Sometimes the zone of dream is so close I can taste and smell things that are not there. I can even smell them burning. At such times I need help from the stone-eating girl. She flies in on her wings of bone. She perches on a windowsill and watches. So it was that after the ash from the towers settled into the earth, I whispered the line I had written months earlier in my notebook. In the darkness of a Manhattan night, I turned on a small lamp and started again the story of how as a child I crossed the Indian Ocean.
When I was a child I saw the sea burn.
I stood on deck, my hands clenched over the railings. Up and down, side to side, all around the sea was aflame. The waves made little sparks that flitted over the sea surface. The clouds were so lazy, floating in the pink sky. I thought I could see a flying fish with its silver, darting wings. And then another behind it, a bright shadow. Their wings touched, making a dark lace that the crimson sea splashed.
Amma and I had walked up the gangplank in Bombay harbor, and minutes later, it seemed, our ship in a jangle of voices broke free of solid land. I stood on tiptoe next to amma, tall as her elbow, as she pulled out a little white handkerchief edged with Brussels lace that had belonged to her dead mother and wiped her eyes.
“We’re off,” she whispered, “we’ve left nadu behind.”
Afloat on the Arabian Sea, I searched for a dip in water, a dart of darkness, something that might turn into a tunnel so I could slip back into the Tiruvella house lost to me.
Beyond the deck the waters rose, crisp and slashed and crimson, the wind rested and the waters turned to molten silk that bobbed and wrinkled.
I could have stood there forever staring at the sea, my head filled with voices.
But amma was bearing down on me. She put out her hand to draw me back, but I shook my head hard and stood there, my eyes filled with the sea.
The sea was darker now, in patches, as if the fire had cooled, making ash out of its own mysterious substance.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
Amma’s hand was on my elbow, pulling me.
I knew she would not give up. I belonged to her. I was her only child. I shut my eyes. I wanted the sea to be painted on the inside of my eyelids so I could take it with me. I tried to hold my breath, but I felt it come out in spurts.
I prayed for strength to leap into the sea, become a water child, an amphibious thing, a silver flying fish. Schools of them had flapped and slipped by in the sea a few days after we set out from Bombay harbour, darting glistening things, at ease in air and water, midway creatures, beholden to no one.
“Go with God,” grandfather Kuruvilla had said when he blessed me on parting.
Surely this was God, this flaming sea.
“Aaoiu, enda devame.” I heard amma draw in her breath as she stared at the sea. Her hand tightened on my shoulder. We were travelling by sea during the Suez Canal trouble, and often ships were burnt by bombs dropped onto the waters.
But this was sun that turned the sea the color of molten brass and made the air rise in peaks of magenta and scarlet. Not bombs but the sea itself as the sun played on it.
Amma drew me into a lounge of sofa and chairs.
“Sit down, mol. Here is a birthday present for you.” She laid a flat brown package on the table. I picked it up and pulled apart the brown packing paper.
Children’s Coloring Book, it said in big letters and, under that, the intials CLS for Christian Literature Society.
It had shiny covers in red and green. It was wider than my two hands placed side by side. Wider than my grandmother Mariamma’s palmyra fan, the one she used on hot days when the earth grew sticky and damp and the sky turned the color of elephant hide.
I flipped open the book and ever so slowly stared at the first picture.
It was done in bold black hand, almost like a woodcut. It showed a very old man. He looked oddly familiar. I felt I had known him all of my natural life.
I put out my hand and the paper felt cold, as if it had been whirred about in a storm. I ran my finger over the old man’s robe. It was bent under him as he worked his way over heavy rocks. His beard was flung to one side by the wind. He had a long strong nose and over his shoulders was a funny sack.
I glanced up quickly at amma and saw that she was content now that I had actually opened the gift.
“Ilya thought you would like the book,” amma said as she turned away. “He thought it would help you learn the Bible verses by heart.”
When I put out my finger to touch what I saw, my finger felt funny, as if a dragon had rubbed my skin all over with its gossamer wing.
My finger did what it was meant to do, tracing that old man’s body, from his feet covered in rough sandals made of skins, up past his knees, to that bent head.
Down below the picture, in bold print, someone had written out these lines:
AND GOD SAID: TAKE NOW THY SON THINE ONLY ISAAC WHOM THOU LOVEST AND GET THEE INTO THE LAND OF MORIAH; AND OFFER HIM THERE FOR A BURNT OFFERING UPON ONE OF THE MOUNTAINS WHICH I WILL TELL THEE OF. GENESIS 22:2
I looked more closely at the sack. It quivered under my eyes. I could not bring myself to touch it.
I could see now that what I had thought was a sack was really a child, about my age, flung over Abraham’s shoulder. The boy’s back was humped like a tortoise.
The old man had a staff in one hand, and its tip was pointed firmly at the sun. In his other hand he held a burning brand. There was a knife stuck in his waist band. His foot was firmly on the lowest rock of the mountain.
And Isaac, his body down to his father’s shoulder, was staring up at me. I felt something bubbling up in me. I wanted to tear Isaac off the page and fling him upright. Yell in his ear, “Run away, silly boy. Why lie there like a heap of ash?”
Amma had told me that Sarah, his mother, was seventy when Isaac was born. So if Abraham was seventy-five, grandfather Kuruvilla’s age, how quick could he run? Surely Isaac could escape? And why didn’t Sarah go out there to help her only child, her Isaac? She should have stood up and yelled at the patriarch, brandished her rolling pin.
