Word Count: 4734 | Reading Time: 16 min
The women of my family are born with rivers in their stomachs.
Every day, when we walk in single file to the Café for the Dead, the passersby can hear the water gurgling over the pebbles we have swallowed. We follow Amma and she opens the door, standing to the side so that each of us can enter and take our place at the table near the window. We nod at the people who work in this café—the gardener who keeps the worlds growing after we have created them; the postman who brings letters from loved ones and slips them into the slot underneath the table so that they will reach the dead; the woman who sweeps stray leaves from the café floor.
Today, I see their eyes turn to us as we walk by. Large tables take up most of the space in the room. There is almost no paint left on the walls—just a cement covering over bricks, a single flickering tubelight as our source of light. The quiet in the café feels heavy and I know that the creases in their foreheads are a sign of sympathy. I have felt their gaze often in the five days since Appa’s death.
I try to concentrate on the table, searching for something solid. The wood is brown and sturdy. The floor beneath my feet is smooth marble. I cannot concentrate. Now that we have come to build his grave, my blood passes grief across my body like a game of passing the parcel. Amma holds a wooden box that Teresa, my youngest sister, painted when she was five years old. It contains our father’s ashes.
I place my hand on my belly, listening to the currents within me. Teresa, eight years old and working the first year at the café, presses her forehead against the window. When she turns back to me, little tributaries of the river are flowing down her face. I pick up a napkin of moss from the table and dab her cheeks, green streaks marking the passage of tears. My older sister, Zareena, is bringing over a tray with five clay cups of tandoori chai. She catches my eye and attempts a smile. Smiles have been rather difficult during this long year that Appa had been sick; today they are even more so.
Amma moves towards us. She, too, is pressing her fingers against her stomach, a whisper of her river. She takes her seat beside Zareena, facing me and Teresa, while my sister Lupisa, at twelve years of age, sits at the head of the table. I am fifteen, and fifteen, like twelve and eight, is too young to lose a father. I imagine there is no age which is not too young.
Amma fiddles with her wedding ring: old steel, nothing fancy. Nothing to say she once lived in one of the richest neighborhoods in our town. Zareena places the chai before us and we sip, the creamy texture, the taste of cardamom slipping down our throats to mingle with our rivers.
“Amma.” Zareena starts a sentence, then stops. She holds out her hand as she takes a long drink of chai, cup half-empty in one moment. That’s the thing about being positive. It’s easy to say cup half-full if it is empty and someone poured tea into it, but it’s another thing when the cup is full and someone takes half the chai away.
Teresa presses her lips to the cup, her face still stained green from the moss, a dent in one cheek formed by the trickle of water. The chai churns within my stomachs; I can feel my river turning brown and muddy.
When we are done with our teas, our hands reach for one another’s as we form a circle around the table. We look into the clay cups, futures laid out in front even as the past holds us back. Amma nods, we all take a deep breath.
Holding tight to one another’s hands, we bend over the table and vomit.
#
Appa, can you hear us? Are you with us? Appa, how do we do this?
Appa, we are making your grave.
#
The rivers pour from our mouths, frothing and bubbling, water falling and making its way across the table. Muddy threads of chai mingle through the translucent water. The edges of the table rise to hold the rivers as we belch in unison, pebbles starting to drop from our lips. The small stones fall, splashing water on our faces. Still, we continue. The rivers’ part around the stones, water rising against the sides of the table. The brown chai forms a sediment. Liquid turning into fine sand, darker than the normal beach sand. Through my own tears, I see that it is the same shade as Amma’s skin. Appa would like that.
Soon, the water has left, mud and pebbles lining our lips. Amma wipes her face with a moss handkerchief. She is so empty, she cannot even cry anymore.
We stand around the table as we form the world that will serve as our father’s grave. We have made graves before. Each person who dies is given a world that reflects them. We weave in memories from the people who love them so that even in death, as they stay in this grave, they know they are never alone.
But this is Appa. I don’t want to build a grave for him.
