Hands Like Trees by Sabyasachi Nag

Author:Sabyasachi Nag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Cultural Heritage, Women Authors, Literary, Family Life
ISBN: 9781553806875
Publisher: Ronsdale Press
Published: 2023-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

A few months after we returned from Calcutta, the school wanted to talk to Mom. No one’s home, I had lied earlier. So they sent a letter. For an entire evening, I saw it on the console table, the school emblem on the white cover, standing out among the flyers and other peanut-coloured envelopes carrying bills. I knew what the letter was about. I wanted to destroy it without anyone noticing, but Mom got to it. She called Dad. She had no choice.

* * *

I wasn’t nervous, just numb, when I heard my parents had been summoned to school. I remember, the meeting at the principal’s office lasted the entire forty-five minutes of science class. Halfway through the meeting, I noticed the vice-principal walking in to fetch my homeroom teacher, who took away the box that contained all the binders with my drawings. It would be a shock to them. I knew.

I knew that because Dad didn’t live with us anymore, he’d blame everything on Mom. For weeks, I’d been having a hard time even being seated at any one place in school. No one cared. I’d see something, a switch would get flipped setting off a reaction, shutting me down completely. I’d start shivering, pimples would break out all over my skin, my heartbeats would quicken. It was like something had invaded my body and got me all worked up. A hand hammering away at my chest. Breathless, I moved around just to get the hand off my body; get the hand off the hammering and nailing and clawing; get the hand away from a black box, empty and waiting. I moved from the class to the café, from the café to the library, from the library to the gym, all the while searching for an exit door, out of the gym, out of the school, out of my body. Soon I was in the parking lot, watching cars pass by the street out front. No longer in control of my body, with no sense of time, no real memory of how I got there, no idea what I’d do next. Not until someone got me back.

Usually, it was the vice-principal. In class, I’d follow along for a bit, then fall off the grid again, staring blankly at the open page of the book on the table. The print on the page converged into a black mass—the shape of an animal, or an animal tongue, the shape of an animal hand—hairy and fluid like a snake in the grass, and I knew it was just a dream. I’d hear whispers: I won’t tell anyone. I know it’s a secret. I know how to keep a secret. I couldn’t shake it off. So I started drawing them out just to stop thinking about those hands—in different positions, doing different things—clawing, digging, scraping, touching. Caught up in the act of drawing hands, I’d become free. No longer suffocated. No longer breathless.

When the meeting ended, I remember feeling light in my head, almost weightless.

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