On the night I am born: a crack of thunder, the burst of a sewage pipe below our flat, shopfront shutters rattling in alarm; at the industrial site encroaching our streets, an explosion that destroys the oxygen plant, injuring seven migrant laborers, followed by emergency services careening through flash floods, a rescue so unexpected the event stays in the news cycle for three months, the workers’ families weeping at the burn ward as the Home Minister hands out modest cheques to curry favor with the migrants’ wealthier home nations; and on that same night, in the dark of our neighbor’s kitchen, a cylinder of liquid petroleum gas – much like the one which my own belly-heaving, thighs-quivering mother is braced against as my head crowns – exploding.
No one talks about the second explosion, except to say, what a shame, the neighbor’s wife so young, only seven months into the marriage, and with child too – a baby girl according to a recent ultrasound. How fortunate the fire was contained inside the kitchen, how lucky the rest of their family escaped. Everyone talks about the catastrophe at the oxygen plant – a nephew’s friend’s cousin’s husband interviewed for the job at the factory office and turned away, what a close call that was, they say. No one talks about the second explosion, except the cylinder manufacturing company that, grumbling about how people don’t blame car companies for car crashes now do they, releases a statement about the real issue: an unregulated supply chain, all those cylinders stacked hazardously in trucks, overheating and idle under the sun, hurtling down highways before being delivered to unsuspecting wives.
No one talks about it except in whispers – about the widower set to remarry, a younger bride with a bigger dowry, his family now moved over to the new housing complex, did you hear? But of course, they can’t be expected to keep living and eating in that old pyre of a kitchen, can they? The neighbor’s first wife becomes one more in the trail of whispers that never seem to peter out – a mysterious gas leak in another home, another inexplicable kitchen fire two streets down, another stove exploding.
In the years after I am born, Baba’s mother, his aunts, his choke of sisters, say I must have turned out this way because my mother stood grasping the handle of a filthy gas cylinder as her stomach roiled with contractions – no one mentions my father or the doctor’s whereabouts – because my mother plopped me out into this world with the fire from the neighbor’s kitchen fevering my lungs, my birth-screech sounding the precise moment a woman’s body became a blot of flesh.
This morning too, the aunties are tut-tutting as they look at my hands wrapped in bandages. If only my mother had pinched shut her cunt a few more hours, held on just a few more hours, or found a clean bed at least. At these familiar words, heat rushes up my bones. The skin on my arms, neck, torso bubbles up. The aunties’ mouths twist at the sight of me, and they turn away, swiftly moving on to the topic of the newlyweds upstairs – the young couple whose bhajans wake the whole building at the crack of dawn, and of course such devotion, such piety, is commendable but the wife’s voice, lord, so ill-suited for shloks! How unlucky the upstairs bhai is to be saddled with a wife with a voice like that. They shake their heads at his utter misfortune.
My mother is silent as she sponges up the leak of my body, but with her quiet eyes, she is asking me to please, please hold it in.
I take a deep breath, another, and let the aunties’ voices fade.
The heat gentles.
My sisters are scattered around the dining table, slicing the spongy heads of cabbages, calculating figures from a stack of bills. In the kitchen, they beat dough and scrub pots, squatting on the floor next to all the gas cylinders lined up beside the sink – one for each of us, Baba says every time his stash depletes and he, grown up in the precarious years of fuel shortage, speed dials his supplier. My sisters don’t say anything either; they just look at me with contempt – my bandaged hands useless with rag or duster, rolling pin or ladle, even spoons, and our mother, too often preoccupied with inserting cubes of ice into my mouth to look their way. The moment I enter a room, my sisters pinch their noses, fling open windows, and send fans almost spinning off ceilings in their zeal to yank the dial to the highest setting. They can’t stand it. The goop of ointments, my dripping gauze, the rancid singe of my hair, and beneath it all, the persistent smell of flesh cooking, clinging to the fabric of our sofas, rugs, curtains, such that aunties bustling through the door, caught unawares, enquire what the delicious smell is – sekua, kebab, tandoor?
My mother wrings out the sponge in a pail of water. As she dries her hands, a frazzle of sisters stream out of the kitchen then out of the front door with packed tiffins. My mother leaves me to go tend to the karahi. From my seat beside the fourth-floor window, I watch my sisters’ miniature bodies jump onto cycles and rickshaws, holding onto textbooks, lipsticks, secret mobiles greasy from being hidden under their clothes. My sisters are always rushing – for college, for the hospital where they intern without pay, for the bank where an aunty secured one of them a highly sought post. I wonder what it feels like to move in that way. Once, my sisters left me in the kitchen to supervise the chulo so they could crowd around our boxy tv to watch the finale of a dance show. It was a rare occasion when they were all so still. When my mother protested, they said, she has eyes and a mouth, she can call out for us if anything happens, can’t she? They returned to find the hobs dribbling gas, rice and dal clotting the base of pans, and a flame leaping high and bright in my bare palms. Fear flickered on their faces. That night, inside the folds of our mosquito net, my mother slipped a straw into my mouth, a bottle of water cradled in her hands. She told me fire is not a thing we can bear and they will make a monster of you – and I thought about how she bore me on startled arms after I slipped out of her womb, my baby skin boiling up and loosening in sloppy peels as I howled with fury, and my mother not releasing her hold once, despite how much it must’ve hurt.
Now, with my mother busy in the kitchen, I turn to the news channel Baba has switched on. The aunties are cracking supari, rolling paan leaves, and discussing the issue of my eldest sister who is sleeping, curled up on the floor of our living room, absconded from her marital home. If only she, they say – Baba interjects to boast about the number of gas cylinders he’s sending with my eldest sister when she makes the inevitable journey back, even though the price of fuel has rocketed, the government begging neighbor states to plug the supply gap. The aunties praise him. In the background, the newscaster reports on a foreign aid investigation into burn victims in our city, an overwhelming portion of them women; an activist is saying that all our stoves must be haunted considering the number which continue to mysteriously explode, sending wives off to hospital beds and urns. My father boasts, the aunties praise him, on screen the ticker of burn victims climbs – I stagger to my feet. Something thrashes inside my rib cage, hot and alive.
