Word Count: 7416 | Reading Time: 25 min
The summer after her marriage, Ankita returns with her father to the city where she was born, her mother’s ashes tucked under her arm in a thermos-like silver jar. Calcutta had turned into Kolkata in Ankita’s absence, with fresh blue-and-white paint along sidewalks and fences. In the years since she had last visited, the open pastures around the airport had grown shoots of half-built high-rises, maze-like around the highway. It’s now almost monsoon season. Recent rainfall marks the streets at every dip—glassy pools lit by the string lights that cling wild to every tree and pole.
“It’s clean,” Ankita says to her father as the taxi stops at a red light. The road looks desolate without bright spots of plastic and shards of terra-cotta. The driver, hearing English, waits for a green despite the lack of traffic.
“So it is,” her father says in Bengali, a switch flipped easily. “Mamata’s work.”
The driver snorts. “Next time you come, it’ll be dirty again. Not a single light will turn on.”
Ankita would prefer to see more waste, more remnants of the city populating Kolkata in the hours when it is sparse of people. That would make her homecoming feel more like home. She’s already unsettled to be in the wide leather seat of this taxi without her mother’s hot arm pressed against hers. The emptiness out there makes the emptiness inside the car yawn wider. The years with no memories here feel like a place she can sink into and disappear, the way her mother had.
A woman emerges from an alley, a red spot against the shuttered stores. The back of her neck looks familiar, the same curve Ankita traced on her mother’s spine in her earliest memories. Ankita feels like this woman was summoned from a very specific longing that has been teasing Ankita in the months since her mother’s death, always just out of her reach. She presses her hand against the window. The woman stops and raises her head like a cat, as though she feels the light touch of Ankita’s fingertips and palm. The woman begins to turn around, but the car lurches into motion, and Ankita never sees her face. She recedes as the car picks up speed, pushed from sight just as Ankita pushes the ever-threatening lump down her throat with a hard swallow.
Ankita’s father has only one sibling—his sister, Sujata. She’s dozing in an armchair when they arrive, her stomach held like a beach ball in her lap. Ankita kneels to touch her aunt’s feet, and she wakes with a start, holds her niece’s face, and says, “At last, you’ve come,” as though she has been waiting a decade in that chair. It’s been so long since Ankita last saw her face without pixels, she’s shocked at how smooth and clean her aunt’s skin looks despite its new creases. “You must be tired,” Sujata says, and Ankita nods, suddenly heavy, and lays her head on that long-forgotten lap.
“I could have come,” Ankita’s husband, David, says over video chat the next morning. It’s a strange twilit hour between the animal sounds of night and the human racket of day.
“It’s too hot here,” Ankita says, smiling and brushing stray hairs from her face. “Just look at my hair. You would die.”
“It’s fine.” David looks tired even on video. “I wanted to come.”
Ankita knew this all along but pretended not to when her father proposed the trip. She booked her single ticket without offering to take David along. “We’ll come another time,” she assures him. “On a better occasion, at a cooler time of year.”
Truthfully, she can’t imagine being here with anyone but her parents, sharing a wide bed in a relative’s apartment. David is tall and light-haired, terrible at pronouncing even the simplest Bengali words. She would have no idea what to do with him. She’s thankful the call ends quickly so he can get ready for bed. She doesn’t want to stare any longer at the why he asks with his eyes, even when he can’t say it out loud.
Jet lag makes daytime a yellowed dream. Ankita can only be awake for hours at a time, unsure whether she’s in Sujata’s small fourth-floor apartment or the buttercream-pastel rooms of her grandmother’s old house. Pink, yellow, mint green. In Ankita’s dreams, her mother’s demanding voice rouses her from bed, just like in the Saturdays of her childhood. “Laziness runs in your father’s family,” Ankita’s mother declares as she tugs away sheets and blankets. “I don’t want to see you lying around all morning like your aunt.” Life is stagnant at Sujata’s apartment. She’s a widow who sits in the same chair for most of the day while Aparna, the woman who does her chores, fans herself in front of the television between tasks. “Can we go to Amma’s house?” Ankita asks between sips of tea on the second morning. She had always stayed at her grandmother’s house when she was in Kolkata, but nobody has lived there since her grandmother’s death.
“Why?” her aunt asks, wrinkling her nose. “That place is falling apart.”
“I just want to see it.”
Sujata shakes her head. “There’s nothing there but ghosts.” “Ghosts are just memories,” Ankita insists.
