LEST SHE GO OFF
Design by Bryan Castille from licensed photograph.
When dad left to go live with a Ruby Tuesday’s waitress, the house felt dank and cavernous––like an empty dragon’s lair where helpless worms wriggled about, wondering what to do now that their beast was dead. Mom filled the void with reality television, volume set to MAX. She sat on the brown plaid couch in an unlit living room from morning to night and hunched forward until her glasses were two feet from the screen. The more sexual the show the closer mom’s face was pulled into it.
The rest of us crawled around her, ignoring the salacity, waiting for instruction.
Mom took neither bathroom nor meal breaks as she watched, absorbed as she was in both the commercials and the programming, but when she peed straight through her cotton saree, we figured we should start looking after her. She was tiny and frail and we were her four healthy American children––it seemed an honorable duty (if not something to do) to keep her alive. So we rotated, leaving sandwiches and water on a little table by her chair and––with rumblings of panic––watched her largely ignore them. She ate every fourth day at most. We didn’t know what to do after that. We didn’t actually know mom, truth be told. Our childhood had mostly consisted of dodging a volcanic dad. Mom was just there, like the carpet.
The facts of mom were: she was under 5’ tall, didn’t know her birthday, always wore a pastel saree, fasted more than didn’t, and had brown teeth and breath that smelled like salt crackers. Her gold wire-rimmed glasses magnified black and beady eyes. She had never been one to speak much in general, as she didn’t like English and especially didn’t like how much we had all grown to like English. But now that dad was gone (and I, the youngest, had just finished high school), she had little reason to say anything at all. So, she let full-volume I Married a Princess, Hogan Knows Best, Temptation Island, and Lock Up Raw do all the talking in our rural one-story New Jersey house west of Maurice River, just south of the largest stretch of swamp forest in the state.
The facts of dad were strewn about the house like indelible decor: my sister Anju’s perpetually crooked thumb, the smashed up record player that miserably turned on by itself every now and then, two boarded up windows, a missing door, and various sized glass shards nesting in sofa upholstery. With him gone, the house felt (and smelled, thanks to Kingfisher beer soaking in the carpet) like a hollowed out bust of his head we were quite possibly trapped inside.
And so––in our first communal act as siblings––we four watched mom pay no heed to the food we made her. The camaraderie was bizarre. My two brothers and sister and I had always acted as lone dogs, ready to eat another dog if necessary. As the youngest, I mostly hid away in corners knowing I’d be the first to get chomped. But now, in the void of no-dad, a sort of verve took over. We were a broken people starting a new life (survivors of a village fire?), and together we cooked, plunged toilets, paid bills, pooled money. I taught myself how to drive––through trial, error, and a side-swipe along a playground fence. Hrithik stopped returning his girlfriend’s calls. Anju dropped her community college classes and my favorite brother, Sagar, volunteered to be our gardener. Mom stayed on the couch, smiling at bikini-clad girls, mid-trampoline challenge, hardly aware we were there. Verve or no, though, we were still waiting for her to tell us what was next, to be an axis we could spin around. Maybe just follow us around with a bat. Instead, she picked at her brown teeth and flicked what she found into the air, entirely unconcerned with where it landed. Within a few months, the verve was dead and we four turned on each other, as hard as possible.
“This man was Rasputin, the “holy man” Twice, Anju walked through the house with no pants on, daring Hrithik to punch her lights out for it, then insisting she was pregnant, then laughing hysterically if Hrithik believed her.”
Hrithik decided he would carry the proverbial bat and shoulder-bumped me when I was in his way. Anju hid away questionable sums of our pooled money and started messaging with some old guy on Craigslist. Once, Hrithik knocked out one of Sagar’s back teeth for tracking mud into the living room and Sagar slept for two days with cotton balls stuffed into his bleeding mouth. Twice, Anju walked through the house with no pants on, daring Hrithik to punch her lights out for it, then insisting she was pregnant, then laughing hysterically if Hrithik believed her. I went back to hiding in corners or kneeling by mom waiting for her to notice me, sniffing to check if I smelled pee. Sagar stopped talking completely and twice I saw him in fetal position outside, crying into wet autumn grass. Our power went out the first three or so days of every bill cycle and when winter came we all slept in jackets and draped mom in all the comforters we had. Hrithik’s ex-girlfriend drove by weekly to call us all “Curry fuckers.”
All the while mom was ensconced, lost in a blissful ocean of beautiful white people sobbing and kissing with tongues showing. “Heh heh heh,” she laughed in her monosyllabic, open-mouthed way. It felt personal, even cruel, that she could be so happy. Six months of this and we were seething in a way we had no words to describe.
Anju was the first to leave. On the day of departure, she wore too much makeup and thong underwear that peeked out of black cut-off shorts. She knelt, her broken thumb resting on mom’s thigh. “I gotta move on, ma. I need a life, you know? Maybe go to Cali? Cali’s cool. Visit me cuz I’ll probably have a baby or try and do something big one day. So, you never know you know? Ma?”
