In the drawing room of the Tiruvella house where amma still lives, close to the carved windows that look out onto the courtyard is a small teak table. On the table stands a heavy black telephone that rings loudly enough to wake even the owl that perches in the back veranda. Sitting in New York I dial the string of numbers. I hear the little clicks and splutters as the phone connects, then starts to ring.
I hear amma pick it up and set it to her ear.
“Ah Meena,” she murmurs. “I knew it was you.”
She sounds relieved to hear me. I can tell she is lonely. She asks me what I am cooking these days.
“Salads,” I say, “it’s so warm here.”
It always surprises her that I can cut up spinach without cooking it and not fear damage to my intestines. “You should at least steam the head of spinach,” she admonishes me. “We would never dream of eating things raw like that.”
I cut into our food conversation.
“I am going away for three weeks, to a château in Switzerland.”
“Why on earth?”
“They invited me and I need a break.”
I cannot tell her that memories have been flashing in on me at the oddest moments, flickering flames that threaten to eat me up. I do not tell her that I have been visiting a therapist on Central Park West who sits me down on her couch, helps me to remember what is too hard to bear.
Quickly, before amma can object, I ask her to write down a phone number for the Château de Lavigny.
“What happened to grandmother Kunju?”
“Happened?”
“Yes, I mean her death.” I ask this quite bluntly, then add, “It’s for something I am writing.”
Her breath comes in gasps on the phone.
“It’s for something I am writing,” I repeat in case she hadn’t heard. I hold on tight to the phone as her breathing returns to its normal pitch.
I fear amma still thinks of my writing as a useless profession. Years ago she told me that women who wrote did so because they had nothing better to do. “It’s like hanging your dirty laundry outside the house for all to see. Nothing more than that.” She said this in a fine clear voice. Trained in classical vocal music and also in the Anglican hymns her mother favoured, she has a lovely speaking and singing voice. At the age of seven amma was sent off to a boarding school run by two Scottish Presbyterian sisters, the Misses Nicholson. So that grandmother Kunju could devote herself to her political work, to her travel and organising for the Indian nationalist cause.
Now I hear amma say: “Your grandmother Kunju died in 1944.”
“How old was she?” I ask.
“Your grandmother was exactly a month short of her fiftieth birthday.”
My mother speaks very softly into the phone, as if she were whispering to a child. Her calm words send a jolt through me. As if I have touched a live wire in the wall and received a jagged shot of electricity. Not harsh enough to burn but sufficient to remember.
This is exactly my age, give or take a few months. Now in midlife, childhood is playing havoc with me.
I stare through my window and see the waters of the Hudson River. I feel I am falling through the surface into the river of my childhood. The ash trees turn into sharp green blades of paddy. Slowly a car is driving through the trees toward the river. It is a metallic silver color. Staring at it restores me.
I need to change the pace of our talk, adjust the balance of the ancestral scales. I cannot forget that my mother is still waiting for what I might say.
My mind flashes to a pair of ancient scales. Ilya once took me to a temple courtyard in Tiruvananthapuram. We were on a visit to the Arabian Sea. How old was I, four perhaps four and a half? In the courtyard, poised on a stone pedestal were scales that reached into the sky. Ilya explained that the scales were used to measure the weight of kings. In one scale the rajah would squat. In the other they piled up gold, precious stones, bananas, papayas, the sweetest coconuts. Sometimes they would sneak out the heaviest palm leaf manuscript they could find. Or the burdensome Malayalam dictionary.
Ilya lifted me up, so high my skirts flashed in sunlight. He set me in the scales. As they lilted precipitously, he leaned into the other side, pressing hard with his hands, so they would balance.
Is his ghost still there, to push me into air?
Suddenly I need amma as I have never needed her. Her voice will settle me back into my torn, scuffed skin. I am the girl who fled her skin, I want to cry to her. But she cannot hear me.
As amma goes on about the high price of sugar in the marketplace, the rising costs of rice and dal, a ritual portion of our weekly conversation, I think, who can measure the burden of flesh, whether that of a child or a king? Who can weigh the evidence of the senses?
Something else cuts into my thoughts and I interrupt her, quite rudely breaking into our conversation, tearing the decorum of our weekly back and forth, a fine line of words across the waters and the landmasses, marking the borders of belonging.
“And Ilya, when did he die?”
I realise she is displeased that I have returned to the topic of death. But I am still there and she needs to answer me.
