Read by Anoushka Deshmukh (third story in podcast, here)
Tonight, again, Madam cannot sleep because of the rustling. Because Madam doesn’t sleep, I can’t sleep. She pulls me from my cot — a meagre straw thing pushed to the furthest corner of her bedroom — and wraps my fingers around the pinta broom. We keep the broom inside now.
Downstairs, she says.
Downstairs is the kitchen, which is where I slept before Madam got the way she is now.
A man is downstairs. A man has gotten into the kitchen because Madam left the downstairs window open, hoping that a breeze will flit its way in and soothe the overheating of ancient womanhood.
Now a man has flitted in, a bandit, she’s sure. She is a stupid woman if she left the window open without telling. She knows they must be shut and covered with foil at night. Now a bandit has gotten in, an experienced bandit who knows how to melt down to a snake and sidewind his way in. If he was a snake, we need not worry. Everyone finds snakes in their kitchen and stomps on the throat when they do. Chop off the head and fry up the tail in curry. Pickle the skin for medicine.
The man downstairs is more dangerous than a snake.
He's here because he has a wife and two pickney to feed, and his wife’s belly is big with a third. He doesn’t have education because his parents couldn’t afford to put both his brother and him through school. The brother lives in Georgetown and is a big man working for Kaieteur News while he, the bandit man, robs to survive. Bandits get hungry, too. But he is here for more than food.
Best believe he’s chosen Madam’s house because he’s heard the news, heard it straight from the mouth of the villagers: he knows that Madam is a widow. Bad news travels fast. Even people in Georgetown know that Madam’s doltish husband is dead—that he died a year ago because of clottish blood.
Them people aren’t smart enough to know about blood clot. They can’t imagine how it wedges inside a man’s heart and causes him to stumble out of the bathroom and flop over and writhe, naked, on the miserable floor. They know only that clots foretell death. Whenever concern flickers across their doctor’s face, they joke, serious and proud, No blood clot, right?
Madam is husbandless. Close to servantless. Who can blame the ones who couldn’t wait for him to draw his last breath and who ran out as soon as Madam’s husband flopped onto the floor? Who can stay in a place where no powerful man resides?
Madam has one servant left, a servant who likes to watch guava leaves dance in the shadows on the ceiling—who stays on because no one else will take her. Tainted by a lifetime of servitude to the husk of a woman who won’t acknowledge the gray in her hair and the whispers at her back. A stubborn woman. She’s mistress of this house and won’t abandon it.
Not that there’s much left to abandon. What once was a big house—a mansion in these backdam parts—now looks no better than a toolshed in the schoolyard. A toolshed is better; a toolshed has purpose, knows that it is useful. Madam’s house is so dark, so feeble, so shrunken in. The floorboards are slippery, unwalkable because they refuse to take polish. All but one of the staircases have lost their spine and collapsed.
If Madam’s remaining servant were a man, the bandit might have walked past her house; but because two women—nay, a woman and a child not far past her first cycle—live here, he’ll take off his shoes and walk across the mud floor like it’s Easter and he’s flying kite on the beach. Because Madam’s husband is dead, we’re vulnerable. Madam cannot see that if she was born one of those rare, wilful women she looks at with scorn—a woman born under a full moon or a woman whose father beat courage into her—things might be different. We might stand a chance.
Madam is a tormented woman. A step that creaks in an unfamiliar way convinces her that someone wants her dead. Everyone wants her dead. This bandit may be no bandit at all, but an assassin paid to hunt down her bloodline and erase all traces of her. First, he’ll kill Madam, kill her neighbours, then kill whatever family remains unbeknownst to her in the far reaches of the jungles, across the ocean, on the other side of the universe. She has doomed everyone she’s spoken to and touched. Everyone she has looked at. He has means of finding them. Nothing is beyond people nowadays.
Or he may be something else. Perhaps someone has discovered Madam’s right name—Madam means to say, I have blabbed her Hindu name to someone—and cursed her using black magic. Then this bandit is worse yet; he’s a spiritual being and nothing in this world that can stop him.
He's not one of us villagers, of that she’s certain. Madam knows the tramping of everyone in the village. The schoolmaster walks with a hesitant, light step as if he himself doesn’t believe the nonsense he spouts to his pupils and makes them scribe away at. The men of trade, our butchers, our tamarind ball sellers, our farmers—all are too masculine, too heavy-footed.
