A dream clung to me like a clot of blood. It hardened into stone and I wanted to etch the map of my life into it: the west coast of India, the east coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean with its foamy points of waves.
But the dream faded into pallor, white on white embossed onto a handloomed handkerchief, the square starched and ironed and folded into a child’s pocket.
In the heat of midsummer the child has a nosebleed and the handkerchief is pulled out hastily, used to blot the blood, then crushed back into the pocket.
The stain that penetrates the embossed patterning never quite vanishes. The fabric seems changed forever.
Who can dip it in blue, hang it on the line in the heat of a Kerala day, so the color will revive, so butterflies swarm to the ivory-colored square, soft with the well water it was first washed in? What mercy there?
Closing the book of childhood I feel the dream dissolve into the dark waters that surround the island of Manhattan, passing away with the burnt fragments of flesh, mess of plastics and papers, torn wood and wire and stone. And above us all, in the north winds, the souls of the dead, wings tipped with fire, still whirling.
In my dream there is a house with two rooms. One and the other. Just large enough to hold what they must, two or three people, a mat on the floor, a chair, a simple wooden bed. The rooms are dark in spite of opening onto a veranda that runs the length of the house. The windows are painted green, shuttered, bungalow style.
Someone calls from the other room. A woman with white hair, curly, drawn back in a bun. Strands blow about her neck. Her face is turned from me. Something leaps in my ribs when I hear her voice.
“Quick, he is going. Quick, come quick.”
I enter the room. He lies on his side, his eyes huge in his head. I kneel by his side. I hardly recognise him. I do not know what comes over me.
“Bless me,” I whisper.
I do not know where these words come from. But it’s all I want from him. His eyes are huge, shining in his emaciated flesh. His clothes are white and shimmer. I want to get this over with before mother enters.
Bless me, Grandfather.
With great effort he passes his hand over my head. I feel his fingertips, dry breath, a light breeze over bleached paddy stalks in the hilly region where he was born.
Now he lies on his back, breathing heavily. The shutters over the window stir a little. In the dream I wear a cotton sari. A sari washed over so many times the threads are frayed. At times the cloth feels damp, at times the cloth is hot and dry as an iron. My legs are shaking.
My right hand is closed over something hot and hard.
A stone prised free from the ground where I was born. Shaped like a ear, it fits perfectly into my palm. My sweat makes the stone moist.
The dream repeats. Again there are two rooms, each rather dark, and a brilliant veranda. A small modest house I have seen before. I cannot be in both rooms at the same time, but feel I need to.
As I kneel on the cold floor, he reaches out to me.
I force myself to bend to kiss him and his lips find my forehead, right by the hairline. He is warm with the fever inside him. His lips brush my skin, my hair as if a life depended on it.
I pull myself away just as amma enters the room. Her sari is pulled tight about her waist. She has an anxious look. I can see that the powder she set to her cheeks is fading. Her skin shows through. She pretends she doesn’t see me.
She makes straight for the figure on the bed.
Something funny happens in the dream as amma reaches him. I am no longer by the bed. I am flat on the earth, between the two tracks of a train line. The tracks run through a red gorge with steep sides. The spokes of the metal wheels grind closer, the sunlight on the parallel tracks make me blind. My eyes are holes.
Everything shakes. A screen of light made up of tiny particles moves as if during a ritual dance of warriors, silk threads were chopped into fragments in the breeze. I have a dim awareness that I will see only what I can hold, a fraction at a time, as if the morsels of the visible were cut with a silver sword: a bit of the red tiled floor, the corner of a wooden pallet, elbow, wrist, curve of dark throat that gleams and vanishes.
The bed starts to dissolve as if the atoms that composed it, the wood, the white sheets, even the flesh and blood of the emaciated man were all blown by a great wind, the boundaries of form sifting.
Things clarify. A man tall and gaunt, ready to die, wrapped in white muslin.
“Marya, Mary mol,” I hear him cry out.
“You’ll be a doctor. You will work in the service of India.
“You will do as Gandhi taught us, minister to the people.
“You’ll cross the black waters.
“You will be a yatrakari, journey far away, as far as the Red Sea and the Thames, the Mississippi but always return to this land.”
I see his hand flicker, dark as my own but with all the veins rising.
Suddenly I am no longer a woman of twenty-five.
I become a girl child, somewhat tall for her age, wearing a silk dress with tiny pink roses embroidered on the yoke. Grandfather grips my wrist and the dress turns damp.
His wrist has hairs on it, white with age, the color of pale butterfly wings.
When Cousin Koshy visited grandfather Kuruvilla’s house, we used to catch cabbage butterflies, and on lazy Sunday afternoons we’d pin them to the corkboard the cook gave us. How bored we were on Sunday afternoons, after church, after the endless social rounds of luncheon and tea. But the mercy of associations, an amnesia of sorts, dark river water over which butterflies float, will not blot out what comes.
I struggle hard. I feel my wrist turn numb as I try to prise my flesh and bones loose of grandfather’s grip.
Just then she enters. “Help me, help me,” I plead. Using both her hands, she unlocks his fingers from their iron hold. But it takes up all her strength. The sari falls off her head. She has no face.
The dream starts to fade in response to a hurt I cannot name, my body the two wings of the black monarch butterfly, stretched over a crack in the earth.
The small house with the two rooms, the old woman with white hair who summons a young thing in a plain cotton sari, hair tied back, myself in this dream incarnation, all dissolve.
Mere moving accidents.
But why is grandfather dying in such a small house when he was laid out in the great house with the ravaged gardens I used to call home? And why a woman whose face I must not see?
What am I to her? Or she to me?
But perhaps dreams are not meant to be questioned like that, in a crude blunt way.
They rise in us, waves on an indigo sea, keeping us to a love that is always already there for those gone on, through hurt and harm, invisible presences that make us what we are.
What we are is flesh and bone, skin and blood and all the distances in between that mark the fierce palimpsest of need.
What we are is not readily tellable. We have instincts of loss, instincts of homecoming, a hovering tender thing, what a mother can do for a child passing her hand over that child’s mouth, back, thighs. But something is altered beyond remedy.
I think of the sari made of pink silk worn by the warrior and poet the Rani of Kodamangalam as she set off to battle. On the sari were inscribed the names of the seventy saints and seventy-seven holy women and men who could protect her and her just cause.
When the Rani passed through fire the sari melted into her skin, so that even as she rode out of battle on her elephant and the conch shells blew to celebrate victory, the whole world could see that the warrior queen had changed in some way.
“Look at her hands,” a child cried.
“Look at her breasts where the sari pallu rides up,” a man yelled.
Grown women rubbed their lips and stared.
The letters inscribed in indigo ink on the sari she had worn for protection were burnt indelibly into her skin.
What allowed her to live out her life, made her what she was, was graphed in curving syllables over her woman’s body.
But no one could read that script. The markings were bright as hairs in the elephant’s tail, dots of pollen on the humming bird’s claw, but no one could decipher them.
To be haunted by the illegible is the fate of those who have passed through fire and children who have been hurt beyond visible measure.
I have written what I could through the rips and tears in the dress I once wore, a shield for a small child’s soul, silk stitched with shadow work in delicate rose, violet, and green.