The Tussar Saree by Oindrila Ghosal

Sound

The first time I draped the beige tussar silk saree, I had no premonition. Even when I ran my fingers across the embroidered flowers and paisleys on the dull gold of the coarse silk while adjusting the pleats, there were no whispers. The soft rustles were empty. Except for the mellow jingles of the gold butterfly danglers and bangles beneath the whirring fan, there was neither a sigh nor a chide. I had expected at least a rebuke. When nothing came drifting in the afternoon breeze, I toppled the barricade holding back the defences I had rehearsed. The newly released captives did not stop for the usual rituals of farewell and instead boarded the little boats of my heavy breath, leaving the shores of my heaving lungs.

I did not call after them. Instead, I stared at my reflection in the mirror—past their fleet. There, over my ripened tummy and welling breasts, the blooming flowers were strewn. I stood like tilled earth with criss-crossing networks of roots on either side. My gaze outlined the kaleidoscope of the petals. As my irises traced the multicoloured threaded curves, the unchecked autumn sun reeled in through the open window and wrapped around me. And in the warmth of the weightless shawl, my cheeks reddened.

What broke my rubrum inertia was my mother’s voice—coming from across the lashing waves, “You should not keep the southern window open at this time of day.” I knew in my heart that there was nothing to disprove that my ears had misheard. Perhaps they hadn’t. I knew sooner or later I would hear the crack of her voice. 

She did not know that I had bought the saree for her, not even when we chose to live apart. I had never confessed to her that during each of her annual trips to the shopping centres and streets, I had seen her secretly ogle the tussar sarees displayed behind the air-conditioned glass. That act followed an undisputed pattern. Often, in the middle of our way through the busy streets, she would pause and stand at a distance from them, imagining herself in the lustrous fabric. I would stop a little away and watch her face illuminated in the subtle beige, gold or copper of the weave. Content, when she almost frolicked to me after minutes of hopeless daydreaming, I never asked her why she did not walk into one of those stores. My unasked question was pretty much in line with the explanation she never provided for the money saved from her salary, which she counted each night after she was convinced I was asleep. That money never accompanied us on those shopping sprees.

While her secret kept the two of us like sealed envelopes in the same musty drawer, mine would surely have ripped her apart. 

I pulled open the drawer beneath the mirror and curled my fingers around the sooty tub of kohl. On twisting open the lid, the impression of my swiping finger on the grim, greasy black soothed the black in my eyes. I retraced the print and dotted some on the back of my neck. 

Whispering prayers to dismiss her voice, though I had heard nothing since, I slid the tub back in and shut the drawer. 

The idiosyncrasy was my inheritance. It was only a speck of the beliefs my mother had handed down to me. For the remaining parts of her sorcery, she stayed tight-lipped. Occasionally, the doctrines treasured in her heart would leak into our lives like a breeze. For instance, she, who, through each stage of progression towards a wilted leaf, never spoke of anything starkly bright and wore nothing but black. Especially on those afternoons when she donned the midnight shade, she made kohl. She was a connoisseur of kohl-making and, like all experts, had her undisclosed list of ingredients and protocol pamphlet, which she had pledged to take with her to the burning pyre.    

I do not remember the exact chronology of events anymore, but I believe that the afternoon I told her that I preferred living on my own in another part of the city, she might have burnt her kohl-making herbs. There are no distinct memories of her frantic protests. When I stood on the threshold encircled by the suitcases, she pressed the tub in my palm and assured me it would keep the fear away. Looking back now, it seems that black was also a metaphor for the words we kept from each other.  

The kohl saga, however, did not last long. Soon, my blaring phone and the exasperated anxiety on the other end dissolved the bleakness of the soft slush of kohl, that no longer smelled of anything. I glimpsed once more at the pinned drape and the bright vermillion in my hair parting, before hurrying out with my weighed-down pace.

The commute to the decked-out community hall was blander than my scarlet wedding. The two friends who had come to pick me up were so engrossed in their word shuttles across the phone that I could arrange the sequence of my mother’s silences and surprises at the sight of the saree, for as long as the wheels rolled. 

Rolling out of the car at the driveway, I made my way through the pruned lawn to the gathering inside, in measured steps—cradling my belly. The two, muted, were close behind. My swollen feet, submerged into the crests and troughs, waded to the gathering through the passage of our wedding photographs.

When I walked in unveiled through the jasmines strung door, people stopped in their laughter and the clicking of their glasses. Their frozen faces turned to me and burst into cheers. The two pieces of music, on their jarring crescendos, drowned in the cacophony of thunderous claps. I only parted my lips slightly and continued towards the pink-blue cake in the centre.

Behind the cake, I quickly scanned their faces. No, not exactly their faces but the distorted, jittery movements that had yet to wane out of their bodies. Urgency. They had to be relieved from the cake-cutting episode so they could drive away to the rest of their day after the feast. I had to go home and pack my bag. But before that, I had to train Nirav in the basics of stirring the ladle. He could, anyhow, safely be left on his own to catalogue the fruiting onions and potatoes. A mild shiver stirred in my blood.

