Biso

Why did you give her your earrings?” my son asks, as soon as I get back in. Even the little one is up, and they are all sticking their heads out of the window, waving to the girl and the nun on the platform the way children do. I join them, and I watch the two figures go from intimate clarity to representations to insignificance on a fading landscape as the train carries us forward and away. I do not wave.

“Why, Amma?” Loku Duwa repeats her brother’s question. Chooti Duwa touches my ears with her still-a-baby-soft fingers. They feel tender and ticklish and warm from her long sleep.

“Because she needed them,” I say, stroking her hair but looking at Loku Duwa.

“Why did she need them? Is she poor?” Chooti Duwa asks me.

“No, she is not poor. People do not need earrings because they are poor,” I say. What I cannot say is this: a young woman needs earrings to show that she is proud to be a woman and that she has a family. Earrings are not decorations. They are a statement of legitimacy, of dignity, of self-worth. Ask any woman, and she would tell you that she would pawn everything she has before she gave up her earrings. Even her wedding band. For what is a wedding band worth except to say that a man coveted your children and wanted to claim them for his own? A wedding band can come from any man, just like children. Earrings, a real pair of earrings, come only with love. And that girl needs someone to love her, some way to feel worthy and dignified where she is going. She needs them more than I do.

“Amma, yourface looks odd without earrings,” Loku Duwa says. “I don’t like that you don’t have earrings.”

“I’ll borrow some when we get to my aunt’s house,” I tell her, my voice soothing.

“Earnings aren’t important,” My son says. He has always resented these female conversations that exclude him.

“Aiyya, you’re just jealous because you can’t wear any,” Loku Duwa says and ducks her brother’s palm.

“Men can wear earrings,” Chooti Duwa says. “I saw men with earrings on the beach.”

“Those are bad men,” he says, “or they are not real men.”

I still the fear in my heart. I hope that my son has never been near those men who used to come grazing for little boys like him, their skin shinning pink beneath the oils they rubbed on one another lying almost marked outside our hotels. I remember how they talked to other little boys, coaxing them with round, colored sweets or chocolate in long cylinders and pyramid-shaped tubes; how well they knew the way our children craved those foreign tastes. I used to shoo those children away, pretending I was doing those men and women a favour, keeping the children from bothering them. I would have said something to them if I could, but I never wanted to get in the way of white people, who always seemed to have too much of everything, even of the good things in our own country, our best fruits and fish, our hotels, our power, doing things we wouldn’t dream of doing, disregarding our customs and laws.

My son sees me watching him, and he comes over to me and grins. “Don’t be troubled, Amma,” he says. “I never went near those men. I got money from picking up the tennis balls and handing out towels at the Blue Lotus Hotel. Only those two things, you can believe me.”

I believe him. What else is there to do? I am glad that we are far away, so far in the hills that no salt water can get near us with its deadly currents, tempting my children with its froth and shells, luring them into evil. I shepherd them back to ours seats, but we are still in motion when we enter the longest tunnel we will go through in our journey, a full third of a mile long. All my children grab my body, pressing close to me, screaming with fake terror. I listen to the echoes of other children’s voices from compartments to either side of ours. These shrieks that I have heard each time we pass through a tunnel lift my spirits. They are the sounds of childhood and innocence. When we are out of the tunnel and my children let go of me, I feel unmoored.

In our booth, the children entertain themselves by building bridges with their legs for a while, then fight over the window seats. In the end, the girls get them. Their brother makes a chair for himself with his legs, bending the left and balancing on the ankle with the shin of his right. It’s uncomfortable, and I watch him switch from side to side and finally give up and persuade his baby sister to let him hold her on his lap. She pouts until he tickles her belly with his free hand and makes her wriggle and laugh. What bliss, that sound of laughter, the absence of fear.

I hear my youth in their voices, see it in their quick smiles, their delight in this new journey. I imagine that my parents must have watched me, too, that way. I had been a girl whose yearnings had been the measure of their days. on Poya, I had stood in front of our lit lamps, causelessly devout. On holidays, they had taken me to the fairs and other entertainments that came through our town and bought me thick, sweet drinks in small, ice-cold bottles from the Muslim shops, which had refrigerators. When I came home at the end of each term with a report card full of the evidence of my scholarship, it had been to the fragrance of sweet, sticky black kalu dodol studded with cashews.

I shrug. Such bliss is not meant to last.

to be continued...