Casualty

When my mother conceived me, she wasn’t in a good place with my father. A failed marriage loomed over them and their desperate attempt to save it became my inception. Marriages were meant to be a permanent bond until death arrived to sever it. No one knew what it was like to live separately after a seemingly trying time together. Even if you hated your husband, you were supposed to live with him for the rest of your life and vice versa. Affairs on the sly, separate bedrooms and cold wars were all secretly acceptable but not divorce.

 As I grew up, I never heard a kind word from my father to my mother, and I never saw my mother smile at my father. They slept in separate rooms, and I slept with my mother. For me, that was natural. Parents weren’t supposed to coddle one another or pass, knowing smiles at one another over meals. They were meant to – like my parents – live under one roof in their respective rooms and argue whenever their paths collided however briefly. Every day as I went to school and my father went to work in the tea factory, I wondered what my mother did when she was by herself. I didn’t have to wonder too long because one day we were sent home early. I found my mother sitting in front of the mirror and staring at her reflection in perfect stillness. From the back, she looked like the statue of goddess Sarasvati in one the pandals put up by our village during Sarasvati puja. Wavy dark hair fell down to her waist in a thick tumble, and as I stood at the door and watched her dumbfounded, and as she stayed like that - oblivious of my presence - I realised that I had never seen my mother’s hair open like that. She always had it tied in a knot on top of her head, or kept it platted.

“Ama.” The words escaped my mouth in awe. I was struck by the beauty of her thick dark hair that cascaded like waves; waves of the Balasun river after the sun went down; waves of the Balasun river under a full moon night, mysterious and breathtaking. She whipped her head around as soon as she became aware of my presence, and I saw that she was wearing make-up. Bright, beautiful eyes lined with kohl and red lips stared back at me.

“Why the hell are you home so early?” She spat out and suddenly, all her beauty disappeared with the words that came out of her mouth turning her back at once into the bitter gourd she usually feeds me. I have vowed to never have or cook bitter gourd ever in my life when I grow up.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked. I was curious. She never left home.

“Do I have to go somewhere every time I put make-up and comb my hair? Can’t I do what I want for once?” She said, her sentences all ending in questions that I had no answers for. Turning back to the mirror, she added, “as long as your father isn’t at home, I can bloody well do what I want.” I understood then that it was all about father. A part of me was happy that she wasn’t going anywhere, but a part of me wondered what our house would be like without her.

She suddenly stood up and ran to the bathroom emerging half an hour later without the make-up. A lop-sided smile hung in one corner of her mouth, and her eyes were glassy. She had washed her face, and it appeared red and raw. Perhaps she had rubbed it too hard. The rims of her eyes and the tip of her nose were a bright red like the lipstick on her lips a while ago. Had she been crying? Drinking in the bathroom?

I realised later that she had been doing both.

I was old enough to see that my mother was miserable and that my father was more like a guest who stayed the night watching tv into the wee hours of the morning drinking whiskey. I didn’t understand how he stayed up every night and still be on time for work. Once, I stayed up all night studying for an exam and the next day, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d studied the night before. I fell asleep on the desk and failed the exam.

It wasn’t until I began watching shows on the black and white tv in my neighbour’s house that I saw that a father and a mother could smile at each other and say kind words to one another all the time and sleep in the same bed and exchange knowing smiles over meals. To me, that was some revelation. I wanted to see more of that. Somehow, I got hungry for shows like that. It was like I was craving for food that I had never tasted. My best friend Pema chuckled when I once said that I would like my father and mother to be kind to one another because the folks on tv were so kind to one another and when they were so nice to one another everything seemed so lovely all around.

“Dummy. All that isn’t real. That’s what tv shows do. They make you long for things you cannot have.”

What would she know? I thought later. She only had a mother. She never knew her father since he’d died long before she was even born. That’s what mother had said when I’d asked her about where Pema’s father was. Then I had been horrified when she’d added. “I’d be lucky to be in her mother’s shoes.” What kind of a wife wishes for her husband to die? I thought revulsed by my mother’s words.

In our neighbourhood, we’d often hear about a boy and a girl eloping for three days and three nights until their families gave up searching and welcomed them home as a couple. People in our village talked about how deeply the couple were in love that they just couldn’t do without each other. Could two people love like that? I wondered. Then what of my parents? Did they start with a love like that? Or were they just brought together by my grandparents one day and said that they were to live as husband and wife from that day on?

