Reckoning

Tehnuka

We gathered Her pieces from across the land.

She left them under a palmyra tree where She huddled overnight. I would say ‘slept,’ but I think no one there truly slept, unless, perhaps, the infants. I imagine they dreamt of the earth cracking around them.

Others were deep in drifts of white beach sand, itself made up of fragmented bodies of long-dead sea life.

One was flung on the red cement porch of a childhood home.

We did not know where any of Her was, so our gathering was slow as we retraced Her footsteps. First, of course, we had to find Her feet. They were the last pieces of Her to go, but our task was challenging because they were lost amongst many pieces of many people, desperate to find their own remainders, loved ones, and homes. Saththiya recognised Her stubby left big toenail amongst all the others and pulled out the entire foot.

Do you know that card game, ‘Memory’, where you have to remember the positions of face-down cards while you search for the other in the matching pair? Once we had Her left foot, we thought back through all we had seen in the walk through that body-yard. I won’t call it a graveyard, because that implies proper burials. Anyway, our tradition is to cremate, not bury.

The right foot was blacker and more swollen than the left, but Parvathi, holding the found foot by the heel, picked through the crawling flesh to the ditch where we had seen it.

Sitting in the middle of that place, amidst our neighbours and countryfolk, we put Her feet side-by-side. We let the maggots stay, because they had found a home and it was not for us to displace them.

Saththiya rummaged in the sack she had toted over her shoulder all this way. With clunks and rattles she pulled out a small jar of nail polish that looked just like what we’d used in childhood, miraculously still liquid.

We didn’t try to trim Her fractured toenails, but we painted them parrot-beak red and said a prayer to Amman. We made up the words, because none of us had been to a temple for years, nor recalled the language of prayers.

Saththiya and I painted our own toenails and each other’s fingernails for dance performances. Her amma plucked maruthonri leaves and crushed them to decorate our hands with dark green paste, and we sat together on her porch each watching that the other didn’t smudge, and a koel somewhere said kuooou, kuooou, and peace was guaranteed for those minutes because we couldn’t move until everything was dry orange and red.

I don’t know how many times this really happened. It has collapsed into one memory. All the hot mornings, all the cuckoos.

“The birds have begun returning,” Saththiya said, but I hadn’t heard a single kuooou since I exited the bus.

The two single feet could only shuffle, which meant walking took longer. We’d barely made it across the next field before the sky oranged. We couldn’t seek a guesthouse. Who would want rotting feet inside their home? And we couldn’t leave Her in a yard alone when She had already spent years lost.

Parvathi thought footwear might solve the problem of speed, as well as prevent Her feet falling apart. They couldn’t quite accommodate the swelling, but we hooked my sandals on anyway. Her feet didn’t move at all.

“They would not have been bearing much weight at the end,” sighed Saththiya. “They could barely shift themselves before the sandals. Should we carry them instead?”

“You bear them on your head if you like,” said Parvathi, as I reclaimed my mud- and maggot-stained sandals, “but they’ll need to get used to carrying weight again before long, and coddling won’t help.”

From that place we had just left came scritching and slurping noises you’d never hear from an intact human body. Saththiya, keeping watch for snakes, used up the torch batteries lighting the grasses whenever a rustle came too close. We slept little, and all there was to eat when the sun rose was the kūdduchchātham we’d lacked the appetite for last night, gone sour in a dappa knocking around in Saththiya’s sack. We tossed it out to feed whatever birds and memories of life remained.

I missed home. Homes: the one I could never return to and the one I must return to when my visa expired. But my homesickness wasn’t the issue. Even when we were girls, merely ducking under the fences or down the lane to playmates’ houses for a game of hide and seek or carom, none of us willingly returned home without finishing what we’d started. The problem was that I had only a month-long visa, and we needed Kottravai.

Her feet led us to the outskirts of a village where She’d last truly slept, under a woven palmyra-leaf shelter. Her ankles were torn as if an animal had been chewing on them. Everyone had gone hungry, towards the end.

We guessed which side was which, and I sewed them to Her feet. Saththiya brought out silver anklets from her sack. They couldn’t reach all the way around the swelling, so we tied them on with a piece of cotton thread. The bells rang alongside us as we walked.

Parvathi and I lived on the same road. She came to my house before school every day, and we walked to the bus stop together. I don’t remember it being so hot then, but maybe that’s because I have acclimatised to a colder latitude now. Maybe it’s just another misremembering. We shared our lunches under the sprawling fig tree and studied together.

