The Secrets of a Fire King (2 page)

4

The Secrets of a Fire King

“What will you name this one?” she asked, tugging a strip of cloth so tightly that my mother winced.

“I don’t know yet,” she said, studying my little brother’s face.

“I have to get to know him a bit first. Zul, perhaps. That seems to suit him.”

The midwife handed my mother a glass of greenish liquid, so pungent it made my nose wrinkle up.

“It’s not right,” she said, wiping her herb-stained hands on her apron, “to give a child one name for the first years, then change it to another. What they become is not his choice.” My mother sighed and drank the green drink, then made a face and held her hand out to me.

“I have them for the fi rst five years or so,” she said. “He never takes an interest until then.” She smiled at me and pulled me close. “And Eshlaini’s mine. I’ll always have Eshlaini.”

“It isn’t right,” the midwife repeated.

“It’s not for us to question,” my mother said serenely.

She did not question, or if she did my father’s words soothed away her fears. After all, many people say that he was the most eloquent speaker of his generation. I remember glimpsing him in his study, straight and dignified in his hard chair, surrounded by other men, the ceiling fan making its slow rotation above their heads. No matter how many others were in attendance, it was my father’s voice I heard most often, as dark and melodious and as forceful as a monsoon rain. It was my father’s hands I saw, raised to emphasize his words, it was my father who spoke of choices they must make, of setting a course to guide them through the coming years. He claimed through his daily prayers to believe in destiny, but he spoke like a man who felt the world turn and quiver on his command.

As my mother must have done, for despite the warning of the midwife she was pregnant again within a year. From the beginning it was difficult, and she was confined to bed. I used to go and sit next to her, let her comb my hair beneath the steady whir and click of the ceiling fan. Her fingers were strong, massaging my scalp, and the braids she made pulled at the skin around my
The Great Chain of Being

5

temples. Even today, so many years later, I sometimes braid my hair to evoke those moments: heat raising a fine sweat on our foreheads, the tropical sun muted by wooden shutters pulled tightly closed, the vile, medicinal glass of herbal tea she sipped at through the day.

My mother’s labor began when the fruit trees ripened, just after the hot season and before the monsoon, and at first we believed it was an omen of good luck, that she would avoid the fevers of the first and the chilling cold of the second, that she would bear the fruit of her body in a timely way, and live.

Her labor began early in the morning, and by noon that day I had a sister. She was placed in the room next to my mother’s, the room I sometimes slept in, and I was put in charge of her. Tiny sister, even wrapped in blankets she was small, just four pounds at birth. I touched her miniature fingers, the lobe of her ear, the blue veins visible beneath the translucent skin of her forehead. Through the open door I saw my mother sleeping, her dark hair like a shadow between the dual paleness of the pillow and her face.

The midwife was gone, and I stood in the doorway for a moment, listening to my mother’s even breathing in the rising heat of the room.

For the next two hours the peace held. I watched my sister and kept the silence like a long extended prayer. And I was startled, but not surprised, sometime in the afternoon, when I heard the panting begin again, the soothing words of the midwife interspersed with the groans my mother made. Alarmed, I left my sister and ran into the other room. The sheets were stained red, and the midwife barely glanced up from her massaging of my mother.

“What is it?” I cried. “What’s wrong?”

“There is another coming,” said the midwife. “Your fi rst sister has a twin. Now go quietly and watch her, and do not worry about your mother. You must trust her to me now, and to God.” This second labor was longer than the first. It seemed to me that way even with no clock to measure it. I fed my sister, changed her, felt the day’s heat rise and culminate and finally recede. Later they told me that it took twelve hours, but to me those hours of muffled screams and groaning felt like days, like years. It was
6

The Secrets of a Fire King

past midnight when the midwife brought the second sister to my room. She was smaller than the first, and more fragile.

