Stargazing
‘The net hadn’t made her view of the sky any less clear, but she had felt imprisoned in its presence, even more so than she already did in the tedium of days she had accepted as her life.’
Tonight, after so many days, Sarla had finally had the chance to sit in the courtyard and gaze up at the stars, for as long as her heart desired. It was one of her favorite things about early November, when the days were still warm, but the nights cold enough to warrant wearing a light shawl. She had unearthed all the shawls, cardigans, sweaters, mufflers, and woollen socks from the almirahs and boxes, the garments redolent of moth-ball, that peculiar odor which she exclusively associated with winter.
During the inferno depths of Jodhpur’s summer, when she cannot remember what it feels like to be cold—or whether that ghost sensation even existed—she found herself conjuring it up by inhaling the moth-ball-smelling woollens, reminding herself that there will come a day when she will be grateful for their presence.
And now, it was finally here: this November night, the stars clear and distinct, the moon a hesitant, delicate crescent, and the courtyard entirely to herself.
Sarla wore the shawl that Mehek had gifted her last winter.
“Such beautiful embroidery,” Sarla had told Mehek the first time she had seen the shawl, marvelling at both the intricacy of its embroidery and unusual color combination: puce and mauve. “Did you get it during your Srinagar trip?”
Mehek however had been vague about the shawl for a while, refusing to disclose as to where she had bought it from. This was indeed a surprise, given that mother and daughter regularly shared the details of their purchases with each other, along with so much else. Sarla’s oldest daughter had always been more of a friend and confidante, the one who understood without being much said and the mother had clung to her for reassurance over the years. And yet, for some reason, no matter how much Mehek tried to dodge the shawl question, Sara had persisted in her curiosity, unwilling to let go of the mystery.
“It was Silky who gifted it to me” Mehek had suddenly confessed one morning. “She bought it from her first month’s salary.”
Sarla had been visiting Mehek in Jaipur for a fortnight by then, and they had already established a morning routine. In the limbo between preparing breakfast and lunch, they would sit on the sun-drenched verandah, idly gossiping while sorting through the freshly-purchased winter vegetables, one invariably peeling and slicing carrots, other shelling peas, the December morning sunlight cradled in their laps like an invisible, beloved cat.
They never spoke about Silky anymore; rather, Sarla avoided talking about her younger daughter as much as possible. Mehek would absently offer details about her sister in passing, details once spoken, assumed would be forgotten, as if they were talking about a distant, uninteresting acquaintance.
Sarla knew that Mehek had always wanted a cat as a child, a fluffy, white one with green eyes, one of those rare instances when she had articulated her wish for something. But, as with everything else Mehak had desired during her childhood, the cat, too, had never materialized.
Sarla had sat up right, having forgotten about the peas; her heart was thudding in her body, each distinct audible and distinct. They never spoke about Silky anymore; rather, Sarla avoided talking about her younger daughter as much as possible. Mehek would absently offer details about her sister in passing, details once spoken, assumed would be forgotten, as if they were talking about a distant, uninteresting acquaintance.
And yet, the moment Mehek had uttered Silky’s name, Sarla could see her beloved youngest daughter dancing in the sunlight, as if she was right here, oblivious to anyone watching her, simply giddy with the pleasure of hearing her favorite Hindi film song. Sarla blinked once, twice; the illusion retreated, leaving her stranded on the verandah, surrounded by a pile of shaved carrots, fading dahlias, bleached grass, and Mehek’s sympathetic, melancholy eyes.
“I have a headache, I am going to rest,” Sarla said and then fled to the sanctuary of her room at Mehek’s house, that rare space in her life which was hers alone, even if only temporarily. She had not grown up in a house with the idea of guest rooms, that a room could simply sit there, unoccupied, adorned and awaiting a visitor. She had shared a room with two cousins while growing up; afterward, she had shared it with Alok, and later, the children when they were young. During her earlier visits to Mehek’s house, she would stay only briefly and always accompanied by either Alok or Silky, reluctant to stay for long in her daughter’s marital home.
