ISSUE 46

Mahabali, the benevolent king, wore a pink silk mundu. Darker pink than a cat’s tongue, lighter than a square of Big Babol.

His bamboo parasol leant casually on his left shoulder and in his right hand he thumb-scrolled through his phone. Insta? Selfies with his fans? #Mahabalirocks.

No, Rahmat decided, looking at Mahabali in the back of the pick-up truck turning toward Poonkunnam. He’s more a TikTok Mahabali. Probably lip-syncing to that song about not being Michael Jackson that’s blaring out the sound systems of every store in Thrissur right now.

‘Don’t you think it’s too early for him to be out?’ Rahmat asked her father, who was driving the Maruti hatchback and listening a bit too intently to the jokes on the radio with the canned laughter and fart noises.

‘Who?’

‘Him,’ she pointed at the disappearing Mahabali, ’Onam is still weeks away,’ the pink silk mundu, a wisp in the wind. She changed her mind – it was the exact colour of Big Babol after all. (Do you get Big Babol these days? Dark blue wrappers, pink bubbles blown up and bursting in social studies class. Tina in her green checked uniform flying down a flight of stairs, hair alive, skin glowing. Gone now, to another country, a house by the sea. Nice white porch, geraniums in a hanging basket. If Rahmat were to tell her sister Rahiya this, she’d scoff. Tina? Really? That Tina with the snotty nose? In a sweet white wooden house like the kind you’d see in one of those small-town-life-in-America movies? No. No way. She’s living in a dingy apartment and there’s bound to be the smell of garbage in the air.)

Her father let out a distracted hmm and asked, ‘You have the prescription, right? For your sister?’

‘Yes, it’s here,’ she gave the brown sling bag a pat and her father, reassured, concentrated on navigating the tricky cluster of private buses with their conductors hanging out the open doors screaming Kodungallur! Guruvayoor! Irinjalakuda! at the passers-by. Threading through them were the more officious red and cream state transport buses, their government seal of approval preventing them from canvassing for customers in a similar manner and their conductors with the pursed lips who rang their bells furiously and yelled ripe abuse at the private bus drivers. Passengers who’d just got down from the train at the railway station leapt on to the running buses. Vehicles in every direction attempting to overtake each other at once.

Her father clicked his tongue.

‘Think the Jayanti Janata just arrived. Rather delayed this morning,’ Rahmat said. A train stood at the first platform, blue and white and snaking and exhausted. Two days since it had left Mumbai and every kilometre crossed, showed on its dusty skin. When she’d worked at the store in Cochin, she’d taken this train. Full to bursting, the ladies’ compartment. Teachers, government clerks, bank officers – all taking it to reach their offices in the city. Making this their daily morning commute. Women who’d known each other for years and who saved seats for one another – rare to get, rarer to keep by the law of the spread handkerchief marking the sliver of space. The only place to stand was near the toilet vestibule, the stink of a two days’ ride through the Deccan sulphurous and metallic. Tastes she could practically feel in her mouth even now, a few hundred metres away in her father’s car.

Some days, she took the train with the knot of pain in her middle, radiating down her thighs to the back of her calves. Her mother would give her breakfast in the mornings, the milky light of monsoon days filtering through the thick foliage of the mango trees in their garden. Rahmat would take a spoonful of porridge and grimace and her mother would be standing behind her, stroking her back, the warmth of her palm helping.

‘You don’t need to do this,’ her mother would whisper, and she’d reply, her words escaping through the hurt: ‘What else is there to do?’

‘How can you bear this pain and take that journey?’ A two-hour train ride to Cochin, standing all the way, thrumming uterine cramps and muscles sore from her body’s pre-menstrual preparations. Lasted two days then. A week now. The older you get, the doctor had said, the worse it may become.

‘I have a business to run, Umma.’ She’d patted her mother’s hand and pushed it away and then walked out of the house crunching a paracetamol, bitter and hard to keep down.

It didn’t last of course, that little store off MG Road with its quirky hand printed fabrics and handmade books and watercolour sketches in gold frames of skiffs on Vembanad Lake and Fort Kochi ruins. Tourists would come in and wander around, their backpacks occasionally knocking things off the shelves. Always apologetic, the British and the French and the Japanese. They’d pick things they’d knocked over and put them back in place and buy the cheap merchandise kept near the cashier: memo blocks and recycled paper photo frames. One month they had good sales of elephant dung keychains and bookmarks. A rare burst of sunshine, never again repeated.

They didn’t make the rent the final month and that’s when they knew the store had to close. They had dinner at Grand Hotel. Sandhya and Madhu paid for the meal. They laughed and ate and drank and split an ice cream between them and kissed Rahmat and put her in the last convenient train out of Ernakulam South, a slow and sleepy passenger, and promised to stay in touch.

No, no it was alright, the money was gone, yes, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Go back to your mother, take care of her. She needs it. We’ll call (they didn’t, till much afterwards).

A month later that train was the one the girl took one Friday evening, to return home to Shornur and her mother and brother and the boy who was coming to see her, a marriage prospect. Except she didn’t reach home and her body was found in the bushes by the track after Chalakudy. Eyes open to the sky, the papers had said.

