Autofiction-ish

 She labored through sweltering hot days and warm, balmy nights. She cooked and cleaned and cooked some more. Hot dosas from the cast iron pan, served with a steel spatula straight onto his shiny silver plate, her tiny feet pattering to and from the kitchen and the dining table. Back just in time to flip the next dosa on the stove, waiting for it to reach the peak of its delicious, crispy brown. On his plate she placed a spoon of coconut chutney and a heap of pappu podi, gently making a hole in the center of the lump of spiced beige powder and pouring in it some freshly melted ghee. An act so endearing but all I could think was "why can't he do that himself?" The hem of her bright blue sari grazed his starched white shirt, the colors melding together like white foam on greenish-blue waves. A formation born of turbulence in nature and a reflection of their relationship in reality - chaotic together, non-existent apart.

At least she could fake her happiness and feign a dignified life. Her daughter suffered a different kind of torment, left by her husband for another woman, four years and three babies later. She was forced to stay, because society, because money, because how would these three babies be fed and clothed and schooled for the rest of their lives when she had no means of making a single rupee, with no education or generational wealth to her name? She stayed with her husband's family but without her husband, an arrangement so convoluted, a plan so intricately designed for the outer circles of society that almost no one suspected a thing. Why would they, when he dutifully visited every once in a while, attended family events, brought home presents for his sons and his daughter? And so she waited in painful agony for her children to be grown and she resigned to this fate.

I told myself I wouldn't be like them. Staying because leaving wasn't a choice, working to pieces because relaxing wasn't an option, choosing submission because anything otherwise meant not even having the bare necessities. Because financial independence was a possibility as far-fetched as snow on the beach in the sweltering Chennai summer.

I told myself I wouldn't be like them. I would break the cycle of generations of free-labor; of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and aunts. At first, I refused to do it at all. And then, I did it for myself. And finally, I did it for a price, because I told myself I knew my worth, and that worth was far from free.

And so I sit a million miles away, clanking on my laptop, drinking my fancy red wine and eating my expensive meals, believing that I lead a better life - but oftentimes still unsure if that is true.

31

disorder around the staircase
the rattle of metal rods and the patter of small feet
drown the gentle ringing of bells
that dangle on the door of the puja room
intricately placed within perfectly carved bell-shaped holes

mixed and mingled
with the steamy hiss of a pressure cooker in the kitchen
filled with hot, soft idlis
waiting to be devoured with ghee and karapodi
by eager hands and hungry mouths

in the background somewhere

a serial plays on Gemini TV

a rerun from the night before

the high-pitched voice of a televised mother-in-law

contrasts with the low-pitched voice of the real-life one

layers and layers of sounds

further blanketed by the ringing of the doorbell

its ten-second tune momentarily muting the rest of the chaos

despite being chaos itself