Mira, a girl in my class who sat beside me, slipped a note in my desk one day.  I really like you. It said. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say and why she’d had to write a note when I was sitting right next to her. I liked her too, and I liked Pema, just like I liked everyone in my class. She probably read my confusion because the next thing she did was pull my hand under the desk and squeeze it and look at me like the people on tv did. I panicked, because no one had pulled my hand under the desk and squeezed it looking at me like that. For some reason, I kept this from Pema. I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to keep this a secret and I felt disgusted when I thought of Mira's hand on mine. What was that?

When I came home, my mother opened the door with a blue eye. I pretended not to notice it. She went back to her room while I went to the kitchen to rummage pots and pans for leftover lunch. I ate a bowl full of rice and chicken, and I still wasn’t satisfied. I felt hollow inside. Father came home in the evening piss drunk and picked a fight with mother again. I wanted to run away from home. A week later I bled, and terrified as I was, seeing the big black spot in my underwear, I screamed so loudly that my mother banged on the bathroom door and struck me hard with her knuckles when I opened it. That was when I was told that I had become a woman. My stomach bloated, and it hurt everywhere, especially my chest that had begun to swell too. “You better be careful now. Boys will smell you like dogs.” My mother said, pulling out a sanitary napkin from the drawer and handing it to me. I was mortified by the sudden changes in my body, and I thought that I was dying. One thing I was sure about those days was that I had been struck by a terminal disease, and I was dying. I waited for death to embrace me, but it never arrived.

The bleeding stopped to my relief only to appear again a month later. I had thousands of questions popping in my head continuously those days, but every time I began talking to mother in bed at night, she would turn away. When I pressed, she'd breathe heavily and say, “enough! You are a woman now. Understand that. Men will want you the way you have never been wanted. Keep away from them.” Keep away from men was the first real advice I got from my mother. Men like my father I thought, who never smiled or said a kind word to mother or to me, who drank like a fish and picked fights almost every day.

 Our house turned into a battleground when mother began to hit back. Soon we had broken things lying around in the house that could no longer be fixed. I wanted to run away from home. I thought about it every night, but where would I go? Then one day it dawned on me. There was a monastery far up on the hill where only female nuns lived and practised. I had been there once or twice during festivals. Could I go there and live with them? There wouldn't be any men smelling me up like dogs there. What would happen to my mother if I left? That was one troubling question that reared its head up like a snake in my head. I was never close to my mother, and I hated the way she got annoyed at me for every little thing. She wasn’t the kind of mother I saw on tv or read about in books.

Sometimes I wanted to do things to make her cry or worry. Like that time when I didn’t come home for the night. I stayed at Pema’s house without telling her. The next day, she slapped me across the face and pulled my hair, saying, “how dare you! How dare you do this to me too!” I was more frightened than hurt. I didn’t know who to hate more. The man who was my father in name only, or the woman who gave birth to me and called herself my mother but did nothing else that other mothers did. I had learnt to do things early by myself. I cooked, I cleaned, I washed, and I could take care of myself better than any other girls my age. My mother only cooked when she was in a good mood, and that was rare.

Then one day, news hit our small village. “Did you hear?” Our neighbour, a woman with a substantial girth, said pushing herself in through our tiny door.

“Namu has left her husband.”

“For another man?” My mother asked, dark rings under her eyes making her look like a ghost.

“No, she left just like that. She didn’t even bother to take her things. And oh, those children! What will happen to them now? Disgraceful woman. Couldn’t she have thought about what this will do to her parents? They will be treated like outcasts now.”

My eyes darted between my mother and our neighbour, and strangely, my mother smiled as though she was glad for the woman. But when she spoke, she said, “you’re right; her parents will be shamed, and everybody will feel sorry for her husband and the children. She will never be welcomed back. Where did she go? That woman?” The smile lingered on her lips a few more seconds but our neighbour, who was busy lifting lids off our pots to see what mother had cooked, didn’t notice it.

That night in bed, I turned towards mother. We faced each other and just as she was about to turn away, I spoke. “Do you want to leave too?”

“What?” Her voice was hoarse.

“I said, do you want to leave father too?” I repeat.

“Go to sleep. It’s late.” She turned away, and I didn’t see the tears that fell on her pillow. I only felt her shoulders shake.

That night I must have grown a whole lot because for the first time I felt a pang inside. It hurt, and it wasn’t my pain. It was my mother’s. She had been in pain all along. The pain of a loveless marriage. The pain of an indifferent husband, sorrow for all the wasted years in school and college when she could’ve used it to find a job and become independent. Pain and anger for trusting someone else more than trusting herself. Pain for not being able to become a mother to me, for not being able to love me.

