The Prophet in Paris

When Salma arrived in Jamshedpur, she made sure she didn’t smell like the AC filters and compartment seats of the Tatanagar Express on which she had spent almost two days. She blotted her underarms and her pale wrists with her sister’s skin-sinking strong perfume, the smell of chemical lavender which would have scorched her mother’s senses if it were not for the full blast of the central AC that caressed her head and ears with the sensual touch of sinusitis. It usually took more than a day to recover after the train ride. This Jamshedpur summer felt like it had plans of its own.

On the car ride to her grandmother’s home, she reminisced on how different Bangalore’s summer days were from those of Jamshedpur. The thought of the burning heat in Bangalore very feasibly used to instigate a feeling of nausea which she suppressed better than her mother and her younger sister. She looked at her father’s nape glistening with droplets of sweat. He seemed to be scrutinizing one young lanky street boy, presumably the same age as Salma, approaching her from outside the car window with his basket of comically oversized guavas. Salma closed that tiny gap in the car window upon her father’s command as if she could get seduced to death if she would inhale the same air he breathed in. She might’ve heard her sister sigh as the boy moved on and about with the same boring eyes, halting at a more promising vehicle like a red-eyed housefly raking its hands over a gaudier savory. The one with the red eyes was her father; he looked like he’d gulped down a whole bottle of Hennessy but claimed he’d never tasted alcohol. Nevertheless, he turned back to have a good look at the boy who’d probably moved onto his fourth customer. He turned his head towards the side again, but this time Salma had moved on too. She instrumented her thoughts with a bass of surety that it was the same eyes of her father that once eyed her lazy-eyed uncle from Jamshedpur who would frequently come home many years ago. She remembered the vivid details and the exact song that played in the foreground when a couple’s feud played out like an orchestra, the audience - her uncle and her - sitting hand in hand, waiting for the music to subside.

Sing sweet nightingale... Sing sweet nightingale...

In her family of four, only she and her father who could duel with motion sickness. That was the singular thing she could find in common with her father, who now coughed roughly twice when the taxi driver increased the volume of his Spotify playlist. Salma’s palms were drenched in her sweat, while her stomach grumbled with the Haldiram’s packet she had opened for only a fistful of moong dal. She was famished still, but the thought of staying in her grandmother’s house for a month after a year, put the urge to feast on any kind of delicacy to bed.

For Salma, nani ghar (grandmother’s home) meant more than the two-storied living space with high rise walls abrased near the ends of the doorframes from which protruded honeycomb like patterns of thin wall paper dust which held the utmost fascination of Salma and her cousins. It meant weeding her mental garden, and curing her gastric problems, for she couldn’t refuse the turmeric milk her grandmother would hand her every night before tucking herself into bed.

The next evening, she found herself in the living room which was situated at a very peculiar distance away from the main entrance of the house. She couldn’t smell the sandalwood soap she lathered on her neck and elbows a few minutes ago, instead the room was filled with the smell of the pineapple pastry her grandmother had ordered from Howrah bakery. She nibbled on the frothy buttercream and licked clean the cream sticking to the side of her upper lip. She swayed about the room, holding onto one end of her dupatta (scarf) and swirling it with abandon. She was alone. She needn’t scrounge for logic in this place. She needn’t reason her doings, so she scooted towards an ebony cupboard that lay inanimate in one cozy corner of the living room. She lightly tapped on the book spines, like she could be playing the keyboard. When her fingers lingered over a frail book spine a little too long, she picked it up.

“The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran” the cover page of the book read, the title of the book and the name of the author partitioned by a singular leaf that looked like it was carved in gold foil. The corners of the book were dog eared, and a page was snipped by a centimeter.

Just then, a commotion of her four little cousins broke through the living room door and Salma held the little book tighter towards her chest, partially concealed by her dupatta. The commotion was followed by a man, short in height with a prominent wart on his nose, his lazy eye finding the book in Salma’s hands. It was her distant uncle, her mother’s younger cousin.

He picked up Salma’s youngest cousin and seamlessly allowed her to pull his big ear that was already pink with blood. 

“You want to read that?” he asked Salma.

“Yes, just wanted to ask if I can read this while I’m here”

“Haan, that’s fine. Just make sure no kid gets hold of the book; it’s got some nude pictures naa. See?” he turned the pages himself as if to desperately prove his statement right. “Otherwise, your khaalaammi (aunt) will kill me.”

“Got it.” Salma returned the smile. Two of her male cousins tugged at her dupatta and she placed the book on the topmost shelf before joining them for a game of cops and robbers.

