Short Story 2016 Featured Sayujya Sankar

The Dragons of Az-ma’an

There have always only been five.  They were the last five.  Belonging to Az-ma’an, they were the end of the species, but they were the ones who created history.
Na’akul was the black one.  His heart was fiercer than the sun’s core.  He was the dragon lord.  He was not their king.  He was not the crowned ruler of dragon-kind.  He was just the unspoken leader.  His scales rippled like the blackest of nights.  His eyes were two sharp, piercing diamonds that could catch every single thought, every single whisper of a breath.

Na’akul was the only one who had a partner.  Sha’rza was a coy one.  She was golden in colour.  Her nostrils weren’t as big, so her fire wasn’t as powerful.  She was a silent one, a sweet one, and yet she could be vicious.  She had claws and spikes to compensate.  Her eyes were honey-studs.  But of the five, she was the only one who could escape that deep, penetrating glance of Na’akul’s.
Then, there was the bond-brother.  Nobody would have thought that Zian’s scales could wound as they did, nor would one anticipate the speed of those flaky wings.  But Zian was the charmer.  He was an indescribable mix of black and an almost transparent blue. His shades flashed differently in different lights and at different heights.

Of course, Zian was not Na’akul’s blood-brother.  Born of two different blood-lines, Na’akul and Zian had sworn hearts above the water flame.  After all, since water is the only element that can extinguish dragon-fire, the water flame is significant.  A water-flame can only be found in the depths of the ocean, above a sea-volcano.  However, since most dragons are land-dragons, they cannot manage to find the water-flame, or perish in their attempts to do so.  But the expedition is sacred, and history has noted that most of these voyages were undertaken by two dragons usually of the same sex.  So, there were brother dragons or sister dragons. Only on extremely rare occasions were brother-sister dragon bonds forged at the water-flame.

The fourth dragon was Elle’za.  She was the gorgeous one.  She brought out the shades of green in the flash of her tail, in the gush of her wings and even in the gurgle of her fire-laughter.  She was the wild one, the vibrant one, the cheerful one.  Maybe that’s why she was the colour most attributed to nature. Yet, she was inexplicably attracted to Zian’s charms, his lanky exuberance, the blackness beyond the transparent sky-blueness. She would tail him wherever he went, and it couldn’t be denied that he enjoyed that attention. Often, they would wander the skies together, though they were not bound in love.

There was one, however, who was different from the rest. She was the only water dragon. If ever she laid a nest, it would be under-water. Unlike the land-dragons who couldn’t breathe fire under-water, her flames were the most powerful there. She was called Topaz after the colour of her element. But, her wings, her torso, her scales were a glistening white, with streaks of an aquamarine blue. In the sun, her scales would flash a shade of silver, and on cloudy days, her body, too, would take on the greyness of the skies. The colour of her skin constantly changed- not only with the season, but also with her changing moods. Her eyes were a sharp flash of metal that could soften into the mellowness of raindrops at the skip of a heart-beat. Because she was the only water-dragon, she had two small slits for gills, but she also possessed a pair of lungs.

Topaz was one of the rarest few to break the water-flame rule of brother-brother and sister-sister. Though she was of free skies and deep oceans, her friendship ran strong. She was Na’akul and Zian’s closest sister, a relationship neither male could define. Their loves ran strong and bold, but this was the friendship of mellowness, of closeness without words, of space in that closeness, of being different but united, of sibling-hood. In the middle of the night, unbeknownst to the other four, Topaz reached the volcano of water-flame. Slowly streamlining herself to the depths of the water around her, she placed her nostrils against the opening of the volcano, letting out a wave of fire.
Usually, water-flame bonds are built with all the to-be-siblings present. But Topaz did something nobody had heard of ever before. She swore fealty to two male land-dragons without their presence. She swore to be a bond-sister. Of course, neither Na’akul nor Zian was aware of Topaz’s actions. They were lost in their own worlds.

When the humans arrived, they were five too- the beginning five. Five grown adults born of the blood of dragon shed over night-fire. It had been Na’akul’s idea. He was the most idealistic of them all. He had believed that human would be a representation of their thoughts, of their desires, of their ideals. The five humans were born of the five dragons. But, funnily enough, they believe that there were only two in the beginning!

They were said to be one and the same. It had been Zian’s idea, however, never to reveal themselves to humankind. They would be the gods of humans, he said. Initially, the humans did not have names, and the dragons believed them to be a part of their own being. And thus, they took on the names of their creators.

