| Sarveswari Saikrishna | July 2025 | Short Story |
Kittama came to Bhavani in her dream. Again. She was wearing the same gaudy orange saree and fake sunglasses that Bhavani had seen her in for the first time on the beach many years ago. Except now, Kittama was stroking a blind cat, a smirk twitching on her lips. Bhavani was still in bed with no will to get up, her molten loneliness weighing her chest. Her husband had left for Mumbai that morning, his first official trip after their daughter moved out to her college hostel.
While packing in a hurry, throwing in his good underwear, T-shirts, and jeans into his suitcase, her husband had lamented, ‘My boss just snaps a finger at me and expects me to bundle up and get on the plane.’ He pushed away the blue shirt Bhavani held out to him. ‘It’s an informal meeting. You know, like buttering up the client’s managers and sidekicks, etc, etc.’ There had been an unmissable shiver in his voice, a tremulous excitement.
Bhavani made an impulsive weekday call to her daughter and asked, ‘Do you remember Kittama?’
After a tch, her daughter hmmed. Bhavani could imagine her daughter’s lips curling in irritation, just like how her husband’s did.
‘Well, do you?’ Bhavani asked again.
‘Yes. She smelled of Gokul Santol powder,’ her daughter replied with a background of furious keyboard click-clicks audible over the phone.
Kittama would ask for a tin of this sandal powder when Bhavani went shopping and would apply a thick layer of it on her face every day, ignoring her neck and ears. When
Kittama cooked, washed, and ran behind Bhavani’s daughter, the powder turned pasty and ran down her face, leaving grey patches.
‘You look like a circus clown with that painted face,’ Bhavani had said once.
‘And you look like a plucked turkey in those pants,’ pat came the reply.
Kittama was like that. Bhavani had to adjust to this plain speaking when Kittama came to live with her. But for several years, she was the mooring to which Bhavani’s days were tied.
‘I wonder what happened to Kittama,’ Bhavani said.
She was serving her husband pongal with onion sambhar. He had returned home that evening with a gift of airport-bought perfume and a Cheshire-cat smile. Pongal was his favourite, but he was not eating much. When he heard Kittama’s name, he nodded his head, contemplating his next move. His mind always fine-sifted his thoughts before answering her as if he were rehearsing his role as her husband before acting it out. How very opposite to Kittama, whose opinions seemed to directly drain out through her mouth.
Behind her husband, on the wall hung a photo of them as a mint-new couple, smiling into the future. She, full of love, he brimming with confidence. It was easy to fall in love with this man, perhaps a bit too easy.
‘You forgot to add salt,’ he said.
‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ embarrassed, she spooned in a mouthful of pongal.
‘It’s alright. I can adjust.’
She bit into her inner cheeks. She should have known that when she mentioned Kittama, her husband would look for chances to keep her defensive.
A few months after Kittama came to stay with her, she had declared that Bhavani’s paruppu rasam tasted like donkey piss and that nobody with a brain in the right place would eat her cooking, let alone a year-old baby.
‘Why don’t you cook, then?’ Bhavani retorted, and just like that, by confronting Bhavani, Kittama relieved her from the chore she struggled with. Bhavani could never ask for help easily and would rather suffer than face condescension. Which her husband knew, and that was his weapon. He gathered her failings like tokens and used them against her at convenient times.
They had fallen in love while still young when he believed she was the most beautiful girl in the world, and she believed what he told her. They had married against their parents’ wishes, both believing that love alone was enough to live. His parents called her a slut who hypnotised their son. Her parents called him a gold digger who was after their money. They eloped to the city, severing all ties, with just a couple of suitcases and a lot of hope. They made plans—first a job, then a house, and finally a baby. But the baby came first, upending everything.
On the day Bhavani met Kittama on the beach for the first time, she hadn’t planned to go there. In fact, she had no recollection of going there. Her daughter had never been an easy baby, always resisting sleep, rejecting Bhavani’s aching breasts, and protesting against any form of consolation. But that day was a new low. Bhavani tried feeding her daughter, burping her, patting her, swinging her in a thotill fashioned out of an old saree—everything she had read and heard about—but all failed. She paced the length of the apartment with the baby
flung over her shoulder, her agitated chest against the baby’s fluttering heart, not knowing what else to do. Fatigue crept up her feet, calves, gut, shoulders, and head. By afternoon, Bhavani became unsteady, walls closing in on her and the floor melting apart. Her baby was tethered to her like a sin, its shrill voice piercing her ears and needling her eyes. An urge to get away from it all gripped her. The first time, she shook the thought out of her head. But it reared again from the pits of her being, hacking its way up. This time, she succumbed, shoved the howling nine-month-old inside the makeshift thotill, locked the apartment door, and walked away.