Every thai pongal, the first visit would be between our houses, one of us bringing the other the pongal we’d just made. We might have returned home from university and continued that way, if it hadn’t been for the war.

“We should be grown women together. Instead, I am a blood-drinking pisasu,” she says. “What an injustice.”

I agree that this is a terrible injustice. I continue not to ask how she died. There’s no good answer, and she’d tell me if she wanted.

She doesn’t drink any blood that I can see.

The only strangers here are those in military or police uniforms and pale-skinned tourists. In our childhoods, they were rare.

Despite all the other changes, thanks to our language and dress and the way we move, we still don’t need to be recognised through a village or a relative’s name to be welcomed. As we continued into the hamlet, a woman washing clothes beside a well said, “You must be here for those legs.”

That got us all the way up to Her knees, leaning against a garden fence. The woman had discovered the legs beneath a palmyra and constructed a small lean-to outside her garden to shelter them instead. The lower part of Her sari was still wrapped around them—brown stains, red hibiscus print, greying cream background—so we only had to brush off the dust. The householder gave us buttermilk and sat quietly with us to watch me stitch.

She was satisfied, when we took her guests on our departure, and didn’t ask who they were. “One must be blessed to have such sisters,” was her farewell to us.

I had watched the war in ink-on-newsprint and pixels on a cathode ray tube screen, felt only in delayed chest squeezes and stomach churns and sleepless nights what others lived through, or didn’t. When Saththiya and Parvathi met me at the bus station, they’d appeared thin and old. They told me I’d lost weight.

I had left home before I developed the skill of commenting on other people’s weight. “You look just like your amma,” I told Saththiya instead.

“She asked after you.” Her voice had changed, or was it that for over a decade I’d only heard it down a calling-card-crackled phone line?

“And Parvathi. I hadn’t believed we would see you again.” I didn’t know what to say to her. It’s a blessing to be with her again, after we didn’t have a chance for a final farewell. I don’t understand how any of this works. What determines who returns from the dead?

“Who else could make sure you do this properly?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, and I was distracted trying to fill in both their histories from small gleanings. The village they’d been in during that displacement, that evacuation. The fates of relatives, neighbours, familiar faces. They asked about my life, while I tried to reconcile the rubble with my childhood memories, avoiding questions that might pain them.

Then Saththiya said, “There’s one way we three can help.”

Others were putting overseas money into rebuilding temples and funding prayers as well as orphanages and hospitals, but my friends had a different idea.

We found Her fingers next. They were curved around a burnt kudam in the fractured hall of a school where many had hidden. No one else had left their fingers behind, though. I imagined She might have been fetching water or cooking for the others. We tried to pry one set of fingers from the neck of the kudam, but they squished under our hands, and the greenish stuff that leaked out looked and smelt like the scum in a sewage canal. The only option was to bring the kudam, and to carry the fingers that had oozed off, because Her legs, although they strode alongside us now, could not. I wrapped them in a scrap of fabric from Her torn sari and took them in my hands. When that bundle soaked through, Saththiya tore the mothalaippu off her own sari, and we bandaged them back onto the kudam. Parvathi carried it against her hip, wrinkling her nose, one of the only things she could carry for us.

I remembered how these fingers had worked the gardens with us. I breathed deeply, trying to take in what was left of Her, even if it was corrupted by decay.

Leaving the wrecked mandapam, we passed another group of searchers. I recognised the way their gazes scanned the shell-shattered landscape, the burnt tops of palmyra trunks, the distant horizon.

Everyone wanted to put their loved ones back together, but only some, like Kottravai, could ever be recovered. This cluster of workshoppers carried a head with a small strand of jasmine wrapped around a flimsy topknot. They were singing to their god to come to them, to bring peace, to cool their eyes.

When I looked again, I saw that the head was a coconut.

“That’s a possibility,” said Parvathi, following my gaze. But I wanted as much of Her as we could salvage, not some imagined re-creation.

When Kottravai lived alongside us, we thought nothing of it. To plant, water, and harvest was daily life, not worship. We had all felt Her absence for the first time after we left—or were displaced—and daily life no longer existed.

I’d thought I might find Her again when I placed a spider plant on the mantlepiece above the fireplace or when I soaked an avocado seed until it sprouted—but there was only one Kottravai for us, and She stayed at home and broke, until there was not enough of our home left to hold all of Her.