Na’akul’s creation was dark as the deep night- just as he was. He came first. And when the five humans met, he was their unnamed leader, too. He was a warrior, and he loved his fight. He was passionate, he was kind, he was smart and he was bold. Sha’rza created a woman who was cunning, sharp and witty unlike the shy Sha’rza herself. Her creation was the most deceptive. She always flashed a gorgeous, knowing smile and shook out her dazzling hair. Yet, she could be vulnerable. With a drop of his blood, Zian created a youthful, energetic lad. He had a mop of unruly hair, constantly falling on his face. He had a lanky frame accompanied by a lanky grin. He was a charmer, just as his dragon-father was and his agility knew no bounds. Elle’za created a fair and tall, elegant-looking woman. She was the liveliest of the lot. She, like her dragon-mother, loved to walk across the green terrains of hills and dales, and her laughter sounded like the rustle of the leaves. Topaz’s woman was different from the creations of Sha’rza and Elle’za. She was dark like the bark of woods. Her eyes were dark like the depths of the ocean. She was an archer and a swordswoman of the woods. She was a strong and weathered fighter.

These were the beginning five. They had been created across the width and breadth of the lands, but they came together by instinct. They met where Na’akul’s creation lived. The vast savannahs stretched as the five stood in a circle, setting eyes on each other for the first time, filled with an inexplicable bond that tied them together. They seemed so different from each other that they first thought that they were different species. But Na’akul ensured that they understood each other. And so, he created language.

But language was deceptive. Some knew how to use it well. Some did not. The most fluent was Sha’rza’s creation. The silent one was Topaz’s creation. With language came communication. As the beginning five grew more accustomed to their clime and language, they began to communicate more with each other, and less with their creators. The hard-work and bloodshed of the dragons began waning. But, there was one amongst the created five who still believed. Zian still held commune with his creation.

A youth, about twenty-five, Zian’s creation still believed in his god. He asked his creator to help him during his troubles and he thanked him for his small joys. Zian, always a giving dragon, flew through the night and delved into the depths of the world to protect his creation. Zian, of course, never revealed himself to his creation though often, a presence was felt even if it wasn’t heard or seen.
This presence was vaguely felt by the other humans as well. But a feeling in a world of language is usually left forgotten amidst the words. Yet, a few of the emotions felt by the dragons had trickled into their human counterparts. Na’akul and Sha’rza’s creations fell in love. In the vast emptiness of green grasslands, under clear blue skies, or dark, inky nights there was passionate love. And just as with the dragons, the strength of the sibling bonds remained between the humans. Yet, their ties which had never been hindered by space, allowed them to move back to their territories. Topaz and Zian went their own ways, and soon, Elle’za left as well.

Topaz’s creation was the furthest off. She sailed a boat to her native land. Once she touched her home-ground, something pricked her conscience. She felt the dragon in her rising. She was confused about her god. But Topaz was not one to sit still, and watch her creation drift away from her. From the depths of the ocean, she sang a grieving song. And her creation heard it in the lapping waves, the slipping sands of the ocean and in the empty sea-shells. She walked through forest and hill with confused thoughts dashing across the shores of her mind.

With the movement of people, the dragons had to part ways too. Na’akul and Sha’rza were together, but the other three found isolation. Zian flew to the zenith of his territory, scorching the lands he saw. He missed his bond-brother, and the bond-sister he did not know he had. His separation caused him anger. Elle’za waited. Patient. Quiet. Knowing things will blossom again. Topaz sank to the depth of the ocean, remembering an isolated oath that no other breathing creature knew about. Hers was a guttural cry to reunite. Alarms rang in the under-current of the ocean as her shade turned pale with worry. She was the most agitated.

We know that Sha’rza’s creation was the most deceptive. She could hide, with her skilled use of words, the true intentions of her heart. She became so adept at this that Sha’rza fretted. She flew as high as she could, shrieking clarion calls to her friends. But Na’akul silenced her. He couldn’t comprehend that his creation did not remember him, and instead chose to love a woman who did not truly understand his heart. He hoped that his creation would come to him for help, as Sha’rza hoped for hers.
But Na’akul’s creation loved beyond the bounds of his heart’s ocean, and so caught up was he that he could not hear the agitation of the clouds or the distress in his plains. He loved as the night loves day, chasing her without choice, without realising that night and day can never be together. He didn’t even feel the forged bonds of brother and sister straining to come to his aid. They had not been wanted. They had been silenced.

Once, just once, Na’akul’s creation heard a deep wail emanating from the ocean. He spoke to Sha’rza’s creation of his belief that a ghost-wind was sweeping through his land. She just laughed. But she was afraid. Well-equipped with words, she knew that ghost-winds meant omens, and omens were supernatural. But her rationality strained against these irrational beliefs, and she attempted to scoff away these notions.