“No, they’re not,” Sujata says with such finality, Ankita is afraid to ask again.
Aparna turns off the fan to sweep, and Ankita dips into another doze. When the humid air grows still, it’s impossible not to. Her grandmother’s house tugs at her. She doesn’t know if it’s nostalgia or a way of missing her mother and even her grandmother. Ankita longs for familiar skin, the sheen of sweat behind their ears, hair glistening with sweet hibiscus oil. The heat-and-lotion smell she’s grasped for all her life.
When was the last time Ankita held her mother? At her and David’s wedding, maybe. It wasn’t something she thought to do often as an adult, and now she wonders why. Her mother’s body doesn’t yet feel like something out of Ankita’s reach. So far, her passing has felt like a long separation. It happened on a rare day in March that parted the clouds. Ankita’s mother was in the sunlit kitchen while Ankita’s father worked in the garden. Her mother’s life was sliced quick as ripe fruit under a sharp knife: heart attack, DOA. She had already stopped breathing when Ankita’s father found her. She died alone on the new tiles she picked at The Home Depot just before her daughter’s wedding. If Ankita went into that kitchen now, she might expect her mother to still be there, dropping fritters into hot oil.
But now, Ankita is alone in Kolkata, a place she has never been without her mother. The house they always slept in sits abandoned in a different part of the city. The cousins who had once dropped by daily to keep her company currently work tech jobs in bigger cities with families of their own. Her grandparents’ generation has mostly passed away. Without them, this city is a stranger to her. She is beginning to realize that she’s never set foot in it alone, and more than that, she’s afraid to. Early each morning, her father leaves with the rental car to explain his wife’s death to what’s left of their extended family. He never offers to take her along, and she doesn’t feel like she can leave the apartment without him. What once felt like the warmest, fullest place she knew now gapes vast and hostile beyond barred windows.
Ankita wakes to clattering bangles. She expects to feel her mother’s wrist on her cheek, smooth fingers against Ankita’s ear. Instead she finds Aparna crouched at her feet, bangles shuddering as she drags the broom under Ankita’s chair.
“I want marriage bangles,” Ankita tells her aunt, who is leaning sideways, scrutinizing Aparna’s work under the furniture.
Sujata straightens and says, “About time.”
Sujata refuses to take Ankita out by auto or rickshaw, not when she’s so unaccustomed to heat and pollution. They lie in front of the AC for hours, waiting for Ankita’s father to return with the car. The city languishes in the long, bright day. Ankita wakes from another nap as her father spreads himself, freshly showered, on the bed beside her and says, “This is good. The sun won’t be as hot by the time you leave,” as if it mattered in the air-conditioned car.
Sujata is already up and telling him about their outing. Ankita drags herself slowly from the deathlike sleep of a foreign time zone. She tiptoes into the kitchen for a slice of bread—a small independence after days of Aparna beating her to every task. The day wanes across the combined living-dining room. On one wall, the doors to the balcony are flung wide open to let in whatever breeze the day can muster. Dusk has peached everything.
A sliver of Aparna’s back peeks out between swaths of fabric hanging to dry. Her bangles chatter as she pins up more clothes, her red sari glowing behind Sujata’s widow-white ones. Ankita thinks of the first time she got her period in India. She had been so humiliated because there were no laundry hampers or washing machines to throw her stained underwear into. She couldn’t bear to hand them over to Aparna, who was a boisterous teenager back then, catching every opportunity to tease her. Ankita’s mother showed her how to soak her soiled clothes in a bucket full of soapy water in the bathroom. As Ankita watches, hugging her knees to become as small as possible in shame, her mother takes her underwear up in an unas corner of her grandmother’s patio, next to the withering fig tree Ankita was always warned to steer clear of. Aparna’s arching body takes the same shapes her mother’s did then, fingernails catching the last bit of light as she releases each bright plastic clip on the line.
Ankita has a strange urge to do chores even though she loved lethargic summers in India as a child. She ate well and never had to clear the table, dozed in the afternoon, spent hours watching Hindi soaps she only half understood. Her mother was never content with this lifestyle. She flitted around the household help, picked fights with Sujata, shooed Ankita into the streets to play with her cousin who was much older and didn’t know what to do with her. Ankita spent quiet evenings riding with her cousin on his bicycle around the alleyways of Dhakuria, sitting on the bike frame as he pedaled around potholes. He bought her ice cream and made her promise not to tell anyone when he bought loosies from the little shop on the corner. They shared content silences, Ankita eating ice cream on the curb while her cousin smoked by the ribbons of chip bags that framed the shop front.
