The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  Against the wall, half-dozing, a watchman in khakis and long wool jerked up and smiled at the Brother, and then at her. She didn’t return the smile. They looked at you like you were the same as other children, they always smiled at you as if you were the same: silly, clowning, social, unserious, playing make-believe or, worse, becoming precious for them. Some of her cousins behaved like this when trying to win the love of Grandma during summer visits and it disgusted her. Her Mother would whisper to her, with delicious scorn, look at that little liar; Grandma was never swayed, but aunties were, which made them not worth loving.

  She skipped the sixth step and went directly to the seventh, where she always stalled; she could climb no closer to death. She sat for a while with her feet over the edge. The Bhavan’s courtyard seemed to exist outside the city, borrowing only its birds, which crossed in lazy flocks the rectangle of sky that capped the compound. Parrots showed green against the blue, but their scribbling noise was muted by the assonant chorus of music lessons, each individual lesson weaving into a new whole that contained an element of the Mother she could not quite hear, but still somehow sense. Through the door, she had seen the Mother’s teacher wince at the sound of her voice, but the Mother had not noticed or cared, and plowed on, heedless.

  Yes, though, there was another noise, a sense of rhythm, the shivering sound of rain. It was nearer, and then voices too, on the ground floor, and Vidya, now curious, followed the steps toward the sound: the level half underground and half above it, with windows that looked onto the courtyard and the street, letting in a dim yellow light:

  there were girls moving with purpose in this new secret room; their movements were described twice, by the rhythm of finger and palm against drum (a man played the drums, pulling from it a range of tones both heavy and light, his fingers springing away from the dark cores) and by spoken voice (a woman recited the rhythm in a language of single syllables, mysterious, expressive words both odder and more familiar than English)—and a third time by the bells wound thickly around the ankles of the best girls, and thinly around the ankles of the younger girls, some almost as young as her, some teenagers or even young women, moving with varying grace and control, but all moving with purpose, their bodies taut with the effort of correctness, their feet speaking and their eyes driven inward. Vidya, in the doorway, was not seen, was only seeing, her body lifting unconsciously, straightening itself, wanting to stand and move correctly as she watched a girl at the front of the room moving in a whirling yellow kameez, with short, swift limbs, who made a phrase with her body and was scolded by the woman who had spoken it, who made the phrase again with her body, moving this time her arms in concert with her legs, her bells glistening with hard noise, and was scolded again by the woman, who, in the dim light, had the fierce, kohl-made eyes of a leader and a ferocious bearing, not unlike the Mother’s, even while seated. This woman was beautiful, magnetically so. Her hair, striped with white, was parted down the middle and pinned into a low bun in a plain style so that her opulent face stood out in relief to it, pale and richly colored, her eyes a glinting black as though jeweled. Her hand slapped against her thigh, marking the same rhythm she spoke through that strange language of single syllables, and the moving girl again tried the phrase slightly refined and this time was not scolded by the woman—not praised, but her bearing became prouder, as if she had been praised. The room was incredibly hot: there was no fan, in the corner was a small shrine to Shiva with his foot lifted in destruction, a stick of incense burned to the nub for him and the room smelled of it, and loudly of sweat, the girls’ and the percussionist’s, whose hands seemed to take a precise effort regardless of how quickly or slowly the rhythm was that issued from them, and he held his arms very heavily in order to let his fingers be light. She could be tiny in the doorway: just eyes. Watching the girl move now made her want to be nothing. A thought came to her and it was like the first thought she had ever had: I am nothing. How long she stood there, fixed—moth: flame. Then suddenly coming out of a dream she remembered her Brother and ran up the steps.

  Evening had deepened outside but the Mother was not finished. The Brother was sitting by himself on the step she had abandoned, a cry starting to bubble into his face, and she snatched him up and stood in the courtyard listening now to the sounds coming from the building, trying to parse and understand them. What was the language the woman spoke? And to whom were they speaking, exactly? Not with that odd spoken language, not just. With their bodies that they made follow a set of grace rules.

  “Ah, you must be a dancer,” said the watchman.

  “That was dancing?”

  “Of course. What else would it be?”

  She thought it was the clapping and swirling of Navaratri, exuberant and ordinary. She sat on the step. To be small was to be comfortable with the world being constantly upended: oh, but she wasn’t. The sun was going and the sky began to bruise from its absence.