That was the first death. With the dismissal of the creator by the created, Sha’rza did not know whom to love more- Na’akul or her creation. Are blood and heart the same thing? Blood was child and heart was partner. After dismissal, Sha’rza’s creation felt a ripping shard in her mind-scape and she remembered. A sudden realisation, fear and anguish came upon her. Repenting that she had ever doubted her creator’s existence and forgetting the importance of words, she cried to her creator to bear her to her home, and blood won over heart. The death of love.

Na’akul was devastated and furious that Sha’rza had chosen her blood-child over him. This anger reflected in his creation, but he no longer knew what to believe. He was broken. Na’akul swore a land oath, breathing fire into the skies, promising that he would not allow himself to fall again- for the love of a partner, or of a son. He would be without ties; unbounded. And that was the second death. Stealthily, as his creation lay asleep, Na’akul, black as fury, swept over his son and fed him to the waters. He then clawed out his heart and threw it in with his son and slowly flew away. The death of a heart.

Na’akul’s heart floated above the water-flame, sending deep scars cutting across his bond brother and unknown bond-sister. There was aid at hand almost immediately, but a heartless dragon needs no aid.
The ensuing battle was fierce. Zian, who remained closer to Na’akul’s terrain, reached his brother first. Na’akul turned savagely on him, eyes flashing, steam rising from his nostrils. Zian was anxious. Flying in a downward loop, he met a flare meted out to him by Na’akul. He raged. Zian spread his sparkling-blue-black wings, barely missing the flame. Growling, Na’akul rose off the ground in a massive leap, and just as Zian was about to swing around flying skyward, Na’akul caught his tail-end, clawing it till there was a deep hole in his bleeding tail. Na’akul, for good measure, singed his bond-brother’s sparkling coat until there was a scar running above his right wing. Zian roared and reached for Na’akul’s underbelly with his talons and managed to wound him enough to escape.

Just as Zian was leaving, there was a fuming white blur in the distance carrying a heart of fire. Clanging talons angrily dropped what was her bond-brother’s, on his own land. But before he could reach for it she swished a white tail at him. Amused, Na’akul looked up at her. Her fire was as red as his. Her smoke as black as his. She was impatient. He already wanted a truce, for she had brought him back his heart. But she was deaf with rage. There was a roar of fire which he quickly dodged. She turned into a radiant mix of angry red and furious yellow, letting out another ball of flame. This time, it nearly caught him, but he barely managed to evade it as well. From her tail she let loose a few spikes. But he knew her every move. After all, he had taught her some of these techniques himself. His fury had abated now. He no longer wanted to fight. But Topaz was still fuming. She realised that she could not win without calming down, and she turned beating her wings furiously. But as she turned she let her tear fall.
Na’akul stood above a beating heart that was no longer his own staring at the tear-drop of a bond-sister he hadn’t known he had until he saw her arrival at his heart’s tug. This was the third death. Death of a bond.

While the fights were on, Elle’za, who had always been the wild one, and had tried to stay away realised the need for unity. She went to the existing creations and tried to reach them and talk some sense into them. She whispered about belief and about trust. And she managed to reach her creation, bringing back belief in her blood-child. Elle’za saw a beginning of a new life in this, and as she rejoiced she flew over her land into that of her neighbour- Zian. On the highest peaks of the world, she saw a blue-black dragon keening in anguish as his wounds gushed out blood. Their unity had no name, for they knew the danger that had been brought on between Na’akul and Shar’za with the naming of their bond. But, this was a bond forged in a sphere that was purer than water or land- it was forged in the icy-cold breeze of the air.

Topaz’s creation, too, reached belief, though through a different path. She didn’t look for her creator, but she looked for beauty in the world around her- in the trees and the seas and the sky. And through beauty, she found truth. Neither Zian nor his creation ever found out about their bond-sisters. Na’akul’s creation had died even though Na’akul had gotten his heart back. This was the end of the dragon era. Human had been created and the world had to move on. Zian and Elle’za’s creations brought forth more of their kind. Maybe that is why humankind believed that in the beginning there were only two. But, there were two more creations somewhere, who soon passed on to other worlds. The last five dragons were there as long as belief was there. But soon, belief began to fade. So did beauty. Deception became the need of the day, and so, the dragons, unwillingly, but with not much of a fight, passed on into oblivion.

Short Story 2014 Longlist, Sayujya Sankar

An Incomplete Building
 

When she had first spotted the cordoned-off zone of the construction site, Vishakha had tentatively stepped across the rubble and squatted behind the parapet-wall trying to snatch a moment to herself. She sat amidst the stone and mud, taking in the smells, the sound of the evening traffic and watching the chaos in front of her. It had been empty, with the earth up-turned. The empty mess seemed to soothe her nerves. She closed her eyes and allowed the tears to flow.