After her mother’s funeral, Ankita rotted on the couch like the trays of food left untouched for days in her parents’ house. Even David let her sulk for weeks while he did all the chores around her. But now Ankita feels her mother’s restlessness bestowed upon her from the grave. The walls induce a kind of panic. Ankita sees how a room can be oppressive, how idleness can be hypnotic.
While Sujata applies makeup at her vanity, Ankita asks tentatively , “Should I make tea? Since Aparna is busy with the laundry?”
“Aparna left,” Sujata says, gaze focused on her own reflection. “It’s a long way home, and her husband beats her senseless if she’s not there by sundown.”
“She’s on the balcony.”
“Still?” Sujata turns around, one eye lined, both concerned. She crosses the room to look out the window. “No, she’s gone.”
Ankita joins her, peering out the iron grate at the perpendicular wall. The balcony is vacant, the line of saris puffed with evening air. “Someone was there.”
“She must have just left.”
But Ankita hadn’t heard the gate outside the threshold rattle, or the heavy front door slam shut. Sujata returns to her vanity, but Ankita lingers. Ghosts are just memories, she tells herself again, even as she searches for a flicker of red between the damp cloth.
“You’ve grown quiet,” Sujata says while she and Ankita sit in traffic. “You remind me of your mother when she first came to live with us.” They had all lived in that house when Ankita’s grandmother was alive—Ankita’s grandmother and her older sister, both widows; Sujata, her husband, and her son; Ankita’s parents and eventually baby Ankita for the first few years of her life.
Ankita laughs. “Ma was never quiet.” Her mother had been a preschool teacher and always talked like she was addressing a room full of rowdy children. Ankita wants to accuse her aunt of sarcasm, but doesn’t know the right words in Bengali.
“She was when she was a new bride. My mother and aunt were hard on her. And she was far from home. She came to us from Lucknow, you know.”
Ankita does know. She and her father were born here in Kolkata, but her mother came only after marriage. “Lucknow isn’t far,” Ankita says.
“Not compared to America. But it was to her back then.”
They reach the market and leave the driver to park somewhere while they shop. Summer has the city slowly decomposing, thick with body odors and overripe fruit. Vendors press close to their sluggish fans and flap their saris in a futile attempt to stir the dense air. Shoppers pass between them in clumps of umbrellas and sweat- stained cotton. Some gather around cold drinks and ice cream stands for respite. Sujata navigates the cracked sidewalk with practiced finesse. The gold and jewelry stores stand in a glossy strip at one end of the street, glass walls promising cool air. Inside, Ankita stays mute, not wanting to reveal her foreign pockets.
The shop clerk tries several times to bring Ankita into the conversation, but she refuses. Sujata picks the simplest jewelry per Ankita’s earlier request. While her aunt haggles, Ankita, unneeded, wanders to the window.
Ankita’s mother had kept her coral and conch bangles in a velvet box in her dresser. They were too fragile to wear every day, she told Ankita, who would sometimes secretly take them out while her mother was showering. Ankita would suck the candy-like rings and graze them with her teeth. But Ankita remembers her mother’s gold bangle best, thick and shining on her wrist. She never took it off or let Ankita play with it the way she played with her mother’s other jewelry. It was the most precious, she insisted. Taking it off was bad luck. The one night she left it at home, she and Ankita’s father hit some railroad tracks on his motorbike. He almost lost a finger, and she almost lost Ankita in the womb.
She hasn’t touched any of her mother’s things since her death. Ankita has barely even set foot in her parents’ bedroom. That box must still be there, still fragile, still shut away in the dark.
A woman stops in front of the window and leans against it, fanning herself with the cloth draped over her head. Ankita imagines that she’s her mother, waiting just outside for them to come out and show her the new jewelry. Ankita trails her fingertip along the warm glass, following the line of the woman’s spine. The woman turns her head just slightly and raises her arm as if to point. Ankita follows it with her gaze.
The woman’s arm stretches out of her sari’s hem and across the sidewalk, twisting around slow pedestrians. Ankita blinks, shakes her head, but nothing changes, and no one else takes notice. A man stands next to an ice-cream stand, smoking a cigarette. The woman’s hand reaches past him and slides into the ice-cream cart while the vendor hands a Kwality cup to a little girl. She takes out an ice pop and traces its yellow wrapper on the man’s neck, shoulders, behind his ear. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and shuts his eyes.