“Heh heh heh,” Mom laughed at the TV, where a host with white teeth and orange skin just announced the winner of Beauty and the Geek. Anju wrote down her new address, put it in mom’s palm, then almost forgot to say bye to the rest of us before clomping out the door. Hrithik left a month after that, stuffing a Cheesecake Factory gift card into the shoulder of mom’s saree blouse, flicking two fingers up and saying, “Peace.”
That night I touched Sagar’s arm, as he cleaned the kitchen in the near-dark, and whispered, “I guess it's up to us now.” He turned to me startled, as though he hadn’t noticed I’d been there. He looked me up and down, making me wonder if I had been there. I wanted to bring up a fact about sharks because I knew he loved sharks but I couldn’t remember anything, even whether they were mammals or not, so I just stood there smiling without letting teeth show. He nodded, his head moving faster than seemed appropriate. I knew he’d stay, though. Sagar was a shy, scrawny boy who absorbed guilt like a dishrag. At 19, he was only ten months older than me, which, in my book, made us twins. A week later, he left in the middle of the night without telling me or mom or bringing any of his favorite things.
Mom added The Ashlee Simpson Show, Miami Ink, and Rock of Love to her lineup. I started making more noise in the house and knocking things over as a sort of maternal instinct I had to keep mom from realizing all her other kids left her. I found I rather liked moving around like four people, instead of like one terrified rat. To walk at any chosen speed from a bathroom to a kitchen made me feel as light as a cloud.
I woke up each morning and looked out the window, wondering what out there my sister and brothers were getting on with. It was March and rainy and the sky was disturbingly white and I racked my brain thinking of where I’d go if I left too. All I could come up with was maybe hopping from one bus to another pretending I had a destination. I much preferred thinking about the different sandwiches I’d make for mom that day and whether or not she’d ever tried a pickle soaked in Kool-Aid.
The truth was, I didn’t want anything else except to be with mom, to unlock the mothballs-salt cracker smell of her. Her––this tiny beady-eyed woman who must have held me at some point in her life. I figured if I put in the work, it was only a matter of time before the open-mouthed smiles she shared with the screen would be turned in my direction. It was only a matter of time before she’d be saying things like, “When I gave birth to you, you were small and sickly. But then you looked into my eyes and… smiled!” I could be as patient as a nun for it. Meanwhile, we’d live in a dimly lit house-cloud, just her and I, floating along, held by the glue of deafeningly loud reality TV.
I got a job at Tiny Peaches, a clothing store in the neighboring town’s mall, and started stealing little things––offerings––to bring home to mom. Pink sunglasses, a chapstick-shaped like a pineapple, fake sticky earrings, a fuzzy purse lined with mirrors on the inside. I’d leave them on the end table next to a microwaved meal and sure enough, six or so hours later, mom would be in the same position as before, but now wearing the sunglasses, or with a fake earring stuck to her hand, with glossed lips. I tallied up my victories with no shortage of pride. Every third or fourth day she ate her meal. I washed her clothes and left a fresh saree on her bed each night that she wore the next morning. We spoke so little that if I hadn’t been working at a mall, I might have forgotten the sound of my own voice. Some nights I dreamt that my siblings came back, one by one, and asked if they too could be taken care of by me. Anju gave me her earrings, did my eyeliner smoky-style, and cried into my neck. Hrithik bought me a gun for self-defense and apologized for being a dick. Sagar was less formed in my dreams but he was there, too, like a constellation version of himself surrounding me while I slept. Once I dreamt that dad snapped my foot in two and I could no longer drive to work but I had to get there otherwise I’d be fired so he carried me there on his back and when we arrived, he put me down and said, See? I'm your pa. I’ll take you anywhere. When I woke up from that one, I walked with a limp.
I moved on from stealing trinkets to cobbled together arts-and-crafts kits––whatever I could gank from Michaels, Home Depot, or Waldenbooks. At first, I’d just see their contents scattered on the living room floor, looted for anything of any actual value, but just as I was about to give up, I came out of the shower one day and there she was––painting a ceramic pig black and gold, singing to it some sort of lullaby in a language I didn’t know. She stiffened up as I watched her from behind and slowly turned to look in my direction, but I jumped back into the hallway unseen, giddy with pride. From then on, I wore large puffy jackets (Hrithik’s, mostly) to strip malls and stole whatever I could for her. Her participation was sporadic, but over the next month or so, she took to spin art for half an afternoon, paper doll making for almost a whole day, she read one page of a comic book (then ripped it up) and sanded a block of wood for no reason. She dabbled in fake flower arranging, a stamp and stencil kit, spirographing, Bake-an-Owl, make-your-own-toothpaste, an archaeological dig kit, 3-D glasses, pet rocks, using foil to ward off the government, a time-travel manual and picture book, and tattoo pens, until finally, finally, on a whim––and dare to myself as it was a large piece of loot––I brought home the karaoke machine (by chucking an open seven-layer burrito at the security guard's head to get him to stop chasing me).
