The Sunday before everyone is disappeared, our mother leaves fish off the grocery list. Baby, four years old and still not speaking, throws a tantrum at this, shouting over the smiling news anchor on TV, who attempts to tell us that no one knew how some undefined “this” could happen because the man driving the car had been respectable. The eldest of us, Varun, who’s fifteen and thinks he knows everything, tells us that if respectable means being drunk like Matthews Uncle always was on the weekend, it must be the easiest thing in the world, men. Eeee-siest, he says, spitting the fly of the word at all of us, swaggering.
Baby is still upset about the fish. Amma, jangling up her keys from the bowl, tells Varun to keep quiet and have respect for the dead. And Varun snips the wings off the next ee in his mouth, but he’s still left behind to do the dishes. He grumbles that he didn’t want to go to the shop anyway, still swaggering as he pinches each of us in turn as we leave. His fingernails leave curved welts purple on our upper arms. Kalash tries to rub them out of Baby’s skin, gives Baby the red basket to hold that Amma once took from the grocer when we were younger and then never returned. Fish, welts, sobbing Baby; our mother gives us a look, we fit our hands into each other’s, into hers, and step over the threshold and into hanging damp.
Plaited together like this, we try to catch a glimpse of the ocean as we avoid the streets that lead to the fish market. Baby stops crying even though the stench of rot and ozone from the hole reaches us even all the way over here on the island. It’s nine in the morning, too late to avoid the rush, and the crowd spills over into our sidestreet, a mass of roiling, snatching, pulling bodies that threaten to jostle us apart, make us feral, angry things too. It’s never been this bad, not that any of us can recall, but Amma walks like this was how it had always been, blunting her soles like she means to dig through the road and make her own holes. Why is it so easy to remember how things looked, but so difficult to recall old scents, to know without a doubt how my island smelled? Kalash’s hand is sweaty as our mother yanks us along, so easy to slip out of, so easy to lose. We keep together.
People line up outside the shop with their bags, those who didn’t want fish this week like us. All single-person households, or households with no children, or households that had kept all their men; but still half-full, half-empty, hole-carved households. When they see my mother, her arms shiny and slick with salt, us ribboning out from her as still-living products of her body, each face changes. Her eyes only slide over and past them, but we watch, fascinated, as the skin of their brown nostrils flare, sweat dripping down their philtrums and cresting their upper lips as the whites of their eyes flick sideways and expand, and there’s jealousy there. And pity, we suppose.
They let us pass and our mother doesn’t even mutter a perfunctory thank you, just waltzes right in and starts stuffing eggplants and the last fresh tomatoes into the red basket in Baby’s arms like she did last week after Appa had gone. Is this why she can ignore them so wholly as she does? Does she see what his lack has allowed her? The grocer slides the vegetables across the counter without scanning them and deposits them back in the basket, looking at the three of us with that same pity-jealousy that not having a father gets you. Poor children, his eyes say, poor, poor children. But we do not feel poor, only hungry and confused as we try understand why our mother’s back remains rigid at the sympathy.
Baby gurgles to us as our neighbour sidles up beside us, cataracted eyes on our tomatoes. We appraise her twin grandchildren, stare unblinkingly at their smallness, at their arms segmented into logs of doughy baby fat. There, in their cheeks, in the mole under one’s eye, we see their mother, but she is not here, no. This island disgorged her onto the mainland well before her husband drove his car into the ocean. It makes us think that these children, too, are weak, not made out of the same salt-stuff as we are, but their blue-black pupils are pits in their heads, and we lose the game of chicken one at a time.
Kalash lasts the longest. He only breaks when Matthews Aunty asks us in that wavering-thin voice of hers whether we heard about the powerline that went down with the car last night, looking up at Amma. But our mother doesn’t pay much mind to the woman or her grandchildren. She just juts her chin out like a stone from her throat as she checks our vegetables for brown spots.