“Ankita.” Sujata at the counter, paper box in hand. “Let’s go.”
They walk out together, Ankita clutching her aunt’s sari like she’s a child. She searches for the woman, but she’s gone. The man continues to smoke alone, eyes closed.
–
Once home, Sujata pulls out old photos. They smell like the sandalwood from the box that kept them. While she sorts through, Ankita asks her father, “What was Ma like when she got married?”
“Depressed,” he says in English, because Bengali isn’t so clinical with sadness. “She didn’t sleep at night for a long time, barely spoke during the day.” He sighs. “The arrangement was very hasty. I wasn’t her first choice, you know. Our fathers were old friends, but we’d only met a few times during the holidays. She liked some librarian who lived in her flat. I saw him once when I visited—handsome, a bit shy, but you could tell just by looking that he wasn’t right for her— socially, I mean. Family in a different place. Anyway, her father found a Cadbury bar and some pressed flowers in one of her library books, and it all went quickly from there. Engagement, marriage. Suddenly she was in Kolkata with a man she hardly knew.”
Ankita didn’t know that marriages still happened like that. She always knew her parents were arranged, but that was true for almost anyone in their generation. She assumed theirs was like her cousins’, with meetings and dates, chances for the two of them to get to know each other before they decided. She wonders what her mother’s parents were like. Her mother was a rare only child, and Ankita’s maternal grandparents had died while Ankita was still young. There were very few photos of them. Ankita knew her parents had known each other as children. She had imagined that one day, when they finally took note of each other’s adulthood, they felt the same as she had when David leaned down to take a beer out of her friend’s fridge, even before she knew his name—a shiver of anticipation in her flesh, something settling in her bones. It was strange to imagine her mother looking at a nameless, faceless man with the same sensation.
“We should have been kinder to her,” Sujata says from where she sits cross-legged in front of the metal armoire. She sees the discomfort in Ankita’s posture and knows it’s time to change the subject. “Our mother gave her a really hard time.”
“We were married for almost a year before your mother started to talk much at all, and then she had such a mouth. I loved it.” Ankita’s father laughs. “She wanted to work—even when she was pregnant—in that dingy schoolhouse for street kids. Your grandmother thought she was possessed.”
“You can’t blame her,” Sujata says. “Your wife sat under that courtyard tree all evening, right next to the drain. And when she suddenly went from silent to loud and restless—that wasn’t natural.”
That shriveled laurel fig is in the tiny square patio outside the back door of her grandmother’s house, enclosed on all sides by neighboring homes. Her mother told her to never touch it, in case it was diseased. It’s been there since before Ankita’s great-grandfather built the house. Its branches were always dry and twisted, fed rotten water from the open drain. She pictures her mother sitting on the warm stones, staring wistfully at it. “Why didn’t anyone cut the tree down?” Ankita asks.
Her father scoffs. “My mother was a superstitious woman. She was convinced it would release some evil spirit.”
Ankita understands this in a way. She was afraid of the tree even as she got older. Part of that fear came from the scary stories her grandmother told her, but there was something about the tree itself too. Sometimes when the light was just right, Ankita saw faces in its bark.
“Here.” Sujata hands Ankita a photograph. “One of the only ones we have left.” In a monsoon accident a month after their honeymoon, all her parents’ wedding photos drowned when a window burst open while they were out. This small photo has rounded corners and a faded pastel image of Ankita’s mother in a red wedding sari, a deep scowl under the white dots around her brow. Her hair was tied in a knot, tucked back under her veil, the matching lipstick turned pink with time. There are things she never told Ankita— things that Ankita never thought to ask. How much of what she knows about her mother is true, and how much is assumed? It feels lonely to wonder.
Sujata slides the red, gold, and milk-white bangles onto Ankita’s wrist one by one. It should have been done when she was first married, but Ankita wanted a diamond, a white dress, and neither of her parents objected. Sujata’s eyes begin to drip as the bangles slip back, clacking together at the softer part of Ankita’s arm. Sujata pats her face with her sari and says, “We should have been kinder.”
Before bed, Ankita video calls David. She shows off her bangles.
He tells her they’re beautiful.
“I wish I could’ve picked them with you,” he says.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be there for that anyway,” Ankita replies, resting her arm in her lap.
“See? I don’t know anything. I could’ve learned so much.” Ankita shrugs. “It’s fine. It’s not like I know much about myself.” “We’ll go again. We’ll learn together.”
