He loved going to the mall, he did, and so did she. The crowds of people made him happy. He would
laugh and run and she would chase him and gather him up and swing him in the air and they both
would be happy. He was all she had, all of five, chubby-cheeked, with stone-black eyes that were
exactly like his father’s and a smile that was the sun breaking through dark clouds. It was his
birthday today. They would spend it at the mall all day, and in the evening, she would cut a cake for
him and have some children from the small society complex they lived in for a small cake and pizza
party. He was three today. No longer a baby, no longer a toddler, but a child. She didn’t know too
many people to invite to a proper party; living on one’s own did that to one. And the other kids at the
playschool kept a healthy distance from her son. He was strange, they said. And then the teacher had
requested her to find a private tutor for the boy. “Perhaps he needs some more time amongst people
before he can adjust with other children.” That week he had bitten a boy in the cheek and gouged out
flesh, they had to sew the cheek back into place. They had never gone back to the playschool. After
all, he was still a baby. He didn’t know how to control his temper. It was the other child’s fault. He
shouldn’t have taken his wooden bricks away. She would teach him how to control his temper as he
grew. He was still young; there was time enough for him to learn.
They normally visited the mall on the weekends. She would, of course, have to medicate him so he
behaved. Through the week, it was just him and her in the house, alone. Watching television most of
the time. Or when he played with the dogs, which was a lot of the time, he could understand their
language and they could understand his. It didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t speak to people;
theirs was a language he was reluctant to learn. She missed her husband. But that was how life was,
he wasn’t around to see her child grow from a baby to a delightful young boy. Sometimes, she
wondered how it would have been had her husband been around, how he would have dealt with this
rather unusual child she’d given birth to. It is good he isn’t around, she told herself. Sometimes,
everything happens for the best. It was strange, though, how he’d died one night in his sleep, his eyes
transfixed on the baby’s crib, an expression of absolute horror in them. A heart attack, the doctor had
said, it happens sometimes even to perfectly fit young men who have no history of any sort of heart
disease.
Her boy. He was the one thing that lit up her life. He was an easy child, a golden child, emerging from
the birth canal feet first, draped in the caul. She had remembered her mother gasping in shock, as she
waited for the doctor to assure her that all was well with the baby.
“What happened,” she had cried. “Is everything all right? Is my baby fine? Is it alive?”
There was no sound, but a flustered silence, with her mother holding her down as the doctor and the
nurse took the baby to the side and checked its vitals.
“Why aren’t they showing me my baby?” she asked, dismayed.
Her mother patted her hand, “Wait, they’re just checking him.”
“Is everything okay, Ma? Did the baby look fine?”
It had to survive, this child. She had lost too many children in the womb to be able to bear the
heartbreak again. It was why she’d made the bargain she did.
Her mother drew her breath in and hesitated a moment before uttering what they both knew would be
a lie. “Yes, your baby looked absolutely fine.”
“Why aren’t they showing me the baby?”
“They will, they will,” her mother said, patting her head, stroking her hair, insisting she lay back and
wait till they brought the baby to her. There was a long silence while she felt her breath begin to
rise as muffled sobs in her chest as no sound apart from urgent, hushed whispers came from the doctor
and the nurse. Then an anguished wail rent the air, and her chest reacted violently, with the primal
surge of maternal longing surging from her breasts with the milk yet to come in.
The nurse came to her side and placed the baby on her chest. “Here’s your son,” she said, her voice
weary with the pain of standing for the hours it took. Her arthritic knee was troubling her today and
all she wanted to do was to find a spot and put her legs up before the pain began exploding through
her cranium.
The doctor who had delivered the child came to her. “There’s a slight growth at the tailbone. We can
get it surgically removed later. Else all normal. Congratulations.”
Her mother took the baby from the nurse and opened the swaddling quickly, scanning the baby’s body
quickly. Perhaps to check that all was normal and well. She reached out for her baby. Her mother,
having assured herself of all being well, tied the baby back into a tight bundle and handed it to her.
“Just like his father,” her mother said as she peered at the newborn’s face.