Her hands were at Saththiya’s house. Saththiya’s family had locked the doors and left when the bombs started landing too close, and they hadn’t been back. If it weren’t for Her feet leading the way, we’d never have learned She had stopped there.

Saththiya wept when we arrived, a moan creeping up her throat upon seeing the weed-smothered garden and the unswept path, the roof tiles in shards. I took the sack from her so she could cover her face with her hands, and we retreated out of sight of the gate until she felt ready to speak. At least her home was largely intact, but it was cruel to say that. For all I knew, she was crying with relief. There was a new distance between us, as wide as the oceans I’d flown over.

Someone rose from a cane chair on the ruined portico to greet us, offering seats before she knew who we were. She didn’t apologise when Saththiya said this was her home. They only used two rooms, she said, and kept those tidy. We didn’t ask for her story, but we heard it anyway.

In the bedroom, Her hands rested on the almirah. What must She have thought when She returned to find the house closed and empty?

Saththiya’s old comb was half-embedded in a palm, encrusted fluid sealing them together. “Do you remember She used to oil our hair and search for lice?” Saththiya said. “Maybe She came here expecting us.”

“The neighbours would have told Her you left,” I protested. “You can’t blame yourself.”

While Saththiya walked around her old home with its new residents, getting to know them, I sewed the separated fingers onto Her hand with the comb, curling them around it, and sewed the fingers attached to the kudam onto the empty hand. Her feet and legs leaned against the edge of the bed.

Parvathi waited until I finished sewing to say, “They’re the wrong way around.”

I hadn’t noticed. When they’re detached and still, fingers don’t have obvious left-right orientations. “Well, She couldn’t have held a kudam and a comb with the same hand.”

We studied my handiwork. ‘Hold’ was generous. I’d made good use of the strips of nylex sari to keep Her digits and palms together. I tidied my sewing things into my handbag and Parvathi rummaged around the drawers. “What nice clothes Saththiya had! All these silks. Oh, and look at the embroidery on this! We should take it with us, it hasn’t been eaten one bit.”

“It’s the mothballs.” They nauseated me, on top of the odour of rot. Parvathi grabbed a few of the small white pellets and bent over Her feet. I stopped her before she could drop mothballs in the holes. “The maggots are there already. We could try to keep them away if they weren’t, but it wouldn’t be right to—”

“Seri, seri, I know.” She looked up from the pile of clothes she was making as the door opened. “Can you keep these things?”

Saththiya picked up the kudam and hands and sat heavily on the bed with them on her lap. “She visited, when we first moved here. She helped dig the garden.”

“At least She got to see it again. Maybe She stayed awhile,” I suggested. “You could have sheltered Her without knowing. She might have used your things, otherwise why would She have picked up the comb?”

“If She’d had any hair left to comb, wouldn’t we have found it here?” Parvathi always had a snarky comment. “But we can take some of these things for Her. One of your saris, and look at these glass bangles!” The valuables had been taken by Saththiya’s family when they left. Or perhaps they’d been sold by the new occupants who, after all, had arrived with nothing. Only the bedroom seemed untouched.

Saththiya shrugged. “It’s not as if we’ll come back.”

The legs had taken a few steps forward and waited beside the doorway. “I guess it’s time to go.” She rose to open the door, and Parvathi shoved the bundle she’d pulled from the almirah into the sack.

A teenage boy brought us tumblers of tea before we left, and then it was a long walk through country lanes and towns until we found the rest of Her legs leaning against a palmyra. We recognised them from the hibiscus sari fabric. Saththiya hummed a song while I sewed. Her thighs were shrunken—everyone had lost weight in those last days—so it was complex work. I doubled back over my stitches to be sure they would hold.

She left Her hips and stomach on the beach to be lost under the shifting sand. We found them because Her fingers began drumming on the kudam as we approached. It took three of us digging—we did not expect Her fragile, fading fingers to help—to uncover it. Her legs waded into the shallows, between rags tangled in the rocks and dull-coloured plastic scraps, and Parvathi had to pull them back to shore, pleading with them to be careful at least until She was back together.

“They can’t hear you,” Saththiya said. “Just prop them in the sand.”

Parvathi dug another shallow hole where she placed Her legs side-by-side, kneeling with Her thighs against her shoulders, and scooped the sand we had excavated onto Her feet, until they couldn’t pull free. I stood bent over to sew them to Her hips.