She had been sitting there for quite some time, her tears dried up against her cheeks, when she heard a noise. By now, the sun was a glowering red. She looked up and saw a slender-framed, but well-built man stubbing a beedi , walking questioningly towards her. He wore a dark, earth-stained pant and a towel was tied in a turban around his head.

“Who let you in? You can’t enter this zone,” he snapped in Tamil, sounding annoyed. He had taken out another beedi and searched his pant pockets for a matchbox. Not finding one, he cursed. Vishakha flicked out her lighter and held up the flame to him. His eyes registered surprise, but unquestioningly, he accepted her light. Noticing the flicker of astonishment her face broke into a sudden grin as she lit a cigarette for herself as well.

“You work here?” she responded with a question. He nodded taking a deep drag, as though he was letting all the tension in the world out in a puff of smoke.
“What is coming up? An apartment?” Another nod.
“How long have you worked here?” she asked, not really knowing why she was pursuing a one-sided conversation.

“Construction? Five years,” he responded.
“Before that?” now she was just curious.
“Finished twelfth.” Before she could respond, however, he stubbed his beedi and continued, still in Tamil, “It’s late. You cannot be here!”
She was annoyed but decided to leave.

The next evening, just to see whether the construction was starting anytime soon, Vishakha went to the site again. But before entering, she heard a bunch of men shouting to each other and the various sounds of construction-sites- the pounding hammer, spade against mud and the stacking of bricks- filled her ear. She was about to leave, when she heard a voice behind her.
“Why do you keep coming here?” he asked.

“It’s on my way back home. And, plus, it’s a nice place to smoke before heading back!” she quipped. “Unga paer enna?” What’s your name? she asked the construction-worker.
“Mani. Neenga?” You? he seemed to put on an impudent air as he asked her.
“Vishakha,” she answered.
“What do you do?” he asked as she took out a pack of Flakes and offered one to him. He shook his head, taking out his beedi, quickly looking to see if he’d be missed at the site.
“I teach. College.” He looked surprised at what she had told. “What? I can’t be teaching?”

He looked sheepish, “No. It’s just… I thought that you might be studying.” She grinned.
“What do you teach?” he asked, curious.
“Physics.” Looking once again at the other workers, he nodded a goodbye to her and went in. Vishakha heard the others yell at him: Mani, you’re always late! Pick up that shovel and start digging.
 
He was not too old, she realised- probably in his mid-twenties. A lot of the other men seemed much older, wrinkles creasing their faces and hands, their beards peppered with shades of grey. There were women, too, the pallu of their saris tucked into their waists, carrying loads of earth on their heads. She watched them as she slowly consumed her cigarette, vaguely enjoying the sounds before leaving. Ever since, whenever she walked by, if he was around they would wave a cordial hello to each other as she passed by, Mani taking a breather in the midst of his work.

A month later, she walked back from work with tears in her eyes again. She felt the weight of the world against her shoulders- a tight, constricting pain against her heart. She wanted to collapse, to give in but she willed herself to walk. One. Foot. In. Front. Of. The. Other. It isn’t that difficult, she whispered to herself. She hugged her bag to her chest, lost in her world of grief when his voice snapped her out of it.

“Ka! Why are you crying? What happened?” Mani called from the parapet-wall. She turned towards the voice, quickly wiping the tears from her eyes.
“Akka? I look like your elder sister?” she responded, pushing her worries to the back of her head. He grinned, offering her a beedi. She took it, grateful for the distraction.
“What? You never work, or what?”
“Illa, ka. Break-time,” he said. Then, quietly, he handed out a lunch box to her. She raised her eyebrows, but opened it. The sweet smells of halwa wafted from it.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked.
“A girl has been born to me,” he said.

“Oh!” Vishakha smiled softly, “I didn’t know you were married! What’s your child’s name?”
“We’ve not named her,” he looked elated. He was still in his dirty, black pants the towel resting next to him. He was wearing a yellowish-white stained, unbuttoned shirt. The wind was whipping up the leaves at Vishakha’s feet.
“And your wife? What’s her name?”
“Kamatchi.”
Vishakha smiled, “I’ll remember,” she said as she waved to him wanting to leave.
“You should come some day and see them!” Mani called out after her and she shouted back, “Definitely!”

