A Small Story

Amrai stared miserably out of the kitchen window at the courtyard below. It was full of her family, at their happiest and best dressed. Her mother and younger sisters bustled around offering mithai to the guests, pouring out steaming kulhads of chai and forcing them into the hands of the men and women seated on the family's best divans. They had all been moved into the courtyard the night before, so that today's proceedings could take place under the blue sky and the shade of the family's sacred old peepal tree. In the middle of the group of women sat Paali, Amrai's youngest sister. Her head bowed shyly as was expected, her red sari shimmering in the dappled sunlight under the tree. She was surrounded by the women who would soon become her family, murmuring softly as they asked her questions, and blushing prettily as they teased her. Watching her, Amrai's chest filled with the bitter fluid that she was sure had started running through her veins in the last week, since the engagement had been announced.

A glint of sunlight danced suddenly before her eyes, guiding her gaze across the courtyard, through the crowd of relatives and servants, between low tables weighed down with food and drink, gliding across the distance in a graceful serpentine dance until finally nestling below the feathers in his saafa. Amrai felt her heart, which had been beating sluggishly and painfully for days, break into pieces.

She turned away from the window, and sank her fingers back into the laddoo's she was making for the wedding feast. The batter squirmed under her fingers as she blindly pounded the yellow orange goo, watching in her mind the long corridors of a palace far away, where she had spent a childhood, growing up and falling in love. Tears dripped from her face, tasting strangely of the bitterness inside her, tracking clean channels of skin across the backs of her hands, mixing the laddoo's.

At the wedding feast Amrai's laddoo's were passed out to everyone. She could hear the laughter and singing from the corner of the kitchen where she still cried silently. She hadn’t been allowed to join the wedding or the feast; her presence would have been uncomfortable considering… Anyways, Paali refused to be married if Amrai attended so that matter had been settled early on.

It was after the laddoos had been given out that it happened. One by one the happy laughing people began to weep. Softly and slowly at first, but then, as the memory of the pain grew sharper they wailed and sobbed and beat their chests crying for a love that they had once lost. Everyone who had eaten those laddoos was overcome with the pain of heartbreak they had once felt. Tormented again with that unbearable pain, that many of them thought they had forgotten forever.

Amrai's mother beat her well that night, demanding to know what she had done, and how she had done it. Paali screamed herself into a fever over the ruin of her wedding, and it was only on the orders of their father that Amrai was not beaten anymore. The truth they didn’t believe, no matter how many times she said it. That the only thing she had added to the laddoos were the strangely bitter tears that she hadnt stopped crying.


**This is not an original concept. I heard this story at a reading some years ago, and tried to reproduce it. I dont know who the author is, but if you do, please tell me.