“Eshlaini!” the midwife said. With the strain of birthing she had forgotten all about me. “Have you been here all this time?” I nodded. There was a bed in the room, but I sat stiff and alert on a single straight chair. I was exhausted, and very afraid—the night air seemed to crackle with spirits and emotions never visible in the day.

“Child,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “You must sleep.”

“I want to see my mother,” I said.

“She’s sleeping now. The best thing you can do is sleep as well.”

“She’s dead,” I said. “I know it.”

The midwife looked surprised, then troubled. “No, she isn’t dead. Oh, child,” she said, and even though I was nine years old and tall for my age, even though she herself had worked past exhaustion, she picked me up and carried me to my mother’s room.

My mother’s breathing was shallow, uneven, she looked as pale as the new babies she had borne. But when I touched her on the arm I felt her warmth, and some string held tight within me started to release.

“There,” the midwife said, stroking my hair, pressing my head against her shoulder and leading me back to the other room, where the light breathing of my sisters filled the air. She pushed me down on the narrow bed and draped an old sarong across me.

“That’s better, Eshlaini. That’s it, now. Sleep.” I did sleep, but not deeply and with many dreams. When I woke up the house, though very dark, was alive with movement and urgent, whispered voices. The door to my mother’s room was slightly open. I could see my father sitting by the bed, my mother’s hand in his. He was praying. I was only nine, too young to understand the words, but I remembered them from other deaths, I knew the portent of those sounds.

All that followed is no longer very clear. The words rained down around me, and suddenly I was standing up, illuminated with an idea of how to save my mother. I remember that the fl oor
The Great Chain of Being

7

felt cool against my bare feet, that moonlight came in through the window and lit the crib where my two sisters slept. Their mouths moved, even in sleep, and their hands and feet jerked sometimes with the motions of the womb. In the sudden silence from my mother’s room I reached for a thick pillow and placed it above the sleeping faces of my sisters. I was nine years old, with a literal mind, and I remembered the midwife’s words. If these twins would cost my mother her life, then I reasoned I could save her if they died.

There is no way to know, now, what might have happened. I might have carried through, possessed as I was with the madness of loss, with the misguided logic of an egocentric child. But I was not an evil girl, or truly demented, and it’s just as possible that I would have stopped. It’s possible that, hovering above my sisters, I would have broken down, retrieved the pillow, and sobbed into the feathers. I can’t know, now, which would have happened, and it no longer matters. For my father found me in that moment of intent. He appeared in the doorway quite suddenly, silhouetted by the terrible and empty light of my mother’s room.

He gave a roar so loud it froze the scene forever in our histories.

It called my brothers forth; they tumbled into the room like birds spilled from a nest. They were witness to the blow my father gave me, the punch of a grown man inflated with wild fury against a death he was powerless to stop. And they were there to hear it when he gave me, finally, the name I would carry through my life.

“Take this one,” he said, pushing me across to the oldest boy, the brother who was said to resemble the soldier. “Take her and lock her in her room. She has gone mad, like her grandmother before her. Rohila.” He spat the name out like poison. “This evil girl, she is Rohila once again.”

Rohila. It was a name we all knew, but rarely spoke. She was my father’s mother, at one time young and lovely, known for both her beauty and her skill at sewing. Brides sought her out, and rich girls, and she sat night by night in the lamplight, her needle flashing like a minnow in the dark. Her own clothes were so ele-8

The Secrets of a Fire King

gant and graceful that she drew the eyes of every man. It is said that when she finally married, another girl was so distraught that she cast some black magic on Rohila. No one could have guessed this, for at first Rohila and her husband were very happy. It was only later that people remembered how she was plagued that year with headaches and strange dreams. Soon she was pregnant, but from the beginning there was something wrong. Rohila grew round without growing plump, and it is said that there was a nervousness about her, a kind of tightness that showed around her eyes.

