A Story and a Song

Although you might find this hard to believe, my mother has something trapped inside her. Two things, in fact. One is a story, the other is a song.

Sometimes, after we have finished washing up, I sit in the hollow of my mother’s lap. I put my head against her chest and I imagine that I can hear the story and the song trapped inside, restless, fidgeting, trying to escape.

I ask my mother to sing me the song. She smiles, but she is too tired, she says.

I ask my mother to tell me a story. She says she doesn’t remember any stories. But I know there is one inside her, struggling to get out.

I don’t understand why she won’t tell her story or sing her song.

Last night, when my mother was asleep in her chair, I found a pair of old boots on the porch outside our house. They were covered in mud. Hanging above them, on the arm of a chair, was an old brown coat with lining spilling out like stolen porridge.

I knew immediately what had happened. The story and the song, trapped for so long in my mother, had somehow escaped while she slept. They came tumbling out of her mouth like a confession, blinking like baby birds. Then, so they wouldn’t be found, they turned themselves into a pair of boots and an old coat.

I stood by the coat and the boots for a while, watching to see if they would turn back, straining to hear just a few notes of the song or a few words of the story. But they weren’t going to appear while I was there, they were too frightened after all that time trapped in my mother.

Behind me I heard footsteps on the path. My father is exactly twice my height and he treads heavily on his toes as he walks home. I watched from behind a chair as he came to the story and the song, sitting there pretending to be a coat and boots. He looked at them both for a long time. I wondered if he too had realised what they were. Then he stepped inside the house.

“Sudha”, he said. My mother didn’t reply.

“Sudha, where are you?”

I heard my mother sit up in her chair, imagined her brushing her hair from across her face with her fingers. Looking up at my father through tired eyes, standing up to greet him.

“Who is visiting?” my father asked.

“No one,” she said

Sometimes my father’s voice sound like an old tractor engine, hot and rusty. Normally when it sounds like that I know I’ve done something wrong.

“But whose coat and shoes are outside?” he asked

“I don’t know” she replied.

I could feel in the floorboards that my parents were going to have a fight, so I ran round the house and crawled through my bedroom window. I put my head under my pillow and went invisible so I could only hear the lowest notes in my father’s voice as he quarrelled with my mother.

After a long time I made myself appear again. There was silence in the house. I opened up my door a crack, so it wouldn’t squeak, and I walked on bare feet back through the dark kitchen to the door. The story and the song were there, still trying to look like a coat and boots. My father’s shoes had gone from their place beside the door.

* * *

The temple isn’t difficult to get to if you know the short-cut. I ran through the trees and arrived just in time to see my father shaking out an old grey blanket in the first room. He was still cross. Dust was flying everywhere.

I sat on a low branch in a nearby tree, watching. As the moon started to peer out at the far end of the village all the lamps started to arrive at the temple. Lamps always come to the temple to gossip once their owners have turned them down at the end of the day. I looked for our lamp, but it wasn’t there. Maybe my mother was still using it.

The lamps started to talk about what had happened in the village that day. Samir has a new job in Bangalore. Shiva and Mithla are getting married. I sat and listened for what seemed like hours. Then, my mother’s lamp appeared at the gates. The other lamps gathered round it.

“What kept you so long?” asked one.

“At our house, the couple quarrelled late into the night”, said the flame.

“Why were they quarrelling?”

“When the husband wasn’t home, a pair of boots came onto the veranda, and a man’s coat somehow got onto a chair. The husband asked her whose they were. The wife said she didn’t know. So they quarrelled.”

“Where did the coat and the shoes come from?”

“The lady of our house knows a story and a song. She never tells the story, and has never sung the song to anyone. The story and the song got suffocated inside; so they got out and have turned into a coat and a pair of boots. They took revenge. The woman doesn’t even know.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father sitting up in his makeshift bed in the temple. I wondered if he’d heard the lamps talking. He was sitting very straight, looking through the door of the temple, looking through the gate, looking directly at where I was sitting. I looked behind me and saw the sun coming up in the field, throwing light all around me.

“Supreetha.” My father said.

I tried to look as much like a tree as possible.

“Supreetha,” he said again.
“I can see you.”

I sighed.

“Yes Appa”

“Come here please Supreetha”

As I walked from my hiding place to the temple the lamps around me started to disappear back to the village, ready for the half-light of the morning chores. I walked to my father and sat on the dusty rug next to him, looking out onto the fields.

We sat for silence for a little while. Then I breathed in and said: “Appa, did you listen to the lamps?”

“The lamps?” he asked.

“The ones talking outside the temple,” I said, and then, not waiting to hear if he had or not: “Our lamp was here Appa. It was saying that a coat and boots appeared outside our house and that they are not really a coat and boots, but a story and a song, in disguise, hiding from us.”

My father smiled slightly. “Why would that be Supreetha?”

“Because the story and the song were trapped inside of Amma, Appa. They were trapped there for years and she wouldn’t tell the story and she wouldn’t sing the song even when I begged her. She was always too tired, or too busy, or you had a guest. And they got all crotchety and cross in there, they felt suffocated. All they wanted to do was be told and be sung. So they escaped while Amma was sleeping and they disguised themselves as the coat and the boots.”

I held my breath a bit and tried to watch my father out of the corners of my eyes. He wasn’t moving and it was difficult to see if he was smiling or frowning. Then in one simple movement he stood up, picked up his blanket in one hand, took my hand in the other and walked out of the temple, down the path and back towards our house, away from the temple and back toward the rising sun.

When we got home, we walked in through the door together. My mother was making breakfast. She did not look like she had slept at all since last yesterday. I pushed my father a bit, to make sure he didn’t walk past her and go to bed, but he was already walking towards the kitchen.

“Tell me about your story and your song” he said.