Love, a confusing emotion had somehow niggled its way inside me, and it was no short of a miracle. It was perhaps my birth-right to feel it even if no one had taught me how to. That such emotion was a natural order of things and should come just as naturally as the seasons. I felt love for my mother that night. I wanted to hold her even when I knew she would slap my hand away. That night I felt love for my father. I wanted to tell him it’s okay. I understood how he ached inside, being despised by the woman his parents had so carefully picked for him. For the first time, I understood that it hurt him more than anything else. The monastery on the hill that beckoned me so loudly that past month, now seemed too far away and the journey there seemed impossible.

I was born as an attempt to save a marriage. A loveless marriage. I stood as a testament for two people who had tried and failed but had nowhere else to escape. I thought about the way Mira had squeezed my hand under the desk and looked at me with a kind of yearning. Was she feeling love?

I don’t know what it exactly means to love one another. I can mimic it from books and tv and films of course, but I don’t really know what it means to do things for love, but that night, I was willing to try. I wanted to try. I wanted to feel loved and I wanted to love another person. Home, was where I wanted to start. My mother and father were the people I wanted to start loving. Love, that little word suddenly felt so big and unattainable, but I was willing to try.

*Illustrations by Yoshay

Friendship for Grown-Ups A Review

By Nao-cola Yamazaki

Translated by Polly Barton 

“One day, there was light. The light hit the rock. The rock was filled with life, [.]”

An immensely delightful read, Friendships for Grown-ups is a collection of three very short stories that are interlinked with one another. What got my attention was Strangers Press’ artistic format of this chapbook, so beautifully compiled, and of course Yamazaki’s graceful and delicate writing. Three stories that start with an amusing almost comical story called A Genealogy, which is about a rock’s evolution into finally becoming this woman called Kandagawa. An inanimate object such as a simple rock gives -through an evolutionary process – birth to an animate being, a woman whose name is Kandagawa, and who is the protagonist of the second story. I loved the part how as a human Kandagawa goes to the bath house and when she stretches her legs, she remembers how in the past she used to be a fish.

“When she looked at the painted nails of her feet that were sticking out of the bathwater, she though they looked like fins.”

The second and third story focuses on relationships. In The Untouched Apartment,
Kandagawa is having a dream about her previous apartment that she’d shared with her ex-boyfriend Mano. She then gets a call from him out of the blue, and together they set off to see their old apartment. Walking together in their old neighbourhood and visiting their university and restaurant, Kandagawa realises that she no longer is the person she used to be when she was with Mano. Like the coelacanth climbing out of the water onto land in the first story, she has evolved, moved on and become someone else.

“It was a white pebble, about the size of a peanut. She’d chosen it because it had looked somehow pure. She held it under the fluorescent light, and stared at it. It still had traces of soil in it. Unsure whether stones are combustible or non-combustible, she hesitated for a while. Then she threw it in with the non-combustible rubbish."

In the final story Lose Your Private Life, which is the longest out of the three, Terumi Yano who is Kandagawa’s friend, is a writer under the pen name Waterumi. She falls in love with Matsumoto a musical composer but her feelings remain unrequited. This story really struck a chord because it is about defining oneself through the eyes of others. Yano is heartbroken when she realises that Matsumoto only loves her novels and not her as a person. Yano struggles with the separation between the art and artist initially believing that she is separate from all of the novels she’s written, just a girl in love with a boy. Like the first story, Yano too through a difficult process realises that her raison d’etre is her writing and that the art and artist are one, and as the title suggests Yano finds a way to lose her private self, merging with her art.

“I fall in love because I think that unless I fall in love I won’t be able to write properly, but the things I write are a thousand times more attractive than I myself am, so nobody ever likes me as a person, but I’m going to give my life up to writing, so it doesn’t matter.”

I resonated a lot with the second and third stories in a way that it sat so close to me in its reflections. That we are continuously evolving through different phases of our lives, and yet how that change is the only constant is something that we all ponder upon from time to time. It is when you see it in a body writing, it strikes a major chord. Yamazaki’s fine story telling in Polly Barton’s brilliant translation is a dedication to that very aspect of the slippage of time without the realisation of which we have become someone else entirely.

From a distance even dust motes twinkle deluding the human eye - Review of Twinkle Twinkle by Kaori Ekuni

“I try to be careful, but sometimes I fall in love.” Kaori Ekuni in her afterword of the novel.

