Flame Tree Road. Shona Patel
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a fitful sleep. Random choppy images swirled through his brain. He saw himself in a large field. The ground was strewn with damp white lilies and tiny pencils with broken points. There were so many broken pencils that they looked like scattered peanuts. Biren was bending down to examine the pencils when he heard something that sounded like the drone of bees in the distance. He looked up to see a crowd approaching. They were faceless, hairless people, neither men nor women, all dressed in white, moving toward him in a serpentine wave. As they drew closer, their hum turned into a mournful wail that looped over and over in a mounting crescendo. They trampled over the delicate lilies and left behind a brown, slimy waste. They headed toward the fish market and Biren followed them.
Next he found himself in the fish market with his father. Biren reached for his father’s hand but came up with a fistful of coarse, white cloth. He panicked. Where was Baba? None of the people around him had any faces. To his relief, he saw the chicken man. Biren knew he could wait safely at the chicken stall and his father would surely find him. The chicken man acknowledged him with a friendly nod. He was in the middle of telling his customer the story of a man who contacted rabies after being bitten by a chital fish. Biren listened idly, thinking one did not get rabies from a fish bite. But he didn’t want to spoil the chicken man’s story. The chicken man stroked the beautiful black rooster on his lap as he spoke. The rooster’s yellow eyes were closed and it looked like it would purr like a cat. Its blissful expression reminded Biren of his mother’s face when Apu gave her a head massage.
The chicken man finished his story. He took a puff of his bidi and, with the bidi still dangling between his lips, he placed both his hands around the rooster’s neck and broke it with a single, sharp twist. Then he held the bird down until its wings stopped flailing. Biren felt bile rise in his throat as he watched the chicken man chop off the rooster’s head, pluck the feathers, gut its entrails and tear out a small pink heart that was still pulsing. After splashing water from a bucket to wash off the blood, he shoved the heart, liver and gizzard back inside the chicken, trussed up the bird in a banana leaf and put it in the man’s cloth shopping bag. Then the chicken man counted his money, shoved it under his mat, rocked back on his haunches and smoked the rest of his bidi. Every time he drew in the smoke, he narrowed his eyes.
Biren woke up clammy with sweat and lay in bed thinking. That was what had happened to his mother. In the same way the rooster was changed from a bright-eyed bird to three pounds of meat and bone in a banana leaf, his mother was stripped of her long hair, her colorful sari, her bright laugh and the kohl in her eyes. Dehumanized, she was just meat and bones wrapped in a white piece of cloth. She had become one of those cursed ones: a widow.
Biren returned to the woodshed again that night. Shibani was expecting him. She pressed her cheek to the wall and touched a finger to his through a gap in the wooden slats.
“You came back, my son,” she whispered. “I think of you and Nitin all the time.”
“What happened to you, Ma?” Biren cried in a broken voice. “Who did this to you? What happened to your hair?”
Shibani touched her bald head. “Oh, I must look a sight, don’t I?” she said ruefully. “I have not seen myself, which is just as well. This is what being a widow is all about, mia.”
“Did they cut all your hair off?”
She nodded. “The priest shaved it.”
“Why?”
Shibani gazed at her son’s soft, troubled eyes. “It is the custom, mia. That is what they do to widows so they can never marry again.”
“Why did they lock you here? Who gives you food?”
She sighed. “This is my mourning period. I must be kept in isolation. Even when that is over, things will be very different. I want you and Nitin to prepare yourselves. You will not see much of me after I come back into the house. I will no longer be a part of the family. I have to cook my own food now. Eat alone and only once a day. I can never touch meat or fish or eat spicy food or even drink a cup of tea.”
“What about chili tamarind?” asked Biren. He had not meant it to be funny, but he was relieved to see her old crooked smile.
She looked away. “No chili tamarind,” she said softly.
“When will Apumashi come to—” he was about to say “oil your hair” but stopped himself “—see you?”
She sighed. “I will not be allowed to socialize with anyone. A widow is a cursed being. Married women with children and happy families like your Apumashi are not allowed to come near us. They fear our bad luck may rub off on them. My friendship with Apu is over, I’m afraid.”
It was inconceivable! They were best friends; they told each other all their secrets. Had they not promised to live next door to each other forever? They had even planned to get their children married to one another, so that they could live together as one big happy family.
Biren was beginning to feel desperate. His words came out in a rush. “What if...if I marry Ruby? What if Nitin marries Ratna? Then you will both be in-laws. You have to be friends.”
Shibani regarded her son tenderly. His sweet, hopeful face, the feverish plea in his eyes. A tear coursed down his cheek. Biren dismissed it with a careless flick. Seeing this adultlike gesture broke her heart. Her sweet baby boy was growing up in front of her eyes.
Biren’s chin trembled. “I will marry Ruby,” he declared with manly determination.
Shibani was touched and amused at the same time. “Oh, you really want to marry Ruby, then?” She suppressed a smile. “So you think it is a good idea, after all, do you?”
“No, but...”
“I want you to listen to me, son,” Shibani said firmly. “Your father...” Her eyes filled with tears, but she controlled herself. “Your father and I did not bring you up to do things against your will. Marrying Ruby is childish talk. That is not the answer and that is not going to solve the problem. You must take care of your brother. Only you can explain things to him. Just do the best you can. Be there for him. I cannot be there for you both any longer. My life is over. Yours has just begun.”
Biren’s thin veneer of adulthood cracked and he broke down with a cry. “Why do you say that, Ma?” He sobbed. “Why do you say your life is over? Are you going to die?”
“Shush, mia,” she whispered, touching his cheek with the tip of her finger. How she wished she could cradle him in her arms and wipe those clumped eyelashes with the end of her sari. “Of course I am not going to die. This is no time to cry. I am just trying to prepare you for what lies ahead. I will be here, but I will no longer be a part of your life. A widow does not have a position in the family. I will remain in the background and you may not see much of me, but I want you both to remember me—not the way I have become, but the way I used to be. You can come and see me when you wish, but you must promise not to do so out of sorrow or guilt. Come and see me when you have good tidings and we will rejoice together. I may be cursed as a widow, but I have been blessed as a wife and mother, and nobody can take that from me.”
Through the slit in the wood, all Biren could see were her eyes. They burned with the unnatural brightness of anger at the injustice of it all.
His mother may be trapped, Biren decided, but he was not. It would be up to him to set her free.
He did not go straight back to bed. Rather, he sat on the kitchen steps by the pot of holy basil and hugged his knees, thinking. A big moon sailed high in the sky, weaving in and out of the clouds, sometimes bright, other times clumped and patchy. Biren’s thoughts churned deep and dark into his soul, trying to find glimmers