This time, however, she had come alone and how she would miss this precious respite, where she could lock the door and curl up in bed, temporarily liberated from the onerous responsibility of being a mother, wife, and grandmother, all those labels which she outwardly took so much pride in, and yet secretly longed to divest herself of. Burrowing herself into the razai, Sarla recalled how Silky would ‘help’ her in the kitchen as a little girl, peeling away labels from the glass bottles so that they could be either repurposed or given to the raddiwala. “See, the glass bottles are nanga now,” she would giggle, “you need to get them new clothes, Ma.” Sarla would reprimand her, telling her that she shouldn’t use such words, and yet laugh inwardly herself.
Sarla’s eyes burned, instinctively willing herself to unremember her daughter, whom she had not met for years now.
And yet, she knew that it was, ultimately, a futile, cruel exercise. Of all her four children, Sarla remembered Silky the most, her absence having become a presence she could and would not exorcise from herself.
The night before Sarla was to leave for Jodhpur, Mehek had come to her room, ostensibly to help her pack. Yet, she merely sat at the end of the bed, watching Sarla neatly stack and place ironed saris, blouses, salwar-kameezes, and other sundry items inside her suitcase. Sarla did not like shopping and had to be coaxed into accepting the few gifts that Mehek had forced upon her during the course of the stay.
Sarla was about to lock the suitcase when Mehek suddenly produced Silky’s shawl in front of her.
Like always, Sarla had complied without to Alok without question, too heartbroken and numb to have the energy or inclination to resist his decision. The luxury of surrendering to a bottomless grief could only come much later.
“Ma, I want you to have this,” she said and then added softly, “I know Silky would want you to have this too.”
Sarla’s first reaction had been to decline the gift, like she had done so with the others. But she’d wordlessly accepted the shawl, sandwiching it between her saris.
She and Mehek had never referred to the shawl since then.
Once Sarla returned home, she buried the shawl inside the large tin chest containing some of her most precious possessions: letters from her late mother, her wedding saris, and all the things that Silky had once called her own.
After Silky had run away from home a week before her wedding, Alok had told Sarla to excise all traces of Silky’s presence from the house, as if she had never ever lived there. He had pronounced her as good as dead.
Like always, Sarla had complied without to Alok without question, too heartbroken and numb to have the energy or inclination to resist his decision. The luxury of surrendering to a bottomless grief could only come much later.
Silky had only left with a small suitcase, and Sarla and Mehek had painfully sifted through all that she had in turn left behind, donating first the mountain of clothes, shoes, hair ribbons and bands, and rusting, broken jewelry to whomever was willing to take them. They had to make endless trips back to the shops where they had purchased her wedding lehenga and trousseau, returning the clothes without a word, thankful that the shopkeepers never once questioned them. But what Sarla found the hardest and most impossible to relinquish were Silky’s school notebooks, the medals and trophies she had won in sports and dance competitions, and the diaries she had secreted away in an unlocked compartment of her almirah.
Sarla could not help flipping through these diaries, her desire to hear her daughter’s voice overriding her guilt at encroaching upon the intensely private world and life Silky had constructed inside those pages over the last many years—a world that Sarla had been singularly and perhaps, deliberately ignorant of.
She eventually stopped reading, helpless in her now new-found knowledge of how torn her daughter was between creating her happiness and that of losing the love of her family, how high and far her dreams had soared and spread beyond Jodhpur, that her life was so much more than a knot binding her to a man.
Sarla often wondered if Silky had deliberately left the compartment unlocked, wishing that someone would find those diaries, and understand why it was that Silky had had to do what she ultimately did. After a while, she stopped wondering and simply bundled up the medals and notebooks and diaries inside an old sari, placing them at the bottom of the chest.
One day, Sarla promised herself, one day when she would be reunited with her daughter, she would give them to her and say: Your mother would and could never have forgotten you.
When would that day come? Would it ever come?
Tonight, wrapped up in Silky’s shawl, Sarla imagined her daughter in the courtyard besides her, gazing up at the glimmering, winking stars.
For years, Sarla’s star gazing ritual had been a solitary one, as if she had been unwilling to share the stars with anyone else. When she had been newly married, she would steal an occasional night away after her husband was asleep; later, as her family and responsibilities grew, she would demarcate the time between the evening soaps and bedtime as her own. Even on the coldest of nights, she would still find her way to the courtyard, if only for a few minutes or so, unwilling to relinquish the ritual. She would sit on the steps leading up to the water tank, reveling in the time that was simply her own. Her thoughts would aimlessly float in her head, like leaves upon a river; she did not have to think about vegetables she needed to buy for tomorrow’s lunch or rising at dawn to fill up endless buckets of water or the phone calls she had to make. Everyone else in the family at that time of night was entirely absorbed in themselves, and she was free to do as she pleased. It was her favorite time of the day.