I say this not as hyperbole: The karaoke machine changed everything for us.
Even as I was about to pull it out of its neon box, mom stood up and tossed her fallen saree back over her shoulder. She placed her hand on the cardboard, on the giant picture of 13-year-old girls donning crop tops and posing like popstars and looked directly at me. Her barely-there eyebrows popped up, as though she was seeing me for the first time. As though I was, perhaps, her very own daughter.
“Open!” she commanded, before hovering over me like an underfed bird. She whipped her hand around as though it would get me to move faster. I ripped through the impossible zip ties as quickly as I could before she nudged me away altogether to lay her hands on the shiny pink handle and silver buttons. She mumbled something along the lines of either “beautiful” or “dutiful.” I didn’t know if she was talking about the machine or me.
“See, ma, this will play a song, and the words to the song will pop up here––”
“Ka-roky, I know.” She thrust the catalog into me. “Here. Find song by Jessica Simspon.” I plugged everything in, found Irresistible, and handed mom the mic. With both hands gripping the microphone as though it was a walker holding her up, she slowly side stepped as the music started, monosyllabically laughing, “Heh heh heh.” Then, nowhere in sync with the music she yelled into the mic so loudly I plugged my ears: “HE IS RESISTIBLE! CLOSE PERSONAL CANNOT BREATHE! PHYSICAL DEEP POWERFUL DEEP TO ME CANNOT BREATHE! CANNOT BREATHE! CANNOT BREATHE!!” Her “singing” was mostly monotone screaming and her eyes grew big and concentrated, as though all of her insides needed to focus on this singular act of being a star. Laughing in both shock and awe, I joined in where I could but didn't dare lean into the mic for fear of losing an eye.
That night and the days that followed, we ripped through song after song in the machine’s catalog. We turned solo songs into duets and were surprisingly not terrible at it. We bobbed our heads in sync, even switched off verses. I had no idea how she knew any of the lyrics or tunes to these songs. When we sang LL Cool J, she seemed to have no idea what the words meant but knew at least 10% of them. (“Doing it! Doing it! Doing it! Doing it!” / “I call you daddy eat candy rain!”) After Vitamin C’s Graduation Song, she shook me by the shoulders so hard I thought I might hurl. I tried to harness her jerky limb-flailing by teaching her some dance moves and eventually, step-touches turned into box-steps which led to shuffle-ball changes, where she’d throw her weight so far over she’d fall over onto the carpet. I’d sneak in some form of a small hug every time I helped her back up. Every day I came home from work, she’d switch the TV off and before even looking my way, call out, “Come! We do…I’ll be there for you.” It was everything I had ever wanted.
A week after the karaoke started, she stood silently outside my bedroom door until I awoke and when I opened it, promptly said, “I go with you mall.” I was mortified at the thought of bringing her to work and, simultaneously, I blushed with pride. To willingly trade six hours in front of the TV for six hours spent with me was everything I could have asked for. Perhaps, if the other store-girls weren’t around, she and I could even talk about things, like take a magazine quiz or do would-you-rather questions. I hoped she wouldn’t weirdly hover by the wall of lacy underwear or touch any of it. But when we got to the mall, she held her hand out to me, asked for $20, and told me she’d meet me by the pretzels at 3:00pm.
This became a routine. I couldn’t afford the $20 every day, but I gave it to her because she wanted it. It all felt a little bit like how if you wanted to hold a banana slug in your fist you’d have to grip it as tightly as possible, lest it go off and slither into the woods.
Between our trips to the mall during the day and our karaoke and makeshift dinners at night (which she now ate every third day), I felt amazing about the grasp I had on her. We were meant to be the lone survivors in this dank lair. Perhaps all we had ever needed was for everyone else to die off so we could start afresh. (Twice Sagar sent envelopes stuffed with cash our way––once totaling $27 and once $16. Neither included a letter nor return address.) Sometimes I looked at mom’s small face and tightlipped smile and closed my eyes and could feel my own tightlipped smile matching hers exactly. Like if I kept my eyes closed for long enough I could talk through her mouth. I said things in her nasal, accented voice, like, “This is my daughter, Saamya,” or “Go get me chicken and knife and then get out! Heh heh heh.” or anything else I thought she might say in a world that was not this. I was good at pretending I was her. Sometimes when we were singing I was sure––positive––she was enjoying my company. Other times, I’d go to the bathroom and realize she had no idea I was gone. Between songs or in the car on the way to the mall, I’d tell her little things about me––like that I was thinking I might want to be a dental assistant one day, or try stage managing for the performing arts, and that I wasn’t totally sure whether I was attracted to girls or boys or both or neither. She listened, because she had to. But still, she listened.
