The town is swallowed by war, but you were never concerned about that, draped in the white sari of violent widowhood. A year-long domestic sphere not of your own making, dark ringlets tucked underneath a fluttering chunni, colorful bangles I once gifted you absent from your bronze wrists. Modest, demure. I watch the faint silhouette of your figure on the street through my bedroom window, a bag at my feet, combat boots digging into my heels. A gentle slope of your neck, the curve of your shoulder, swathed in the fresh feathers of a husbandless bird.
Your boy clutches your sweaty hand, eyes watering from the billowing exhaust from the sputtering cars on the road, the cries of the peddlers hawking their wares, and street food stuffed like cotton inside desperate mouths; soldiers line the sidewalk, dressed in the colors of the royal army, waiting for me. The bag is slung down my hip when I emerge from my small little clay house, locking the door for the last time. A stray dog barks, ribs jutting on its flank and lips unfurling to reveal hungry wet teeth. Prowling, dangerous. Your son tosses a stone. It skedaddles, shooting down the dusty path past the dozens of frantic motorcycles and into a bed of wilting flowers, blackened by factory soot.
"Dai," you greet: older brother. I am no older brother to you, in blood or in neighbor.
“Dai,” you greet: older brother. I am no older brother to you, in blood or in neighbor, but I press my mouth to the apple of your cheekbone, taut brown flesh flushed hot from the corrosive clouds of smoke that rise in the street. The spice of cardamom and kitchen smoke curls inside my nostrils, addictive like the cigarettes that our fathers used to share, sneaking to the backyard where their wives did not see—the remains of a violent revolution. I want to rip that coy netting from your hair and bite it, chew those fragrant locks between my molars and swallow them like meat, and eat you whole; it is your boy who pulls me away from sinking my teeth into your throat, asking me for a sweet. From the depths of my army jacket, I lend him a mitai, and he clenches it between his sticky fingers.
“Say thank you to Uncle,” you scold him. He does not, avoiding my eyes and scuffing the dirt with the sole of his half-broken sandal—I feebly attempt a laugh to coax his own, but it falls flat. At his disrespect, you smile, half-hearted, a shadow of the skinny girl that used to steal my father’s mangoes from his sprawling fields, escaping through the low window in the cellar and from his clutches.
“Must you leave, Dai? I shall be lonely, you know. And it.” Your palm splays over the flat expanse of your stomach, angling comfortably over your waist, where a dagger had entered years ago, on your dead husband’s demand (childbirth is a prison, and ignorance is death, but you know this far more than I).
This is not a surprise to me.
“Another baby?”
“A girl, this time,” you say.
A girl—squeezed out screaming into a country baying for blood, the disastrous slaughter of a disastrous monarchy, a dominion with puppet-kings and conniving ministers.
“Congrats.” The word comes out easy and sly, for the truth hangs between us, in your boy and in your belly.
Dew is beading on your brow smudged with soot, and your slender arms slide around my neck, clinging and tight, your sweet-smelling cheek pressed against the corded sinew of my shoulder. A hot, desperate emotion swells inside the base of my body, my throat, my scalp, filling and filling until my skull is pounding and the tears threaten to turn into hunger. My elbows link around your scarred hips, and I bring my teeth to the flesh of your lower lip. Salt dances on my tongue, as well as a trace of juicy mango.
Gently, you draw your chunni over our heads, unfurling around our ears like a curtain, shielding us from the prying eyes of the soldiers, of the peddlers, of the street, of the war. “Make sure to come back,” you breathe, delicate jaw clenched, white cotton glowing against the curve of your cheek.
The syrupy truth mangles my vocal cords, so I press the palm of my hand to your spine instead, where your hair once flowed freely, before you became his widow—my widow, in every way that matters. Your breath catches in the back of your throat, a soft shudder, barely a sound, but it reverberates between us. I can feel it. Your fingers tighten around my neck, nails pressing crescent moons into my skin. I feel the pulse in your wrist, quick and alive. Your mouth brands into my collarbone, scalding as a faithless prayer, and your hand squeezes my shoulder with a strength I have not felt from you in years—not since before he took you, broke you, and tied your fate to his pyre. But I remember the best of you.
I glance at your boy—our boy, unknowing of the blood that we share, that he came from me and not that man whose ashes are now in an urn—licking his fingers of the mitai. Pieces of me sprout like a bamboo shoot inside of your ribcage. Pieces of me, glass shards within a mantelpiece, stay as ghosts at your side, and that is comfort enough.
