Rekha’s hands alternated between the dough and the spoon. She kneaded the dough, carving it in places with the spoon. It was getting to be the right consistency. She sprinkled a little more of the powdery flower over the top. Rekha dipped her finger tips in the silvery steel patterned bowl filled with murky water. She used her thumb as a spring to send the rest of her fingers flinging water at the ball of dough lazily soaking the powdery wet mess. A strand of hair dangled from Rekha’s forehead. She made a cursory effort to put it in place, but it inevitably insisted in obscuring her eyes by laying in the path of her vision. Yes, she realized that dinner was getting late.

Because of the water and electricity problem, everything in the house hold work needed to be pre-planned. Rekha had gotten up at 4am that morning, like she did on most mornings, to fill buckets full of water so that she had enough for the cooking and cleaning. The water needed to go far enough for her to do the laundry in the afternoon. She had finished a particularly heavy load today. And she had gotten so wrapped up with things that she hadn’t noticed the time flying by. That was when she had rushed to scrape dinner together.

The kids would be coming through the door at any minute from their tuition. The last thing she wanted was to be yelled at again by her husband because he was sitting down for dinner when the news was on the television. Last time this happened he had scolded her. It was a harsh rebuke that made the whole family wince. Her son had watched the whole scene ducking his face and erasing his eyes and nose to wipe away the reality happening in front of his eyes. She had felt embarrassed for him and mortified for herself. Rekha noticed that whenever incidents like this happened her son would avoid looking directly into her eyes…days at a time.   

Rekha grabbed the knife from the drawer. She pointed the tip of stainless-steel knife towards the pulsing greenish-blue veins on her wrist. Slowly and deliberately with hand-writing that she had mastered in class three in Gujheshwori School she started to carve her initials on her wrist. But what actually came out were jagged carves. Blood creased out of light brown skin and seeping from the earthy brown flesh. Red fluid with a shine of kitchen light smiling upon it. Rekha grabbed her hair and started to pull on it from different angles. Her hair started falling apart from the bun she had tightened behind her head. It came undone, open and waving. A jangled mop of black hair. Feeling like a Hindi movie actress doing a scene in Simla, Rekha let her arms and legs flow into a dance. She danced around the kitchen waving her knife around. Blood dripped from the edges of the knife. Tiny spots of red splotches dotted the cemented floor.

Rekha blinked. Three chapattis were done. If she could just get eight more done she could ask the rest of the family to come for dinner. She glanced at the clock. Her husband would be coming to the kitchen any second now.

These thoughts have been coming for months now. She found herself carried away with them before she knew what was going on. Rekha found herself fantasizing about being cut and bleeding to death. At first she had been quite frightened. She didn’t know who she could tell. What did it mean? It was odd. It brought memories of Dakchhin Kali where her family would go early on a Saturday morning to make an animal offering to the blood-thirsty goddess, Kali.
These days, Rekha’s imaginings came in different flavors. Sometimes they came in dreams when she was sleeping at night. At other times she found herself drifting off and had to catch herself before she felt like someone…something was calling at her.

It was a call for blood. Hers. Images would flash before her mind. Sometimes it was the kitchen knife carving her name on her breasts. At other times it was using the hasiya used to cut grass and hacking her limbs. And yet at other times it was about puncturing herself with sharp nails. She would shudder and try to focus on whatever it was she was doing. She would scrub the dishes she was washing more frantically. She would wrestle and strangle the clothes she was washing with more angst. She would whip the floor she was sweeping with less pity.

But all this wasn’t helping her situation. Rekha felt numb inside. Denying her fantasies weren’t helping her. She felt a hollow unfulfilled wail within her. It called to her like a hungry baby calls for his mother. Rekha did not understand where it came from. She would run to hide, but where? Out from the hollows of her soul the breeze of death seemed to call with the sound of a flute in a cool evening. They came in waves of erupting feelings of chaos. “Come dance with me…,” it seemed to say. “Come be with me,” it seemed to say.