Then she started disappearing in the mornings.
At first she was out and back before I woke up, but had twigs in her hair and waterlogged shoes so I knew she’d been somewhere. Then she started staying out later, sometimes for two to three hours. I’d wake up early, lie in bed, and hear her brush her teeth, rummage in the kitchen, then open and close the front door. I washed her clothes and toothbrush, cleaned her shoes, and pretended I had no idea she’d ever been gone.
We started eating together at our small dining table, the television lowered to a volume of 30. She ate every other day now––an achievement for which I gave myself full credit. As a kid, I had always remembered her in the middle of one fast or another, rocking her hunched body over prayer beads while the rest of us chomped on microwaved chicken dipped in ketchup. But now, I stared at her in wonder as she devoured a half-tray of Marie Callender's Frozen Country Fried Pork Chop & Gravy.
One morning, when she came back from wherever she’d been, there were snakeskin moltings stuck to her back. Another time, a chunk of her saree was missing, as though it had been bitten clean off. On days she wouldn’t come with me to work, she used the landline to make hour-long phone calls to a number I didn’t recognize in Alberta, Canada. I paid the phone bills, confused as to how she could hold a conversation for that long.
Two weeks into her morning escapades, I found a small chopping axe lying by the side of our house. A week after that firefighters drove in from three nearby towns to quell a “person-induced” fire in the center of the swamp forest behind us. After mom went to sleep, I turned on the news and learned the firefighters had found an assortment of belongings strewn about the fire’s origin. They were ashy and some half-burnt, but it was clear as day what they were, as the firefighter held them up one by one, his eyebrows furrowed in disappointment at the reckless culprit. The items were: A pajama shirt; a baseball bat; red underwear; a bottle opener that said in a cheesy font “Pennsylvania will fuck you UP!”; a soccer trophy; a toy metal elephant; a framed poster of a wolf howling at a moon; a collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards; a high school yearbook; and a book of shark facts.
The clothes and cards and yearbook were Anju’s. The soccer trophy Hrithik’s. The poster and shark facts Sagar’s. The bat and bottle opener dad’s.
I understood. Or I thought I understood which was maybe close enough to understanding: All four of them were gone. All four were ghosts of a once-family.
But the toy elephant was mine. And I was not in the slightest a ghost.
The firefighter mentioned that many more items were also burnt but too unrecognizable to point out. I pictured Sagar in a bare room somewhere watching too. I wouldn’t have minded if it guilted him into coming home.
The next few mornings mom laid low. But a week later she was back in the woods. One morning I followed her out. I crept behind her and watched her tiny, hunched frame hobble down the street under the still dark purple sky, the small axe swung over her smaller shoulder. But before I made it half a block, I felt guilty: That I was disrespecting her. That she deserved to have something for herself. That she had indeed birthed four children and let us all nurse at her breast and held us when we were hurt and slept next to a violent adulterous man for thirty-one years and never said a word about any of it and so, perhaps, she deserved to go off and hack down trees and burn what she could of her once-family in a swampy woods from 6:00 to 9:00 in the morning.
I didn’t want to keep spying on her. But I was now over $400 in on her mall allowances and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how she was spending six hours in a mall four days a week. Perhaps I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t burning the money I gave her. (All our other expenses I was putting on a credit card Anju had left in our room and apparently forgotten about. I didn’t know the credit limit but, surely, I was close.) Or maybe I wanted to know why she burned my elephant. So, when mom was in the bathroom or watching Brat Camp, I dug through her mirror-lined purse and found the occasional receipt for an Orange Julius or chocolate-dipped ice cream. Once I saw on her saree blouse what looked (and smelled) like tuna. None of it felt like explanation enough. One morning while she was showering, I snuck into her room and rifled through her drawers. And there, in her bottom-most dresser drawer, I found it––ten, maybe twelve tubes of bright red lipstick. All unopened, all different brands. Under the lipsticks, two long sleeve white shirts and a pair of white linen pants, with tags still on. I had never seen mom wear anything other than a cotton saree. My heart pounded as if I had seen a dead squirrel. I closed the dresser drawer and pretended I’d found nothing of what was inside.
One day, in the car, I asked her to tell me something crazy that happened in her childhood. She looked at me, startled, as though I’d just brandished a weapon. I backtracked and said, “Any memory, really.” All I knew about her life was that she grew up in Podampetta, a tiny coastal village in India. I had never been to India, let alone Podampetta. Mom fixed her eyes on me for a long time. The middle of her pupils seemed to grow yellow. Then she looked out the front window of the car, her smile returned to her face, and she said slowly, “I swim….in beach… water so warm dolphin comes. We play…horsey.” She smiled so wide her nearly brown teeth glisten. Saliva pooled in the corners of her lips. “Then. On rock…see Chacha dead. Head in two.”