“Sure.” Ankita nods to appease him. Truthfully, she’s not sure if she wants to. She doesn’t feel like she fits in here any more than she felt she fit in with her white classmates in the earlier years of her school life, before she smoothed out all her foreignness. She’s no longer a little girl who can eat ice cream on the curb and pretend she’s like the other children just because she looks the part.
Ankita is on her grandmother’s patio, squatting over the open drain to pee. She watches the sparse leaves rustle on the fig tree, and the tree stares back. This is a dream, Ankita realizes when the pee won’t come out. She wakes to a strange silence. No stray dogs in heat, no cars or wind. A figure in red stands at the foot of her bed. Her sari is draped over her head, her face in shadow. Ankita is in her parents’ teak wedding bed, surrounded by the mint walls of her grandmother’s house. She can’t move. It has been years since she’s had sleep paralysis, but she tries to stay calm and wake up. She wants to shut her eyes but can’t. The figure crawls onto the bed. Out of the corner of Ankita’s gaze, she watches her lean over David, asleep beside Ankita. The figure whispers something in his ear. Ankita strains to hear, but there’s no sound.
–
Ankita wakes sweating. The room is bright, and the city is already bustling outside. She is in her aunt’s apartment again, in an empty bed. The silver jar with her mother’s ashes gleams like a sharp tooth on the dresser. Her father is stepping out of the shower when Ankita opens the bedroom door. “Can’t we visit Amma’s house? Just once?” she asks him as he towels off his hair.
“Why? It’s not safe.”
“Just to see it. It’s been so long.”
“That place isn’t like you remember. It’s better to just let it be.” “Please.” Ankita’s voice breaks. “I’m having nightmares. I keep thinking about Amma’s stories. I need to see it.”
Her father frowns and presses his cool knuckles to her forehead. “The heat is getting to you. Are you sure you want to come to the temple today?”
Ankita nods. She doesn’t want to miss the only outing her father has invited her on so far.
“Take a cold shower,” he says, skirting around her to get into the bedroom. “Have Aparna make you tea. You can get some sleep in the car.”
Ankita runs on her toes toward the temple, terra-cotta tiles scorching her bare feet. Her father, ahead on the path, does a similar dance. A group of women standing along the shady edges laughs at them as they pass. The river comes up brown and white, nearly blinding. Ankita and her father dart off the path and descend the steps straight into the water, until they’re ankle-deep.
“We should have checked our shoes.” Her father sighs. They left their sandals in the car with the driver, who told them the same.
The stairs are crowded. A man beside Ankita dives smoothly into the water, and several women emerge just ahead of them, soaked saris clinging tight to their bodies.
“I could have just scattered them here.” “What?”
“Ma’s ashes.”
Ankita’s father shakes his head. “I don’t know why you brought them all the way here. There’s no point now. It’s past time to do any rites.”
“But that’s what she wanted.” Her mother always said so when she was feeling dark or sentimental on winter evenings. In the days after she passed, Ankita could only think of acrid smog, the cool cement of her grandmother’s house, this murky river. “Isn’t there some ritual we could do?”
“There’s a ceremony,” her father says. “It costs money, and it should’ve been done within days of her cremation.”
“I’ll pay. I want to do it right.” “We’ll talk about it later.”
Ankita’s mother loved this temple. She came alone every time they visited Kolkata. Ankita tries to imagine what her mother thought about the first time she saw this sacred river. It must have meant something to her.
“Did she love you?” Ankita asks her father suddenly, just as he’s about to walk away. The question hangs for a while, almost swallowed by splashes and chatter, the distant clamor of rituals. Then her father laughs.
“I was her husband. Why are you asking me such an American question right now?”
Ankita looks at her submerged feet.
“Is this because of what I said last night? We left all of that behind. She was happy in the US. What is a couple chocolate bars compared to a life together? Come on; we don’t have time for this.”
They hop from straw mat to straw mat until they reach the main temple. A serpentine queue covers most of the sun-bleached courtyard. Throngs of worshippers stand or squat in wait, glistening with sweat. Ankita’s father meets with a man who takes their bowl of fruits and sweets. He disappears into the altar through the back door and emerges a few minutes later to hand the offerings back. Ankita gets only a glimpse of the goddess—black arms and wild-eyed profile, red tongue. Ankita and her father light some incense.
