What Lies Within

WHAT LIES WITHIN

by Isha Karki

The first night on her husband’s bed, after weeks on a heaving ship, Swarna finds herself yearning for chickpeas. 

Her husband’s bed is large. Blankets, woven from wool, cotton, cashmere, stack upon layers of mattresses. Insulation, he said. His home is a land of brittle winds, not like Swarna’s, where they often sought the coolness of the hearth at night. 

The bed towers. For my bride, he said. On the journey over, its pieces had lain in the ship’s hold, metres under where Swarna slept, waiting to become. They were whittled from the ama ko muttu trees of her parents’ orchard, where she’d first met him. He was a foreign businessman come to see their kalo chana, the crop known for flourishing even through floods and droughts. Instead, he glimpsed Swarna through the trees, wrapped in a lungi and a bhoto, plucking a flower, sap spilling from its broken stem.

What is this? he asked, drawing near.

Ama ko muttu, she said, ducking her head, Mother’s heart. 

He touched her palm where the sap pulsed, blood-red. A spark shot through her skin and, surprised, she snatched her hand away. The liquid smeared across his fingers. He held them up to the sun.

These trees only grow when their blooms fall and sink into soil, she said, sensing his curiosity. Otherwise, they wither. We call it the mother’s sacrifice. 

Fascinating. He looked at her as he spoke. Almost human.

Her parents didn’t want to part with the trees, but her husband insisted, A wedding gift to help us flower. They’d refused him the chickpeas—it’s illegal to export this, sir—so they relented on the trees. The moment they did, Swarna saw the tightness of her husband’s jaw ease. A man who dreams big, she’d thought with admiration. For days after, her home filled with the thwack-thwack-thwack of axes. Swarna was forbidden from looking at the bed until it was in her husband’s bedchamber—and when she finally did, she saw how the mattresses and blankets swallowed up all the wood. 

That first night, Swarna dreams of plunging her hand into a tin bucket brimming with liquid. She plucks out a single chana, drops it into a large bowl, then reaches in again and repeats.

The moment before Swarna wakes, she feels a hardness pressing into her lower back. The sensation is so acute that she gets up, climbs down with toes gingerly placed on footholds, unlaces the lace nightgown her husband presented her—no need to wrap yourself in cumbersome saris, dear—and stands naked before the mirror. 

On her back, a bruise, just-darkening, the shape and size of one small chickpea.

•••

Honey, she says at breakfast, the word he chose for her clunky in her mouth. The bed, it felt hard.

Hard? He looks up from a newspaper. My dear, those mattresses are made from the most expensive wool the world has to offer. I dare say they’re a touch softer than the ground.

She stirs lumps of sugar into tea, bland without cloves or ginger, fingers stiff with chill. The mattresses are wonderful. But there seems to be a stray, she hesitates, stone or chickpea— 

He laughs, a quick sharp sound. Where would a chickpea come from? In his words, the weight of his journey. He’d hoped for riches when he sailed to her home. Instead, he brought her back. You are my prize, he’d said, as the ship rocked and her stomach churned. 

Before he leaves the breakfast table, he says, It must be the shock of a new place, dear. Our minds help in strange ways. 

•••

The days stretch on, cold and empty, her husband often on business, his home steeped in a carpeted, heavy-curtained silence. 

Every day, Swarna wakes craving her mother’s food. The mounds of steaming pulau, pots of tomato-thickened dal, salty and crisp aloo, slivers of fried fish. But especially kalo chana, the colour of glossy chestnuts, softening in a wrought iron karahi. She can taste it: the bite of its flesh, almost chalky.

Swarna spent her childhood watching her mother pounding chana into flour, pouring water, kneading dough, shaping it into parathas, some secret magic in her fingers, passed down from ancestors who harvested the crop. She palmed it into spheres, slipped it into bubbling oil. Soaked it overnight. Fried it with slices of onion. Toasted and roasted it, a dry snack with cold lassi on a hot day. 

