Pray for the Vermin

Neha De Alwis

You are immediately enchanted when you see it, and you don’t know how to translate this enchantment. Your eye is drawn to everything at once.

The sheer pleasantness, the safety; the citrine-sweet oranges, the verdant greens, the smooth expanse of white; the crisp apple reds, the baby bird blues, the yolky yellows; the wobbly shapes; the kindly ghost hands sculpting and resculpting; the eyes on the birds and their roundness, like papaya seeds; the reaching trees; the radiating warmth; the wide-eyed, dark-haired flute player; the flute; the red sash; the paint; the texture; the sweat—

You could go on. You just might.

* 

That house was full of snakes. Snakes and cockroaches and lizards and mice. It came as no surprise to us. The heat was relentless, and the house was thick. During the day, the fat, roiling rays of sunlight sank deep into the cracks of the clay walls, baking the inside of the house like a hot womb. That heat incubated baby mice, and the walls kept out the harsh light and the feral cats who might feast on any newborn vermin.

It was impossible to remove them all. We could not unravel the long reptile bodies twined around the rafters, nor could we flush the insects out of the pipes. The tap spilled cockroaches instead of water. It was their house, really; it must have been in their families for generations. We were only living there.

So we slunk between rooms like the intruders we were, waiting to be bitten or poisoned or infected with sickness. At night we draped nets around the beds to keep the mosquitoes from biting us raw. We set rat traps. We jolted at the scuttling and the scratching, expecting to find snakes curling around our limbs.

That house was a mother to the vermin, and to us. To sixteen-year-old Esme, who had gotten married at long last.

I don’t know how to start a family, said Esme.

Let me show you how it’s done, said the house.

*

You bend your head over the plaque. The piece is attributed to Daroga Ram, son of Sona Bai Rajwar; the creator of this Surguja style of sculpture. Sona Bai was married at fourteen. The voice of a tour guide drifts through the air, and a small crowd rustles past you. They do not realise that you are feeling sick and strange. They are concerned with other things; listening to the guide explain the making of ceramic teacups and small pots.

You turn back to the plaque and start reading again. She was fourteen when she was married, and her husband locked her away in her house, and she made toys for her son from tall grasses and clay. The neat type ends abruptly. It does not tell you nearly enough as it should. The crowd pads farther down the hall, moving on from ceramics to tapestries.

*

Esme spent many hours trying to pray away all of the creatures who lived in that house. She prayed over chutis of fish curry and thalanabatu. She prayed furious whispers through her scratchy veil at church. She prayed herself to sleep at night beside her husband, red rosary clutched in her hands, beads dripping through her fingers like blood.

She spoke to her husband about this many times, and always he told her that her worries were inflating the problem, and that the animals were harmless, and that she would get used to them in time, and that she was too young to understand what real problems were. It was easy for him to say. He only lived in this house in the mornings and at night. The rest of the time, he was away, working.

Esme consulted one of the nuns at church. The kindest one, Sister Agnes, who ran the nearby orphanage.

I can’t sleep, Esme told her. I can’t drink water. I can’t cook without the fear that they will crawl inside the food and I would be feeding myself and my husband cockroaches and lizards.

Sister Agnes, at least, took her concerns seriously. I will go and speak to the Father and see what he says, she said. Don’t worry, duwa. We will sort this out. Then she patted Esme on the head as if she were a child. 

*

You have to go back to see it again and even that isn’t enough. You stare. You circle. You read the plaques over and over, trying to slake yourself on the few sentences presented to you, as if those could have ever been enough. But nothing works. You’re greedy. You’re starved. You know this feeling. You’ve been here before.

The women in your family don’t tell you anything for fear that it will corrupt you. You were the first baby in your generation to live and that was a sign. You were born rosy, peaches-for-cheeks, smiling. Chubby fingers splayed open, ready to be alive. A fleshy, burbling lump of potential. You would be perfect. You would bring them joy. You would make them proud. You were the pure, hope-staked baby and there is nothing in the world that can change that. Not even you.

You’ve heard things, over the years. Scraps of stories. Details that shock you, spoken with a casualness that also shocks you. You’ve learned to be more careful. Conversational about your questions, and not curious. You cannot be gentle. They can tell when you become gentle, and your gentleness makes them sad.

