The only thing my mother says that I believe is that I see what I want to see. You do, too. And so does she, but I don’t know if she believes what she says. I know this is true because she refuses to see objects as they really are, how they become when no one is looking. 

“There is nothing there. It’s just dark. Nothing to be afraid of,” is all she says.

I, on the other hand, am sixteen years old and perpetually suspicious of the world. I think curiosity is misunderstood as a positive value; suspicious curiosity is the only way curiosity works. At least in nature.

Objects of my mother’s world morph in darkness, give themselves up to rigor like smoke curling up from a cooling pyre. They fall in agreement with the order of emanation that animates things like soil and wood, hair and skin. They make me think about the amoeba in my biology book and their pseudopodia. False feet. Their crawl, an oozing motion.

Objects in her house, like microbes, seep into the vacuum that surrounds them, noiselessly stirring up everything I think is true about the world. Things shudder, reach for form, and in their unnatural inspiration, point to the practice of being human. Things begin to want for more, for me. I, in turn, speak an object language, even though such a thing does not exist, like true physics and true love.

I am suspiciously curious about vacuums and darkness. The space where nothing exists: the odd presence whose fluid face you can see in this phrase. My reflection in the window when it’s dark outside alerts me to the construction of the scene of my life: a window made of right angles measuring against each other in discreet corners. When one line isn’t quite right, it will never meet the other at the intersection, and there will be no shape, no window. No reflection. No me. Everything around me alerts me to systems, large and small, that are hard at work all the time, enabling human life. Nature enables, even darkness. Death, oblivion, apocalypse included. 

My mother prefers to have her windows be windows. They are never part of the equation that defines what makes us, us. The difference between my mother and me, I think, is one of incongruity, but also of imagination. Her incapacity is my horror. In a world where windows develop false feet and churn her sight, my mother will cease to be.

Fear is an unnecessary concept for my mother. I think it is because fear inhibits her defenses, which I think she believes is more important than freedom. Fear warns her of the possibility that objects can have lives.

Fear is necessary for me. It tells me how everything really is, which then tells me that, at times, everything might not be the same. For example: the object-presence in our three-by-seven storeroom—where the light socket has been cold ever since I can remember. It behaves unlike anything I’ve seen before. It behaves like us, but is not us.

My parents refuse to stick a bulb in the three-by-seven room because of the way it is structured: along one of its seven-feet walls, a large window exposes it to the elements in the west. This window has no doors, only grilles; pigeons and cats come and go as they please. Sometimes, the crepuscular mammal feasts on the nest in this anomaly of a room and leaves blood-thick feathers for my mother to take care of in the morning.

We store nothing in this storeroom. Cyclones enter our house through this room twice a year. The setting sun illuminates its other seven-feet wall, along which there is another window, much smaller, with wooden doors that can be locked and that look into the kitchen. When my mother cooks, she lets the vapours escape into this room, out of the doorless grilles and into the world. Along one of the shorter lengths of this room is yet another window that looks into the bedroom where my mother and I sleep. The last side holds a heavy, noisy, rusty black door. Because it is heavy and noisy, we neither close it, nor ever open it. It remains perpetually ajar, like an expired invitation.

This room is not a room. Its only permanent thing is the solitary dark object that breeds there. It sees my mother in the kitchen; when it turns its gaze, it sees me sleeping in the bedroom.

Sometimes, it slides past the black door and hangs over the altar in the adjacent prayer room. When evening comes, the only sign of life in this part of the house is the single oil lamp my mother burns for her gods, although when everything comes to an end at night, its eyes seem to be everywhere in the house, refracted off the solitary cotton wick of the lamp, which continues to burn minutely till the thinning hours before daybreak when it blackens into a wisp.

~

The full moon night in the month of Ashwin marks the end of monsoon. With the last of the low-pressure depressions moving further into the Bay of Bengal, nights become longer and denser, like fibroids that make my mother groan and twist on the edge of the bed every month.

On this night, young girls like me are asked to worship the moon.

“At the exact moment it achieves total fullness,” my mother likes to caution. She likes to be particular.

I am supposed to look directly and with intention, for the ritual consists in the looking. Then, once connection is established, I must pray for a husband as gentle and as beautiful as the moon.

My mother believes that one solitary satellite could fulfil all our desires.

“The moon takes twenty-seven wives as it transits across the zodiac belt,” she says matter-of-factly. “The moon is your mind in motion. It is also a signifier of Mother in one’s birth chart.”

I think the fact that the moon symbolizes more than one thing in my mother’s stories points to something else. The moon came into being from the remnants of Earth after the Big Bang. Other theories suggest that the moon was formed when another, smaller planet collided with Earth. Either way, the spotted orb is an extension, a remnant of Earth, like the three-by-seven room is an architectural remnant of our house, the remainder of a long division.

My mother and her myths and her astrology operate on approximations, trying to narrativize truths too big for human language. In my mind, the world is a coded mixture of connected things whose connections are missing. I am here to render those connections into a story. 

Darkness has life-affirming parents. Luminosity is a borrowed attribute, even for humans. Does she know that, like I do? Does she know that there is little that is divine about the moon, and just as much to make it human? Does she not see her life unfolding like a story, curious and haunted?