–
Ankita’s mother must have waited hours to kneel before the goddess and actually look into her eyes. She would return home flushed and press the knot in her sari to Ankita’s forehead. Ankita looked forward to it because her mother always returned with her favorite sweets—the best ones were made at this temple.
Ankita waits at the entrance while her father calls the driver. Tired of standing in the sun, she sits on the steps in front of a shaded corridor of shops selling those sweets. As she watches her father talk, pace, then squint out toward the road, a hand comes in and strokes her jaw with its knuckles, leaving light touches on her ear. Ankita turns, but no one is there, only a long arm stretching out of the crowd with an offering: a milky gold disk no bigger than a sand dollar. Gleaming on the arm’s wrist is her mother’s gold bangle. Ankita takes the sweet, and the arm retracts, snaking back into the crowd. She searches every sari-clad woman for her mother’s face, her gait. If not her mother, then who? She shivers and turns back to the river as she takes a bite of the sweet. A long black hair comes out between her teeth, cooked in like a prize ring.
“Ankita!” Her father approaches with her sandals dangling in one hand. She crams the rest of the sweet into her mouth, swallowing quickly before he reaches her.
In the car, he unwraps the banana leaves from their offerings and hands her an identical sweet. She taps it to her forehead, her chest, then presses it against her lips, but finds she has no appetite.
“Aren’t they your favorite?” her father asks, watching expectantly.
She nods and forces it into her mouth.
At home, she vomits everything she ate that day. Her aunt blames the heat, her father the sweets. Unable to throw away the blessed food, Sujata eats a few despite her diabetes and sends the rest home with Aparna.
–
Ankita pays for a ceremony. Her aunt and father insist that it’s unnecessary, but her mother had asked for very little besides this. Ankita finds comfort in pretending her mother can still care, fearing the indifferent silver jar that remains. Dressed in white, the family arrives at the riverside temple as early as they’re allowed, before the crowds swarm the place. Morning colors the sky like chalk dust, smothered by pollution. The late-sleeping city is still subdued, the Bally Halt bridge a silent web in the distance. The priest speeds through the scripture, and Ankita recites back the Sanskrit clumsily, hands sweating around the cloth-wrapped urn with her mother’s ashes. She sets them adrift in the river, and that’s it—her mother is gone. Ankita stays at the riverbank for a long time, waiting for tears that don’t come. At last, her father takes her by the shoulders. “Come on,” he says, steering her away. “They need to start the next one.”
On the ride home, Ankita is full of regret even though she has no idea what else she might have done with the ashes. She wishes she kept a little, a small vial, so some piece of her mother would remain with her. She doesn’t dare say anything to her father or aunt, antcipating the I told you so. Instead she stares out the window, pressing her forehead to the warm glass. Kolkata is more forest than city. Ankita finds it beautiful, even the cement streaked with grime. Lush trees and vines drip from the colonial architecture, choking every building. She tries to guess if any of them are laurel figs, but she’s not sure what that withered tree looks like when it’s swollen with moisture and nutrients and life.
At Sujata’s house, they eat lunch with the relatives who came to the ceremony. A group of aunts Ankita hardly remembers strokes her hair and admires her new bangles. The women ask about her husband, and Ankita’s tongue loosens as she speaks, the innate draw of her first language prying open her jaw gently. She tells them he’s kind and funny. A person who doesn’t understand all of her but knows the best parts.
While Sujata is caught up in another conversation, Ankita asks two of her aunts, “Have you been to Amma’s house recently?”
They exchange looks. “Not lately. It’s locked up.”
“Sanjoy says we’ll fix it, make it modern,” one adds, saying the word modern in English.
“Abhijit says we’ll destroy it and sell the land,” another says. “I was thinking of going to see it.”
“No!” They both gasp in unison. “You shouldn’t go.”
“Why not?” Ankita asks, reaching for a glass of water as an excuse to lean closer. Her aunts look uncomfortable.
“Even if it wasn’t falling apart, that house is bad luck for young brides. Your mother had a bad time there. Sujata too when she and her husband lived there for a time. Your grandmother must have as well when she first arrived, because she was always going on about a spirit in the courtyard.”
Ankita glances at Sujata sitting beside her, eating another sweet she’s not supposed to touch. “I thought it was just a story.”
“It’s an old story,” one of the other aunts says, leaning into their conversation. “Who knows? It’s good to stay careful.”
Sujata looks at Ankita, then turns wide-eyed and snatches the glass from her hand. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry, I forgot.” Ankita stares at the tap water, the glass trembling in her aunt’s plump fingers. “Where does it come from? The water.”
