Art by Elsa Li
Content Warning: explicit suicidal ideation
Two weeks after Nalini’s 36th birthday, she dreams of her mother; it has been the same dream since her death. Ma on the balcony, the light cotton of her paisley-print house-robe fluttering in the wind, a cigarette balanced between her middle and forefinger, smoke wafting in a spiral around her face. She turns to look down at Nalini, bends so close that her raven curls caress Nalini’s cheek. Ma smiles at her, calls her beta, and tells her to die.
And that morning, Nalini decides it is time to listen.
***
Three years ago, Nalini decided to rent the little terrace house on Canterbury Lane purely because of the fireplace. It wasn’t anything special; the wood of the mantel and hearth were chipping, the paint peeling off. But it had, nevertheless, evoked a sort of romantic sentimentality in Nalini. She had imagined herself writing late into the night, the light from the fire reflected in the lenses of her glasses. At the time, she had still been clinging to the strained fragments of an old dream. The reality was that she rarely lit a fire, and most of her all-nighters were pulled in her matchbox-sized room, with its far more reliable, less cumbersome, portable heater.
But tonight the fireplace is lit. Nalini has allowed herself to indulge in that homey nostalgia. The flames cast orange light upon the booklet she holds in her hands. Little magic, by Nalini Chandawan—Nalini’s most recent collection of short stories, in which unexplained and impossible magic flickers briefly in and out of existence in an otherwise dreary world. Her favourite of the stories is the one which sparked the idea of the collection: one about a pair of identical twins who visit each other in their dreams. She thumbs through the booklet, landing on one of the final pages.
On the night of the Last Dream, Suju is reminded of the First: They are children, Viju and he, as they always were and perhaps always will be. They sit cross-legged in a strangely pale, kaleidoscopic space. They do nothing but stare at the other. Finally, one twin smiles and stands. He reaches out a hand to his brother and pulls him up. The boy never lets go, but his brother must leave.
In the morning, only one brother wakes up. The parents, distressed and grieving, are made more inconsolable by the fact that they cannot differentiate between the child they have lost and the one that remains. They ask him again and again for his name. But the boy does not answer. In fact, the boy will never speak again. He lost many things that day: a brother, a name, his dreams, that little hint of magic.
But determination is only a mindset, one easily overturned by instinct. Sitting in her dingy living room, throwing her stories into the fireplace, Nalini’s instincts are poised. She is consumed by the scent of smoke and burning paper, by the rigid, robotic motions of her hands and the desperate, pathetic stuttering of her heart. When it overwhelms her, she staggers to the window, unlocking the latch and taking a deep breath of fresh air. She is not her mother, smoke-scented and dark-eyed, speaking boldly and living to her truth. She cannot die without fear.
But, she reminds herself, turning to face the fireplace again, that doesn’t matter. If there was one thing Nalini is, it’s obstinate. A keeper of promises, she would drag herself screaming and crying to the end if that’s what it took to honour her mother.
Nalini returns to her efforts at the fireplace, and her stack of booklets becomes at least a third smaller than it was when she began. She picks up the next booklet, scoffing at the title and the memories it brings. Mera Jaan/My Dear. Without even opening it, she recalls the booklet’s first few lines.
My mother is cruel but has a voice of silver. In a lilting tone she will condemn the fallen women: Sylvia Plath, Rosalind Franklin, Henrietta Lacks—overwhelming talents who consistently meet the same silent end. Swallowed by a man’s greed, whittled down into brief lines in history books while their counterparts swell in success, buoyed by stolen fame.
My mother will call me endearments while offering stone-hearted advice: “Hear me now and hear me well, mera jaan. You would do better to die than to find yourself on that list.”
Written a year after Ma’s death, the story is, in reality, a poorly concealed autobiographical reflection on the tormented relationship between a mother and daughter. Plagued by images of Ma on her death bed, body small and fragile on white sheets, her once-beautiful head of raven-black curls reduced to sparse strings of grey, Nalini had written it with desperation, hoping to be freed of the memory of her mother. It hadn’t worked; still, she is steeped in memories of her mother—Ma, like the bite of bitter tea leaves lingering in water, despite the teapot having been emptied and refilled time and time again. Her ghost lurks in Nalini’s stories, her dreams, the murky recesses of the places she called home. It whispers to her and tells her about time: how it runs, unstoppable and merciless; how it steals success with passing years; how it turns women from young dreamers into old, bitter crones, hunched over balconies, killing themselves with smoke. For a while, time had driven Nalini, urging her to write with an unstoppable intensity. But now she can only register the pathetic results her efforts have amounted to—a few stray competition shortlists and prizes, a fellowship in her university years. She sees the ghost and feels nothing more than exhaustion.
