The Flower Seller

I saw her selling flowers on the street side corner one afternoon. Her white, wispy hair was pulled away from her face; bronze, brown skin crinkled like paper in a fist; a grey moon in each eye; her brown eyes spilling down her cheeks like secrets. Cheeks drooping, chin folding. 

She was eighty, perhaps, and looked to be frail as a burst balloon, shrinking into herself, knees folded under her body, head forced down to the ground. A studious student of fallen petals. The flowers were fresh, not one was frosted over in the cold or crinkled at the edges, no petal was browned, no color was dimmed. Each flower held a moon in its breast, and beat like a heart on the palm of a hand. Alive even when plucked. 

She was dying. At least she looked so. I could tell from the whites of her eyes turning a pallid yellow, the brown becoming obscure, her lips thin and shrunken like a flower submerged in water. She was sunken. The moon in her eye was drowning in folded skin, curls of white eyelashes poking into her vision like shards of bent glass, and I watched her so for some time. Her white, sparse strings of hair were falling from the loose bun. Her red saree with gold borders bunched up at her knee. 

I stood poised against a wall a few meters away, not out of sight, and looked on as she folded each flower into a long white string the color of her hair, a string that looked like it came from the moon, plucked from a star, a sitar string, I wondered if it made any sound at touch. She was making bright yellow marigold garlands, a few leaves woven in between, forming the link of flowers adorned on bodies at funerals, glass-cased and sheen-skinned, the corpses laid still on white cloth with a marigold garland upon their necks. Would she make a yellow marigold garland for her own death as well, save it, keep it safe? 

Then I walked. Slow, and then bending forward, faster. Before her shop I stood, my figure casting ghosts of shadows across her body, an impatient ghost trickled down her left cheek like a tear, another one climbed up her right shoulder. I waited until she looked up. She didn’t look up for some time, but when she did, her eyes were closer to her lips than her forehead, skin hanging everywhere like unlit lamps and fallen chandeliers. Like in those movies. She looked memoryless. She looked forgotten. A book left on the counter of a shop that nobody touches anymore, battered and blue as a bloated body pulled from the river. Counter clerks change, but the book is never thrown. Weathered. Facing each season with scrutiny to see when it’ll die. When will it die? When will she die? 

Are you here to buy flowers, son? 

I just shook my head, collecting words and putting them together to speak, creating a book of verses from nothing but a question. I felt like I’d been stranded in a darkened room. A black room stretched beyond, leading to more dark rooms, but none with answers so fitting as to be said. Nothing was there to be said. The black room existed. And then I did. Somewhere in it, unhearing, unspeaking, and full of melancholy darkness. There was nothing to be thought and there was nothing to be said. Simple as that. 

Wouldn’t some strung jasmine look good on your Amma? A rose, maybe? 

I shook my head again, numb as an unfeeling scar. There was something in that room that wished to be felt too, a scar wanting to be a wound again, just for that wet light to seep in. There was light somewhere between the rooms, I knew that, but I’d never seen the rooms before and I was only just finding my way. Lost with the dried petal of a beating heart in my chest. Wanting. 

The room grew quieter still, and I was walking but leading no further to light. I was moving about in some random way. I was just walking, walking, walking to a place that didn’t exist. A tireless journey fitting for none. I just stared at her. Unspeaking. 

Son, do you need some, a whisper, barely any sound leaving her mouth, words full of air and nothing else, yellow marigold garlands? 

I smiled. No, but I’ll buy a pink rose; how much is it?

She blinked. Then smiled back at me. Wide spaces sat fat between her thick, yellow teeth, each one ragged and broken at the tip, a ceramic plate sawed to parts and dyed for years with turmeric and chilli powder. The pink gums were pallid and a light pinkish-brown, with holes embedded in them like gold coins in their velvet case. Her bottom row of teeth sat under the top row without disappearing a bit. Her thin lips became thinner, and pale as a smooth white stone. Her eyes momentarily lifted from over her cheeks. 

Three rupees. I’ll give it for two, okay? 

I nodded and poked my fingers into the pockets of my blue trousers, pulling out a few coins of change and a crumpled green note. I smoothed the green note with my clammy fingers, watching the wrinkles on it fall apart and then grow closer again like they’d never been apart once. Wartime lovers, they were. Wrinkles and old money notes in pockets. Reaching for each other even at the frontline. 