The part of a sari that trails over the shoulder

A type of sweet
Kamatchi was a young woman of twenty. She sat at home with her daughter cradled in her arms. She was in a nightie , squatting on the single-cot that was placed at the corner of the room, with her back against the wall. Vishakha took in her surroundings as she squatted beside the mother and child, Mani hovering in the background. The house they stayed in was a shack- something of a makeshift home. There was no current and the stifling stillness of the day was oppressive. Vishakha could smell the fish in the pot on the stove at the other end of the room. Kamatchi was a rather shy woman, Vishakha noticed, but her eyes were extremely expressive. Euphoria played in the blackness of her pupils. Her long, plaited hair reached her waist.

Her daughter was a tiny bundle. The child’s round face was small, her lips bright and gurgling, her eyes were closed, and her tiny wrists were closed into a tight fist, her thumb tucked safely between her other fingers and her palm. Her naming day was to happen the next week, and her parents were excited. She had asked them what they were planning on naming her. Thenmozhi, they said unanimously.
The mother and daughter were being cared for by almost all their neighbours who kept visiting her. A bunch of them would bring food, or sweets or they would come to ask if Kamatchi needed help. Kamatchi’s mother, who had come down to help her with her child for a few days, had just stepped out to meet a neighbour.
Vishakha had bought her favourite kaju kathli and some mangoes to give to the happy couple. They accepted it and almost immediately, Mani brought the sweets and fruits on a plate for everybody to eat. She sat with the family of three, playing with the little girl, and chatting with Mani and Kamatchi about their lives, their little joys and their hardships.

Kamatchi had also worked at construction sites, she found out. That was how Mani had met her. Their relationship had been very sober. Kamatchi had five siblings, all younger than her, and her parents had wanted her to earn for them as well. Mani had offered to provide some of their income for the support of Kamatchi’s family. Mani’s parents died in a fatal bus accident, which forced him to find a job after his schooling, and he got into his father’s profession. Mani was a fighter, Vishakha realised. He would never give up hope and he never held a grudge against destiny.
That afternoon, she ate with them- rice with fish curry and pickle. When she left, she felt an absurd sense of satisfaction with life. That evening, she caught the bus back to her house. Standing outside her building, she looked at the window that was her room. She sighed before entering.

Her walls were a stark colour of plainness, with almost no picture to remind her of her past. A Beatles poster hung in the hall, near a tall lamp-shade. Her kitchen comprised of necessities stacked neatly in a row, compartmentalised into boxes. Her bedroom had a mattress lying on the floor. There was a shelf in the hall with all her books, and the open rack in her room contained her meagre set of clothes.
Vishakha went to her room, started up some music, and then got around to preparing her dinner. Having set the rice and eggs to cook, and the sambar to simmer, she grabbed a book and a small photograph wafted to the floor. She stared at the two faces of a lady and a girl plastered to the floor and she froze. And time froze. And the world around her stopped like a heart-beat.

She was twenty, living with her parents and having a hard time. They did not like the fact that she had so many male friends in her life. They did not like that she would come back beyond eight at night. They didn’t like her choice of clothes, her sense of make-up, the constant phone calls she would receive… She was finding it hard to explain to them that this was her life and that she felt out of place in theirs.

A night-gown

A sweet made of cashews

A type of South Indian stew cooked with vegetables and spices

She got to know Rithek during her post-graduation. They became very close friends and remained so for a long time. They had met a year after their courses had gotten over during their graduation. Vishakha had started her doctorate degree while Rithek had begun a graphics company. They had gotten together over drinks. She had never thought of Rithek as a person she could love- never a person she saw spending the rest of her life with. Yet, in a moment of passion there was a spark of comfort. He was a friend who taught her how it felt to be subsumed in, to be consumed by, and to explore the dark, deep pools of passion… somebody who would probably leave the next morning, whom she would not see again for months on end.
She stood in front of the mirror in her college, her eyes a little blood-shot from having cried briefly in the loo. She was afraid, terrified. She was only twenty-three, she thought dully. She thought of what it would mean to abort her child. And an image of a little head being chopped off, brutally murdered flashed across her eyes. She wondered whether she had the courage to kill it. But even worse, she wondered whether she had the courage to keep it.

She had decided to tell her parents about the man who changed her life completely. Gathering all her courage, she told them that she wanted her child; that she was four months pregnant; that she couldn’t possibly destroy the foetus that bloomed inside her. The quarrel that ensued was a never-ending one. Her father refused to see her again. He would leave before she got up and would come only well into the night. Her mother seemed to her to be a stone wall- emotionless, devoid of care or love or even empathy. She could no longer tolerate the silence. She left. She found herself a single-bedroom apartment in a not-so-prominent locality. When she settled there, having found herself a content-writing job that paid her rent, two months after having broken the news to her parents, she gathered up the nerve to call the father. Rithek picked up her call and the initial enthusiasm in his voice drained as he heard her story. She had never expected him to take responsibility, but she was daft enough not to have realised that it would ruin her friendship. In her eighth month of pregnancy, the father called to say he was getting engaged; that he didn’t want to hear from her again. It suited her well, really. She didn’t need anybody in her life. And yet, she was to be yoked to an infant for the rest of eternity.