  “Vidya!”

  There she was, the Mother, so tall, in her funny outside shoes, men’s shoes made of brown leather, with laces and too large, in her gray and red sari, descending the steps. The hour’s music had left sweetness on her tongue. In the fading light the Mother looked familiar and fragile, and Vidya ran up the steps toward her, heedless of the trailing Brother: wanting the Mother, wanting no harm to come to her, wanting her hand. She took it, cool, in her hot palms.

  “Here I am.”

  Sleeping, she thought about moving like the girls until she was dreaming. She was underwater where the gods drowned in the festival looked at her with their cracked wide-open eyes. Her movements were difficult and pure in the salt of the city’s bay water. She woke when the Mother woke, in the small hour before dawn. The Mother made no sound as she woke, and the others slept on heedless, but Vidya was tugged out of sleep to watch her rise from her mat and walk to the kitchen and light with a match the small kerosene lamp they used in the evenings when the power was cut. Through the flickering light, Vidya watched the Mother draw out a notebook from the cupboard that housed schoolthings. The defensiveness with which the Mother held herself was entirely absent: it was as though she had walked straight into her notebook from her dreaming. She seemed to be leaning out of her body, reaching with her mind toward the notebook as her pencil moved over it. Her lips moved as though she were praying. What was she doing? In her face, in the eyes, there was that same quality of intention, of will. Holy eyes. The nature of the work, it was clear, was inscrutable but important.

  Watching the Mother, Vidya was coming awake. She liked to come awake slowly, like this; it was difficult changing states, a night creature turning into an entirely different one that functioned during the day, and then had to turn back into the original creature once night fell. Father Sir and the Brother were unlike her: they were awake as soon as their eyes came open. Fresh pale light began to gather at the window, when it reached a certain density Father Sir sat up and stretched. Vidya went outside to clean her teeth, dreamy at this task, rubbing the bitter tooth powder with a lazy finger, then spitting over the railing (look first! shouted an angry neighbor—but she never did). She liked the feeling of her soul returning to her body the same way her arm came awake when she pressed the life out of it. In this time, she could see herself outside herself like when she watched the Mother, she could see her own smallness, the small holes where her eyes were and her tiny ears, and her tiny grasping hands and feet, her pink divided tongue with its flat tip: all the equipment she had to divine the world’s moods and rules and strange events.

  Bodies were secrets: not hers. She was a clean little egg, hunched in the bathing-room, she spread the lips of her susu and enjoyed the look of it, glossy before it was even wet, with a lush texture and the faintest most animal scent. But take too long at your bath and the Mother might pull you out and slap you. So she was careful. It was important to not be slapped in the morning to keep the feeling of dreaming on, until it dissipated, slowly, of its own accord, during the yellow hour of mother-chores. T
hen she was transformed into her day self, standing triumphant on the roof, dredging the washed clothes from their bucket and laying them on the railing so she could overturn the bucket to stand on as she hung them dripping from the line. From here, six stories up, the heat and noise of the city—the city’s weight—was eased and softened. What lay before her seemed to her to be the whole of Bombay with its flapping laundry and water tanks, though she couldn’t see the ocean, obscured by Malabar Hill, a green slope dotted with the white mansions and bungalows of the rich and the Saint Catherine’s Nursing Home, where rich babies were born. Even white babies, though she had never seen one—only the white baby dolls in the window of the toy store in Colaba that shut their lovely blue eyes when they were laid on their backs for bed. The day self was strong enough to withstand it, to withstand chores, and school, and the evening hours before bed. But the night self was the true self, the one who dreamed.

  The Mother didn’t like to talk during the yellow hour. Sometimes she lay down on the divan with a look of pain on her face and would not be moved. Mi-grane, said Father Sir in English, who showed her to take a rag and dip it in cool water to spread across the haunted forehead. In a nightmare the Mother was moaning, her hands pressed against her ears. Her blood was too hot and needed to be cooled, Vidya understood, laying the rag against the Mother’s skin: she understood the Mother’s nightmare. Vidya would be standing at the window watching the dogs at the edge of the courtyard bunched in their bodies and dreaming, she would be sucking her finger to get its first tang of salt, and humming something to herself mindlessly, four or five repeated notes in a drowsy sequence, and would feel a flickering thing within her like a very very small flame, very very small, but if she could hold on to the thread of it she could say what it was and grow it, it was a good feeling, deeply good, but so shy and without any name—and then suddenly a dog would wake and snap its jaws, it would nose into itself to bite a wound that itched, only that, and the feeling would snuff out and she would feel wildly bad, as though she had been slapped.