That is all she feels now as she continues throwing booklets into the fireplace. The night has taken on a soft, hazy tint, not so much peaceful as it is resigned. The burning fear Nalini had felt earlier has been tamped out into cindery ashes. She wonders if the heaviness that has settled deep into her bones is what Ma felt at the end. Her mother was 56 when she died, but Nalini knows she started dying far earlier than that. Nalini wonders if Ma lay in that hospital bed, as her own blood cells betrayed her, and pondered every element of her life that had led up to her inevitable defeat, trying to track it to its beginning. Was it the day she was forced to return home to Chennai, her parents deciding to fund her younger brother’s tertiary studies over hers? Was it on her wedding day, as she stood, swathed in red silk and floral perfume, parceled away, effectively doomed from ever achieving her dreams? Or was it on her 34th birthday, when her younger brother received her dream position as a tenured professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University? Was it when her husband was promoted, given a raise and the time to sleep with young, pretty receptionists? Had she realised what it would cost her, the first time she had stolen a pack of her husband’s cigarettes, inhaled the haze, sucked in that clogging scent she despised so much? Or was this the consequence she desired? A kind of self-punishment, after she looked at her wide-eyed child and felt nothing but a horrible, intense bitterness. Maybe it’s a curse, Nalini thinks, for the women in our family to never truly make it past their thirties.
Nalini’s hand drifts to her side to take the next booklet, only to meet the uneven floor; she has not registered the last few stories she has thrown into the fireplace. She cannot stop the sharp, sudden drop she feels in her stomach. This is it—the end. In her mind she sees her next steps. Standing up and walking to the bathroom. Undressing and sliding into the bathtub. Taking the Stanley knife in hand and slitting her left wrist. She will close her eyes, she decides, because the sight of blood has always made her feel sick. She will pretend she is falling asleep, allowing herself to be lulled into darkness.
Nalini cannot move. The world has collapsed, her vision narrowing until she can see no further than the fireplace. Still it roars, not yet sated despite consuming two decades worth of her stories. Its endless hunger seems like a promise; it will not burn out until it has consumed her too. Nalini notices that the final booklet is not yet burnt through. She had thrown it carelessly, and its lower half sags away from the pile of wood and flame. The last few booklets hadn’t even been completed stories, instead containing mere fragments of untold tales. She reads it now, the last little part of her that hasn’t been destroyed.
My mother named me Nalini, lotus, a flower with roots entrenched metres below water and earth. She sought to remind me of my origins, that all beautiful things must begin and end in the dirt from which they grew. But my name didn’t stop me from being born sky-facing, from staring at the stars.
Nalini’s heartbeat echoes, loud and slow, in her ears, resounding thumps that she feels deep in her bones. Time slows to a crawl, the urgent flames made sedate and pondering. They have snatched the last corner of the final booklet and seem to progress with the feline grace of a huntress, intent on savouring its prey.
Instead, I spent much of my life stretching upwards, seeking to uproot myself and ascend, impossibly, to the sky. To join mythical constellations and dark asterisms, to carve out a space for myself alongside those of ancient monarchs, deities, spirits.
It is just Nalini and this fragment, made smaller and smaller by the flames narrowing its edges. Except it is not just her—it is every version of her that has existed: Nalini in the present, tired and haunted by her mother’s ghost; Nalini with deep, etched eye-bags, a product of full-time post-grad studies and two part-time jobs; Nalini in high school, staring out the window into space, pen tapping at her notebook. Each version different but made the same by the silent, strained ribbon of a life-old dream.
Ma sought to teach me that mortal dreams have limits, ones that cannot transcend the earth from which we bloom. But I’m afraid she failed. Perhaps even from birth I was destined a hopeless, selfish dreamer. One that would—
Contorted suddenly by the heat, the corner of the page flips up, hiding the final sentence. Nalini sees her hand reaching into the fireplace, snatching the still-burning piece of paper. She is startled by the stark pain, frantically attempts to tamp out the flames with the pads of her fingers, breathes short, repetitive breaths. Most of the booklet has been reduced to crumbly ash that stains her fingertips or is made unreadable by burn marks, but the last line remains. Nalini reads it aloud: “One that would rather die than lose the chance to live among the stars, to be admired by a rare sky-facing baby, to become the object of their helpless, obsessive devotion.”
Nalini’s fingers, tinged red by heat, sting with an intensity that makes her feel as if she has been shaken awake from a dream. Half-dazed, she looks around, aware that she needs to go to the sink, run her hands under cold water, clean up the mess around the fireplace and tamp out the flames. But instead she sees the strange, rarely noticed little details of her imperfect home. The irregular, misaligned stone tiles of the floor. The fourth leg of the dining table, slightly shorter than the rest, which always makes it wobble under the weight of a meal. The slight crack in the plaster ceiling, extending all the way from one corner to the centre. Her mother’s ghost lurks somewhere behind her, floating in her house-robe, for once remaining silent. For the second time that day, Nalini feels herself filled with a sudden rush of fear. She has the confusing realisation that her existence is suspended in temporality, subject to brief flickers of emotions, the slightest shifts in choices. And because in the end, she is still tired, still mourning, still unable to register the immensity of her decisions, Nalini brings the paper to her mouth, made dry by heat and breath and air, and presses tight. She lets it disintegrate against her tongue, crumbling bitterly, the only truth she has ever known.