We let go of one another’s hands and get to work, our jobs the same as they are with any other grave. As the youngest, Teresa is in charge of the garden whereas Zareena works on the house. Lupisa fashions the bends in the river, shaping it so that the beauty means something— the rivers we make for our father will one day reach the rivers someone makes for us. My job is to be the custodian of stories, the one who holds onto the memories. I make the main room, the largest in Zareena’s house. Amma’s job is the last to begin.
When my fingers move, shapes appear. I build bricks by cutting my fingernails and placing them one on top of the other, gluing them with drops of chai. I place memories in the room, pulling some strands of hair from each woman in our family and using it to make objects. As I build the grave, Zareena speaks of the fairy lamp Appa found in the garbage. I use her hair to build a miniature replica. Lupisa remembers Appa’s music and the song of flying carpets. So, I use her hair to weave a small rug. Teresa murmurs words from past conversations at the dining table and I knot her strand over itself, again and again, until it forms a table. Amma does not say anything. But from her locks, pictures of our family take shape in my hand. Plucking my own curls, I build a tiny shelf for books.
By the time I am done, my sisters have already finished their parts but Amma is just beginning her work on the tree. I look around at them all.
“Zareena,” I call my older sister. She looks at me but I don’t know what I want to say. Perhaps it was important. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Her face crumples but she doesn’t cry. I wonder what she sees in my face.
“He’s still with us,” Zareena says. She doesn’t sound like she believes it.
Lupisa and Teresa observe our exchange and Teresa curls into Lupisa’s arms. They sing softly to each other.
Amma does not look at us, she still must do her part. She presses her index finger against the sides of the table and the blunt edges turn sharp. She takes our father’s ashes with a wooden spoon, mixes it with the blood from her cut finger. Holding the ashes over the world we have created on the table, she then lets them fall.
It rains ash and blood, watering this world we have made and helping it take care of our father’s spirit. We watch as the tree bursts from the table, the wood spiraling almost as if in flight. A rush of a sound, the tree spreading itself over across the rivers, its branches winding around the house. It grows until it reaches Amma’s chin and she rests her head against the leaves.
“I love you,” she tells the banyan tree that now holds Appa’s spirit.
We move to hold her tight. The leaves shiver in no wind, seeming to shimmer like they are glass catching light. Shock passes through the trunk and the hanging roots. The tree starts to sink back into the table, taking the rest of the grave with it. Its branches flatten over the house, cover the rivers. It is closing into itself, pushing downwards into the surface until nothing remains. Just a table and no tree. A table and no world. A table and no grave. A table and no Appa.
#
Appa, I look at the sky and speak your name over and over again. Why am I doing this?
#
I was five years old when I realized that money was difficult for Appa and Amma. Until then, our poverty had seemed natural, the poverty of everyone who lived near us. Though I saw the mansions that had been built near the café for the dead, they seemed to me a different world, one that was not accessible. Not a world I thought of except in dreams. Appa was a cleaner, Amma a grave-builder, and while I know now that there a shame people expect us to feel for these jobs, I was proud of my parents then. Shame was not a lesson I had learned yet.
Things changed the day Appa first took me to work. My sisters were either too young or too old to be excited about our parents’ jobs. I sat on the backseat of his old bicycle, my small hands clutching the seat excitedly, with no fear of falling. When we reached the mansions by the café, we shifted to the big green cart pulled by another bicycle.
Despite the magic that runs through the people who live here, our world looks like many other worlds. Roads of cement lined by small trees, cafés on winding streets. People wondering what the next day will be like. Birthdays celebrated in buildings with red signs and cakes made of chocolate. And like all other worlds, we also have garbage.
We emptied the dustbins into the cart, picking old plastic, chip packets and dirty paper from the road with our hands.
Appa bent to retrieve an orange peel. “Amma used to live in that house,” he said.
I turned to look at the stone bungalow he was pointing towards, its solid walls and sprawling garden spread across the land with a certainty I didn’t know buildings could possess. As if the bungalow knew it was worth more than anything, anyone else. Palm trees lined the driveway and at the front, a small fountain spouted water, stone holding up stone with a sureness I had never experienced.
