A Lamentation, While Full

Matriarch.
Mappilai Samba, the bridegroom’s rice, soaked in water. Ground with a slurry of liquid between two stones. A red ochre-tinted batter, smooth and pliable.

There was a story you told yourself about what happened on the day of your great-grandmother’s death.

Ritual mourners and revelers danced, beat their chests, flung themselves around the open courtyard of her house, around her corpse sheathed in parrot-green silk, around the makeshift wooden throne on which she was seated. Your emotions crashed against the sobs of the oppari, the pounding array of the marana gaana drums, the currents of flower petals, the liquor and ganja-soaked haze of her great-grandchildren, of her grandchildren, of her children from an assortment of men—for she had pledged fealty only to a single husband, but not to a single bed.

A too-quick moment, a wedge of carelessness. Perhaps that was when your great-grandmother slid under your skin, slid under the corded ropes of your musculature. Perhaps that was when she pulled apart the jewel-red slab of your liver and relaxed into its slick warmth. Perhaps it was because you did not arrange your face into an expression of grief, choosing to sip from a thimbleful of boredom instead.

Perhaps that was the story you told yourself.

A boy, loved from afar.
Batter ladled into muslin-lined pans. A swell of newly-steamed idlis. Blush-colored, fragrant.

The days smeared into her memories. You were an insignificant great-grandchild, certainly not her favorite, not her least-favorite either. Ordinary, routine, expendable. There were aspirations that you had once claimed as your own, once held within cupped palms—the cool logic of statistical data, helices of numbers, spiraled equations.

After she moved into the chalk blue antechamber of your portal vein, taking up space as only she knew how to do, as only she ever did, her voice insistently scraped against your skull. Your aspirations dulled into fog.

Night after night, you fell asleep into her dreams, into her cravings, the smoke from her suruttu cigars wisping through your esophagus. On waking, the sweat-slicked faces of her lovers scattered into pearlescent clouds.

I invited someone, she rasped one morning. For you.

In your left ear, a perilymph sea. Gleaming waves eddied against your ear’s walls, rushing into the loops and spirals of its bony labyrinth, forming endolymphatic tidal pools in its wake. This was where you felt his presence first—the tiny splashes of his footsteps echoing in the passageways of your cochlea.

Many years ago, after receiving a series of kindnesses from an upperclassman at school, you tripped, bent, fell face-forwards into your feelings for him. Kathir, you mouthed his name, felt its sharp cadences rip your throat. Kathir, you’d sigh yourself to sleep. You kept these feelings hidden, nestled carefully under the folds of your indifference. Kathir with the astonishing eyelashes and the astonishing calves, who would have never looked at someone such as yourself—a diminutive, funnel-chested boy.

And yet, there he was. He raked his fingers across the sponge of your vestibular duct as he walked through its corridors. Your ears bled, scabbed over, bled again.

I didn’t know you were dead. I’m sorry, you whispered one day. I loved you, I love—your voice trailed off.

Kathir seemed to pause.

I know, he said simply, his low murmur filming over your eyelids, the skin on the back of your neck. I’m sorry too.

And at night, he was gone. Your ears rang with tinnitus in his absence; a familiar, comforting song.

Enemy cousins.
Blistering idlis fed into a sevainaazhi. Long strands of rice noodles disentangle themselves from the sieve.

Vaguely-formed cousins teemed around the knobs of your femurs, like ravenous aphids. They skidded down each shaft; tearing through the petal-soft musculature that clung to the uneven ridges of your linea aspera. Your thighs itched for an entire week.

My cousins are all alive, you finally said, in exhaustion. Who are you people?

A warning swell rippled against your abdomen. They’re my cousins, your great-grandmother answered. It is not your concern.

A momentary calm washed through you.  The word concern bounced around and clattered to a standstill within the hollow citadel of your body. When your great-grandmother had been alive, you wondered if she had known your father, your father’s father, your name. As its intervertebral discs clicked softly into place, your spinal column began to shift and turn in anger. You finally sat upright with the shining beacon of purpose, of what needed to be done.

Bounty.
Jaggery. Black peppercorns. Desiccated Coconut. Woven rice noodles in pastel hues, spun into idiyappams.

The voices of your great-grandmother and her cousins keened through the pores of your forehead, your cheeks, wrists. A frenetic pulsing hammered across your limbs, threatening to split your skin open into two papery halves.

Holding your jaw in a firm edge, you toiled in the kitchen as you readied the dishes, melting misshapen cones of jaggery into a deep, golden liquid—a slurry poured over steaming idiyappams, topped with glistening raisins and cashews. The first batch was always sweet.

For the second batch—always savory—you sautéed black peppercorns, birds-eye chili halves, and wisps of desiccated coconut in cold-pressed sesame oil, poured over another steaming pile of idiyappams.

And now, the meal.

Untying the lacy knots of the rice noodles, you consumed each strand with methodical precision—your fingertips sticky with a hot, pungent sweetness. Voices softened into silence as you sated your hunger, your great-grandmother’s, your familial lesions in need of tending.

Your stomach bloats. You felt no sensation, heard no sound, except the food sliding into your throat, your hands scraping against the plate.

© 2021 M. L. Krishnan

About the Author

M. L. Krishnan originally hails from the coastal shores of Tamil Nadu, India. She is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Paper Darts, Sonora Review, Quarterly West, The Minnesota Review, Zócalo Public Square and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter as @emelkrishnan.