Her stomach was empty, and Saththiya wanted to fill it before we sought Her ribs. With Pongal, she said, and I asked where we would find rice and milk on a coast that would only be known now for death.

With fish, suggested Parvathi, but she didn’t know how to catch them. She was the only one who could row a boat, and she could only move small objects, like mothballs and remains. She didn’t dare touch a living animal.

So we scraped the dust of our travel from our bodies, windblown beach sand pale with bleached coral fragments and funeral fire ash and the yellow soil and orange-brown soil and red-red soil from across our land, and they dropped in clumps from our hands into Her stomach cavity where the organs had rotted in the heat into a kind of mush.

Rebuilding should be beautiful, but it was only horrific.

Parvathi wanted us to start again and weave a new stomach of palm leaves. Saththiya insisted we would not remake any part of Her that we already had, however degraded. So much had been taken already that could never be replaced.

Palmyra trees are the life of this land: among other things, they provide fruit with the cool nungu inside; sweet karupaddi from its sap that ferments to kallu; bitter odiyal from the panangkilangu—the sprout; the leaves that can be woven for shelter or etched into olai chuvadi that may last hundreds of years; and timber. I see the fan palms standing charred and headless all across the landscape. If a god had a heart, I think this might break it.

We rarely talked of what might come next, or what we hoped for once we put Her pieces back together. Occasionally someone would say, “I wonder if it will rain?” or “Will the palms grow back?” and the others would respond with, “Maybe.” I suppose we had learned in wartime not to contemplate a future beyond survival.

We left the seashore and wandered a few miles inland to the next village, arguing. Should we start building up Her arms? No, it was hard enough carrying the kudam with Her hands. We’d look for Her upper body and build out from there.

As the walk continued, the days passed, and Saththiya and I grew hungrier and thirstier, we started wondering if we would find all of Her. We passed others accompanied by part-bodies, exchanging nods. We didn’t ask who their gods were.

We went to Parvathi’s old home next and found Her left forearm. It lay at the intersection of two old watering channels, or so Parvathi said. I remembered the garden that used to be here. Like Saththiya’s, it was overgrown. The forearm was a muddy, yellowing bone poking out of the dirt. We bound it around with banana leaves stripped from a nearby sapling, and I carried it.

We must have gardened with our families, not together, but nevertheless I have false memories of the four of us carrying a manveddi, guided by Kottravai, shifting the soil in these irrigation channels to determine where the well-water would flow. Of pulling weeds together, bare-handed. Of hacking down a huge clump of bananas. Of cutting leaves to feed the cows.

Parvathi smelt Her liver. It smelt like blood, she said, instead of decay. It was grey and faded and tucked into the corner between the half-wall and the house wall of the red cement portico.

My house, a few hundred metres further along the road, was completely gone—bulldozed or bombed, we didn’t know.

The neighbours had returned and rebuilt their home. They stopped us in the lane to warn that no one had checked my family’s land for unexploded mines.

“I can smell Her in there,” said Parvathi. “I’ll search. I can’t die twice.”

One day someone would discover what was buried in that soil. If we could unearth a lost Kottravai from all across the land, what might grow, or be built, out of the war debris concentrated here? I steered my mind away from that question. When Kottravai was here, She could help us face those terrors too. Maybe.

Though we’d mourned her once already, this Parvathi, this pisasu who might only be an echo or another fused memory like the cuckoos, felt like the real Parvathi.

Wanting to delay losing Parvathi for as long as possible, we finally change our approach.

We bundle together fistfuls of too-dry murungaikkai from a neighbour’s tree, forming the upper part of Her left arm and a full right arm. I sit on the ground and sew.

The neighbours still use their well, so Saththiya and Parvathi lower their sun-faded blue plastic bucket into the inch of water at the bottom and find an eye floating inside. Saththiya knots it into the mothalaippu of her sari.

There are no trees left in our garden—not the mangoes, the jackfruit, the papaya, not even a single banana tree from the plantation we’d grown. But as we turn back inland, carrying Her completed arms, we find Her head—Her real head—hanging empty-socketed from a coconut palm among the ordinary coconuts. Saththiya twists the eyeball into it like a lightbulb.

And that’s how it continues, alternating between the real and unreal.

Panai maddai, the lacey interwoven fibres surrounding the palmyra trunks, that we gather into matted hair.

