A House Is a Body

by Shruti Swamy

  I thought of all the moments of my son, all the moments he had ever had. I held my mind to them like a hand thrust into a fire. I walked from the window to the bed to the window, again and again, not quickly like my husband, but slowly, thinking of my dead son’s curiosity, and of his fear. I had thought that grief would make me brave against the rest of my fears: if the worst had come, there was nothing left to dread. But I was still afraid. I could smell smoke, though my window showed me nothing but the shore and the moonlit water. I watched the sun rise yellow through an eerie haze, my maid told me the fire had already been extinguished but it had done some damage. The air smelled of flesh, and singed hair.

  When my husband came to me, five days after our son had died, he was dressed in the white robes of a mourner. I would not speak to him and turned my face away. I was trembling from the force of my suppressed tears, finally they came anyway, leaking out of my eyes. I didn’t want to be his soft little woman. He said my name. In his voice was a pure sorrow I had never heard, so perfectly it mirrored my own. I looked at him. His face, ageless for centuries, was older than I had ever seen. He said it was too late. Even if he returned the girl, it was too late.

  I told him we still had two other sons.

  He said that these sons would avenge the death of their brother. Or, I, he said, and rage came into his voice. He slapped his chest hard with his hands. He said he’d kill the creature himself.

  Why did you send him? He was just a boy.

  He had wanted to give the boy a chance at glory, conquering an easy foe. It was not battle, and he was not too young, my husband had fought and vanquished at a younger age than him.

  He wasn’t like you.

  He was my son as much as yours.

  Why, why? Lust? All this for a fuck?

  He said no. He said he didn’t owe me any explanation.

  I thought of a time when my husband and I had raced across a field of grass. I ran as fast as I could, and he ran just a few paces ahead of me, looking back at me, goading me onward, laughing. We were much younger then. I had felt as though it was I running ahead of myself in my husband. I felt I was running ahead of and looking back at myself and I was also the one behind looking ahead at my husband. We stopped running and gazed at each other without speaking. We were looking at ourselves inside the other person, feeling the resonant core that had hunted its mate through the various births and rebirths. The part that said, yes, you. It felt not like luck but birthright to have found my husband. The way you might enter the house where you spent your early childhood but had never returned since. The memory of the room had the same weight and blur of a dream, yet it existed outside of your mind. Your hand pressed against the cool walls of that house.

  We were on opposite sides of the room, and stood and looked at each other. My husband was huge, and handsome, and his face was dark. I felt shocked into my own body and mind; I could not enter his. I could not reach him and was not sure I wanted to. Would he return to me? He had been a good king once, and, even more improbably, a good husband. But he was neither now.

  In the weeks that followed, life was oddly calm. I had neither the interest nor the permission to participate in the strategizing, the gathering of troops, the fortification of the Capitol walls. Instead, I worked in my ruined garden. A week was spent clearing the debris. Trees centuries old had been uprooted, I had them hauled away. In a time of peace this wood, prized above all, would be carved into fragrant couches and beds; now the trunks were chopped and burned like cheap firewood. When it was finished the earth was pitted with holes. The rich, loamy soil showed through the torn skin of grass, moist and black. It had a sweet smell. I gathered a handful of it and squeezed it between my fingers. When the army comes, I thought, they will find me here. I will stand here and hold the earth of my son in my hands. I was frightened. I kept squeezing the handful of dirt. It got into my nails. I wanted just to stand there, and I stood for a long while, very still.

  The next day I planted new shoots and seeds. I called for the girl and she came willingly. She seemed relieved to be outside. We knelt against the earth together. I told her that her husband was coming for her. She said she knew. A few weeks more, I told her. She nodded. Her arms were stippled with red, where mosquitoes had bitten her. She said that she spent most of the day asleep, or looking out the window. But her dreams were often that she was asleep, or looking out her window, so she never knew when she had been dreaming, and when she had been awake. It got very dark in her cell on moonless nights, and she would open her eyes and think she had gone blind: it was a kind of darkness that didn’t ebb as the eyes adjusted. Then she looked at me and said that I seemed frightened. Sad, I told her, with sharpness, but she insisted, frightened. Her husband was good and just and merciful and would spare me when he came. The just and merciful one who watched his brother slice the nose from a woman’s face? Then she was angry and looked away.

