Extract from The Sky is Not Empty

Aadira Parakkat

‘I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.’ – Sylvia Plath

I

‘So much noise, molu,’ said Achacha. The television was on, set to the local Malayalam news channel. The traffic on Canal Road sounded its usual scattered cacophony. The pots and pans clattered and clamoured in Achamma’s kitchen. 

But Amrita’s grandfather wasn’t talking about any of that.

Amrita was sitting cross-legged opposite Achacha on the sofa in her grandparents’ living room, as he closely examined the folds and creases of her open palm. 

‘You see here? All these criss-crosses? At the beginning of your life line?’ Amrita felt Achacha’s calloused fingers circle the part of her palm between her thumb and index finger. ‘Those are all the lives you’re trying to live. In here.’ 

He moved his finger to her temple. ‘They’re arguing with each other. I want this, I want that. That’s too much noise. Too much.’ 

His concerned eyes peered at her from above his reading glasses, which made Amrita shift uncomfortably in her seat. ‘But as it goes down,’—he traced his finger down the line to the base of Amrita’s palm—'for a while it becomes one faint line. The voices are tired of arguing. Of wanting anything at all. That is wisdom, molu. That is peace.’ 

Wisdom and peace have a lot in common with depression, Amrita wanted to say.

Achacha brought Amrita’s palm closer to his face and ran his thumb over it, like he was wiping away a dusty screen. ‘And then here, at the very bottom, there is a split.’ 

 ‘Gobietta, enough. You’ll make her worry.’ A stern voice sounded from behind Amrita, accompanied by a scurry of steps that could belong only to Achamma. ‘Molu, your kaapi must be cold now.’ 

Amrita turned to acknowledge her, but her grandmother had already disappeared into the bedroom. 

Amrita and Achacha exchanged a knowing glance, and he let go of her hands. She took a sip from the lukewarm cup of coffee, and the paalpaada that had collected on its milky surface clung uncomfortably to her tongue. She’d left it waiting too long, and taste of full fat milk had become too overpowering now that it had cooled. She gulped down the entire cup, feeling the sticky film slide down her throat. 

‘I should go water the plants now, before your grandmother finishes her prayers.’ Achacha grunted, setting his reading glasses on the coffee table, his knees creaking as he rose from the sofa.

‘Wait, Achacha, what does the split mean?’

‘Let’s leave it for today, molu.’ Achacha gave her a reassuring smile and reached out his hand; Amrita gave it a little squeeze. He gently held her fingers and inspected them. 

‘You have the fingers of an artist, my child.’

It was something he’d said to her before. And she’d believed it then. But today, she wasn’t sure.  

As she walked through the dining room to the kitchen, she took another look at her hands. A life line with a split-end. Amrita felt a fizzy discomfort in her chest. 

She suddenly had the overwhelming sense that her time was running out.

She imagined herself entangled in a web of gauzy string, like the creases of her right palm. She felt the fizziness in her chest swell. 

 She reoriented her focus towards the sounds around her to bring her out of her head. The rush of tap water and the squelch of the soapy sponge. The hum of her grandmother’s hymns in the next room. The news, still blaring on the television. The voices quietened, and the tangled cloud of string frayed out until all that remained was a faint hairline. 

She set her cup aside and patted her hands dry on her faded blue pyjama bottoms. She used the left sleeve of her T-shirt to wipe off beads of sweat from her upper lip. This was to be the hottest June Kerala had experienced in 82 years, the news channel said. 

Amrita made her way back to her favourite spot, the living room sofa, floating like a raft on a grey-green terrazzo sea.

She picked up the sketchbook on the coffee table in front of her and flipped past around a dozen drawings, each at varying degrees of incompleteness, to find a blank page. 

She lightly pencilled the outline of a hand. Asymmetrical fingers indented in various places from firmly holding a pencil for too long. A gauzy intersection of creases. The hand of an artist.

‘Om, shanti, shanti, shanti.’ Amrita heard her grandmother’s voice and tried to catch a glimpse of her through her grandparents’ bedroom curtains. She saw her, sat up on their bed and rocking back and forth, carefully reciting each weighty word from her book of hymns, just like she’d done ever since Amrita’s father was a child, a ritual that allegedly cured him of a debilitating case of typhoid when he was ten years old. 

And then, once the hymns were recited, without leaving a second to waste, Achamma was on her feet and out of the bedroom. ‘Is Achacha in the garden, Ammu?’ 

‘Yes, he’s watering the plants.’

‘Nonsense,’ Achamma scoffed. ‘He’ll be busy chatting with the neighbours.’

