Crow’s feet
The flurry of rushing bodies, like a swarm of bees, absorbed me. The Kolkata airport rang with panicked buzzing, overpowering the lilting voice announcing flight delays over the intercom. As we moved through immigration, there were clumps of people trying to skirt their way to the front, contrasting the orderly single-file lines I was used to. Only my Ma’s small palm on my head, smoothing down my hair, was able to ground me. When we reached the front of the line, the immigration officer conversed with my mother in rolling tongues, Bengali flowing out of both of them with ease. But when she looked at me, she spoke in accented broken English.
•••
My uncle waited for us among a crowd of other family members, friends and lovers. The first thing I spotted when he came into vision was his receding hairline. Standing a head taller than the rest of the crowd, his long hair was pulled into a low ponytail that magnified his widow’s peak. Ma’s pace quickened until she was engulfed in his arms. I watched as she crumpled against him, as he dug his face into her now greasy, unkempt hair and they breathed together. When they finally broke apart, he put a firm hand on my shoulder and though his eyes looked tired, he gave me a warm smile.
“Kemon acho?”
“I’m alright Mamu, just tired after the flight.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the wide expanse of his forehead, the wispy light gray hairs that fell onto it and seemed to move in slow motion when he laughed at something Ma said, something I couldn’t quite understand. Had it always been that thin? He grabbed the handle of my bulky suitcase out of my hand and before I could protest, he began to weave through the thick mass of people around us with a rehearsed ease. I was only propelled forward by the faint pressure of my Ma’s hand at my lower back. She kept her palm on the small of my back like I could slip away any second.
We passed businessmen with mustaches that looked like thick, dark caterpillars resting on their upper lips, old women who wore their hair in inky braids that lined their spines, their pudgy stomachs poking out from under their saree blouses, teenagers in skinny jeans and t-shirts from the Gap, embracing their friends after a long journey home. When a strong, stout man with a gruff voice and a luggage cart in his hands shouted after us, strangling soft-tongued Rs and Os that lived in my family’s mouth into something sharp and ugly, no one turned their head. My family’s steps did not falter, but I couldn’t help but look back every few feet to stare as he yelled at passenger after passenger and not one of them listened.
•••
This was my first time visiting the Kolkata house after Dida had passed. As my Ma, Mamu, Mami, cousin Ani and I huddled around the dining table, I was struck by the lack of white noise that usually emanated from her old radio. The faint buzzing that painted the background of my young childhood memories was gone. I didn’t cry. Just continued to scoop steaming rice and fish with my fingers and into my mouth. I let my fingertips burn from its heat, and sucked on them lightly with each bite in my attempts to ease the pain.
•••
I was six years old and pressed up against my Dida on her bed. Dadu sat on his wood chair next to the window with a cigarette in his hand, blowing out thin streams of smoke that billowed around him like an embrace. He rocked back and forth in his seat, one of its legs so worn down from wood rot and time that it basically functioned like a rocking chair. Dida’s radio was set to her favorite station, old Bengali songs that soothed me even if I couldn’t understand what they meant. We lay there together under a blanket of stillness, her arm only moving to adjust the knobs of her radio when bursts of static punctured through. I fell asleep to the smell of burning tobacco and the light ticking of wood hitting the floor against the radio’s soft melodies.
•••
“Rina-Didi, did you get your period yet?”
“Yeah, I got the first one a couple months ago.”
“Wow,” Ani said, in awe, “I still haven’t gotten mine.”
“That’s okay, it kind of sucks.”
“You’re so cool.”
The adults had sent us to Ani’s room after dinner, saying they needed time to have a ‘grown-up talk.’ I wanted to protest that I was already thirteen, basically a grown-up myself, but Ma’s eyes looked so tired that I decided it wasn’t worth it. And anyway, Ani was still only ten and hadn’t even gotten her period yet, so she definitely wasn’t ready for something like that.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” Ani asked.
“Probably Dida.”
“Oh.”