  The day would fall into a despairing mood, and turn so ugly, she would spend brown hours doing chores or her schoolwork, and there was nothing good in the world but the jar of honey kept on a high shelf in the kitchen, which, when held to the light, glowed gold like a lantern, and when licked had a terrible sweetness. But she was not allowed to hold it. She didn’t even want to eat it, just to hold it. She was not allowed. She was in a rage and wanted to do something bad; when no one was looking, she broke Father Sir’s red pencil in two, sorry as soon as she’d done it. The two broken halves looked as disturbing as the gecko split by her evil boy-cousins, and she put them trembling back in the case, leaving the nightmaring Mother with the Brother, and went to school with her slate wrapped in a cloth so it wouldn’t be smudged. Mi-grane. The Mother was not well. Crossing the street carefully, Vidya walked quickly past the sweetshop not wanting to be flooded with itchy desire. All day all day she thought about the pencil, the way it snapped so easily in her hands, like time itself, separating between what could have been and what was. She was not ready with an answer when Schoolteacher called on her and she received a rap along her knuckles with the flat of a ruler. Stung! She felt ashamed before god and asked for his forgiveness, but she didn’t receive a reply. What an evil girl she was, what bad deeds she was capable of! Walking home, she looked at herself in the jewelry store window, delighted, momentarily, by her wrongdoing. She would run away! She would lead a rebel army, like the Rani of Jhansi!

  The Mother was up and cooking, the boy banging two cups together, adding his noise to the evening racket. The chaali was never quiet, but in the late afternoon it ran several channels of gossip and at least two fights, and all sorts of yelling from the kids downstairs, not to mention the Mehtas’ radio with the sound turned up so the neighbors could enjoy the program. The sounds of water, washing, of work, bodies laughing and groaning and living. Stripped suddenly of her courage, she wanted to weep, she was so bad, so sorry. She imagined a mother who would look for a moment at her, with the eyes really looking at her not just her shape or dirtiness or bother, but at her, to the dreaming core, and say her name. For a moment that was all she wanted in the world, that the Mother would look up and say her name. A name would pin her back into the world, make her belong inside it again; a name bound one person to another, made them belong to each other. Then she would do anything, anything, without complaint. “Take him, will you?” said the Mother without looking up.

  Dutifully she took the cups out of his hands and lifted him up. He was soiled and she changed him. He was worse than a doll, laughing at her. She would not kiss him, or give him any sweet thing. When she put him down he started to cry so she picked him up again. Why did you break that pencil? she whispered in his ear, placing the broken halves into his hands like toys.

  Then it was summer, already too hot, and they took the train to Father Sir’s father sir’s home in the north, in a world built of brown dust. From the train window she saw the black mountain where the goddess lived, and where, each harvest, pilgrims climbed in the desperate heat to offer her their prayers. In Father Sir’s father’s sir’s pale blue house Grandma sat in a room surrounded by Vidya’s one hundred cousins, looking like a huge, amazing, loving, gentle beast. “Come, Vidya,” she said, and lifted her onto her lap, heedless of the Brother. Vidya was favorite. In the sleeping hour, Grandma slept inside with the adults, and the children slept outside in the shaded courtyard. Vidya hated the sleeping hour, and would have preferred to wander, quiet, though the mud-cool rooms of the house, to sit quietly in the innermost room where the curd and milk and gods were kept, very quietly, she would not disturb anybody, but knew that if she were caught in this trespass her punishment would be severe, that the condition of Grandma’s love for her was more exacting than Grandma’s love for her wretched boy cousins. It was like god’s love: it demanded absolute fealty. She had crossed Grandma once, and Grandma’s face had turned startlingly violent, like a bull’s. And then Grandma would not look at her. This went on for days. She remembered begging at Grandma’s ankles. Low down she had the smell of soil in the folds of her sari, and the sweetish smell of the sandalwood and kumkum she used each morning in her prayers. When Grandma returned to her, Vidya was obedient to her every command. She sat charmed on her lap, tracing the tattoos that had been poked into Grandma’s skin with song and ink, blue as the blood that showed at each wrist where the skin was thinnest. Wasp, goddess, crescent moon—Grandma said they made her body more beautiful, and more sacred, but smiled: you didn’t even know I was beautiful, you wouldn’t believe it. And it was true, the girl could not imagine a grandma who was different from the old woman whose folded legs she so proudly occupied. Vidya would never be old, as she would never be beautiful, just a girl, and shook her head. You will be too, my girl, said Grandma wickedly. You too, my girl, will be both soon enough.