The Ernakulam district was in the heart of the city of Kochi. Canal Road was particularly well situated; it was a residential street just off the main road. The row of houses on both sides of the street were mainly occupied by wealthy pensioners, Malayalees who’d lived and worked in other cities for most of their adult lives and moved back to their home state to be close to their ancestral homes, yet still within the comforts of city life. Everyone who’d lived here had lived here for years; the newest residents were their next-door neighbours, the Josephs, who moved in over twelve years ago. 

Amrita could hear her grandfather’s chortles overlapping with a familiar voice from the front gate. It was a good thing she decided to stay indoors.

 Just like Amrita had her spot on the sofa, Achacha had his spot on the wicker chair on the front porch. He’d spend every day sitting in the same place, newspaper in hand, looking up from time to time to spot the regulars on their daily walks, then rushing to the front gate to start a conversation. Occasionally, he’d decide to water the plants and mutter to them when passers-by disappointed him with their small talk. 

Once the sun would set and the mosquitoes began to bite, he’d come back in. 

‘Tch, Gobietta, you’ve brought the mosquitoes in.’ Achamma came storming out of the dining room into the living room. She rushed into the iritu muri below the stairs and brought out her trusty mosquito raquet and try to zap every flying menace in vain. This too, was a part of her daily routine. 

The iritu muri was the locked room under the stairs, where all the placeless things went. 

As little girls, Amrita and her little sister Chickoo would look through the keyhole and imagine the room as a passage to the underworld, teeming with dark magic and supernatural life. At bedtime, squeezed in between their parents in a bed not big enough for four, Amrita would act out horror stories with shadow puppets as the streetlamps and headlights danced across the bedroom ceiling. She would weave together long twisted fables of the iritu muri’s inhabitants, until, inevitably, Chickoo would shriek in fear. “Amla!” Chickoo would yell, pulling the covers over her head and jolting their parents awake. And then, after they were reprimanded and desperately pleaded with to go to sleep, they would both quietly lie awake, eyes twinkling in the dark, too spooked to shut them and see menacing underworld creatures crawl across their eyelids. Amrita would then trace secret messages on Chickoo’s arm and gently rub circles into her palms until both their breaths steadied and they drifted off to sleep. Nothing had happened to them yet.

Zap.

Zap, zap, zap. ‘That should do it,’ sighed Achamma. ‘Let’s have dinner.’

Before they sat down for dinner, Achamma scurried off to the bathroom to remove her dentures. Without her dentures, she looked just like Amrita’s great grandmother who had passed years ago, with her flat chin and frowning mouth. Seeing these glimpses of her grandmother’s frailty should have frightened or upset her, but Amrita found it to be a bit of relief, really. 

At Amrita’s grandparents’ house, everything seemed to be characterised by a peculiar inertia: the brown sofa with its dusty velvet seat cushions, the shut windows and their improperly Velcroed mesh screens, the untouched crockery on the shelves in the dining room. But not Achamma. She was in every place at once, almost as if she could walk through the walls of that two-storeyed house. 

She was in constant motion: at work in the kitchen, or dusting corners, or looking through her drawers of old documents to check that they were all still there. 

It was as if each one of her routines was a piece of braided string tied to something important, and that she had to keep tending to them; for her routines, from the prayers to the frantic buzzing around rooms, were keeping her loved ones alive, and to falter at any would mean the complete crumbling of all she held dear.

It was as if she and the house were one; a single pulsing, breathing being. 

Amrita enjoyed seeing her grandmother without her dentures at mealtime for the same reason she loved to watch her eyes shut firmly in prayer every afternoon, or how she would mix her supplements into a glass of hot milk and sip on it, creating a thin white moustache on her cupid’s bow every night. In these moments, it wasn’t obvious in the dark pupils of her eyes and the restlessness in her arms how quickly Achamma’s mind was sprinting. 

Amrita felt herself floating between rooms like an apparition, impelled to invisibility in fear of Achamma’s surveillance; cleaning up after herself, tiptoeing upstairs, and trying her best to stay out of Achamma’s way. Taking up as little space as possible, until one day there would be nothing left of her. It had happened before, and it could happen again.

For perhaps all this house really had the space for was Achamma, along with her vital routines and the expectations she had for the people in her family. 

This was perhaps why Achacha stayed outside in the garden, the only space of his own, where the niceties of strangers and the bustling traffic were antidotes to the stagnant indoors. That was his place, out of Achamma’s way. 