“I think Ma is sad we couldn’t come for the cremation, but she wasn’t able to take time off from work in time. That’s why Papa couldn’t come this time either.” I’d never seen my Ma cry as hard as she did when she got that fateful call from Mamu. It was even worse than when Dadu passed away a few years before. I stayed in my room all day, trying to escape the groundbreaking sound of her sobs. That night, when she thought I was asleep, she crept into my bed and held me tight, like a scared little kid. I kept my eyes shut, even when I felt her hot, wet tears pressing into my neck.
That night, my cousin and I slept huddled together on her twin bed, just like we did as little kids. Her warm side pressed against mine under the old cotton blanket we shared, the one that has smelled of laundry detergent with a faint tinge of dust for as long as I could remember. I ran my thumb over rolled-up balls of lint that had accumulated over the soft cloth and listened to the ceiling fan whir. Ani’s ceiling was still covered in the glow-in-the-dark stars we had stuck up years and years ago. I stared at them till my eyes blurred over; what was once a radiance our little minds could only attribute to magic had faded to nothing more than a dull, pale green.
•••
Dida once woke me in the early morning when the sun was still waking up with the rest of the city. One of her hands held my small palm, the other a pouch of uncooked rice. With groggy eyes and bare feet, I followed her out of the apartment and up the stairs leading to the rooftop. We stepped onto the wide open space of concrete, enclosed away from the rest of Kolkata only by short ledges. The only other people awake at that time were two young maids, hanging their freshly hand-washed kurtis onto clothing lines. Dida greeted them by name and they replied with hollered hellos.
She held the bag out to me and smiled, the lines by her eyes upturned like my baby-toothed grin. We tossed our fistfuls of rice to the sky, slicing through the smoggy Kolkata air. The pigeons roaming the sky swooped down to eat their fill, their frantic wings descending down around us like a hurricane. At the center of that storm, we just laughed and chased after the birds to watch them flutter up through the air only to dive back down once we moved away.
And then the crows descended. Their black feathers looked like bold strokes of ink as they cut through the parchment paper sky and plunged down to our rooftop. The pigeons dispersed like a puff of cold breath. At first, the young women up there with us tried to shoo them away, but Dida stopped them with just a raised finger. Carefully, so as not to scare them away, she reached into her bag and littered the ground with more rice. My wide eyes stared at their curved black beaks and beady eyes from behind Dida’s legs, too afraid to approach.
I felt a light pressure against my fingers. Dida pushed the rice into my hand and forced me forward. My palm squeezed around it, pressing the hard kernels against my skin until they left little indents. With another encouraging nudge, I hesitantly threw the grains towards the crows and ran back behind her. Her twinkling laugh intermixed with their happy caws, and I decided that maybe I liked crows after all.
•••
I woke up to Ma softly shaking my shoulder. “Rinu, get ready, we’re going to the mandir.”
The shower in the Kolkata apartment only sprayed cold water, so I bathed myself with the bucket that we had filled with water heated over the stove. Streams of shampoo ran down my scalp and into my eyes, and as I scrubbed it away, my body grew cold in the exposed air. Once my painstaking bath was finally over, and I had pulled my jeans and long-sleeved shirt over my still-damp body, I stared at my foggy reflection. A new splotch of red was blooming over my forehead, a tell-tale sign of a pimple about to emerge.
It was only as I was picking at the sore spot of skin in scrutiny that I noticed the tiny red dots stuck to the corners of the mirror. My Dida’s bindis, which she wore every day, were still there. The pad of my finger rubbed against its velvety texture and delicately peeled it off the mirror. Its tackiness had diminished with time. Still, I pressed it onto my forehead, right over my budding acne spot. The bright red bindi overtook my face, and became my sole point of focus as I continued to stare at myself in the mirror. Slowly, its outer edges began peeling off my skin, not strong enough to adhere. Then, a rapping at the bathroom door.
“Didi, mujhe susu karna hai!” Ani cried out, needing to use the toilet. I ripped the bindi off my face and used my thumb to firmly push it into the underside of my wrist.
