Everything Was Good-Bye by Gurjinder Basran

Author:Gurjinder Basran
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pintail
Published: 2012-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

2.6

I crouched down on the small wooden board that Masi had covered with red silk, my eyes fixed on the intricate and colourful rangoli design she’d created on the ground in front of me. My sisters held a canopied chunni over my head, while my mother knelt by my side and tied a red string around my wrist. She curled and stretched her lips with each twist of a knot until she knew that no one could undo what had been done. Settling into her own satisfied smile, she passed the ball of red yarn to my sisters, who tied a length on all those present.

My mother called to Masi to say that she couldn’t remember the words to the old songs. Masi sang in her place and my mother strained to find the tune as she scooped the turmeric paste into her palm and smeared it across my forehead and cheeks, cleansing me in ritual preparation for my wedding. She dipped her hands into a bowl of flour and wiped them over my face, pushing the paste into dough, until it fell away, leaving my skin with a smooth saffron stain. My sisters and cousins joined in and rubbed the paste into my arms and legs. Aman stood by, ready to slap any hands that got too close to my hair.

“Watch the hair, she just had it done,” she kept saying. “For God’s sake, the hair… it has to stay like this until the wedding,” she said, occasionally dousing me in a spray of vo5. “Okay, only a few more minutes. Meenaneeds to have her bath before the photographer gets here,” she pleaded, all the while dispatching my cousins on various errands.

In the months before the wedding, I’d lived by the weekly checklists and colour-coded calendars that she’d created for me, each task a new distraction. Every Sunday she had come over and assessed what was left to do, pacing back and forth like a drill sergeant strategizing about colour schemes or planning the next week’s shopping excursion, in which we methodically replaced every item I owned with something new. By now nothing remained of what I had owned or who I had been. Tomorrow I’d leave my mother’s home with a new life wrapped in Cellophane, packed into a series of suitcases or stuffed into the Louis Vuitton trunk that Sunny’s mother had bought for me. When my mother cleaned my closet of its contents, the last thing to go was my box of journals. I came in to find her sitting on the carpet cross-legged, staring at the stack, fingering the print in each one, her eyes troubled as if she had deciphered the meaning. It was then that I knew I couldn’t keep them or leave them behind, so I loaded the box into my car and drove to the beach, where I read each one, flipping and ripping pages, tearing them up until only bits of paper hung from the threaded binding. I placed them into a paper bag and lay them on a float of driftwood, which I carried into the water.

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