  We began our work. It was a strange sight for the attendants and guards, two queens doing the work of servants. With a small spade I cut holes in the ground and placed three or four seeds carefully. Then I covered the hole I made and gave the earth some water, poured from a copper vessel. The girl needed no instructions. She seemed at ease with her fingers in the dirt and her arms covered in soil. She looked very young and happy, sweating a little as the sun beat down on her, as it did on me, darkening our skin. We’ll move you back outside, now that everything’s cleared. She nodded. I told her that my husband was a good man. She didn’t say anything. I asked her if she had heard me. She asked me what I expected her to say. Nothing, I told her. I wish you knew that he was a good man, that’s all. He had been a good man.

  Tell me, do you remember your mother?

  She said yes, of course she did.

  Not in the abstract, the concept of mother, but right now, can you remember her?

  She said yes.

  Tell me what it’s like.

  She was like hearing your own heartbeat. If you stop for a minute and are entirely still you can hear it. All along she’s with you, but you never notice until you think to notice.

  Is that what mothers are like, I asked her. Or just her mother?

  Just hers, she thought, though she didn’t know. Her mother was the only one she’d known. Perhaps all mothers were like that.

  I was not with my son in the garden. I wiped my face again.

  Maybe not.

  When I looked at her there was kindness in her eyes and mouth. It was enough that for a single instant my pain subsided, and, despite everything, joy rushed in to the space it had opened.

  My husband continued to visit me at night. He had a manic energy. He seemed almost happy. It was terrible to look at him. I had dreams that they sliced off his head. In my anxiety I would find my sons, smoking with the soldiers, drinking and talking, or strategizing late into the night. Quietly I asked them to surrender themselves to their enemies and be spared what was coming. Of course they balked. Once, the elder got angry and called me a traitor. I could see him lying on the palace floor with flies crawling his cheeks and eyes. And remember the sweetness of his first word—mama—bursting joyfully from his lips. He died first in my dreams, with an arrow in his navel, like his father. His brother died by sword. I held them. I took their hands in my hands and kissed them. I wrapped my arms around their big shoulders and they didn’t refuse me, but softened with a mysterious grace and let me. I gathered and kept it, all of it, their voices and their smells and the sound of their rough laughter, and their hands, cut and bruised and strong and tipped with hard yellow nails. My husband told me that if I did not stop my hysterics he would have me confined to my room. I was confined to my room for several days. I spent most of those days awake but in a strange state that was neither waking nor sleeping. I was not hungry and ate only berries, brought to me by the girl. She looked clean and healthy and well-fed even without my care. Or maybe it was my mother who put her hand on my brow. My mother, a frog? She had brilliant, amphibian eyes. I stood i
n a fire. I could feel my skin burning clean off, and the pain was a relief. The voices of the dead reached me, my son, and the not yet dead. I was so afraid I began to weep. My tears evaporated before they formed. The fire left only my bones. There was a loud noise like nothing I have ever heard before, the scream of something metal. Then, I stepped out of the fire.

  It was calm and silent, night. I was alone in my room. I looked down at my body, lying on the bed, whole, dressed still in the mourner’s white. Dizzy when I sat up. Alone. I took in a lungful of air. I felt for the place that fear had been, and couldn’t find it. Where was my rage? After some time an attendant came in and gave me some water to drink. The fighting had begun, she said. My sons? Gone to battle. My husband? Leading the charge. She told me my fever had broken. Had I been dreaming? Yes. Was I dreaming now?

  No, she said. No, I wasn’t dreaming.

  I bathed and dressed, and went to the garden. The girl was sleeping lightly under her tree, and woke before I touched her. Is it time?

  Not yet.

  She said I didn’t look frightened anymore.

  No, I said. I wasn’t.

  She said she felt ashamed.