•••
The entrance to the mandir was atop a staircase lined with beggars. Old men with lengthy white bears and protruding rib cages that seemed to cave in on themselves, barefoot kids in battered clothes chasing each other and stopping only to flash their big round eyes at white travelers, women who sat with their legs spread apart like men, hardened by time. Like at the airport, I seemed to be the only one phased by them.
At the top of the stairs was a gate and hundreds of pairs of shoes. As Ma slipped out of her shoes, she leaned over to me and whispered, “Rinu, put your Converse under another pair of shoes so they don’t get stolen.” I hid them under a pair of shabby-looking flip-flops and followed her inside. The chaos that accompanied us up the stairs evaporated once we stepped behind the gate. Inside businessmen and beggars alike walked with bare feet to kneel in front of Ma Kali. With clenched eyes, Ma and I sat amongst the crowd and wished, wished, wished. I hope Ma feels okay. I hope there is another side so Dida can be there. I hope Ma never dies.
Before we left, Ma left a box of mishti under the shrine and broke off a piece of ladoo from another box to bring it to me.“It’s prasad, baba. You have to eat some.”
As Ma pressed the sweet against my lips, I was reminded of how I’d shout when Dida pushed boxes of mithai down my throat, how she would insist on feeding me by hand even when I insisted I was old enough to do it myself. This time, I swallowed the morsel of ladoo happily.
•••
We heard the low strum of Mamu’s guitar before we even stepped back into the apartment. He smiled at us in greeting but didn’t stop the slide of his hands up and down the fretboard. Ma and I settled into the couch next to Mami and Ani’s seats, letting Mamu’s minor chords ring through us. His crooning voice crept in, stripping my mind bare. The soft Bengali lyrics wrapped around me tightly. With a light thunk, Ma tipped her head against the wall behind her with closed eyes.
“Bhabi, you’re too good.” And then Ma’s voice joined in, like a nightingale taking flight. Slowly, Ani and Mami began to sing along as well. Their voices were disjointed and pitchy, but somehow I still felt a firm lump build in my throat. I could do nothing but sway and blink back my tears. I had yet to cry since Dida had passed away, and yet this simple song had me teetering on the edge.
As their voices came to a close and the guitar strings reverberated for a final time, Mamu looked at me and said, “Rina, you’ll learn this song soon. Even if you struggle with the words, you’ll pick it up quickly. Music runs in Bengali blood.” My fists clenched to hide how they shook. The knot in my chest loosened, and for the first time, I didn’t feel the absence of Dida’s radio.
•••
The next morning, I woke up next to the sound of Ma’s snoring and the smell of her morning breath as her face lay only inches away from mine. I had slipped into her bed after Ani fell asleep. She held me to her chest as my body wracked with sobs, and when my hiccuping breaths finally slowed, I let her coaxing fingers comb through my hair until I was lulled to sleep. I pulled the blanket tightly around her body as I stepped out of bed and to the window, where I could hear the chai wala’s hypnotic chant, beckoning everyone in our vicinity to buy his tea.
My hands gripped the curved metal of the window grills, felt its bumpy, rusted texture under my palms. The street was painted with the faint yellow light of dawn and I felt a tug in the pit of my belly, pulling me outside. Quietly, I made my way out of the bedroom, stuck a slipper in the doorway of our apartment’s entrance to make sure I could eventually make my way back in, and walked up the stairs to the rooftop.
The hot concrete floor scorched my feet as I walked to the roof’s edge, and left them dark with dust. The woman hanging up her laundry paid me no mind as I sucked in polluted Kolkata air. Below me, the sound of a Hindi soap opera wafted out the window of another apartment unit. And then I heard it. Crows overhead swept through the sky, cawing as they made grand gestures with their long black wings. This time, I had nothing to offer them, but I greeted them with a proud chest. They continued to circle above me until one, just one, flew up to the sun, plucked it in its beak, and dropped its warmth right in my lap.