Page 64 - Raffles09_March2022

“They trust you,” said A. He looked, as usual, away from her.
At what point in time she began to feel less alone in his company she couldn’t say. What she knew was that all these days and weeks had become a single still moment, and that the stillness was situated somewhere near him: it was to him she turned under the eerie light of coloured parachute flares, or on cold nights, when the fog stood so clear she could discern its molecular structure. One dawn a tree was hewn loose by a blast, and set to somersaulting across razed fields: there was something humanlike in how it rolled, slapstick and shocked pathos in one, and when it suddenly veered in their direction he put his hand, palm-down, on the ground between them, equidistant between their thighs, and for the first time in her life she felt risk.
And she saw that he saw her see.
The rest of that day, she made a point of working apart from him. She went to the hospital with her dog (for it had become her habit to adopt strays wherever she went) and, before she could begin her usual menial aid, was drawn into a dispute about rice brought in by a patient’s relatives and appropriated by a doctor. She was vested with strange authority that morning, and they begged her to arbitrate. Looking at their drawn faces, she found herself diverted by a pulsing lambency beneath: it was as though she were seeing with fresh eyes, seeing their inner selves, which were, each one, luminous, sensuous, infinitely assailable. She felt a tenderness towards them akin to what she’d felt when she’d first looked into this dog’s eyes and seen zero potential for violence. It wouldn’t last long in this world. She would love it while it did.
Love. Later, down at the stream, she beheld her face reflected in a wet black rock. It had been polished by countless slaps of laundered linen and cloth. She too was aglow, she saw, and she was beautiful: she could accept this fact without resistance now, the way a hollow of slackwater accepts a bather’s body, the way she now accepted the fact of her feeling for A. Her mother’s love: hearsay love, assumptive love, never shown nor said; the love of misanthropic French writers frothed in lack and hurt. No, let it be A, and his abstract love, although the thought that he might not love her – as her – though who was she? – even a little bit was destroying. As though in sympathy, her dog started to tremble, and then vaulted up at the same speed as her head was shoved down, she was underwater, swallowing water, the water weirdly quickly warming, and when she lifted her head out of the water it was to a world drowning in fire, muted and blurred, the air hellish orange, the surface of the river deranged with smoke and overhead trees spraying sparks and it was then she caught
sight of A, only a few paces away, chasing her dog up the bank, and before any of it could register they both hissed brightly into flame. She forced her head underwater and – even through water – saw them crumpled in the moving heart of fire and found that she was no longer afraid.
***
What followed was dream. She survived, though her head suffered horrific burns, she quit school and joined the revolution and despite her youth rose quickly, for she was fearless, committed, careless of her own life. She travelled the land, wearing out pair after pair of sandals cut from disused tyres. She tied a red-and- white krama across her forehead as though to accentuate her face’s disfigurement. Eventually she was given command of a small group of guerrillas, and they swept like a cleansing wind through the country. She became a figure of legend, a thorned sugar palm leaf in her right hand.
And then the revolution succeeded. And it restarted time, setting the year to zero. And it rebirthed and renamed the nation. On its new flag, the great temple was still golden, and when finally it was raised in the capital she gazed up and – for the first time in a long time – thought about her father. She recalled his letters, long lost, and then his voice, retelling the story of Muchukunda: how after he achieves what the gods themselves cannot, triumphing – after a year of all-consuming, unceasing battle – over the hosts of demons, the gods grant him one boon. The universe entire lies open before him. But the moment anything was mine it changed its nature, and became as a burning fire. He is tired, that is all he knows – and all he wants is sleep. Sleep absolute, undisturbed. So that whosoever dares awaken him should be instantly reduced to ashes.
It was like that, yes. These five years passing like a single sequence in dream, just as one second in heaven for Muchukunda was a year on earth, such that now, here, high up on this victorious balcony, she awoke only to find spread out before her a dead city – a city she had killed – and beyond it a deadlands, all long evacuated, alluviated by the past.
She took off her krama, tossed it away. It didn’t float on the wind, nor did it crease her eyes with its dwindling. It dropped like a sod into dirt and disappeared.
***
62 RAFFLES MAGAZINE
− EMOTION −