by Shruti Swamy
“I’ll remember,” I said. The tiles in the hall were large, and red—why red—and still damp from being scrubbed—further down a woman in smarting turquoise crouched with her rag. My shadow trembled twice, against the tile and against the bare white walls. Did other women, then, have holes torn in their memory, torn by pain? Now I remembered everything, and, no matter how awful, I did not want to forget.
“You’ll remember that it hurt but not what it felt like.”
“I’ll remember,” I said, and then the pain rushed back and I curled my hand into a fist so my nails bit against my palm, my body was incandescent, it was a magnificent horror, I began to shiver, oh god, I would be torn open, “I’ll remember—”
V
For a time I had not had a child, I had only the idea of a child: imaginary but real in the same way god was. For the months in me, though her presence became more and more physical, she remained distant, abstract: I could not from her movements deduce her face, the reality of her body outside my body, held in my arms. I could not imagine her hands, her needs, her slate-colored eyes, newborn and unsettled—I could not believe they existed. It was as though her birth had been the end point rather than the beginning, the precipice from which I would fall—and die.
I went to live at my father’s house. My brother, hell-bent on his elopement, had left the flat: my father still worked as hard as he ever did, traveling all around the city to give his tuitions: I passed day after day in the dream-state that mirrored my daughter’s, never quite awake, never fully sleeping, my body always listening for hers. When my eyes were open, I studied her with curiosity—the mobility of her face, over which many expressions passed effortlessly and seemingly without meaning. Meaningless, the folded brow, the flickering smile that lived only for a second on her lips—and gestures of her tiny arms and legs too carrying no meaning, just a random and inelegant jerking of limbs. This perfect marvel of creation was badly made. Her hands, exquisitely shaped, with the slender, tapering fingers I immediately recognized as my mother’s, could not even grasp their own movements, whether they flared into lotus shapes or knitted together as though in prayer when she was at my breast. Her eyes were hazy, unable to focus, her body dark and scrawny, the wild strand of darkness that ran through my family barely tempered by the other side’s pink-rose fairness.
And yet, how much better was I? My body was big and dark and heavy and dumb—it was stunned from the pain it had walked through, even as it had lost the physical memory of the pain. It had forgotten how to express itself through the language it had so doggedly acquired, and so become mute. Worse yet, it had nothing to say. If I looked down I saw the deflated body of a stranger. I dried myself and put my sari on quickly.
When my husband visited, I didn’t know what to say to him. He held the child badly, and she cried, not because she wanted me, but because she could feel his nervousness and it unsettled her. We could not look at each other, yet our hands touched as we passed her between us, and we spoke to each other easily about the shape of her eyes and her tiny random movements, the way her fist wrapped around an offered finger. I did not have the time or courage to study him, to absorb the hurt that radiated from him. To study his face or the posture of his shoulders would be to read the position of one’s stars at birth, and then to orient one’s life around the reading—I had no desire, no patience for his influence. I wanted only to put one foot in front of the other until I could understand the path my feet were making.
“You’re looking well,” he said.
“Am I?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing away from me after our eyes brushed. Still, after everything, it thrilled me, his gaze.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You’ve softened,” he said.
The baby—Kalki—had begun to doze in my arms. She loved nothing more than being held. Put her down in the cradle and she screamed, refused to be soothed by the rocking motion, screamed until she gagged, but nearly anyone could hold her—my father, the bai, a visiting neighbor—and she would begin to coo and often her eyes half-closed in pleasure.
“You look well too. Maybe it’s just that we’ve returned to where we should be—this is where we look most right.”
“You think you belong here?”
“Why not?”
“You never thought you did.”
“I was too arrogant.”
“I liked your arrogance.”
I clicked my tongue. “Is ‘well’ the same as happy?”
“No,” he said.
He put his empty cup down and stood up. In his beautiful clothes, he looked like a visiting celebrity, and people came out of their apartments to gawk as he left. He put on his sunglasses, strengthening that impression, but I knew it was because the attention made him feel ashamed, and he wanted to deflect it without communicating his shame. I watched him go like everyone else, so small now he looked like a toy-husband, disappearing into the toy-car with dark windows that waited for him just outside the gate. Back to his toy-life: wifeless, childless, and filled again with the ease of toy-money: toy-work, toy-parties, toy-women willing to gamble their reputations for a slightly tarnished prize.
