The Day They Shut Down Heaven

I.

Ammi says God is a fifty-year-old haggard, his eyes clouded into little pools of grey. She says God is a peddler in our village, with a straw basket on his head and little glass jars in them, filled with spirits of dead emotions, emotions people cannot pull out of their hearts, through their throats, and spit out of the mouth. Ammi says he sits near the river that cuts through the village, every day at the same spot, where the bushels are washed clean every minute in the turbulence of the flowing water. He puts down his wares in front of him, and he doesn't get up till the last speck of illumination has disappeared from the sky, leaving a downpour of darkness to cocoon the river, the houses, the trees and the mice scurrying toward repose.

II.

Ammi says she's seen God and his little glass jars in its myriad of colors. Anger/krodh is red, bubbly, steaming and warm, simmering under the lid of an unusually tall jar, as if ready to burn through the throat when engulfed. Happiness/khushi is soft yellow, flowy, a wave of golden shimmer floating, dancing in the liquid, it slips down the throat in a breeze. Envy/Eersha is a festering marshy green, with a sour, rusty stench in its aftertaste. Sadness/dukh is pale blue with shades of black swimming in the jar.

He seems to have hundreds of these jars, each different from the other, reds, greens, blues, purples, goldens and greys. I ask Ammi how she knows their tastes by the jar. She waves me away, in a mournful nonchalance. But ever since then, unbeknownst to Ammi and Abba, I have started feeling everything by their colour.

Abba arrives with sweat on his shirt and grime on his face, Ammi gets to tending him. Pink. After a cup of tea and 6 cigarettes, Abba sits me on the lap and teaches me math. Yellow, yellow ochre.

I cut him short, "Abba, have you seen God and his jars?" Abba stares at me for several fleeting eternities like I had uttered the satanic. It grows red, he lashes his hands across my face. He gets up and screams his lungs at Ammi, for teaching me old wives' tales. Red. He slaps her down on the floor. Crimson.

I don't utter anything to Ammi when she pulls herself up after Abba has stormed out. There's an unspoken cloud of looming grey. At night between tosses and turns, I see Ammi slinking into a shadow of a different room and emptying a jar into her mouth, I don't try and see the contents, I turn and shoot my thoughts at the ceiling fan for them to be cut down by its blades. Everything fades into slumber. Black.

III.

When the monsoons announced its wake in our land, the sky grew livid, as if awaiting an implosion. It rained for six days after the first sparks of purple amidst the clouds. Ammi said God had retreated into his hut, but his sale of veritable potions hadn't stopped. Paro's maa next door had waddled four miles in the flood to get a jar for herself, but she didn't tell me which colour. What emotion would Paro's maa need? I lay awake, wondering, and yet, I dared never ask Ammi, or worst yet, Abba.

Abba, I tried to think of him fondly, his face was crooked, like the end of a golf club on some days, and on others, his face betrayed warmth and a tired, hungry, voracious grasp at affection. I missed his warmth when he used to out to the river casting nets for fish. This time, his face kept coming into my head, then, contorting, dissolving, sublimating into a shadow. It had none of his warmth, only the cold blow of a crooked metal club. Abba had slapped me so many times this month for asking anything about the supposed jars. He had thrashed Ammi for teaching me baloney, and stormed off into the shadows, just like his face in my reverie, while Ammi, barely weeping, slipped between the shadows into the kitchen, and poured down a jar of liquid down her throat, that as hard as I might try, could never identify.

On the 7th day, the village broke out in a furor. On the edge of the river ghat, a woman lay dead clutching one of the spirit jars in her hands, a small stream of remnant red liquid, flowing out of its glass prison and leaching into the wet grass.

IV.

It was Paro's maa. When they brought her body into their house, Ammi quickly turned away her face and set about to work, but I didn't miss the single quiver of her lower lip when she shied away, stone-jawed, into the shadows of the other room. I watched through our window, I saw Paro's face grow into a darker shade of black than the sky, and the scream that drowned the thunder. That night none of us slept a wink of sleep. Paro's wails ran as incessantly as the rain through the night, and Paro's maa's flashed before my eyes, her grotesque face, her eyes, a bright cluster of red arteries, her pupils, as if breathing fire, even when her body was white with death's cold touch, made the skin curl up against my bones. Abba and the fishermen were stuck far out in the middle of the stormy river, as long as the rain wreaked havoc. Would he believe me now, or would he slap me shut again, I wondered. The flash of red whizzed before my eyes. I crept up against Ammi and slept.

V.

The accidents didn't stop there. Two days later it was another man, then the same evening, a couple of straying boys, and within a week two more women. Each time I would ask Ammi if God was growing more fickle or more blind, or more sinister. Ammi's face would be set in stone, and lips sealed with wax, and hands, busy as ever, cutting up vegetables for our meal.

I wondered what Abba would have said now if he saw God's little mason jars, flung out of their hands in a paroxysm of emotion, erupting through them like the sky breaking out in rain from the heavens, right before their body gave way to overkill. I wondered if Abba would have slapped Ammi again, or me, like he always has. A flash of red whizzed before my eyes, then several, then Ammi's screams, from every time she was thrashed down on the ground, a crimson stream trickling out of her lip, like the jar in Paro's maa's grip.

VI.

When the clouds cleared one day, and the sun-washed the land in its glow, I thought it was Abba's time to come home. Time to sail us away, far away from the land of death. Abba came home that night as a corpse. His body bore marks of lashes, where the blood had dried out, his mouth, frothing out poison, his face twisted into a lob of clay, his eyes hauntingly reminiscent of Paro's maa, a clump of blood-red arteries, as if still pumping furiously into his eyes, even after the body was cold. For the first time, when the news stepped in through our door, like an unwelcome gust of chilly wind, I saw Ammi's hands stop in the middle, her eyes quiver, and her lips break off from the icy stone it has held for years.

VII.

We ran through the ground that was still marshy from the rain. We stumbled through cold. The chill bit us in the face, on our toes, it pulled at our skins, but I clung on to Ammi's hand, while she ran in a fervor of insanity. She ran that night like a rogue horse off its saddle and reign, she ran like the merchant's servant in Baghdad, trying to evade death. On the river bank where Abba's body had been placed, livid men stood guard, planning to end God's fickle doing for once, and for all. When Ammi reached in bleeding feet, her eyes swore revenge even without any red potion, and they carried her to the hut where God was rumored to live. I clung to her arm, hurt, angry, dizzy, scared and sick to the bone, and I didn't see the colours of anything I felt.

They beat down his door, we raided the hut but God, the haggard, had already fled, leaving his array of jars, his potions, his chemicals, his paraphernalia that had turned from helpful to bitter. Men stormed off in search of the rascal who had been God. Women stormed off to flush their jars out, fling them far, far away from their homes. Only I was left, in the cold, dead night, clutching Abba's rigid, lifeless fingers. There was no sound, not from the rain, not the river, no people, not even a lone fox to coo in my mourning, under the ghastly half-moon.

Only one sound cut through the dead silence and resounded through the land. One single shriek, a wail from Ammi, with her jaw pale, her limbs numb, her pupils shrunk to dots in hysteria, kneeling on the cold floor inside the hut, beside the pile of jars labeled 'Silence', sans a single drop of crystal white concoction in it.