You dare not tell me that the boon I granted is not the one you wished for.
No, you’re too well-trained to ever think such a thing. Pious, god-fearing Janaki. Janaki, the fourth child, the one who came after a string of sisters. Janaki the granddaughter, the wife, the daughter-in-law.
You don’t let yourself think this even when your palms smart from the rope burns. Burns you shouldn’t have because having them means you came to me. To my ratha yatra, standing amongst the thousands who showed up just for a glimpse of me.
In fact, you try to forget the moment when I passed you on my chariot, turning to see you and the glint of the rufous dot on your forehead. Your pottu. You also try to forget the moment my blessing floated towards you. The golden pink light that, instead of mesmerising, singed its way in. A needle-thin poker straight into your mind. It felt as if your brain was being cauterised. Then, the light carved an intentional path down to your heart, making it rumble on contact like an imploding concrete ball. Your heart fissured and through the cracks grew thorns of desire. The underside of your tongue became a bruise, one that is now scabbing over, purplish black.
You cannot forget this feeling, even if you try, because it is not just inside you. It is in your eye like a permanent afterglow, the result of a lifetime of staring at strobe lights. I am the lens that colours your vision. I sit under your tongue, charring your words with anger.
“Aiyo Rama, fuck,” you say when the green chillies you’re chopping touch your skinned palms. Hah! These verbal accidents, this profanity, is out of your control and there’s not much you can do about it. I see you try to bite the words back, but you’re no match for me.
“I heard that,” Anusuya says, entering the kitchen, a sparkle in her eyes. “Those TV shows you watch on your phone all night are getting to you.”
She is amused that her god-fearing mother is using not one, but two swear words in a sentence. She shakes her forefinger in front of your face. A parent’s reprimand.
At this point your husband walks in as well and, if he were an observant person, he would notice shame writ on your face. If. But we both know he isn’t, don’t we?
“So, what do we have here?” he asks, rubbing his palms genially, as if this is his office pantry and the two of you report to him.
“Go, sit. I’ll bring you the upma. Can you help Amma to the table?”
Ram doesn’t respond. He is busy sniffing, nose dangerously close to the bubbling rava. For a moment, you think of warning him, but I pinch your throat, catch your words for you, and all you can do is watch as a hot green pea leaps at his face. We both know he will pretend it didn’t sting him. Being a man, he doesn’t let himself wince, but you can see the beginnings of a burn mark on his eyelid.
“Yenna na, did you hear me?” you ask, careful to avoid referring to the frisky pea.
“Yes, yes,” he says, trooping out. Anusuya rolls her eyes.
There are times when you wonder if it was just a bad dream, like the nightmares you keep having – rats gnawing on your right hand; Zeeboomba, the boogeyman, smashing through door after door of your house to get to you; Paati, your grandmother, smiling at you through bloody teeth.
You wanted the goddess’s blessing, my blessing, but I know you expected it to work differently. I bring no sunlit mellowness, I bring glowing embers. And since you don’t understand how the blessing went so wrong, you pray harder than ever before, reciting all the slokams Paati drilled into you with knuckle-taps on your skull. You begin with the first one and make your way to the last, careful to not mess up the order. Over and over, from morning to night. You carve out extra time to keep the velakku lit through the day and teach yourself how to make garlands so you can weave prayers into each knot.
But it’s too little in the face of this new force. I unshackle the hold on your tongue.
“Get yourself a spoon if the sambhar is too hot,” you snap at Ram over dinner.
“Pack your own lunch,” you tell Anusuya one morning.
When the lady from the parlour arrives to trim your mother-in-law’s ingrown toenails and colour your hair – you refuse for the first time in twelve years.
“I’ll grow it out,” you say, referring to the shocking silver that has begun emerging every two weeks instead of three.
“But ma’am.”
“I’m fifty-two. There is no need for me to look any younger.”
“But until your daughter gets married …”
You ignore those words, let them hang in the air as you sit facing Amma. She needs company for the pedicure.