But she was real: the child: my Kalki. Her needs were intense but simple, and I met them all; I fed her, I fed and fed her, I cleaned her, I rocked her to sleep. When she cried I held her until she was soothed. She was real, the butter-smooth length of her. But still her face did not settle into its future. It was trying on aspects, rushed with ancestors, and so changed like the shifting of a kaleidoscope’s colors from angle to angle, mood to mood. A tilt of her chin: she was my infant brother; my husband’s mother broke over her face as she laughed; my grandmother in her ears with their fat lobes, and in her long arms; my husband in the whorl of her darkening eyes, greenish flecks appearing in the outer rim of the iris; my mother in the look of concentration, as her body began to learn itself, as consciousness began to spread out in her, from the direction her eyes looked, to the expressions of her mouth, then out through the arms and hands, which learned how to wave and grasp their fingers.
Kalki cried: I lifted her to my breast. Her mouth fit neatly over the nipple, her eyes closed in nearly a swoon, her breath falling soft and hot against my skin. Alone in the flat, I didn’t mind it. I had begun to cultivate a sort of affection for my breasts, the left one slightly larger than the right, and fuller with milk. If not beautiful, they were useful. I had not been instructed in the hospital of their use, the nurses preferring to feed the baby with formula, and anyway I had not been there long: I left long before they would have allowed me to, not wanting to keep spending my in-laws’ money, not wanting to owe them anything else. But mere hours upon my return to the chaali, the chaali’s women had come into the flat, had come thundering like water into the flat and washed away any resistance with sheer force, shooing my father out, swooping up the baby, surrounding me on the divan, opening my blouse, clucking at the hard breasts, at the hungry crying child angry in her hunger, who had seemed then like my opponent—a mother had taken my hot breast in her cool palms and kneaded it, another mother had settled the child in the crook of my arm and put her mouth to my nipple. I was nearly whimpering in pain. They had come because pity had called them; I didn’t want their pity but I didn’t care anymore: I was too tired to be embarrassed by my nudity, the breast that blared out of the blouse. They adjusted me and tried again, firmly and without sympathy. Then the milk began to flow through us. The relief was so intense that at some point it passed into pleasure.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” I said to Kalki now. I had begun talking to her just to say something to someone and for her to hear my voice. “I ate so many chilies yesterday I hope your milk isn’t too spicy.”
Her eyes were open, and she was looking at me. I wonder if we had been like this, me and my mother, if my mother had looked into my eyes with curiosity about the self that flickered inside them, trying to extrapolate the fixed future from the malleable present. It se
emed impossible to me—even once—that she hadn’t. Kalki came away from the breast with a sigh. I walked to the window and looked out with her—I was always looking for Mrs. B out that window, imagining her striding through the chaali to pluck her granddaughter out of what she would call its filth. I would have fought her—I wanted to—snarling like a beast, but she never came. They wanted nothing more than to forget us, the Bs, who had never laid eyes upon their son’s child. Kalki would never have a grandmother, someone who loved her indulgently, and best. She would never have so many things. I propped her up on my knees. Her bright eyes tracked my fingers as they unhooked my anklet, and then dangled it within her reach. I saw something pass over her face: pleasure, from the sight and sound of the bells and the bright silver, then curious desire—she reached out and brushed her fingers against the silver, and made a crow of joy as it chimed.