My mother, perhaps catching the blackened whiff of the sofa where I sat a second ago, appears in the doorway, eyes wide. She’s shaking her head.
For a second, the air blurs. For a second, I imagine it gushing out, the blaze, washing the room, the kitchen, the cylinders, scorching the whole city clean–
My mother is guiding me with a touch on the elbow into our bathroom. She twists the knob for the shower and pulls the door shut as she leaves. The water sputters, hissing where it strikes. I gasp. My muscles bunch up, and I am ready to bolt, out of the door, down our paan-spit stairwell, into the streets, out, out, out – but.
Fire is not a thing we can bear.
They will make a monster of you.
I let the water douse me.
In the months that follow, my sisters leave us one by one for their new marital homes and new families, laden with ashirwaads and gas cylinders, lavish send-offs when they beg our mother to keep me home – weddings and havans being no place for something as flammable as me. One of my sisters, the one who saved up tuition money to splurge on a telescope of all things – what use is this, my father asked, perplexed – who brought home glass beakers and pipettes and slim bottles of chemicals – what use is all this, the aunties asked, also perplexed – who miscalculated a chemical reaction and clouded the house with sulphuric outputs, the whole block complaining of rotten eggs for weeks, my body for once not the most volatile variable in residence; this sister who lugged two stools to the roof, one for me and one for her, every time a thunderstorm was about to break, who told me that one stroke of lightning could turn the air a temperature hotter even than the sun, this sister also leaves. There were moments when the shape of her leaving could’ve been very different – a research project in Europe, a global exchange programme for young leaders in STEM, imagine our daughter in Europe! – but the visa application, the fees, my father swimming in loans to fund cylinders and endless weddings. And a girl alone out in the world, they said, quite dangerous. Better here, married and settled near us.
When this sister visits us – unlike the others who occasionally come armed with boxes of laddoos or watermelons the size of babies, sometimes babies themselves – she sits in a corner and looks out the window. She holds a glass of Coca Cola or Fanta and watches carbon dioxide bubble to its surface without ever taking a sip. She sits for long hours and doesn’t speak. The day that the aunties, bored of fanning themselves in the monsoon lull – the city’s new load shedding rules cutting off the tv and fan at inconvenient hours – alight upon her, my mother is quiet. Even my father on this occasion is subdued, nervous now his black-market cylinder supplier has closed up shop – no more access to a quick fix. The aunties dole out strict instructions to my sister, about how she should deal with her issue, how it’s unseemly to spend so much time at her maiti, how it’s her responsibility to be good, to be beyond reproach, before they pack her off back to her marital home. After, no one talks about my sister’s absence – except in hushed whispers.
The hot thing inside me grows and grows. My lungs, stomach, bladder – each organ engorged with it. My mother sweeps away charred bedsheets every morning, scrubs at singe marks on the walls, fills buckets of ice cold water, and begs me to please, please hold it in. I sit rigid at the window, looking down at the streets with the corn-roasters and kebab vendors fanning their flames high, searching for a glimpse – just a tiny glimpse – of my sister’s miniature self.
There is no sign of her.
Then, on an evening when the air outside hums with a dry charge, and the clouds gather, I hear it coming. Thunder. My sister would’ve taken us to the roof, I think, my chest painfully tight. With the telescope and the umbrella for the telescope. She would’ve taken us right now. I turn abruptly to look at the aunties and ask them what happened to her, even though I know, I know – this body a progeny of abject knowledge, of history, silent witness to all that happened, to all that is happening – I know, and the fact of my own stillness sickens me. The aunties glance up, surprised to hear the smoking rasp of my voice, surprised at the directness of the question. They glance at the kitchen where my mother is out of earshot, preparing a cooling tincture. None of them say anything about my sister’s absence, except to lean in and whisper about the unfortunate matter, and she so young, so clever. Such a terrible incident. That poor thing.
If only she had listened – they say, shaking their heads. At the utterance of this too-familiar refrain the pain in my chest splinters.
If only she–
Fire whooshes out onto rugs, curtains, sofas; aunties screeching and flapping the ends of their saris and shawls, hopping on blistered heels, as my skin gashes open with the force of what has been seething inside me. Through the haze, my mother reaches out to grasp my shoulders. I see her eyes behind the smoke, wide and dark with fear.
They will make a monster of you.
But mother, I want to say, look. Look at the lot of us. They have already done it.
Her fingers dig into my flesh, the touch unbearable, but she doesn’t let go. She is coughing badly, but she doesn’t let go. I look down at the point of contact, her palms peeling; beneath them, my muscle mass slopping out of shape. I understand finally that a body cannot hold.
I push her hands away. A hose is dragged out of the bathroom, its mouth seizing with the gush of what’s to come. Before the water can hit me, I am moving – out the door, towards the roof where my sister once looked at luminescent balls of gas and told me, not everything has to have a use. I am spit out into the vast night. Above me, the crack of thunder. Around me, the imprint of a past moment, the ghost of my sister pointing at the exact spot lightning will flash the sky, and as I look up – the absences, the exploding stoves, the accidents no one talks about, the wives doused with kerosene and gasoline – they scream rage through me, and for once I don’t think about this body, birthed in a moment of violence that keeps repeating; I don’t think about the years I’ve been penned in for holding this fire; or about what happens after, to flesh and bone, to the footsteps thudding up to the roof, too close. For once I let go.
The city blazes.