At first, Swarna resented being sent to the kitchen. I’m meant for more than this, she’d muttered, thinking of her books, of the vast ocean and its horizon. But then she heard the humming and, amazed such a sound could come from her mother, stayed. 

Her mother was a quiet woman, her words scratched whispers, an old pain residing at the base of her throat. Swarna, becoming accustomed to the heat of open flames and the sting of onions, soon realised it wasn’t her mother but the chickpeas that hummed. 

They were her mother’s true voice. 

Swarna learned to listen to them. Playful and warm, they told stories of her mother’s childhood. How she tore up her grandmother’s silk saris. How she bribed a fisherman’s son to steal a boat. How she snuck into the harvest store, packaged up the chana and handed them out to beggars. Swarna wondered what changed, how a bold and boisterous child became this woman.

Swarna mentioned it to her husband, once, when he was courting her: The food here speaks. 

It certainly packs a punch. 

No, I mean it speaks.

The expression on his face knotted her stomach, tight, so she never mentioned it again.

At nights, her husband comes home smelling of brine and brandy, his hands reaching for the hem of her nightgown. After, he rolls off her and presses a hand on her stomach, What grows within I wonder. 

When she sleeps, Swarna dreams of that bucket, of her hand reaching in and plucking each chickpea out one by one.

•••

Then, one morning, the muscles in her back are too rigid. When she tries to move, they twinge. It takes hours to pull herself down the tower of mattresses. The sun, what pale light there was, slips away.

When her husband returns, she is lying on the parlour floor, limbs like lead. She is dimly aware her petticoats are askew, hair uncombed, face unwashed. Stale odour hangs in the room.

Her husband, face hidden by shadows, towers over her. 

Get up, he says.

I can’t. 

Don’t be so—he stops. Then he says, in a softer tone, Sometimes, we imagine pain on our bodies, but this is only a reflection of what is within. 

A spasm seizes the left side of her body. Her vision darkens. 

When she comes to, her nails are snarled in her hair and her whole body is shuddering. 

She scratches out a whisper, Something’s wrong with me.  

She glimpses his face in a slant of moonlight. She knows immediately she should not have said anything.

He takes her in his arms. I’ll run hot water and call a doctor for tomorrow. He smooths the hair off her damp face. But the earlier moment, that look in his eyes, leaves a seed of ice within her.

That night, she lies flat and very, very still. After he pulls out of her, wet and dribbling, sweat souring the air, he falls asleep and she lets out a trembling breath, pain tonguing her back. 

But he opens his eyes again and turns to her, places his hand on her stomach. On the ship, this same touch suffused her with warmth. Now, its chill seeps into her bones.

What grows within I wonder, he says before blowing the candles out.

It is the first time Swarna allows herself to imagine something sprouting inside her, swelling, spreading; the first time she understands that she does not want to be with child at all.

•••

That night, the chickpea speaks to her.

But the words are blurred, like they are not quite the right sounds for its language. Rather, what blooms in Swarna’s mind is an image of herself at the ship’s helm, moments before it unmoored, that final day in her homeland. In her cupped palms, a thaili. And inside it, a silver pot brimming with sindhoor, an heirloom passed from her mother to her. 

Swarna does not know that her husband will put the thaili away, that she will never wear the sindhoor in her new home.
In the dream, she is scanning the port. Her father stands under an umbrella. Her mother, who rarely leaves the house or its sprawling farms, will not come. Swarna knows this, yet she longs for her. That morning, the kitchens were empty. Stoves cold, firewood charred and dead. 

When Swarna wakes, her eyes are hot. She feels the chickpea’s hardness on her back, and in her throat, something stuck.

•••

The doctor recommends walks, fresh air, a diet of iron-rich food: spinach and broccoli, red meats, livers, kidneys, brain and heart. Chana and dal have filled Swarna with iron most of her life but the doctor doesn’t mention them. When she says she doesn’t eat meat, he peers at her, then looks at her husband, exclaiming, Aha! The source of the problem.