They’re right though. The things that you hear do make you sad. The deaths of precious children, the misted-over horrors of a country fresh out of civil war; the arranged child marriages, the time spent in orphanages. The strength spent enduring the anger and greed and crimes of men. The held tongues. The salted hot silence in church.

You find a coal in your throat. What could you know of suffering? What could you know of anything? Why did you come here? And what is that burning sensation in the pit of your stomach?  

*

While she waited for Sister Agnes or Father Paul or God to answer her prayers, Esme tried to go about her days as usual. She swept the floors, she cooked, she mended torn shirts, she polished shoes, she washed dirty clothes. She flinched often, sometimes at nothing and sometimes at something. It was becoming difficult to tell.

In the rafters above the kitchen she could swear that she had caught a glimpse of sunlight bouncing off scales. But then, she was always looking for scales. When the occasional mouse got caught in a trap, she would try her best to ignore it and continue with her work. Then, when she couldn’t ignore it any longer retreat into another room, whispering apologies and asking for forgiveness from God because she was unable to kill it.

Her husband thought her compassion was stupid. How could she be so afraid of something, and then feel sorry for it? Esme’s mother told Esme that she should consider herself lucky; most of the mistakes she made, her husband chalked up to her youth and gender. He was more forgiving than most, and a forgiving man was a safe one.

Sister Agnes did eventually return with the priest’s advice. The priest had told her that the animals in the house were manifestations of demons; Esme was being punished for something she had done long ago. She wracked her brains for her past sins. She did not know what she could have possibly done to deserve such an extreme and long-lasting punishment. Still, she prayed for forgiveness anyway.

*

Her first name, Sona Bai, stays in your memory. It sounds sweet, like a song or a lullaby. You are still thinking about her when you go home. You feel so sad for her. You feel so sad for every generation of women in your family, whose stories are all so similar. A new well has opened up inside of you.

You scour the internet for Sona Bai’s whole story, and you are disappointed to find that there is not much more there. She was exiled because she was unable to give birth for the first ten years of her marriage, and then when she did have a son, her husband didn’t let her leave the house. She decorated the walls of her house, and she crafted lattices—jaali—from clay and paint from spices and cooking oil. She sculpted toys for her only son. She imbued stories into her work, which is to say, she imbued life into them.

Most of what people have written about her is of the strength she had. Praise her for enduring what she endured, for not letting her situation stop her for creating such profound, loving, bright work. She was widely inspiring, remarkably brave, and full of resilience.

This might be true. You don’t know. But you can’t help the image in your mind: seventeen-year-old Sona Bai heaving up a bucketful of clay from the well by herself. Setting the bucket down, draining the fluid, taking out a lump of clay. Did she feel widely inspiring then, with the wet bit of earth in her hands? Was she being remarkably brave when she whiled away the long hours, sculpting and resculpting? Did she feel full of resilience five years into her marriage, having to tell her husband again and again that no, she was not yet pregnant?

Or was she sad and lonely and just wanting to make something with her hands? Were her creations not acts of courage, but acts of survival?

*

Years passed. Esme still did not know what it was that she had done for the house to be so full of vermin, but she grew braver. She learned how to wrangle snakes out of the house with her broom. She began to kill the mice caught in the rat traps. She heard from her neighbours about how to brew certain vinegary concoctions to keep ants and cockroaches away.

She did not choose to be brave. Her bravery was her only choice. But the stories of her bravery is the only thing that trickles down through the generations. They wonder how she did it, how she could have possibly managed to survive. They like to remember her as faraway and brilliant. How beautiful she was, and how kind. Hope-staked baby, hope-staked ghost.

* 

You wish you knew what it was like for these women. But the only thing you have is this graveyard of misshapen stories. A glimpse of a black and white photograph. A moment in a museum. The words from a plaque.

It won’t be enough.

*

Esme died at twenty-six. She was not bitten by a venomous snake, nor did she contract a deadly infection from living in such close proximity to vermin. She died giving birth to her fifth child.  

* 

This is the knowledge you come away with: there were girls inside of those women. You know you should mourn them. You know that you should celebrate them. Honour them.

But you are too busy thinking about how they would have felt if you could have held them, just once.

Neha De Alwis is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer based in Naarm currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing at RMIT. Their works have been published in Kill Your Darlings, Nowhere Girl Collective, and Myriad Magazine. They write horror and poetry and a little bit of everything else. They like drawing and love bunny rabbits.