I handed the money to her, and she pulled out a battered steel box from under the makeshift table on the ground and put it on her lap. The note raised its hand at her, swaying on her bunched-up, gold-bordered, red-colored saree as she smoothed the note and put it inside the box. The box clanged like a bell tolling at temples, and I watched as she shut it, then locked it with a small key before putting it away. She shifted her body from under the table and put the steel box on the ground next to her. Sitting on the bare sandy ground, she was. Sitting with so frail a body on the sidewalks, waiting for parading town kids to kick her table and flowers aside. Steal her little steel box of money. Marigolds flowing toward traffic. Roses losing their thorns finally. Jasmine falling apart like marriage. 

You should count the money. Not good to trust strangers

She laughed. A full, loud laugh. A laugh where I could hear her past, the little life she lived, and the hut that housed her family. A laugh so full, it coated my entire ear in its sick sweetness. The sorrowful darkness lifted, the room reaching some remnant of sound, and I resumed walking. Going further still. 

No need for such formalities. You look like a good boy. I’ll trust you

I wondered how many good boys she’d trusted and never known until they’d cheated her of her money. A few paisas lower, then a rupee, then more. For each flower. So it went. I vowed to never do it. I vowed to never let anyone do it within my sight. There I felt a certain need to protect her, although I was the younger of us two by over six decades. Nearly seven. 

Son? 

I looked at her. The black room expanding still. Me going further still. Inside. Son, she kept calling me, not knowing she was the first one to do so without question. She seemed so sure of her choice of words. I was almost threatened by her knowledge of me. I hadn’t told anyone yet. Amma and Appa didn’t know. Jay was clueless as well. None knew me better than a stranger selling flowers on the sidewalk. 

What, Ma?

She smiled. Give me your bag? You can’t carry a rose in your pocket, you know that, right? 

I blinked. I hadn’t brought anything. I hadn’t planned on buying a rose, either. She sensed that and got to work packing the flower safely instead. An old newspaper. A glossy magazine sheet. It looked new. She looked like she had stopped mid-read to attend to me and used her glossy magazine as a wrapper. In lieu of anything else to pack with. The magazine paper seemed expensive. Something only foreigners could have. How did she get such a thing? 

She handed me the rose, thorns chopped off and still fresh as a river, and I took it. She smiled at me. I smiled back, my dark brown skin stretching around my lips, a sliver of white teeth peeling out through the space between my lips, a long plank of teeth concealed beneath that show. Her words repeated in my mind as I turned and left. Son, she had called me. Like she’d known already. 

*

Should I tell you what I know or what I want you to know? I thought low of her already. Even with those expensive magazine sheets, I thought of her as poor and beneath me. Devoid of any health or remaining dignity. I thought the gold borders on her saree were fake too. I thought the gold chains coiled around her neck and wrists weren’t real gold. She looked like she floated at the brink of poverty, unable to care for her health or afford food. A pathetic one. I felt like I was above her. A better one. 

Yet I wasn’t so capable of not thinking of the flower seller. She said so much in so little words. A syllable, and I’d live in that dark room forever, not a star of light in my vision, only a black canvas and no paint, nothing to create or plan for, but a future of so many moons I couldn’t have foreseen. Stretching, it was, the rooms. I’d moved through each room but never reached light, and the rooms never ended as well, every room longer like an extended piece of cloth hanging off a dress. Some light I could never reach, but the blackened room was warm. There was smooth velvet stretching through it, my vision only held by dark arms and skin soft, malleable like a mother’s. Such love as I’d never felt. So I couldn’t stop but visit her. I only wished to feel it again. 

A bitter wish, it was. I’d been taught to not think of myself, but I was on the brink of it. Falling so, falling quick. I thought much of myself. I thought of a future of no sunken moons and undying stars. A future where my heart still beat. And as much as I disliked it, I was learning from her. I had learnt so many flower names. So much of plants I hadn’t known. I scribbled it into my mind. Stored it in a star. On the breast of a flower. 

One evening, I stood between the sleeves of two intersecting roads as I watched her from the spot I’d first seen her at. She was still selling flowers, and it was like I’d assumed she would’ve disappeared since then, even as it had only been two days, I thought she wouldn’t be there anymore. A ghost I could never find. A home of saints that had burned itself down. 

Son, you are back. How is school? 

