Mashi
by Roshni Veronika Mallick
PART I
MIMI
At night when everything is supposed to be quiet, Mimi’s house is alive with painful moans, fitful coughs, and sighs of temporary relief. Sitting on Baba’s wicker chair, she doesn’t have to guess the source.
Since the past month, these sounds have been omnipresent: in the bedroom where she sleeps with her mother, in the kitchen where the cook rolls out dough, in the bathroom and also in her head. In the beginning it had annoyed her, how the din interfered with her concentration as she spelled out words in her notebook. She had complained to Ma, saying it induced a headache; but Ma had dismissed her complaint, saying the pain that people were suffering as they fought the coronavirus was far, far worse.
Thanks to this, she had had to learn the art of ignorance. Day after day, night after night, she practiced ignoring the sounds as Baba started to take in more and more of the infected; so many that the second and the third floor of the house now was an infirmary of sorts.
Today, having had dinner under the watchful eyes of the cook, Mimi waits for Ma to come join her so that they may call it a day. It’s way past her bedtime, but having hardly seen Baba properly for a month, she craves her mother’s company.
When Ma doesn’t arrive for another hour, Mimi slips out of the bedroom into the dimly lit corridor. The stone floor is cool beneath her bare feet. She stops a few feet away from the kitchen.
There’s Baba, tall and broad-shouldered; looking at him one can never guess he is a doctor. A pretty competent one, too. He’s standing behind Ma, who faces the wall. Even as she watches, he hitches up Ma’s saree and presses her flat against the wall. He pounds into her, once, twice, thrice. Mimi dashes back into her room and under the covers.
Later, she’s fully aware of Ma dropping in beside her. Feigning sleep, she ignores the smell of her sweat mixed with the odor of medicines and Baba’s tobacco.
HEMA
I know Mimi is waiting for me. But it is absolutely imperative that we have this conversation. As he washes his hands in the sink, I notice the slight hunch of his shoulders. He turns around.
“How long?” I ask, my voice intentionally rude.
“How long what?” He has the audacity to look surprised; it fuels my anger.
“How long are you going to treat them? The infected?”
“For as long as I can,” he says. His voice is determined but I can see in his eyes that he expects me to contradict him.
“What about me?” I challenge. He takes a few moments before replying. When he speaks, his voice sounds weak.
“I understand the danger, Hema. God knows I do. Why do you think I haven’t so much as touched you since the last month? Why do you think I sleep away from you and Mimi, upstairs? That’s because I know the perils of my actions. But I can’t leave people out there to die. Not when I am a doctor and have more than enough room in my house to help the sick.”
I know he is right. But I also know that we are well short of these infected people in our home.
“Have you thought about what it means for Mimi? She’s just seven, for God’s sake. She keeps asking me to get you! What do I tell her? That her righteous father is busy taking care of COVID-positive men and women? Do I tell her that if anyone of us were to get infected, as I think we will, we could die? Do I tell her that her father is not just trying to repair the lives of dying people, but also playing with death himself?”
There is a burning sensation in my throat, and I bet my eyes are shining.
“Mimi,” he says. Just her name. His monosyllabic response infuriates me, so much that I want to throw the steel water jug at him. Instead, I get up and turn my back on him.
The air is tense with unspoken things, unexpressed feelings, and longing; because as much as I am mad at him, it is true that we haven’t touched each other in way too long. He must feel the same way, because without warning he enters my body from behind. It’s rough and hard and fast coupling.
Finished, I ask him, “Were you properly sanitized?”
“Yes,” he says. His voice lingers at the base of my neck.
“Change your clothes and wash yourself, just in case,” I hear him say. This time his voice is farther away.
SHYMAL
He knows she was right, indisputably so. But he is a doctor and there is no way he will turn his back on his duty.
She had called him righteous, and maybe he is, for don’t the patients join their hands when he checks on them? Don’t they look at him with hope and reverence? But right now, standing under the naked glare of the electric lights, all he feels is shame. He’s plagued with worry for his seven-year-old diabetic daughter and his relationship with his wife, which seems to be going downhill. The idea of going down and apologizing to Hema is still forming itself in the architecture of his head when a woman starts coughing violently. He quickly walks over to her, and as he forces her to take her medicine, he thinks of all the things he needs to mend.
