Teatime for the Firefly by Shona Patel Page A

teeth splayed out like the fingers of a hand, through which the gossip of the entire neighborhood flowed.
    “Your mother was a madwoman and you are a Banana Bride,” Moon declared. We were both around six years old and playing in the backyard. “I wish I could marry a banana tree,” she added wistfully, and then with complete irrelevance, “but I have a doll that vomits and you don’t .”
    I did not care about being a Banana Bride, but I badly wanted a vomiting doll.
    “You can marry a banana tree anytime,” I said. “Why don’t you?”
    Moon sniffed with scorn. “Don’t talk like a donkey. Azzifff you can marry whomever you like. Your parents have to propose for you.”
    “Then ask your mother to propose for you.” Nobody would dare turn down Mima’s proposal, least of all a banana tree.
    “I told her I wanted to marry a banana tree and she got very angry. She wanted to know who had told me things about you. I said, ‘Rekha told me everything.’ Then Ma went into the kitchen and screamed, ‘If I ever hear you talking to the children about any of this, I will throw you out like a dirty rat and you can go back to your village.’ Rekha was crying and begging. Then Ma turned and yelled at me, ‘I will throw you out, too, like a dirty rat, if you tell Layla anything .’” Moon looked at me ruefully, absentmindedly pulling on a corkscrew curl. “I am not supposed to talk to you, about the banana wedding, your crazy mother, or anything.”
    Moon was so enthralled with my tragic childhood that our favorite pastime became to enact the macabre little drama in all its gory details. Our favorite character was my mother. We took turns playing her, tearing out our hair and sneezing our brains into a handkerchief. Nobody wanted to play Baby Layla the Banana Bride, because all she did was sit under the tree and cry. Instead we dressed up Moon’s vomiting doll in a red dishcloth and stuck her under the banana tree while we concentrated on elaborate wedding rituals, throwing rice and pretending to make conch sounds by blowing on a rock. The doll was then made to switch roles and become my mother. We sneaked out the plastic bucket from the bathroom and floated the doll facedown in the water. Moon and I became the professional mourners, throwing ourselves on the ground, beating our chests and wailing.
    Then one day we got caught like two stricken cockroaches under a flashlight. Mima came looking for the bucket and found us wailing and saw the doll floating in the water. She knew exactly what was going on and gave us both the spankings of our lives. She said she would throw us both out of the house like dirty rats if she caught us playing the game again.
    Many years later, I realized that all that role-playing must have been cathartic at some level, because my real-life tragedy had become woven through with imagination, a colorful fable to be accepted, elaborated upon and embraced, until—to the wonderment of it all—I could let my past go and fly free.
    * * *
    Moon and I spent our holidays in Dadamoshai’s house. Every summer, Mima’s family packed up and took the ferryboat across the Padma River from Sylhet to Silchar. Here we stayed for two lazy, sun-dappled months in paradise.
    We loved Dadamoshai’s huge, dilapidated house with its creaky, lopsided gate leading into a big, rambling garden with its birdbath, sundial and sleepy snails that waved their feelers up and down the garden wall. It was a peaceful time. Mima became cuddly and warm and threw discipline to the winds. She got foot massages and snoozed on the veranda. Moon and I climbed the mango tree, demolished anthills, mothered baby crows and challenged Dadamoshai’s brain with obtuse and difficult questions.
    One year, two crow chicks fell out of the nest in the mango tree. Moon and I adopted one each. Two days later, Moon woke up to find her chick dead. She burst into tears, shoved me hard against the wall and ran howling through the house, looking for