“He died in June.”
“When in June?”
“It was the year you turned eleven. June of 1962,” she adds slowly, calculating backwards. Like me, she sometimes has trouble with numbers. Then suddenly she was quiet.
“You are calling on his death day; you realise that don’t you?”
“June thirteenth,” I murmured.
It was light where I stood, dark where she was on the other side of the planet. We were both silent for a little while. Then, because she has learnt how to survive, let some things lapse into silence, she went on briskly.
“Believe it or not, Meena, your ancestral house has not been properly whitewashed for so many years. Even though you are in constant globetrot,” she pronounced the word slowly and carefully, “someday the house will be yours.”
I understood from the way she spoke that she needed money for a paint job and did not want to ask me directly. After all, it is the role of a daughter to understand these unspoken things. All the years that my father was ill, it was hard to paint the walls. He was very sensitive to flecks of paint, motes of dust. His lungs were so fragile, scarcely managing the intake and output of precious breath.
That night, in the simple room in which I sleep and write, I pull out my cheque book, then hesitate. I mean to write out the cheque but put it off till the morning. I sleep badly in my nest of white sheets. A dream comes to me.
When it is time to sign my name as I would normally, on the bottom right, I start scrawling all over the cheque in tiny letters. Letters so minute that they could only be read with the use of a magnifying glass. Letters making sentences in the languages that, as a child, I had once set down in my ricepaper notebook, the sentences of my childhood hooked and snarled in the secret hand that bears witness but cannot reveal.
Over the neat letters where I have written One hundred and one dollars payable to Mrs. Mary Alexander, I have set down at top speed, in black jewels, the illegible story of my life. A Book of Childhood. Of memory and forgetting that no one will read.
Later amma takes the cheque to the little State Bank of India that stands next to the banyan tree. The bank is on the Kottyam–Mallapally Road where the buses pass, crammed with souls, fit to burst, the road I had written about so many years ago trying to close Fault Lines. The bank manager steps out of his little Plexiglass compartment and says, “What sort of cheque is this, kochamma?” He shakes out a white cotton handkerchief and wipes his face. It is very hot, just before the monsoons. He faces her.
“It is most curious, kochamma. I cannot read an amount, nor even your daughter’s signature. You know it’s always been quite unstable and now it is illegible entirely. Obviously it is worthless, we cannot tender any money for it.”
As amma steps out of the one-room bank, wild parrots in the banyan trees start flapping their wings. I hear them screech. Suddenly the world is full of wild parrots.
What shall I write when I sit at my desk at Lavigny? What can I hope to reach in the shelter of memory? One line will be enough. A single line to catch the glory of stubble fields, trees, a red bird in a green tree. An image, or even a single letter of the alphabet, something rare and glowing.
At Lavigny, ever so slowly, I start my sentences.
Amma was an only child and the death of her mother passed into me as sunlight on a lake filled with waves.
The sunlight turns the water crimson, then subsides as foam glistens and the colors beneath darken, as silk does when it is drawn under the heft of cloth. I was water and she was shadow I swallowed. She was the blood in me and the indigo. I longed to hear about her, but amma was loathe to talk. I do have her birth date and her death date. Born in Calicut, in the princely state of Cochin, in 1894. Died in Tiruvella, three years before Indian independence, in 1944.
The death of grandmother Kunju affected amma greatly. It was as if she were forced to wear a sari with a hole burnt into it. The kind of hole that flares up when a careless dhobi lets a coal drop from his hot iron and it sears the delicate cloth. And wearing the sari with the hole, amma had to dip and pirouette, tug hard at her pleats so the burnt black part would never, ever show.
Once I asked amma straight out why grandmother Kunju had to die. Amma had taught me it was rude to turn your back when someone is speaking to you. Though she prided herself on being the soul of politeness, just then, ever so sharply she turned her back on me. I saw her broad back, wrapped in a pink sari, bump into things in our drawing room. A silver candlestick that had belonged to grandmother Kunju, a rosewood table which held a porcelain bowl filled with water.
In the water floated jasmine flowers. They pitched about as amma knocked into the table. A few drops of water splashed out. Later the maid came by with her soft cloth, washed so many times it was a dull brown color. She had to rub the table hard, so a stain wouldn’t form.
