CW: Graphic Violence

Amma had always been superstitious. She would never allow anyone to clip their nails in the house, only in the backyard. If you dropped anything, you would have to touch it and bring your fingers to your eyes – especially books, as knowledge is precious and one should never disrespect that. She would even refuse to hand Arul a knife or scissors or any sharp object directly without placing it on another surface first in fear of invoking the severing of their relationship. A mother and her son are forever inseparable, she would say. The list is endless. Arul never understood any of these inhibitions of hers, but he knew to never question what his mother would say. When Arul was not even four years old, he had closed the door forty-five minutes after Amma had hand-painted the rangoli for Lord Rama’s return home. Arul knew nothing of gods then, nor of what a rangoli was, only that the pattern on the floor was beautiful enough that Amma could be a skilled artist if she really wanted to be. When Amma had found the door closed, she had not only immediately opened it, but had smashed open every window and glass surface on the front facing side of the house and set forth to pray in hysteric murmurs to Lord Rama until midnight.

Arul went to bed starving that night, as did his father and Amma. When Arul was nineteen, he still did not know who Lord Rama was, but he knew that whenever he saw a rangoli out in front of any door in the house, he would be the last person to shut it. When he was 19, he had a girlfriend, Isha, who he had met at a bar with his friends one night in north London. She was also Indian, with skin so dark it straddled the dim purple lighting they met under, and she was beautiful. He doesn’t remember much about that night except for the drunken sex in the backseat of his car – Amma’s car. Arul dropped Isha off near a train station stop the next morning and slipped his number in her phone case while she wasn’t looking, hoping she would ring him, then sped home to Amma waiting outside. She rushed him out of the car before driving off, noticing the used condom Arul had forgotten to pick up in his haste. Over the next few years they continued meeting like this, in secret – seeing one another only when moonlight could touch them, making love in the clammy backseat of Amma’s car, doing whatever they could to divorce themselves from the speculation that would ensue in their communities had they been sighted. In these two years, Amma had collected four used condoms and around three-hundred loose strands of Isha’s rich, black hair, enough to form a fistful.

It was raining the night Arul knew he was in love with Isha. It had been exactly three years since he first met Isha in that dingy pub by Islington. Amma usually slept at nine-thirty, so he would leave at ten o’clock just to be sure she was asleep and return by morning. But Amma did not sleep at all that night. Arul paced around his room for hours, waiting for her to go to bed, grabbing milk from the living room every thirty minutes to see if she was still awake.

“If you want any more milk, bring me a cow and you can drink it from the teat if you so please,” she said on his fourth reentry. Her body was growing frail, and she could not stand for more than thirty minutes at a time. Greyness had begun to lick the roots of her hair, and her skin sagged ever so slightly. Wrinkles ridging her face like dirtied tiles.

“Why are you still awake?” Arul asked her.

“I cannot sleep in this rain.” A slight unease had permeated the air. 

“You can go. I won’t stop you.” She did not even look at him as she spoke. Arul grabbed the keys and drove out, manic.

Isha noticed the sweat forming all over Arul’s neck before he did himself. His hair was damp, he spoke with a parchedness to his voice, his hands felt dry despite the pools of sweat that had formed all over him. Isha had told him of the stipend her investment company had granted her for housing near central London, and they agreed to move out within three weeks. The rain had stopped during the night, but Arul knew his mother was still awake. He didn’t need the lights at home still burning away to know that she was waiting.

“You cannot marry her,” she spoke with that same metallic tone as Arul walked into the kitchen.

“What do you know about her? When was she born?” She asked, entirely still. “What are you saying?”

“When was she born?” 

“September 4th!” “What year?”

“98! Why the fuck does it matter?” “What time?” There was a pause.

“Are you serious?”

“Watch your tongue. What time was she born?” 

Arul knew that his mother was interested in astrology, but he didn’t know the extent of it. It wasn’t like the astrology his friends in high school or the white women at work would chat about –whether Paul was a Gemini rising and Leo Moon, or whether a Scorpio and Sagittarius could ever make it work. Amma had a splay of files on the kitchen counter, pages of charts and circular models subdivided into specific degrees based on birth time, birthright, caste, class, profession, education. There was one folder on the very edge of the counter with Isha’s birth time, location, previous relationship history, the same for each of her parents and siblings.

“She may be an illegitimate child.”

“What kind of background check is this?” Arul was screaming at this point. Amma finally looked at him and hardened her voice.