Your mind wanders as it always does when you’re forced to sit in attendance.
Ram’s retirement is fast approaching and soon he will be at home all the time. Sunita’s complaints of her husband’s retirement have prepared you for what to expect – he will take notice of everything you do; he will decide to repair all electronics and broken furniture himself; he will take a sudden interest in the garden. Your garden. Here’s what you’re going to do. He needs to be kept busy, so you make a plan to pull out the bagfuls of wires, connectors and broken electronics you’ve been collecting over the years. A couple of days after his retirement, you will place the bags somewhere he can’t miss. You will also begin collecting flowering fruits and get Anusuya to order one of those composting bins that she’s been after you to adopt. Ram can take care of it – sorting and composting all the vegetable scrap, imagining they’re the files in his office.
A smile forms on your lips. You try to contain it, to keep it in your mouth like a stolen piece of rough-edged confection you can suck on later, but Amma spots it.
“Yenna di?” she asks, her gaze hawk-eyed. “Is something the matter?”
You get up to find the purse before you end up saying something to her.
Your Paati was never like other grandmothers who, you’re told, are soft and pampering. Shick shick shick, she’d chop vegetables on the curved blade of the aruvaamanai, her substantial thigh sitting on its wooden base to keep it in place. When you were a child, she’d make you sit while she quartered cauliflowers or brinjal so she could teach you the slokams, those “prayers every good child needs to know”. She’d never look at what she was chopping, eyes trained on you, pausing her massacre only when you forgot a verse or if you shrieked on spotting a wriggling green worm.
“Inga vaa,” she’d call through clenched teeth.
You’d walk up to her, but stand out of arm’s reach. That never stopped her. She’d grab the hem of your frock, drag you towards her and pinch you, always in an uncomfortable spot – the back of the knee, right above the elbow, in the hidden part of skin behind the ear. Paati’s lessons were always tough and you were never pious enough. But she did one thing for you – she taught you to feign dullness. Appear blunted.
That is why you’ve been careful to always seem a little lost. Gullible. Naïve. You kept quiet and nodded when Ram explained to you which bus to take as if you were a child. You let him check the accounts and compliment your math skills in surprise, month after month. You let your daughter make UPI payments because only the young know technology. On WhatsApp, your profile pic is the glorious and powerful Madurai Meenakshi, as beautiful as truth. But on Facebook, it’s me, Karupaambal. The dark one. Ram doesn’t check Facebook and your daughter hardly knows the difference between goddesses.
Zeeboomba was Paati’s favourite choice of threat when you were a child. She told you he would come to get you if you laughed too much while playing, or if you had unclean thoughts, or if you didn’t plait your hair. He had a direct line to you and all your desires. Everything you wanted which you weren’t supposed to want would summon him. Sooner or later, he would get you. She also told you that prayer was insurance against him. All you needed to do was be careful until the prayers began having their effect.
So, you linger in the kitchen, cleaning up long after you need to, hoping that Ram would be asleep by the time you got to bed. You don’t dare to speak much around him, afraid of what you might say or do.
But once you’re in bed, his ice-cold hand slips under the hem of your saree. You hold your breath, you close your eyes, a hot tear rolls out. Then, my power shimmies and shakes inside you. It has grown tendrils. A heat spreads across the centre of your forehead and your hands do the thing you never let yourself do – you reach down, grip his wrist and yank it away. You even whisper, “Not tonight.”
He is so stunned, he sits up, his nostrils flaring. Then, a sort of understanding dawns on him and his brows uncrease. He thinks you’re on your period. Might as well let him; you didn’t tell him when the blood stopped. It was never his business to know.
You realise that this new power is more than an unwanted blessing. It is changing you.
Excerpted with permission from ‘A Rough-edged Confection’ by Suchitra Sukumar in Between Worlds: The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, Vol 1, edited by Gautam Bhatia, IF/Westland.