Good, I said, standing above her like a wall, my body casting a wave of shadows on her form. A man tumbling down from the roof of his home. She looked up at me. She smiled, said she had never been to school and learnt English from her son, and I smiled back and nodded. Her son was a doctor in America. He had seen all the glossy magazines. He had heard all the white men speak and gloat. He had sent her these magazines and some money. She didn’t need the flower shop. Only I did. 

In school, the benches were short stout beings, their legs full of wonky, splintered wood that shook, dancing to the beat of my tapping foot. The benches were a new addition to classrooms; we were used to sitting on the cement floor, the walls holding their chins high above us, their bodies imposing, grey things. Shadows dappled our skin even through the boarded-up window and its fingers holding the sun away from us. Little ball of gold held against its palm as it fought light to keep our eyes away from the window and onto the blackboard filled with white chalk scribbles. Attention still waned and waddled in that room, a shaky boat with only one row and a hundred people aboard. The entire town’s children were there. It was more of a meeting spot, the classrooms, than a room for any amount of study. They failed their purpose miserably. A pathetic thing. 

Fees had increased since the year before as the desks were installed in the classes, an upgrade to a previously empty room, now still empty only with lone creaky wooden desks that we fought with each other to get. At times, none got it. The teacher would make us sit on the cement floor anyway, a cold itching up my buttocks like ants were crawling up my skirt, my body wrapped in shivers even in the summer. 

The desks served no purpose but to bring a divide between us. A superiority for the ones that sat up on the wooden benches and desks, and a resentment in the ones that sat down on the cement floor, shivering in the cold. It became a status play, even in the only school in town. 

Appa refused to pay for it until Amma begged him for months, pulling me out of school as Jay continued his education without a hitch, and watching me work around the house, the bones of the house creaky, the stars over them weeping. I knew that is how it went, and I wished only for a proper death, an immediate loss of life, none to be hurt, none to be pained. The ease of it all appealed much to me. And when Amma wasn’t home, I began to cut. Cut. Cut. Cut. Until flesh peeked out. A star bleeding. A moon dying. 

I have enough money to live in the house he’d built for me, son, but not working is giving up. You cannot give up that freedom and joy at any age, son, as long as you live, you must have that for yourself. Some more money you bring in for yourself, however small. Some stray freedom. Do you understand, son?

So many sons. I was afloat in the dark room. I wasn’t searching for light anymore. It was slowly finding its own light, the room. It was slowly keeping me alive in the warmth of its palms and open body. I nodded. Do you even like selling flowers? Do you like flowers?

She nodded. She waved her hand at her face. Of course I do! I know much about flowers; what would I do with all that knowledge Amma taught me if I don’t follow in her footsteps? 

I smiled. She handed me some jasmine woven into a long white thread, bought with father’s money, and his drunken unawareness. The magazine sheet was glossy. I imagined her son in America. The sheets beyond sheets of words. The loud laughing men. The people who wouldn’t know me as I was before I met the flower seller. A land far from mine. A land so different I could forget everything else. I wanted to go there as well. 

The night hosted a flower basket of stars and a bouquet with a single moon in it for dinner. It was a party only the celestial could have. Amidst a graveyard of stars and a single sunken moon, they sang and danced. I only watched them through the window of the bedroom, lying between Amma and Jay. Jay was at the edge of the room, as I wanted to get him as far from Appa as possible. In case Appa did something to him. Appa didn’t like me much, and was keen on making Jay resemble himself. He would hurt him if he wasn’t being as Appa wanted. A spitting image of him that Jay could never be, an unattainable wish of his that he was intent on fulfilling. To make him what he is. I only hoped Jay would never become that way. 

An ancient star winked at me, and my mind stayed on the crumpled string of jasmine on the street that I left behind after I left the flower seller’s shop. I couldn’t be seen with flowers. Appa and Amma would think I was given love letters as well. That I was with a boy. Some boy I didn’t know, but I knew they’d create stories of it. I knew that. 

When I closed my eyes, the flower seller returned to my mind. Strung flowers floated in my mind, sweet-smelling and bright-hued. I wondered if America had that. Her, I wondered if they’d ever have her. Her, with the way she couldn’t doubt herself. Her, with the confidence of a talking bird. If America had a shard of what she was, I thought I could live there forever. I wondered if her son was like her. Then. Then, I wondered if he’d love me too. Like she did. 