“You cannot marry her.” She stormed past him towards the nearest kitchen knife and held it against her throat.

“Tell me you won’t marry her.” Arul stared as she said this, dumbfounded. Applying slight pressure, she felt the base of her neck lap up fresh blood. He was crying now, hysterically, and rushed towards his mother to grasp the knife from her. Frantically, she threw the knife across the kitchen, evading his touch, and sank to the floor. She would not let him touch it.

Arul moved in with Isha just three days later. The first few weeks were difficult. He would wake up to find Isha sleeping on the couch in the living room – she just needed one night where he wouldn’t whisper constantly, or sweat through their pillows or wrangle the sheets. Other nights, he felt Isha’s nails glide across his neck, only to suddenly scratch and claw deep into his skin, suffocating him to the edge of lifelessness before he would wake up, clutching his neck, entirely unharmed. He could never sleep for more than three hours at a time, four if he was lucky. The first time they actually had sex, Isha’s eyes appeared almost light green, her skin lifted several shades, it even felt textured, as if she had aged years within seconds. Arul went to the bathroom and made up an excuse about feeling sick all of a sudden.

He never told her the truth. What would he do if his girlfriend found out he was crazy? What if they broke up, and he was kicked out of the apartment and forced to return home to Amma? What if he would sleep at home and wake up to find his mother hovering above him – would she hold him dearly, or grasp at his neck? He could not go back, he had decided, and he would do everything he needed to to make sure Isha never knew. Within a month, he could control the tremors at night, he sweat much less if he just dehydrated himself hours before bed, he kept the apartment unnervingly clean, made regular date plans, made enough new friends and kept up with old ones,enough that Isha wouldn’t feel suffocated by his presence. He got used to the sex too. He closed his eyes for months, burying himself into Isha’s neck, telling her that he loved her scent, woody and earthen, that whatever perfume she was wearing reminded him so much of the women in Kolkata where he spent the first four years of his life. Though he never explicitly mentioned his mother to her, they both knew it was who he was pondering when he smelt her. The sex became electric, tinged by the humidity of Indian air in the monsoons, a passion that was lathered in sweat and stickiness and unbridled heat.

Amma called six months after he left. He had watched the phone ring for fourteen minutes, more than forty missed calls. When he finally picked up, there was silence for several seconds before Amma spoke.

“Arul..? My baby Arul?” Arul felt his throat close up. Before he knew it, his mother was spiraling. She told him that she was sorry, she missed her beautiful son and she didn’t know what to do, she had burnt the horoscopes and all information about Isha and woke up one night with her own body doused in alcohol with a lit up match and she nearly dropped it before swallowing the match whole and sobbing relentlessly saying she wished her baby boy would come home. She began to paint the rangoli on the front step every day hoping he would return, not Lord Rama. She never cared about him to begin with and all she wanted was her baby boy back. She even made him all his favorite sweets like the laddu he liked and buckets of gulab jamun. When she realized he wouldn’t reply, she began to lose composure.

“Is it Isha… are you with that bitch now?” 

Arul hung up the phone and blocked her number. 

He started to see her everywhere. The waitress at a restaurant for just a couple seconds; a taxi driver at a stop light, the receptionist at his dentist over the phone. It was her voice, Amma’s voice, that’s what it was. He thought that maybe she had killed the receptionist and found his dentist to try and let Arul listen to her voice one more time.

Then it grew worse; everyone started having her hair, everyone’s eyes light green. The type of green on trees that hung lethargically from the sky sweating itself onto Kolkatan soil in the 90s. A type of green that was infectious, plague-like. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he drove home and strangled her, watching her green eyes pop out of her skull. Or if he went home for chai to catch up and spiked the milk with just enough bleach to watch her spasm on the floor before him. Perhaps he could douse her bed in the leftover whisky his dad left before he passed and set her aflame. He would do it at 2:45 in the morning, so she wouldn’t be awake. 

After two more years, Arul had proposed to Isha, and she said yes. The two of them knew that neither of them were truly in love with each other; she barely smiled when he had shown her the ring, but he was the only love that she knew. Arul kept his eyes closed now whenever he could, and he was used to seeing the exact same face and body in every person he met, though he was not sure he even remembered what she even looked like back then, years ago. He often wondered what she looked like now. 

They had planned the wedding quickly, it would happen in a few months with just Isha’s immediate family and close friends, and they would do it in West London at the cheapest church they could find. Isha’s family was catholic, so they insisted on this. There was no need to go to India for a wedding neither family would attend. Three days before the wedding, Isha found out she was pregnant. The two of them slept on separate beds that night.

