Sep 22, 2015 Original Short Story, Writing 101
Bidi, Bibi
©September 22nd, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Suresh sat on a little box under the makeshift shade of his fruit stand-shack. The sun burned high overhead, and the air was thick with yellow dust and smoke. Fumes from the diesel trucks and rickshaws plunged his senses into a nightmare of asthmatic cloudedness. From his greying blue cloth bag, he dug out the inhaler the doctor had prescribed, and took two puffs.
After replacing the inhaler in the bag, he reached under his shirt, and pulled out a small bidi, which was in a little pack he had wrapped in a grungy handkerchief. This would soothe him, he thought. Then, remembering how his wife, Meena, berated him when he smoked it (it stank to high heaven, and burned a hole in his earnings), he paused, then shrugged. A man had to have something to ease the mindless monotony of the day. He took out a stick of agarbatti from a wooden box, where he kept his money, and lit it in front of a small Ganesha he always had in his store for good luck. Immediately, the fragrance of sandalwood and amber filled the air, and made his spirits rise a little. Ah, that would make things better! Then, he lit his bidi, and took a deep, satisfying whiff.
Who cared if his asthma would overpower him again shortly? Who cared if the diesel fumes killed him? He had his bidi, and was at peace with the world for the nonce.
He forgot his mother, who had coughed all day and all night long, and then given up the struggle a month ago — he was too beaten by her struggle towards the end to grieve. He forgot his twelve-year old son who had been getting into trouble at school. He didn’t care if the rich housewives, from the fancy apartments nearby, haggled with him over the price of mangoes or apples, or custard apples or bananas. He didn’t care if any dreams he had once had, had disappeared in a puff of smoke. He could ignore the nagging pain in his gut. He could focus on the here and now of the world before him.
With interest, he watched the pretty teenaged girls go by in their churidar-kurtas, chattering like parrots, and as gaily bedecked in beautiful colors. He shook his head when he saw them holding hands surreptitiously with their boyfriends, but a part of him envied them their freedom. He had had no such luck. Married at twenty-one to a village girl, he had no idea what romance was — sex, yes, but romance? He saw it in movies, and wondered at it. Would he ever weep over a lost love? Would he care? He was numb within. The bidis helped. The agarbatti helped too.
He stuck the bidi in a pot of earth near him, and turned to adjust the beautifully arranged towers of fruit arrayed in pyramids behind him. He liked doing this. To him, this was a sort of meditation, an art.
Suddenly, he heard a footstep in front of him, and turned back. His heart did a double-take. In front of him stood a golden apparition. It took him a minute to recognize her — Meena, his wife. Her hair shone like a raven’s wing, and her large, limpid black eyes, always expressive, but usually only registering tiredness, irritation or worry, were shining. She was wearing her wedding sari, a gold-edged red sari, with shiny spangles of gold. She looked happy (when was the last time she’d looked happy? Oh yes, at the birth of their son.).
She didn’t even notice the bidi stuck in the pot of earth (thank Ganesha, he’d stuck it in there).
“What are you doing here?” Suresh asked stupidly. A strange feeling was flooding him. He had no idea what it was. It could have been love. He was happy to see her — something he didn’t often feel, because of her constant tiredness and lack of interest in him.
Meena opened her fist and showed him the paper she was holding.
Suresh took a look at it, and the fruit-stand shack revolved around him.
A real-estate developer was willing to pay them fifty lakhs for their little plot of ancestral land on the outskirts of town — the land of his fathers, his forefathers, not much to boast of, but something that was theirs. He stared unseeingly into the crowds of people passing by, not saying anything for a minute.
Meena looked anxiously at him. “Aren’t you happy? Why don’t you speak? We’ll be rich. You won’t have to be here all day, and smoke that nasty stuff. Our son can go to a better school than the municipal school. You won’t have to haggle with those fat housewives who think they’re better than you and I are.”
He looked at her then, saw her shining eyes, and the strange feeling swelled inside him. And yet … the land, his land!
“Let me think,” he said.
With exquisite instinct, she knew not to press him. Together, they sat and watched the crowds go by. No one bought any fruits from him that afternoon. The sun beat down ruthlessly upon his little shack-stand. The agarbatti died, and was replaced by another. They ate the roti, dal and sabji that she’d brought for him and for herself. He drank some coconut water, which he bought from a nearby vendor, and offered her half of it.
And through all this, he was silent. Then, he pulled out the bidi he had stuck in the pot of earth, lit it, and smoked. Meena said nothing, nothing at all. She just looked at him. He made up his mind. He had fallen in love.