*

I had begun taking money from Appa’s pockets. His pants and shirts were tousled like hair and overturned like ships, shaken until the coins and crinkled rupee notes dropped to the floor. Water, the money was. Dripping down from its own little man-made source. I would collect it and keep it in my pocket before I left home to buy flowers from the flower seller. The dark room had expanded now. It had taken me in like a mother. Amma didn’t know I loved the darkness more than her. Amma didn’t know of the room the flower seller had given me. Dark as it was, it kept me from withering. Much like her flowers. 

The pockets grew emptier and emptier as the days wore on. Cloth the days were, used and thrown aside, growing holes in the memory of its existence. Appa had complained, but Amma had chalked it up to the fact that he often returned home drunk. Drunk and swaying at the house step, Amma had to lead him into the bedroom we shared every night. He would slur, and utter obscenities, things I mustn’t hear but did. Things she mustn’t hear too. 

One night, the stars had burst and scattered into tiny silver dots across the sky, speckles of dust and glitter swimming between the clouds, touching the moon with their fingertips before withdrawing, too frightened to advance. They had been in too much of a fear to do much but float. A silver speck. Nothing but. Dust. And so, the darkness sat fat between the clouds and crept into our windows, walking on its two-legged body of velvet and cotton, seeping in like tears on skin. Appa had banged on the door, the wood of the door recoiling into our house, trembling with its fists clenched. Amma feared the neighbor’s disapproval at his behavior, and quickly walked to the door, trotting like a duck. She pulled the door open, slid her arm under his and helped him into the house. Shut the door. He swayed clumsily as she pulled him along with her, walking and dragging him to the bedroom. He called her something. She couldn’t hear. Then, he said it again. Over and over and over again. Then again. 

Whore. Such a whore. You’re fucking that boy at work, aren’t you, little fucking bitch? 

I hadn’t heard of that word before. But I could discern the meaning with much clarity. I was standing in the kitchen, behind a faded, blue-painted wall, a glass of half-drunk water on the kitchen counter. I listened. Amma flinched. She staggered forward, drowning in his voice, an ocean expanding further between them despite their physical closeness at the moment, and I left my place behind the kitchen wall, and walked to her. She waved me away, eyes pleading, full of fallen stars and a sea between the whites, but I stood my ground. I tried to not look at her. Only at him. 

You shouldn’t say such things about Amma, she isn’t like that.

Appa stared at me. Amma’s arm dropped from under him. Her knees almost gave out as she stood standing, eyes darting between us like a boomerang between two amateur players, tears slowly easing out, released from their prison. A sea collected under her eyes, a thick bag of dark skin holding it in its palm before it released the tirade of liquid onto her drought-stricken cheeks. Appa staggered forward. Amma tried to catch him. Stop him, I think. It all happened so fast. I didn’t understand what he said, but Amma did, and then he raised his hand at my face. Then. Then, he slapped me. A metal plate falling to the ground. Echoing. The sound of his palm on my cheek hit the walls like a scream. Loud and thrashing. Begging for its release. Jay came into the room. He said nothing. Only looked. 

Amma grabbed Appa’s arm, and he hit her across her face. She flinched, but didn’t move from her place by my side, a statue standing its ground until removed by force. I was scared he would slap her again or worse, hurt her some other sinister way. Cruel, he was, nothing could change him. A red sting was still throbbing at my skin. Skin plucked from flesh. Thrumming like a sitar. Flesh torn and then stitched back up. I took a step forward, but Amma shook her head, and said, he’s just drunk, it’s nothing, you know how Appa is, he loves us. I didn’t feel so loved then. I didn’t feel loved at all. 

Is this love, then, Amma? Is this how it feels to be loved, Amma?

She hung her head, and said nothing. Jay was still watching us from the bedroom, an open textbook in his hand; it looked like maths. Jay wasn’t one to stand up. He wasn’t one to speak at all. His eyes were wide. Cheeks crimson as kumkuma, he looked like a startled deer plucked from a forest and put in a home. A fish caught on a hook and kept hanging in it. I looked at him, and his eyes caught mine. His lips twitched. He didn’t want to be silent, but he must be to not reach the fate I had. He mustn’t talk. So, I shook my head. 