  She lay down now on her mat. Her body became itchy all over in the windless air and she looked with longing at the older cousins who lay close to each other, speaking softly and laughing, languid but not sleepy, occupying the sleeping hour like swimmers waist deep in cool water while their top halves still resided in air. She forced her eyes closed and thought about dancing. Dancing—a secret was passed along, something a body told a body. She could not steal it, so how would she acquire it? The Mother would say no! It required money. Perhaps she could steal it by standing quietly and looking. She thought of the movements she remembered, but already they were blurred. Something you did with the hands, flashing the palms? To submerge the eyes in absolute serenity. How could she sleep now, when the world persisted, filled with shattering movement?

  The Brother, bathed and fed, had been taken in to sleep with the grown-ups; now, fussing, he was carried out by the Mother, who stood on the verandah with him still in her arms, her arms always reaching for him when they were not otherwise occupied, an apology of arms always reaching for him. She walked slowly across the verandah bouncing the boy
in her arms. After a while the Brother stopped fussing and fell into a doze, his body sagging against the Mother’s. But even then she did not stop walking back and forth across the verandah. She walked, rocking him, her lips were moving, her body gaining energy as it moved. She walked like this building fury until Father Sir came outside. Come inside, his body seemed to say, as he reached for the boy to put a hand on him but the Mother was too quick.

  “He wakes when I stop moving.”

  “He’s too old for this. You’ll make yourself sick. Have Vidya take him.”

  The Mother clicked her tongue. “He’s my boy.”

  “You didn’t sleep at all on the train. Even my sister can help.”

  “Your sister who fed her children the milk that was meant for yours? And tell me this,” said the Mother, not even whispering now. “If your mother loves you so much, why didn’t she take him?”

  “You know she couldn’t. They can’t take care of children.”

  “She’s not an invalid.”

  “They’re old.” Father Sir’s voice was unusually sharp; he was worried about being overheard.

  “What nonsense. She carries on with the children all day.”

  “It wasn’t up to her.”

  “Jackals, all of them,” she said. “Everyone looking at me with their eyes like daggers. And this heat. It’s worse here than in the city.”

  In the afternoons, the children went down to the river. She had been told the river was broad in the month following monsoon, big as the ocean it was named for, but whenever she was here it was flanked on both sides by hard, dry mud, with the same cracked fractals as elephant skin. Boys got to swim, but the girls of the family had been forbidden: long ago, a teenaged cousin had drowned. After chores, the girls made a doll of Vidya and practiced complex braids in the late afternoon shade. She enjoyed the feeling of their sudden attention and the feeling of so many hands in her hair as her head was tugged this way and that, listening equally to the distant shrieks of the splashing boys and the gentle voices of the girls who enjoyed singing the movie songs they had half-learned and embellished together the parts they didn’t know. After a while they became bored with being kind and started to tug her hair and tease her and goad her, calling her a tribal person. She was too dark, Suchitra pointed out, presiding over the group of girls as regally as Grandma presided over all the cousins. She was too dark; the color of her arms darkened, it seemed, as soon as she arrived in the village, to something the color of river mud: wet. Of Father Sir’s family, everyone seemed a light gold; it was the Mother’s side who incubated the secret tendency toward darkness, visible on the faces of the Mother’s elder brothers, whom Vidya had met long ago, as though in a dream, and of whose faces she remembered only this singular feature. Where do you belong, said Suchitra, with mud-people? You should go live in the forest with your tribe. Vidya ran away, her hair still loose, and so angry, rubbed herself in dirt, wanting to be dirt, living in her true family. If she knew how to move with purpose, nothing would wound her. But she had not considered the darkness of her skin. The neighbor girl was far fairer than she. Maybe she would not be allowed to dance, would be punished for stealing. Maybe she could not even steal!