Aji

by Praveena Shivram

Praveena’s story describes a troubled mind that finds succour in a relationship so deep that it is hard to delineate the real from the imagined, where friendship is more unspoken than spoken and experiences more dependent on than independent of reality

From where I was standing, I could clearly see the wrinkles around Aji’s eyes. Aji would call them her lifelines and that without them, she would simply drown in an ocean of memories. And then she would laugh, her high-pitched laugh that travelled effortlessly from her stomach to her eyes. Her eyes, not quite aligned, would shine like polished diamonds. ‘The lines go deep into my womb, child, so deep that they come with me each time I am created,’ Aji would say, in that cracked voice that reminded me of shattering glass, the pieces embedding itself into my body like the deep dead of the night creeping into your dreams.

Aji was like the wind – I could never really pin her down, so when people or my parents asked me about Aji, I would find that words have fled my throat and formed an image instead – of Aji looking at me and smiling, an impatient smile, ‘Go on, tell them, who I am’ – and I would freeze. After a while, they stopped asking, and even though I knew what they said behind my back, I was glad to leave the prying questions behind and bring Aji back into everyday conversation without the need to explain. On Facebook (I am allowed an account, I am 14, really), I would post pictures of Aji’s famous halwa, of her rangoli, of her watering the garden under the relentless sun that seemed to suck in all of Aji, leaving only her dark outline for me to film. I even tried to take a selfie once, though Aji who refused to pose for photographs, saying ’You don’t know, child, but I can see the devil’s eyes mocking me every time you hold that thing in front of my face’, moved away leaving only the blur of her shadow. I enjoyed reading out comments to Aji, who would only smirk and tell me that nothing good can come out of words that hung in space somewhere.

If you asked me where I met Aji for the first time, I would draw a blank. Aji was always there like the smell of wet earth before the monsoons. It seemed futile to try and define my relationship with her. She lived in the stillness between my heartbeats and I breathed her in and out as I went through my day.

***

Once Aji and I went to the beach. She said this was the second-longest beach in the world. I asked her which one was the first and she told me to stop asking irrelevant questions. She bought me milaga bajjis to make doubly sure that I didn’t probe further. We walked to the water, letting the waves gently lick our feet. To my right, a dog scratched itself in blissful ignorance of the world, and to my left, a man did the same to his crotch. Next to him, a young boy selling sundal was busy trying to convince a couple to buy a packet. Families in the water with sand sticking to their bodies like chicken pox, couples behind boats with groping hands and unruly clothes, rusted merry-go-rounds looking sad and desolate, crabs going in and out of their trenches like confused soldiers, dog-shit and horse-shit and human-shit buried in the sand… the beach was dirty and crowded and noisy. I decided I did not like the beach. I told Aji who said I did not know how to appreciate the good things but I told her I knew how to appreciate her, to which she just shrugged and turned away. And then I saw her shoulders expand into a smile and I knew I had made her happy. When I told her I wanted to leave, she simply got up and walked towards our parked car with the sleeping driver, without any questions.

***

I once heard the maids talking in the verandah. ‘You know, Govind just called. He saw some dogs attacking a bag near the dustbin outside his shop. Imagine, it could be a bomb! The police are on their way…’

This was too good to be missed. I knew where Govind’s shop was. It was at the end of the street, a small shop the size of an oversized stall that sold everything – from cigarettes and newspapers and biscuits and talcum powder (only Ponds, in sachets) to tea and bananas and batteries and bread (even brown for the diet conscious, like my mother). I went out through the back door, walked along the garden wall, propped up a steel stool and looked over the wall. Govind’s shop was right opposite and Kamala was right, there was a crowd there looking at a black plastic bag. I heard the police siren go wayyon wayyon and saw them get off with more dogs, the sniffer types that are always struggling on a leash with their tongues hanging out. A policeman gingerly prodded the bag with a stick. Then he knelt down and opened it. The crowd moved back instinctively and held their breath. But imagine their disappointment when out popped a dead baby (a girl, obviously), the cord matted with blood. The dogs went crazy at the smell of blood, the crowd went crazy with their mobile phones, and I was utterly amazed at how tiny the baby was. Maybe that’s why my parents barely see me; I must still look that tiny to them; and as unwanted and insignificant.  I ran back into the house and recounted the entire episode to Aji. She didn’t seem impressed at all. I asked Aji that night where the baby in the plastic bag would end up and she said, probably back in a bin.

***

I came home from school one day and saw an ambulance and police jeep parked outside our gate. The crowd outside parted as I approached the gate and I felt like Moses walking through the sea of murmurs and whispers, but unlike Moses I didn’t feel noble enough to complete the walk, and I ran, past the security with imposing guns, past the people in white, the long cars, fast cars, big cars, all the way to the garden at the back, and climbed up my tree and sat there like a little Buddha, my legs folded below my stomach, eyes closed, palms facing the sky, and the ambulance left, the police jeep left, the people left… and Aji came as I knew she would. She sat beneath the tree, and confirmed what I had heard as murmurs and whispers – that  my parents were indeed found dangling from the ceiling fan like carcasses in a butcher’s shop, and that it looked like I might have to leave this house, but she promised me she wouldn’t leave, and there was nothing to worry, and then she sat there, silently waiting for me to come down. And that’s why I love Aji – she had that deep reverence for silence that my parents completely lacked, often pushing me to the corners with their flurry of words, meant always for others but never for me, and so the Great Silence came and descended on them like a shroud. Serves them right.

***

For the last two years, I have lived here, ever since the tax officers arrived and converted our home into uninteresting entries on a long white sheet of paper and I was shipped off to this hostel by Chandra Aunty, my mother’s cousin, because nobody wanted me. Aji couldn’t come with me, but she allowed me to take the picture I drew of her in fifth grade. We had to draw our favourite person in art class and while the rest of them drew their mothers and fathers, I drew Aji and as a joke gave her blue hair and a pink face with orange eyes and a wicked smile with black teeth and lots of wrinkles and took it home. Aji didn’t laugh though. But the next day I saw that she had framed it neatly with cardboard from a shoe box and hung it on the wall of her room. And now it was here in my hostel room, high up on the wall as that was the only free nail available and was meant for Jesus or Mother Mary.

So I thought of Aji today because I was generally tired. School was no fun and I had gone and failed the holy grail of all exams, the Board Exams, which meant I would become insignificant again. I thought of Aji, the one who carried infinity in her palm like stolen chocolate, because it suddenly felt too much of an effort to wake up.

Standing on a chair on my bed, I looked at my crude drawing of Aji and thought back to the day I had created her when she said she had been waiting to be released from my heart, like the genie in the lamp, and someday she would do the same for me. One of her lifelines fell out of the frame, that moment, and gently circled my neck, like an embrace in slow motion. I sucked in my breath and kicked the chair from under my feet.

Praveena Shivram is a writer based in Chennai, India, and currently the Editor of Arts Illustrated. She has written for several national publications, and her fiction has appeared in the Open Road Review, Jaggery Lit, Desi Writers’ Lounge, The Indian Quarterly, Chaicopy, and Helter Skelter’s anthology of New Writing: Dissent. Read her work at www.praveenashivram.com