Amrita just had to find her own place, or else she feared that her grandmother would one day decide that her indolence was too much of an intrusion, or that her presence in the house was doing no favours to the order of things, or that she clashed with the colour of the rest of the furniture. 

And then, she too would be stashed away in the iritu muri, the dark room where all the placeless things went. 

II

Look at those butterflies,

Watch how they flutter by. 

It had all begun then, at four years old: her on Achacha’s lap on that front porch wicker chair, pointing at the butterflies dancing by the bushes of red Ixora. She wished she could go back there, to her little four-year-old body, convulsing in giddy joy as Achacha repeated his little rhyme, back when joy still felt simple, for the passage between heart and mind hadn’t been filled with any ideas of correctness or caution, and it was easier to love things. She closed her eyes and imagined the smell of the mud, the sparse sounds of traffic, the texture of rattan, and the prickly summer heat.

Her sister would often comment on how odd it was that Kathyayini could picture a memory so remote with such striking clarity. To Amla, memories felt blurred and abstract, like if someone had taken a wet painting and smudged it haphazardly with their entire forearm. But to Kathyayini, the past and present flowed in tandem: bosom friends, arms linked, their braided locks of hair swinging in coordinated rhythm. These days, she found herself reaching more and more into the warm glow of her memories; she felt like she would rearrange the present to make more room for the past if she could. 

Her present—sitting in a cramped little café at the edge of Hyde Park, her shoulders stiff and hair smelling like a plane seat, her two suitcases positioned beside her to take up as little space as possible yet still eliciting dirty stares from the old British man sitting at the next table, the dried coffee rings and grainy final few sips of cappuccino in her cup—felt so far away from that limitlessness she felt on Achacha’s wicker chair. 

Her phone lit up with a text message from Farida.

walking over now! be there in 5 x

The banner of text obscured part of Kathyayini’s phone wallpaper, a collage of pictures of the two of them. In their school uniforms, sitting in the field behind their school. Dancing together at Farida’s sister’s wedding, Kathyayini wearing the earrings Farida’s mother had loaned her for the night. At their graduation ball, arms linked, two days after Tejas had broken up with Farida and she asked Kathyayini to be her date instead. 

She’d already been waiting for twenty minutes. She wasn’t sure why Farida had been so insistent upon meeting her; they hadn’t spoken in months, not since the final week of first term. Kathyayini had been the one to try and initiate plans to see each other over the winter break, but Farida had decided to spend Christmas with her new boyfriend and his family. Kathyayini thought Christmas with the family of a boy you’d known for only a couple of months was a bit much, but she said nothing about it, and Farida said nothing back, and six months had passed.

The two of them had been inseparable since the first day of school. Maybe it had been a coincidence that both the girls joining St. Theresa’s in Pune were repeating the fifth standard because they’d scored poorly on their entrance tests; Kathyayini in English and Farida in Science. And perhaps it was happenstance that Science was Kathyayini’s favourite school subject, and English Farida’s. And then, when they were assigned the same bunk bed in their dormitory of ten, maybe it was only natural that they grew to be inseparable over the next seven years—helping each other with homework, borrowing each other’s clothes and books, doing each other’s hair. Or perhaps their bond was made of something entirely more ineffable than mere coincidence or happenstance or nature, at least that’s what Kathyayini had once liked to believe. Because there was no other way to explain how acutely Kathyayini had felt a kinship with Farida the moment they locked eyes for the first time, just like she’d felt with the butterflies at four years old. Like she’d stumbled upon some sort of inevitable path.

That’s the thing with the past. If you look at it for long enough, the discrepancies blur; every unreadable expression or unfinished conversation becomes a crucial puzzle piece, every retraced footstep and fragmented image slots together like a mosaic pavement, and it becomes easier to believe that there’s some symmetry or art in it all, that your life thus far has actually been moving in some sort of direction, and that you haven’t in fact been stuck in one stunted place. 

But as that mosaic path tapers into the present, it becomes painfully inscrutable. It becomes harder to make sense of the way things unfold. How big dreams disintegrate into tedious commutes and homesickness, how a sister becomes a mother, and how a girl you once shared a handwritten secret diary with becomes a stranger you meet for a quick cup of coffee in a foreign town. 

‘Chickoo!’

Hearing the pet name her sister had given her as a baby, one reserved for family, now in Farida’s voice, Kathyayini felt a mix of resentment and nostalgia. She placed her phone on the table, screen-down, and stood up to greet her. Her suitcases stood obstructively in between them, making it difficult to properly hug each other. 

