Monthly Story, November 2021

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Image → St. Denis' feet in the Nautch" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1906 - 1908.

Rasa → Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma

Archetype → Lover

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Priyani waved at her husband and son leaving for work and school. She turned back into the empty house. It looked and felt like a fresh battlefield. Bringing the laundry out, she sighed impatiently at the sky. This was the third grey day. With no sun to dry the clothes, Priyani’s laundry was piling up. She decided to take a chance and do the laundry anyway.

She washed and scrubbed, shaking her head at the unreasonable dirt on the collars and cuffs. Her hands moved skillfully in a half-conscious, half-autopilot melodic routine between the dirty pile, soap, water bucket and the clean pile. But, when Priyani’s hand pulled out an orange fabric, her heart gasped open and shut like a fish out of water. She let go of it as if burnt. In the next two seconds, as the laundry dance stood motionless in abrupt suspension, Priyani realised that it was just her husband’s new sarong dampened to a darker shade, taking on the distinct orange of monks’ robes. She stared at the orange fabric and felt her skin tingling a memory awake. Flustered, Priyani washed the orange sarong in a hurry and threw it into the clean pile.

Soon, school uniforms, chintz dresses, plain pants, and striped shirts hung row after row. Priyani felt a prickling of the hairs on the back of her neck. Her skin tingled in response to a sensation of being watched. The corner of her eyes picked up the robe-orange sarong hanging, dripping slowly in the breeze. Priyani swallowed the ball forming in her throat. She found herself returning to the day that she went to offer a handful of betel leaves to the temple head-monk Gunasāra. Priyani had just won a dancing competition in Colombo. After seeing her perform at the temple’s perahera ritual, Gunasāra gathered the help of his donors to sponsor Priyani’s costumes and competition entry. Priyani tried not to think about that evening. But, the memory was now rushing in, like a smell escaping through the cracks of a closed door.

It was just after sundown, and a little late to visit a monk. Priyani remembered how Gunasāra sat at his desk illuminated by the glow of the lamp, as she stood in front of him. He spoke at length about her talent and how it could lead her to great things. He promised to continue her patronage. Priyani remembered that strange feeling in her lower stomach when Gunasāra’s eyes lingered a little on her hips as he lowered his gaze to the cash slip that he was starting to sign. The world suddenly grew silent. Only the faint sound of Gunasāra’s pen on paper scratched the quiet. Although Gunasāra had his head bent and his eyes averted, Priyani couldn’t shake off the feeling that something of his was continuing to watch her. Skin tingling, Priyani lowered her own gaze. A thrill that had the same foreboding of August currents in the south seas—the kind that secretly sweeps you away somewhere dangerous—took over. When Gunasāra held the cash slip out, looking directly at her, Priyani neared him cautiously to accept. As she stepped into the glow of the lamp, she felt his eyes take all of her in. Priyani’s skin glimmered jubilantly.

Aghast, Priyani abandoned the laundry and hurried inside. Hands shaking, she poured a glass of water and drank it all in one gulp. Outside, the monsoon thunder drummed a dull, distant beat. Priyani tried to disremember the events that followed her meeting with Gunasāra. But, the deeper she pushed them in, the harder they fought to come out. Chest heaving up and down, Priyani walked into her bedroom and opened the almirah doors. The drumming in the sky drew nearer. She reached for the box in the bottom drawer under the special occasion sarees. Inside it was her wedding necklace, puberty gold, and the old performance jewellery. Priyani looked at the dancers’ anklets with bells. It thundered again. The drums were calling. She put them on. Watching herself in the mirror hanging inside the open almirah door, Priyani stepped into its full view. A low, rolling chorus of thunder welcomed her. The almirah mirror watched Priyani, flooding her with a secret thrill. She felt it drinking her in. Her skin tingled all over. The rain started to patter against the asbestos sheets. But, Priyani didn’t listen to the tame voice that reminded her to bring the laundry in. Instead, she let herself get swept in the August currents.

Priyani started to dance. Her hands and feet moved in strange synchronicity with everything in wild abandonment—like the rain, the sea, the wind, the beast. Her steps followed the pitter-patter on the roof in perfect timing. The thunder crashed right above the roof as Priyani dipped her head down in dance. Her hair clip broke with the oblique weight of her tresses that it wasn’t designed to hold. Priyani felt the memories and emotions she hid behind the closed doors dancing free in the warm glow of the lamp where all of her was seen. She felt how her perfect movements, watched in secret by the averted mirror of the half-open almirah door, were made too divine to behold. It poured and poured. Priyani danced and danced.

When the sky finally finished releasing its shame, Priyani fell breathless. She was temporarily freed until the doors would break open again. She sat up on the floor, glimmers of sweat running content rivers down her skin. Outside, the storm had died and noon was breaking.

Priyani got up and took off her anklets. She put them back in the box carefully, and slid it under her wedding saree in the bottom drawer—where she knew it would remain, waiting.

Priyani cleaned the house, mopped up the leaked water, and opened the windows. Priyani hummed while she showered, soaping her skin in gentle strokes—it was appeased. She put on the blue dress that her husband liked, and went to make herself a tea.

TTT.S1E2 ✺ The fish-woman's son

This time tomorrow is an on-going story experiment that explores questions we have about the future. How will people connect? How would we work, consume and unwind? What would we value? What would we search for?

We asked some interesting people to imagine a year from now and brought their predictions alive through stories. This is what we see.