Everyone knows about the fevers that can follow childbirth, the precautions that must be taken to prevent them. It was not Rohila’s fault that the midwife was unskilled or forgetful, jealous or enchanted. It was not her fault that the herbs were not prepared, that the offering went unmade, so that after the birth of her first and only child my grandmother fell into a temporary madness. They found her standing on a bridge with the baby, my father, in her arms, ready to drop him into the creek. After that she was cast away by her husband in favor of another wife, the woman of sweet pastries, the woman I knew as Grandmother.

Rohila was sent home, to live in isolation. She tended to her aging parents; when they died she went to help her brothers and their wives. I saw her once, a bent old woman who shuffl ed away from children, who gave us bad dreams. Aside from this I know nothing at all, though sometimes now I imagine that I understand her life.

For, in the way of our name legacies, her life became mine. I was only a child, but on the day my sisters were born and my mother died, my destiny was fixed. I became Rohila, the one who would not marry, the one who would remain at home to care for my brothers and, in his old age, my father. It was not spoken, but simply understood. Ask my family about the justice of it all, and they would have looked up surprised, they would have called it fate. They, named for the strong and sane and famous, could afford to believe in the preordained. If everything was destiny, then it was not their responsibility to intervene. And yet there was a truth I soon discovered that they never paused to think
The Great Chain of Being

9

about. If I was to be an old maid, chained forever to that house, then this was also true: it was my father’s will that made it so. It was his decree, his choice.

What is destiny, and what is in the power of the individual? By seventeen I was strong but petite, with long slender limbs, and wrists and ankles as delicate as bone. I learned quickly that the body is one destiny. No one who saw me would have guessed my fate within that house. The young men, watching me walking to and from my school, their eyes lingering on my skin like the warm light of sunset, none of them guessed. They followed me, slipped notes into my books that spoke of love and the future, of other lives. I should have been smart enough to see these for what they were, a lure connected to the hook of another predetermined life. I should have remembered my mother, turning her head away when the midwife warned her to make a choice she didn’t have. But I was young and foolish, and those notes in my pockets were as light and persistent as hope. I smiled shyly at the young men, blushed becomingly, and soon they began appearing at my house, hoping to gain my father’s permission to marry me.

On the night the first young man came, I stood at the upstairs window and watched him ring the bell. I had his note promising to win me, and I had a wild joy in my heart. I thought my father would reconsider. After all, no one wanted an unmarriageable daughter. My suitor had dressed very carefully, his hair had been combed with water until it looked polished. When he disappeared inside the house, I waited to be summoned.

Time passed slowly for me then. Still, not half an hour was gone when I heard the door slam, when I ran to the window to see that young man walking quickly to the road. The next day I looked for him, desperate to know what had happened, but although I saw him from a distance, across the classroom or the playing field, he never spoke to me again.

What had my father said, and why? I thought perhaps he’d found the young man unsuitable; he was, after all, a famous and important man, and particular about his in-laws. Which is why I was careful about the other notes I had, and finally chose one
10

The Secrets of a Fire King

from another young man who was not in our school at all, but an officer in the army and stationed near our house. Wasn’t my oldest brother also an officer in the army? My father must approve.

After some time had passed, after a flurry of notes and shy glances, this man too approached my father’s house. This time I left nothing to chance. I crouched beneath the window of my father’s study, and listened.

“But I worry,” my father said, tapping his pipe out in the ash-tray. My young officer was seated across from him, hat in his hands, hope on his face. “I worry about this madness she has shown, and what might happen if there were children. You know, my daughter is not quite right. No doubt you’ve heard the stories—she nearly killed her two sisters when they were only infants. Even now I see her at the park sometimes, watching the children. Her eyes are quite unnatural then, the way they were that long-ago night. We keep a careful watch on her, you see.”

“I had no idea,” the young man said. There was trouble in his voice. I wanted to jump up, shout out loud, for what my father said about the park, about the children, was not true. Those children held no interest for me. Even the night my sisters were born seemed like a dream, like a story that had happened to another girl.