I sat there, staring at the book, trying to imagine the missing Sarah. I dressed her in a blue sari, the color that the girl who was Virgin Mary wore in our Christmas pageant.
I made her run as best she could, up the side of Moriah Mountain to help her only child.
That night, in the cabin I shared with amma, I lay on the bottom bunk and opened up the coloring book again. The lamplight was soft on the book, on the white sheets, on the green blankets that the attendant had folded up and hung over the edge of the bed. I waited till I thought amma was asleep, and then I pulled out the crayons I had brought with me. My hand curled around the orange crayon. It was bright as a love apple fruit. Shining and hard. I picked it up and set it to the page. I had meant to color in the sun but instead, without knowing it, my hand moved to the tunic Isaac was wearing.
I colored it in, the brilliant glowing colors of night fires, of blood that lay under the woodcutter’s axe. I colored in the wood on his back till those brands started burning and Isaac, with huge dark eyes staring into mine, turned into a burnt offering.
I must have made an odd sound because amma leaned over the edge of the bunk and saw me. She slipped down quick and quiet and held me in her arms. I buried my neck in the space between her breasts. I could smell the mix of talcum powder and sweat and Chanel No 5 she had dabbed on specially for my birthday.
“What is it? Tell me, child. Tell me.”
But my eyes were filled with tears and no words came out of my mouth. I held out my right hand, the orange crayon stuck to it, making a wound.
She stared at it, her eyes straying to Isaac’s body with the harsh, tearing lines across it. She put out her hand and gently eased my fist open.
“There, you’re not sick, are you, child? Here, open up your hand. You’re trembling.”
Her hand was cold as she prised my fingers apart, one by one, and freed me of the orange pencil. Then she started to sing.
In the lamplight amma’s hands had a life of their own, and as she sang they fluttered, two brown birds tied to her body. I could see her in the mirror behind me, I could see me small and squat in my white dress, staring at her. The sheets were all about me making a nest. And behind me was the porthole filled with indigo water. Dark water with a ripple of moonlight.
After amma was asleep she came to me, a child my size and shape. I knew instantly who she was. The stone-eating girl. She flew in through the open porthole. Her skin was as dark as a jamun fruit. She had a pair of wings that grew through her shoulder blades.
They looked just like chicken wings but were brown streaked with gold and strong enough to let her blow in through the porthole.
She squatted next to me in a pool of light and I felt her skin with my fingers and knew that she had a little bump by the back of her knee just like I did.
With cracking sounds like knuckles make, fretting under skin, she broke off her wings and set them at my feet.
I knew she would not mind if I touched her broken wings.
When she opened her mouth no words came, just sharp hot sounds like stones rattling. She had picked up stones from the wellside and popped them into her mouth. She swallowed the stones even though it hurt her insides.
The stones made words for things she couldn’t say.
The girl with wings had no mother or father or grandfather or cousin. She was fierce and free.
The sun was her father, the moon was her mother, the stars were her brothers and sisters.
The stone-eating girl squatted right by me and made me look out the porthole. I saw the midnight waters of the great sea on which we were afloat. But right under the porthole I saw a patch of something. It looked just like an oil slick.
Noke noke, look look, the stone-eating girl tapped on my shoulders to make me look. But I turned my eyes away. I did not want to see the dark shadow at the edge of the boat. I was relieved when a wave came in through the open porthole.
Later, I looked out in search of an oil slick. Amma had pointed out the oil slicks to me. The S. S. Jehangir had to be careful because of bombs that could be dropped on oil tankers.
But this was neither an oil slick nor a crater made by a bomb. It was dark sea shape, an old man mountain with a child tied to his back.
And the child, its tunic fluttering like a girl’s skirt, was staring up at me.
I had seen Moriah Mountain. On special feast days the children put on a pageant in Tiruvella’s village church. One Sunday the pageant needed a mountain, and Bhaskaran the cowherd was persuaded to bring piles of wood from the jackfruit tree that was cut down by the wellside. He stacked the wood in the courtyard of the church and covered the rough triangle with old cloth. This was Mount Moriah, against which the scene of the sacrifice of Isaac was to be acted.
During the pageant, when ayah’s youngest son was tied to an old man’s back and old man Kariap started plodding toward the rickety mountain, I bit my lip so hard it started to bleed. I could not bear to hear the screams of the little child when the knife ayah had borrowed from our kitchen was polished.
Only when I saw the crude mask of God slip from the face of the headwaiter in the local restaurant did I let go of my ears and thrust my elbow hard into Cousin Sosa’s knee. “Meena, you’re a crybaby,” she hissed.
Suddenly, to wild clapping and the burst of song, little Mohan shot free of his dirty binding clothes and ran toward his mother. As ayah lifted him up she was trembling with pride.
That night as grandfather Kuruvilla read out the sacrifice of Isaac from the Bible, the story of an aged father who was willing to kill his young son in response to God’s command, I buried my head in ayah’s sleeve and drank in the stale sweat from her armpit. It comforted me, flesh that I could hold onto. If grandmother Kunju had not died so soon and I could still talk to her, would she help me understand the cruelty of that story? And what of Sarah, Isaac’s mother? Why didn’t she rush out and wave her fists at Abraham and cry out: You foolish, impenitent old man! Time for you to lie still in your grave. Lie utterly still covered by a heap of stones. For you there is no escape.