Her husband was talking to their daughter over the phone. She put away the leftover pongal in the fridge and hurried to the living room. But her daughter had hung up.
‘She said she already spoke to you a couple of days before,’ her husband said without taking his eyes away from the phone. He looked sinister, eerily lit by the mobile screen. He was smirking at the phone, thumb pads busy in conversation. Her daughter was like her husband, preferring to have Bhavani on standby, unintrusive yet ready on demand. Disappointment was still lingering on her skin when she dropped beside her husband on the sofa.
‘You are happy only when you are peering into your phone.’
The teenage smirk evaporated in seconds, replaced by that familiar expression of looking at her like a child who needed indulgence. His fingers instinctively pressed the lock screen button. Then, he made an exaggerated act of keeping the mobile away, turning and listening to her. His way of showing off his efforts to please her, the trait that made her fall for him, now grated on her.
‘A guilty mouse grins the most,’ Kittama had told Bhavani once. This was when her husband was on his usual two-week-a-year break from Singapore. He had brought several gifts for Bhavani, each one handed over to her ceremoniously—this particular wristwatch, that latest cassette player, and that expensive gold ring. This was not the first time he had given her gifts, and her husband always liked to put up a performance. But even by his standards, this elaborate display looked strange. Bhavani, already battling unease about her husband’s act, felt humiliated when Kittama tactlessly called it out. As if her chance of being wrong about her husband was now snatched away by Kittama.
‘You are a jealous old woman who thinks every show of love will have a mustard of guilt in it,’ Bhavani said, only half-mocking, her comment bouncing off Kittama without touching a hair.
Later during the day, because it was bothering her like a toothache, and because she wanted to prove Kittama wrong, Bhavani related the incident to her husband. He turned red. With anger, she hoped, and not with shame.
‘You are too gullible to that illiterate woman’s tactics. Of course, she is a great support to you when I go back to work. But she is feeding you poison,’ her husband said.
From then on, her husband looked at Kittama with resentment, and she, in turn, with distrust, each one grudgingly bearing with the other. Bhavani tried as much as possible to reduce the interaction between both of them during her husband’s yearly visit.
On the beach, Bhavani had looked no different from other weird people who were there at three in the afternoon. A couple under the canopy of the girl’s dupatta, a drunk man sprawled on the pavement, and urchins with matted hair hanging around the unopened kiosks. Nobody paid attention to one another, especially to Bhavani, sitting cross-legged on the hot
sand, rocking back and forth, talking to herself. If they had overheard her, they would have heard about a husband who left for Singapore, leaving her with a newborn in a city full of strangers. They would have heard about parents who disowned their daughter and ‘her spawn’ as contaminated blood. They would have heard the loneliness and fatigue whittling her soul sliver by sliver until there was precious little left. She did not know she was rocking like a possessed woman.
A shadow fell on Bhavani. A saviour momentarily relieved her from the scorching sun. The dazzling orange figure offered her a dented plastic bottle full of water. She took the bottle, too confused to disobey. As the water slid down her sandpaper throat, she realised the missing weight—on her shoulder, on her lap, in her womb, in her heart. She jerked up and ran.
‘Ei, ponnu,’ the woman called after her.
But the world had muted itself for Bhavani, not conveying the garble of dismayed curses and impatient honks. She ran through the busy road, up to her apartment, opened the door, and felt the darkness slap at her face. Her eyes took several minutes to dilate and locate the thotill at the corner of the room. But she could not hear anything. Not a cry, not a whimper, not even a wheeze of breathing. Her leg buckled, not wanting to carry her to her misery. She slumped on the floor and stayed there.
‘Loosa nee?’ the woman, who had run behind Bhavani all the way from the beach, gasped, finally catching up with her at Bhavani’s doorstep. Following Bhavani’s eyes, the woman saw the eerily still thotill, suspended from the ceiling like a hanged man. She inched towards it, her eyes darting between dishevelled, shocked Bhavani and the unmoving thotill.
When Kittama finally peeped into the thotill, her heart pounding in her ears, it took several seconds to register the rise and the fall of a bird-like chest.
‘It is breathing. It is breathing,’ she screamed and took the baby out.