  Why? This has nothing to do with you. We could hear, distantly, shouting, and metal against metal, and a sound like fire. I took her face in my hands. I’ll miss you.

  She kissed my hands. Small shoots, I noticed, needled the earth, growing imperceptibly from the seeds we’d planted. Even on this night. I plucked one from the soil and put it in my mouth, a bitter green. We sat for a long time together and waited for daybreak.

  Earthly Pleasures

  I met Krishna at a party. It’s hard to believe that I had even been invited to such a glamorous place. But in those days I had a friend who had a friend who got invited to those things, and once in a while she would ask me to come along. I had one dress I wore each time, and little velvet shoes. I was young, and poor, and often felt a kind of pleasant longing for wealth that I knew would never be fulfilled. I would walk downtown and look with equal hunger at the delicate silks draped over the mannequins in the windows and the finely boned women who wore them on their living flesh, and painted their mouths into red hearts, and their eyes into knives or black holes to put desire into. These women were also at the party where I met Krishna.

  In myth, his skin was blue, and in life, his skin was blue too. I had seen pictures of him in celebrity magazines, but he didn’t photograph well, and many times held something to cover his face. His skin in those pictures was sometimes a strange blue-black, and other times a paler shade, a sky at five-thirty in summer, when the sun was starting to think about setting. Outdoors he always wore sunglasses so that people could never see his eyes. I had looked at those pictures many times since I was a girl, and bought the magazines just to keep looking at him. There was something ugly about him that compelled me. Ugly—or hurt—or a kind of longing that seemed difficult to articulate. It was not that I felt sorry for him, rather, I could imagine having a conversation with him. I felt he could sense in me something secret; his gaze, screened by the sunglasses, the book or jacket he held up to block his face, still seemed tangible, and called out to me. I felt like I must be imagining this connection, but I didn’t want to lie. It was there, to me.

  The apartment was so large it was a surprise for it to be in a city; it felt like someone’s country mansion. The colors were muted. People glittered in it, talking quietly with drinks in their hands. I, the friend of the friend, and the friend, gave our coats. I didn’t feel any shame over my dress, which was black, and had been bought secondhand, so it was a little threadbare—I had replaced a missing button at the waist with a small brass safety pin. I was perversely proud of my dress and my large peasant hands with their unvarnished nails. I took a drink from a tray and looked out the window, where the city glimmered as though it had been purchased for exactly that purpose. Then I turned my eyes all over the room and saw Krishna.

  He was not wearing sunglasses. When he lifted his eyes to me for a moment I felt the wind knocked out: I was a bell, and he’d rung me. I’ve never felt the gaze of another as a physical force. We wondered: was he a god? His brilliant eyes revealed nothing. He was brighter than I expected, blue as a peacock’s neck. Wearing a simple suit, white shirt, navy jacket, and no tie. His long dark hair was knotted up at his crown.

  Frankly, he was surrounded. The entire party circled him, as if without knowing it. Even the people at the outer edges turned their bodies unconsciously toward him. The friend of the friend whispered to the friend, “I didn’t think he’d be here.”

  “You know him?”

  “Sure, we’ve met a few times. Travels a lot.”

  “What’s he like?” I asked.

  The friend of the friend smiled with her beautiful painted mouth. “Char-is-ma-tic.”

  I could call home and tell my mother: this was my glamorous city life. She had told me stories of him at bedtime, so I had slept and dreamed of him. Tell her they had followed him to the bathroom, gone out to the balcony and offered him their cigarettes, tripped over themselves to get him a drink, and I had watched him downstairs hail a cab, and disappear into it, without being able to say one word. What would I have said? In the morning, I drank a cup of coffee black, and sketched his face on the newspaper. My hand seemed to be moving of its own accord. It was a cold morning with a thick mist that came up from the bay, a gloomy morning that made the city seem built only from ash, fog, and iron. I had a hangover that made my mouth feel dry, and there was a headache building at my temples. I wanted that good cold air on my face.