She gathered the newly swaddled baby to her chest. “My baby,” she thought to herself. She had been
waiting for him for all these months. The hormones flooded her bloodstream, making her uterus
clench and begin expelling the nine months of blood and tissue it had accumulated within. The baby
had stopped wailing and was now a wizened, squashed face topped by a mop of thick dark hair.
Her mother came with her to look after her and her baby and stayed with them for a year before the
cancer took her from diagnosis to the grave within five months. “This boy of yours,” she had told her
in one of the lucid moments before the pain overtook her toward the end, “This boy is precious. Keep
him safe. Don’t let them take him too.” Her words had been slurring into each other, barely escaping
from her emaciated frame, hollowed out by chemo and pain.
“I will, Ma,” she had promised, not knowing what her mother was going on about.
“Don’t let them take him,” her mother had continued, hacking out the words from the depth of her
being, battling the pain that came and went in waves of excruciation. “They want him. Don’t let them
take him.”
She put it down to the delirium brought on by the medication. When her mother passed away, her
maternal aunt came to stay with them a while, till the boy was older and toilet-trained. When he grew
older, she went back to her home, where her life kept on hold awaited her. “It is not normal,” her aunt
had told her, “How long do you plan on living like this? Get married again. A boy needs a father
when growing up.”
Her son didn’t know his father. She had barely known her husband or the father of her child too. It had
been an arranged marriage of convenience. But it was expected in her community, that once a girl
crossed a certain age, the parents would find an eligible match for her and get her married off. Few
girls defied the diktat of the community, and the few that did were ostracized immediately. She had
been married within the community to a man who was an absentee husband. It suited her fine.
Her eyes filled up with tears that spilled over and down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the
back of her palms, a childlike gesture, a realization that she now had no one. No one. Her father had
passed away a couple of years ago, barely after he’d got her married off. And then, her mother. And
finally, her husband.
“Take me with you,” she’d pleaded the last time he came down. “I can’t get family accommodation
yet,” he’d said. “I’ve applied. The moment they okay it, I will call you over.” And then he never went
back to the Gulf, to his job as an onsite construction supervisor, dying in his sleep of an unexplained
heart attack the night before he was to return.
She had her boy. He was all she needed. How he grew, from baby sucking at her breast with an
appetite that knew no satiation. She would beam proudly when they told her he looked like a baby
who had crossed his first year when he was barely six months old. He was big for his age, and quick
on the milestones. Children born at around the same time as he were still crawling while he was
taking his first fumbling steps. But he wouldn’t speak. It dismayed her. She took him to the topmost
pediatricians in the city, and they referred her to specialists when they couldn’t find a physiological
cause for the delay. They said he would speak when he was ready. He could make all the sounds
required for speech, but he would not attempt stringing them together to create words and sentences.
He would stare at things, and she would know what he was trying to tell her without him saying a
thing. And over the months, she realized she could hear his voice in her head. It just felt completely
natural; they spoke to each without needing to speak. The neighbors found it strange, but soon it
stopped bothering everyone. It also helped that her son was so beautiful, almost carved from a block
of marble, with his exquisitely sharp profile, deep eyes so black they sucked you in when he looked
into yours, fringed with lashes so thick they cast a shadow on his cheeks, skin like alabaster, so
different from her own. But he looked just like his father.
Her son. He ran through the crowds. A flash in a red and white T-shirt, his feet unsteady as he
struggled to negotiate the swarms of people moving in gusts. He fed off the energy of the crowd, it
made him excitable, and then when they returned home, exhausted by the hyperstimulation, he would
fall off to sleep the moment she put him down on the bed. And she would sleep too, deep undisturbed
sleep, populated by all the strange creatures in her dreams in places she had never visited in this life,
but which her son took her through, now grown up, holding her by her hand, leading her through lands
of blue moons and red grass, and creatures that swam in the sky, and crawled under a transparent
glass like earth. She was never scared, because her son was with her, and he knew the way, this
strange place that was home to him.
And then, she couldn’t see him. In a flash, a blink, he had disappeared. She called out his name,
loudly, with her lips and her mind. Surely, he would hear her. Perhaps he’d gone behind the pillar.
For a moment, she had a glimpse of his face, and then another child darted into view.
“Excuse me,” she said, her voice high-pitched in her panic, asking faces in the anonymous crowd.