Mutuski, a gay doctor bordering on OCD is married to Shoko a highly strung, slightly alcoholic woman. Shoko is aware that Mutsuki is gay when their marriage is arranged but she gives her consent readily. She strongly agrees that Mutsuki continues his relationship with his lover Kon, always coaxing him to tell her stories about Kon and their time together. When Mutsuki insists that Shoko should have a boyfriend, she vehemently denies. She doesn't warm up to the idea about having a boyfriend outside her marriage, but she is alright with her husband having a lover outside the marriage.
Sounds bizarre right? Well I thought so too in the beginning, and it took me a while to get into the story. However, it was much later I realised that I had actually fallen in love with this story and its eccentric female character. Shoko is unstable, fiery and drinks more than one should. She feels she’s culpable in fooling Mutsuki into the marriage and cannot stand his kindness. But the truth  is, she is deeply in love with her husband and with the way he is with Kon, knowing that their relationship goes way back to high school days. She desperately wants to have a part of what Mutsuki and Kon have. She wants to be accepted by the two of them and when she cannot get that through to Mutsuki, she retaliates through volatile outbursts and depressive behaviour.
Twinkle Twinkle is not your ordinary story and the simplistic writing does delude you to the point that it may sometimes even bore you in the beginning but if you have the patience, this gem of a story gets to you even before you realise it. It’s a late bloomer appearing cold and stiff in the beginning to the point of frustrating the reader, but slowly unfolds into this heart-warming story of love and a complete understanding of the other half. It also made me rethink about romantic love and its inevitable tie with physical consummation.
“The feeling I had that I was embracing water came not from the loneliness of a sexless marriage, but from the complex we both had about it – the suffocating need to be sensitive to the other’s feelings the whole time.”
Twinkle Twinkle does address the frustrations of societal pressures of how men and women are supposed to conform to their stereotypical roles of man and wife, but the author’s main intent is to tell a love story between unlikely people, and that, love is not something restricted to sexual preferences or the number of people. Love can bloom between any two or even three very different people.
The author mentions in her afterword that one of the chapters “Sleepers and the One that Watcheth” is based on a painting by Simeon Solomon. I looked it up and the author’s intention suddenly became clear to me.
I must add here that only Japanese writers can write about a topic so sensitive and so fragile with such serenity.  I also must give credit to Emi Shimikawa for her brilliant translation. 5 out of 5 stars from me.

Pachinko, A Book Review

                 

                    “History has failed us, but no matter.”

A compelling family saga spanning four generations, Min Jin-Lee’s Pachinko begins in 1910 in Japan occupied Korea, and ends in 1989; the year Lee got the idea for this epic tale. Pachinko opens with the story of Hoonie, the club-footed and cleft-lipped man marrying a fifteen-year-old in Yeongdo a small fishing village in Busan, Korea. It is their daughter Sunja who carries the story forward as she grows up helping her mother in their boarding house. In due time Sunja falls in love with the rich Koh Hansu, an older man who dotes on her and lavishes her with expensive gifts but his affluence comes from dubious quarters. Sunja falls pregnant, but Koh Hansu already has a wife and three girls in Japan - a truth Sunja only learns after she's carrying his child. Luckily for Sunja, Baek Isak a sickly but a compassionate protestant priest offers to give the child a name and a new life in Japan. Sunja follows her husband, a man she barely knows into an inhospitable country, and as they begin their life in Japan together with Yoseb and Kyunghee, Baek Isak’s brother and sister-in-law, a future full of adversity awaits for them but not without a few snatches of happiness.

Undeniably an engaging read, Pachinko is the kind of book that comes by only once in a while. Lee’s eloquent and smooth storytelling keeps the reader thoroughly engrossed. At the heart of it, two resilient women Sunja and Kyunghee, whose indomitable spirit to live with courage and fortitude under adverse circumstances is the kernel of the story. Lee walks us through the history of Korea and Japan through her characters, and she does it with great finesse. What struck me most about this novel was the outrageously inhuman treatment the Koreans received at the hands of the Japanese during the Japanese occupation. One couldn’t even hold on to their names. The advantage laid in being more Japanese and the Koreans in Japan did everything to be Japanese which tore them apart from their countrymen who wouldn’t have them back in Korea. Another thing that struck me about Pachinko was how the male characters with all their complexities, their inadequacies and their failings, highlight the unflinching tenacity of Sunja’s and Kyunghee’s characters, and even Sunja’s mother Yangjin’s character. Lee’s women struggle, suffer irreparable heartbreaks, but they do not get bent out of shape which is the strength of this 531 pages monolithic work of staggering brilliance.