Upon the doctor’s orders, her husband asks the cook to serve up the bloodiest red meats. The cuts pulse on her plate. Her lips tremble as she picks up her cutlery. The squelch as her knife sinks into organs, the spurt of red—Swarna pushes her chair back, hand pressed to her mouth.

Her husband glances up as she rushes to the bathroom.

She can’t eat the meat. She manages to force down a slice once and it emerges again, glistening, a grotesque centrepiece for their dinner table.

•••

The bruise grows; Swarna’s back aches. Every morning, she wakes with a lump in her throat. She gulps pitcher after pitcher of water, her bladder straining.

Her husband calls another doctor. This one says, Not to worry, we’ll cut this right up—he draws a line on her stomach with his finger—have a little poke around and all will be right as rain. 

Her husband likes this one, she can tell. The doctor leaves after whispering instructions outside the bedroom door. 

What a competent fellow, her husband says at dinner. 

He does not see her face blanching, her serviette balled in her fist, her teeth biting her lip with such force she tastes nothing of the boiled potatoes and eggs, only blood. 

•••

In her dream, Swarna is fishing out chickpeas as always, except this time her fingers scrape the bottom of the bucket. Submerged up to her elbow, she finds nothing. Instead, as her arm sloshes the liquid, a fragrance, sweet and heavy, rolls in the air. 

Swarna realises the bucket is filled with the thick sap of ama ko muttu. 

Inside her something clenches—a seed—then bursts. 

•••

Swarna gasps awake. There’s something lodged in her neck– she coughs so hard, her whole body heaves. 

Her husband, dressing for work, pauses as he fixes his collar, then snaps, For god’s sake, I’m arranging that surgery for today. Then he whisks out with his coat and bag without another look.

The sheets are damp. Amidst the racking of her chest, Swarna catches sight of the blood stain. But her undergarments are dry. The blood is not coming from her but rising from beneath the mattress.

She hears the chickpea of her dream loud and clear now: What lies within.

Her throat seizes up. She scrambles down, even as the muscles in her back scream, her toes covered in sweat, almost slipping.

Be gentle, child.

The chickpea sounds so much like her mother. Tears spill down her cheeks.

Her feet touch the ground. Swarna breathes deep, swallows, massages her windpipe. Slowly, slowly, something eases and shoots out of her mouth. 

It is small and hard and brown. The colour of glossy chestnuts.

Well done, child. Now, the next thing.

There’s a gap in Swarna’s throat where, finally, knowledge wells:  

Her mother coughing and coughing at night. The sacks full of chana in their store even when the land was parched. Her mother watching her when Swarna was a little girl as if searching for something.

Her husband who’d journeyed to her homeland to bring back riches. Instead, he’d brought her. You are my prize. His hand on her stomach. What grows within I wonder.

Her husband knows.

With a jolt, she remembers the first words she said to him, how they made his eyes focus on her face, latch on.

Heart pounding, Swarna rushes to the bed. She begins climbing, nails tearing, fingers slicking, leaving crescents of red on the sheets. When she gets to the top, she grabs the first blanket, throws it down. Blanket after blanket, panting. 

The stain grows as each layer is removed. 

Her mother’s voice becomes clearer. 

Courage, child, I am here.

Then, standing on the ground, she heaves the first mattress off the bed. Mattress after mattress. Her arms ache. Sweat drips into her eyes, stinging. She feels faint. But the bruise is a throbbing point of urgency – she can’t stop.

The final mattresses are soaked.

She flings the last one off the bed and uncovers the carved hollow of the wood beneath, pooling with blood. Her legs give. Swarna collapses on the pile of bedding, clutches the slippery edges of the bed, and retches. Chickpeas, whole and broken, scatter from her throat.

We call it mother’s sacrifice. 

Inside the hollow is her mother’s head, severed.

As Swarna heaves, the mouth falls open, gapes. On her mother’s grey tongue sits one single chickpea.