  Outside, the streets were empty—it was too early for brunch. Most people weren’t awake yet. I pushed myself down into my coat, ducking the bottom half of my face into my scarf. I felt as though I was looking for something, for someone—yes—for him. I imagined him, alone in his five-star hotel where he could watch the city from a magnificent height without getting out of his bed. It was mysterious what he did, how he spent his time. He didn’t claim to be anything. Sometimes he brokered treaties between countries, and taught philosophy classes at universities in Delhi and Paris. It was rumored that he had danced with Baryshnikov in New York one surprise summer season. The day my father died, I saw an article in the newspaper about Krishna’s peace talks in the Middle East, which had ended in nothing definitive, but had set a new course for diplomacy. I pictured him in the desert, his eyes shielded against the glare by his movie star glasses. He wouldn’t be wearing sunscreen: I knew his skin, like mine, was too dark to burn.

  When I returned to my apartment, my skin felt burning hot. I removed all my layers and stood at the sink in my underwear, drinking a glass of cool tap water from a metal tumbler. It must be this: his presence infected you like a virus. Or was it just me? I felt lonely.

  It was my childhood that had been lonely. We lived away from people and I had no siblings. I read a lot of books. There was a wild cat I tamed by leaving out little bowls of milk, and I talked to him in a soft voice while he lapped it up until he became used to me. The first time I tried to pet him he scratched me across the back of my hand, drawing blood; the wound became infected. The traces of it can still be seen on the back of my hand, the left, three pale lines. Somehow I wasn’t deterred and continued to leave milk out for him, until he let me touch his neck and back, rub his face in my hands, and scratch his shoulder blades, finally carry him. I talked to him. We tramped out into the woods together, and I told him all the things I worried about. Quietly, because I didn’t want anybody to hear. I had a sense, even then, that most things were secret. My family was that way. We had all been trained since birth to keep secrets, and we kept them well. While I was little, and still needed to speak, I could stuff it into the ears of the cat. Later, and for many years, I practiced silence. The tricky thing about silence is its weight, the heaviness it gives a particular word or name that sits unspoken on your tongue. That word or name may grow over time, filling your mouth, your lungs, your belly, with the evil and be
auty of its absence. I have never met a person who has been able to bear the weight like I have. At least, nobody who could bear my weight, my silence. Relationships often ended before they began. Or, sometimes the middle lasted for months, but the end always came. It was not a question of fault or blame. It was just weight. It was alright, except for the times it wasn’t.

  But I was young. Sometimes I believed I was beautiful. I spent all my money on paint and canvas. I lived in the same tiny place I painted and breathed in the ferocious smell even as I slept. Though I never smoked, I loved to drink. I would stand in front of the mirror with a tumbler of pure gin in my hand and my lips parted, practicing a cocktail laugh. I would practice standing on the balls of my feet in high heels, walking from one end of the room to the other. Who or what was I practicing for? Dimly, I imagined some moment, some party, where my head would turn at the right angle, and I would laugh just right. Really, it had no purpose. I drank until my eyes got blurry and my body felt heavy and I would lie right down on the middle of my floor. This was the kind of drinking I did alone. In public, I kept to white wine, or beer, and only drank enough to feel it start. I may come home afterward and drink a little more. Or put on a song I liked and dance to it, or eat a piece of toast. It was a pleasure to get home after a party and turn on all the lights and take off my shoes and dance. Or to spill honey on a piece of bread spread thick with butter, to hold food in my mouth. Or taste the first spiky sip of real alcohol, gin or vodka. They were the secret pleasures of the body that animals must feel too. Sleep was a pleasure, falling asleep, in bed or on the floor. To let someone put their fingers or their cock inside me, to move warm against their skin. I was alone, sometimes, lonely, I had headaches—yes, I felt, sometimes, desperate. But I couldn’t deny my life held all the earthly pleasures any person could hope to expect.

  The phone rang, it wasn’t Krishna. It was my mother, or the landlord, or a friend or the phone company calling with an exclusive offer on long-distance rates. Why did I think—every time—it would be him? Why did I clear my throat and exhale in a little puff before I said hello?