was her name? Yes, she replied, when she was cut at the age of nine; she knew it tasted bad but the pain was worse; she wanted it, the tai had nothing to do with how much she wanted it; Dimple, like the actress of the hit movie Bobby , who was younger and prettier than she.
*
Mr Lee was on the floor with his legs stretched in front of him. A single lamp burned in the room and its yellow light shone on his bald head and clean undershirt. His actions were slow, economical, planned ahead so there was no wasted movement. He boiled more water on a pump stove and poured it into their cups, reusing the leaves he’d measured out from a tin. In another pan he heated milk. From a tin trunk he drew tiny scales and a bowl. He put a sticky black ball on the scale, weighed it, broke off a bit, weighed it again, and put the ball into her palm. He gave her the warmed milk in a steel glass and told her to place the pellet on the back of her tongue and swallow quickly. She did exactly as he said. The pellet was unbearably bitter and it stuck to her tongue. She panicked and swallowed too much milk, but the pain disappeared in fifteen minutes, to be replaced by its opposite, something enveloping that told her she was loved, no, beloved: she was beloved and not alone.
*
That night she was sick, throwing up quickly and repeatedly, so quickly it was almost pleasure. She had many dreams, separate dreams that seemed to pass through her simultaneously, or was it a single dream that stretched in all directions for most of the night? She dreamed of a house she had never lived in and of a family she did not know. The neighbourhood was unfamiliar, but she knew it was somewhere in Bombay, Malabar Hill maybe, or Breach Candy, or Marine Drive, or Cuffe Parade, some neighbourhood where the rich lived, because everybody in her dream was rich. She had friends with names like Queenie, Devika and Perizaad. She was popular with her teachers because she did well in class and for the same reason she was not popular with her classmates. She was often happy. Even in her dream she knew she was happy because she was a student and reading was her proper occupation. Her favourite book was a slim collection of prophecies by a nun who wrote in Konkani, who wrote every day, who filled up exercise books with her tiny handwriting and threw away most of what she wrote. Only three of the slim books survived her severe self-editing. The nun’s name was Sister Remedios and after her death her writings were published in Konkani by the convent where she had lived and died. Dimple’s edition was an English translation that appeared two decades later. The book was terrifying , not because it contained endless descriptions of civil butchery and mass suicide, but because of the serene accompanying sketches of trees, streams and sunbirds. The drawings were scattered throughout, small drawings the nun had made that were sometimes related, though only cryptically, to the catastrophic visions she described; more often they had no connection to anything at all. In eighty or so pages Sister Remedios described a ruined world shaped by landslides and floods, a world in which ‘fissured cities rose and fell in a cement tide, and trees upended their roots into the air, and birds fell to the ground like stones, and the moon fell into a crack that had appeared on the earth, the old earth that was breaking itself into pieces’. She wrote in the past tense, as if the terrible scenes she described had already happened and had been witnessed by thousands, by hundreds of thousands of doomed souls and only she, Sister Remedios, had returned alive to tell the world of its death. The nun did not record the cause of the cataclysm, she did not say whether it was war or some unnatural planetary upheaval that had caused it; but the scenes of suicide were faithfully rendered. The book ended with two pages about a great pit filled with black blood, its surface pocked with toxic gas bubbles, and the army
*
Mr Lee was on the floor with his legs stretched in front of him. A single lamp burned in the room and its yellow light shone on his bald head and clean undershirt. His actions were slow, economical, planned ahead so there was no wasted movement. He boiled more water on a pump stove and poured it into their cups, reusing the leaves he’d measured out from a tin. In another pan he heated milk. From a tin trunk he drew tiny scales and a bowl. He put a sticky black ball on the scale, weighed it, broke off a bit, weighed it again, and put the ball into her palm. He gave her the warmed milk in a steel glass and told her to place the pellet on the back of her tongue and swallow quickly. She did exactly as he said. The pellet was unbearably bitter and it stuck to her tongue. She panicked and swallowed too much milk, but the pain disappeared in fifteen minutes, to be replaced by its opposite, something enveloping that told her she was loved, no, beloved: she was beloved and not alone.
*
That night she was sick, throwing up quickly and repeatedly, so quickly it was almost pleasure. She had many dreams, separate dreams that seemed to pass through her simultaneously, or was it a single dream that stretched in all directions for most of the night? She dreamed of a house she had never lived in and of a family she did not know. The neighbourhood was unfamiliar, but she knew it was somewhere in Bombay, Malabar Hill maybe, or Breach Candy, or Marine Drive, or Cuffe Parade, some neighbourhood where the rich lived, because everybody in her dream was rich. She had friends with names like Queenie, Devika and Perizaad. She was popular with her teachers because she did well in class and for the same reason she was not popular with her classmates. She was often happy. Even in her dream she knew she was happy because she was a student and reading was her proper occupation. Her favourite book was a slim collection of prophecies by a nun who wrote in Konkani, who wrote every day, who filled up exercise books with her tiny handwriting and threw away most of what she wrote. Only three of the slim books survived her severe self-editing. The nun’s name was Sister Remedios and after her death her writings were published in Konkani by the convent where she had lived and died. Dimple’s edition was an English translation that appeared two decades later. The book was terrifying , not because it contained endless descriptions of civil butchery and mass suicide, but because of the serene accompanying sketches of trees, streams and sunbirds. The drawings were scattered throughout, small drawings the nun had made that were sometimes related, though only cryptically, to the catastrophic visions she described; more often they had no connection to anything at all. In eighty or so pages Sister Remedios described a ruined world shaped by landslides and floods, a world in which ‘fissured cities rose and fell in a cement tide, and trees upended their roots into the air, and birds fell to the ground like stones, and the moon fell into a crack that had appeared on the earth, the old earth that was breaking itself into pieces’. She wrote in the past tense, as if the terrible scenes she described had already happened and had been witnessed by thousands, by hundreds of thousands of doomed souls and only she, Sister Remedios, had returned alive to tell the world of its death. The nun did not record the cause of the cataclysm, she did not say whether it was war or some unnatural planetary upheaval that had caused it; but the scenes of suicide were faithfully rendered. The book ended with two pages about a great pit filled with black blood, its surface pocked with toxic gas bubbles, and the army
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