Names of the Women by Jeet Thayil

Author:Jeet Thayil [Thayil, Jeet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473584273
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-03-24T18:30:00+00:00

13

I felt the nails go in and I heard the sound they made inside my bones. I felt the parch on my lips and I asked for water and though no sound left me someone soaked a sponge with sour wine and put it on a sprig of hyssop and held it to my mouth. The blood in my eyes made it difficult to see but I knew it was you, Mary. I knew it was you and I sipped at the sponge, not to ease the pain, no wine would ease it, but to be fully awake in the breaking and to know the shape the nails made inside me. Below me I saw you, Mary. And I saw my mother, whom I had set at a great distance from me. I saw that my true disciples had never left me. Mary my mother and Mary of Magdala. I heard you ask the watchers if you could give me a drop more of the sour wine to moisten the cracks on my lips and I heard them tell you no and I heard the breath that left you when they said you would be taken from the hill by force. What I said then I said for you, to say to the twelve brothers of weakness who left me in my hour of need. Write, Mary. I say to them it is not finished, nor will it be finished until the dry lands become water and the water becomes dry and the battle rages between the usurers and the usurpers, until it rages on the plains and the hills and the floods come again. I say to them to heed as the battle is already upon them. The lure is upon all men. I cannot speak more, for my body has gone away from me. And then you came, Mary, with a sponge to clean my legs and put a drop of oil on my feet as you had done in the life where I was whole, even as some among the watchers commanded you to stop and I told you to stop also, for I want you to listen as I say to you that forgiveness is the recourse of the weak and we are not weak and we must not forgive.

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