She couldn’t remember when exactly Silky started to join her in these stargazing nights; it must have happened after Alok had stopped her from dancing in the courtyard, angrily telling her that she had become a big girl now, something she should have understood long back. Silky had only just turned twelve but was already taller than her mother and Mehek. “Dance in your room,” Alok had thundered one night at dinner, watching a sulky Silky push around the food on her thali. “And decent girls don’t focus on dancing, they learn useful things. When Mehek was your age, she could cook a meal for ten people.”
Sarla had been busy serving Alok and her two sons hot rotis; like every night, Mehek rolled out the rotis, Sarla roasting them on the flame before dousing them in ghee and depositing on impatient plates. Alok did not care for a lukewarm roti, especially during summer, for some reason and her sons were the same, rejecting the roti if it did not as much scald their fingers.
Silky had yet to eat a single roti, the same roti growing colder and limper on her plate until Mehek replaced it with a fresh hot one.
“I don’t want to cook food, I don’t want to do anything,” she had said between sobs before rushing out of the kitchen.
She would sit on the steps leading up to the water tank, reveling in the time that was simply her own. Her thoughts would aimlessly float in her head, like leaves upon a river; she did not have to think about vegetables she needed to buy for tomorrow’s lunch, or rising at dawn to fill up endless buckets of water, or the phone calls she had to make.
They had sat in silence; Sarla and Mehek pausing the roti assembly line, looking at Silky’s abandoned plate, the men glaring at the kitchen doorway. Mehek rose to take the plate to Silky but Sarla could feel Alok's disapproval and gestured Mehek to resume rolling out the rotis.
The morning after, Sarla fed the abandoned, dry rotis to the street cow. As she watched the cow gulp them down, Sarla thought she could taste her daughter’s hunger, but knew that she had nothing to assuage it with.
In the coming years, Silky fought with everyone but her mother; it was during this time that she began to intermittently join her mother and her nightly communion with the stars. Sarla had initially resented the intrusion, but then actually began to look forward to her daughter’s presence. They never spoke during that time. Sarla was reluctant to taint this precious hour with recriminations.
For everyone in the neighborhood by now knew about the corrosive differences between Silky and her father, the angry paternal words and frustrated teenage outbursts drifting away in the air, like errant kites, tangling themselves in the neighbor’s tree or TV aerial. They knew Silky wanted to study further and make something of her life, she didn’t want to get married. That she absolutely hated her life. They knew that her father was adamant that she get married as soon as possible, that marriage was her only destiny, that only a husband would make her happy.
When Sarla went outside to buy groceries or attend the evening aarti at the nearby Ganesh temple, she found alternately sympathetic or mocking eyes upon her, looking away the moment she made eye-contact with them. There was very little one could hide from one another in this neighborhood of interconnected roofs and open courtyards. It was a neighbourhood where everyone knew when a couple was separating, even before they could themselves feel the fissures tearing their marriage apart. Everyone knew that a son and his wife were soon going to abandon their parents. They knew that greed would shortly divide families into fragments.
All this knowledge—and what for? In her hourly encounter with the stars, Sarla simply refused to acknowledge the bitter realities that impugned her life. In those moments, she and Silky simply gazed upward, united in their dedication to inhabit this pocket of peace, even if they knew that it would soon crumble away.
Sarla wondered if Silky remembered those evenings wherever she was now. She had suddenly stopped giving her mother company during those periods of stargazing, eventually spending most of her time in her room. Sarla thought it must have been when Alok decided to install a fine netting over the courtyard, claiming that it would deter the monkeys from jumping inside and ransacking the house. Monkey invasions had increased in frequency in the city. No monkey had yet to make an appearance in their neighborhood, but Alok had been adamant about his decision, stubborn in his unyielding belief that his truth was the singular truth.