Little Rakhi was a year old, and had nobody in her life to play with except her completely anti-social mother. She would listen to her mother’s stories with awe and the moment her lips stopped moving, Rakhi would begin to bawl. Frazzled and exhausted by it all, Vishakha was the happiest, most content human on earth. She shifted her work timings from eight until noon, working the rest of the time from her house. She got so accustomed to multi-tasking, she would only half-focus on the content writing, constantly expecting a cry or a strange silence that could only mean bad news. Coffee was the only source that allowed her to become un-grumpy at one a.m. when Rakhi demanded her love and attention. 
 
Vishakha picked up the photo and smiled, softly shoving it back amongst the books. She went back to her work, trying hard not to remember and trying even harder not to forget.
Vishakha had started weekend visits to Kamatchi and Mani’s house which soon became a part of a routine. She would bring some food over to their place and she would play with their kid. They would play music on her phone and she got to know a lot of the other workers. She found out that their housing was a makeshift one, and that they would leave this place to another one when their construction contract was completed. She couldn’t imagine being constantly on the move like that. She loved the place she had called home, and Mani and Kamatchi’s story made her re-think her concept of home.

Thenmozhi was a vibrant kid. She gurgled with laughter, and when she cried it was enough to bring the skies falling down. She would always grip her mother’s forefinger with all her might, swirling her feet in the air, as her anklets jingled loudly. The months passed and Thenmozhi learnt to flip onto her belly, and push herself across the floor. A few months after her kid was born, Kamatchi went back to the construction site for part-time wages, leaving her daughter with her mother. Vishakha offered to help, but the couple would not hear of it.

Thenmozhi was more than a year old now. Vishakha had thought back to Rakhi’s first birthday. Her shabby apartment had contained nothing; no one except the two of them. Squatting in a corner of the house, holding her child in her arms, she wept miserably for the lack of company her daughter had grown accustomed to. She wept that she couldn’t even provide her a decent birthday. She wept that she had to do it alone, and she wondered if she could manage. Then, gritting her teeth, she got up and decided to make it a memorable day. She had taken her on a stroller to the park nearby. She had tidied up the house for her (just so that Rakhi could mess it up again) and she had snapped pictures with her camera so that she could remember that day as a loving day, as a day of happiness. She had resolved that she would not allow herself the solace of wallowing in her loneliness anymore.
It was the time of semester examinations. The rains had arrived. The roads were flooded, and she had to stride through thigh-deep water in order to reach her house from the bus stop. She had stopped walking by, because of the hassle of the rain water. Her raincoat was barely sufficient. The first paper was over- quantum mechanics. She had just received a bundle of papers to correct. She sat with the television switched on- NDTV news. The words wafted over her head as the papers in front of her filled with red ink. There seemed to have been a commotion on screen. She looked up. There were police, ambulances, workers- everybody screaming, yelling, shouting. A building she had known almost intimately had come crashing down. Thoughts raced through her mind, vying for attention.

It couldn’t have been this afternoon. I would’ve noticed.
Was Mani there? Kamachi? Were they alright?
Should I go there and see?
Should I wait? Find out what they are reporting before heading there?
I should call. Call him.
Switched off. Maybe he didn’t go.
HOW could it just crash? I should go check!
 
Then she saw him. He was being shifted onto a makeshift stretcher. An oxygen mask was being placed on his face. It didn’t seem as though he was breathing at all. His body was partially mangled. His left hand seemed to have been pulverised…

She couldn’t watch anymore. She switched off the television.
She had to do something. She couldn’t sit at home. Alone.
She went to the site. Found out which hospital they had taken the victims to. Victims. What a terrible word! She remembered having read somewhere- the word ‘victim’ was originally Latin. It meant an animal or person sacrificed for the supernatural powers… the gods. Who were these people being sacrificed for? Who god?

The hospital was in utter chaos. She couldn’t find him. She realised she didn’t know his full name. She searched throughout the ward where the patients from the building collapse were brought. He wasn’t there. She thought of Kamachi. She hoped that the wife at least had escaped, though she knew that Kamachi would have also gone to work that day.

She vaguely recollected something that Mani had said. They were going to get their salary that week. He had wanted to get new clothes for Thaenmozhi. With a surge of guilt she thought of the one year old child, not knowing what had happened to her father. She didn’t know what else to do, and so she went back, vowing to herself that she would visit the family the next day after college.