Amma was sixteen when she got a telegram summoning her home from college. She stood in her cotton sari with the flowery border drawn tight around her waist, her head folded down on her neck, her eyes fixed to the ground, refusing to enter the house of death. She would not put her foot on the lowest of the stone steps. Those steps are dappled with the shade of palmyra leaves, lined with pots filled with mauve petunias, petals streaked with jet.
“I refused to put my foot on the steps. I refused to enter the house in which my mother died. Can you understand that?” That was all she would say to me. As she spoke I saw my grandmother, utterly weightless, a feather torn from a gull’s back, floating over the threshold of the house in which I was raised. A house with a red tiled roof, dark tiles of the floors, white walls upholding the chiselled teak of the ceiling, and in the sandy courtyard, a mulberry tree my grandmother planted. In the rainy season it filled with tiny red fruit and, sometimes, silkworms crawl there.
Château de Lavigny is an eighteenth-century mansion with courtyard and stables. I have a room in the annex, which is set apart from the main house. The annex is built like a carriage house, with rooms over an archway next to the stables. The room itself is simple, white walls, a bed, a chair, a desk. The low window on the right gives onto the outer gateway, and the cobbles of the drive make glinting circles of stone beneath the gas lamps. The traffic, in and out of the château, odd bicyclist or car, passes under this room.
I realise that the place where I write is nothing so much as a wish, a breath, four white walls upheld over an archway into the interior. I have set the writing desk close to the window on the left so that as I sit I have a clear view onto the courtyard. The chandeliers and mirrors and lacquer work are barred from my gaze by thick walls, but I can see the rose garden, the white patio chairs, and one of the other writers, a man in a blue shirt who comes and goes, notebook in hand. Behind him is the glinting surface of Lac Leman. Later when I meet Robert, he tells me that Lac Leman is where T. S. Eliot came to recover from his nervous breakdown. Somewhere on other side of the lake, closer to Geneva.
There are six of us here, writers, each embarked on her or his mission. I had written on my application that I would be working on new poems. The Book of Childhood seemed much too hard to spell out. As I start to write my bits and pieces, I soon realize that I am searching for the grandmother who died before I was born. Why do I need her so much? Do I feel that finding her will help me make sense of what happened in my buried childhood? Sometimes I feel as if my life is flowing into hers. I want to shake her hard and cry, why, Grandmother, why did you die so soon? I want to stop her in her tracks.
Why don’t I realise that to find her I will have to cross an impossible border?
At Lavigny, over and over again I sit and write fragments, stitch and unstitch sentences that seek to link my childhood to her death, a shadow work that leaves me breathless.
When I was a child, amma had a special dress of shadow work made for me in the Mindamadam. In Malayalam, Mindamadum means “House of No Speaking Nuns.”
Mindathe is “Do Not Speak,” as in “Marya mol, shsshsh shsh, mindathe.” Madum is “a house where nuns live.”
It was a dress I knew by-heart. By-heart means I loved that dress so much I knew each tuck in the soft silk, each ruffle at the sleeve, fine folds in the sash, petulant dip of the Peter Pan collar as it rode on my collarbones. Cut to precise measurements, it fit my body perfectly. It was made of the softest muslins and silks, and held in place by a series of petticoats. Eyes closed I touched each whispering layer of muslin, each tight pink rosebud and jasper leaf knotted in silk. Above the topmost layer, on the underside of the silk was the delicate tracery of shadow-work butterflies. Humayun in all his glory, riding his white charger, could not have been prouder of his brocade suit than I was of my shadow-work dress.
I knew about Humayun because grandfather told me of Humayun’s father’s conquests, his victory march: Humayun lying ill with a fever no one could cure, Emperor Babur circling his child’s bed thrice crying, “Fever, fever, leave him, come to me,” muttering like a medicine man, till the fever rose and covered the emperor’s flesh.
I do not think amma knew anything about Emperor Babur or Humayun. All her concern was with Rahelamma, the young novice who was so skilled at shadow work. “Yes, Rahelamma decided you would like butterflies,” amma said. “I told her that you and your cousin chased butterflies.” She said this with a little smile.
Shadow work was and is still prized for its delicacy. The silk was worked in under the fabric so that only a trace of the color showed through the limpid surface. Very few people were good at shadow work. Making the silk slip under the fabric, teasing the threads into just the right shape, a mango leaf, rosebud, or butterfly was no easy matter.
