Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das

Author:Indrapramit Das
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780765386557
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3. Notes on Maturation

The second time I saw Guru Yama, it was to identify his wife and return her to her mother.

I met the widowed mother, who requested I not include her name, at the Barista on Lansdowne. I bought her a plain coffee. As I handed her the cup, I marvelled at the fact that we can still enjoy the privilege of overpriced lattes and mochas while black government vans roam the state for the risen dead. Every time I saw those vans, some shining with the words WEST BENGAL UNDEAD QUARANTINE fresh-painted on them, I stopped to wonder whether I was remembering something from a movie or actually looking at something real. The cafe was relatively quiet—just a few afternoon customers chatting amid the burbling of espresso machines. But elsewhere in the city, people were striking and rioting to throw stones and claim their own religions and ideologies as responsible or not responsible for this cosmic prank. That very day, there had been a march on Prince Anwar Shah Road, by South City Mall, with fundamentalists of one or many stripes demanding that movies filled with immoral violence and sexuality be removed from the mall’s multiplex immediately in order to end God’s wrathful plague of the waking dead. The puritanical thrive in apocalypses.

The mother is a Hindi teacher at a small school. She took one sip of her coffee out of politeness. I had to ask her, after apologizing for doing so, “Did you recognize your daughter on TV that day?” She looked like she was out of breath or keeping down vomit. After a moment, she nodded. She did recognize her daughter. Of course she did.

I could understand the rest without her saying anything more. Who would want to acknowledge to themselves that their missing daughter was on TV, on the news, in real life, a walking corpse? That was too many impossibilities to deal with. I couldn’t bear to think what this woman, with her greying hair in a dishevelled bun, wearing an innocuous blue salwar kameez that made her look like any one of my high school teachers, was going through. I felt sick with her, the coffee acrid in my chest. Having had an abortion during college—one of the wisest decisions I’ve ever made—I wanted to say I knew how she felt. But remembering the brutal, almost physical depression of that distant time only furthered my remove from this woman, who had seen her adult daughter walking across the mud of the Hooghly naked as she had been in the first moments of her life, but dead.

I touched the mother’s hand, and she gasped as if terrified. We left the cafe in silence, her cup still full, cold on the table. My heart was racing just from being in the presence of such horror. Outside, the late winter sunlight did nothing to calm it. Thankfully, there were no marchers or black vans on Lansdowne. If we could forget for a moment, it might have felt like any other day in Kolkata, in that bygone world where the dead stayed dead.

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