What greeted her eyes was despair. There were families awaiting the news of their loved ones- families whose oppari pierced her like a dagger through her heart. She reached the shack that had been Mani’s and she saw his mother-in-law holding a tiny bundle across her chest and weeping.
She barely understood what she was saying. Wage day, she said. They had been eager to get the money. Clothes, food, special dinner. Then the rains began. They had stood under the concrete ceiling that had come up. Sudden collapse. Both of them… She had promised to visit again, but the lady had stared at her blankly. A week later, after the exams had gotten over and the semester holidays had begun, she went back to Mani’s house, but there was nothing there. The houses had been cleared away. The people had been moved, somebody told her. A new project had come up across town and they had to leave this settlement. They didn’t know where the project was.

She would never know what had happened to them, she realised. An incomplete story. A week later, college had reopened. She had caught the morning bus and had dozed off between stops. On her return, she passed the construction site, now razed to the ground. No workers. The place looked bare. Lifeless. A flash of an image in her mind’s eye. Desperately, pointlessly she tried Mani’s number again. Still switched off. She watched the barren land, as though hoping to glean some information from it. She sat there all evening, smoking cigarettes.

When it was finally dark, she went back home and opened an album with stories of her child. Stories that had stopped. Another half narrative. Incomplete.

A loud wailing that is associated primarily with death

Short Story 2013 Shortlist, Sayujya Sankar

Alone

She stood in front of the fire on a wood-burn-silent-breeze-crackling-smoke night. She was a night time lone walker. She had left the confines of her car to stubbornly take a solitary stroll in the midnight air. She felt slightly unsafe- as though the eyes of the people of the night were boring into her back, and maybe they were. She was quiet, though. She did not want to move, and yet a sense of restlessness invaded her body. From the corner of her eye, she could see some of the homeless women and children looking up at her scrawny self from their sprawled positions near temporary shacks.

She was a young woman- maybe in her mid-twenties- with nothing to gain and nothing to lose in life. Her life was ordinary, simple, unimportant. She wore a simple red kurta and black patialas, with a soft scarf winding about her neck. Her dark, black hair hung in loose curls about her shoulders. Her eyes were thickly lined with mascara and eye-liner. Her lips were tinged with red, as though her lipstick had rubbed off through the course of the night. Her earrings were small droplets of red. Her feet were clad in simple chappals and small toe-rings twined round her little toes. There was a single black anklet round her left foot. She carried a bag that was a mismatched green.
Her life was dull, in a get-a-job-buy-a-car-and-house-and-settle kind of way. She stayed in a single bedroom apartment in a not-so-posh locality and went to bed night after night, alone on a bed, with a tired ache in her heart and a wetness between her thighs. She longed for something to fill her up- to complete her. Her loneliness, she felt, needed to be complemented by another existence, or a purpose of being, that she attempted, night after night, to satisfy by herself.

When she had seen him… well, he had been tantamount to the perfect escape. She had never known him, had never loved him. He had been a college acquaintance and they had met after years of not even knowing about each others’ existence. And in one drunken night she had decided to turn to sex as an escape- as many of her friends and peers seemed to do. She had never done this before. But her friends had seemed to find something in it, and she wanted to know what they had meant by the sheer ecstasy of intercourse.

For them- her friends, that is- their bodies took them to another world, a realm of being that meant something, that gave them something to look forward to, something that would take them away from their mundane lives. And she had wanted to feel that flight of freedom, of unison, of passion, that something which gave temporary meaning to the everydayness of life.

She was nothing like ‘the’ standard notion of pretty. She had an oval face lit up only by her sense of individuality. Her eyes were a gorgeous shade of dark-chocolate-brown, which heightened her smile. Though she was very thin, she considered herself an ungainly woman. She was neither fair nor dark. She was an in-between brownish something that on Indian marriage sites would be called a “wheatish complexion”. She definitely did not think of herself as wheatish, though. She did not think of herself as tall, or thin or uninteresting. She thought of herself only as ‘I don’t care’.

Yet, she was surrounded by a babble of friends who had wanted her to alter herself. Her prettier friends asked her to put on some weight- “look healthy,”they said. Some of them asked her to change her style of clothing- accessorise more often, wear better earrings, fancier clothes or buy matching bags! The more rebellious ones wanted her to get a tattoo where nobody would see it, or streak her hair in shades of brown or red. But she was tired of these voices in her head. And so, she had gone there with an almost rebellious attitude- dressed in a not-so-sensible fashion, knowing that she would not be noticed. She would be on the sidelines of that party, and she was alright with that. She was not particularly interested in the people. She had just wanted to drown her evenings in alcohol and music.