Chacha meant Uncle.
I ran a red light and three cars honked at me.
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
I called the number in Alberta, when mom was in the woods. A deep woman’s voice answered by saying, “This is President.” President asked me who I was. I asked President who they were.
“How did you get this number?”
“A…friend gave it to me. Told me I should call.”
“What is this friend’s name?”
“....Champavati Gochhayata.”
President didn’t respond for a while and then eventually said “Tell Champa there will be consequences for this,” and then hung up. I called again and nobody answered.
I stole an extra mic for our karaoke machine and a 90s rap extension to the catalog. We spent two days learning Missy Elliot’s The Rain. Mom said all the words about twenty to sixty seconds late but got them out in one form or another. More lipsticks were added to her drawer. Another pair of white linen pants. One morning I found a brand-new suitcase tucked under her bed.
Mom ate every day now. I introduced her to new cuisines. She took to Szechuan food the most and usually ate my dish as well as hers, leaving me hungry and proud. She gained no weight but looked less gaunt than before, and walked with a small, but new pep. Now the TV was specifically turned on for shows she wanted to catch up on, like Celebrity Love Island and Survivor, rather than blaring on in perpetuity. I found outgoing letters in our mailbox addressed to Alberta. Envelopes stuffed with thick packets of paper. My mom’s handwriting on them looked like that of a six-year-old. I held them up to the light to see what I could see, which was nothing at all. But instead of opening them, I caressed the writing and put them back in the mailbox. Once, the envelope wasn’t even stamped. I added three stamps to get it across the Canadian border and raised the mailbox flag so the postman wouldn’t miss it. Then I went home hoping we would sing Backstreet Boys until our bones hurt.
One night, in the middle of The Biggest Loser, a breaking news banner split through the screen and a half-asleep reporter warned us of more strange activity taking place in the swamp forest. We learned that somebody had been chopping at small, young trees and using whatever they could tear off to form a mat of some sort. “We believe this is evidence of some sort of ritual as police found not one, but three decapitated squirrels in the vicinity. Investigators believe the decapitation was done with some sort of small axe or hatchet and urge anyone who might have any information about the identity of the perpetrator to call the tip line below.” That same night I smelled something strange coming from Hrithik and Sagar’s room and found everything, including their bed, the upturned lamp, and the clothes in their drawers, covered and soaked in inconceivable amounts of swamp water.
By the grace of some god, the America’s Got Talent flyers went up the next day. We saw them together, taped to the entrance of the mall. Mom recognized the logo immediately, her eyebrows popping into her forehead. “Ma, look. They’re having auditions, here at the mall. Look! They want solos, duos, or trios!” She took the flyer and held it two inches from her face. Then folded it in half six times and stuffed it deep into her saree blouse. It looked like a misplaced nipple.
“She practiced all day––with me, alone in her room, in the shower. I’d hear her day and night: ’I been waaaaaandering… waaaaandering. No, waaandering. Wandering. Wandering. Waandering. Round. Rain or shine. Step jump. Good, Champa! Waaaaandering!’”
Later that night I saw her looking at the flyer while watching Temptation Island. She got up from her chair and walked right up to the TV screen, her face almost pressed up against it. She turned her head to me. “I…on TV?” Then she looked into the screen again as though trying to find where she might enter from. She caressed the corner of the TV and mumbled something like, “Will miss you,” or “Fill this too.” Then, she turned her head to me and asked, “What song?”
“For…our audition?”
“Yes.”
We settled on You’re My Best Friend. I choreographed. As per usual, mom followed some of what I laid out and mostly whatever she wanted. She invented new kick moves, some knee circles, and a karate chop thing that involved flat palms moving in opposition as fast as humanly possible. We both sang loud and proud and even hit a final pose. I hugged her then quickly let go and signed us up for the earliest time slot I could get.
Mom stopped going into the woods in the mornings. Perhaps to not get caught by the now-alert podunk cops or perhaps because she was too consumed with her upcoming performance. She practiced all day––with me, alone in her room, in the shower. I’d hear her day and night: “I been waaaaaandering….waaaaandering. No, waaandering. Wandering. Wandering. Waandering. Round. Rain or shine. Step jump. Good, Champa! Waaaaandering!” If I was cooking or doing dishes, she’d stop me, pull me to the living room and show me a new move she wanted to try. I said yes to anything she wanted. Four days before the audition, I heard a crashing noise coming from the backyard. I ran around the house and saw dad’s cherry-wood nightstand, smashed, lying on a stretch of concrete below mom’s bedroom window.
Three days before our audition, I called Alberta again, closed my eyes and talked through mom’s nasal voice. I had her cadence and tone perfected.
“Hi. Champa here.”
“Password.”
“Heh. Champa Gochhayata. No need passwords no more.”
“Password.”
“...I forget. Am old…”
“Password.”