“You’re telling stories,” I told Appa.
He sighed as he picked up a crumpled newspaper, putting it into his giant garbage bag. “Your mother made big sacrifices for me,” he said. “I don’t know if I deserved them. She was supposed to be a tide-twister, using the rivers in her stomach to keep the water in our world flowing. She was not supposed to work with the dead.”
I remember trying to puzzle this out. If it wasn’t for him, we could have lived in this beautiful house. Did Zareena know? Had my oldest sister forgiven my father for what he had done to us? I could have been a tide-twister instead of a grave-builder.
Appa must have seen something in my expression. I will never forget the way his face creaked into sadness. I hugged his leg, desperate to keep him happy but the damage had been done.
As he peddled the green cart down the street, Appa told me a story:.
– Once in a land of plenty, a monkey who had everything wished to make a flying bicycle. He built it from leaves and twigs, filled the wheels with water and made a bell out of stone. But no matter what he did, he could not make the bicycle fly. Then one day, the monkey who had everything met a monkey who had nothing. The second monkey had built a water bicycle, one that would float and move through the rivers like a boat and though she had nothing, she taught the monkey who had everything how to make the bicycle fly. And so, they flew and floated, until a third monkey, jealous of their happiness, stole both bicycles and all the leaves they needed to make new ones.
– Then what happened?
– Then nothing new happened.
My father moved to the packets of chips people had thrown into the bushes, the frailness of his body evident to me. I moved out of the way and watched as he touched dirty chocolate wrappers. I could have helped. I should have. I didn’t.
#
When we return home after building the grave, my friend, Rhea, a cleaner at the mansions, is waiting for us. She looks younger than me even though she is a year older. It has always been like that. She has always known how to go through life better than I have.
Rhea has made sambar rice for dinner so that we don’t have to cook. I move towards her and she envelopes me in a hug. Amma watches us, the crow’s feet next to her eyes more strained and crinkled. Zareena puts her arm around our mother, kisses her forehead.
“Do you want me to stay?” Rhea asks.
I shake my head.
She nods.
“Amma must sleep,” I whisper, though I’m not sure why I’m saying it. “She hasn’t been sleeping.”
Pain shutters through Rhea’s face, as if she feels hurt watching the hurt in me. I hold her again. Am I comforting her?
“Thank you,” I say.
I follow my family into the house, and we sit down to eat the brownish yellow sambar. Tomorrow, we will have to go back to work, and it feels cruel. Why should we work when our father is dead? How can we?
Zareena tries to make conversation but the quiet of death has spread over the household. She makes a joke, and for a moment, we laugh. We forget. Our father is dead, but we are laughing at something. A betrayal. Teresa must have been thinking the same thing because, in the suddenness of grief, she starts to cry. Lupisa follows.
Amma and Zareena leave their chairs and rush to my sisters.
Teresa starts to scream. “I won’t move on. I won’t move on.”
Amma presses her lips to my sisters and tells us that people cannot move on after death. After all, what do you move on from? Perhaps, you continue, to walk, eat, make chai, to be. But you don’t move on. It’s impossible to walk without the dead being a part of every footstep. Death does not take them away.
I look at my family huddled together. I chew sambar rice wordlessly.
#
Appa, I talk to you in my head but you’re not replying. Appa, reply. Please reply. Please.
#
The next day, we are building a world for a baby. His mother had a miscarriage and refused to look at us when she gave us the small blue-gold pot of blood.
She whispered little songs to her dead baby. “I am with you. I am with you.”
Her fingers let go and we brought the pot to the café for the dead.
We are creating rivers on the new table that has risen from the ground. Around us, the other workers have stopped with their sympathetic looks. I hate that we have to be here, that our first job after building a grave for Appa is for this baby. Neither life nor death are fair.
The drool left by the river sticks to my chin as we work on the baby’s world in silence. I fold pieces of his mother’s dress and use it to create the sky, moonlight shimmering over a sky made of a blue kurta. It is one of the few stories the mother has for this child and I spend a long while beading her earrings to create stars.