They had met there, not bothering to speak much with each other throughout the evening. They had loitered by the bar long enough to acknowledge the existence of the other. They stood there silently, consumed in their own thoughts, their own worlds, only vaguely noticing each other. He had been dressed in official wear- a colourless shirt with an equally boring tie to suit it. His hair was tousled, as though he had not paid any attention to it. His eyes were blank. She could see that he lived in a world of fancy-watch-and-fancy-shoes not very unlike her own self.

With enough alcohol in the system, it had been easier to contemplate intercourse. Their kiss had been passionless and their intimacy seemed to take them further away from each other. He did not seem to care about either her or even the sex. It seemed mechanical, as though he, too, wanted to fill a void in his life. She could feel him breathing deeply against her, and yet she could not explain the feeling of isolation that swelled within her even as they were being as intimate as they could ever be.
 When she had opened out her legs to him, she had let escape a sense of privacy, as though she had given away something that had been hers to keep. Not that it was impinged upon her. Even though the intercourse had been of her own volition, she felt drained and empty, not the happy exhaustion that she had anticipated. This was not how it was supposed to feel, she thought! Not all the movies, nor all the books portrayed someone as feeling so void after the beautiful act of intercourse.
Now, here she was alone in the night, walking through the dark alleys of the night, standing in front of a burning fire wondering why she had been so disappointed with her first experience of intercourse. He seemed to have enjoyed himself, with the dark blankness in his eyes, but his groans of joy seemed to have meant something. His grip had been intense, as though he wanted to achieve something by it- almost like a desperate hope for something that he could not find. Hers was a silent coming. Quiet. Like the night. She had felt nothing. She had responded not with emotions of desire, but with a necessity that she slowly began to feel was unimportant- as though her coming had no consequence to life or love or her loneliness.

She had turned around to face the homeless women who were staring dolefully at her- don’t take away the heat from our fire, they seemed to be saying reproachfully. She saw them with their dishevelled saris, and with their men and children beside them. She wondered what it had meant to them to spread their legs in front of a man- if it had been only to their man. Was it with expectations of ecstasy or was it sheer necessity or was it forced upon them? She shuddered as she saw their silhouettes flickering in the fire, becoming a million faces of faceless women with faceless stories thrusting themselves upon her single, unimpressive narrative of loneliness. The children all tired and crumpled lay in a huddle in the corner.

She had sneaked out of the room without waking him up. He had asked for her number, maybe hoping for some more nights of meaninglessness, but she had evaded him. Later, she left him a note on leaving- Thanks. He would probably be confused, or angry, or maybe even indifferent. But she knew she had to say it. He had spoken to her in ways which words could not speak. The blankness of his eyes reflected the blankness of her world, and she knew that he was an insignificant spec in the universe. Like her. Like almost everyone around her.

A moment of revelation…
Before it vanished like the thin wisps of smoke. She sighed as she walked back the short distance to her car. Inside the soft cosiness of her car, she felt safe, as though the real world- the world that could catch you unawares- had been left behind with the fire, and the reproachful women and the world-that-slept-on-the-road. She felt safe in her money and her riches and in this safety was a sense of bitter disgust.
She reached her apartment, with the small dull yellow light bulb hanging outside, awaiting her return. She turned the key, opening and then shutting the door behind her in the stillness of her home. The outside light went off. She dumped her keys and bag on an empty chair, wandered to her bedroom and lay alone on a single bed, with a wetness between her thighs.

Poetry 2013 Shortlist, Sayujya Sankar

Celebration and Yearning

Standing alone in the room,
She looks at the neatly folded kasavu .
Thin, silken, gold threads
Weave their way through the fabric.
She slowly, affectionately,
Wraps the cotton cloth
Of summer-ease
Around her body,
Heightening her slender frame.
Concentratedly, mathematically,
She folds the pleats
Of a single length of cloth,
And tucks it in.
She then drapes the pallu
Over her shoulder.
Softly, the comb caresses
Her black tresses,
Neatly parting it
In two equal streams
Of scented black.
And the music twinkles
With the bangles
That she lovingly dons.
The anklets sing
To the tune of celebration.
The large gold jimiki
Pierces her ear.
And finally, the fragrance
Of mallippoo
Is the powerful scent
Of white against black.
Against the white of her eyes
Is the darkness of mai .
Against the whole body
Of white and gold,
A splash of blood-red kungumam
Colours her forehead.
Standing in front of God,
She hopes for another
Physical presence.

The length of the sari that is draped across the chest

Dangling earrings, usually gold or silver in colour

The jasmine flower

kohl

Saffron powder

A type of sari that is cream in colour