“Ganga,” Sujata says. “All the water in Kolkata is from there.” “And you drink it?” Ankita feels nauseated again, the too-big she just ate churning in her stomach. The river is full of rot and waste and the remains of dead Hindus. Not even fish can bear it.
Her aunts all laugh. “Look at your face,” one says. “Our stomachs aren’t coddled by American water. And it’s filtered many, many times.”
Embarrassed, Ankita breaks from the conversation and walks out onto the balcony. She leans her elbows on the stone railing. Dust sticks to the bottoms of her feet; Aparna hasn’t had the chance to sweep yet.
In the unit on the opposite wing, a woman sits cross-legged at the threshold to the neighbor’s balcony, just as Ankita imagines her mother sitting before the courtyard tree. The woman’s face is half-obscured by hanging laundry as she sinks her teeth into the purple wrapper of a Cadbury bar and chews it down, paper, foil, and all. Between bites she grins, taunting Ankita with a mouth caked in greasy chocolate like mud from the foul riverbed. How stupid, how American, to think you could put me to rest just like that.
–
That night Ankita and her father sit in front of the television after her aunt has gone to sleep, both reluctant to face their lingering jet lag in the too-stiff bed.
“Do you feel better?” her father asks, passing her the bag of Khatta Meetha he’s been absently snacking on.
“Kind of.” Ankita crunches a handful and adds carefully, “But I’d really feel better if I could see Amma’s house.”
“Why are you so fixated on that?” Her father turns down the volume on the TV. She and her father never talked like this before her mother’s death. Heart-to-hearts between them were rare, her mother’s strong presence eclipsing theirs. But lately they’ve been able to ask more of each other, to fill the space she left behind. Ankita shrugs.
“I don’t know. I keep seeing Ma everywhere. I’m having weird dreams. Maybe I need it for closure.”
“I know it’s been hard. It’s been a long time since you’ve been home.”
Ankita places the snack bag on the coffee table and says, “This isn’t my home.” It’s hard to admit, especially to her father.
He looks a little sad, but nods. “To be honest, I don’t think it’s mine anymore either.”
Ankita feels a little bad then for wallowing in her own boredom and grief, resenting her father for leaving her with it. She is certain that he’s suffering. It’s possible that he is also, in his own way, trying to spare her from the same.
“Amma’s house was home,” she says quietly. The house where her father and his father grew up. Where she took her first steps. Where her mother found her voice. “I miss it. It feels wrong to leave without seeing it just once.” Ankita doesn’t tell him that when she leaves Kolkata this time, she won’t be back. She suspects he already knows. The tears come quickly, now of all times, over the clashing cymbals of a Hindi serial soundtrack. She brings her legs up against her chest, wetting the knee skin against her cheek.
“Okay, okay.” Her father rubs her back with his flat palm. “Don’t cry anymore. It’s done. We’ll go.”
–
Ankita is on her grandmother’s patio again. The clotheslines streak in front of her, the dark house staring shuttered and asleep. Her mother kneels before her on the tiles, gazing up. She is young, with thick hair tucked behind small ears and plump cheeks. What do you want from me? she asks, and Ankita wants to tell her—Nothing, everything, I don’t know.
I just want you, Ankita tries to say, but from her mouth comes a sound like a thousand insects, a summer downpour, the shaking leaves of a dying tree that fades into a stray dog’s eerie keenness as Ankita wakes in the dark once more.
–
The trip lasts only two weeks. Just as the jet lag begins to ebb, it’s time to leave. Ankita, her father, and Sujata drive to Dhakuria the day before the flight. The house has been unoccupied and unkempt there for years while the family argues about what to do with it. From a back alley, it watched tall apartments and shopping malls form around it.
This afternoon is the hottest yet, climbing past forty Celsius. The three of them wait for nearly an hour in traffic until the streets become familiar again. The mouth of the alley is one of the few places unchanged from Ankita’s memories. The lake beyond the railroad tracks surrounded by shanties, the police station lined with rusting shells of cars and bikes stripped of all their useful parts. The electronics shop with kitchen appliances of decades past. The man who irons clothes—undoubtedly the son of the one from Ankita’s childhood—smoking a cigarette in his stall.