Appa, you are horrible to everyone, can you stop drinking every night? It is bad, I read it in school and my science teacher said so

I shut my eyes. Breath trickled into me like water, wetting my throat and aching at my damp chest. Lungs full of stars. Eyes full of moon. Then, I heard footsteps. Then, my eyes opened. Amma rushed forward, but Appa staggered, walked like he was on a string and must be quick to get to the other side. He reached Jay before Amma did. He grabbed Jay’s neck, and pushed him to the floor. His book skipped away from his hand, midair as a paper sat clutched in his fist, a torn wing of a lost bird, the book slowly skittering to the floor like a dead firefly. I wanted to fix this. I didn’t know how, and my throat tightened into a straw, a thin long red straw that had shrunken and dried rapidly, taking all my words with it. No syllable found me. No letter came to my mind. I only watched, an ache hiccuping at my chest, the stars sinking, the moon buried. 

Did your teacher fuck you? Is that why you talk back to your own father? 

I couldn’t talk, so I walked toward Appa. Amma grabbed my arm, and I shook her off. I continued walking. Appa kicked Jay on his stomach and pressed his sweat-soaked foot on his neck, holding Jay to the ground, his cheek smashed like on glass. He gurgled on his own spit. He screamed. Words seeped out without meaning. Words had failed him too. 

Don’t hurt him, Appa. He did nothing wrong. He is only trying to tell you good from bad.

Appa’s head swiveled, and his eyes met mine. I shivered. I thought my stomach had dropped to the ground. It felt empty, my belly. My moonless throat was still tight. So, I don’t know good from bad, huh? 

I shrugged. Maybe.

Appa’s foot left Jay’s neck, and he lay limp on the ground. A fish lost of its life. Breathless and sinking toward death. His eyes had rolled back into their sockets. His lips were pallid and dried to petals preserved in books. I only looked at him as Appa raised his hand to hit me from the corner of my vision, a small moving image from my peripheral that I barely thought of. I couldn’t register the pain I’d feel if he hit me. Then, Amma’s hand wrapped around my forearm, and she pulled me back as he stumbled forward, almost falling to the ground. She hissed words I couldn’t hear. He screamed words I didn’t care for. I only looked at Jay as he twitched on the ground. Then, I shook off Amma’s arm, stepped away from Appa, and knelt at Jay’s side. I grabbed his hand. It was chilly as a storm. Blue as a morning glory. 

Are you okay? Can you breathe, Jay?

He nodded. Limp as a drooping flower, and I pulled him up by his arm, slung his right arm over my shoulder, and wrapped my arm around his waist as I dragged him to the bedroom. He didn’t resist. He only muttered gratefulness in scattered syllables. His face was drooping and hung like a lotus garland on my shoulder. Unwell, he was, and I didn’t know to help. 

I walked into the bedroom, and shut the door behind me, locked it so Appa couldn’t barge in like he often did. He was forever in suspicion of us. I didn’t know for what. I laid Jay on the red and blue striped straw mat spread on the cement floor, and he gurgled on his own spit, spit dribbling down his chin and landing on my shoulder. I was taller than him by a few centimeters. It helped some bit that night. 

Thanks. For helping—

The words after weren’t coherent, but I understood enough to nod. I sat by his head, cross-legged on the bare floor, and brushed his hair from his eyes. His eyes rolled up and he looked at me. I laid my hand palm flat on the cold cement floor, a tickle going up my wrist like snakes slipping along my arm, slow and deliberate. My fingers bent, knuckles ached. I still looked at him. His cheeks had lost color. His lips were still dried peeling petals preserved between the pages of an old large book. Herbarium, I think it was called. I didn’t say anything. 

I’m sorry. If I brought more trouble for you. I know he always hated you more than he did me.

That was true. The frequent beatings and scoldings did enough to prove their case, but it was nothing of his fault. In any case, how long could this last? Would it last when Appa learns of everything about Jay? Anyway, Amma liked me more than she did Jay. I felt it was a good deal. Although I knew she wouldn’t love me anymore when she learns of everything I am. It was difficult to love what I was. I’d resigned to that fact. 

I shook my head. No, it’s not your fault he hates me. It’s his to hate his own child. 

It’s because I’m a boy, I know. My birth was your curse. 

I pressed my fingers to his cheek. His skin was gaining its warmth back. I smiled. You’re a gift to me. I would’ve been all alone if not for you, Jay.

His eyes were wet, but he didn’t cry. He was taught not to. You’re a great sister. The best ever.