A sweeping journey through the history of adversity between the Koreans and the Japanese during the Japanese occupation, the division of North and South Korea, and it’s repercussions on the proletariat, Pachinko is a heart burner.

As Lee points out, history always fails the low working class readily sacrificed in the strife between two great powers. 

The House by the Graveyard

Up here in the hilly countryside, where the land is restless, the landscape is always shifting.  The house that stood on the hill yesterday seems to have sunken a few inches. The plates within the mounds and hills are constantly shifting and every year during monsoons, the land slips and slides claiming many lives. Up here, the fog shrouds the land in a way that one hardly notices a shift here and a drop there. Up here, the fog casts an ineffaceable gloom under which the living walk in a silent cortege while the ghosts of the past rise and mingle with the milky air.

 For nine-year-old Rega, her tiny house perched on a small plateau overlooking the graveyard is her lifeline. She was born in that house and in all her nine years of life, she has known that she will never leave this place. The two-storeyed ramshackle is small with several tiny rooms allotted to the siblings. The biggest room belongs to their parents, and as they’d have it,  they have a new addition to the family every year. Rega the eldest, has four young brothers and sisters under her and her mother is expecting again. There had been more than four after Rega and two above her who hadn’t survived the unforgiving winter that seeped through cracks on the walls and from under the doors sucking the life out of infants.

The house is derelict and rickety, and at night when the wind blows, it heaves and creaks and moans. The house overlooks a graveyard, stooping like an aged watchman, watching over the lonely departed whose earthly remains are either interred or cremated on the ground below. A vast plain that stinks of rot and death. Haphazard stone blocks mark a grave here and there and whitewashed tombs stand out oddly like scant teeth inside an old mouth.

On a day like this, when the fog breathes through the trees and creeps into every small crevice and crack, the graveyard is obscured behind the thick white pearly churning, covering everything within it and beyond it. On a day like this, when little children are better off sitting at home by the flickering candlelight poring over a book or by the roaring fireside, their jaws hanging low, listening to sinister tales spun by the elders, of days long gone when ghosts outnumbered the living, Rega is out in the woods nearby looking for Pretty, her goat. Her mother had given them each an animal from their small farm to look after, and while her sisters had got three hens each, her youngest brother the rooster, she had Pretty to take care of. Pretty is due to give birth any time and she has wandered off into the overgrowth below the house in the morning with a huge belly jiggling around her. At around late noon when the daylight begins to diminish, her siblings collect the hens and the rooster and put them in their pens. Their mother serves weary men - on their way back from town after selling the days vegetables, dairy products and eggs - who stop by her shop for tea and snacks. They still have a long way to go before they reach their homes further down in the valley, but for now, they sit and enjoy the small respite.

Rega passes the graveyard and enters the woods beyond, looking for Pretty. Her tiny heart trembles a little and it’s not the graveyard she’s frightened of. It’s the tall dark trees that loom over her and whisper over her head as though conspiring against her.  It’s the long winding road that is slowly being swallowed by the dark on the other end that plucks at her nerves. On a day like this, it’s natural for one’s thoughts to wander into dark places inside the head and lift that curtain of what if?

What if something unnatural, something unsightly is waiting behind the trees or at the end of the path?

“Prettyyyyy! Prettyyyyy!” She calls out but the fog rushes in muffling the sound of her voice as she opens her mouth. Rooks fly high above cawing, headed to their nests but other than that, there is a still, compact silence around her and she thinks it strange because the woods are usually never bereft of sound.

“Pretty, where are you? Here girl, come here.” She tries again. Nothing. Heavy silence sits upon her and a voice inside tells her to turn around and run homewards but the thought of the heavily pregnant Pretty tears her heart and Rega knows that she must find her. The wind carries the fog from the hills above and engulfs Rega in its cold wet embrace blinding her and although she is used to the weather and the antics nature plays, she is aware of a presence just a few inches from her.  She is used to imagining ghosts amid the mist hovering in the air, swirling, feetless, but growing up above the graveyard she knows that there are no sinister spirits, only sad lonely ghosts, longing for a glimpse of a world they once were a part of.  She has seen them many times sitting on vestiges of old forgotten graves and she knows that there is nothing frightening about them. But this presence, waiting, watching behind the dense fog is something else. It’s not something that has risen from the dead but from something living, something threatening, something perilous. Rega takes a few steps backwards in the growing darkness when she hears a bleating further down by the bush. 

