Next time, he came to meet her, he asked her about that gash under her chin. And she was lost, looking at him, his innocence. Is she supposed to tell him.How? Is she supposed to tell him. Why? All she had to do was trace her finger over the tiny, unhealed, chin-under gash-and she could clearly summon to her mind its vicious, entirely unforgettable arrival into her kismet and over her body. Only she knew, Why was not for the gash but for love or to be said in a better way. Why not ?
Her parents once deeply and madly in love got over it faster than they fell into it. The only thing that happened in between was a marriage and ofcourse She. Their life would follow a routine, her father a Doctor left for work early in the morning. Her mother awoke at nine, and set to work on her paintings.Somewhere inside all of this was She. Watching. Listening. Memorising. Her father would return at lunchtime only to recommence an argument with his wife that he had abandoned the night before, and they opened with the very words they had broken off at, ending over lunch. They resumed work and met at the dinner table at eight, where they ate in an eerie hush since they were still brooding over their hastily concluded noonday argument.As always, the meal was fairly inedible, because a grotty meal - a charred roti;a daal that tasted like a salt pan - doubled as the gracious harbinger of a quarrel that could rise now and continue well into the night and be consummated at noon the following day.
At night she would often hear them shouting " If it wasnt for her , my daughter I would have left you ages ago", " If it wasnt for her, I would not have married you into first place", he replied. establishing that indeed it was she who was to blame.
As for that gash under her chin.
Well, now that was instituted in astonishing circumstances:during a fight that started- When her father came back after spending five wonderful months in England. When her mother announced that she was pregnant.Eight months pregnant. When it was too hot outside, and she was cuddled up in her room.
She hiding in her room, could hear her father yelling so that the glass panes shivered to his masculing timbre, which insulted his wife three generations back, describing her father a castrated pig, her mother as a cheap village whore, her grand mother as a lower-caste drain-cleaner and so on untill their invectives were overlapping and redundant and, in despair that he might run out of things to say, He started to beat his wife, first with a soup laddle he picked up absent-mindedly from the table, then with the back of his hand. This went on with merciless delight. She tolerated as much as a woman with an infant in her womb could.
In the darkness of her room, She hurried up to her door and pressed her ear to it:what now ? Who was being pulled ? What caused those screamings ? Animalesque. Unearthly. Were they going downstairs? She hurried back and hid behind the curtains, thoroughly petrified that the Hand that knocked her mother down was also waiting for her.
But no. Oh no,no,no! It was far worse.
When she looked outside of her hiding place,she saw, through the window, her mother on her all fours near the tree in their garden, just outside the main door. She heard steps of her father coming back. He started playing Beethoven. She looked at her mother again, panting and beaten into a pulp. She heard her mother shouting for her... save me please.. save me from your father.. for god's sake, I'm a pregnant woman.. and the baby is here.. your little sibling. But she was too scared that her father would hear her and grow mad at her, she ducked under the window.
Convinced that her daughter has abandoned her as well, Doctor's wife was back on all fours, digging with her hands, like an olive ridley turtle digging up a nest. Intrigued by her mother's sudden silence, She peeped up to watch. And she saw her mother spit out a child.Tear away from placentra.Rip out the chord.Small and dirty it was, but it was lifting up its so soppy arms and wailing forcefully. Breathing. She saw her mother lean down and kiss the bloody face before she.... she... why! she chucked it into the hole she had dug to the tune of Beethoven ( the small mercies in life:good music to bury your baby to). He was bawling and begging not to be burried, but only She other than her mother, watching intently understood that her mother had done the right thing. That night, She felt, this could not be, that this was not the life of a seven-year-old child should have to encounter and decided: never be a child.At that instance, her feet melted and she fell and smashed her chin on the marble-topped table whose sharp carved edge indented into her, for ever, the memory of the night when her mother was left out howling for her to help me please right before she burried her infant brother with her hands, and all she did was faint, to fade like the echo of a wail that rises from the deep gut of the Earth itself.
That was the first time she had got a seizure attack of epilepsy. She didnt know then how many has yet to follow.
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