A scrunchie with a spool of hair fell out from her husband’s suitcase when Bhavani emptied it. She must tell her daughter not to leave her things all over the place. Good, the suitcase was not secured with plastic fasteners. It was sometimes hard to pry them off. In fact, even the flight’s baggage tag was missing. Her husband’s muffled laughter reached her from the balcony. He was talking to someone who made him blush.
In time, Bhavani would learn that Kittama, the woman who saved her baby and her sanity, had come to the city after a fight with her stepson, who, like many others, could not stand her. But that was several days later, when Bhavani was strong enough to ask her who she was. Until then, since the evening Bhavani fainted at the threshold of her apartment, she slipped in and out of the world, fever and cold sweats raking her body. During brief patches of lucidity, when Bhavani came around, she would see Kittama feeding the baby or cradling it to sleep or trying to make Bhavani eat something.
When Bhavani was strong enough to talk, she told Kittama, ‘I am scared to be alone.’
Without many words, a friendship bloomed between the two women, who found that each one needed exactly what the other could spare. A shoulder for support and a heart to accept. And without many words, it was agreed that what brought them together would stay only between them.
Kittama taught Bhavani many things—smell the fruits to check if it was ripe, snap the vegetables to see if they were fresh, and rap the tender coconut to judge the quantity of water
in it. She taught her to read the baby’s demands. A shrill cry, an insect bite. A whimper threatening to become a crescendo, hunger. A nagging whine, illness. For seven years, they were sometimes like a maid and an employer, sometimes like a mother and a daughter. But mostly, they were just two women who intuitively understood one another.
It was only when her husband relocated to the city from Singapore that Bhavani felt the exhaustion of keeping peace between them. Explaining Kittama to her husband, defending her husband to Kittama. It layered on her like a fine dust, growing imperceptibly heavier by the minute.
Their final argument happened over a restaurant napkin balled inside a pant pocket in the laundry basket.
‘Isn’t this the paper they give at hotels?’ she asked Bhavani.
‘Yes. So? Bhavani replied, busy watching television.
‘But he told you yesterday that he was too busy to eat when you asked him about the unopened tiffin box.’
Bhavani hoped Kittama did not notice her face growing pale. She stared ahead at the TV and remained silent.
‘Why does he lie to you about simple things like this?’
‘He might have forgotten to tell me.’
‘That he ate when you specifically asked him why he did not eat?’ Kittama snorted. Bhavani ground her teeth to stay calm, not knowing where to direct her simmering anger—her husband for making her defend him or Kittama for her overbearing intrusions.
‘Should you always poke your nose into my business?’
Kittama shrugged and said, ‘The world does not go dark just because the cat decided to shut its eyes tight.’
‘You must keep your mouth shut. I am fed up of playing referee between you and my husband.’
‘You are scared of the truth, scared of being alone.’
‘All this you got from a tissue paper? So you are a detective now?’
‘I need not be one to know that a husband is lying to his wife.’
Bhavani tried to come up with something equally scathing, equally cruel to hurt Kittama with. When she could not, a crippling shame coursed through her, and she found herself saying, ‘Please leave the house.’
Kittama, for once, was tongue-tied. She stood for a few more minutes before moving away to the store room, which held her meagre belongings, and left the house into which she had entered under strange circumstances. There was no goodbye, just as there were no thank yous. Bhavani was too blinded then to realise that the unlettered Kittama would have no place to go in the city, which could be a home and a hell, all at once. She did not want to know, just as she did not want to know several other truths.
Bhavani slipped in and out of her disturbed sleep, her head feeling like molasses, dark, thick, and sticky. There she was again, Kittama with her blind cat. She was laughing at her again. When Bhavani was about to ask Kittama why she was taunting her, the cat opened its eyes, the dark eyes daring her to ignore it. Bhavani startled awake. Her bed was empty.
It was almost midnight. She walked into the living room to find her husband still smirking, still texting like a teenager. The mobile phones continued to relay messages with an incriminating ding.
Glossary for Tamil phrases:
Ei, ponnu – Hey, girl
Loosa nee? – Are you crazy?
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Sarveswari Saikrishna is a short story writer and Kolam Writers’ Workshop alumnus. Her stories have been published in many literary magazines, including The Bombay Literary Magazine, Out of Print, MeanPepperVine, Gulmohur Quarterly, USAWA, and several others. She was a finalist in the mentorship project offered by Writers Beyond Borders in the year 2020 and also has a few creative nonfiction pieces published in a national daily, The Hindu.
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Feature Photo by Soheb Zaidi on Unsplash
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