Summoning the Rain

Mansi Poddar
YELLOW
(Chapter One)

Rathnapore summers are cruel; parched, scorching and unbearably yellow. Days inflate and nights wither. The air expands with heat, dust, and desolate hope. The muddy creek shrinks. Sunlight bursts through cracks in the crumbling sky, undulating immodestly over silver tin roofs and golden sand dunes. Freshly furrowed fields lie still, gestating patiently. Parched soil peels off the earth like dandruff. Trees bloat with fat, bright mangoes. Flies abound, frolicking in the ripe, summer smells of unwashed bodies, cow dung and ritualistic oil. Underfed, angular children grow jaundiced. Cattle die. Through it all, the village holds its collective breath and waits for the rain.

Every once in a while, the monsoon peeps over the rim of the horizon, smudging the boundaries between earth and sky. At times like these, the entire village gathers outside the granary and watches the clouds, willing them closer with its collective stare, as if reeling in a wayward kite tied to invisible string. The priests ring temple bells seven times and light two oil lamps for Indra, the fickle god of rain, fasting for three nights and praying that he bestow them with his blessings. He rarely does.

It’s a wonder they don’t lose faith. Like a battered woman that can’t summon up the courage to leave her abusive husband, they remain doggedly, ardently pious.

* *

Rathnapore hadn’t seen one drop of rain the summer Arun turned twelve. The creek disappeared, sinking deep into its bed, like a child returning to its dark, moist womb. The earth shriveled like a corpse’s skin. Young shoots that had pushed head-first through the fertile soil withered. The musty stench of death, disease and despair suffused the air. Although meals were pared down to once a day, the already meager stock of the village granary depleted rapidly. The Panchayat convened every evening, searching desperately for a solution. They found none.

It was during one of these meetings that Arun, watching from his hiding place in the old peepal tree, saw Rajesh, a respected member of the Panchayat turn empty eyes up to the sky. He saw them fill with tears, then overflow, the glistening drops slipping over wrinkled skin. He watched as Rajesh put out his tongue to catch them, licking his lips greedily. His own throat swelled with thirst. He was sitting there, in the tree, long after the Panchayat disbanded for the night.

* *

Arun watched color seep out of the sky, leaving it eerily dark and silent. Nerves danced in his stomach, matching their footsteps to the shadows shifting on the ground. Unable to contain them within his scrawny body, he expended them in little movements that were unusual for him. His fingers fidgeted, his toes wriggled, his bottom shifted. His mind swerved wildly, oscillating between crippling fear and throbbing guilt. His thoughts became unbearably noisy. Clamping his callused hands over his ears, he squeezed his eyes shut, and bringing his knees into his chest, curled deeper into the tree.

It was there, cradled in the leafy, latticed arms of the peepal, that he took his first, shaky steps towards Growing Up. It was there that he made his decision.

The decision he would vow never to make again.

A vow he would eventually break.

Even at age twelve, a small corner of his mind was wise enough, prophetic enough, to understand that both these events lay folded inside him, sleeping.


ZEBRA CROSSING
(Chapter Two)

Arun sat cross-legged with the afternoon shimmering around him and the ratty charpoy hard under his bottom. Four sticks of chalk lay in a neat line in front of him, white against dark cloth. Anticipation and fear marched side by side inside him, making his stomach churn and his fingers clench on the small, white-edged blackboard. He unclamped his hand and reached for the chalk. His breath hitched, his mouth trembled. His fingers brushed, then curled over a smoothly rounded stick. A crow screeched by, cawing raucously.

He began tentatively, running the chalk lightly over the dusty board like a thief casing a joint. He started at the edges, drawing small fluffy clouds. Pausing, he raised his eyes upwards. The sky remained a stark, unbroken blue.

He pressed the chalk more firmly onto the board, slashing over it with bright, fluid lines, creating clouds, lightening and rain with skill that was unusual for a child. He forgot his trepidation, forgot his mission. His entire world condensed into that twelve-by-sixteen slab of slate.