“Have you seen a little boy in a white and red striped T-shirt, around this high?” She held a hand out
to indicate his height; he was almost to her waist. They wouldn’t believe he was just five. No fiveyear-
old was that tall.
“No,” they said, “sorry we haven’t.” There was disinterest in their eyes, a distant, uninvolved pity.
“Why don’t you go to the helpdesk and get them to make an announcement?”
The public announcement loudspeakers blazed into life, “This is not a drill, this is not a drill. There
is a fire on the third floor of the mall. The fire brigade will be here shortly. Please evacuate
immediately, in an orderly manner.”
The voice was calm and measured. All hell broke loose in an instant. People stampeded through the
atrium in waves, she got pushed over and fell down. Unseen hands helped her up and she began
getting swept up with the crowd toward the exits when she spotted a flash of white and red in a
corner. She pushed with all her strength through the crowds, getting battered by the pressure and
reached the corner. The bright day had turned into an ominous greyness, a pewter sky brought on by
sudden dark clouds that had rushed in from nowhere. A storm was coming. And then she spotted
him, her son, standing calmly, his head inclined down, seemingly rooted to the spot unaware of the
chaos around them. She ran to him and hugged him hard, going down on her knees.
“Oh god, oh god,” she cried, “I was so frightened, I thought I’d lost you and would…” Her voice
trailed off as she realized he hadn’t looked up at her but continued to stare fixedly at his shoes. An old
lady stood next to him, one hand on his shoulder with an air of authority. She barely registered her.
Her features slid from her mind with a slipperiness that defied remembrance later. All she would
recall, when she would think back to this moment later, was a lady with a shock of white hair, and a
gaze amplified by spectacles that sent a shiver down her spine. Her clothes were not those of
someone who would visit a mall. She looked a little down on her luck in a frayed tunic and trousers.
She was barefoot. Perhaps, she’d lost her footwear in the melee that had just broken out.
“Thank you so much for taking care of him. I thought I had lost him.”
The lady smiled, a smile that was gentle, yet with a hint of menace. “Don’t thank me, I must thank
you for bringing him to me.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, feeling the roar of the crowds and the pell-mell of the folks dashing to
the exit, coupled with the announcements over the loudspeaker, begin to pound at her brain.
“There’s nothing to understand.”
She fished in her handbag and found a five-hundred rupee note, folded carefully and tucked into the
back for an emergency. “Here,” she said, handing it across to the old lady. “Thank you again, I owe
you so much more. Come, son, let’s go.”
The old woman put a hand out and stopped her. “He will not go with you.”
She was taken aback and put a hand out to her son, “Come, son,” she said again but he did not look up
from the ground. His voice did not come to her as it always did. There was a blankness from him
that terrified her. Come to me, son, she said, in her head, trying to probe into his head to reach out
behind this wall he had erected against her.
The old lady laughed a laugh that sent icicles tap-dancing down her spine. The chill seeped into her
bones, right into the marrow. “He cannot come with you now. Didn’t you realize that his father would
ensure he took his son back someday? Today is that day.”
This couldn’t be happening. All she’d asked for was a child. She was tired of the taunts of being
barren and infertile and a curse. And the children who were formed in her uterus kept falling out in a
couple of months. Her mother had told her about the father of her child. And how she’d turned to him
when she had wanted a son to carry on the family name. She remembered her little brother going
missing when he was five. He had never been found. Her mother had never tried to search for him.
She put her hands on her son’s shoulders, “Look at me,” she commanded in desperation, “Come with
me, I am your mother.”
He looked up, his beautiful eyes pure black pebbles in an alabaster face, and spoke for the first time
ever, his words clear and crisp, his voice high and silvery. It pierced her ears with its metallic ring.
“You were a vessel. I have no mother.” It was noon, the moment her son had emerged from the womb
five years ago.
She fell to the floor, huge heaving sobs escaping from her, feeling her heartbeat accelerate within her
chest, cold clammy dread clutch her intestines and squeeze them, a sweat breaking out all over her
body that had nothing to do with the temperature outside the air-conditioned mall.