In shadow work, the embroidery is done with great care on the underside of the fabric. The missing parts are hidden under the skin of cotton or silk. All that is missing casts a shadow. And sometimes the shadow is considered lovelier than the thing itself. I was hopeless at embroidery, and my grandmother Mariamma, who lived in the fortress-like new house twelve miles away, my pale-skinned, gray-eyed grandmother, was the only one who had even bothered to make me try to learn.
Perhaps amma felt that the nuns in the Mindamadum with their devotion to silent stitching might inspire me. It still surprises me how determined she was that my willfulness must be cast out, cleansed through a regime of prayer and watchfulness.
Amma was getting an assortment of dresses cut for me, for soon we would have to cross the black waters, go to a desert town in North Africa, where appa had been sent by the Indian government.
On the way down the drive, as I sat in the car next to amma, smoke from the garden fire made me cough. She gave me her linen handkerchief to hold over my nose. The handkerchief was white on white. Linen embroidered with the pattern of mango leaf. The handkerchief had to be held up to the light to see the pattern. Or felt with the fingertip.
“It belonged to your grandmother Kunju,” amma whispered. “Someday it will be yours.” She watched me run my finger over the mango leaf embroidered in ivory. “The finest things are like that,” she murmured, “invisible. Except when they stain.”
At Lavigny, on a shelf near the writing desk I find a postcard in a frame. Dark red walls, mottled table and chair, and through the window, trees, lake, and sky. Almost as if it were painted from my room, or one very like it, the colors altered, a figure half-visible in the doorway.
I feel this is something that Bonnard has done. I love his work. Who else has that deep, vulnerable red, brushed to a patina? Yet I have never seen this image before. I pick up the frame and prise open the back. It is the only way to be sure. A cheap frame and the two metal strips that hold the backing come off easily enough in my hands. I turn over the card:
Exposition Bonnard, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Fenêtre ouverte sur la Seine a Vernonnet, vers 1912, Huile sur toile, 74–113 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice.
So it was Bonnard, his work in mechanical reproduction. I set it under the bright halogen lamp they have given me. Even in this mass-produced form, the brushstrokes of the master painter are visible, in the woodwork of the window, the hollowing out of the clouds, the trees that front the water. No, not a lake, as outside my window, rather a river. In Bonnard’s painting there is a desk and, on its mottled surface, a book or a binder. It seems to me that, just for a brief space, the figure in the doorway has turned away from his work. I set up the postcard on my writing desk and let it remain.
How would Bonnard paint my grandmother Kunju?
Would she sit on a chair, her hands in her lap? Would she be a figure, backlit at the edge of a doorway? Would she be a dark nude floating in a bathtub, something Bonnard has never done before? I somehow feel he would have painted her in red, with a red scarf, a red sari, with a pair of rubies glittering in her ears. When Bonnard painted red, what was he thinking of?
Red, the color of stone quarried from deep inside the earth, the gorge I knew as a child, molten rock, fire.
Bonnard took that color and put it on the walls of the house of flesh. In that way, through his adherence to things, near at hand and common, he was able to illuminate what it means to stay in place.
So much of my life has been motion and flight, the tactics of self-evasion. When I think of one face, one figure I layer it over with what it is not.
Even now I need courage to enter the interior of the Tiruvella house, where amma sits on a rosewood chair that had once belonged to her mother. I need courage to pass into the bedroom with its rosewood mirror and then move through the dark door of grandfather Kuruvilla’s library.
I turn back to the image I have set up at the edge of my writing desk, the postcard struck from Bonnard’s painting. With my fingers I touch the red of his walls, repeated in the garment the figure is covered in, except for a blue shawl.
The red that you would expect to find at the edge of the inferno, where there is a slight cooling off of lava so human beings can plant their crops and harvest them and forge kitchen utensils and fall in love and drop into hate and paint and write and stumble at the feet of great mountains.
There was a portrait of grandmother Kunju in an inner room of the great house. It was made two years before she died. It hung on a raw stretch of wall, across from the mirror rimmed in gold she was given as part of her dowry. In the portrait her eyes are luminous, and she is gazing into the photographer’s lens. Her hair is curly, drawn back on her head. A simple clasp of pearls shaped like the prow of a boat holds up her pallu.
The background is painted in so that in the manner of those times, no horizon appears, and grandmother Kunju appears in the frame, unmoored to rock or root or stone.
How shall I put it? There was a lightness about her that sent me soaring. When I was a child, sometimes I would go into that room next to the bamboo grove and squat and stare at the portrait.
