Saraswati Blue
by ANURADHA PRASAD
Jordan Tierney, Blue Jay Reliquary, Late 21st Century Jones Falls Settlement, tree root with natural stone inclusions, vintage flatware chest, beads, broken china & crystal & furniture parts & hardware all found in stream, collage, velvet, paint; 15 x 22 x 4 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
SARASWATI BLUE
ANURADHA PRASAD| MAR 2023 | Issue 22
Or is it pink?
You’d know, but I can’t ask you. You are dead. It’s a chasm I can’t cross. It stands between you and me and me and my history. You were the history and the bridge to it. You are dead.
Who I am: it stopped and began with me. With you gone, I don’t start and end with me. A continuity I had shunned is suddenly a lifeline, necessary. Behind me a chasm. In me, memory’s volatility. In me an urgency to dig for my roots, risk an uprooting.
Where do I come from? Who do I come from? I didn’t want to come from you. I didn’t want to know you. I muted your stories. I saw your disappointment. For I was not the first to mute you.
Away from nebulous memory, there was the jewelry box whose brass latch you often flicked open to reveal a teardrop opal: your birthstone, milky white with scratches of iridescent blues, pinks, and greens, a little universe you allowed me into. The red velvet-lined, engraved wooden box is empty now. It’s been empty for so long that there is no box.
Those stories you told me were never yours alone, they belonged to others too. Yours was interwoven with your family’s (mine is unwoven from mine) and your own subtext to it. You clung to it like it was a pashmina wrap over your bony shoulders, jutting clavicle, later fleshy. Childbirth was not kind to you.
You wished for the courage to not be a mother. It never suited you but you wanted to be told otherwise. You wanted me to assure you of your sacrifices. I refused to lie. You refused your lie.
So there we stood, a neat chevron fissure between us, steaming with your anger and pain and betrayal and my anger and pain and betrayal. Your heart cracked, made an asymmetric love beat. I turned to bone. Nights, I woke in starts, my breath stopped: breathe, breathe, slow and laborious, the breath would limp and wheeze. Head on my pillow, I heaved terrors that were dreams.
Death took you while I took meticulous notes of your dying. I knew you’d ask when it was all over. How did it all happen? But didn’t you? Was it? Yes, we did and yes, it was. It burned in your body for eighteen years. You never survived it, you survivor. Hearing it, you’d sigh with defeat and pity. You would grieve for your death. I would too, though my grief is hollow, a jaded chalice, for I have grieved for your loss once before, for the loss of who I thought you were but you weren’t. I grieve for me too. For all of me that died with you once before and now again. And to be alive still without that skin of history—how do we mourn such a thing?
Can you tell me, mother?
No, you cannot. You are dead. And I am alone as I search my way. Where does one begin? Do I reduce an ocean to its essence, a mountain to a rock sliver, a tree to its wood scrap, or my skin to a scrape of cells? Looming over it, through a glass magnifying the redacted, will I encounter the whole experience of loss or only a fraction of it, or something else altogether?
We drag grief into little boxes and rituals, make them containers for the oceanic grief of mythical depths. In the end, you were reduced to a human figure made out of nine laddoos, a few twigs, roses, and tulsi. We bowed to you, for your soul’s liberation. These rituals, if they set you free, set me in agitation. The lightest breeze became my personal hurricane, lifting and exhausting me.
Your dying was a slow and arduous task. I wasn’t there. I was late. Something as mundane as traffic. But you are now the eternal performer and my dream life is your stage. You perform your death for me in many encores. There you are: you learn of your imminent death. There we are: I witness your incineration. You try to get away, but your body remembers its death and crumbles into fire orange and black soot. There we are again: I cradle your head as you gasp and die in my arms. Forty or so days before your dying, there was another dream. You were waiting to board a train. You were ready and happy to leave. The tarot card I drew during these weeks was always black death mounted on a white steed. Your soul was already perched for flight. Your body would catch up soon.
Your diagnosis could not be found until your body was good and ready to give up. The impulse is to save, or to fix. Not to let die. To allow death without the effort to stave it off is criminal. In the end, the cancer had never left. It simply bided its time. It tottered behind on a leash, that old faithful. You grew increasingly obsessed with your body, its faintest murmur, so frightened of a death I would willingly give myself to when it comes calling. You held your fear up like a trophy, eclipsing all but your own pain. I lay drained.
You were a fighter. But even the strongest lays down their gloves. It is the nature of the fight. You chose to fight. When we had to choose for you, we took off your worn gloves and laid them down. I held your bare hands in mine. You did not ask for your gloves.
Worlds collided within me. Paths hungry to be forged in this barren land where you no longer stand and neither do I, the I that existed only in relation to you. In this world of death, I was newly alive: shiny and fresh, sweet as blossom, with a bite of tang, the heat of fiery chilies in me.
In the logistics of living, you are often forgotten, you fade. Not altogether gone, not altogether there. I feel shame and awe at my forgetting. Sixty-seven years of everything devolving into nothing, retrieved as old stories and songs a pretty shade of pain.
I condense my memory to a shared space of only you and me, to the first nine years of us. You shed your saree for shirt and trousers. Released from its plait, your long, long black hair rippled like black sea waves. We sang and how we danced. I looked at you and in the gaze of that most innocent of love: you were the most beautiful. I did not have a language yet for the pain of us. It would take me many, many years of walking through tight tunnels in voiceless and screaming rage before I found the language. When I found it, I waved it at you like a fire torch: stay away, away. We circled each other warily where we once danced.
You were beautiful in death. The ravages of disease, life, and you did not show. You were draped in a purple saree and white jasmine. Once or twice your teeth rattled. Your forehead was clean of the mouth ring of pink gloss I had left the night before when I leaned over, kissed your forehead, and said, oh my darling. You asked me to stay. I refused. We had played this game before and we played it one last time. The next day you were ash in an earthen pot afloat in a river. A fish, I heard, swallowed the marigold that kissed your last tangible self.
Love is a brutal thing, mother. For now, I am willing to only return to its innocence, the spaces unmanned by language. Here, we dance and sing again. You are the dancing queen and I am the brown girl in the ring.
Anuradha Prasad is a writer living in Bangalore, India. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature. She writes short fiction, essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, The Bangalore Review, Borderless Journal, Muse India, and Usawa Literary Review.
Jordan Tierney lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Always an artist, she has also worked as an illustrator, building renovator, gallery owner, and museum exhibit fabricator. Her artwork has always been the result of intimate knowledge of the terrain she walks. She worries about climate collapse, and especially her daughter’s future. She is awed by the abused urban streams and forest buffers of Baltimore City. The beings struggling to survive there inspire her to use her skills and a little sorcery to change the valence of trash she collects from negative to positive. This process of observing nature, collecting trash, and making visual poetry has become a spiritual practice. Her sculptures are objects a shaman of the future might create to speak of the mysteries of the universe. She enjoys the resourcefulness of working with what she can find. Each piece is a manifestation of many days of labor. This kind of devotion only happens when we love something. Jordan loves this planet and is grateful for the places where her feet touch the ground here.