And she knew then from the huge shadow that fell across the three of them, that her son’s father was
standing right behind her and had come, as he had promised all those years ago, to collect his son in
flesh and blood.
laugh and run and she would chase him and gather him up and swing him in the air and they both
would be happy. He was all she had, all of five, chubby-cheeked, with stone-black eyes that were
exactly like his father’s and a smile that was the sun breaking through dark clouds. It was his
birthday today. They would spend it at the mall all day, and in the evening, she would cut a cake for
him and have some children from the small society complex they lived in for a small cake and pizza
party. He was three today. No longer a baby, no longer a toddler, but a child. She didn’t know too
many people to invite to a proper party; living on one’s own did that to one. And the other kids at the
playschool kept a healthy distance from her son. He was strange, they said. And then the teacher had
requested her to find a private tutor for the boy. “Perhaps he needs some more time amongst people
before he can adjust with other children.” That week he had bitten a boy in the cheek and gouged out
flesh, they had to sew the cheek back into place. They had never gone back to the playschool. After
all, he was still a baby. He didn’t know how to control his temper. It was the other child’s fault. He
shouldn’t have taken his wooden bricks away. She would teach him how to control his temper as he
grew. He was still young; there was time enough for him to learn.
They normally visited the mall on the weekends. She would, of course, have to medicate him so he
behaved. Through the week, it was just him and her in the house, alone. Watching television most of
the time. Or when he played with the dogs, which was a lot of the time, he could understand their
language and they could understand his. It didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t speak to people;
theirs was a language he was reluctant to learn. She missed her husband. But that was how life was,
he wasn’t around to see her child grow from a baby to a delightful young boy. Sometimes, she
wondered how it would have been had her husband been around, how he would have dealt with this
rather unusual child she’d given birth to. It is good he isn’t around, she told herself. Sometimes,
everything happens for the best. It was strange, though, how he’d died one night in his sleep, his eyes
transfixed on the baby’s crib, an expression of absolute horror in them. A heart attack, the doctor had
said, it happens sometimes even to perfectly fit young men who have no history of any sort of heart
disease.
Her boy. He was the one thing that lit up her life. He was an easy child, a golden child, emerging from
the birth canal feet first, draped in the caul. She had remembered her mother gasping in shock, as she
waited for the doctor to assure her that all was well with the baby.
“What happened,” she had cried. “Is everything all right? Is my baby fine? Is it alive?”
There was no sound, but a flustered silence, with her mother holding her down as the doctor and the
nurse took the baby to the side and checked its vitals.
“Why aren’t they showing me my baby?” she asked, dismayed.
Her mother patted her hand, “Wait, they’re just checking him.”
“Is everything okay, Ma? Did the baby look fine?”
It had to survive, this child. She had lost too many children in the womb to be able to bear the
heartbreak again. It was why she’d made the bargain she did.
Her mother drew her breath in and hesitated a moment before uttering what they both knew would be
a lie. “Yes, your baby looked absolutely fine.”
“Why aren’t they showing me the baby?”
“They will, they will,” her mother said, patting her head, stroking her hair, insisting she lay back and
wait till they brought the baby to her. There was a long silence while she felt her breath begin to
rise as muffled sobs in her chest as no sound apart from urgent, hushed whispers came from the doctor
and the nurse. Then an anguished wail rent the air, and her chest reacted violently, with the primal
surge of maternal longing surging from her breasts with the milk yet to come in.
The nurse came to her side and placed the baby on her chest. “Here’s your son,” she said, her voice
weary with the pain of standing for the hours it took. Her arthritic knee was troubling her today and
all she wanted to do was to find a spot and put her legs up before the pain began exploding through
her cranium.
The doctor who had delivered the child came to her. “There’s a slight growth at the tailbone. We can
get it surgically removed later. Else all normal. Congratulations.”
Her mother took the baby from the nurse and opened the swaddling quickly, scanning the baby’s body
quickly. Perhaps to check that all was normal and well. She reached out for her baby. Her mother,
having assured herself of all being well, tied the baby back into a tight bundle and handed it to her.
“Just like his father,” her mother said as she peered at the newborn’s face.
She gathered the newly swaddled baby to her chest. “My baby,” she thought to herself. She had been
waiting for him for all these months. The hormones flooded her bloodstream, making her uterus
clench and begin expelling the nine months of blood and tissue it had accumulated within. The baby
had stopped wailing and was now a wizened, squashed face topped by a mop of thick dark hair.
