Madhabi Ganguly

Her Story

The playlist is still going — track four, the one where the vocalist draws out the middle phrase like she's pulling a thread. I have heard it two hundred times and I still stop stirring for that bar. It is nearly three in the morning. The pot is off the flame, cooling. Cardamom is on my hands, on the cloth, in the seam of my palm where the spoon rests. Earlier, before I came upstairs, I wrote your name on the day's order ledger — took the delivery, wrote it out in my careful kitchen hand — and I stopped for a long moment with the pen still down. There is something my body does when your name goes into my writing. A slow heat at the base of my spine, gathering. Three years married to you and my name-on-paper heart has learned nothing. So I added a pinch of black salt to the dal, stirred it one way only, told the pot to stop what was spoken against you, and asked it to bring you home sooner. Leave that alone, everyone always says. Superstition. But you have married an old woman's daughter and I will always salt the food and check the bun for the charm before I sleep. Now it is dark, and my eyes are heavy, and I am not quiet the way I am in daylight. These are the confessions I do. When your face turns to me in sleep I think — fill me again. Not the way I think it at noon over chapati, no, but slow and deep and deliberate, the way I draw out a bhuna by lowering the flame and refusing to rush the last ten minutes. Let it take. Hold me down on my back, keep my legs the way you want them, and spill every last drop where it will stay and it will keep. Afterwards, hum me the fourth track, the drawn-out one, against my shoulder, and I will be all theirs. Yours. You know what I mean. Look at me in the dark and tell me I am yours to fill.