“Of course,” she says, “We heard it on the news.”
The neighbour’s tongue kisses her teeth, the susurrus slipping from her mouth as she asks us how we hadn’t lost power, says to no one in particular that it’s unimaginable, completely unimaginable, horrifying, and can we believe her Adaikalam’s car took the whole thing down? Why, she thought this island had better management than all that, never had she seen such a thing in her sixty years. Her eyes are trained on her grandchildren as she talks about their father as if he was never her son at all. Does she see in them their mother like I do, as afterimages of dull survival instead of this short, conflagrant life? Does she know what she might have preferred for them, for her son, for herself?
“Oh, but power cuts happen all the time, Aunty. This isn’t any different, no? We’re not worried – we have the generator. It’s been running all week,” our mother says proudly, but we can see the tension in her shoulders, and we know she’s thinking about Matthews Aunty’s son too. The neighbour nods, but the milk of her eyes turn sharp at our mother’s easy dismissal, and her voice is unsteady, pained and caustic all at once when she tells us brothers that our father was handy, but it’s a shame, really a shame about him. She tells us that we should stay with our mother even when we’re older, that an island, especially this one, is safer than the ocean around it. No one talks about the mainland.
Baby gurgles and our mother gives him the basket to hold again, telling him not to leave any toothmarks in the eggplants this time. Kalash, his fingers bruising and tight, only looks at the line outside of the supermarket as our mother ignores the neighbour. But we can see the words have gotten under her skin, strawberried it so that the shine from her sweat breaks against the pinkish ridges, turning her into a pebbled thing.
“Come have lunch sometime, Matthews Aunty,” she says to the woman as we leave, voice like a whip, “I’m sure the AC will be welcome in this heat. Come share our generator, yes?”
We pass the streets by the market but they’re emptying now, the crowd thinning into people again. Angry hands gesture to the boats tied up, the glittering back of the ocean, blue save for the one pupil-dark spot fifty kilometres out. Somewhere in the horizon, the heat makes the mainland look like a floating city in the sky. Policemen put ugly orange cones along the road and push people away with batons, tell them to go home, to watch what they eat, but this is only what everyone says when anything goes wrong. Their brown uniforms create faux stretches of clean sand between the silvery carcasses of fish all over the beach; the stench is almost unbearable.
Our mother’s anger congeals in the whites of her eyes as she looks out into the blue, looks at the masts of the boats that tilt their white sails towards the floating city beyond, our marred coastline thick with their inept wooden bodies. The smack of her slippers is irate against the heating tar; she moves quickly enough that they don’t stick down, and we’re tugged along faster than we can walk. Baby stumbles but holds onto his basket, and Kalash makes a face at us when our mother isn’t looking; he never likes it when she fights with the neighbours, never likes all the awkwardness and force-fed sweetness after. Watch what you eat, indeed.
When we get home, he quietly tells Varun what Matthews Aunty said, and our brother begins, never keeping his voice low like I do. How often has he rehearsed this, all arms and pointed fingers, and yet how stupid is he to never be careful enough to keep his voice low when he talks about our poor-probably-dead-drowned father, men? Most always, it’s when Amma’s out, but not now; by the time he’s gotten to the part where he says that maybe Appa would’ve been okay if he hadn’t stolen out in the middle of the night like that drunk, that Matthews Uncle, our mother’s broad shadow is over him, her face yellow with rage.
She chases him with her slipper, round and round the dining table. Our smiling news anchor pantomimes words under the noise as Varun screams one long, winding scream, shaping it into words only intermittently. Between the passing flashes of his body, we see Adaikalam Matthews’ face on the TV, his oil-dark eyes rheumy with drink. Varun’s skinny, no swagger now, his still-boy knees jerk out from underneath the hem of his shorts as he runs. They’re orange and terrible, something he picked out himself and which rest of us hate but will have to each wear in turn.
