Staying Gray
“You should dye your hair. You should let me dye your hair.” It was an odd day that Mina had any guests, but things had boiled over at her niece’s on Wednesday. Thus, Usha was hustled a few doors down as the sun set.
So there was a little more to prepare for breakfast that morning.
“Should I, now?” Mina had a thought to take a bit of loose hair and twirl it around a finger, but no, she was fulfilling the matron role at the moment, wasn’t she?
“Yes. You don’t even have to bleach it first.”
“I suppose that would be true.”
“And besides, you look weird with white hair and BABY skin. It’d make you look younger.”
“And why would I want to do that? Does Jyo need another baby to carry around the house?”
“NO. Maa has plenty of babies. Ugh. I mean like, make it a cool color. Make it Red.”
“Do you want Red hair? Like a fire truck?”
“…Maybe.”
“What would Uddan think, coming back to a wife with fire-truck hair. He might try to hose me down. Here,” Mina set a plate of rice, potatoes, and spices down in front of the preteen, “You’ve been talking long enough. You still have school, don’t you?”
“…yes.”
“Then it’s either eat or get dressed. Your Mother left your uniform.”
Usha stared at the plate for a second, than started in, “I was hoping for Poori.”
“Let me wake up after 6 in the morning and maybe you’ll get it…” Mina sighed. The childcare life wasn’t for her. “Let’s get started on your hair, the couch didn’t do you any favors.” She reached into the bathroom to get a brush – feeling blindly around the sink for it.
Usha always imagined rubber band noises when aunt Mina did that – stretching her arm meters across the room for something. And the ‘snap’ of a whip when it shrunk to normal length. It didn’t make any real noise though. The brush started tugging at her messy hair.
“Besides, these days people might mistake me for one of those American heroes. Firetruck red hair. No thank you.”
Physical Education is in Another Room
“She’s sick.”
As soon as the substitute teacher made this announcement, half the classroom tried to swap seats. A few didn’t succeed, still ending up with sharing a long desk with someone they didn’t particularly care for.
The substitute had found a chair, and seemed prepared to surf the internet for the day on his phone. Oh, he managed to take roll call after a few minutes, but seemed generally uninterested in doing anything else with the students.
A few gossiped. A few were hugging around a smuggled in cell phone, and seemed to be quietly gushing over a series of music videos. One boy seemed to be trying to locate the best place on the wall to write his name and not get caught. A few stuck to their textbooks, occasionally asking each other questions about what a certain bit was supposed to mean. The answers the came up were never quite teacher quality.
Usha tried to be responsible and study, imaging both of her parents adminishing her for wasting her education, but found herself trying not to fall asleep. Her aunt’s couch wasn’t her own bed.
She tried to wake up by standing at the window, hoping there would be a breeze, but as the temperature continued to climb… nothing. Tired of dodging eyes of passers-by, she ended up laying on the floor, the cool concrete being enough to keep her awake.
Until she was being kicked. Maybe not as awake as she had thought.
Kusum. Calling her a childhood friend would be … dishonest. The two had managed to always be in the same class since first standard. “Oye. Usha. Abhay doesn’t believe me how bendy you are.”
Usha groaned at being woken up, rubbing at her eyes “Oh? Who cares.”
“He thinks he’s the best in the class.”
Usha tilted her head back to look along the floor. Abhay was in the another corner of the room, his legs twisted in half lotus, angled up to wedge a knee in an armpit – being ignored except for the two boys “testing him” by trying to twist him further. His own gaze though was aimed the two girls.
“Purna matsyendrasana, do you know about it?” his voice was a little louder than it needed to be.
Usha stayed where she was, but crossed her legs, “I’ve seen better.”
“Let’s see yours then.”
Without moving from where she lay she twisted sideways, bringing her chest around to the ground while her butt still rested on it. She nonchalantly propped up her chin in her hands, “I thought you’d be asking me to stretch. No thanks.”
Abhay didn’t exactly have a response. That pose, as far as he knew, didn’t have a name. He waved off the two boys that were holding him in place – then they finally noticed Usha. They spent a moment whispering in a huddle.