Rahmat’s mother had cried reading the news reports and Rahmat had stood on the terrace of the house, gazing out. She listened to her mother’s little sobs, her shaky voice describing the dark torment of the girl’s final moments on earth and the despair of the bereaved family.

Later that night when she helped her mother into the hospital bed that had been set up for her in the barely used ground floor bedroom, she’d felt the thin back and the lumps there and had stroked gently as her mother lay back on the soft orthopaedic mattress with a sigh. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ she had whispered in her mother’s ear and her mother had clutched her hand and told her to never, not ever, take those trains again. ‘You hear me?’

The buses detangled and traffic flowed and they were moving again. The Jayanti Janata gave a tired whistle and they were passing by the bakery where her aunt Zulfath had taken her one April day a decade ago to buy Mysore pak for her cousin. It had smelled of bananas, the bakery. Overwhelming and intense. It was dark inside, an old building, a pre-independence structure, one of many ringing Swaraj Round and each year you’d think the corporation would demolish them but there they’d be, surviving another monsoon, even staying upright through the floods last year.

‘These shops are on their last legs,’ her father said, his voice rusty. He cleared his throat. ‘See the roof on that one?’

‘They aren’t demolishing them?’

‘The paper said they would after the floods. It’s been a year and here they still are.’

That day in the bakery, when her aunt bought the Mysore pak and took it home and gave a few blocks of the sweet to Rahmat to take to her mother, the owner of the store had asked Zulfath about the college where she was the Principal and if there wasn’t a clerical job open for his daughter. ‘Send her over,’ her aunt had told him. That large hearted woman, always trying to heal broken things. Wounded birds, limping cats, three-legged dogs, lost men, scarred women. She helped them all. Never threw out a machine that stopped working, either. She took it to the college and got the vocational students to repair it and it would be back in her house working as good as new. Her aunt was with Rahmat’s mother last year just after the floods, the week they found the one-armed man guilty of murdering the girl on the train. Zulfath had wiped the drool off her mother’s face, changed the soiled sheets, wiped clean her thighs and belly.

A few weeks later, in mid-September (that date, coming ever closer), Rahmat had stood at the door of the ground floor bedroom watching her aunt prepare her mother’s body for the funeral. The tender way she had washed and wiped clean everything. Cleansed her of earthly sorrows and sins. Later, along with her mother’s other sisters, Zulfath had recited the Yasin over the frail body. The face that was once her mother’s was now the clearest and most peaceful it had been in two years.

Her mother had not liked the Mysore pak when she’d taken it home. She’d asked where Zulfath had bought it and Rahmat had said it was from the old bakery near the railway station and her mother had made a face and muttered something about the strange places where her sister bought sweets and snacks. Why go to the dingiest bakery in all of Thrissur to get Mysore pak? Which is probably, she said as she sniffed the packet, rotting and old?

Here, can you smell it now? Can you smell the rot in it?

Sandhya and Madhu had come to the funeral and sat next to Rahmat and her sister and hugged them both. When they left after the burial, they told her to come to Kochi and spend a few days with them. Take your mind off things.

She’d refused. Sandhya had looked hurt. She’d called a week later. ‘Is it because the money hasn’t been returned to you yet, Rahmat?’

‘No, of course not.’ How easily the lies came out.

‘We are working on getting back the money. We will pay back your share of the investment. We know you sacrificed a lot.’ Sandhya couldn’t stop herself.

A lot. Money. Two years away from a steady job. Now she was making her way, getting back on her feet, getting those little watercolour prints out for architects and interior designers and then her mother had to die and Sandhya (and Madhu, never forget him, the ghost at all their banquets, the silent scowl) had to come back and dig it all up. Those fights about who spent how much time and effort and sweat in that little shop. Sandhya saying she was always trying her best to drum up sales by networking at swanky coffee shops around the city. Trying hard to land corporate orders for the beautifully produced diaries and planners while Rahmat paced around the store doing her best to convince a Korean couple that yes, she was the artist who’d done the illustrations and wouldn’t they like a nice memory of their time here in Kerala?

All that grief and anger and her mother’s anxiety each morning. ‘You don’t need to do this.’ The overfamiliarity with the toilets of the Jayanti Janata.

Stay the week in Kochi and go home on the weekends, Madhu had suggested six months before they finally pulled the plug. ‘Why do you need to keep doing that painful commute?’

So Sandhya hadn’t told him. And Rahmat wasn’t about to tell him now. She hadn’t shared confidences with him when they were studying in architecture school together. Not even when she’d been forced to be the third wheel during their lunches and picnics and movie outings (Madhu and I have to keep it respectable looking, Sandhya had pleaded, this can’t get back to my parents). He only had eyes and hands for Sandhya and Rahmat had looked the other way and never spoken about herself, her family, her home.

He’d never asked. A cold fish, a classmate had described him. Through their years together first as college sweethearts and then as husband and wife, Sandhya hadn’t managed to warm him up. ‘When did you tell him about my mother and her illness?’ Rahmat had asked Sandhya during the call, cutting her off in the middle of retreading the old, tired drama of their failed business venture.

