Past in Prints
by Shraya Singh
Sumie tells us it’s time to test our cups. She pours cardamom tea into each one, the mosaic of never-used post-glaze pottery catching the light that streams in through the window, a single ray refracted in the soft brown stream of tea that holds my eyes as I watch the cup that I’ve made with the pressure of my fingers fill. But there’s something that mars this beauty, a single smudge left behind, a fingerprint fossilized in its terracotta surface, and I find myself turning my hand to my face, inspecting each digit, accusing them equally for the misdemeanor.
I know fingerprints are not hereditary, the curves and ridges on the pad of my thumb are not the same that rest on the pale underside of my father’s hand, but I remember still what his fingers have touched, what he has left his prints on – the paisley tea set from my grandmother’s old kitchen, the red prayer book nestled beneath piles of incense and roli, the countless pens scattered across the whorled surface of his deep brown desk, the edge of my cheek, doorknobs, keys, forgotten spoons.
Every morning, I would watch him pick two marigolds from my mother’s balcony garden, two roses, five sadabahar; breathing the bitter edges of his neem breath into the sunset of colors he would gather in his cupped hands – skin against petal against skin. I would watch from the balcony as he made his way to the temple downstairs, leaving his slippers behind as he crossed the holy threshold, the flower sunset still nestled in his palms as he went inside, disappearing beneath the gold-topped dome. From there, I would imagine the flowers falling from his skin onto the feet of the gods we worshipped, his fingerprints finding solace in the touch of Shiva’s peacock-skinned feet. I would imagine his hands on the curve of dark stone that formed the shivling, on the cool bronze of the temple bells, on the coarse yellowed pages of prayerbooks. And when he came home, I would imagine that the tika of red roli that my mother drew on my forehead everyday held some mark of him, the roli falling like powdered blood at my feet as I felt around for the warmth of my parents’ touch in red print. They kept their mornings for our gods, and I kept my mornings for a hope that their gods had left some space for me.
As a child I was unfaithful with my faith, my touch, where I placed my hope – I would leave dirty fingerprints all over the idols in our home – on Shiva and Krishna and Gayatri – and touch their faces instead of their feet. Back then I would ask my mother why she prayed, why she clasped hand in hand every evening and every dawn, why she held her palms above the diya’s fire, the tip of the flame close enough to leave a burn. And sometimes, if the lighting was just right, if the sun was gently settled on the horizon and the air was filled with the summer sounds of crickets chirping and the occasional frog, she would tell the story that my father told her of his childhood, and it would go like this:
Dirt floors, open doors, a bathroom with only a curtain for privacy – this was the house he grew up in, walls of baked mud and the occasional brick, walls that would soften each monsoon, unsturdy amidst the pitter patter of rain. He grew up doing chores, feeding cattle, chopping sugarcane, mincing grain to flour, kneading flour to dough. He told my mother that’s where he would have stayed if he hadn’t gotten away, if he hadn’t left the village to a life worse than what he knew. In high school, he ended up living with his uncle and a cousin brother – an uncle who would make him wash his clothes and mop his floors in exchange for letting my father stay in his home. An uncle who would send him on petty errands the day before his exams, wasting the daylight until all that was left was for my father to skip his sleep, sit on the floor with his eyes bleary, pacing across pages to the flickering flame of an oil lantern. Soon enough, he had to wear glasses. And somehow, he managed to get out, he managed to learn despite the odds against him, managed to read and write and do all the things that his mother, my grandmother, had never learned how to do.
This is the part in the story where my mother would stop and close her eyes, touch her fingers to the hollow in her throat, and sing a song to goddess Gayatri. She would hum it three, four, five times, her other hand nudging me to join my voice with hers, our whispers tangling in the empty air. She would tell me this is all their doing — Goddess Lakshmi’s light, and Saraswati’s gyan, and Ganesh’s wonders – and like any other fool in the world that I grew up in, I believed her.
Only once did she continue the story and tell me about the worst of what my father had left behind – the slap and the heat of his uncle’s walking stick, the sting of his words and taunts and years of ire. And I realize now that is the only touch my father has known, a touch that leaves behind a mark, a burn, an itch to escape and stay away.
Of course, my therapist would tell me now that this is why my father has never touched me kindly – no graze of his fingers against my hand, no pat on my back, no fraction of an embrace. But I think of it as blessings lost on me because of past crimes I’ve committed in past lives I’ve lived. Things that I have forgotten or could never remember, but the gods have kept a tally of somewhere in their bronze-belled homes. Sometimes my mother would share her own blessings too, how the heavens have looked down upon her and given her gifts, how she is blessed that my father has never raised his hand against her. Now I think back to those blessings and wonder where exactly I let them bleed into faith.
When people ask me if I believe in God, I never know what to say. But I remember walking to the temple with my parents, sometimes in cities we would drive for hours to reach, sometimes to a temple only minutes away. The cool feel of marble and sandstone floors would sink into my soles, peppering the bottoms of my feet with pieces of fallen incense, offerings, water from the holy river – gangajal. Afterwards, I would always complain as I washed my feet at home, why the palace of our gods always had sticky floors, but in the moment I lived for the balance, the stability, the support those floors offered, as if the ground itself were reaching out to call me in, to call me home. I don’t know if I believe in our gods the way my parents do, but I still chant their names when I need grounding, still picture their faces when I think of life and death and the moments in between when I am drowning, when I am lost in the sea of homesickness looking for a place to wash ashore – when I think of one I think of the other, my parents, our gods, poles apart yet conflated in my mind, superimposed into a warm memory of belonging.
When people ask me if I believe in God, I picture my mother’s head covered by her dupatta, my father ringing the great bronze bell at the entrance once, twice, three times. I picture the two of them side by side, elbows nearly touching as I stand behind them, sometimes between them, hands clasped, eyes closed, heads bent. What I believe in is the comfort of a hundred voices chanting the same song, a chorus of hope and belonging giving me a moment to rest, away from the rest of the world and the realities of my problems. I believe in my longing, my thirst, for touch, in my hunger for skin against skin as my father would share a piece of his floral sunset with me, his cupped hands pouring into mind, the only moment I can remember, one second out of an endless count, when our fingerprints would finally touch.
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Shraya Singh
Shraya Singh is an ex-engineer, writer, and teacher from India and loves frogs, Lord of the Rings memes, and epic fantasy. She got her MFA from Eastern Washington University and you can find some of her work in The Southern Review, Write or Die Magazine, and The Spokesman-Review.