She sprints towards the direction of the sound and in the middle of a thorny bramble she finds Pretty. She has pushed herself under the overgrowth somehow and has given birth to a fine young calf. Rega tears her way in through the bush, thorns stabbing her, ripping through her hanju and grazing her skin but the pain doesn’t bother her, neither does the danger that darkness brings along. The only thought she has is that mother is going to be happy to see the new-born calf. This means extra income with goat milk and goat cheese and that would please mother very much. The calf would grow up and contribute in its own way. She picks up the slick little body and cradles it between the folds of her chuba, and beckoning Pretty she starts walking towards home. 

As she reaches the landing where she had sensed the presence, Pretty snorts, her entire body becoming rigid. She has sensed it too. Daylight is receding fast and the dense brume swirls and froths, turning darker in shade as the colour of the night blends into it. Pretty’s flanks contract, and breathing heavily, she lets out thick white beams of vapour from her mouth and nose. Suddenly she raises herself on hind legs and sprints towards the direction of the house leaving the calf and Rega behind.

Rega gathers the hem of her chuba in one hand and rushes behind Pretty who has disappeared in the haze. She runs as fast as she could, the tiny kid pressed against her small flat chest. She reaches the graveyard and sprints through it,  looking neither left nor right. Silent graves stare blankly at her and weary old ghosts sitting on the headstones watch her, cheering her on to hurry, like spectators in a race, waving their armless sleeves in the wind. Encouraged by the cheering, she races ahead but something is at her heels, something thick and viscous tangling itself around one of her ankles. She has no time to stop and examine. She must run before it’s too late. Finally, further above, she sees a dull glimmer of a torch burning through the dense murk. She knows she’s close now. Through the accursed fog she can make out the silhouette of the crooked roof and uneven windows glowing yellow from within, glowing with life and with hope, and she knows that she is home any minute.

“Rega!” Her mother is looking down from the window, holding the flaming torch high above her head.

“Quick child! You had us all worried.” Her mother’s voice is a blessing and small bubbles of happiness burst inside her. She is finally home safe and she has a welcoming surprise to share with everybody. She wouldn’t trade this moment for anything in the world even if it meant that she’d have to encounter the stygian danger again, the one that threatened to eat her whole.

The night is dark and the wind savage. The fog presses against the window panes trying to get in but failing.  Her brothers and sisters have all rolled like snails and cashews in the corners of their beds deep in sleep, blankets kicked away. The pale light of the dying embers flickers in the fireplace. A stream of cold wind pushes through the cracks and Rega lies under a thick warm woollen blanket, waiting for sleep to visit her. She listens to her mother’s sonorous breathing behind the thin wall that separates them and smiles. 

The house is old and rickety but it is their safe haven, their respite from the grim world outside. The house holds all of them within its belly, wanting to shield them from savage storms of life. But then, up here, where the fog and the wind and the rain reign, the land shifts and slips quietly and sometimes when the day breaks, a house has disappeared in the night, a family has joined the brood of ghosts in the graveyard down below, and the world moves on, clueless, blind and unstirred by the drudgery of the less fortunate. 

A shadow of a little girl peeking out of a lonely shabby cottage overlooking the graveyard can sometimes be seen by porters and carriers on the way up to town. But they know better. It’s only the shadow from the past.  A trick played by the fog.

My Mister - A Short Story

 I saw him sitting on a low concrete block outside the mall. His head buried between the crooks of his arms and his hands dangling loosely. Slender long fingers like an artist’s or a pianist’s. I had never seen beautiful hands belonging to a man. They were usually either big with knotted fingers or too fleshy. His hands were beautiful, different, and the way he rested his head on his arms stirred an inexplicable feeling within me.

I sat across him, dressed in my regular interview attire and I had just come out of my tenth interview I had been to in the past two weeks. So far, I had faced nothing but rejection. In my twenty-two years of age, I had already faced so much rejection that my hopes of finding a decent job were dwindling. I couldn't study further because I needed to ease the load off my mother’s shoulders back home who ran a small kiosk of homemade snacks. I had to make sure that my younger siblings were well fed.  It had already been five years since my father passed away from a poor heart on a cold December morning. He had only gone out to relieve himself when he had tripped and fallen and that was it. His heart has just given up right there. These five years have been tough for my mother and I've been compelled to find a job to pay the bills. 

I took a sip from my water bottle and continued watching him. A few minutes later, he raised his head and looked around. Perhaps a bit older than I am, the man wore deep frown lines in the middle of his forehead. He wore a serious expression on his face that made him look stern but otherwise he had an amicable face with slender features, pointed chin and wavy dark hair that curled under his earlobes. He caught my gaze and I looked away at once, too embarrassed at being caught. I rummaged my bag instead; looking for something I had no intention of finding. Then I saw him stand up and walk away and I noticed that he had left behind his notebook. I jumped, grabbed the notebook and ran calling after him.

