Keagan Guy, Dark Blues
sumitra singam
she makes me a garden of midnight blue
In the hackneyed telling of the Ramayana, my husband Lakshmana is a selfless hero,
burnished skin shining, muscles pulsing. He gave up sleep for fourteen years so he could keep vigil over his brother Rama and his beautiful, chaste wife Sita for the duration of their exile.
Do they ever tell you about those left behind? I’m only Lakshmana’s wife, Sita’s sister.
Doesn’t the wife always have to pick up the husband’s careless discards? Nidra Devi,
Goddess of Sleep didn’t ask when she laid her hand on my brow to pay Lakshmana’s sleep debt. I writhed, trying to throw her cloying bonds off, intoxicating as they were. “This was all written long before you were even thought of, Urmila, why fight it?” she said.
My dreams were violent rainbows – reds and oranges of bleeding sunsets, vivid greens of envy and hatred. Sita paraded her long, jasmine-scented hair, moving and living and loving and being. She came to my parents from Bhoomi Devi, the great Earth Mother, through their sacrifice and prayer. My two other sisters and I came the usual way, the taint of sin already on us as newborns. When Sita chose her husband, my father offered his remaining daughters to Rama’s brothers. This phalanx of handsome, royal brothers overthrew any sense of choice.
For months I travel through the spectrum and back again. It is never black, the colour of full sleep. It is never the white of full consciousness. A ball of feeling builds in my chest, pulsing hot. Nidra Devi sighs, “I have never had to visit someone so much. You are like a fractious child.”
“Make me a garden,” I say. “Somewhere I can locate myself. This nothingness is too much.”
She makes me a garden of midnight blue. The flowers chirp and squawk and flutter their wings, the leaves are a colour I have never seen before, a shimmering aqua-purple-gold. The grass is heavenly soft, clouds of cotton. I find a patch of cactus and sit in it, sucking my breath through my teeth.
“Stubborn mule,” Nidra Devi towers over me, her hair a river of silk, fragrant musky oil of frangipani, cloying sweetness of mango, earthy scent of holy basil.
“I do not want to sleep! I want to live!”
“Do you think Lakshmana had any choice?”
I purse my lips, jut my chin pugnaciously. “We are not talking of him.”
“It is bigger than you.”
“I am still in it. I am necessary!”
She produces a jilebi, sticky, neon orange, stinking of hot ghee and sugar, a deep, smoky, bass note, “Have a sweet, little one,” her eyes twinkle, kohl-rimmed, deep and dark, portals to oblivion.
I stamp my foot, then wail as it is pierced by a million barbarous cactus needles. She laughs green and pink, a trill like my parrot. “Come here,” she holds her arms out, “Come.” I do not want to go, but she is irresistible, her ginger-curved hips a voluptuous reminder of vitality.
She is sandalwood and neem, she is milk and honey, she is... She is tricking me. I push myself out of her embrace.
“It is destiny, Urmila. Mere goddesses cannot intervene.”
“Nidra Devi, the one with the great power to take away wakefulness, has no power to choose when it happens?”
“It is the way of things,” but I can see a furrow in her forehead, a swirling in her eyes. She’s thinking of the time Brahma called on her to wake Vishnu from his celestial sleep; to protect all of creation. We’ve all heard the story, but the hero of it is Vishnu, never her.
There is a jackfruit at my feet, it’s swollen, green, pimpled skin split neatly in the middle. The scent of nectar is cloying. I remove one of the pods, peeling strips of the succulent fruit with my teeth.
“I must go,” Nidra Devi says, but she doesn’t move.
I eat another of the pods, glistening yellow in the night. Saccharine juices run down my arm. Drunken bees zig-zag, maddened by the smell.
“I am needed elsewhere,” she is almost pleading with me.
I remove another pod, the sticky sap from the skin coating my hands. I hold it out to Nidra Devi. There is a universe circling in her eyes, an entire gravity between us. There are bells on her sari pallu that tinkle as she moves to me, brings the fruit in my hand to her mouth. She drowns in my mortal eyes, this Goddess. Her consciousness finds mine, and we come awake.
__________
Katherine Hughbanks, Fire Rainbow
the weight of river stones
After school, after the subtle shoulders closing us out, the clutch of whispering children, the party invitations floating past like feathers; my silent child, eyes as wide as the moon, walks to the creek. The first few times I stopped her - no it’s winter, it’s too cold. Her expression never changed, just that same wide-eyed look, but she’d turn her feet homewards. Dinner would be a time of silence, father and daughter within their own powerful force-fields. Me over-bright, asking about everyone’s day, though it is written plainly on their faces.
I am called to school, there is an incident, something I can’t quite understand - it isn’t that we are accusing your daughter, they say, but their jaws are set, hard stones in their eyes. Willow doesn’t ask this time, walks straight to the creek, strips down to her underwear. Her ten-year-old body has nothing spare on it, and she dives straight in. I wade in, am stung by the cold, panic when I can’t see her. It’s just a mass of bubbles, and for a moment she’s gone, no limbs, no body, just water. Slowly, her lissom piscine body resolves itself, and I let out a breath. My child, ungainly on land, is a minnow underwater. She darts about, flicking her legs as if they were a tail fin.
Her body animated by this icy water, she follows a fish, picks up a stone, caresses a plant. She opens her mouth, says something which I interpret as delight. I touch her, lightly, on her foot. We must go. Immediately the lead returns to her bones, and she resolves into the trudging child I know. She stands, holding the smooth river stone in her fist, her lungs somehow gasping on air. Without a sound she dresses and leads the way home.
The creek is a given now, she just turns her feet that way after school. Most times I hop in too, feeling the water seep into all the deficiencies in me, just as she finds her rhythm, darts about, exclaims – her voice reaching me in distended whale song.
She pulls out a turtleneck from my wardrobe. It’s large on her. It’s a thing she has never worn, collars have always been uncomfortable for her. I ask why, she just turns away.
Each afternoon she spends longer and longer underwater. It is literally minutes before she surfaces. And when she does, there is a rote quality to it, something she has remembered to do. Mechanical like she is with other people – hello, how are you. It is harder and harder to get her home.
She refuses to go to school. She throws things, slams her door. Comes out in her swimsuit. Please, she says. The only word she has said in months. There are marks on her neck. My belly spasms tight.
The bright morning light refracts like honey through the water. My child smiles at me, points downward. Underwater, she cups my cheek in her hand, her gills flowering open and shut. Her eyes are full of tender understanding. She picks something up from the river bed – a second stone, smooth, flat, shaped like a teardrop. She presses it into my hand, holding up her own stone. She turns, her hair billowing like a betta fish. My beautiful daughter, not made for land, not made for humans, swims away, leaving me with the weight of a stone in my hand.
______
About the author
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2.