Sometimes I heard her say words to me, words I could not write in any of the languages I was forced to learn to read and write: Malayalam, Hindi, Sanskrit, English. Sometimes I fell into the cracks between the languages, and the very best I could do was dream. I would stare into the pool in the garden with the single blue lotus on it. The petals of the lotus were a vivid blue.
It seems to me now that my inner life is akin to a species of shadow work, the real stuff of consciousness hidden under a transparent surface, as a bird beak or rosebud or leaf is tucked under the surface of silk, drawn out by the quick needle.
A dream state can suck me in, making it hard to draw straight lines, tell right from left, up from down, setting impediments to the links one needs to be in the real world.
I tell myself that it is entirely natural to hide from pain. Hence this dream state. The shock to the nervous system, the betrayal of childhood love is not something one recovers from easily. I needed to believe, to trust, in order to survive as a child. I needed not to remember.
Yet what makes it possible to survive also exacts a price, a smokiness of vision that covers over the wound, still bloody.
“One never paints violently enough,” Bonnard wrote in his journal, quoting Delacroix. What did he mean?
My mind moved to grandfather Kuruvilla. Why did he expose me to the violence in his head? Sometimes when he touched me a strange light came into his eyes. Why did he use my flesh, my soul instead of canvas or paper? Why did he paint on me so violently?
Afterwards he would set me on his knee, speak of the horrors of Partition. What was the old man doing?
He was born a little over a decade after Bonnard. He was seventy years old when I came into the world. By then the bloodshed of Partition was part of our national memory.
I cannot bear the thought of my grandfather. I want to find my grandmother, the woman I never knew. At Lavigny I am haunted by the idea of Mont Blanc. It seems to me as elusive as my dead grandmother.
I walk through the stubble fields hoping to catch a glimpse of a snow-covered mass. Once, following instructions from Christine, who works as the administrator and chef extraordinaire, I stroll through the cut fields, through a sudden swell of almond trees with their hard green fruit.
I come upon a little sign: parc de l’Avenir it says in big letters, and behind it are swings, a seesaw, a slide, all set up for small children.
I keep walking and see an electric pole with a big sign saying Danger. I glance up beyond it and stand struck at what has opened up, mountains rising to the edge of the lake, a terrain of stone and cloud.
“Mont Blanc is all white,” Christine had assured me, but not one of the mountains I see is just white. They all have scrapings of stone and bits of cloud stuck to them.
I keep walking and enter orchards with pears and apples, and piles of wooden crates with the name J. P. Perrot. I am enclosed by the trees and their green darkness, as if the mountains never existed.
Sometimes the only way to catch the impress of a lost body is through notations, musical, specular, entirely iridescent.
Notations that nothing catch, nothing render back except the trail itself, the desire for the impassable sustaining us, longing sheer as for a heap of stone invisible behind the banks of mist. A great white mountain.
Sometimes in my room I tilt the mirror around, hoping to catch a reflection of what I cannot see.
Clouds fill the mirror. Once the cloud bank is perfectly shaped, in the rough V of the mountain. Then, as I stare the clouds start to drift apart.
*
In dreams, the world is very small. It’s a pebble streaked with jet, held in a rosewood mirror. Flecks of color rush under its skin. Held to the light, it gleams as a jamun might. A fruit perfectly rounded, flecked with indigo. I have heard ayah say that when children swallow things, bits of bone, buttons, stones, they come right out. I splash my hands with well water, run my thumb over the stone, hold it up to the sunlight. I set it on my tongue, close my lips, and swallow.
My dress is covered with mud from the wellside. I clasp the extra stones I have collected in my skirt, and when I let go, streaks of mud run down the pleats, staining the delicate embroidery.
I look all around but no one is in sight, not grandfather Kuruvilla, not Bhaskaran the cowherd, not ayah. Slowly, barefoot, I return to the wellside. I decide I will splash well water all over my face and throat.
The silvery bucket at the wellside is almost empty. There is just the tiniest layer of water inside, enough to touch to my forehead. Nothing more. I put my hand out and touch the stone rim of the well. The parapet is as high as my waist.
I stand on tiptoe. I lean over harder, hurting my ribs, till I am balanced flat as a heavy pole over the well’s mouth, just my toes anchoring me to the ground. I squint, then open my eyes. There is a slight mist over the base of the well, a green halo over the water. A well frog leaps up, sharp green, the color of a new mango leaf. It bites the air and vanishes. Something quivers at the mouth of the well, a dark child’s face.