Sarla had bitterly resented the net, one of the rare times she had fought with her husband although she had been hard-pressed to tell him why exactly she had had been so angry with him. The net hadn’t made her view of the sky any less clear, but she had felt imprisoned in its presence, even more so than she already did in the tedium of days she had accepted as her life. Every time she gazed at the blotted night, she had felt a blinding rage towards the net, as if she had discovered she was myopic, and would now have to see life adulterated through a dusty pair of spectacles.
No wonder Silky had retreated indoors and into herself, knowing that the only way she would ever escape this circumscribed life was to forever flee from it.
Each spoke carefully and falteringly, as if they were walking through a garden of thorns, so intent on avoiding injury that they were reduced to having nothing else to talk about.
It was Mehek who told her over the years that Silky was working in a media company in Gurgaon, that she travelled across the world, and that she was planning to do an MBA. Unlike the rest of the family who had consigned Silky to oblivion, Mehek had refused to do so, staying in touch, becoming the safe harbour that Silky had so desperately sought.
It was Mehek who told Sarla that Silky had been wanting to talk to her for a long time; by then, Silky had been gone from their lives for almost four years, four long, painful years that Sarla could not imagine how she had survived and endured. “Just talk to her once, Ma. “She misses you so much, she remembers you every single day,” she said before pausing.
Sarla had initially refused but then eventually agreed, as she knew she would, desperate to hear her daughter’s voice. And yet, when Silky’s call had come, she had been unable to say anything, neither words of reproach nor yearning. Each spoke carefully and falteringly, as if they were walking through a garden of thorns, so intent on avoiding injury that they were reduced to having nothing else to talk about.
It was towards the end that Silky told Silky she was heading to the States to pursue her MBA, that she would be living somewhere called… But Sarla had cut her off before hearing the name of the place that her daughter would soon call home. “I think I hear your father coming, I must stop,” Sarla had said.
She had been sitting in the courtyard during their conversation, on the very steps that she and Silky had often sat upon while gazing at the stars. Even though it was approaching dusk, the stars were still hidden, waiting to emerge only when they felt it was safe to be seen. After they hung up, Sarla went to her room, locked it from the inside, and opened the tin chest in which lay her daughter’s ghost, the one that she had borne and loved and then let go. She picked up the diaries and trophies, inhaling them, desperate to smell her daughter although they only smelt of mothballs, that distant ghost of winter.
She had cried for hours, unable to understand why she had hung up, why she had chosen to silence her daughter’s words. Later that night, when Alok noticed her reddened eyes, he asked if she was falling ill. She wished she could have told him then, that her sickness was loving her daughter, of being unable to forget her. But she had said nothing.
And Silky never called her again.
Sarla wrapped Silky’s shawl more closely around her; the netting had long fallen away, leaving the sky once more accessible to her. And for what recompense? She had lost a daughter, a daughter who was now so far away that she could not even ask her if she was in a place where she could sit outside and stare at the stars for hours, where stargazing was a pleasure, a necessary pleasure, not a miserly gift eked out from an impoverished life. Sometimes, when she thought she could no longer bear her daughter’s absence, she would imagine that Silky was sitting next to her: she heard her breathe, the scent that was her alone, the warm contact of flesh.
When Silky was small, she loved listening to her mother tell her that of all her children, Silky had kicked her the most during the pregnancy, those insistent feet creating a flurry inside her. Even now, she felt those kicks once again, a storm of love within her. But in the end, they were phantoms too.
Sarla stared at the stars; they stared back at her. They had participated in this visual dialogue for years but not once had they uttered a word to her—or she to them. Tonight, she thought, would be a good day to start. She took a deep breath and spoke. She let the words linger in the air, words she had never ever uttered aloud to her daughter, when she was there in front of her, never thinking that she would even need to say them because she thought her daughter always knew.
She felt the words tread the air, that precarious limbo between earth and sky, and she only left the courtyard when she knew that they had finally made their way to the stars, the shawl trailing behind her.
***
Priyanka Sacheti is a writer and poet based in Bangalore, India. She grew up in the Sultanate of Oman and has previously lived in United Kingdom and United States. She has been published in many publications, including Guardian, Literary Hub, Hyperallergic, and Scroll, with a special focus on art, gender, diaspora, and identity. Her literary work and art have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. She's currently working on a poetry and short story collection. She can be found on Instagram: @iamjustavisualperson and Twitter: @anatlasofallthatisee.