When Salma started reading the first chapter, she had very conveniently overestimated her level of comprehension of poetry. She usually found herself at ease with simple prose, but as far as the book in her hand was concerned, she read a few starting phrases and smiled at the tit- bits that felt agreeable for a 17-year-old. After a few moments of reading between the lines, she drifted far off from the lines in the pages, to the picture she reminisced very often about in her kodak photo album. It was captured on her fifth birthday, where she had worn a satin floral frock to her knees with off-white stockings underneath, galloping around to scrounge for chocolate wrappers for her new best friend. The floor would’ve been dappled with the residue of the birthday snow spray which was either dissolving on the floor, or being scooped by kids of mothers who wore Banaarsi stitched salwar suits and yelled at their kids if they didn’t wash their hands before eating from someone else’s plate.

Salma could’ve cooked up the details she pondered on, yet she could  be trusted with the memory of her distant uncle, who in the picture, wore a dirty green shirt with loose jeans, smiling more capaciously than any of the kids captured. His frame was short like always, like he couldn’t be any shorter than his current height, his lazy eye squinting at the camera that captured the life that Salma once had. She was never spoken to about it, not even when she questioned her mother. She gave it a last try that day.

“Whenever he used to come to Bangalore, you used to drag him to the living room and start playing the Cinderella CD”, Salma’s mother said, handing Salma her favorite kurti because it wasn’t as loose as her other dresses. “And bechaara (poor guy) used to sit and watch every time like it was his first time watching it”

Salma grabbed the matching green dupatta from the corner of the suitcase before her mother asked her.

“Then he stopped coming home”, her mother announced as her knees cracked while getting up from the floor.

“Why?” Salma croaked and likewise received a glare from her mother who’d warned her before eating orange ice candy, Salma’s favorite.

“Bola thaa nahi khaane (told you not to eat it).”

“It’ll be fine amma, why did he stop coming home?”

“Your father wasn’t very fond of him.”

“Abba isn’t fond of many people, maybe it was uncle who wasn’t fond of him,” Salma said.

“Salma, go for a bath, paani thanda ho raha hai (water in the bucket is getting cooled down).”

The room adjacent to the living room contained beds peculiarly close to one another, almost as if they were arranged solely for the older ladies and their daughters to settle down and discuss household matters, not any less important than any national matter on the news. They brought their knees close to their chest, picked on their toe nails as they discussed one of their recently engaged sons and allotted timely chores to the new maids of the house. When Salma entered the room, nobody could dim the spotlight she was lit under. The older ladies embraced her for a lifetime, some of them hugged her stomach, a few even smooched her lower abdomen and she flushed.

Just as she seated herself amongst her graceful grandmothers, her uncle came in with a cheap plastic bag carrying milk and eggs and handed it to one of the maids who was oiling her amma’s hair.

“That kurta looks really good on you,” he said, before walking out of the room.

Salma mumbled a humble thanks which he wouldn’t have heard even with the silence in the room. She couldn’t perceive the silence and the hushed whispers and laughs exchanged between her two aunts. But she started to believe her mother was right as always. Her abba would never be fond of a man like him.

That evening was called the calm aftermath of a bustling afternoon, the sun appeared to be setting an hour earlier than usual, and the rest of the household was asleep after savouring the heavy yakhni pulao (mutton rice) and a ball of Gulab jamun (an Indian sweet) to balance the aftertaste of mutton. Salma stayed awake seated at the dining table; The Prophet opened at chapter 3 in her hand as she chugged a glass of water. The only sounds heard were coming from the noisy kitchen exhaust and the ascending footsteps that occasionally halted on the way, until finally revealing itself to be that of her uncle, his lazy-eye fixated on the kitchen exhaust. He speed-walked towards the exhaust, his sandals slapping against his heels and the marble floor.

After switching off the exhaust, he sat down a chair away from Salma and started pouring water into the steel mug he got from the kitchen.

“The book is really nice,” Salma said, turning the final page of chapter 3.

“I know, but don’t rush through it. It’s a slow read, one must live their life alongside reading it,” he said in between his chugs.

“Yeah, I get what you mean. It’s not like the other books I’ve read,” Salma said, closing the book and turning it over to view the back cover once again.

“So what do you do apart from all the science stuff?” He motioned his hand in an uncanny manner.

Salma giggled. “I read; I also write stuff sometimes.”

“Waah, I write too, humaare dost bolte hain hum bahut achhaa shayri likhte hain (my friends say I write great poetry).”

“Rajaa!”

A voice called from upstairs but only her uncle seemed to hear someone call him. He sprinted across the dining hall towards the entrance and jogged upstairs, his sandals making the most noise. Salma furrowed her brows in perplexion until her abba came in the next second, holding his stomach that brewed all the yakhni (mutton) he devoured that afternoon. He raised his brows at her and she shook her head while turning to the next chapter, Chapter 4 – On Friendship.

Salma wrote in her diary that night, after spilling a drop of the yellow milk she was drinking.

“Society is bad fiction for God, it’s got many plot holes, one of them being strangers can become the best of friends, while an uncle is an uncle, an aunt is an aunt, a mother is a mother. Gibran would understand what I’m trying to say.”

