Chapter 10: Night Six (Red)
That evening, before the puja, Mummy and Ananya put on their red bangles. They left their bangle boxes open on the small side table near the puja corner. Rows and rows of glass bangles, every colour, shining in the light of the lamp. All through the puja, I kept looking at them.
After the aarti, Mummy went to the kitchen to bring the prasad.
Ananya looked at me. I was in my white kurta. Nothing red anywhere.
“So?” she said. “What’s red today?”
I didn’t answer. I was looking at the bangle boxes on the side table.
I walked to the side table and picked up two red glass bangles. I had heard that sound my whole life. In the kitchen. At the door when Mummy came home. Over my head, when she oiled my hair.
I squeezed them over my fingers, one, and then the other. They were tight. They hurt a little going over my knuckles. And then they were on.
I moved my hand. They made the sound. Coming from me.
And I started crying.
I didn’t decide to. It just came. Five nights of not saying it. Months of not saying it. It all came up at once.
Mummy came back from the kitchen with the prasad. She saw me standing by the side table with red bangles on my wrist and tears on my face. She stopped.
“Sorry,” I said. “Mummy, I’m sorry.”
“Rohan…”
“I’m sorry for all of this.” I couldn’t stop. “The hair. The clip. The earrings. The kurta. The top I kept changing out of before you came home. The kurta inside out. I’m sorry.” My voice broke. “But I like it. I like who I am when I wear these things. I don’t feel dressed up. I feel like me. The way Ananya is just Ananya.”
I looked down at the red bangles on my wrist.
“Sometimes I wish I had been your daughter,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Every time I said I forgot. That’s what it was.”
The room was completely silent. Ananya didn’t move. Mummy didn’t move. The same long silence as the day of the earrings. As the day of the clip. I waited for it to end.
Mummy put the prasad plate down on the table.
She came to me and took my hand, the one with the bangles. She looked at them for a long time.
“Why are you saying sorry?” she said. Her voice was shaking too. “Did you think I didn’t see? The hair. The nails. The kurta inside out.” She laughed, and a tear fell at the same time. “I saw everything. I was only scared. Not of you. Never of you. Of what people would say to you.”
She turned my wrist gently, and the bangles made their sound.
“Two are not enough,” she said. “They look lonely.”
She went to the side table, picked up more red bangles from her own box, and slid them onto my wrist, one by one, until my wrist was full of red. Then she held my face in her hands and wiped my tears with her thumbs.
“There,” she said. “Now it’s red.”
Ananya was crying too. She pretended she wasn’t.
That night, Mummy didn’t go to the garba. She said her feet were hurting. But I knew. She sat next to me on the balcony, and we listened to the music together, and every time I moved my hand, the bangles made their sound on my wrist.
I had said it. Finally. Out loud.
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