“Hey, do a Chakrasana!” Kusum was a little loud, but the boys paused before coming to any sort of decision.
“If you insist~” The din of the room had quieted a little, eyes were looking to see what was going on. Usha raised herself on all fours for a moment, her midsection still neatly twisted – before her bottom half flipped around to something closer to normal orientation. She had to make this good. Her eyes shot over to the substitute teacher – he either hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care to acknowledge, a thing. She shoved aside some books on the desk nearest to her – into the student that was still trying to study – then climbed up on it. She easily bent backwards from standing, bringing her hands down to the desk, the arch of her back tightening to the point she could have rested rest her butt on her head.
“Bitch,” the student tried to gather her work and move to another desk.
“Is this good enough?” she looked between Abhay and Kusum – either side of her legs- as she asked the question.
“I don’t know, are you holding out on me?” Kusum stroked her chin while gauging Abhay and his friend’s stares.
“Of course I am, I’m in a dress.”
~
As the students were released for the evening – most none the smarter for the day – Abhay quietly passed Usha a printed flier. “It’s right by the second bus stop north of the lakes – you’ll need to email them for a form. But you can just say your mom is your coach. You should try it. I wouldn’t mind coming in second place.” He winked.
“Yoga Competition” the flier read.
Well, maybe there was a better person than her Maa to be her coach.
Conversion of the Oppugnant
The shuttle sped across silk threads on the loom, the beater rhythmically clacking forward and pulling back to continue the long process of making a saree. It’s rhythmic clacking filled Mina’s house, the gaps filled in with a droning on with some men talking about some affairs in Ranchi that effected nobody outside the city limits.
It was nice to dwell on, or ignore, problems that weren’t yours.
“Mami!” Oh. Of course she was back. Usha had left her night clothes. Mina simply kept on shuttling as if she hadn’t heard.
“MAAAAMI” She was closer – it would have been easy enough to keep calling from the door, but the thump of something on the couch made that an impossibility.
“Mami,” Usha whispered in her ear.
“What,” Mina allowed the loom to slow the slightest bit, “You can do your homework here if you need to – or are you staying another night?”
“There is no homework today. Or… not much. No, look at this,” She shoved a flier, black and white and neon yellow, into her aunt’s face, “Abhay from school says I’m sure to win.”
“Does he?” her head drew back from the sheet a few centimeters to see it was another yoga competition – her neck extending oddly in a way human’s necks don’t, wiggling her nose to adjust her glasses the slightest bit. “If they can’t afford to print in color – well, if does look like they’re trying to start something. And?” Surreptitiously she reached and turned down the radio.
“And you’ve done this stuff before, right? You’ll sponsor me, right?”
“Oh. Money.” She turn her head at an odd angle to study her niece. Or at least give a worried look, “I’ll think about it – but I have to finish this,” She took the flier and put it on the table by the radio – and her neck snapped back to normal proportions, “You know where the toy box is if you have nothing else to do.”
~
Usha tried to study. And by try, I mean grabbed one of her aunt’s pillows and she stared at a hindi text for a while – something about some queen gloriously fighting British. There was too much glorious fighting. It was weird they still had this with the militia issues lately.
Toybox. Right. A few marionettes lay on top – if they had clothes at some point, they were gone. She tried in vain for a few minutes to try and get one of them to do yoga, but it just didn’t want to move like that. There were some old tin things that were overdue for cleaning. And.. board games.
“Mami, can we play pachisi?”
It was a long moment of wooshing before the response came, “OK, set it up.”
There was no room to sit right by the loom, the old radio on one side and the wall on the other, so Usha pulled her pillow over set up on the floor out of a normal arm’s reach. Not that her aunt’s arms had any trouble reaching. They made a few moves, each, back and forth across the unrolled fabric board, until Mina started fretting over a specific thread that didn’t want to behave. Usha tried to get creative as she waited for her aunt to remember the game – stretching a bit, then trying to take her turn in awkward ways, moving pieces by clasping thenm in between her toes, first as she sat, then eventually resting on her chest and dangling her feet over her shoulders to do so.
Her aunt didn’t seem to notice, just glancing at the board and rolling the die when she remembered to.