PART II
This is not how she assumed pregnancy would be like. Sure, she had known it would be difficult with her husband gone away for good, but she had never anticipated that she would be reduced to living under someone else’s roof and eating someone else’s food. How she will ever be able to pay back Shymal Da and his wife’s generosity, she has no idea.
She is aware of how she cannot encroach upon their hospitality for much longer, but part of her wants to remain in the comfort of a proper bed with clean sheets and four square meals a day.
It is hard to forgo the pleasure of being well cared for when her entire life has been an accumulation of compromises and adjustments. Then, there’s her growing baby to consider.
All in all, the temptation to fake illness is almost acute.
Shymal Da has come for his usual rounds. She sees him checking the other patients’ pulse, temperature and asking them about this and that.
He seems to exude calmness, pacifying even the sickest individuals. Like her, everyone else is in awe of his unending generosity as a human and skills as a doctor. Some take his hands and kiss them, some talk at length: first expressing gratitude and later their heart’s troubles. He listens to all of them, nodding when needed, speaking per requirement, and in those moments when his eyes are fixed on the speaker, she thinks that the world is not completely cruel, it just needs a little repairing. The initiative for which is taken by people like Shymal Da.
Once he comes around to her, she beams at him.
“How’re we doing?” he asks.
“Getting better and better!”
“Ah, that’s great.” There’s something in his tone that makes her heart constrict.
“I was thinking, now that you’ve recovered, or seem to be doing so, it isn’t prudent for you to remain here. I don’t think it’s healthy for the baby,” he says.
“Isn’t prudent for me to remain here, any longer?” she repeats stupidly. Then, without permission, tears start rolling down her cheeks.
Shyamal Da takes her hand in his and smiles down at her kindly.
“When I say here, I mean on this floor. I think we might be able to shift you to the spare room downstairs.”
This is when she feels the baby kick for the first time.
MIMI
The old room across hers is being dusted clean. Ma, with the end of her saree pressed over her mouth and nose, stands in the corner, and dictates action. The stone floor is being scrubbed, and the housemaid scurries in and out of the room, carrying sheets, pillowcases, and curtains. The mirror on the dressing table is polished with Collin.
After an hour’s work, when the room is finally put in order and Ma has retired to the kitchen, Mimi steps inside it.
The room hardly has any furniture: only a bed with matching sheets and pillowcases and a simple dressing table complete with two drawers and a stool. Blue lace curtains frame the single window from where the stagnant pond can be seen. With the high ceiling and the big window, the place is airy. Mimi decides it doesn’t feel claustrophobic anymore, like it had that one time Ma stayed in the room with dark curtains pulled shut all day. One night when she had asked Baba why Ma seemed so aloof, he said that they had suffered a great loss.
In the morning when she’d gone to kiss Ma awake, Ma had looked at her with strangely vacant eyes and said, “Poor child. You’ll have no sister or brother. Poor, poor child.” Only then had she noticed that Ma’s belly wasn’t fat anymore. The slight bulge had vanished.
HEMA
Truth be told, I am not sure if the pregnant girl should move into that room. It seems wrong, somehow unfit, for her to be exposed to the place that is a relic of death. The death of a baby that had been growing in a womb, just like the one growing inside her womb.
It’s vaguely uncomforting how she will sleep on the sheets that I slept on, rest her head on my pillow. She doesn’t know anything about it. But I do. It unnerves me, how she will sleep with the ghost of my dead child while her own child grows inside of her.
But we have nowhere else to put her. So, she must live with the memories that have faded into the walls of the room, the phantom of my dead child and my pain.
PART III
After she is set up in the room downstairs, she has no doubt left about the fact that Shymal Da and his wife, who she calls Boudi, are incarnations of God. How they can be so unflinchingly kind and limitlessly generous, she has no clue.
Shyamal Da keeps mostly to the upper floors and Boudi, meaning older sister, is always bustling about the house. One afternoon, after they’ve had lunch, Boudi comes and stands at the door. “Can I come in?” she asks, looking uncertain.
“You know you don’t need to ask Boudi”, she replies.
Hema Boudi is wearing a lilac cotton saree, her wet hair is down, and she wears vermilion in the part of her hair. Her skin is fair, her eyes slanted and her lips a tantalizing shade of pink. She sits on the edge of her bed.
