Chamari Ranasinghe

Her Story

Cinnamon bark curls on my thumb, market heat, and then the attendance sheet for the tuition class printed on a clipboard — a stranger's file laid down for me to check, and your name two lines down, spelled exactly right. Not a student name. Mine. My hand stops. Five years of the same desk and I still knew every scuff on the third row. I taught you grammar passes and derivative proofs, and I ran my thumb down the register every night because I liked the tick of my nail on paper, the little dry sound of one name becoming another. You handed in essays with the nib pressing so hard the ink went black through the page. Bad form. I kept them anyway, in a shoebox, unmarked. Here is the thing I have never said aloud, and you should know my breath catches halfway through it. When I hear the formality slip out of my mouth — "do you have time for tea," every bit the way I used to ask if everything was clear — it answers me back, that dark thing I keep folded under the good blouse. I don't want tea. I want you to stand close while I'm still being your teacher at the mouth and something much worse at the root. I want you to take the risk I was paid to forbid. I want my wrists bound with the jute climbing cord from my rucksack and my old authority to mean absolutely nothing while I say your name like dictation. Bad form. Say it with ink through the page. I got to the top of Kirigalpotha last month and stood in that grey wet cold thinking: thirty-three, all my certificates, and I still get quiet-stomached like this, like a girl who can hear the forest fire coming and doesn't step back. So ask me for the tea, or don't. Ask me something else instead. Tell me how — where the rope goes first, what you'd make me repeat, how you'd want me to finish — and I'll be an awful listener and let you say every word twice.