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Predictions by Dr. Asoka de Zoysa

Photography by Reg Van Cuylenburg

Story by Public Works

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The fish-woman's son

Channa met Johnny almost thirty years ago, when they were boys. Johnny came shouldering a pingo load of fish, accompanying his pipe-smoking, loud-mouthed mother. While cycling down the alleyway by the sea, Channa would peer at Johnny’s makeshift house near the dirty beach. Like in a television show, Channa could piece together Johnny's days made with the endless cycle of his fisherman father sailing out to red sunsets, returning at pink dawns with the catch and a bottle of arrack, only to sing himself to a drunken stupor; while his mother cursed, cooked, fed Johnny and the kids, packed her pipe and loaded fish into the pingo—sometimes all at once. Later, these huts were demolished, and the fishing families were moved somewhere else by the Municipality. The alleyway became the Marine Drive; it even had a supermarket.

Channa forgot about Johnny until thirty something years later, when they reencountered during the sixty day curfew. Johnny flashed the same bent smile that his mother had, holding back the smoke. Throughout the curfew, Johnny would risk selling fish along Marine Drive before the cops caught wind. Although Johnny continued to sell fish even after the curfew, he eventually stopped coming.

Channa often wondered about the old fish-woman’s son—half out of some inarticulate guilt, half out of the nostalgia for his boyhood’s typical Sunday when Johnny’s mother would sit in the garden smoking her pipe and cleaning fish. He asked around the neighbourhood; but, already knew the answer. Nothing is poorer than the dreams of the poor.

Monthly Story, October 2021

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Image → @jameshausley

Rasa → Veeram (वीरं): Heroism. Presiding deity: Indra. → Bhayānakam (भयानकं): Horror, terror. Presiding deity: Yama

Archetype → Explorer

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Jayantha sat down on the wooden bench that was gestured to him. Today is the day that he will be ordained into monkhood. He sat on the bench facing the lagoon waters as the young monk assisting him in the ordination ceremony walked around preparing things to shave Jayantha’s hair. By the peaceful lagoon where the wind played across the water, Jayantha felt like he had returned to his once-upon-a-time home by the endless paddy rippling in the wind.

He dug his big toe into the soil; it was very good earth to grow vegetables in—he realised. Jayantha looked around. The monastery land was bordered by a small farmland from one side, and jungle from another. On the other side, the expanse of the monastery grounds disappeared into the coconut palms, beyond which the land opened to the road with the temple and an image house. The humble mud huts occupied by the few residing monks were further in. Jayantha and the monk assisting him were right in between. Jayantha turned his head from left to right over his shoulders, catching the full extent of the property. ‘It must be at least twelve and a half acres’, Jayantha gauged with his farmer’s eye trained to see land in cultivable units. He wondered if the land was under the head-monk’s name or owned by the temple donors. He shook his head at the idea that someone would just donate acres of good land like this, just for it to be left to the jungle, while he spent six years in courts against his cousin, drowning money and trying to hold on to barely five acres of paddy.

“Ready?”, the young monk assisting him asked. Jayantha nodded. He had been ready for three months, two weeks, and one day since he first came to the monastery asking to be ordained and freed; Freed from the payments to the farmers’ co-op, from the crippling microfinance loan, the shame of his divorce, the monthly bills, the sting of watching his cousin walk away from the court grounds with the entire family paddy in his name… Freed from his life in limbo at a dead end; Freed from this whole grand struggle to be—not even a revered, resourced and important landowner as he always imagined, but a lower-middle class insect making ends meet among millions of others just like him. He was so ready to be free. Following ten rules a day is something he could do in exchange for freedom, Jayantha knew with so much certainty. But, the wizened head-monk insisted on the customary three months as a layman observing and assisting the resident monastics. “Some change their mind after understanding what a monk’s life is really like,” he said, looking Jayantha in the eye; Jayantha understood that this wrinkled old monk held the keys to his freedom, and nodded obediently.

Now, he was finally getting ordained into freedom. Jayantha watched the young monk assisting him sharpen the shaving blade; he polished it on an unnaturally angled rock—a doggedly unyielding granite that has taken on the guise of gentleness from all the years of battling blades. The monk looked at Jayantha and smiled; it was time. He started shaving off Jayantha’s hair. There was no mirror. Jayantha saw a lock of familiar black-brown curls fall onto his sarong. He remembered how his former wife ran her fingers adoringly through his curls; it felt like a lifetime ago. He felt the weight of her memory come off as the second lock of curls fell. Another thick lock stumbled onto the crumpled fabric, taking his farmer’s worries of weather and war with it. A large chunk of hair bounced off his knee and fell to the ground, carrying the burden of his ageing mother. Lock after lock, layer after layer, Jayantha felt his troubles disappear. When he finally saw his reflection on the water surface of the filled-up wash basin, Jayantha was taken aback; A man with nothing left to love, nor fear, looked back at him. Only the hungry beads of eyes nursing his fire to become almighty were recognisable.

Jayantha was asked to wear a white sarong and robe. Then, he was given a set of yellow robes to hold when approaching his preceptor—the old head-monk. Jayantha knelt in front of the old monk. “You have three refuges; your teacher—the Buddha, his teaching—the Dhamma, and your community of monks—the Sangha,” he told Jayantha with the ritual stanzas that send disenchanted men off into monkhood. “...Live by the Dhamma, and you will always be protected by the Dhamma,” he said giving Jayantha the ten precepts to live by. “You will be known as Maliwāwita Gunasāra,” the old monk pronounced.

Gunasāra stood up to a world made his sanctuary.