“...dolphin.”
The line went dead.
When I came home from work the next day, mom stared daggers at me. I pretended not to know why.
“Let’s practice ma! Only two days left!”
She walked right up to me, the same way she did to the TV screen a week ago. Her face was blank but hard. Sometimes she looked like a tree to me. A thousand-year old tree that somehow stayed so miniscule and scrawny. She took my chin with her fingers and shook her head at me. Her long fingernails dug into my skin. I let her dig. Surely, President told her some imposter-girl had called pretending to be her; I had violated something precious. The next morning, she went out to the woods again and didn’t come back till 3:00 in the afternoon. I called in sick to work and waited for her. I went to her room to look around. I opened the suitcase and sighed with relief to find it still empty. But then, I slid my hands into its inner pocket and felt the pamphlets. Light purple pamphlets with smiling white women on them: THE STRICIHNA COLLECTIVE. I had seen these pamphlets. Women in white clothes passed them out at the mall, near the food court. I had always thought they were trying to sell skin serums or vagina lotions. I opened one: “Plant your roots of self-embodiment into the soil of conquest and watch your SELF soar skywards, victorious, manifested as WOMAN.”
In the main picture, a white woman with long flowing blonde hair was running on the beach, laughing into the sunset. The caption: GURU DURGRAHA - Director of Flow. Below her, a picture of a seedy looking white man with a long gray beard, turban, no shirt and two nipples: GURU SHAUBHA––MASTER of Flow. Sentences like “Untangle the neurons mapping the patriarchal grid inside the submissive woman’s mind,” and “It is within our highest destinal plane to emerge holding three parts of the same male God—the heart, the hunger, the hurt,” were splayed in rolling cursive over the pictures.
On the back was a picture of ten or so women standing in the thick underbrush of the forest. None of them had any expression on their face. They all wore long sleeve white shirts and white linen pants. They had so much red lipstick on, it looked like a small rose had been stuck into their mouths. Like the rose would keep them from ever speaking again. Below the picture, a poem of sorts:
Drowning in Red
Waters of Lust
She is Origin birthed by the End.
See her flail, how she shudders.
Hold her down with no remorse!
But the night is red and silence infinite…
And the sparrow will shriek for the demon awakened!
Multi-limbed!
Hands of a Crab!
SHE claws to the surface -
Having eaten eyes of a God.
On a post-it note stuck to the pamphlet, mom’s child-like scratch marks depicted an address in Alberta, Canada. Below that, in big letters: “Crab.”
I pressed *69 to hide my Caller ID and called dad. I hung up when I heard his voice.
I called Alberta. As it rang, I closed my eyes and imagined my face to be mom’s face, my eyes beady and mouth tight-lipped like hers. I talked through her voice. The deep-voiced woman answered, announced she was President speaking. I fake-cried, and then real-cried.
“It Champa Gochhayata here. Need to talk. Please!”
“Password.”
“...crab.”
Silence.
“Hi Champa,” a new, soft voice answered.
“Hi…! Need to talk!”
“How are you doing today, Champa?”
“I- I…I don’t know. I don’t know. It is–” what was it? “––good to talk to you.”
“Are you crying, Champa?” I didn’t respond. “That’s not a bad thing, Champa. Go ahead and cry. Have you gone to the woods this week?”
“Yes! Yes. Have gone.” I was there right now.
“Is it making you feel strong yet?”
“Yes. Feeling strong now.”
“Good, Champa, that is good to hear. You told us, more than anything, you wanted to feel strong, right?”
“Yes.”
“Strong, like a man, you said.”
“Yes. Strong, like man.”
“So it’s working. According to plan. What is bothering you today, Champa?”
I didn’t know what to say. Nothing was bothering Champa.
“Are you eating, Champa?”
“Everyday.” Then, I added: “Just like you told me.”
“Good, that is why you are feeling stronger. You’re allowing life in. All of life. The beauty. The pain. Remember what you told me? Why you never used to eat?”
“...yes.”
“Tell me again, Champa.”
I closed my eyes. For a second I panicked, but faster than I could make sense of, an answer came out from my tightly pursed lips.
“I don’t eat, then I feel nothing. No pain.”
“Right. Exactly! That’s better than you’ve ever said it before. If you don’t eat you can’t feel pain. But you don’t have to be afraid of pain anymore. You can invite pain back into your life. Have you been feeling pain?”
“I don’t…think so.”
“You will. You will grow hungry for it, in fact. To both inflict it and bear it. To inflict and bear excruciating levels of pain. You will grow hungry for both. And when you do, remember, it is your right to feel hungry, Champa.”
After some silence, “We are still missing $220 from you, Champa. And plus this call, the balance is $260. But you are doing good work. We hope it is making you feel strong. And ready.”
I wanted to ask what I was getting ready for.
“I am ready.”
“We’ll see you soon, Champa.”