I put her down. There was no music in the empty flat, just the mid-afternoon noises of the chaali: children returning from school, afternoon tea being prepared and served, cars on the road, dogs barking: noise. No music, but so outlined were her movements with her purpose, they stood out, gleaming, luminous; like dance. She kicked her dark leg, then kicked it again. I remembered the days in Versova where I leaned out the window, watching the movements the world had offered, so close to understanding them. I had promised my teacher I would dance in my mind if I couldn’t with my body, but I had not understood my promise. I thought it meant remembering the movements, to rehearse mentally the sequence of steps and poses so that I would not have to reach for them when I danced, something I used to do often, filling idle moments on the bus or in bed with these thoughts. And I had thought that it was the poor substitute, the lesser thing. But I now understood I had been wrong. By watching, by listening, your body could pay attention. Then the movements, gleaming in their shapes, the kicking of a child’s leg, the running of dogs in the waves, were like holes punched in the wall sealing us from that unbroken field of light, the places from which that light entered us. As the eyes and ears became more subtle, the more radiance they observed, admitted, until, infinite, the wall was smashed, broken, gone: you stood bare in front of it. To move one’s body with purpose was to communicate some knowledge of this shining field, but one could not ever truly express it with mortal muscle, skin. The greatest of us could just become a dim mirror, a reminder to look. Eklavya arrowed with his body. I would dance with my life.
Kalki was laughing. I picked her up. The smell of her was of the red sweet oil I rubbed in her skin after her bath, was of milk, and the gentle musk of a clean little animal. I could feel her breath against my neck, her body as it responded to mine, resting her cheek against my shoulder. I carried her up to the roof. It was early dusk. I stood as my mother would have, if she had lived through the afternoon, watching evening fall over the city with a child in her arms. The city was so beautiful. Kalki reached out her hands to grab it, as though to stuff it in her mouth.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my mother, Asha Pandya, who made herself an invaluable resource during the writing of this book, and who read the first forty pages and told me to keep going.
I’m indebted to the kathak artists Akram Khan, Roshan Kumari, Quincy Kendall Charles, and the dancers of the Chitresh Das Dance Company. Their work provokes, inspires, and sustains me.
Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and the documentary Raga all were foundational to the ideas about art, intention, and consciousness explored in the book.
Gratitude to the many people who gave this book much care at Algonquin: Brunson Hoole, Michael McKenzie, Lauren Moseley, Mae Zhang McCauley, Kelly Doyle, Stephanie Mendoza, Steve Godwin, and Christopher Moisan. Sasha Tropp for the copyedits and one brilliant ellipsis. Shyama Golden for the cover. My editor, Betsy Gleick, for her keen eye, sharp edits, and advocacy. My agent Samantha Shea for representing my vision of this book, for her savvy, and for a slightly embarrassing amount of hand-holding.
Thank you to Rachel Khong and Claire Calderón at the Ruby. To the San Francisco Public Library. To Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay AiR, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. To Kundiman and my Kundi-fam.
Thank you to my family, especially Asha Pandya, Sanjay Iyer, Bharathendu Swamy, Merylee Smith Bingham, Ed Bingham, Josh Bingham, Hansa Bhaskar, and Beena Sharma. Deep gratitude to Kavita’s Nana and Nani who took such good care of her while I wrote. To the mothers and caregivers who I have learned from and beside.
In loving memory of Ila Mami, who lit up every room she was in. In loving memory of my Baa, the strongest person I’ve ever known. In memory of those who have passed into ancestor.
Thank you to my friends who read this book with beautiful attention, intelligence and depth: Sunisa Manning, Susanna Kwan, Mimi Lok, Shamala Gallagher, Rebekah Pickard, Rhea St. Julian, Abhay Shetty; Meng Jin, Meng Jin again for the second reading, Meng Jin a third time for the title and epigraph; thank you to C. Pam Zhang, Rachel Khong, Asako Serizawa, Peter Orner, and Megha Majumdar.
To Catherine Epstein, Chris Freimuth, and Shamala Gallagher. My kin.
To Kavita, for that kiss on my shoulder. To beloved Abe for the hours and the years.
Also by Shruti Anna Swamy
A House Is a Body
About the Author
Shruti Anna Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the Pen/Robert Bingham Prize, the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and longlisted for the Story Prize. Her work has been published by the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories. The Archer is her debut novel. She lives in San Francisco.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2021 by Shruti Anna Swamy.
All rights reserved.
A Kitchen at the Corner of the House by Ambai, © 2019 by Ambai, translation from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström, published by Archipelago Books. Used by permission.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA: LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010464
ISBN 978-1-64375-216-7 (ebook)