Gradually, he felt the power unfurl inside him. Not a birth, but an awakening. A snake uncoiling after a long, deep sleep. Night-jasmine blooming secretly in the dark.

At first, he shied away from it, then moved closer. Reaching out, he touched it hesitantly, then with more confidence, stroking his hands over it, reacquainting himself with its shape, its texture.

His pulse raced. His heated fingertips throbbed. He continued to draw.

Huge clouds climbed over the horizon and blotted out the relentless sun. The air snapped with barely-concealed menace. The light curdled. Lightening danced gleefully across the barren landscape, and the surprised shouts of villagers, pealing temple bells, and excited chatter of women was drowned out by rolling thunder. Then finally, the swollen sky ripped open like an over-stuffed gunny sack and glittering, tensile ropes of rain slammed into the yearning, open earth.

It still lived within him, like an extra pea in a reluctant pod. Arun stared down at his quivering, over-heated hands. Nut-brown. Callused. Ordinary-looking. Sometimes, he wished desperately that it would go away. He knew now that it never would. That he would be abnormal, mutated for ever.

Scared, shaken, he sat still and soaked in a storm of his own making.

COFFEE-COLORED ARMS AND A WHITE DHOTI
(Chapter Three)

Arun’s discovery of his special ability wasn’t sudden, nor was it continuous. It happened in spurts, propelled by sporadic clues that eventually led him to a Secret Space hidden behind the false walls of his mind. He never fully understood what part of him was special. The possession of a Secret Space or the ability to find it.

When he first ventured into the dark, cob-webbed Space, all he felt was excitement. A young Christopher Columbus with coffee-colored arms. Neil Armstrong in a white dhoti. He walked around, mapping his kingdom. Counting the steps (toe to arch in a straight line) between one end and the other. Tracing his hands over the walls. Rubbing his toes in the crease between ground and ceiling.

Deliberately skirting the medium-sized clay pot that stood in one corner. Capped. Long-necked. Broad-bottomed.

Aladdin’s lamp.

Pandora’s box.

Heightening the anticipation, holding out against it. Postponing the inevitable. That’s where it lay, he knew. Bottled power, wisps of which escaped occasionally, manifesting themselves in the realization of a child’s [lack of] logic, scrawled onto a chalkboard. Smiley-faced clouds. Peacocks dancing on a dry day. Golden, out-of-season mangoes.

He uncapped the pot, watched it unravel. Circled it, learning its shape and size. He tickled his nose with it, licked it with the tip of his tongue, embraced it with that unmarred, luminescent pleasure exclusive to children. Exulted in it.

This was before the fear came. And much, much before he understood the rules.

FATE OF THE FIREFLIES
(Chapter Four)

He woke with his Baba snoring beside him and darkness suffusing the air. Padding silently across the warm floor, he eased into the aging night. The village slept the abysmal sleep of the exhausted and the hungry. Stillness patrolled narrow streets on broad paws. From somewhere deep in the banyan tree an owl hooted. A thin needle of light pierced a tiny hole in the opaque cloak of darkness. Fixing his gaze on that pin-prick of light, Arun began to walk.

He navigated through the night easily, instinctively, past the corrugated fields, the teeming undergrowth and the dried-up well to the small hut at the edge of the village. With its dust color walls and rounded edges it looked like an extension of the land. He stood outside and waited, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He didn’t bother to knock.

Although he hadn’t seen her, he knew she was watching him through the window and that it would take her a while to climb off the stool and get to the door.


* * * *

The numbness bloomed in Tarika after her mother’s death and thrived within her forever. Red-and-yellow, cup-shaped and carnivorous. It cradled her in its waxy petals, intoxicating her with its sickly-sweet scent. Desperately grateful for the respite, she burrowed in, feeding it her piercing grief and shuddering fear. So it flourished, luring in her thoughts, her emotions, even her memories. Trapping them and dissolving them in its acidic fluids.