When our mother catches him, the slipper stops being the threat it was. She’s never beaten us, but she’s never cried like she does now either and her lashes snatch up bits of her own rotten ocean and turn dark and oily. She asks us what she has done to have four backtalking mouths to feed, and those of us that can talk tell her it’s not her fault. Her throat is serrated and her tongue soft, when she asks us what she has done to deserve four boys who may never grow into their father, and we tell her, more strongly this time, nothing, Amma, nothing. Then she wails, her hair unruly, and beats her chest and looks to the heavens for our father even though it is empty, and asks what it will take and Varun finally snitches on me, tells her I’m the one that saw Appa leave, that I’d been the one to tell him about our father stealing the boat last week, waking him up after Appa had already gone, out and hollow-eyed and half-consumed, the part of him that belonged to us already pulled out with the current.
I blanche. Varun never mentioned me in his rehearsals, hadn’t even listened to me when I woke them all up to show them Appa’s missing slippers, only muttered that I was still too much of a child to know what I was talking about. Even though we had heard the wind whistling through the open front door, saw a passing silhouette in the night. Had he not looked outside? Seen the crammed red warning lights of the boats, still alive as if they would be taken out the next day? No, he’d only tossed his blanket over me and held it down until Kalash had woken up and threatened to tell our mother, whispering so Baby wouldn’t wake. Varun does not tell Amma this, the fraud, and Baby and my mother look at me like I’m a liar, but I’m not. I’m not. I look at the TV, feeling myself get all obstinate and sullen that they all believe Varun and not me, but then Kalash says he heard our father too and cuts his pupil-dark eyes at me, clean. Talk, they say.
Haltingly, I tell them my father had told me, months before he’d gone, before the boats had been tied in and him and Matthews Uncle had gotten laid off, about a hole in the ocean rimmed thick like ridged glass, salty laminar flow. This everyone already knew. It was bending the safety rails off the decks, he said, pulling boats and people and powerlines, or if it hadn’t yet it would. This, too, they know. There’s a hole in the ocean and a perfectly shaped piece somewhere that fits just right, he said. Why else would it be there?
But I don’t say that last part out loud because I’m scared, but the thing about not saying something they don’t know is that it makes it worse, far worse, and then Baby’s started sniffling again. Fish, welts, holes. And Kalash stops lying and angrily says he heard nothing after all as our mother starts crying again and Baby has had enough and beats on me with his little plump fists that reveal a bruise on my skin, blue in the morning. Varun puts his hand on my shoulder; his palm is too warm through my thin shirt, and his fingers tremble dark prints of moisture into the cotton. All of us get sent to bed that night with the best dinner in ages, even without fish, and we curl around each other like a closed fist, our dreams leaking in and out of each other until we wake.
The following Sunday, my TV stops working as the generator finally dies. I realize I have no gas left for it and by mid-morning the heat makes the walls sweat under the paint and I’ve missed the morning news. I’m not too worried. People talk.
When I walk through the streets to the grocery store, the grocer’s red basket in hand, I see Matthews Aunty waiting in line, empty of children. I know us neighbours all wonder when her grandbabies became hole-shaped, but we never ask. We think it might have been after the last time; we know now, what to look for. The half-full, half-empty, hole-carved families wind all the way down now to the side street by the empty beach. We’ll need a new system soon. Secretly, I hope they let us Appa-Amma-brothers-less boys go first. We will one day be men after all. But there’s still too many of us and it doesn’t seem likely yet. Still, when we’re out on the roads, avoiding rioting women with their babies jiggling in their arms, we hope.
Matthews Aunty lets me go in front of her. I wipe my sweaty palm on my shorts and watch the little dark fingerprints smear over the orange and try not to rub at my eyes as she wonders out loud if I’ve heard about the ships stopped well outside our island. I haven’t, but she doesn’t need an answer.
“Nothing will come through, and nothing can go out,” she says brightly, and asks if the offer for lunch still stands.
