Orange Revelation

There was no room to grow in that house, and it was like some great orange overripe fruit waiting for the walls to explode and splatter us all over carefree winds taking us far away and in different directions to distant dreams. So I had a door in my mind, and when I entered, there were hills like Gods standing tall in the bristling wind watching starlight still and starlight falling in streaks of white, streaking through the heavens. Then there was peace in my heart and I closed my eyes.

I am a person of a scared disposition. The fear chews at my innards making my belly grow into my hips and my hair shadow all the other shadows in my face and they say that I will die if I carry on like this. But life makes me weak.

I think everything in life comes in pairs. So it must all have started the first time I went to my first day of school. I was 7 then, and I was so proud to be the only girl from our large family ever to break bounds and learn ways with words and problems with numbers, and so I walked my little feet straight into that school compound teeming with screaming snotty children. But even before I walked into my first class, a couple of big boys sprouting hair from chins like goats approached me and said, what you doing here little girl, shouldn’t you be in the kitchen with your mother, and they forced me to cup my hands and one of them poured out hot urine from his pants like an open tap and said drink, you little whore, drink, but I ran. I ran straight home with wet warm hands and my mother wept when she heard. The second time of my first day of school, I was 12.

But maybe it all started earlier. Earlier, when my mother still had one lifeline and would die only once, a fast early death, an astrologer had told her, in an accident. And my mother had wept, but she had dried her tears and taken her five children home because we were hungry, we said. But when we reached home, my father was not there for fried corn and tea and he did not come home for a weak. My mother wept in her room and wept filling water at the tap and wept digging radish and her tears fell hot into our dal every night, "you took my life," she screamed, "you took my life, why, why, why," but she screamed alone and he was not there to hear. After a week, she hid a wad of ten rupee notes into her petticoat and packed us all into a taxi in the heat of afternoon, "we are going to meet your father," she said, "it is time you all recognized the real him." And she told us to "look in the streets if you can see your father," but daytime fell from the sky and the city light up with lights so many lights my eyes looking at all those lights, and the taxi was so warm and my head found my sister’s shoulder and sleep climbed up my legs from the petrol smell of the taxi seats.