It is a girl. She is walking down an uneven path on the barren hillside, placing her feet carefully on the loose stones. Her thin brown fingers are curled around some ferns with white spore smeared undersides that she uses to stamp Christmas tree shapes on her skin. She places a leaf at the back of the hand clasping the bunch of green fronds and uses the other palm to give it a hard slap. Peeling the smashed leaf off, she smiles at the white print left behind. She turns left to enter a gap in the rough undulating stone wall that she has been following all along. A house stands there - stout and serene under an old walnut tree that has spread its arms out like a giant brocolli. The house is made of grey uncut stone slabs and has a faded red roof with the paint peeling off in places. Someone has carried large boulders to the roof and used them to pin it down so that the wind will not blow it away. This is the roof that the rain drops make music on on those stormy nights when she lies in bed with an oil lantern near her pillow, so engrossed in her reading that she doesn’t hear the wind scream.
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Every afternoon, the woman with the baby in her stomach sits on the steps outside the small hut and watches the opera. It starts with the hills in the distance change colour from green to grey as the dark clouds, pregnant with rain, smash against them to dunk the place in a downpour that clogs the earth and sends the snakes slithering out of their holes. If snakes could have memories (which she has been told, they don’t) she guesses those would be different from hers. Twice she has heard the wet grass rustle and caught a glimpse of a shiny black tail even as she sat with her feet just outside the protective umbra of the roof, watching the rain drops slide down the bare skin and trickle into the clefts between her toes. The unhappy ones sometimes slip off the arch of her ankle and kill themselves by jumping into the brown muddy depth below. For an onlooker from the narrow tarred road, that turns just beyond the hut and leads to a wooden gate where the locals live in their stilt houses with pigs squealing underneath, she is a woman getting her feet wet in the rain. They won’t see a girl traipsing down the uneven path to her grandmother’s house that has a faded tin roof, pinned down by stones so that the wind can’t blow it away. Outside there would be a walnut tree that has spread its branches out and drops green fruit on the ground. These, the little girl will pick up and crush under a stone to reach the soft white pulp inside that she will pluck out with her fingers and place in her mouth, letting the bitterness of the green seed spread on her tongue.
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Her hair is streaked with grey in places where the colour has faded and when she smiles the fine lines around her eyes deepen into furrows that weren’t there some years back. She has told herself they add character to her face and they no longer bother her when she looks into the bathroom mirror. It doesn’t rain much where she lives but today the sky is dark with possibility. She leaves what she is doing and goes out into the balcony to hold her hands out for the drops that will splatter on her palm. She tilts her face to the sky and feels the water trail down her nose and make her eyelashes heavy with its weight. She tastes a raindrop and watches the others splash the slim leaves of the bamboo thicket where the parrots live. The rain still puts a spell on her with its sounds and smells and tricks of the trade that make mist appear from around the bend in the road and a heady earthy fragrance fill the air. Only lately she has realized though that it doesn’t take her back to the stone house on the hillside anymore. That memory has been stored away in some invisible drawer that she has to pull open to reassure herself that it is still there. It has been replaced by another that now pulls her by the shirt sleeve and takes her back to a little hut on a curving tar road with moss green hills in the distance and a generator-lit street light in front that stains the purple night with a circle of pale yellow to entice the bugs. That is where the little kids with shiny black eyes gather each evening to pick bugs that they carry home in transparent polythene bags for their mothers to fry with the dinner rice.
If she turns her head just a little to the left, she will be able to see through the glass window, the little boy who is reading a manga comic on the computer, his plump fingers curled around the mouse. Some day she will teach him to make fern patterns on his arm. Today, she just walks in leaving wet foot prints on the floor.
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Every afternoon, the woman with the baby in her stomach sits on the steps outside the small hut and watches the opera. It starts with the hills in the distance change colour from green to grey as the dark clouds, pregnant with rain, smash against them to dunk the place in a downpour that clogs the earth and sends the snakes slithering out of their holes. If snakes could have memories (which she has been told, they don’t) she guesses those would be different from hers. Twice she has heard the wet grass rustle and caught a glimpse of a shiny black tail even as she sat with her feet just outside the protective umbra of the roof, watching the rain drops slide down the bare skin and trickle into the clefts between her toes. The unhappy ones sometimes slip off the arch of her ankle and kill themselves by jumping into the brown muddy depth below. For an onlooker from the narrow tarred road, that turns just beyond the hut and leads to a wooden gate where the locals live in their stilt houses with pigs squealing underneath, she is a woman getting her feet wet in the rain. They won’t see a girl traipsing down the uneven path to her grandmother’s house that has a faded tin roof, pinned down by stones so that the wind can’t blow it away. Outside there would be a walnut tree that has spread its branches out and drops green fruit on the ground. These, the little girl will pick up and crush under a stone to reach the soft white pulp inside that she will pluck out with her fingers and place in her mouth, letting the bitterness of the green seed spread on her tongue.
--------------
Her hair is streaked with grey in places where the colour has faded and when she smiles the fine lines around her eyes deepen into furrows that weren’t there some years back. She has told herself they add character to her face and they no longer bother her when she looks into the bathroom mirror. It doesn’t rain much where she lives but today the sky is dark with possibility. She leaves what she is doing and goes out into the balcony to hold her hands out for the drops that will splatter on her palm. She tilts her face to the sky and feels the water trail down her nose and make her eyelashes heavy with its weight. She tastes a raindrop and watches the others splash the slim leaves of the bamboo thicket where the parrots live. The rain still puts a spell on her with its sounds and smells and tricks of the trade that make mist appear from around the bend in the road and a heady earthy fragrance fill the air. Only lately she has realized though that it doesn’t take her back to the stone house on the hillside anymore. That memory has been stored away in some invisible drawer that she has to pull open to reassure herself that it is still there. It has been replaced by another that now pulls her by the shirt sleeve and takes her back to a little hut on a curving tar road with moss green hills in the distance and a generator-lit street light in front that stains the purple night with a circle of pale yellow to entice the bugs. That is where the little kids with shiny black eyes gather each evening to pick bugs that they carry home in transparent polythene bags for their mothers to fry with the dinner rice.
If she turns her head just a little to the left, she will be able to see through the glass window, the little boy who is reading a manga comic on the computer, his plump fingers curled around the mouse. Some day she will teach him to make fern patterns on his arm. Today, she just walks in leaving wet foot prints on the floor.
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