strangedaze

Parvati’s eyes, unlike my own, are wide like the silvery bottoms of Coke cans, taking in everything and nothing at once. When she blushes they particularly resemble the eyes of the western girls visiting from abroad. These white girls are slim, mostly bleached blondes who, feeling adventurous, stray from their towering hotels locked limb to limb with their boyfriends and husbands to explore the surrounding neighborhoods, looking for fresh fruit, vegetables, or a taste of authentic India.

From time to time I notice tiny scars, no thicker than the edge of a fingernail, stretching across Parvati’s eyelids. White men like big eyes, mother reiterates when I touch them, hugging her sky-blue gown, flecked with dirt, defiantly to her girth. Unlike our pear-shaped mother, Parvati’s brown body still hasn’t found its curves, but it exudes a profitable mix of innocence and exoticism. Such a combination proves irresistible to the foreign men who leave their women sleeping far away to venture out into the night, looking to pay for pleasure and eager to see whether or not Indian girls live up to their reputation.

Of course, money is scarce. All of us must do our part to make rent, an exorbitant sum given the quality of our ramshack hut – four concrete walls separated into three rooms by wooden planks stacked end to end and nailed together. Our father left when I was very little. I have come to know him in bits and pieces, like a puzzle. When he enters my thoughts, he is never quite whole. Mother rarely speaks to me, and Parvati will say nothing of him, so he exists only in fractured images, memories that might be fiction.

My sister’s beauty has always been our mother’s chief concern and the family's source of income. It is not out of the ordinary for the two of them to spend entire afternoons readying my sister for a night’s work, intricately applying makeup and fitting her clothing so it sits tightly around her armpits and around her slender hips. During the day I earn enough money for dinner by polishing shoes and running small errands for the grocer. The palms of my hands are perpetually blackened by the shoe polish, but a full belly in the evening makes it worthwhile.

Mother had been in the business of selling sex herself for years and years, until varicose veins and hairy moles robbed her of her magnificence. Whispers tell me that my father was a rich businessman from Bengal, but it is impossible to know for sure.

Every evening after dinner she dictates prices to my sister while I make a game of swatting at the flies. One night, five dollars American, with condom. One night, seven dollars American, no condom. Most choose the latter, the authenticity of sexual encounters with young foreign girls willing to please trumping respect for the gamut of health concerns accompanying unprotected sex.

Sometimes I fall asleep listening to my sister moaning in the back of our hut, the only room in the place furnished with a boxspring bed. The rusty metal coils make a haunting lullaby as mother sits calmly, legs crossed and content, waiting for the man to leave. Sometimes she watches from a tiny pin-sized hole in the wall, making mental notes on Parvati’s performance; sometimes other men take her place, masturbating furiously onto the stained wall and dirt floor as they watch my sister and another man. One dollar American. My mother offers herself for another dollar, an offer which has yet to be accepted.

Months and months ago, Parvati, tears crawling zig-zag like ticks down her cheeks, had presented herself to us. Mother glanced at her abdomen, protruding slightly over her blue sash, then poked and prodded it with nimble fingers, soft as gravel. Her worst fear: my sister Parvati was pregnant.

“S’okay, these things happen,” mother had told her, rubbing her fuzzy chin. “Come come,” she said, pulling me by the hand from my spot in the corner. “Come help your sister.”

Helping my sister involved pinned her arms and legs down by wrists and ankles while mother stood on her belly, bouncing firmly in hopes of killing the baby growing inside. Then she kicked. Then stomped. Sweating Parvati groaned, struggled, finally went limp when it was over, panting for air. Mother used her flowerprint shoulder sash to wipe the sweat from her brow. She looked at me. “Now go ask the grocer if you can run errands for him today. Go go, we have to eat, you know.”

Parvati continued making money for weeks after this, though she confessed to me that she often suffered from spells of nausea. I held her hand during these times and felt her stomach. Any movement, no matter how subtle, made us both smile. Soon Parvati’s belly had grown too large and began deterring customers. Those that still want to pay are disappointed by Parvati’s lack of energy and how easily she succumbs to exhaustion. Mother herself now resorts to working, having chanced on a position as part of the kitchen staff at one of the hotels outlined like a mountain over the roofs of our peeling plaster neighborhood. I too double my efforts, hauling heavy baskets of grain for the grocer’s customers for hours on end.

Today, I feel sick. My body resembles a used matchstick, crumpled in the palm and flicked onto the floor. Parvati is in bed, too weak to move herself, while mother peels potatoes and steams rice in a silver world far, far away. The lumpy foam mattress is far more enticing than testing gravity by trying to stand, so I continue to lay there, not quite awake but unable to dream. Then she calls.

“Brother,” Parvati cries out from the other room. “It’s coming, I can feel it!”

