Dissipate

Dissipate

"I don't think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them."

"Then you are an Oriental."

A Passage to India E. M. Forster

*

1999.

Padma walks in to their bedroom after lunch & Parvati is crying against the bed, the kohl leaving a dark stain against the pillow. Her astral charts are lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, an green ink bottle spilled carelessly beside it. Almost involuntarily she asks, "What's wrong?"

Parvati raises her head just long enough to look up at her. "Oh, what do you think?" She mumbles into her pillow, voice stretched and thin.

*

Bombay.

The humid air rushes against their faces, almost too solid to breathe in. They're already gasping for breath in the brief interval between air-conditioned airport and air-conditioned taxi.

Parvati's about to conjure up a glass of pumpkin juice when Padma grabs her wrist.

"Not here," she warns, reminding Parvati that they are not in England. A wand is a sign of strength in England, whereas in India it is a crutch, betraying their phoren origins more obviously than their English accents. "Not here," not in India, where all magic is a call.

*

Parvati shudders. "Do you think aunty will be nice?"

"She is-... She is Indian," Padma replies, saying the words slowly, tentatively.

"But what does that mean?"

Padma shrugs her shoulders and watches the bright cheap colours of film posters flash against their tinted windows. "I don't know," she says finally, and they are not easy words for a Ravenclaw.

*

"You do not understand magic," is the first thing Aunty says to them.

*

In the morning they wake to the strange sound of singing, undercut with the echoing twang of a sitar. The voice is high, singing in straight lines and sharps. The smells of incense and jasmine twine around their arms as they walk down the stairs, Parvati's gold bangles jangling against each other.

*

Aunty tears Parvati's astral chart in half with a strange half-smile. "You think a potful of tea will give you insight into the future?" She asks, with that lilting, sing-song accent that always hovers on the edge of insolence. "How typically English of you."

She imitates her British accent when she says it: Aenglish skittering on her mocking tongue, and that's what makes Parvati cry.

*

Mr. Patil is only in one of the pictures hanging in the dining room. He's gangly and probably just about eleven, holding onto his older sister's neck and smiling. "Why do they move so little?" Padma asks Aunty one day.

"Magic is not for such trifles," she says, bending down and continuing to sweep the floor. "Who wants to attract rakshasein for a few photographs?"

"But-,"

Aunty fixes her with cold black eyes, the red swipe of kum-kum at her forehead giving her the look, Padma thinks, of an ancient warrior. "Magic is not a plaything, like they teach you at that school. It is life." She drops her broom and places her right hand on Padma's chest and Padma feels it flowing between them, magic, magic, no far too weak a word for it. Jadu? No. Jeevan, slashes of Hindi burn themselves onto her eyes, jeevan, life, a thrumming from the depths of the jungle, deeper still until the trees are so dense that the leaves themselves become part of the darkness, rustling and palpable and reaching out with aching limbs.

Hunger, India is filled with hunger which spills from these secret places into the streets of Bombay, sliding down the blue-grey slats of high-rise buildings and oozing through the bazaars, waiting, waiting, always waiting to be called.

*

Padma feels her feet grow roots into the earth, pushing among its particles and her arms dissipating into air air and for one moment she is both solid & spirit, brahma & vishnu & shiva-- and Aunty's arms are catching her as she falls, so softly, and she is saying, "This is magic."

*

"Perhaps the future isn't in tea leaves, Parvati," Padma suggests, and when Parvati looks up she sees that Padma has changed colour ever so slightly. She's washed that strange hazy tint of blue-yellow that coats the Indian sky on cool sunset nights, her fingers are insubstantial.

Parvati is losing her to India, to a horde of six-armed gods and magic that comes from the bones& deeper. The hard veneer of bitter English cold still wraps around Parvati at night, and no matter how hot it is or how many fans have to be switched on, by midnight Parvati is blue around the lips and shivering. She slides into Padma's bed then and they wake in a tangle of confused limbs, and for a little while in the sleepy mornings it's like their childhoods when they felt they were two separated halves of a whole.

There are oceans between them now, and the sweet earth of continents; the expanses of Europe and Africa obstructing their path. Parvati's touch feels like a slicing London wind, and Padma's words sear Parvati's ears.

*

Parvati is not surprised when Padma tears up her return ticket.

"There's a war to be fought," Parvati says, the words feeling strangely empty in her mouth.

"Voldemort--,"

"Don't say his name!"

Padma smiles slowly. "His name has no meaning here," she says, and that's really all there is to it.

*

Parvati packs her things quietly, kissing Aunty goodbye with a click of hard lips against harder flesh.

"I wish you the best," Aunty says, and Parvati knows that she is sincere. "I wish--," but she does not complete her sentence. Only, I wish hanging forever in the air between them.

"I wish, too," Parvati replies.

*

They hug on the verandah as the taxi pulls up, spreading a haze of dust around them. Padma's fingers seem to slip through Parvati's hands and it's almost as if she's trying to catch her own reflection. "You are fading away," she says vaguely, words tossed lightly on a sultry wind. "You are fading into India."

The dust settles just enough for Parvati to see Padma smile.

"Many things disappear here, Parvati," she says, by way of saying goodbye. "But nothing is ever lost."

*

Finis.