Usha did a few other stretches, seeing if she could get her aunt’s attention – pulling her legs up into the teardrop of a Dhanurasana, balancing on her hands and gingerly bringing a a foot across to the other elbow in Maksikanagasana – a few leg sweeps that she wasn’t sure of the name of. But they had to have names. Pretty much every move you saw did. It was annoying to think that nothing she could do was really unique.
It was also annoying that her aunt was completely engaged in her threads again.
Usha tenatively tossed a game pice to get her attention. It was batted away, with no other response. She threw a handful, ad they too were batted away, all at once, her aunt’s arm twisting like a whip to incercept them. She was paying attention.
“Mami – do you think you could be spun as thin as silk?”
“Not comfortably.”
“Because think of how much money you could make if you wove yourself into a saree. You could-“
Usha got a firm slap on the head as her answer, “You sell your work. Not yourself.”
“Rent? If she tries to steal you if could like – wrap tight around her and walk her right to the police.”
Mina merely scoffed and continued with her work, “Did you finish your homework?”
“No.”
“Stop putting it off. “
Usha dragged her pillow back to the couch, opting to look though Math. Tomorrow’s math. Damn it, MORE Algebra. Why would you get so many tables and so few chairs. These question writers really should THINK about these things. How could she stand the noise of that loom all day.
Maybe… she could just slip in and… Usha grabbed a handful of game pieces and snuck around her unwary aunt, first keeping to the wall and then to the blind spot under the loom. She’d been there before, but still let herself watch the threads lifting back and forth for a while, dancing their little dance until they were locked in place for eternity – ok, maybe the “becoming a saree” suggestion was a pretty boring one in the end.
But the moving thread leaft a tempting enought target. The bigger game pieces – oversized buttons really – were easy enough to flick into the gap between threads. It took skill to not have them be caught part way through, though. And even more skill to not get caught.
But, as the threads shifted – the first button did get caught. She reached around, trying to knock it lose before her aunt noticed – but the beater had already stopped, her aunt’s too-fresh face and too-tired eyes glaring at her.
“If I feed you will you behave?”
~
It wasn’t poori. The rice was seasoned pretty heavily. The bamboo shoots were rubbery, probably boiled multiple times. It was food, though.
~
After the pair ate, Mina opted to go though the newspaper form a perch on the couch, rather than return to the loom. She did allow her niece to choose a music station on the radio.
Civics. “Confronting Marginalization” Oh, that must be great, deciding you could do something to help the marginalized. “Mami – remember that story about the Bram…” – oh. She had dozed off. Aunt Mina was still sitting up, but.. oozing a little bit. It was creepy. She tried to lay her Aunt on her side, so she’d stop looking like a wax figure seriously considering a full-on melt. It didn’t work. Her nek looked better, but her limbs still flopped to the floor.
Had Usha had been younger, this might have been particularly fun – staying indoors any playing with her aunt rather than going out in the sun and playing in the mud by the stream. Not the thought of molting her hands into unrecognizable shapes seemed… wierd. Even if she was comfortable about joking about that sort of thing.
She spent a while practicing her braiding on her aunt’s long grey hair. Just so she wouldn’t be sitting there staring. Wondering just what her aunt was capable of. Wondering if she’d even want that talent if she could have it. Did he aunt even like being boneless? was it just a weird burden at this point? Usha tried to convince herself she might have asked these questions aloud if her aunt wasn’t asleep. But it felt wrong to ask. Just like it felt wrong to ask how yoga was supposed to feel if she was supposed to be a nobody.
And yet…
Usha took the long braid of hair and passed it around to the front, took the too-soft arms and started weaving them into a larger braid. Flesh squished thinner under the tension, even as her hair held fast. when the braid was long enough, hips were easy enough to work in, twisting around impossibly, until hand and feet poked out.
And yet how did she imagine her aunt not being like this? How did she imagine her aunt being a winkled old lady as tired as her mother seemed to be?
Oh… she probbaly should have taken off those glasses. Those were just… glasses.
Grabbing the flier, Usha settled down on the floor, somehow more comfortable with her braided aunt behind her. She couldn’t imagine her family being any different… but she could have plans for herself.
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