Amma starts to speak to the baby. “You are loved,” she says. “You are never alone,” she says.
She is speaking to the baby. She is speaking to its grave. We all know she is also searching for our father. She is staring at the coconut tree she is building, as if the dead child is all that matters in this world.
We continue our work. When we are done, the postman nods at us before pushing a letter covered with stickers into the slot below the table. A message from the mother.
#
We work on other graves, each of them different even as our roles remain the same. The main room for me, the garden for Teresa, the house for Zareena, and the rivers for Lupisa, while Amma builds the trees. When Amma sings the song for the dead, I think of Appa.
Grief is a heavy thing. It weighs on you but there are moments when the thing slips. Moments when you smile or laugh and then feel guilty for smiling or laughing. You feel it in your bones, the brittle breaking of your being. It is all you can think about though there are also moments when you forget, moments when Appa can’t possibly be dead. Is that grief? I only know that within a minute of waking, a weight presses down on my shoulders.
Being a grave-builder means I am terrified of death. It is different for my sisters. For Zareena, it means she understands it more, that she can face it in some form because she knows people remain in us and in the world we create for them. As Teresa and Lupisa, it is still uncertain what they think. But for Amma and I, it is the thing we fear all the time. Not our own death but of the ones we love. Because we know that after someone dies, they don’t reply. There are days when an emptiness can fill you. Sometimes, I wonder if I am grieving wrong. Do I feel too much? Do I not feel enough?
#
Never a dominating figure, Appa walked with a slowness that could irritate the easily irritable, but he also spoke with a gentleness that could calm them. When he told me stories at night, he would tuck the blankets right below my chin as he sat on the suitcase we used as a chair. Appa was old, even then. They both were. Zareena had already joined Amma in making worlds for the dead.
I was seven years old, younger than Teresa, the first time we talked about my fear of death. It was Appa’s turn to put me to bed and I told him that every night I wished on the stars that I would die before him and Amma. His face had turned sad and I worried that I had disappointed him.
“Molu, why do you wish for that?”
“I can’t live without you, Appa. I worry I will lose you.”
It was raining that night and we had placed buckets and bowls around the house to catch the leaks.
Appa watched the water hit the bowl and sighed. “Do you know the story of the woman who made the Café for the Dead?” he asked me.
I nodded and he smiled.
“Let me tell it to you anyway,” he said:
– There was once a woman who swallowed a river. She was different from you, not someone naturally born with a river. But like you she had always wanted to hold a world within her. At dusk, when the moon and the sun were in agreement, the stars held a ladle to her mouth and she tipped her head back and swallowed. A tree began to grow in her, stars dotting the branches like apples. Then the roots broke into her legs, turning her feet tender and scarred. One day, when she was walking through the town, moss growing on her feet, she saw an old shack, one of those small ones with the best filter coffee. Except that there was no waiter, simply steel tumblers of coffee that she picked up and swallowed down. And then, for the first time in our world, a woman vomited a river.
The river flooded that shack, pushing at its walls. Her body started to split, as the tree within her turned into chairs and tables. It was the beginning of the café.
– But Appa, Amma told me the woman who built the café died. She died without anyone to mourn her. She died.
– The woman died, yes, but she also remained. Her spirit holds the café together. She is in you every time you vomit out a river. Mourning is not what keeps people alive. Dying does not kill. The café is her legacy, you are her legacy. Her spirit is within you.
– I don’t know, Appa. I don’t know.
Rain had filled the bowl by then and Appa stood up to replace it with another one. He kissed me on the forehead and waited by the bed till I fell asleep.
#
It is late at night when Amma gets the call about the death of the Very Important Person. Amma tries to tell her boss that we are tired, that the rivers in our bodies have not replenished, but her boss tells her this is the Very Important Person. We get up from the bed, our limbs tired, our bones cracking as we walk.
We move down the street and I find myself thinking of Appa’s stories. Teresa presses her lips to my palm to tell me to slow down, as Zareena and Lupisa help Amma drag the giant gold vase with the remains of the Very Important Person. Teresa is throwing a tantrum behind us. Screaming loudly that she doesn’t want to do this. We don’t want to snap at her so we ignore her.
