It was only revealed to me in the thirteenth year of my girlhood by my grandmother what the three-day ritual, just before the birth of the new moon, that my mother underwent every month meant. We would know of it when the floor she had just finished swabbing would have tinges of blood in it and the pock-marks on her cheeks would rumple and threaten to burst into pus. They were tells for her to pack her bundle of soft-white muslin that I have subsequently seen returned dyed in black of cinder, red of vermilion and cream of chenna. My grandmother would later shred it up and use the dots to paint the rye on the bread and the malt in the brew. I am oft told that it is the blackness of that bread and the crimson aphrodisia of the liquor that seduces my fathers into visiting our bakery-stead.
Before she stepped over the threshold into her room of naked solitude, she had first to be cleansed of the monthly grime of her twenty-five days of sinful mortalilty by lighting camphor pellets on her person. Her clenched silence alone spoke of the tumultuous pain as the swooning aroma melted into her belly. It was the smell of night limp in the stillness of ether. And then wispily she would disappear into the room, with her raven-coloured tresses flowing like free verse over the plain of her back. Hers was a lonesome, pure act of birth and death — she would need no words of consolation and none ever of promise; no packets of solace or courage proffered by the matriarch. But before the doors creaked shut her eyes would meet mine, and when they did — in that very instant alone we would talk of agony and anticipation. Hers and mine, mine and hers.
The morning hours she would spend in crystalline silence, while I would nuzzle under the warm breasts of my grandmother. We would speak of my many fathers — the radiant ones, the fiery ones, the gentle ones and the rumbling ones. We would make pickle by dipping peppers in milk-sour that trickled out from under the jagged edges of blackness my mother lay in. We would play pachisi with beads fashioned out of hardened calabar beans. At the noon hour, the elderly widow would enter the solitude of the room and place by my mother’s side her meal for the day — a circle of lentils, barley porridge and onions seasoned in the tart spit of my grandmother.
I have seldom observed the motions of the three afternoons — it was hard to stay awake under a weltering sun but I would often hear my mother’s muted wailing from behind the door while I dreamed of climbing red spiral stairs and pinpricks of hair flaking off my eyebrows. At three it was, I suspected, that her torment grew unbearable and hollowed through our house into the streets and into the dry, rigid air. Even then the sun would beat down mercilessly and savagely, heedless of its middle-age and flagging breath.
But perhaps the most insufferable hours were the twilight hours of the evening as the moon ascended on its trajectory flickering, bellowing, silently struggling from under the grip of the skies but numb through the continuing rape. And as if to soothe the pain, my mother’s howling was daubed in stirringly beautiful dirges rendered in Poorvi first, then Yaman and then concluded in Chandrakauns.
With every passing hour of the third night, as strips of pale-white peeled from the moon the moistness in her womb would splinter into billions of paper triangles that would crease, taper off and swim out into nothingness of space. At midnight, she would reemerge – frail as shattered glass, cloaked in hoary mail-cloth that she would wear out of memory and to mark out the rest of her synodic month.
It was a ritual many thousand years old that befell the eldest daughter in our lineage grown from the bulb of the pregnant moon. We adorn our task with the milky affection that pours out of our bosom and salve the intrusions of my many fathers — the sun, the skies, and the bestial winds with the sap from the bag-ends of our eyes. And upon the twelfth eclipse from the day I was invested with our heirloom of angst, it will fall on me to meet the darkness that had companioned my mother these many years.