“Excuse me!” No response.

“Hello! Hello!” No response.

“ Excuse me, Mister, you dropped your...” By then I was right behind him and I touched his back with the tip of the notebook and he swung around. His eyes wide with surprise. I saw that he was tall and lean.

“I’m sorry,” I began but he took the notebook from my hand and smiled. Then bowing his head slightly he walked off without a word.

Another day, another interview, another hollow promise of “we’ll be in touch.”

I sit at the same spot filling my belly with water so that I don’t go too hungry. I only have money for dinner. I’m weary from running around and I’m desperate for a job. Anything will do. I remember my mother’s face weathered by sun and wind, standing out in that little kiosk day after day, season after season, her struggles ceaseless. My eyes sting from the pain I feel in my heart and I desperately wish I could do something for her. I was sent to the city to study further on scholarship and I had chosen the subject that I was the best in. English Literature. The scholarship ended when I passed out and at the time I didn’t know that to be able to find a job with such a subject as a background, one must study further and at least have a doctorate degree in hand. So, instead, I geared up to find jobs at office front desks or anywhere that hired people based on good English speaking skills. The only job I couldn't handle was in places that required heavy labour. I’m small and I can’t carry heavy load. My mother toiled day and night and made sure that I never did physical labour at home. She always saw me as working in an office and not sweating my life away doing menial labour.

As I sit here thinking and wondering what I step I should take next, a tiny voice inside says, “perhaps it’s best to go back home and help your mother instead. You’ll find something small to make ends meet.”

As I weigh my options, I look around casually, and suddenly I spot a sign by the lamppost. Help Wanted. There is an arrow pointing towards a cluster of shops. I follow the sign and find myself standing in front of a big bookshop with the same sign at the glass door. Help Wanted. The name outside reads Mary Shelley Book Store. It didn’t take long for me to pick up that, Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame is perhaps the owner’s favourite author.

I walk in and a few minutes later, I walk out and sit on the bench outside. They’ve asked me to wait for a while. The lady who interviewed me looked like a dignified professor with short-cropped silver hair. Perhaps she is a professor who also runs a bookshop. I had used the name of the bookshop as a trump card and I noticed how it impressed her.

Minutes later I’m ushered back in by one of the two boys working there.  I find the lady sitting where I’d left her. She smiles at me and announces that I got the job. My heart is a bed of soft spring flowers and I can smell happiness. She explains my job details which to my surprise entails not just selling books but also learning sign language. I’m a bit perplexed at that, and I ask her feeling confused.

“What has sign language got to do with this job?”

She shifts her position in her chair and takes a sip from her cup. “The person who is in charge here is not me, darling, it’s my son and you will have to work with him on a daily basis and the sign language is for that very purpose.” She pauses and studies me.

“You’re not against working with people with a certain handicap are you?”

I’ve never really thought about that. People like us, who have everything functioning as it should, never really think about all that stuff. So her question throws me off guard and the answer that comes out of my mouth is different than I had thought.

“No! No, I have nothing against it. In fact, I would like to extend as much help as I can.”

It's perhaps my desperation for a job that my mouth runs ahead of my head.

“Good then!” She presses the buzzer and a young helper appears in sight.

“Could you ask Nishin to come in?” The boy disappears as hastily as he had come in. She then continues. “So, what do you make of Mary Shelley?”

“I’ve read Frankenstein. We had it in the second year and I really enjoyed studying it.

"Life although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I must defend it."

I quote from a passage that is dear to me. She claps her hands gleefully and I can see that she likes me. 

“Did you know that Mary Shelley wrote more works beside Frankenstein?”

“Yes indeed, she was a biographer and a travel writer too,” I added and the lady raises her eyebrows. I have impressed her.

“You are unassuming to look at but you really are quite the treasure aren't you?.” She adds genuinely and my heart flutters a little because this is the first time anyone has complimented me so lavishly.

Just then the door opens and a man probably in his late twenties steps in and as my gaze falls on him, I recognise him immediately.

With the same long fingers he signs at his mother deftly and the way his fingers move captivates me. Like fish swimming in the water, effortlessly, fins unfurling and curling like magic. I now understand how he'd come to have such beautiful fingers. I suddenly realize that I’m staring at him with my mouth hanging open and I quickly shut it.