All the things that the voice within her asked her to do to herself—cut, hack, grind jagged pieces of bone, appealed to her in a way that she could not comprehend. She just liked the taste of the idea. It filled a visceral need within her. It made her feel powerful in wanting to do what those who surrounded her disapproved. Since she had come to this house, she had done everything according to the dictates of her husband and in-laws. But now she felt like she had access to a forbidden world that only she knew about. It was her playground. It was her place to play mental gatta, the game with little pebble rocks that she used to play with the other neighborhood girls around her parents house. It was satisfying. She felt like she found a way to inject a spark of life into the doldrums of the rising and setting of the sun on the life of household work.

Rekha’s daughter, Sharmila ran through the door with her son, Roshan, following close behind. Her daughter dragged the dining room chair out making a scraping sound. “Mummy, today in school, I forgot to take my PT clothes. So sir made me sit it out instead of doing gymnastics with the rest of the kids.”

Rekha heard her daughter Sharmila’s voice but said nothing. She looked at Sharmila. She had dark hair just like her mom. Dark eyes that sparkled when they were done in fresh gaajal. Instead Rekha smiled to herself. She rolled chapattis out. She imagined slitting a blade across her palms. She imagined making fresh baked chapattis smeared in the dripping blood from her own wrists.

“Aama” Sharmila called. “Aama?”Sharmila looked at Roshan with a worried look in her eyes. Mummy was at it again. Should they get their father? How long had it been since she stopped taking her psychiatric medicines again? Oh god, they couldn’t bear to think of where this was going to lead to this time. It was getting more and more difficult for them to save face and make excuses for the way their mom acted in front of their friends.

The kids had been hyper-alert to the danger signs. Rekha would get quiet in this way. She would become unresponsive and start smiling even when the kids couldn’t see that there was anything humorous happening around. When she was called it was like she was in another planet. Brother and sister had gravitated towards each other trying to cope with this draining situation because they couldn’t talk to anyone else. Their dad turned to alcohol for solace.

Who could they explain about the discomfort they felt when their mom would give cryptic and mysterious replies to simple questions to do with clothes and food? At times she would even chose to not respond at all. Or worse she would break off into a smile or giggle when they were all solemnly eating. The final straw had been when she had started to wail and bang her head against the wall in the bathroom. After consulting with some relatives Buwa had called the hospital. Three people from the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Thapathali had come to get Mummy. She had resisted them. She had cursed them with every filthy name in the book. The kids felt cut to pieces hearing those words coming out their mother’s mouth. They had never known that Mummy knew of such street language that they had only heard bus conductors utter to unpaying passengers. They had never been able to see their mother in the same light after this. But unfortunately, it didn’t just end there.  

Whenever the kids would go out to play, the neighborhood kids would want to broach the subject of their mother’s mental condition. Undoubtedly it was a hot topic in the neighborhood full of women with more time on their hands than juicy topics. Roshan and Sharmila would hear the whisperings. They would try to ignore it. But it was all around them. The neighbors had very kindly cast their mother, Rekha, with powers of witchcraft that she had never practiced. It hurt.

One particularly malicious story that the neighborhood children spoke of was one their mothers had fine tuned. They said that Rekha had been cast by a spell by a holy woman who had done juju on her. On a full moon night this holy woman, a living incarnation of the goddess Kali, had sacrificed a rooster while saying the incantations of Kali sanskara prayers. It was an elaborate ritual that took three days to complete. After three days the person on whose name this spell was cast would feel the blood thirsty call of Kali haunt him or her day and night. It happened slowly but inevitably. It had happened many times before. It broke families. It separated children from their parents. The neighborhood kids would shudder and giggle, repeating this story while making it spicier every time. And Roshan and Sharmila, what could they do but turn more in towards each other? No one could understand how they felt. For the neighbors it was better than anything currently playing on any of the Nepali television channels.