She adjusted to the lack of feeling quickly, with an adeptness peculiar to children, growing strangely comfortable with the jaws of numbness guarding the gates of her mind. Corroding away at her soul, leaving her hollow.

Perhaps that’s why Arun and she became friends. Because in some odd, elemental way, they fit. Like water that flows from a higher to a lower level, his awareness streamed into her vacuum, equalizing them both.

Normalizing them both.

* * * *

She let him in, then shut the door, padlocking it carefully like her Baba had taught her to. He was out again. He had gone to the little knot of Shudhra huts at the other end of the village. But she mustn’t tell. Even at age nine, Tarika understood that she wasn’t supposed to mention to anyone that her father visited the Untouchable women at night.

Wordlessly, Arun wandered around the dimly lit room, idly running his fingers over the window pane, bending down to pour himself a glass of water, adding oil to the lantern. He was more comfortable here than he was in his own home.

This was their space. A sub-world that, wedged between day and night, included no one but them.
A world of sudden smiles and a thin, rusty voice. Of smiley-faced clouds and peacocks dancing on a dry day and golden, out-of-season mangoes.

“Look at what I found.” Her voice was wrinkled with disuse. He could hear the smile in it as he turned to face her.

She stood in her untidily wrapped sari with her long hair tumbling over her back and her arms wrapped around a large, murky glass jar filled with fireflies.

“Baba helped me catch them. From behind the babool bushes. But we didn’t want them to be dead, so we made holes in the top.” Catching the tip of her tongue between her teeth, she carefully tilted the jar forward so he could look. Because he could see her excited pride, so rare for her, and the way her childishly rounded arms strained under its weight, he took the jar, pretending great interest in the haphazardly pierced tin cover. “That’s very clever,” he said gravely, feeling very wise and very jaded when she beamed at him.

They spent the rest of the night sitting cross-legged on the hard dirt-floor, watching the cracked jar of dancing fireflies. Trying to tell one from the other. Naming them. Akkad, Bakkad, Bambé, Bo. Charting out their life-stories. And when they realized that they didn’t want the protagonists of their late-night play to die in a bottle, they set them free.

Outside, the darkness congealed, growing denser.

A light breeze rippled over the half-moon.

The lantern dried up.

THE SECRETS THAT LIVE IN WALLS
(Chapter Five)

Tarika’s mother died a painful, hideously drawn-out death. The cancer reached out of her lungs, uncoiling phlegmy tentacles that slithered over her body. They suckered onto the perfect curve of her shoulder, crept into her dark, moist armpit, searched out the secret spot on the underside of her knee. They manacled over her slim, indented wrists, and tightened slowly, slowly over her long throat. They hollowed out her body and shriveled up her skin.

They turned her into someone Tarika didn’t recognize. Someone she was afraid to look at. Shaking with the instinctive fear the young and healthy have for sickness, six-year-old Tarika would sit dutifully beside the gaunt stranger that had replaced her Ammi, enduring in silence the desperate hugs, the smothering kisses, the incoherent professions of love that were heaped upon her. Yearning, with her entire biology, for the vital, often bad-tempered woman that had presided over her entire universe.

It was during one of these times, while mourning Savitri rocked Tarika in her bony arms, that she died. Tarika felt the jarring motion slow, then stop. She felt the fingers that bit painfully into her back go limp. Felt the imperceptible cooling of skin. Understood, with chilling clarity that her mother was gone forever, and she had taken her childhood with her.

She untangled her scrawny body from Savitri’s heavy limbs, lowering the corpse onto the charpoy. She re-pleated her mother’s rucked-up sari, freed the long hair from under her body and wove it into a neat braid, straightened the circular bindi between her brows. An efficient nurse with brisk hands and a trying-not-to-cry mouth. A little girl exploring being grown – up.
Satisfied that Ammi looked acceptable, she went outside to summon her Baba.