“This is the hottest day of the year, I tell you,” she says.
“Yes, but the room is so cool and airy!”.
There is an awkward sort of pause.
“The food was excellent, Boudi. I am not even ashamed to say that I licked the plate clean,” she compliments. Hema Boudi’s tinkling laughter fills the room.
“Flattery won’t work with me, I tell you. I will not wash your clothes or make your bed,” she jokes. For the next quarter of an hour, they talk about this and that, until Hema Boudi gets up saying it’s time for her to tutor her daughter.
“When can I meet her?” she asks. Indecision flickers over Boudi’s face. Then she smiles and says, “In time.”
It becomes a routine for the two women to talk after lunch. Lazy summer afternoons are spent chopping vegetables for dinner, trading recipes, oiling and combing each other’s hair. In the presence of swelling curtains, Hema presses her palm against the bulge of the heavily pregnant mother and her heart dilates with tenderness every time her palm senses movement under it.
One evening, finally assured that it is safe to introduce Mimi to their two-some, she brings her along.
Mimi is in awe of the bulge, staring unabashedly until Hema guides her small palms over it.
Together, mother and daughter relish in the feel of life and movement beneath their palms.
Soon, Mimi finds herself doing schoolwork sprawled on the floor as the laughter of the two women sitting on the bed swallows the sounds coming from upstairs.
MIMI
At first Mimi is not sure if she wants to see the lady living in the room opposite to hers. But she can see how it has altered Ma. She is less crabby now; Baba and she haven’t argued in ages. She even lets Mimi have as many mangoes as she likes. So, one afternoon when Ma asks if she wants to tag along, Mimi agrees, wishing to see the lady who makes Ma this happy.
When she meets her, Mimi is not disappointed.
The lady has kind eyes and a laughing mouth. Her skin is like polished bronze, her manners free. Instantly, she is in awe of the sisterly love that seems to go back and forth between Ma and the lady. She begins to spend her evenings in their company, painting roses on paper with a yellowish hue, to the sound of their chatter.
One such evening, as she practices handwriting, she hears Ma say, “Now then, tell me, where is your husband? Has he abandoned you, now that you are fat?” Ma’s voice is bubbling with laughter. Mini quite likes it.
“What’s there to hide from you, Boudi?” Mimi hears her say. “He left. Just like that. Whoosh.” She motions with her forefinger and thumb, illustrating. There’s a beat of silence, and Mimi is sure Ma feels guilty for bringing it up.
But then she says, “To tell you the truth Boudi, I’m well short of him. Not everyone is as lucky as you.”
“Lucky? Me? Meaning?” Ma asks.
“Not everyone is blessed with such a kind and loving husband as you, Boudi. More than once I’ve heard him talk about you like his world has reduced itself to you.” She looks at Mimi, smiling.
“And of course, Mimi, too,” she adds.
One evening Ma asks her if she minds sleeping in the other room. Mimi instantly agrees, wanting nothing more than to sleep with Mashi, as Ma has taught her to call the pregnant woman.
Mashi, meaning Ma’s sister.
That night, Ma wears Baba’s favorite flowers in her hair. When Mashi wishes her goodnight (emphasizing night more than necessary in Mimi’s opinion), Ma blushes.
PART IV
SHYMAL
He re-learns the dips and valleys of Hema’s body. By the end of September, beds have been removed from the second and the third floor of the house and Mimi is allowed to wander wherever she pleases. With the onset of the monsoon season, the pregnant lady gives birth to a beautiful girl who has her bronze skin. They call her Meghna, an ode to the weather in which she is born.
Meghna, meaning clouds.
In the aftermath of lazy coupling, Hema tells him she is two months pregnant. Spent, he is already dozing off when she jolts him awake with the news.
“We’re going to be parents,” she tells him.
“Again,” he says. “Again.”
About the Author
Roshni Veronika Mallick is an international award-winning essayist and author of “Genesis: An Introduction to Gender And Sexuality Terminology.” Currently in her senior year of high school, she is fascinated by the expansive breadth of imaginary vision that poetry and storytelling lend to her. She has previously been published in a few literary magazines, including Cathartic Literary Magazine and Kaleidoscope.