When mom got home from the woods, she called out for me, unsurprised I was not at work, “Let’s change song! No more Best Friends.”
My guilt was unhideable and my eyes puffy and red. Mom looked at me and frowned. Her saree was covered in swamp water and she had road rash on one side of her face.
“Okay ma. What song do you want?” I said shakily.
“Must Have Been Love,” she declared, wild-eyed.
We practiced, but it was nowhere near what we had come up with for the last song. There were no final poses, no room for peppy box steps. Mostly just me singing while mom flitted about the room, like a tiny old Indian lady pretending to be a bird. Four to five run throughs and mom announced she was going to bed. Fifteen minutes later I heard her snores rumble through the hall. I hardly slept. The words of the song echoed in my head:
I wake up lonely
The air of silence
In the bedroom
All around
I could smell the swamp water coming from Hrithik and Sagar’s room. I felt it seep through the carpet and drywall and soak its way towards me. I felt the Kingfisher soaked in the living room seeping towards the swamp water, towards me. I felt the two liquids line up along battle lines on both sides of my prone body and knew when they met mom would be gone and the whole house, including me, would collapse like the wet cardboard box we all were.
The next morning, I woke up and opened my bedroom door to an intruder standing in the far corner of the kitchen. I almost screamed but then didn't. It was not an intruder, just an unrecognizable form of mom. She stood at the far end of the kitchen, waiting for me with hands clasped, letting me take her in. Two gray-haired Mickey Mouse buns sat on top of her head. She wore a long sleeve white shirt and white linen pants. Bright red lipstick announced the place where her mouth should be. I stared at her and she let me. I wanted to cry but didn’t want to annoy her. She held out an unplated pancake toward me––the first thing she’d cooked in god knows how many years. Unable to speak, I walked up to her and took it. I put it in my dry mouth but couldn’t bear to chew. Because burning my peripheral vision was a fully packed rolling suitcase with the handle extended sitting just a few feet away from us.
Mom looked disappointed in me and pried the pancake from out of my mouth.
I got ready without showering and as we walked out of the house, mom reached out her skinny arm to grab the suitcase handle. She rolled it across the living room, over the patio and down to the car. I kept walking, pretending I couldn’t see it. Pretending I couldn’t see anything because if I couldn’t see anything then there wasn’t anything to see.
The morning October air was cool and crisp and the sky looked like a frozen, all-white ocean. The four other houses on our long and skinny street sat like sleeping birds, their fat heads nestled in wild red underbrush. Mom and I met up at the back of the car, her tiny hands clutching the bag’s handle. Without looking up, I opened the trunk for her but then froze. My head felt empty and my chest clammy; I could not pick the suitcase up for her. She would not be able to pick it up herself. We waited.
She hunched over the bag to test the handle. Then in one quick swoop––gripping the handle––she flung her body up and promptly fell backwards onto the asphalt, the bag following after her, crushing her two legs. She wailed in her first language and writhed like a street cat: “Nashini maa!!!” I rushed to lift the suitcase and free her legs, but instead of hoisting it into the trunk for her, I placed it back on the ground. We waited.
Mom made her way back to standing, her palms scraped. She crouched with both knees bent, hugging the suitcase from the bottom and groaning with all her might to lift it off the ground, then fell onto the bones of her butt as the suitcase rolled back into her. I rushed to her again, but this time she hissed at me to stay back. Before I could retreat, a deep, guttural rage-fueled sound propelled her to her feet and she rammed the suitcase up against the back bumper and just continued pushing, straight up against it, her feet sliding backwards, her voice roaring like a panther in labor. Somehow the bag started moving up. She pushed with her pelvis, her belly, her breasts, her beast-like sounds. When the bag was up high enough, it dropped cleanly right into the trunk and mom collapsed over it, breathless. She turned to look at me with her yellowing eyes and I had zero recollection of who she was. I felt empty, as if all the blood in my body had been drained and was running down the street’s gutter. We drove in silence to the mall.
Right before entering the parking lot, I opened my mouth, in hopes I could get a response.
“I think this audition is going to be the start of something big for us, ma.” My voice was shaky. I pretended it wasn’t. “Think about it––sponsorship deals, record deals, commercials. Birthday parties. We’ll be who they call when they’re opening a new store and need someone to cut the ribbon.”
“Okay,” she chuckled. All the crevices of my body were sticky with cold sweat.
“I love you, ma.”
I didn’t mean to say it, but it was, in the moment, the truest thing I felt. Maybe it was the first time it was true. I didn’t know. Maybe that was the thing I was sure I knew about her back when all my siblings left––the thing none of my siblings would have understood––that she was the one person I could actually, really, truly love.
When we parked, I took the suitcase out of the trunk and helped her wheel it into the mall. When she went to use the bathroom, I looked through it.