* * * *
She sat with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest. Her spent, empty eyes darted around the room, searching for remnants of Ammi. She wondered who the Octopus that had taken Ammi would attack next, Baba or her, seeking some pattern, some logic in her suddenly senseless world.

The walls stood stoically, guarding the secrets that lived within them. Revealing nothing about the numbness that was waiting to bloom inside her. About a world of smiley-faced clouds, peacocks dancing on a dry day and golden, out-of-season mangoes. About fireflies that would be set free and a vow that would be made and broken.

About a raging storm and the fact that the Octopus wouldn’t get a chance to take her.

EBB AND FLOW
(Chapter Six)

Outside, the storm had subsided. Gilded in watery sunshine, the newly-washed world looked clean and shiny. Recently revived crops straightened. Peepal leaves turned a suggestive green. The creek emerged head-first, warm and wet. Clay walls softened, bulging with moisture. Roofs gleamed. Puddles speckled the ground, murky day-moons that caught the sunlight and threw it back. Earthworms gamboled in fresh muck. The replete earth opened its pores, exhaling a thick, steamy fragrance that overpowered the faint, burnt smell of death hemming the glassy air.

Inside, a dense, dirty fog of guilt spread through Arun. It suffused his mind, smothering it under a blanket of self-loathing. It fumigated away all remnants of laughter and tainted every memory. It permeated the thin, false walls of his mind and entered his Secret Space. It filled the room, congealing its soft, cathedral-like space into a hard, dark knot. Carpeting the ground, it clung to every crevice, nestled in every crack. It filmed over the walls that he had explored and clogged the creases between ceiling and floor that his toes had rubbed over.

It crept through the curved, porous walls of the medium-sized clay pot. Capped. Long-necked. Broad-bottomed. It marred the luminescent power, crippling it, blending with it to create a stinking, rancid mix.

Arun sat in death-like stillness, itemizing this thorough, systematic damage with vicious, masochistic pleasure.

THE EQUITABLE DEAL
(Chapter Seven)

Even two days later, remnants of the burning house resonated in the empty space at the edge of the village. The smell of flaming straw and dung singed the edges of the air. The sizzle of lightening piercing through the thatched roof hissed through the grass and the triumphant roar of flame whispered in the old, charred banyan. The ground carried a conspicuous, puckered scar. Incinerated ruins lay scattered in the congealing muck. A blackened sari, a bent lantern, a dented bronze pot. A curve of glass that had once been a murky jar with a haphazardly pierced tin cover. And at night, the belated, choked scream of a little girl waking from a dreamless sleep and into a roaring inferno rode on the breeze.

Arun stood on the hollowed-out land and remembered spotting greedy, rapacious flames spearing up from the horizon. He remembered the clutch of panic, the sudden noise, the burning smell. Remembered racing down a familiar path in the pounding rain, pushing through the sodden, humming throng of villagers to watch helplessly as the dust-colored house burned like the sun. Remembered warning Tarika to stay inside because he knew storms scared her. Just burrow under the blanket with your eyes shut. Pretend to be somewhere else. Sleep if you can. It’ll be over soon. The words pounded into his brain, over and over. His head felt like it was going to burst. His body felt hollow.

Tarika’s father had stood beside him, trembling, his face wet from rain and sweat and silent tears. Experience had taught him that raging against fate was futile, so he’d clenched his fists and hoped fervently that Tarika had died swiftly and painlessly. The villagers had mopped their brows, shuffled their feet, and muttered under there breaths about exacting, vengeful gods. They’d waited until the fire died, then helped pull Tarika’s corpse out of the tangled, stinking mess. They’d attended her cremation and offered their condolences. They’d observed the two-night grieving ritual and prayed for her soul.

But not for one moment had they doubted the fairness of the deal the gods had struck with them. In fact, they felt like they‘d paid only a paltry price: rain, for the life of an odd, quiet girl.