I open my mouth, but no sounds come. A parrot swoops down from the guava tree and circles overhead squawking.
The shutters were wide open in the small room at the northernmost end of the house, and the floor was flooded with light. The walls had not changed. They were indigo stained, the color of bitter bark. I put my hands out and sought out the mirror. I rushed into the house, damp with well water. I had to see myself.
The rosewood mirror had come as part of grandmother Kunju’s dowry. It was tall enough so a grown woman could stand and twirl her sari around, gather up the pleats, swoop them over her shoulder into waves of jade and enamel.
I pulled up my dress. I ran my fingers over my ribs, over the bumps of my nipples. A creature with a bared chest, neck cut off by the crinkle of cloth. There were tiny black flecks around the base of the mirror where the silvering had worn off. Something caught my eye. A swatch of white. Grandfather Kuruvilla standing with his sleeve on the window bars. His hand was on the window and he was holding on to the bars and holding so tight that his knuckles were cut in stone.
I must have struck it with my elbow, for the mirror rocked on its pedestal. The bamboo grove started drifting, and through the green depth of bamboo leaf and stone wall, the silent sky began to flow.
I stared at the sodden lump of cloth that had covered me, and I gave it a little nudge with my toe. Away it spun under the wooden cupboard that held my dead grandmother’s clothing.
In her heyday, grandmother Kunju cared little for her clothing. She lay down in the middle of dusty Main Street, coaxed other women to come lie down with her. They knotted their saris together to make one human chain, and they chanted, “Bharat Zindabad”—“Down with the British Raj”—and other such slogans.
The voices of the women rose up like fragrance from the crevices of the earth, like attar of the earth when the first rains fall. Their voices turned into cries of circling herons over the paddy fields by the riverbank. Their voices turned into the rough grunts of elephants at mating time: “This is our Land, let us rule it.” They were followers of Gandhi and the police didn’t dare touch them.
In my dreams grandmother Kunju had gone on the Salt March with Gandhi, had walked with Sarojini Naidu and kept walking even as the men dropped like flies under the charge of police with rough, blunt sticks called lathis. Under the fallen nationalists, the dirt spills like smoke.
There is smoke in grandmother’s mirror. A child stares in, a girl with high cheekbones, a broad brow, a fine ridged nose, and a chin with a tiny dip to it. Dark child with two plaits pulled so tight they seem to be made of polished bone. She is dressed in a fine silk dress with delicate embroidery at the collar and waist.
Her back is to the teak almirah that holds her missing grandmother’s clothes, the elaborate silk saris, the pashmina shawls, the brocades, all of which grandmother gave up wearing when she joined the freedom movement. The child knows that her grandmother joined Gandhi’s freedom call, the injunction to wear only khadi.
One night, along with her friends, grandmother Kunju scooped up so many of her silks and tossed them onto the bonfire that was lit on the maidan. Cloth that was woven in the textile mills of Manchester and Lancashire, that was bleeding the economy, tiny squares of linen and silk, foreign-made chiffons, European paisley brought back to spice up the wardrobe, crackled and leapt into flame.
The child imagines the flames behind her, glowing in the mirror. But as she turns her head, she sees that the glow is coming from outside the window.
There are wild grasses in the garden. From time to time the gardeners set fires, wild grasses, nettles, and the long-stalked thistles.
The child rushes out into the bamboo patch. The bamboos whistle in the monsoon wind, there are holes in the ground between the bamboo roots where the snakes can dip their long tails, crawl through the holes made by the paddy rats. The bamboo leaves are silver with smoke.
Quickly, before she can change her mind, she undoes the tight sash on her silk dress. She leans her shoulders back almost as if she were a classical dancer. She unhooks the tiny hooks at the back. It is hard without ayah’s help.
At the base of the dress is a tear that the tailor mended the other day. It came when she crawled in the orchid patch with her silk dress on. Now she tugs hard and the dress is over her armpits. She feels the silk creak a little as if the threads were tired. She feels the wind on her bare chest as the dress rolls off. She crumples the dress into a tiny ball. How slight silk is when it crumples. She sighs a little as she stares at the dress, then tosses it into the fire. She watches the silk float and land at the edge of the burning patch, catches a whiff of something acrid as the long streaks of flame start to eat into the shadow work.