Her mother came with her to look after her and her baby and stayed with them for a year before the
cancer took her from diagnosis to the grave within five months. “This boy of yours,” she had told her
in one of the lucid moments before the pain overtook her toward the end, “This boy is precious. Keep
him safe. Don’t let them take him too.” Her words had been slurring into each other, barely escaping
from her emaciated frame, hollowed out by chemo and pain.
“I will, Ma,” she had promised, not knowing what her mother was going on about.
“Don’t let them take him,” her mother had continued, hacking out the words from the depth of her
being, battling the pain that came and went in waves of excruciation. “They want him. Don’t let them
take him.”
She put it down to the delirium brought on by the medication. When her mother passed away, her
maternal aunt came to stay with them a while, till the boy was older and toilet-trained. When he grew
older, she went back to her home, where her life kept on hold awaited her. “It is not normal,” her aunt
had told her, “How long do you plan on living like this? Get married again. A boy needs a father
when growing up.”
Her son didn’t know his father. She had barely known her husband or the father of her child too. It had
been an arranged marriage of convenience. But it was expected in her community, that once a girl
crossed a certain age, the parents would find an eligible match for her and get her married off. Few
girls defied the diktat of the community, and the few that did were ostracized immediately. She had
been married within the community to a man who was an absentee husband. It suited her fine.
Her eyes filled up with tears that spilled over and down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the
back of her palms, a childlike gesture, a realization that she now had no one. No one. Her father had
passed away a couple of years ago, barely after he’d got her married off. And then, her mother. And
finally, her husband.
“Take me with you,” she’d pleaded the last time he came down. “I can’t get family accommodation
yet,” he’d said. “I’ve applied. The moment they okay it, I will call you over.” And then he never went
back to the Gulf, to his job as an onsite construction supervisor, dying in his sleep of an unexplained
heart attack the night before he was to return.
She had her boy. He was all she needed. How he grew, from baby sucking at her breast with an
appetite that knew no satiation. She would beam proudly when they told her he looked like a baby
who had crossed his first year when he was barely six months old. He was big for his age, and quick
on the milestones. Children born at around the same time as he were still crawling while he was
taking his first fumbling steps. But he wouldn’t speak. It dismayed her. She took him to the topmost
pediatricians in the city, and they referred her to specialists when they couldn’t find a physiological
cause for the delay. They said he would speak when he was ready. He could make all the sounds
required for speech, but he would not attempt stringing them together to create words and sentences.
He would stare at things, and she would know what he was trying to tell her without him saying a
thing. And over the months, she realized she could hear his voice in her head. It just felt completely
natural; they spoke to each without needing to speak. The neighbors found it strange, but soon it
stopped bothering everyone. It also helped that her son was so beautiful, almost carved from a block
of marble, with his exquisitely sharp profile, deep eyes so black they sucked you in when he looked
into yours, fringed with lashes so thick they cast a shadow on his cheeks, skin like alabaster, so
different from her own. But he looked just like his father.
Her son. He ran through the crowds. A flash in a red and white T-shirt, his feet unsteady as he
struggled to negotiate the swarms of people moving in gusts. He fed off the energy of the crowd, it
made him excitable, and then when they returned home, exhausted by the hyperstimulation, he would
fall off to sleep the moment she put him down on the bed. And she would sleep too, deep undisturbed
sleep, populated by all the strange creatures in her dreams in places she had never visited in this life,
but which her son took her through, now grown up, holding her by her hand, leading her through lands
of blue moons and red grass, and creatures that swam in the sky, and crawled under a transparent
glass like earth. She was never scared, because her son was with her, and he knew the way, this
strange place that was home to him.
And then, she couldn’t see him. In a flash, a blink, he had disappeared. She called out his name,
loudly, with her lips and her mind. Surely, he would hear her. Perhaps he’d gone behind the pillar.
For a moment, she had a glimpse of his face, and then another child darted into view.
“Excuse me,” she said, her voice high-pitched in her panic, asking faces in the anonymous crowd.