It was a dream, Salma could swear on her life, it was a dream because the sky was a light shade of pink and the weather was breezy and cool without the AC. Goosebumps ran up her arms and legs when she found herself among a group of artists and readers who were drinking chilled coconut water. Salma chose the orange ice candy. It looked like a writer’s retreat she’d been longing to sign up for since the past year. The air around smelled of sweet cheese, possibly coming from the cottage home at a distance, the other side of the road was lined with cafes featuring yellow bordered French-wise windows and decorated doors with bells the size of her grandmother’s steel baalti (bucket) and cycles placed at equal distances along the furnished footpaths laden with stones that looked like products of heaven. Salma took a bite of the talk- of-the-town pizza, but it tasted like the fried paneer patties they got from Howrah bakery last week in Dhatkidih. Moreover, she was accompanied by her uncle who mingled with the group so charismatically, he could almost be mistaken for a native.

Salma touched the clouds, she’d always wanted to, but as soon as she made an attempt to grasp the white blur, she was at the seaside. She even spotted her physics teacher from school, who was watching the first episode of the second season of Fleabag with the group, her laugh poignantly identical to that of her mother’s. Her uncle wrote a few shaayari (poems) and recited them to Salma after reciting them multiple times to himself. He didn’t have a wart on his nose, and he wore a cotton shirt the color of the sky. He paired his freshly dry-cleaned jeans with his bathroom slippers and topped it with a jute hat which made him look even shorter.

Salma wrote the introduction for the chapter she’d very frivolously upload on her friendly writing platform for the beginner’s validation fever. Even in her dream, she kept her writing to herself. She didn’t narrate it to anyone there.

The rest of the day was spent enacting the dialogues of Greta Gerwig’s erratic screenplay of Little Women, listening to the cacophony of the sea shore waves in unison, and even talking about the one phenomenon who gave the first ever call to prayer (Azaan). Salma turned a baffled eye at her uncle. It was coming from the same man who shelved a copy of Bhagat Singh’s “Why I Am An Atheist.” He talked about his wish to go to Paris and perform his shaayari for the locals there.

“My religion allows me to question, so I take all the liberty to question and reason,” he said, bathing under the sun, his face shadowed by the mesh of his jute hat.

“Okay, but why is the sky pink today?” Salma said, sketching the waves splashing against the ocean rocks, coloring the sea froth pink.

“Sometimes I wish you were my daughter, under the blue sky, not any pink one.”

Blue. The colour of Cinderella's dress when she'd very hastily travelled to the prince's ball. Blue. The colour of her mother's dupatta when she screeched at her husband from behind the closed door of their bedroom. 5-year-old Salma sat on her uncle's lap as they watched Cinderella's step sisters try on that nasty little glass slipper. Her uncle wrapped his arms around her, as if that could pacify the calamity vandalizing the adjacent room.

"What is trust, Raja mama?" Salma asked, her eyes laser focused on the blaring TV screen.

"Right here, this is trust,” her uncle pointed at the TV screen. "Cinderella trusted Prince Charming that he'd find her in a kingdom so big."

"Abba does not trust Amma.”

"No, Abba does not trust me.”

Salma shifted in her position; she started biting her nails only for her hands to be shoved away by her uncle.

"Why does Amma shout so much?"

The cussing from the other room was replaced by loud bellows from both lone parties.

"Because she is your mother and she is my fierce elder sister who wants to protect us,” her uncle replied, increasing the volume of the TV when the bellows grew louder.

"How on earth should I know that there's nothing going on between you two? That haraamzaada is your cousin right? How do I know..." the loud conversations dimmed out for a few minutes as the end credits rolled and Salma yawned.

"Is Cinderella happy now?" she asked her uncle.

"Of course she is."

Salma managed to bite a fingernail before her uncle could swat her hands away for the second time.

"How do you know, Rajaa mama?"

"Because she moved on from her step family,” he replied, covering Salma's ears as if that would dim down the profanities being casually thrown out of the paper-thin door.

"What is haraamjaada (bastard)?"

"Keep quiet-if you stop asking questions, I will take you to Disneyland one day."

"Promise.”

Next year the haraamjaada moved to Paris, not to be seen or heard from again.

Things didn’t change drastically. Salma’s father laughed at a louder decibel than before while watching a B grade comedy film that had aired an abundant number of times on TV. Her mother seemed to be wiping more tears while slicing onions for the chicken biryani she was going to prepare for her younger daughter’s birthday. As for Salma, she stopped growing taller and bought her very own copy of The Prophet. This time, she read through the obscene, nude illustrations, so much so that she could carve them out in her diary solely with her visual memory. Every shape, every crevice, every junction, every philosophy deciphered under the moonlight that Bangalore very selflessly shared with Paris.

Shermeen is a 23 y/o product developer based out of Bangalore, India. She is also an aspiring screenwriter and novelist with a love for dramatic, character-driven stories across film and prose.