‘I’m so sorry I’m late! Ethan and I were out pretty late last night. I literally leaped out of bed and out the door, as you can probably tell.’ Farida took off her leather jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, revealing a T-shirt of a band that Kathyayini had never heard of. ‘I’m going to get the biggest coffee ever. Do you want one too?’

Kathyayini said she was okay, and Farida walked up to the counter to place her order. Her hair was shorter now, something she’d probably asked for at the hairdresser’s in an attempt to make herself look edgier or more mature but which had inadvertently had the opposite effect; as she stood by the counter waiting for her coffee, she looked like a kid in a big T-shirt. So familiar, yet so distant.

As expected, their reunion was largely awkward and off-putting. All of Farida’s stories were somehow about her boyfriend or his friends and family. They were going to live together in second year, in a two-bedroom flat they were going to share with his mate from rugby. She was going to set up the house since she was in London for an internship at a magazine, and she’d be shuttling back and forth from his family’s house in Essex every few weekends to help move all his stuff so the place would be all ready for him once term begins. If she hadn’t looked so elated about it all, Kathyayini may have pitied her for the way she’d arranged her entire life around some guy she’d known for less than a year.

However, there was a momentary glimpse of that forgotten ease when they spoke of their summer plans; Kathyayini explained that she was one of four students who’d been selected to assist a butterfly conservation project with the Somerset Wildlife Trust. ‘I think I’ll be sharing a room with one of the other students. It’ll be like boarding school all over again.’ 

‘You think you’ll braid her hair in the morning?’ Farida asked, and for the first time in months, the two of them shared a genuine laugh, and the present felt bearable for a moment.

She wanted to tell her then, in that fleeting glimmer of familiarity. She almost did, but then the laughter died out, and it was gone.

It was probably a good thing she didn’t. Things hadn’t gone too well when she’d told Amla, and even though Farida might have been more likely to understand the whole thing, she wasn’t too sure she could explain it if she hadn’t. 

On the train to Somerset, Kathyayini decided to change her wallpaper.

She looked through her phone’s gallery, and found a picture of a painting Amla had made for her a year and a half ago, on her eighteenth birthday. It was a watercolour chrysalis hanging from the underside of a leaf, surrounded by deep greens of dense plumage. The chrysalis itself was made up of swirls of chartreuse, emerald and lemon yellow. The camera had failed to capture the shimmering gold outline of the chrysalis, which showed up as a muted olive green on her screen. And in the middle of the chrysalis: the faintest silhouette of a pupa, a formless not-quite caterpillar and not-yet butterfly. 

She set it as her new background, replacing the collage of photos of her and Farida. 

Her sister had begun this series on Kathyayini’s sixteenth birthday with a painting of a round egg, resting like a white pearl on a slanting blade of tall grass. Each year, she presented her with a painting that depicted a stage in the butterfly’s life cycle: the egg, the larva, and the pupa. On her nineteenth birthday, she was supposed to receive the butterfly; the adult. But Amla’s new job in the big city had left her with no time at all for art, and she’d treated her to dinner at one of Bangalore’s finest restaurants instead. And Kathyayini had insisted she didn’t mind; she didn’t feel like an adult anyway. 

When faced with an adverse environment, insects will sometimes delay the next stage of their life cycle; a behavior called diapause. Butterflies do it sometimes during the winter, if they sense that the conditions around them aren’t adequate. 

Kathyayini had explained this to Amla at the time; that she felt like she was in a diapause of her own. That was the same night she told her about Amma. The memory was too recent, too painful to recall and too hot to touch, so she stashed it away for the day it would reveal its meaning.

The train arrived at Taunton station, where she met up with Cara, who worked at the hostel she was going to stay at and would drop her off there. She was the first of the four students to arrive, Cara said, so she could bagsy the room with a nice view of the reserve. ‘The other one is closer to the bathroom though, which could be useful in an emergency, so it’s your call.’ Kathyayini picked the room with the nice view.

The room had two narrow desks and desk chairs, two cupboards, and two single beds, one against the left wall and one against the right. The window stretched across the entire back wall of the room, looking out into a green expanse of trees and bushy, teeming shrubbery. 

Once she showered and changed into a comfortable set of clothes, she felt her eyelids grow heavy. She lay her head on the pillow and pretty soon was asleep.

When she woke up it was 8 p.m. She looked to her right and saw some suitcases laid out on the floor and the second single bed still empty. 

She felt her stomach grumble and reached into her rucksack to look for the sandwich and crisps she’d bought at the train station.

Suddenly, she was struck by the scent of turmeric and jasmine, so staggeringly familiar. Amma.

‘Chickoomani?’