Deaf Heaven by Pinki Virani

Author:Pinki Virani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Bhagya is cleaning her puja area’s little silver diya, carefully sponging out the black residue from its concave centre, where the cotton wick burns in the ghee. She speaks aloud in her empty rental, ‘This black stuff, my dear fair Uhmarikahn alias Umreekan dumpy, is soot. What you pronounced as being too simple to wear at a wedding – only because I do not like looking like I own a gold-mine, irrespective of whether I do or don’t – was a suit, a salwar kameez dupatta suit. So you may please stick your soot right into where the sun does not shine.’

She checks herself. ‘Ada kadavuley, oh God, theriyama sollitean mannichudu, becoming shameless like those people, that too in front of the gods, I didn’t realize what I was saying, forgive me please.’ She puts both her hands up to her face, lightly taps her cheeks in reproach, ‘Thapu, thapu, thapu’, mistake-mistake, and lights the diya. Then she picks it up and slowly begins moving the diya, pausing the flame at each of her favourites in the puja pantheon, with a small thank you and a brief prayer.

To Ganesha, remover of obstacles and benefactor of good luck, ‘Thank you for bringing me back home safely.’ To Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, ‘Thank you for my job and the courage it gives me, I beseech you to keep me blessed.’ To Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, ‘Thank you too for the job and for all the reading and thinking you guide me to do.’ She pauses before continuing, ‘And thank you for the insight that one’s world should not narrow into nothing meaningful the way it has for those women.’ To Venkateshwara, lord of the seven hills at Tirumala – the richest of all pilgrim destinations in the subcontinent – ‘You saw what happened there with those people, you also saw that I did not react correctly. I will have to meet them again every now and then, I suppose. Please grant me your inscrutability, that expression you wear of the meaningfully rich, and from within, so that whenever I am faced with poisonous people such as those, my face and me mirror the inside of you.’

She sets the diya back in its place, folds her hands and closes her eyes in momentary meditation. Petrifying-red ribbons dance within her mind’s eye, Bhagya tries to concentrate, the ribbons multiply, turn snakey. She quickly opens her eyes, opens tiny boxes of white vibhuti powder and deep crimson kumkumam, applies them discretely on her forehead, small red dot, below which slight white dash. There has never been a day in Bhagya’s work life when she left her house without her dots and dashes. She gently extinguishes the diya’s flame by waving her hand, over it and towards her, picks up her handbag, her tiffin box, her keys, locks the door behind her and zooms off on her scooty.

It has been a few days since Bhagya returned to Chennai and work. Her husband has not said when he will return, she is not asking either.

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