Bride-Seeing

BY TANIA BANERJEE

My grandmother likes to hear me sing. In return, she oils my hair, untying the knots, one by one.

The last time my grandmother had sung was forty years ago –when the bridegroom and his parents arrived. With jalebis, gold, resham sarees, and a warning.

‘My child, don’t go around singing even after marriage,’ laughed my grandfather’s father. Gentle but steady; like his son grew up to be. The only man who touched my grandmother.

My grandmother dips her fingertips deep into the coconut oil bowl and asks me why I want her to bring the oil every evening.

‘My hair. Frizzy hair.’

‘Your wounds. Deep wounds.’ She digs deep and I finally tell her the truth one by one.

I can’t sleep; the oil helps.

My mother said she wished she had aborted me. My father is sleeping with someone my age. I don’t like the colour of the soap bar. I hate the heat and global warming scares the shit out of me. On my seventh birthday, my cousin took me to the store room; no one knows.

About my insomnia, my mother’s depression, my father’s affair, the trauma accumulating in the lonely ozone layer –its gaping hole, wide, wider –my seven-year-old thighs held far apart.

‘Me too,’ says my grandmother.

‘You said no man touched you.’ ‘Except your grandfather.’

I look at her. She looks back at me.

Two nights after my grandfather died, my grandmother goes to the terrace. They say she’s going to kill herself, stop her, hurry, run, go. So we go, but she has disappeared. From the attic, we hear her voice. She sits in front of the old, dusty harmonium and begins to sing softly, grows loud, then louder still.

‘So much grief, she has gone mad.’

I watch my grandmother’s homecoming, a funeral jasmine garland tied around her hair like a gajra, her songs flowing into the night. ‘Get her some water, let her mourn,’ one of them sighs. Then they all sigh.

I step into the attic, sit behind her and slowly oil her hair. I dab the oil behind her ears, on her thick hair and her soft neck, and my grandmother sings till the end of the night.