I roll off of the mattress and dizzily rush to her bedside, still disoriented. Through sleep encrusted eyes I make out the blanket, covered in sweat, collecting under her exposed naval. I touch it with the pads of my fingers. The movement is faint, but there. A light blue statuette of Krishna Goppala, surrounded by a harem of contorting cowherding women, watches from the corner, its expression unchanging.

“I can feel it!” I say, seven years old and excited by the wonders of human creation. Lifting the blanket, I begin coaxing my sister through the contractions. She is convulsing now, biting down upon the dirty rag that she had instructed me to wrap around her face to muffle her cries. We are fortunate that mother has business elsewhere for the day. Her hands are less patient than mine in matters such as these. Hours pass slowly, feeling as sharp as Parvati's long and stylized fingernails, which dig into the skin on my forearms and hands, reducing them to a pink, twisted rubber. Then it happens. First a head, the size of a fist, then a neck, four limp appendages and the umbilical cord, which must be cut with a stone. The mess spills into my hands. Relief firecrackers inside as the baby takes its first weak, but still brilliant, breath.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she gasps, spitting out a mouthful of cloth.

I use my thumbs to spread its tiny legs. “A boy,” I say, smiling. “A beautiful baby boy.”

She’s laughing now, softly with whatever breath is left in her body, and I pass her newborn son into her arms. She brings him tightly into the sweaty crevice between her swollen breasts, cooing, “baby, baby, my only baby,” into his little ears.

She instructs me to make ready the washing chest, jammed full of tattered cotton, and I do so, digging a small cloth hole with my hands for the baby. Too exhausted to stand, she hands him to me, and I in turn transfer him to the chest just as the footsteps of our mother are heard stomping into the hut and the smell of lemon-scented cleaning products assumes control of the air. I gently shut the washing chest’s lid, leaving a small space for air to get through. The baby, evidently sensing the impending danger, remains quiet.

“New dress,” mother says, bursting through the door with a lime green length of linen draped over her arm. “Still sick? Has it come?” She notices the sticky dampness of the expelled placenta on the bed sheets and mistakes it for the aborted baby. The heavy lines of her face crease like cured leather, dried lips forming into a smile as she nonchalantly pulls the sheets off of the bed in one strong motion, nearly pulling my sister off with them, and bundles them together.

“Good good, back to supporting your family soon,” mother exclaims, tossing the soiled-sheet bundle absently into the washing-chest, not bothering to look down.

“Ramdeep,” she turns to me, “run to the grocers and buy some bread and chutney for your sister. She’ll need energy these next few days. After that, busy busy.”

Wrinkled red paper is stuffed into my hand and I leave hesitantly, glancing back at my sister, who despite it all is smiling, thin lips stretching from western eye to western eye. When I return with the groceries mother is gone again and Parvati is holding her child and rocking it back and forth, its bald brown head tucked under her chin and smile-dimpled cheeks. She wears the same expression as before, one of contentment, hope.

“When I hold him in my hands, nothing matters, nothing at all.”

The words taste move through me like paper cuts, but I return her smile and gently touch her thigh, noting, but afraid to tell her, that her child hasn’t moved since I entered the room.

__________________
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

eggo

Nice re-write SD,

It seemed very smooth this time around. Only a couple of things bothered me,

To me this sentence seemed out of order or forced.

Mother rarely speaks of him to me,

lastly,

this sentence really belongs with the father description two paragraphs previous.

Otherwise, great job.

Hodge

I didn't read the first one, so I don't know what's been changed. But it looks like you must have already caught most of the kinks in the piece before hand, because it reads very cleanly and flows nicely (and disturbs just enough to be interesting but not so much that I want to turn away in disgust and call you a sickey).


This is really good foreshadowing. I immediately thought, "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (which is what I always say when something seems off).

Red: awesome. I like this description.

Blue: I think you can cut this, it's a bit redundant (you already mention twice that memories of him are scattered).

After reading the rest of your story, this actually doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because just a little later you say this:

How can anyone remember enough about this man for him to have the scattered memories as stated above? Unless, of course, you're trying to make this 7 year old kid sound incredibly naive, like he doesn't fully comprehend what his mother and sister do. In that case, it works pretty well, although I might make him a little more naive throughout because he seems like he understands perfectly what's going on.


Your ending is superb, too. One thing, though.

Did the baby die at this moment or after it was born? You make it seem like it's stillborn, but if it had died at this moment it wouldn't have continued to grow. Pavarti's own body would have aborted it—a miscarriage.

If it's stillborn for some other reason then you may want to clarify a bit. Or maybe not. I'm probably reading into it too much.


Excellent story. I don't like to just give praise, but this only had a couple things—and they're nitpicky, really.

__________________
Science