I picked up the knife, centring all my strength on the rounded black butt. I counted to three at the flashes of white teeth all around and drove the sharp edge into the soft plumpness of the freshly baked cake. Just in time, Nirav’s hand gloved mine. Just in time, he had to drive me to the hospital, I thought. 

He had stepped in just in time for me to loosen my authority on the knife. Slipping back, I blew at the pink and blue frosting and tossed my eyes towards the invitees. Amidst the crowd, my frowning mother in a black kanjeevaram was already helping herself to a slice of cake. My search ended at her rounded eyes, peering at the artistry on the tussar. I could not look away. I chose not to look away. I peered intently, compensating for my ears, now deafened by the clamour. And yet, they could make nothing of the words unsaid. 

My hand in Nirav’s continued sectioning the cake, making no noise. The cake was too soft to cry out. My saree did not rustle. Our warm breaths had no sonority. Only I gasped. 

Sight

After the fever stopped, long after the guests had gone, I concluded it would have been better if my mother had not been called at all. Nirav had not agreed with me right away. He eventually gave in, when, turning around with my rosy eyes, I asked him if he could see fumes above my head. He had instantly withdrawn his measuring hand from my burning forehead and rushed me to the hospital. In the lobby, the obstetrician, emerging out with freshly washed hands, spared one look and nodded: it was time. 

None of them spared me their urgency. Not even the brigade of nurses who stormed in next to wheel me into the operating theatre. I could not see their reason for alarm. Nothing was oozing from between my legs. My belly was quiet. It had nothing to churn out, not yet. I wished a deluge would cascade out and drench my legs. At least that might douse the burn beneath my skin. Tied to the stretcher, I tried asking them to slow down in fragmented phrases. A calendar month was yet to pass. They had to wait for the signs of ripening. They neither decelerated nor halted. I could not hear their rhythmic heaves and puffs. In fact, I had not heard my own protests.

I was in the middle of solving the egg-chicken problem—had the shrieks climbed out of my throat or had my eardrum already turned to steel—when a nurse turned on the overhead rings of light and another pushed the anaesthetic into my vein.

My body, still wrapped in the tussar silk that had not yet been requested to be undraped, lay at the fringes of fading consciousness on the birthing bed until the drug began dissolving the clot of my senses. The lights dimmed. The gloves and scalpel felt otherworldly. My body left me.

Cognisance knocked on the door of my steadily breathing body at its prescribed hour and walked into the heaviness of my head. The sentinels of drowse were marching in circles beneath Nirav’s massaging fingers. They sang for me to slow down—to collect the pieces first.

Impatient, I heaved myself upright, shifting my weight onto hands sore from cannulation. Within the green enclosure, no expert advice from a doctor or a matron floated. Nirav only pushed a pillow behind my back and explained nothing.

I moved my head slowly, starting from my green scrub, the saline drip, to the steel stool in the corner. But instead of a chronicling attendant, in the isolated enclosure, in the chiaroscuro of consciousness and unconsciousness, my eyes distinctly noted my mother in her black kanjeevaram, cradling a swaddle by the wheeled feet of the stool.

“Can you hear the cries, Maa?”

This time, the feeble words dribbling from the lump in my throat were not lost to deafness. 

Perhaps convinced that my hearing had not returned, she pulled the cloth from the face. The charred eyes on the charred face did not open. It was as if the red molten mass pulled out of my burning body had been plunged in chilled water. What if the doctor was recovering from the burns on his hands in some other ward?

The oedematous lump was choking my throat again. It was the catchment area of Nirav’s decision of sending me off to recover with my mother. Beyond the dam were my gurgling protests at what had transpired for him to clear her of the charges.

But wasn’t Nirav always like that? He was synonymous with everything that fell into silence or that were lost in translation. Like the jargon my father pelted at me on our trip to the wrecked civilisation by the emerald waters of the Indus. Like the disdain in my mother’s eyes as she peeped out of the windows of the broken houses. Like his slipping into the dug pit at another remnant of the civilisation years later and fracturing his skull and glasses. Like my mother’s incessant chants of if he had held onto her tub of kohl in his dying moments. Like her insistence at the mortuary on forcing open his clenched fists to confirm. Like her resorting to pinning dead butterflies and moths on wax plates and hanging them all over the house. Like the nauseating smell of the waxy scales of their wings. Like the arjuna groves and their populace of Antheraea I had backpacked to a few years ago. Like the synchronised click of the shutter of his camera and mine, and Nirav and I lifting our eyes from behind the lenses. Like the folklores the artisans narrated while weaving the fabric, of the cocoons boiled to reel the silken yarn. Like the twilight Nirav crowned a wreath of green arjuna inflorescence and proposed marriage to me amidst the haloing moths. Like my mother’s theatrics during our flocking from one shop to another in search of the scarlet wedding Benarasi saree. Like her adamant belief that old women lay undiscovered even in death. Like her conviction that only shifting her to an old-age home or getting her married could save her. Like her endless saga of dating men her age. Like her sketches of her tussar silk wedding saree behind her high school biology notebooks. Like her undying fascination for tussar silk. Like Nirav and I revisiting those woods and hutments on our first wedding anniversary and chancing upon the tussar silk saree I knew had fleeted out of my mother’s sketches. Like me hiding the saree from her upon realising that her photographs with the men she went out with, outnumbered the frames of butterflies on the walls. Like me deciding to torment her by draping the saree bought for her at my baby shower.