Another eye in a temple pond, between flowering yellow water-lilies.

We cut long grass for the rest of Her torso, hoping the air inside it will be Her lungs. We slap handfuls of moist red soil around it, shaping a neck for Her head to rest on. With that done, we don’t need to carry any of Her.

We give Her our own blood—mine and Saththiya’s. Parvathi says, “So there is some use in becoming a blood-drinking pisasu after all,” even though she doesn’t drink any, only spits it back out to fill Kottravai. I’m just grateful to feel her touch again, however cold and clammy.

Before the war, the fruit bats used to swarm every night, over the temple and into the trees. Most of those trees are gone now, too. They can’t stand artillery fire any more than cement walls or stone pillars, and the flying foxes have nowhere to roost. We find a lone bat with one wing, and when it flutters, Parvathi says, “It’s Her heart.”

It wouldn’t survive alone, she argues. Why should we deprive it of this chance?

I refuse to sew—why should a bat recognise a human deity?—but it latches onto the ribs we shaped of blade-sharp palmyra stems and pulses there.

We dress Her in Saththiya’s sari. She still doesn’t talk. I think either Her hands or the glass bangles will break if I try to force them on. I have just five days left on my visa and need two of those for travel.

Saththiya takes my needle and thread and begins making a string of jasmine for Her hair instead.

“Do you think the bats are putting back together their bat-gods?” I ask.

We stay at a guesthouse that night. We can do this because not only is She shaped like a complete human, thanks to Her head, but the flowers almost mask Her smell now. That’s also how we know something divine is happening.

We make up another prayer before going to sleep. Saththiya and Kottravai share one bed, and me and Parvathi the other, careful not to touch. Drinking my blood once was scary enough, she says.

In the morning, as I’m stirring, Kottravai says in Her monsoon-rain voice, “I don’t know whether bats have gods,” and then, “We’d better get to work.”

“I’m dead,” Parvathi answers, holding the electric kettle. “I’ve done all the work I can.”

We say goodbye to Parvathi, again, sitting together with cups of tea that she could brew but not drink.

Kottravai gives her a last long hug, and she disappears while walking down the hall, just like a regular pisasu, between eyeblinks.

“We have much to do,” says Kottravai, sounding fresher and brighter with each word.

I want time to think about Parvathi. I wish I’d asked if she really slept when she lay next to us at night, and if she dreamed. I wish I’d spoken to her alone, sometime in the past few weeks, and not had only this shared farewell. But Kottravai’s appearance alarms me in a way that unearthing the parts of her body had not. Her oozing hand rests on her hip. The comb, separated from her fingers, lies wetly on the bedside table. I’m afraid she will try to tidy her uncombable panai maddai hair and pull it free.

Have we distorted her appearance too much, with too many substitutions? She only has two arms, and I thought a god would have many. And hearing her ordinary voice, I am uncertain whether She was even a god before. She may have been one of our mothers or aunts or grandmothers, or all of them—a misremembering of those who taught us to care for the land. They only had two arms each.

“We were never going to get her back as she was,” Saththiya murmurs. “You saw how the land is changed. What makes up Kottravai has changed.”

I expect her to demand seeds, or a manveddi, but Kottravai leads us along the hallway, green and brown and still decaying, and out onto the sun-scorched tar road.

“I want you to dig water tanks.”

“The two of us?” asks Saththiya.

“I don’t think these fingers would stay together for long.” Kottravai inspects her hands. “Water has always been the problem here. I wasn’t surprised about the temple tank but I saw with my own eye how low the well-water is.”

Saththiya and I look at each other. I wonder if it will rain, we’d asked each other.

We reach the bus stop, and Kottravai continues. “We can’t make it rain. The whole world has changed. Even if we hadn’t been ripped apart, we might not be able to make it rain. But I can tell you how to store water when it does. I can tell you what to plant, and when, and how.”

I want to tell her it’s not knowledge that’s lacking, only the capacity to do all of this on our own, and that’s what we wanted from her. But dear Saththiya, who understands more clearly than I do, says, “I’ll be able to find workers to help,” and turns to me. “Can you help get the money? When can you come back?”

Since when have our gods ever been a shortcut?

The rattling bus arrives, and as our decomposing Kottravai climbs the steps in front of me, maggots wriggling around her ringing anklets, I see that her feet don’t match at all.