“For now, you can use a pad and pen to communicate with Nishin. He owns the bookshop. I only help him a bit.” His mother rises from the chair to leave.

“Oh I’m Kiden by the way, Nishin’s mother.” She extends her hand to take mine and taking her proffered hand nervously I thank her for taking me for the job. She merely smiles and says,

“Thank Nishin, not me.”

She leaves the room with the man and me facing each other awkwardly. I scribble on the pad hastily, thank you for considering me for the job.

He writes back, and his cursive is much better than mine.

You’re welcome, I saw you sitting there the other day and I noticed that you had been to countless interviews. So I thought I could help you a bit.  He smiled.

How did you know that I had been to many interviews? I scribble back.

From your shoes. They were worn out more than your clothes and you are too young to have your shoes worn out like that.

I drew my legs away hastily embarrassed at being found out.

Studying me quietly for a while, he writes again.

“Something told me you would come back there and I pasted the notice on the lamp post just so that you could see.”  

He had a playful expression on his face as he wrote this.

I couldn’t believe that he did that for me. I couldn’t believe that a complete stranger saw me for who I really was and had understood all the battles I’d been fighting inside. I couldn’t believe that in today’s day and age there are people watching out for you finding you at the most desperate hour. For me, he, my mister, came to me as a saviour in my most dire hour.

For the first time in months, I felt like I was in a safe place in this wide big city that had so far been nothing but hostile to me.

For the first time, I understood the meaning of compassion from someone who had lived his life like a stone at the bottom of the sea, in a world bereft of sound.

For the first time I understood the meaning of an open heart and suddenly, life to me seemed beautiful and kind.

* Illustration by Yoshay

No Return

Today is the first day without her and I just cannot bring myself to accept the fact that she is gone. She’s gone off to a faraway place from where I can neither bring her back nor can I reach her, no matter how many journeys I may take. She’s probably still on her way to that place. A place from where there’s no return even if she wants to. When I close my eyes I see her running off at a distance, her hair flowing behind her and I run after her, but no matter how fast I run, the distance between us only widens until she is just a dot far-far away and then she disappears. When I open my eyes everything else moves as it always did. The rain slashes down on people’s umbrellas as it always did. A lonely stray dog shivers in the corner drenched in the rain, like thousands of other stray dogs I have come across in my seventeen years of life. People walking past me have the same expressions as they always do - that neutral blank look when the facial muscles are slagging, unanimated by any kind of emotion. Their feet pattering on the sidewalk along with the rain.

I already miss her. I miss her so much that I want to stand on top of this bench and cry out to her wherever she is. My arms already ache from not being able to hold her. The memory of the smell of her hair when she rested her head against my chest, sting my eyes and suddenly everything is swimming in my tears. Soon people are going to come after me. Her family. I did something I shouldn’t have but I had to keep my promise to her. One day, she playfully said that if she ever were to die before me, then I should scatter her ashes in a place high up in the mountains from where one could see the sun rising on one side and setting on the other. A place from where one could see the mountain ridges. A place where civilization would never intrude. I had held my hand over her mouth and chided her for having even thought that she and I’d be separated like that.

I clutch the urn sitting on my lap. I haven’t peeked inside it. I can’t. I can’t see her in a heap of ashes. When I took the urn from her family and ran, it was still warm against my belly. I knew that warmth. She had pressed herself against me thousands of times and we had shared our warmth promising each other to always love each other like that. I’m angry at her for leaving me so suddenly like this. I curse her for being so reckless and not thinking that she was as responsible for her life as she was for mine. Please come back and save me, is all I can say at the end of my angry rants because no matter how hard I lash out, the fact that she’s never coming back makes me so desperate that I end up grovelling. I am cracking up and all that I held inside is seeping out. Soon I’ll be broken and I’ll be in pieces and I won’t be able to pull myself together. Before that happens I must make it to the mountaintop. I must make her wish come true. My only goal now, my only purpose in life is to take her to the place she wanted to go to.  I will never be able to say goodbye because of all the times I spent with her and those memories hover above me and inside me. I will never say goodbye. I love her too much to even spell the words. I will never forgive her for leaving me like this. I’m that angry at her.

The rain has stopped and the sun peeps from behind the clouds to warm up and to dry everything that the rain has left cold and wet. I walk up to a store and buy a rucksack. Then I ease her gently into the rucksack and walk out of the store with her pressed against my back. I can feel her hands circling my chest from behind. She’s still warm and that warms my heart. Outside, I hail a taxi to the town that lies closest to my destination.

Illustration - Yoshay