‘What?’ Sandhya’s voice faltered.

‘When did you tell your husband about my mother and her illness?’

‘Last year maybe. Why do you ask?’

‘You never told him in all the time we were struggling? When he told me to stay in the city?’ When he blamed me – I know he did – for making you lose money.

‘I didn’t think it right.’

‘No, of course not.’ Why try to make your friend the sympathetic figure. Safer to let her take the blame.

‘Would you have wanted me to?’

Would she have wanted her to tell Madhu all? No. But Rahmat didn’t say it to her then. What had she told her?

Nothing conciliatory – it was the last time they had spoken. The rage must have taken over, seeped out the cracks and out into the world. Her mother’s body buried and rotting. This old friendship rotting along with her in that tree-filled cemetery. When she was a child, her mother had pointed out trees in another cemetery, in another country where trees were rare in desert soil, and said, ‘Look, the graves with the trees growing on them – can you see them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Those are the people who’ve gone up to heaven.’

Fairy tale nonsense, Umma, Rahmat wanted to tell her mother now. Nonsense you tried to fill my head with and nonsense you’d whispered in your last hours on earth. All you could speak about were trees then, too.

Her father and Rahiya had asked her, distressed, whether she knew what her mother had been talking about. What trees? Is there a favourite tree she has?

She knew it all – the belief, the history, the context. But they wouldn’t be at peace with that knowledge. Her father, she knew, would fret. Would probably drive past the cemetery in the days and months afterwards, anxiously peering over the walls to the distant grave and trying to figure out if a tree was growing. He might go and plant a sapling at her grave and then he’d have to take to gardening at home and in the cemetery. He’d infect her with the responsibility and guilt, too. Their family was rather good at that.

Her mother’s fairy tale nonsense (it was nonsense, it had to be) haunted her dreams now. Trees in her dreams every few days. A gnawing anxiety to go to the cemetery and search for that grave which, to be honest, she had never seen, never asked to go see. Her father might have allowed her, might have taken her there, if she’d asked. But if she didn’t see it, it wouldn’t come to her in her dreams, with trees or without them. She’d be safe and sane.

Rahiya, when she’d landed at the airport two weeks ago and got in the car, had asked her as they got on the national highway: ‘Did you ever go there? To see her grave?’

And she’d felt the anger rising. And rising. And spat out: ‘No, we’ve been told to let the dead lie, right? That’s what she kept saying when we were growing up? To let them go. Never hang on to the dead. That’s what she wanted when she was alive. Why should it be any different now that she’s gone?’

Her sister, her round belly heavy with new life on her slim frame, had shrunk away from her and Rahmat had felt the air burn around them. Her father, driving the car, hadn’t said a word but turned up the volume on the radio. Canned laughter and horns and giggles filled the cold air around them and in the night outside she saw the white lights of wayside restaurants swoop past.

Now, in the morning, a few weeks before Onam, her father turned the car into the City Centre compound and told her, ‘Go on, I will park the car. You go get her medicines. We can go to the supermarket afterwards.’

The pharmacy was outside the shopping centre and she walked back out, squeezing past the shoppers making their way in and the incoming cars and avoiding puddles of overnight rain. She walked past Mr. Iyer’s handloom store and the ayurveda shop. The pharmacist, Suresh, so familiar to her after three years of coming with prescription after prescription smiled and took her new list and said that he would get it ready in five minutes. More customers came in behind her, waving their little prescription slips and she stepped away and found herself in front of Lakshmi Silks.

They had come here when she was seventeen. They had to attend the wedding of a cousin. Or maybe it was a neighbour. Get yourself a saree, her mother had said. Zulfath was with them. Rahiya picked out a blue Mysore silk. Rahmat got herself a deep purple-red tussar. The colour of a bruise, the colour of a fresh blood clot on the skin.

It was a hot day like today, end of July, beginning of August. Too early for Mahabalis to appear. The store had weak air conditioning and they’d sweated, the four of them. They’d laughed, draping the sarees over themselves, complaining about the dim lights that prevented them from seeing the colours better. Come then, madam, the salesperson with the ash and vermillion on his forehead had said. Come on out and see it in the light. And the four of them had walked out together. They had stood where she was standing now. Four women, draped in colours they’d fallen in love with. Silk and thread and brocade and print.

We’ll take them, her mother had said. Delight drenched her voice. A wedding in August. A treat to look forward to, to dress up and go and celebrate new beginnings. To see siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and remember those who were lost and gone, who’d have enjoyed the wedding as much as they were.

The women faded away, the colours of the sarees dimmed. In the glass storefront of Lakshmi Silks was reflected the green canopy of Swaraj Round and the man selling packets of pink cotton candy. Two women dressed in white and gold kasavu sarees walked past. Was she wrong? Was Onam soon to arrive? The sooner it came, the sooner the date would fall on them, a year since she’d gone.

Rahmat went back to the pharmacy and paid for the medicines in their neat brown package and took one last look at where the four women had once stood.

‘Rahmat,’ her father’s voice called to her. She turned. He was standing by the gate to City Centre, his tall, gaunt frame picked out by the bright sun.

She walked towards him, the medicines stowed safely in her sling bag.