the smallest stories to extraordinary

Her nose stone had a beauty all of its own. The thin gold like plate it sat on was all jagged but each time Bubna wore the stone it shone on her like a teardrop on a lip. It was her goodluck charm. When she began wearing it suddenly one day and her husband asked where she got it from, was she having an affair on the pretext of going out to work? She replied ‘it’s the diamond my parents gave me when I got married. That I safely kept away.’ ‘Diamond? Your parents gave yooouu? That you kept away Her husband, emaciated and inebriated, was satiated with that response. In fact, he was quite happy. After all, a diamond is always handy, to pay off debts. But for Bubna, putting it on before the sun hit the skies each day as she dressed for work, was often the best part of her day. It was the happiest part. She didn’t have a mirror at home so she would take a minute or even two just to feel it on her nose. She fell in love with its contours - the jagged edges and how it felt on her skin. Then she would caress the skin around it – some days it felt calloused but most days it felt sensuous to her touch. Since she began wearing the nose stone, she had become immune to the ‘emerge’ of her neighbours from their shanties each morning as she walked to the train station before light fell. She no longer reallynoticed the queues for the shared bathroom and or the teenagers rubbing sleep off their eyes waiting for a squatting space to brush into the solitary drain of their by-lane. Previously the daily sight of these queues would evoke pity in her – for ‘her lot’ - herself and her neighbours. But now, for her they had just metamorphosed into banal daily queues that lined her way to the main road. And she smiled with other things on her mind. She would invariably remember how she looked in the mirror of the train window the day before and imagine how she would look today. Today she had worn her favourite maroon sari etched with a gold border. There was nothing to celebrate as such yet she was feeling celebratory. She wondered if anyone would pay her a compliment, but that was for later. For now, she couldn’t wait to get on the train, to see how the sparkle of her nose stone against the maroon of her sari looked in the faint train window-mirror. The train station was its usual self. It smelt of sweat and thousands of people ‘put in a hurry to make a basic living’. Bubna’s slim frame resiliently jostled through the platform and onto the train. It normally took two to three stations till she could wriggle her way through the pack of people to a train window to watch herself in the mirror that dawn etched on it. The days she could not reach a window before daybreak, her mirror would be gone. The clamour of people on the train today was as it was everyday. The only thing unusual was the glitter of her gold sari border. Her mind too felt the same as every other day. She was again angry about some things her husband had said to her the night before. Just that this time she was happy with herself that she was beginning to fight back. Though she knew no one in her family would be happy about this and most especially her mother was unhappy about her new found ‘fighting back’ zeal. “Which man are you seeing, you whore, that you are learning to answer back?” her husband kept pushing her on the waist the night before and asking with the sinister look in his eyes that still scared her despite her growing feistiness with him. She was generally a feisty lady. In all the six homes she worked in, her employers considered her ways and speak, crude. But with her husband, she was muted. Cowed even. Taking his daily vituperations and occasional drunken beatings, as normal. Part of the territory of being a woman and a wife. She had seen her father do that to her mother. Her uncles to her aunts. Her brother in law to her sister. So she understood, from very early on, this was the way. As the train chugged along, part of her was abusing her husband silently and a bigger part of her dreaming of the man on the paper advertisement plastered above the train windows. She could not read any English but she loved what she saw. A fair, handsome man tenderly holding the hand of a fair beautiful woman. They were looking into each other’s eyes smilingly. She somehow felt a loathing for the lady in the advertisement. The lady was wearing a dress accessorized with an ornate green necklace and a ring with a green stone that was atleast ten times the size of Bubna’s nose stone. Bubna imagined herself as that lady – whom she felt a loathing for because she so wished to be like her. Fair, with a ring. And an off shoulder, turquoise dress. And, above all, a good looking man smiling into ‘her’ eyes. Is it only fair women who get a man’s love, she wondered to herself. Her musings were suddenly torn apart by blood curdling screams. Brittle screams that cracked with such horror that ‘seeing’ them was unbearable. The train had just chugged into the next train station. The rest was a sharp, shrieking blur. Rampaging mobs; blood soiled crude knives and sticks; the smell of blood over sweat; the terror of slogans over fear; of destruction over terrified human life. Bubna tasted blood on her lips.