The fabric of the chunni bunches between my knuckles as I peel it from our heads and fold it until it is nothing but a square of white. I tuck it inside my breast, and we are as naked as the day we were born—the soldiers, the peddlers, and the street rushing back to us and bleaching our bones raw.
“Pheri bhetaula, dai.” Let us meet again, older brother, you say. Don’t you dare die on me, you mean.
“Goodbye, bahini.” Little sisters do not look at their older brothers this way—as the father of their children. This does not matter.
I turn to follow the stray mutt into the clouds of factory smoke, where the blackened flowers willingly die, inhaling the last of you and the crumbling ruins of a kingdom. Ten years lost at war. A waste of time.
Ten years lost at war. A waste of time.
Limp-legged and grey and ten years older, I drag my feet home to the village I was weaned in, as the soldiers of every losing side do—pins of the flag ripped from our uniforms and tossed into the river. The country is muddied in the earthbed of new democracy, reeling from the slaughter of royals: regicide, regicide, mothers scream from their kitchen windows on that hot summer morning. I wonder if you also screamed, startling our drowsy son and daughter from sleep, as radios announced the news of the war that raged outside. Now, five years later, people do not think it even happened.
A friend, of the winning side, clothed in the red of his ideology, laughs at me as we trudge homeward-bound, the rage sloughing from our skins along with the sweat. “Do you think Americans even know what had happened to us?” I ask. “Don’t be stupid,” he scoffs. “They were thinking of those towers that fell.” I think of you instead; you were never concerned about that.
The village opens to me, overcome by the burden that is so-called urban—smoky and charred as before, children skinny and starving, beggars just on the footsteps of the temple, flower girls threading marigold malas, and vendors frying pani-puri. And I see you, a perfect thing in white: bangles now on your wrist, our son grown with a wisp of a goatee, a little girl with black curls in his arms—our girl.
When I embrace you, you smell like cardamom and kitchen smoke, sweet and home.
I like to think you see me before I see you, because you turn—you are as grey as me, as old as me, worn down like sandpaper like me. You do not call me older brother like you did before, as the modest widow. Instead, my name erupts from your lips like a dam, breaking and tearing into the fabric of our youth. Your chunni falls, and you are beautiful to me.
When I embrace you, you smell like cardamom and kitchen smoke, sweet and home. The wedding fire is next for us, and the wedding bed, and a new country of skyscrapers and suburbs to flee the stones that are hurled in your direction: widows are never to remarry. Never to have love. Never to be content, remaining forever obedient to their husbands, their sons, their brothers, and their lords.
Our boy hates me. He does not know who I am and does not wish to, his skin scraping and jarring against the blanket of his new country, his new culture. He broods in his bed, unwilling to fix the odd words in his mouth, until I have to grab his jaw and shove a fistful down. He flees to college with a burning intent to never exchange a word with his stepfather ever again. Our girl learns quicker and is soon better at speaking than you; you weep in my arms at this. You are a floating stranger at your nine-to-five, and I am a block of stone at mine. We have no friends.
It is a lonely experience.
Then, our daughter brings a boy home. He is nothing like the husbands I planned for, like the brave soldiers I had fought with in the hot jungles of the old country; he is a white-and-pink swatch of colors, peeling under the sun and coughing at dinner, and he cannot speak our tongue—an alien, foreign to me. He and I dance around each other, uncertain, but you warm to him as a son-in-law, and our boy grows to love him like a brother, arm slung around bony shoulders and palms pressed against each other in greeting. But when he sits in the shadow of the porch, his sweaty pale hands on his knees, and asks for our girl’s hand, that is enough for me.
We always return to each other, cheek against cheek and shoulder against shoulder—a boy and a girl in the frame of my father's bed, surrounded by the mangled petals of factory flowers.
And when our boy goes to his new job in a new continent, he says goodbye to his little sister first, lips to her cheekbone like my final farewell, and then bids farewell to his brother-in-law, slotting his jaw over his shoulder like how I used to do to you when we were fumbling children in the grass. You look at me, and I see it on your face, tears in your eyes.
But it is alright, I think. It will always be alright. We always return to each other, cheek against cheek and shoulder against shoulder—a boy and a girl in the frame of my father’s bed, surrounded by the mangled petals of factory flowers.