***

Arul had not seen Isha in three days now. He was pacing frantically, unnerved at the fact that she was missing but shaking because what if Amma had found out? He shut the thought out of his head, and on the fourth day he went to the police station to file a missing person’s report. A week later, the police reported that her body was found, albeit lifeless. Officers had found the body in West London,  a few streets away from the smallest Church there, with a slit throat and her eyes gouged out, replaced with glass eyes bearing light green lenses. Her uterus was extracted from her body and in that empty hole in her stomach was placed a lock of her own hair. Using her blood, the murderer, currently unknown, had painted a pattern on the ceiling above her dead body that was unlike anything the police had seen in prior cases. Arul, finally, had to return home.

At the base of the front door of his house, now dead silent, was a rangoli just like the one he had seen etched into the ceiling of Isha’s workplace that morning, painted entirely in black. He walked in, leaving the front door open. The first thing Arul noticed was that the house, besides being almost pitch black inside, smelt of damp rain. It was so dark he could not even identify the silhouettes of any doors or wall paintings, or any ceiling lights. The only thing he observed was a candescent red light that radiated

from the very end of the corridor leading into the kitchen. He called out into the corridor only to find his voice swallowed entirely by the walls. Hollowed, he walked forward into the kitchen, entirely calm. He was ready to see her.

Lay on the floor of the kitchen was a woman with light wavy hair, wearing a black lace dress. Her breasts were clearly visible, and her figure jutted out at her stomach, brimming with life. She was pregnant.

“Isha?” Arul called out, again hearing nothing. The walls had swallowed his sounds, and he started screaming her name over and over again until she turned to reveal light green eyes, olive skin that looked as if it was licked by the sun. Beauty itself was immortalized in her – but it was not Isha.

Scattered on the floor were lockets of withering hair, as black as the rangoli from the front door, and precisely four condoms with rotten clumps of jaundiced semen inside of them. Inside most of them, except one. The woman before him caught his gaze and pressed her hand against her stomach, oozing with birth. On the button of her stomach was the center of another rangoli, etched into her with blood. The room reeked of urine, as he saw bottles upon bottles of yellow fluid dispersed throughout the kitchen. Arul felt a delirium tread his veins. The room was getting warmer and he started to lose sensation in his feet, as if pricked by a thousand needles until all the blood had seeped out and he was standing on his knees – that’s where he felt the most pressure. Right against his kneecap, he could feel his patella cracking with each second going by.

He was suddenly aware of a hotness melting down his face, boiling at his eyes. Arul, wiping the thick honeyed substance from his cheeks, stared at his fingertips. In the beetroot light, now bleeding throughout the house, all he saw was a streak of sticky blackness across his hands. Screaming now, he scratched at his face and closed his eyes, hoping the hot blood that was pouring forth would congeal and seal them shut forever – in vain, for each time he tried to close his eyes it felt as though he was staring directly into the sun. Amma bore a smile hiding her teeth, crying the same honeyed tears as Arul, reaching to him with her arms outstretched. Shaking, he kicked her down to the floor and grabbed the nearest kitchen knife, slitting his arms. Entirely rabid now, Amma was lapping the blood like nectar, ensuring nothing was lost. Her baby bump grew, as if she was entering labor then and there. Debilitated by the scene before him, Arul was now conscious of the numbingness of the heat in the room. As if he had been led into a furnace, he was depleted, falling to the floor and barely clutching the bloodied knife. Amma dropped down, reaching out to him with her malnourished arms, whispering imperceivable chants in his ears. His eyes were slowly giving up on him, his body finally feeling slumber wash over itself. As she closed her arms around his emaciated frame, Arul felt the weight of her emblazoned breasts sink him further into the floor. 

Amma grabbed his empty hand and pressed it against her stomach.

“Do you feel it? Do you feel his kick? It’s a boy,” she whispered. Arul could feel his heart barely beating, as if dragging itself through quicksand. He fondled her stomach, clawing for a kick or a beat or any sign of life at all, but he felt nothing. In his barren state of mind, he considered mustering all the energy he had left to batter his mother’s stomach, to slaughter the embryo she purported to have conceived. But what did it matter anymore? Whether there was a child or not, he would still have Amma. She would never leave, and she was all he had left. Before his mother could reach out to his other hand, Arul dropped the knife. There was no blood left in his eyes, nor sweat on his head. He stared blankly at Amma, and sank into her.