I smiled. The compliment didn’t feel like one though, it pricked, a rose’s thorn on the beating heart, muscles going limp like used tissue papers, and it hurt like a cut to the wrist. Like blood spouting from under skin. Like a chopped vein. I didn’t say anything about it though, only told him to go to sleep. What else could I say? How could I say what my mind had when none but a stranger selling flowers on a sidewalk knew? How could I say she knew me better than anyone ever did? 

Words had failed me again. The moon had sunken further into the night. The darkness had bled into the room. I shut my eyes, and wished I was on that street again. Looking down at the woman as she wrapped my flowers neatly in little newspapers and magazine papers she had bought from the old newspaper sellers across the street. Looking down at her as she called me her son. A boy. 

*

Appa had found out. His money was going missing with an increased frequency, and I was reckless with it. Visiting her everyday now. I bought flowers, and we chatted of much. She told me her mother was still alive, that she had breast cancer, that her son was paying for the treatment. It had spread to the brain, and she had a month to live. That month was agonizing, she said with a tired smile, never ready to complain. So unlike the people I’d seen all my life, looking for strangers to unload their complaints and lost life stories that I only listened to. The dark room had slowly found a light switch, and without a touch, it turned itself on. The room was now lit golden. The room was a candlelit prayer with wads of flowers hanging onto the white-tiled floor. Their sick-sweet scent clung to my skin like clothes. I was awash in it.

So, I hadn’t noticed it when Appa called me into the living room early one morning. He was awake earlier than ever, much so that Amma was still asleep, awakening before the sun did. The sun had sunken into the clouds, and the moon was blinking in its borrowed light. The stars had grown sparse like leaves in Autumn. I looked around the room, and Jay was crumpled on the cement floor, his back to the edge of a wall, whimpering like a stray dog with a chopped foot. I looked away from Appa and rushed towards him. He was curled into himself, his knees bright scarlet and glinting wet like a tear. His body was trembling. He was shivering. I knelt next to him. He hissed through his teeth. He was a wound. Covered in blood like a red dress on a bride. I flinched like I was in pain. 

I turned back to look at Appa, his face was imprinted with a scowl, and I screamed, my words wet with fallen stars and a melancholy moon, so full of hurt the words ached in my throat, why did you hurt him so? What is wrong with you? 

Did you steal my money, girl? Tell me, did you steal my fucking money?

I flinched. My eyes shut, and the velvet comfort was long gone, not within reach, slowly retreating even from sight. Words hiccuped at my throat, and I swallowed them like a bitter candy. Nothing to say I had. Nothing to speak of. Then. Then, I hung my head. Breath rattling like the pot during monsoon in our garden. The room was trilling with indecipherable noise that I later realized without much help was from Jay. He was still trembling. He was still shivering. I kept my palm on his face. I felt his blood on my hands.

Tell me, girl, did you steal my money? 

Before I said anything, a hand was at my short black hair, and I was pulled up and away from Jay by those thin wispy strands, some breaking off and falling like a building from their ground. Leaving a smattering of dried skin on my scalp. I skittered up, a rat trotting toward a snake, and my neck twisted until I could meet Appa’s gaze to his satisfaction. I still said nothing. What could I say when I was in the wrong? How could I say I was carried away so soon after meeting her? Was I even allowed to speak after the damage I’d done to my brother? 

Unable to speak I was as Appa looked down at me. His scowl had deepened. How much did you fucking steal? Are you fucking a boy now? Are you planning to elope? 

I shook my head. Water raised up an empty well. Stars flowed into it. A moon shone on it. My eyes were wet with it. I squeezed them shut, and only thought of the shaken shirts and their dripping money. So easy it was to take from an evil man, but harder it was to survive such a man. I had ruined too much this time. And I only hoped Jay could survive past this. 

Can you take him to the hospital? Appa, please, can you take him to the hospital? 

Then, Appa dropped my hair from above, and I crumbled like a biscuit on the tongue of a lucky child, as he screamed obscenities I wasn’t yet aware of. He kicked my face. A sweat-soaked foot pressed to my eyes like a cold pack leaking fluid. He kicked me again and again and again, but I never screamed. Appa didn’t like it when I screamed or talked aloud at all. I wasn’t yet allowed that privilege. 

That gay boy I couldn’t change, and now a thief girl eloping with some fucking boy. What did I raise all these years? 

