewhere within it, as even after all these years, Saifullah had his fruit stall.
Saifullah spoke slowly and had a distinct voice, like his throat had been lacquered with coffee, guttural and liquid sounding he said,
‘Mangosteen, miss?’
It takes some doing to say no to Mangosteens, the boujie thaatinungu, perfect nonetheless. Like the plums you left in the fridge, you know, you know.
‘Just three kilos of oranges!’
It was a shitload, but this was a big deal. I pulled the paper out and showed him the recipe, gesturing wildly at the little scribble that was his name. His eyes glazed over, his pupils like oil in a water emulsion, liquid like his voice, he smiled and said,
‘oh, oh ok,’
he nodded his head and began weighing the oranges. I shook myself into place, I guess yellowing paper and old recipes aren’t everything to everyone. But there, I had two kilos of Nagpur’s finest and jasmine in my hair, what could possibly be next on the list?
It wasn’t as easy as that either. You’d knocked me off my feet already, we have to keep that shit balanced in order for this story to make any sense. So let me get it out of the way. Yes it was heavy, like a quadruple dose of imploding and exploding galaxies, but it was also just that you walked up to me with an orange in your hand and said,
‘You dropped this.’
Somehow we ended up riding the same train, you with your whole sexy, terrifying, mystery thing going on and me with my ‘reaching all the way back to find anything’ situation. And this market was stop one and only, well, not really, but the largest station, that encouraged both light and heavy conversation.
‘Thank you,’ I said, wiping some wetness off the top of my lip and reaching my hand out, noncommittal.
You were the rag-tag prince by day and the dressed and pressed sniper by night. I remember liking the way your eyes stuck, at least at the start I did. See, it’s going to sound like I’ve been building it up for the breakdown this whole time, the one, two, three, you and me, recipe for easy bullshit. If you lacrimate and masturbate simultaneously, it’ll make your evenings seem more worthwhile. It wasn’t like that. A wise man once told me, long ago, when I was a child running through fields and chasing after goat herds, he whispered out the side of a bush where he had bent down to take a shit, that the real recipe called for painting each other golden whilst gasping for breath, thereby requiring some actual skill and/or mystical mastery. So there I was dripping in gold and breathless, trying to keep it cool nonetheless.
‘Scurvy.’ I muttered as I returned the runaway orange to my basket of Vitamin C. I remember that you smiled then. See, the breakdown was a while away, we were only beginning. I remember thinking that I had not known a face like yours, that with your almond eyes, and your open smile, you were so focussed and centred and all together too terrifyingly on point, as if to say … Hello, here I am, let’s do this. And so, because there was no time for any of that other stuff, you spat it out.
‘I saw you near the Palace the other day.’
And I spat it back,
‘Yes, I saw you.’
It was an easy, breezy, say it like it is and hold up the queue kind of deal. Well, there was no real need to say it any other way. I had already been caught buckled down on my knees and out of breath so the awkward bit was done and dealt with. Who are you? I had wanted to say. Who the hell can you be? Because every time I saw the faint possibility of joining together a cluster of dots around the side of your left ear, at least, it was instantly shattered by you saying or doing something inscrutable. And you know, it’s easy to want to join the dots together, we are taught to from day one, they even have activity books for it. But you were spotless and dot free, just a big old returner of lost goods. And what a funny feeling this is, how on earth must I go about describing to you my first memory of your face? I can tell you that I remember it being not from this world, but also remember having known it’s every dip and dimple, information that seeped into me back in those placental days, I had known it before, but not as a face, perhaps as a patch of sunlight on a rock or as the taste of milk, honey, cinnamon, cardamom, something. I remember thinking you looked like fawn down, you smiled in that hey babe, whattup kind of way. Straight through me. You reminded me of my sunshine cat that lay pliant and easy on the sandpapered, blue table in the Lovely Room. Sometimes you could look like a black and white photograph of an angsty cigarette smoking author, the type of picture they put on the back of 10th edition prints. You had a vacant stare every now and then that made you seem like you so wanted to be here but were so stuck elsewhere. Your history was unknown and motives were unpredictable. In a second you could have either wiped us all out and burst into flames or clinked your ankles together to summon the little children who sold single red roses by the traffic light, and lead them into the ocean. You had it all in you. You were clean cut but down and dirty, your jaw slit the air into two halves, making the earth and the sky compete over it, the sky being it’s focussed but detached self and the earth holding on with all it could. I had not instantly known, in fact in that instant it was just a physical thing, my body wanted all that you were. I was a field in drought and you were the motherfucking monsoons. It seemed like you had a good grasp on how it all worked, when you said, like I had been itching to this whole time,
‘Who are you?’
It was a fair question, and open to interpretation. I suppose I was a renaissance re-enactor with motion sickness. Well, not renaissance, but you get the idea. I don’t know, I was just the girl from the house that jack built, who was trying to get her hands on some sort of comet to launch herself out of here. It was all an act I guess, I was the one building it up from the very start, under the pretence of benevolence. Just so that soon enough, whenever that was, I’d be able to clink my own ankles together and lead it all into the ocean with me. It being whatever I’d done in the meantime, the comet, the dinner, the house, the recipes, you?
‘Amia,’ I said, ‘Who are you?’
And that’s when shit really hit the fan. I remember you smiled, but you looked worried this time, less angled, less defined. Excuse me for asking, dearest sole Inquisitor of the Land, please, lest your godlike face melt into worry. Was this not a two-way deal? Get it together man, it’s just a question. Forgive me, I couldn’t figure you out. There you were golden, glowing, Saifullah still putting in good words for those mangosteens, your voice like a loaded gun slowly chipping away at my skin, giving no indication of where you came from, or where you didn’t. There was no particular drawl, twang, accent. Perhaps it sounded most like you were from the mountains, the slowness with which you spoke so that each of your words could slice precisely through the cold mountain air. Or from the ocean, the easy-going way your vowels rested their arms on each other’s shoulders and kicked a football into the sunset. I didn’t fucking know, it sounded like you were not from here, you didn’t exude inherited memories and so it was hard to gauge where it was you emerged from. I, on the other hand, was pretty obvious I think, if for no reason other than that I was constantly tracing the outline of the Cassia on the back of my left hand.
‘K,’ you said
‘Oh,’ I said
and the oranges all fell to the ground, and Saifullah tried one more time,
‘Mangosteen, miss?’
*
Zui Kumar Reddy completed her BSc in Biology at Warren Wilson College, NC. She has been writing for a long time. Her work has been published in The Peal, Down and Dirty Word, Out of Print, DNA and so on. In 2015 she won the DNA-Out of Print National Short Story Award for her work ‘Anagrams and Barbed Wire Jesus’. This is an excerpt from her (soon to be released) debut novel The Generation of Light.