“Have you seen a little boy in a white and red striped T-shirt, around this high?” She held a hand out
to indicate his height; he was almost to her waist. They wouldn’t believe he was just five. No fiveyear-
old was that tall.
“No,” they said, “sorry we haven’t.” There was disinterest in their eyes, a distant, uninvolved pity.
“Why don’t you go to the helpdesk and get them to make an announcement?”
The public announcement loudspeakers blazed into life, “This is not a drill, this is not a drill. There
is a fire on the third floor of the mall. The fire brigade will be here shortly. Please evacuate
immediately, in an orderly manner.”
The voice was calm and measured. All hell broke loose in an instant. People stampeded through the
atrium in waves, she got pushed over and fell down. Unseen hands helped her up and she began
getting swept up with the crowd toward the exits when she spotted a flash of white and red in a
corner. She pushed with all her strength through the crowds, getting battered by the pressure and
reached the corner. The bright day had turned into an ominous greyness, a pewter sky brought on by
sudden dark clouds that had rushed in from nowhere. A storm was coming. And then she spotted
him, her son, standing calmly, his head inclined down, seemingly rooted to the spot unaware of the
chaos around them. She ran to him and hugged him hard, going down on her knees.
“Oh god, oh god,” she cried, “I was so frightened, I thought I’d lost you and would…” Her voice
trailed off as she realized he hadn’t looked up at her but continued to stare fixedly at his shoes. An old
lady stood next to him, one hand on his shoulder with an air of authority. She barely registered her.
Her features slid from her mind with a slipperiness that defied remembrance later. All she would
recall, when she would think back to this moment later, was a lady with a shock of white hair, and a
gaze amplified by spectacles that sent a shiver down her spine. Her clothes were not those of
someone who would visit a mall. She looked a little down on her luck in a frayed tunic and trousers.
She was barefoot. Perhaps, she’d lost her footwear in the melee that had just broken out.
“Thank you so much for taking care of him. I thought I had lost him.”
The lady smiled, a smile that was gentle, yet with a hint of menace. “Don’t thank me, I must thank
you for bringing him to me.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, feeling the roar of the crowds and the pell-mell of the folks dashing to
the exit, coupled with the announcements over the loudspeaker, begin to pound at her brain.
“There’s nothing to understand.”
She fished in her handbag and found a five-hundred rupee note, folded carefully and tucked into the
back for an emergency. “Here,” she said, handing it across to the old lady. “Thank you again, I owe
you so much more. Come, son, let’s go.”
The old woman put a hand out and stopped her. “He will not go with you.”
She was taken aback and put a hand out to her son, “Come, son,” she said again but he did not look up
from the ground. His voice did not come to her as it always did. There was a blankness from him
that terrified her. Come to me, son, she said, in her head, trying to probe into his head to reach out
behind this wall he had erected against her.
The old lady laughed a laugh that sent icicles tap-dancing down her spine. The chill seeped into her
bones, right into the marrow. “He cannot come with you now. Didn’t you realize that his father would
ensure he took his son back someday? Today is that day.”
This couldn’t be happening. All she’d asked for was a child. She was tired of the taunts of being
barren and infertile and a curse. And the children who were formed in her uterus kept falling out in a
couple of months. Her mother had told her about the father of her child. And how she’d turned to him
when she had wanted a son to carry on the family name. She remembered her little brother going
missing when he was five. He had never been found. Her mother had never tried to search for him.
She put her hands on her son’s shoulders, “Look at me,” she commanded in desperation, “Come with
me, I am your mother.”
He looked up, his beautiful eyes pure black pebbles in an alabaster face, and spoke for the first time
ever, his words clear and crisp, his voice high and silvery. It pierced her ears with its metallic ring.
“You were a vessel. I have no mother.” It was noon, the moment her son had emerged from the womb
five years ago.
She fell to the floor, huge heaving sobs escaping from her, feeling her heartbeat accelerate within her
chest, cold clammy dread clutch her intestines and squeeze them, a sweat breaking out all over her
body that had nothing to do with the temperature outside the air-conditioned mall.
And she knew then from the huge shadow that fell across the three of them, that her son’s father was
standing right behind her and had come, as he had promised all those years ago, to collect his son in
flesh and blood.
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