A rhetorical question it was, but I itched to answer it. Jay was as good a boy as they came, I knew that. Jay was with a boy from class, I knew that too. He hadn’t known I knew, but most in school had found out through the vines of gossip floating between the classes. Little leaves seeping into the ear like tears into skin. A ghost threatening to break past its home and follow the one it belongs to until they are dismembered to only a remnant of what they once were. No secrets allowed in this town. No hope as well. 

A man came to our house at night. He warned this gay to never see his son again. Then, he stole my money to spend on his faggot friend. Were you helping him, bitch? 

I stole the money, I said, my words only an echo of sounds that coiled around my chest in syllabic strings that tightened around my already-fragile ribs. Aching, my knees curled to my chest, and white breath left me in gasps of ice-cold air. A ghost watched me from behind my neck, and I squeezed my eyes like lime between the fingers in the womb of a lone kitchen, and heard his breath on my back. I only wanted him to continue breathing for so long as one could. I heard his name in my throat. In my chest, the heart beat in tandem with his breath. He was home. A clutch of constellations. All the family I ever had. Even if he’d never see me as I am I can live with that. So long as he kept alive. Enough, it was. 

You going to elope with some fucking boy? Are you fucking someone, whore? Like your mother, such a whore. Such a fucking whore.

His foot hit the curl of my chest, and at the curl of the breasts I wasn’t supposed to have, jabbing into my ribs, an accusation, and I whimpered. Something wet and thick dribbled from my lips, and I shut my eyes until I felt blood pool into my mouth like a bottle filled with river water. It was sickeningly sweet, my blood. Like the flowers. I thought still of the flower seller’s son in America, and wished to go there. Perhaps see him. Perhaps scream sometimes when I was hurt. Perhaps to have some remnant of freedom. Privilege. 

He leaned down, and pressed his fingers deep into my left cheek skin, his nails sinking into my flesh as I screamed, a single drop of blood filling my nose before a wave of it slipped out, a grove of hair and their little river of blood. My face felt tender as a fruit. My skin felt bloated and fat as an old tree. I was crumpled on the floor a few inches from Jay, but heard no sound from him. I whispered his name once. Then twice. And, as Appa hit me over and over, his fingers clutching my flesh and his foot curled into my ribs, I repeated his name like a prayer, over and over and over again. Even with my voice exhausted. Even with the tiredness turning to a black cloth tied around my blurry vision. Even with the room growing still and quiet. I said it. Jay. Jay. Jay. Please wake up. 

*

Jay was never taken to the hospital. Jay never talked again. A shard of a broken mirror, he was, full of hue and hope. A future full of moons. A future with swimming constellations. Such was his future, but all was gone on that night. There were no rites performed at his funeral, only a quiet cremation and a crying Amma, a defensive and morose Appa. The boy he had loved was watching from afar, a moon without a clear face, weeping into two soft round palms, eyes clouded and closed with cotton. I was quiet. Stunned as a fat star that had been pushed from the sky and into a home of seawater. A sea floating in me. No light anymore. Dreams fought for and gone. Hope had died with him. 

I was seen by no one after that. I was kept home by Amma and Appa. Withdrawn from school and their fought-for desks and benches. Away from the flower seller and her foreign son. I was home in the room I had sat in with Jay, the room I had slept in next to Jay, the home I had shared with Jay and no one else after school. He was everywhere. A ghost of a building that was pinned to my bruised ribs. A ghost I had searched for everyday since. 

If Amma hadn’t awoken and stopped him, I would have died too. And I so wished it upon myself. In the past, I had to cut to feel the pain, and I still cut my wrists, but strangely so it kept me alive. A choice, it gave to me. I could die too if I willed it. I could wish so long as it was right. I had a choice. I had to have that for myself.  

My body was still weak. My skin was still bruised and wet with pus-filled, blood-drenched wounds. A sunken half-moon in each eye I held. A long-wet wound on the left cheek I possessed. Some days, I kept the wounds unclean in hopes it would get infected and I’d die, but when the pus dripped down my face and neck, Amma began to clean it every morning and night. She was still grieving. So, she spent all her free time with me. Looking after me. Taking care of the one that had stolen the money. Caring for me even as I killed her son. Wounded and whimpering he was when he died. A wretched way to pass. 

One night, Amma had run out of cardamom, and asked me to buy it from a store. She warned me to never talk to anyone, never answer any questions about Jay, to forget him already much like the town had done. Like Appa had done. Appa didn’t like it when I talked of Jay or mentioned his name, so I said his name in private everyday a hundred times until my voice had worn out like used cloth. Until I was no more alive than the ghost of him still pinned to my heart. 