“Okay,” he said.
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Glossary:
Bidi: A thin, Indian cigarette filled with tobacco, and wrapped in a leaf. There is much more nicotine and risk of oral cancer in bidis than in cigarettes.
Bibi / Biwi: Wife in Hindi
Agarbatti: Incense sticks.
Churidar-Kurta: Leggings and long tunic worn by girls in Northern India.
Roti: Whole-ground wheat-flour flatbread (resembles a tortilla)
Dal: In this case, cooked lentils, usually moong dal.
Sabji: Curried vegetables
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(Note: The photograph featured here is from The Deccan Chronicle article: http://archives.deccanchronicle.com/130716/news-current-affairs/gallery/ap-and-south-india-pictures-16th-july-2013)
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Tags: #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, acceptance, Bidis, Fruit vendors in India, love story, poverty
Sep 10, 2015 Original Short Story
A Love Story And A Canoe-Trip
©September 10th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Every night, Jacob cleaned his hoe, his rakes, his pitchfork and his trowel, and put them away. He’d take out his fiddle, and play a slow tune on his back porch. His Bernese Mountain Dog, Buckminster, lay at his feet. The sunset stretched into infinity. The corn-stalks were ripening. The rain had been good this year, and the lake nearby was full of fish. He felt he should be happy.
He stopped playing, went inside, put the kettle on the stove, cracked open two eggs, made an omelette with onions, fresh-picked tomatoes and green peppers, and ate it with brown bread, smeared with yellow butter. He heated up coffee, sloshed in some rum, and drank deep and fully.
Then, he washed himself noisily at the large kitchen sink, and towelled himself off, humming tonelessly all the while. Something moved at the corners of his vision — a shadow, perhaps. He turned and looked. There was nothing, nothing at all. Disappointed, he went on towelling.
He had been born mute. He was not deaf, though. Everyone but his wife had thought he was a loser. Josie had been beautiful, dark-eyed and adoring — and he had loved her deeply during the ten years they’d been married. Then, one day, after the rains failed to come for three years in a row, she had left him, quietly, without awakening him, at dawn.
He had awoken to the sound of her car hitting a tree.
They say he was never the same after that, but he thought he was. Here he was, playing his fiddle, with his dog at his feet, working the fields, eating normally, sleeping at 10:00 every night. Here he was, sowing, tending, reaping the corn, with a few hired men and women. Here he was, playing at the local coffee-houses with the local Old-Time group cobbled together from old friends and school-mates, who’d come to see him for who he was — a strong, unspeaking, gentle giant of a man, with music pouring out his being, and with love for all things that grew. With grace, he had dealt with everything that was handed to him, even this, the most devastating blow of all.
Of course, he was fine. Wasn’t he?
He went upstairs, changed into his night-clothes, and took out the photograph of Josie. He looked at it carefully for a little while, then put it away, after wiping both the photograph and his eyes with a rough face-cloth.
Then, he got into bed, flipped open Robinson Crusoe, a book that Josie had loved, and read for a few minutes. Reading was always difficult for him, but he loved it, carefully mouthing the words to himself, loving the words, as his wife had taught him to do. He came to a description of a canoe, and paused in his reading.
Somehow, this canoe brought him pleasure as no other boat had before. He loved rowing, loved going onto the glassy stretch of water on the lake near his fields, loved seeing the reflections on it, the darting fish, the languidly waving fronds below, the rocks that slipped past his vision into unfathomable depths. His eyes closed, and the book slipped from his hands, and he was asleep.
And he was rowing, rowing, rowing onto a faraway lake on a canoe that gleamed silver and black in the moonlight. And at the prow of it sat his wife, smiling, holding out her hands to him, and gleaming silver and black in the moonlight. And his dog, Buckminster, sat proudly at the stern of the canoe limned in light, his tongue hanging out gladly. And Jacob sat in the middle, resting his paddles, smiling back at Josie, his eyes shining black and silver in the moonlight. His heart was filled with song, and he reached out to hold her hands.
In the morning, when the sunlight streamed in, and illuminated the room with gold, washing out the paler gold of the reading light, it found Jacob asleep, with a smile on his face, and the dog at his feet.
Neither of them stirred, even as the sun rose high overhead.
Somewhere, a beautiful shadow detached itself from the wall, and walked towards them. Golden dust-motes danced into the room.
The air was still. Outside, a fly buzzed outside on the window-sill, and a lone loon called across the lake for its mate.
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Tags: #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, canoe, love story