The auditions were taking place in the main concourse, one level below the food court. The floor was packed with people warming up in one way or another––singing scales, juggling knives, stretching legs over heads. Mom and I sat on a bench to share a baked ziti from Sbarro’s, though I couldn’t bring myself to eat. I looked at her every now and then, waiting for some form of confession, but only saw her looking straight ahead, smiling at nothing at all. She still looked like a tree, but a calm one. Rooted in her own forest. Ready to transmogrify into a panther again at a moment’s notice.
“What happened in Podampetta, ma? On the beach, when you were a kid?”
She looked at me. Her smile melted back into a nothingness, and I regretted my question but also didn’t. Mom plucked ziti with her fingers then thrust fingers into her mouth.
“Dolphin come. Want to play with me. We play horsey! Water so warm I think I will die happy.” She spoke as slowly as possible. The noodles looked like chomped skin stuck in her teeth. “Chacha not supposed to be there. Not supposed to come near me. But he riiiiight there. I see him from water. I clutch dolphin! Ask dolphin help. Then... I. Don’t know. Some time pass…” More ziti, more teeth. “Sky turns red color like god is mad with me… my hands breaking from rock… then Chacha dead. Head in two. Everybody say, Go Champa run no come back Champa RUN!”
She grabbed a whole fistful of the remaining ziti, scraping the corners of the box to get the melted cheese, fit it all in her mouth, then licked sauce and orange cheese oil from off her palm.
“Heh heh heh.”
“Is that when you stopped eating?”
She held my gaze. Then smiled with her mouth open. Like she wanted to devour me. Like she wanted to stick her tomato-sauce encrusted fingernails into my eyes until they reached my brain and I’d have to beg her to stop. I wanted her to do that too. I wanted it badly. I’d call her Mommy and hug and kiss her begging her to stop.
When the clock read 10:42, a man with a clipboard butchered our names.
Mom stood up. I did not. She looked at me, a picture of calm happiness.
“Go, ma. You do it.” I smiled big so she might remember me smiling big.
Without hesitation, mom wiped her hands on her white linen pants, smudging them red and orange, then went up alone onto the makeshift stage. Teenagers rolled their eyes in response. The music started and mom danced, swaying her arms from side to side. She basked in the lights shining down just for her. “Heh heh heh. Lay whisper!!!” A hefty and prematurely balding boy yelled “Boo!” as he sipped from a Big Gulp. I stood up and yelled, “Go Ma!!!!” hoping she could find me in the crowd. The bald kid booed louder.
“On pillow!!!” She tried a strange hop from one foot to another. The boy booed again and without skipping a beat, mom looked for him in the audience and then chucked both of her shoes at him, one of them hitting a pregnant lady’s shoulder and the other an old man’s plate of meatballs. “LEAVE WINTER ON GROUND!!!!! Heh heh heh!” She laughed at the irritated faces now turning her way, kicking up more boos from the audience. She reveled in the crowd’s annoyance and her whole body, from fingers to toes, began to flex and contract just for their sneering eyes. “MUST HAVE BEEN LOOOOOOOVE!!!!” Boos begot boos. Mom growled back at them like a predator sniffing meat. More boos. Her limbs jerked in a way that made her look feral. Her eyes grew yellow. The boos layered atop one another like a polluted sea. A feral ballerina come to life; mom kicked out into diagonals. She stomped out towards children, teeth bared. The rolled-eyed teenagers sat stunned, as she spun, shook, whipped her head one way then the other. She scream-sang whatever lines she wanted to, whenever her dancing called for it, and sometimes just screamed, then laughed maniacally when she almost fell off the stage. The boos and the music and her scream-singing grew together in a gnashing crescendo until mom just started smacking her own cheeks, one by one, as hard and fast as possible, until they were as red as tomato-sauce blood. She spazzed and spun and roared and frisbee’d her gold wire-rimmed glasses into a little girl’s eyes. She moved so fast her two buns came loose and out flew twigs, leaves, dirt, snakeskin, sand, feathers, squirrels, teeth. She was a beast and a panther and a village girl who could break a man’s skull in two. She was a 1000-year old spruce tree and this New Jersey Mall Concourse was her lair, the crowd’s vitriol her water and sun. She crawled around on all fours as her eyes yellowed with hunger and she ate and ate and ate and ate.
I stayed long enough to clap harder than anyone else, to cheer and wail as loudly as humanly possible and slip $300 cash into her bag, but I made sure to be gone by the time she stepped off stage, sucked on her teeth, and pushed her suitcase straight towards, then into the double-wide glass doors, bracing for the cold, her child-sized shoulders pulled in close, her tiny figure marching forth.
Meera Rohit Kumbhani (she/her) is an Indian-American writer, actor, and performer. As an actor she works in television, film, and theater. Her writing has been published in Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, SAND, and more. She has degrees in Acting from Columbia University and Neurobiology from UC Berkeley and lives in California with her two young children. www.meerawrites.com