Jay. Jay. Jay. Jay. Jay. 

I went to a grocery store that night, a tiny shop not well lit but clean, and bought the cardamom. I didn’t say anything when he asked about my brother. I didn’t smile when he did. As I left the store, I passed by the flower seller, and she called out to me. I didn’t stop until someone told me to, touching my arm like I was fragile as a plate of stained glass. They said she was calling me still. So, I reluctantly went to her tiny shop and stood before her like a frowning wall. A shadow with nothing but dark. A presence not worth noticing.

How are you doing, boy? 

I said nothing. Looked at my feet and the stone between my toes. How would I feel at the aftermath of a murder I’d helped commit? How would I feel after losing my brother and my own future with him, for his loss had forsaken any hope I’d ever possessed? There was not much to say. There was not much to think of. But still, the room swam into my vision, dimmer than before but brighter still. I wondered what made it stay bright still. I wondered why it couldn’t have stayed dark with me. In that velvet. In that black. Arms wrapped around me. Words in my throat again. 

She smiled at me, only out of kindness and a flicker of love. She handed me a stack of glossy magazines. Her fingers were curled and bent at every knuckle, her skin wrinkled and loose. Her squinting eyes had almost disappeared into the brown folds of her skin. Her lips were no longer there but for a thin pink stitch-like thing. The skin had swallowed everything. I wondered if her mind was still intact. If she remembered the names of the flowers still. 

Keep these. My son sent it from America a few days ago, and you would make more use of it than I would. You’re a smart boy. Take the books, and read them. Hide it from your parents, okay? 

I took the magazines, their paper smooth and shining in my fingers, a moon reflected on the breast of the colored paper, so large and thick. The magazine was almost a mirror. I could see my face in it. Brown and shrunken. Eyes bloodshot with a green vein swinging underneath it like vines in our garden. Blue-black scars all over. A long, twinkling gash smiled back at me from the glossy paper. The wound again filled with pus and blood. Yellow and red. 

I nodded. I muttered a thanks and walked away from her, wobbling on my foot like a drunken man. The walk home was not long but tiring. I looked at the books clutched between my fingers, and only remembered Appa’s hands on my cheek. Only remembered the thick seeping wounds on Jay’s body. I raised the front of my shirt a bit and tucked the small stack of books into my skirt. Then, I held my hand over it as I walked into our home. 

I spent the next few nights reading it. Large, shiny-skinned, white women floated on the paper like dead bodies. Thin and pale as a scar. There were words all over it too, from the men I’d never met or seen or even heard of. Lofty, long names are increasingly difficult to pronounce. I was a stranger on the pages, and I liked that. There were stories too, many stories written with words I’d never read, but began to understand after a few tries, unaware if I’d grasped the meaning right. The stories were of faraway people in faraway lands. Foreign people with their foreign tongue. A world so new I swam in it. Then, I drowned. 

About three weeks later, I went with the books to the flower seller when Amma and Appa weren’t home. The shop was still bright and dappled in sunlight. The stores around still buzzed with people. The streets were still dangerous with stray speeding cars. But she wasn’t there. No one was. I looked around the street, but it was the same as it was that night. Only brighter. Only lonelier. Less so important. Less so loved. 

I tapped on the window of a bakery right next to her flower shop, and asked about the flower seller. He was a tall brown man who smelt of fresh bread and cake, he looked down at me, my body swathed in his shadow, drowned. He smiled at me, a tired, sad smile. Then. Then, he told me she had died in her sleep. Melanoma, she’d had. Her Amma was still alive. Mindless. But she’d died in her own bedroom with their own bright lights. She’d never told her son of it in want of the freedom of working, of not being bound to a hospital bed every morning, of living until she couldn’t. A week ago, she was cremated after a small ceremony. Her son was back home. I wondered if he felt the way I did. In a house full of ghosts, but none you want to have. A house that itched like fire ants all over a wound. Or if America had changed that too. 

The bright room seeped in like it did the first time the lights were switched on in the velvet darkness. The bright room with everything I’d need and none I could see. A bright room with a full moon and a tirade of stars. The full moon smiling. The stars floating happily. Arms enclosed around me again, and I was lit with warmth. Arms wide and thick and malleable like a mother’s. Full of stars, the room was. A bright room with a future of moons. The arms held me still. And calmed me as I wept.