The car is too wide to fit in the curved alley, which has a row of houses on one side and a high stone wall on the other, separating it from the shopping center on the main road. Sujata and Ankita leave her father with the driver and walk on together. Trash lines the narrow passage, but the stray cats walking the wall are unexpectedly white. Amma’s house is the second one around the bend, golden yellow grayed out with grime. Sujata struggles with the verandah gate, its heavy padlock jammed, hinges rusty. She pauses at the steps. “I think I’ll stay here. This place gives me a bad feeling. Are you sure you want to go?”
Ankita nods.
“Watch out for snakes.” Sujata hands Ankita the keys and walks back into the alley to chat with a neighbor who greeted her as they turned the corner.
Ankita enters from the verandah through the dark, waiting doorway. Inside, the lights miraculously still work. The house emerges like a memory, cracked and veiled in cobwebs. Not even cockroaches or geckos inhabit it. A naked bulb lights the low-ceilinged hallway, the pale rectangle on the wall where the refrigerator had once been. Everywhere, the land encroaches, taking back what the house tried to press down. Vines snake in between shutter hinges. Her parents’ room is without furniture, littered with decaying plant matter and fallen petals of mint-green paint and drywall. The bathroom floor has a large wound, termites busy in and around it. The wilderness left only the living room untouched. Remnants of her family are strewn about. Ankita recognizes some old toys, an ancient armoire looming in the corner, her grandparents’ mahogany altar. Dusty murtis of her grandmother’s favorite gods stand sentinel inside the altar with their round eyes and fat red mouths: the universe, its brother, its sister.
Ankita hears the gate to the patio open and shut. She walks carefully down the hallway, wondering if it’s an intruder or maybe a snake. There’s no one. The gate is locked. Ankita tries the keys one by one until it opens, hinges groaning. Sun-bleached clotheslines still crisscross the patio. Broken furniture and rotting leaves are littered about. The fig tree has overtaken the far wall, larger and stronger than Ankita has ever seen. It leans toward her. A woman crouches within its foliage, red sari fluttering.
“Ma?” Ankita calls. She reaches up to clutch the hem of the woman’s sari, longing to see her mother’s face the way it was when she was young—round and copper, a freshly minted coin.
“Ankita.” The woman’s voice is brittle, harsh. She lowers her head to reveal a knotted-wood face. It shifts, molding into different features as the leaves stir. Ankita steps back, and the woman laughs, a sound like snapping twigs. “Don’t be afraid. You know me.”
One of the branches twists forward. It’s an arm, covered wrist to elbow with red, white, iron, and gold bangles. Its hand traces Ankita’s ear tenderly. It smells like the inside of a velvet jewelry box, a sugary milk sweet, her mother’s neck. The touch feels so familiar, Ankita leans into it, closes her eyes, and whispers, “I missed you.”
“You don’t have to anymore. I’ll stay with you.”
Ankita nods, opening her stinging eyes. Another hand emerges from the leaves and selects the white bangle closest to its wrist. The bangle slides off with unexpected ease. The woman offers it to Ankita, her grin revealing a row of sharp teeth. Ankita isn’t scared. She’s not sure if she ever was. The long arms, the pointed teeth behind pretty lips—they feel like they’ve always been part of her. How far she has to reach to find herself. How everything she tries to hold is sharp. She touches the bangle. It’s creamy white like ivory. “What is it?”
The creature holds Ankita’s wrist and gently slides the bangle on. “Your mother’s bones.”
–
“Are you satisfied?” Sujata asks as Ankita shuts the verandah gate. Ankita turns around and offers the keys.
Sujata shoves the padlock shut. “Did you lock everything you opened?”
Ankita nods. She watches a group of neighborhood children chase one another barefoot through the alley. The soles of their feet smack the ground hard, unafraid.
Sujata takes Ankita’s wrist as they walk back to the car. “You’ve already managed to get it dirty?” The white bangle is now dull and yellowed, scuffed in places.
“I’ll clean it when I get home.”
“Take care of it. Don’t wear it all the time.”
A light wind funnels between the stone and cement. The air carries the smell of sewage, sweat, and the fritters sold on the next block. If Ankita shuts her eyes, she can return to the afternoons on her cousin’s bicycle, cheek stuck to his damp arm. But that was a long time ago now. The city has a new skin, as does she. She tugs her hand out of her aunt’s grasp. For a moment, Ankita is her mother, smooth cheeks and high, stubborn chin, walking away from a city that is now closed to her, already a stranger.
“Excerpted from MOUTH: by Puloma Ghosh Copyright © 2024 by Puloma Ghosh. Published on June 11, 2024 by Astra Publishing House. Reprinted by permission.”