Ashwinpur
The air smelled of smoke and the sweetness that comes with morning dew. Outside the girl’s window, the world had already woken up without her. Sunlight tried to fight its way into the dim room, through the damp salwars and ghaamchas drying along the steel bars of the balcony. Inside the room, the whirring of the ceiling fan wafted around the scent of Dove. Though she could not see the world past the dripping fabric, she could hear it: the clink of the tall spoons as they stirred the simmering curry in heavy metal pots, the laughter that weaved itself in with the cooing of the morning birds.
She could imagine the scene outside. The younger kids would be kicking around a ball, careful to not shoot it out of the tree-goalposts and directly into the pond. Her mamis, khalas, and Ammu sitting around the dirt stove, stirring as they gossiped and giggled. The sun would be gleaming through the trees, setting shadows against the soft dirt floor.
There was an unfamiliarity here that felt like returning home. She was still getting used to the shape of her mother tongue in her mouth, the way her r’s didn’t so much roll as they stumbled and tripped, how her k’s and kh’s swapped places, the way her throat thickened and her tongue sweated with each passing sentence. The language was inherent, she recognised it in her soul, the curves of its poetry, the rough edges of its colloquialisms, though she could not understand what it was trying to tell her. She was getting used to the sound of her name in her mother tongue; the rolled r, the perfect precision of its pronunciation. She was both unrecognisable and recognisable to herself again; she meets this version of herself again every few years. She was getting used to the people she had known her whole life, relearning them, readjusting, reliving loss.
She sat up, leaning against the lacquered wooden headboard. Carved into its mahogany flesh are paisley swirls, imitating a peacock attracting its mate. Around the girl’s waist, the plum-coloured kaatha pooled onto the mattress, the fluorescent green embroidered figures tangled and falling into one another. The bed was empty now, but the sheets wrinkled and pulled where her sisters had lain next to her. She rested her head gently against the cool wall, painted a shade of pastel sage which might have been sickly had it not been so comforting. Though she had woken up thirty minutes prior, she still needed some time to settle the nerves that occupied her heart-space.
A loud laugh carried itself over the rest of the noise, contagious and youthful, sounding like a distant memory brought back to life. Her Ammu was at home here in a way she has never been anywhere else. In a way the girl may never be, anywhere.
She did not want to leave the room, to have to face her stumbling syllables and the love which would leave with her an inevitable loss. She instead wanted to continue sitting with her ear pressed up against her mother’s laughter. She wanted to peel back the layers of fabric, peer between the bars to see what existed beyond the window without the interruption of reality. She wanted to see what her mother could have been without the existence of her.
-
They arrived at their graam the night before in two vans. The journey was long, suffocating, and intoxicating. When they’d left her mama-mami’s home in Dhaka in the early afternoon, the air was dusty and still golden. Four generations of family, the smallest sitting on their older cousins, arms linked, heads leaning on each other. Dhaka passed by slowly; the traffic was stagnant and loud, rickshaw drivers yelling, bus drivers yelling right back. The orange sun was even brighter amid the smog and smoke that rose from the roadside plastic burning. The flames flickered and reflected on the reds, oranges, purples, and greens of the artworks on the hoods of the rickshaws, tracing the broad curves and strokes of the Bangla typography.
Eventually, cement and dust turned to fields of green and the red sun floating on black rivers. They stopped on the side of the road, halfway through their journey, for some jhaal muri, the type that was served in oily newspaper cones. Inked Bangla headlines soaked into the yellow, before disappearing behind the puffed rice and chanachur mixture.
She has been coming to the graam ever since she was a small child – if her memory were stronger, she would have said she had almost grown up there. Her Ammu would pull out the albums, every few months, to show her faded photos, cream and purple inked, of her as a child, racing over the dirt floor, in front of a tin house, shoving her mouth with sweet bread. Another photo, her and her nano, whose skin was bright and smooth, her arms dangling gold. Then, her Ammu would show her photos that were older, more faded, their edges unfurling slightly of their backing. Her Ammu and her khalas standing together, almost smiling, in white sarees. They were younger than she was now, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Her Ammu looked like no one she had ever seen before; she was entirely unknown. Except, when they returned to this place, that girl was found again, in glimpses at first, and then, in full clarity. Eventually, she would disappear again, faded ink.
Every time they returned there was a new change. The trees took on new shapes, the paths were laid out more evenly, a wall was built along where she used to sit to watch the river. She had grown taller, though not by much, her cousins knew less about her than the last time, her nano walked slower. Her Ammu would always tell her about this place, calling it home, but it had changed over the generations from the place she had grown up in. A house of brick built beside the tin house, a mango tree cut down, the rooms empty for all the weeks of the year, except this one.
Arriving at night made it easier. The darkness concealed the wrinkles in her nano’s hands, the way time had warped them. They clung to her Ammu’s hand the entire ride. Her Ammu’s hands had the same smoothness that her nano’s did in the photos she had seen. The change didn’t catch you off guard if you saw it through the shadows first.
-
The chaiwalla poured the fountain of chai from his ladle into the row of glasses. She sat on the wooden bench, watching the steam drift over the creamy brown chai. The edges of the glass fogged slightly.
She was sat next to her cousin, who took a glass of milk instead of the chai, before passing a cup of chai to her. She wanted to talk to him about belonging; about the feeling of returning home. She felt a deep nostalgia for the very moment she was in. She wrapped her hands against the hot glass, breathing in sugar and masala.
She sipped her chai, letting it melt on her tongue; the thought of speaking melted along with it. Her cousin, the son of a son, never hesitated to remind her, the daughter of a daughter, of her lack of claim to this land. As though a document or surname could ever capture what it meant to belong to a place, to a people. She belonged to this place, as much as her Ammu ever did, though their belonging was fragmented, interrupted.
-
She sat on the edge of the dirt path behind the house. It was a different place from where she had sat the last time she was here, two years ago. She was much more distant now, hidden from the house, the tin wall separating her from everyone else. She watched the river flow, endlessly weaving its way through the greenery. Fields of mustard flowers and green crops chased the horizon. The orange sun rested in the sky.
The path was narrow and elevated; below her was mulch, vines, and the roots of more things to grow. Her book waited idly in her hand as she tried to trace where the river started and where it ended. This was the place where she felt most at peace, on this ledge between the world and the dirt.
She tried to imagine her Ammu, walking down this path from her school. Her two plaits, tied together with ribbons, would swing behind her. Would she be walking alone or with a friend? Would she try to memorise the scene of the rivers and the mustard flowers, or would she take it for granted? She tried to imagine her Ammu taking a seat by her, between the world and the dirt, but the sun began to set before the image could entirely materialise.
She stood, dusted the dirt off the back of her kameez, and returned to her people.
Glossary of Bengali Words
Salwar: The trousers of a salwar kameez, a two-piece traditional garment.
Ghaamcha: A traditional thin cotton towel.
Mami: Aunty; mother’s brother’s wife.
Khala: Aunty; mother’s sister.
Ammu: Mother.
Kaatha: A traditional embroidered blanket.
Graam: Village.
Mama-mami: Uncle and aunty.
Jhaal muri: A Bengali street snack made of puffed rice, chanachur, mustard oil, and other ingredients.
Nano: Grandmother; mother’s mother.
Chaiwalla: A vendor who makes and sells chai.
Chai: Tea.
Masala: A mixture of spices.
Kameez: The top of a salwar kameez, a two-piece traditional garment.