~

On nights like this, when the spiritual demand on human beings bears more heavily, when forces beyond us hold court in special aerial conjunctions—of planets, stars, and the constellations they belong to—when my mother too begins to talk about things that are bigger than just us, I believe more and more that the dark object can see me directly and wants to say something. Bring something about. Between my mother’s devotion and its omnipresent control, I count the many fears that make up the space inside me.

I feel it spread more horizontally tonight, like a net over the surface of a stillwater pond, trapping fish beneath its weightless malice.

My mother’s oil lamps at the altar are liquid pebbles burning in a sea of darkness.

I can tell that it knows I’m here.

I can see it heaving, its pallor coagulate.

My mother collects fruit and milk from the kitchen—offerings for the moon god. She stands on the balcony with the veil pulled low over her head and gestures to me with her eyes: It’s time.

I stand at the threshold of the prayer room, eyeing the paraphernalia of ritual objects inside. The darkness is an impassive wall staring at me from the farthest corner of the room, where the door of its lair is always ajar. The full moon illuminates a third of the prayer room. The south wall is dark. Whatever I take from the deities in that room, I feel like I’m taking from the dark object reigning in the corner. It broods tonight in a prehistoric way, its ancient darkness an empty appetite for danger because it has no desire. Pure fear: it has the effect of death on me.

I know it is not a physical threat. It is not evil. And yet, it is trapped, unhuman, malignant like an abandoned town.

“Will you take all night? Where the hell are you?” My mother’s voice sounds angry. It always sounds angry. And unyielding. I question my ideas now, standing in catatonia, stuck between my mother’s karmic debts and the looming presence, its inscrutable design. Maybe I should never have thought so much about it. Maybe it exists because of me.

“If I come in and see you making a mess…”

I startle at my mother’s reprimand and feel the fingers of pity touch my vocal cord. I want to call out to her, to tell her that I am afraid. I want to ask her to come and turn the light on.

I enter, feeling the wall for the light switch, fumbling, too scared to turn my eyes away from the darkness lest it should come closer.

I turn every switch on. The room is bathed in tungsten yellow. A portable fan comes alive, filling the quiet with metallic grind. I am in the prayer room and the dark shadow is now behind me.

“My limbs will rot waiting for you!” I hear my mother’s voice among the fresh disturbance which has entered the scene. “What are you doing with the fan? Turn the bloody thing off and do what you’re told. Can you hurry?” 

I hear a bang. The sound of a brass plate of offerings clatters down on the erupting, eroded concrete of the balcony. She is tired and if I linger, she will come check on me. I don’t want her to see that I’m crying.

I realize I’m crying. My tears make the darkness seem closer.

The pile of flowers, incense and other assorted ritual objects is a blur. I begin to collect everything in a cane basket, hoping that my mother comes to dissipate the reality. Mango leaves. Grains of rice. Vermillion. Camphor. 

Tears turn to sobs. I want to hurry, but I don’t. Jaggery. Coconut. The bell. I collect everything one by one. Fear makes me sincere, which then makes me feel more pity. The pity makes the dark thing build over me.

The darkness breathes down my neck. It’s in my hair and on the surface of my skin. I’ve never been in the dark for so long. The more I try to remember my mother’s list of things, the greater the risk grows. I know the more I fear, the sooner death will come. And yet—

I know also that my mother is right—darkness is just darkness; I know that. Yet, for the same reason, I know that an encounter will propel me into a state of being from which I would never return. Will there be a death for me unlike all deaths, fully empty?

I know that everything unknowable is truer than everything I know. And so I must be careful about what I try to know. 

I know that trees respond to the weather, but I don’t know their response. 

I know that clouds are patterned in their transit across the sky. I don’t know the pattern. 

I know time constructs omens into creatures like sparrows, elephants, squirrels, ants, and vultures who know things that nobody knows. 

I know that once I know how things truly behave, they will be a part of me. I feel unprepared, blind.

I keep everything in the basket. Sandalwood. Milk. Tears. Chrysanthemums. Everything my hands can feel. I can no longer see objects, only darkness.

I lift the basket and feel something give.

Things scatter everywhere. The basket is no longer in my hands, perhaps broken, perhaps gone. I give up. 

“Mama!” I yell, sobbing, but I don’t want to say anything to her. I am scared because I feel like I don’t know anything—why am I so small? Why am I suffering? Why do the gods, the moon, the myths and the prayers never do anything? Why is my mother not afflicted by the dark object that lives in our house?

“What?” her voice from the balcony. “The moon is aging. Come quickly if you don’t want to marry an old man…” she pauses. “Don’t forget the oil lamps!”

The oil lamps. Instead of our everyday one, the one that pushes the darkness into vestigial corners, I see several little earthen lamps lined up at the altar, their flames steady.

Suddenly, I can see more. I call out to my mother. I can hear that she has started to sing, the time has come.

“I’m coming!” I shout into the dark. “Incense and lamps, and everything else, what if they won’t work? Did your almanac consult with meteorologists? Astronomers? How do you know when celestial bodies turn old? What if tonight is not the night…what if I don’t like the moon…what if by looking at it…”

The more words I use, the more the darkness gathers behind me, now in front of me. I can see it and I look straight into it. And when I hear my mother singing from across the ether, I find the little power in the heart of tolerance. I pick up one ritual object after another and tuck it safely in the basket. There are several more, deep in its territory, which I enter.

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Sristi Ray is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her research explores the intersection between ritual play and poetry. Early poems have appeared in The Bangalore Review, and 100 Poems Are Not Enough, an independent publication from Odisha, India.