At the end of my cyclical catharsis, I swirled back into the enclosure with my mother holding my charred baby and Nirav running his fingers through my hair. I had run out of time to reverse the decision. The lump still ached.

I reclined against the pillow and closed my eyes. To my closed lids the sentinels of drowse sang lullabies. I parted my lips slightly and drowned in the deep end of sleep. For the next slipping days, they pushed more medicines down my veins. Unabashed, I slept under their needle. My eyes wouldn’t part even when they changed me into the shirt dress Nirav had brought on the day of my release.

That day, he slid my lulled head to one side on the wheelchair and pushed me to his car. My mother was already sitting in another silhouette of a black saree in the back seat. He drove his hands unaided beneath my slack arms and dropped me onto the seat beside her. She crouched towards her side of the window. The drive to my mother’s place passed as if in a dream.

No one spoke in the car. When we finally wiped our washed hands and feet and sat on the sofa, overlooking the muted daily soap on the television, my mother added, dipping her biscuit in tea, that they had ensured they wouldn’t cut me open in the tussar saree. And even if they had, silk remained untouched by impurity, by grief, by bodily fluids. Nirav sipped his tea and whispered, at last, that he had already sent the saree for dry cleaning.

Smell

After dinner, I stood in front of the undusted mirror affixed to the wardrobe of the bedroom I had slept in many years ago, baring the thick scars from stitching my tummy back together. The eyes on the wings of the corpses of butterflies and moths on the wall behind me, stared at the unhealed seam. I lashed out the breath I had been holding for too long and filled my lungs with the odour of their scales. It was far more tolerable than the still-wafting pungency of the curried fish.

The curry, she boasted, was the recipe of the retired forest ranger she had been seeing for two months now. Nirav, perhaps slightly unprepared for the dinner table confession, asked for a few more pieces of the sea fish. She gleefully flooded his plate with a ladleful of chopped fish swimming in the curry and resumed the paraphernalia of his description. I, between them, spitting out the bones, was caught in the whirlwinds of wondering whether I was good enough to cocoon another life within me, until it could fly out into the world.

I stood up with my plate when the conversation steered towards her talking him into buying her a tussar saree the next time he trekked to the woods. Perhaps the preceding set of sentences had been his passing comment on our trips to the arjuna groves and her piqued interest. When I wasn’t listening, he might have attempted to escape unscathed. 

They were so immersed in her fondness for the silk that they did not notice me leaving and washing my plate in the kitchen. On my way out and up the winding stairs with a plastic bottle of filtered water, I heard her conjugate something about us visiting my baby’s grave the next day, in the middle of her silken elocution. Her sigh that immediately followed—the death in the family had only delayed her wedding by a year—did not escape my ears.

I stopped only when I unbolted the door of my erstwhile bedroom. Inside, the staleness of butterfly wax reminded me of childhood gloom. I walked into the time standing still and broke the spell. I switched on the light. The mousy, thick shroud of dust was a stranger to my childhood. The forgotten, wrinkled flowers on the bed were not a scene from my childhood either. I paced to the mirror reflecting the corpses of butterflies and moth.

“What am I then,” I asked my dodgy reflection, “the silk or the worm?”

I scoffed. How could it know what I was? I was the silkworm that had spun the cocoon only to be killed. Everything else since then was the tussar saree. Or maybe not. The saree remembered the sudden nip in the bud in the previous life and lamented. We were all tussar sarees now—lamenting.

I dropped the hem and parted the doors of the wardrobe. The sublimating moth balls glowed on the shelves that no longer stored my clothes—unleashing the woody aroma, another smell from my childhood. 

I caressed her stacks of muslin bags enclosing treasured silks. Woken by my wayward touch, they whispered, we are all tussar sarees now. I repeated the phrase in the same meter.

And a silk of such peerlessness needed care, needed protection. The sarees had pointed it out right. I had drawn the right inference, first though. My hands, reminded of an unlearnt lesson, poised on a saree bag and pulled it out along with three mothballs. 

Under the watchful eyes of butterfly and moth wings, I climbed onto the unmade bed. I loosened the drawstring of the bag and rattled the muslin saree out. The saree, untagged to its history, spoke nothing but we are all tussar sarees now. My trembling lips sloganeered.

Lying on the rotting flowers, I spread the black flimsy fineness over my body. The newly released mothballs rolled out and settled along my curves. We were all tussar sarees now. And tussar sarees must be stored with utmost caution—protected from the fever that had lost its way since the childbirth, from the betrayal of sound and the smells of memories.

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Oindrila is an emerging author and also a doctoral student at Tata Memorial Centre – Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer, Navi Mumbai. So far, her short stories, “The Harlot’s Veena”, “The Asylum” and “The Jungle Within Me” have been published in Kitaab.

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