She was once the talk of these men when they gathered after work to play domino and drink rum. Back in the day she was a seamstress. The men talked about her back in a distinct slouch and her neck tucked in between the shoulder blades as though seeking warmth. She was sweet. Then she married and discovered the taste of a little money.
Now all they see of us—of me—is when I go to shop for Madam at the marketplace. There is no reprieve in shopping. Cake and custard have no place in our world. Say one forgets oneself and hovers too long over the frying pot of gulab jamun, or smiles at a handsome boy—What stupidness is this, eh? It won’t be long before I forget to laugh, too.
Madam knows them all. But she may be wrong, and the man downstairs might be the schoolmaster, the tamarind ball seller; he might be the pandit who walks miles to bless babies and perform pujas at the houses that dot the very border of the village, houses that touch the darkness of the interior itself. There’s never any recognizing these men. They know to wear dark clothes and a shawl, to daub their eyes and cheekbones with kohl. They’re smart enough to never leave their house without flinging on a scarf or hat. Best believe our bandit has all the scarves and hats a man could ever want in his life, each one a different color.
A pint-er broom is really no match for him. A pint-er broom is all we have, and not even a new one. Madam’s is made from ugly and rain-battered branches. Still, there’s no point in us staying locked up in the bedroom like sows in a corral. If he can enter the kitchen, he can enter the bedroom. He could be one of a group of three, or five, or thirty. The rest might be on their way, and he is just the lookout, the surveyor, the scout. Imagine the king!
The surveyor scouts the house and if there is anything worth stealing, he sends his gang a signal. They’ve agreed on a dish rag. He will pull a white rag out of his rucksack and tie it to the guava tree in the front yard; they’ll see the rag fluttering in the black night and know to pounce. We don’t have much worth stealing. On the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard are the jhandi dishes, the vegetarian karahis, and murtis. The kitchen is no place for religious items, but Madam insists. Everything else was stolen by those who left or is too tarnished to be worth stealing. He—they—are too smart, so they know we have nothing. He will tie the white rag, regardless, and his twenty-nine brothers will be upon us.
Hate draws them. Hate for Madam and her rebellion—husband and house fallen, she rebels by carrying on. A woman should know when to submit.
If one of us should go down there—the thought is painful because it is no thought at all, in mere seconds the thought will break the barrier between future and present and become our reality; say, instead, when one of us goes down there (and this not up for debate—I will be the one to go down)—the going down will be the end of us.
Of me.
The stairs will shake, so there will be an urge to fling oneself off them and get the ordeal over with. But the body never listens to the brain; there will be one way of going down, and that’ll be to flatten against the wall the stairs jut out of and tiptoe down like a nervous ballerina.
And then he’ll notice—even if he were blind he would notice—what I am. He sees a servant but then I transform into a girl, then into a woman, until finally I become what Madam has always told me I am: a gauze curtain not worth pushing out of his face. He notices because there is moonlight streaming in through the open window, which is slanted so the light will blind me when my big toe touches the last step. Even if I had put on socks so the balls of my feet don’t slap the stairs when my toes inevitably fail to keep my body upright, he would notice.
What else crosses a man’s head when he finds himself alone with a woman in a kitchen where moonlight is streaming in?
I’ve forgotten to brandish the broom the way Madam taught me to. What I need is a cutlass, but I can’t remember where Madam keeps hers. I can be sure he has a cutlass and, any moment now, he will draw it from his rucksack.
Tonight, there is big sporting happening on Dundee Dam—not to celebrate anything in particular, but for people to change into gouting clothes, gaff and drink rum until their belly bursts—and no one there could possibly hear you scream, or care. Madam lives far from the road, far inside the trees. No sound you make will reach outside. And even if the neighbours, our only neighbours, aren’t out, then surely the husband is at home watching cricket, snoring louder than the umpire’s calls which fail to rouse him because he’s hard of hearing; and the wife has retired early to bed because she must perfume herself tomorrow to play secretary in Georgetown.
But they are out, they must be. They are slumped over one another on the dam bridge, too drunk to distinguish between screaming and owl squawking. If they happened to be at this moment crossing in front of the house, they wouldn’t shout for help. They would draw their cloak tighter around themselves and thank God they are likable.
So, you see, there really is nothing near us; nothing except the dam, which is far, so very far away.
Girl, will you scream with a cutlass pricking the gooseflesh on your throat?
Comments