Traces of Love

I.       the ghost & her snake

      There’s a snake peeling away from my grandmother’s hand. I’ve always been terrified by snakes, and yet I’m a foot away from this one. Its tail coils at my feet, long and limp and cotton. For a couple seconds, I study the way its yarn twists around and down my grandma’s fingers, weaving into a steady pattern.  

      The snake is a scarf. That’s what my grandma says. Now, she’s got my own fingers tangled in the string because I told her I was bored. That was a mistake, telling her, because her idea of a cure is knitting, not turning on Disney Channel like I’d wanted.

      That’s all she does in her apartment—knit, sew, cook, clean, and garden. She floats around with her sunken eyes and swaying skirt from task to task. My grandma’s not dead, but her presence sort of slips in and out of this world like a ghost. The only time she comes alive is when there’s a problem to solve, when her sewing machine acts all grumpy or her plant leaves crinkle like paper. That’s when there’s something to do for once. 

      I’d always thought she should have just gotten a job if she was so bored, but when I told her as much she just clucked her tongue, silly girl. She said it didn’t matter what she wanted. I thought maybe I should stop talking so much because my grandmother is a bitter woman. But then, tinkering with her sewing machine, she muttered that she’d always wanted to study history. 

      I think that for her, the scarves really are snakes.

II.       the past is a library

      The girls were deep into their nighttime ritual of trading gossip when the principal arrived at the dormitory. The principal only ever came to send a girl away for marriage, but Pari didn’t want to dwell on that. Instead, her mind wandered the aisles of European history towards Maria II of Portugal, a queen she’d studied in class. The eldest in her family, Maria was named Queen at age seven and then again at fifteen, forced to take care of a family, a nation, when she could barely take care of herself. Soon, Pari would have to do the same. Her father was ill and her mother was dead, so the family placed all their bets on Pari finding a good man with good money. 

      It was no surprise to Pari’s friends when the principal plucked her out of the hostel and hustled her down the marriage assembly line. All the young girls in Sri Lanka marry. She even got to marry a nice man, a respectable one. But Pari was a difficult woman, and despite her good fortune, she still dreamed of studying history and living by herself. She spent most of her time in her mind, wandering lonely aisles of the past, searching for kindred spirits. My grandmother was never alone in history; she could find bitter women anywhere. 

III.       her crystal ball is a liar

      Salini didn’t feel like seeing people that day, so when she saw the men layered in heavy green suits and A40 guns, she was disappointed. Still, she trudged towards the front door with her mother and sister, straightening her spine as the door pushed open. 

      The Sri Lankan army’s demands were always small at first. They asked for a cup of water or to see your national ID card. The problem is that when you inevitably did what they asked, they guzzled down your obedience like cheap liquor. Emboldened, they took a little more; they sauntered through your house, through your room; they stole your gold chains; their eyes slithered down your bodies, greedy. The even bigger problem is that you kept quiet; you used simple English words like please and thank you; you let them take from you, but you didn’t let them take too much. You learned that it didn’t matter what you wanted. 

      When the soldiers came, Salini, my mother, used to be able to block them out. She had these visions she escaped to, a life where she ruled over Death instead of the armies. There were flashes of white coats and patients and a control over life that she had never felt before. But today, she got notice that she failed her promotion exam–she wouldn’t be a doctor. 

      Maybe her visions were fantasies of an abandoned future, but they had felt real, like, so long as she kept them close, they would keep her close too. But as she tried to reach out for them today, she felt nothing. So, as the men pried into her life with greedy hands, all she could do was watch.

IV.       the witching hour never stops

      I know if I go to sleep now, I’ll be dead. Someone will shoot me or I will have a heart attack and I will die. I don’t know exactly how I know this, but it’s so obvious to me that I wonder if I’m special, if I can talk to Death. So, instead of going to sleep tonight, I press my pillows to my body as if that would slow the travel of a bullet to my chest. Then, I watch the clock, careful to keep my eyes open wide.

      The summer before sixth grade, I started having my own visions: in them, Death was a bounty hunter, tracing my steps as night fell. Each night, we raced together, Death only a footstep behind, until it all went dark and suddenly I was waking into daylight.

      Today, the muffled pulse of a scream is what brings me back. I’m alive, I realize. I go downstairs with this revelation and see my mother, pacing the kitchen and muttering to herself. If my grandmother’s a ghost, I think my mother is a witch, chanting curses for my destruction whenever she goes mad. 

      Why do you do this to me? You know how much happier I could have been without you? Couldn’t you just die and leave me in peace? I could kill you, and then I would be happy for once.

      There is always something I’ve done to make her spiral. I’ve not finished my dinner, or worn the wrong clothes, or studied for my history test when she had wanted me to work on my science project. There is a secret set of tests she has for me that I never pass.

      Sometimes, though, when she’s sorry, she takes me out to ice cream. In those moments, I hate her even more. I need her angry. Her anger gives me a reason for my anger and without it, I have nothing left to explain myself.  

      When the sun sets that night, the visions come back to me. I lay in my bed, knowing that if I go to sleep I’ll die, but if I wake up, someone will wish I were dead anyways.

V.       my love is her love is my love and her love

      It’s always there, bubbling in a pot of my grandmother’s payasam in the morning, then in the evening, tucked into my mother’s threats to kill me. It spins in my grandmother’s ceiling fan as we lay in her bed together, a tear slipping out of her eye as she mutters, “This is no life to live.” It is mad in my mother’s eyes, bitter in my grandmother’s. 

      I wake up in my college dorm room now, and I think I have escaped it. I play squash and study for lab exams and gossip about the people down the hall. I look forward to my bed and my home and my life. But then, I find it at a party, and I wait desperately to get back to the dorm so I can cry myself to sleep. I find it at the crosswalk, an assassin that spins me into a dance just to press a dagger to my throat. I find it lacing my words with poison and sharpening the knife in my hand until I am as bitter as it is. I try, I’ve tried, and I will try to escape, but it won’t let me.

      But then again, I wake up in my college dorm room sometimes, and I don’t want to escape anymore. I wake up, and I am a witch, a ghost, and then suddenly I am running, hurtling myself towards these traces of love, desperate to make them know me the way I have known them.

Shaakhini Satchi is a freshman at USC studying Human Development and Aging. Sometimes she’s dreaming up a world with culturally diverse, affordable retirement homes and sometimes she goes on quests to find her long-lost mojo. She is convinced it will be found by either watching Adventure Time, reading the Heroes of Olympus series, or starting an elevator conversation with a stranger.