The café is locked but Amma has the key and when she puts on the light. A single table rises from the floor. Eyes half-closed, sleep sticking our lashes together, we hold hands and vomit.
#
The next morning, we are on a holiday. The whole world is on a holiday. It is, after all, the day The Very Important Person died. Nobody else is allowed to die today. Teresa and Lupisa go to watch a movie, they have been saving coins for months now. Zareena takes Amma out to the gardens. The roses are coming into bloom. Some are so red, they are nearly black.
I look at Appa’s old bicycle, standing outside our wreck of a house, calling for someone to use it. I wheel it onto the road and swing my legs over the seat. I move my feet until the wind hits my face. It feels like I am flying.
I close my eyes and cycle, allowing the wheels to take me where they will. When I stop, open my eyes, I find myself at another café. One for the living. I have a coin in my pocket though I don’t remember bringing one. I tell myself I do not have money to waste. Then I tell myself taking care of yourself once in a while is not a waste.
I put the coin on the counter and ask for a cup of green tea.
“Not too hot,” I say.
I look around. This café is different, bustling with the life of people who do not work for the dead. There is a shelf of old books in the corner by the window. Sofas and chairs to lounge in. There are small side tables but no big ones.
The waitress nods—why is she not on a holiday today, I wonder—and tells me that I can read any of the books I want. They’ve started a new system where I can even borrow one for free. She has kind eyes, this waitress, and I vaguely remember Appa telling me about a dog who created a world of love by merely existing.
I smile at her as she passes me the lukewarm tea.
“How’s the day going?” she asks.
She is so friendly. How do I talk to her?
I force another smile. “It’s… it’s going.”
“Tough times, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess. Tough times.”
I stand there with the tea. She moves to help the next customer and I force my body to move. I don’t regularly visit these cafés that are frequented by living people, but I assume it is not right to stand at the counter without moving.
I pick up a book of fairy tales from the shelves, even though, of course, I am too old for fairy tales. I slip my feet out of my sandals, curl up on the sofa. We don’t have a sofa at home. I read and read and read, minutes becoming hours. Once in a while, I look up to see my fellow customers around me.
On the sofa beside me, a little girl sits on her father’s lap as he tries to come up with a story for her. She jumps up and down, excited, as he slowly begins to speak. The girl jumps again and almost falls on me. Her father apologizes. I smile. Appa. Grief.
Something like anger rushes through me as I try to return to the book. I hate it. I hate what has happened. I stare at the book but the words blur on the page and instead, I hear other words.
Appa’s voice and the last story he told me:
– There was once a man who had five daughters with songs in their lungs. On Sundays, they bought biriyani wrapped in banana leaves and newspaper from small shops that would one day be big shops. They climbed the hills with weeds growing out of the cracks. They told stories in a language only they could understand. But then the man died, and his daughters wept. They cried, and cried, and then they screamed, but the scream became a melody, a song and it was in his voice. Their voices would go on forever, their songs would create worlds. And in the music, he would live.
The father and daughter leave the café and the waitress announces that they are closing in five minutes, an apologetic tilt to her head.
I close my book and rise to my feet. I can hear the beginning of a river within my stomach, the familiar feel of water pooling inside me, a movement of sound and softness. Slipping the book into my bag, I try to walk but my steps are slightly unsteady. The waitress moves to help me but I shake my head. I should go home, and cook something for my family. A surprise. A remembrance.
I stand outside as the lights are turned off, as I hear the waitress lock the door and get on her bike. I stand as the street lamps turn on and it starts to rain, water pressed against my nose, caught in my eyelashes, sliding down the hair on my arms.
There is a river outside me. There is a river within me. I think of Appa and the world we have made for him, and though it is raining, warmth licks my toes.
A fairy tale lamp. A flying bicycle. A sick man. Water dripping into bowls. Let me tell you a story, molu.
I unlock my bicycle and ride home in the rain.