~2980 words, ~17 minutes reading time
‘The cities of Bengal were many and strong. Several were spread across the banks of this land of two rivers. Tanda was one such city, a centre for textiles, trade and travellers. In 1826, severe flooding destroyed the city and plunged it into a watery grave. Many lives were lost, including those of foreign travellers and merchants. Tanda no longer exists today.’
Her name was Meher-un-Nissa, the granddaughter of an astronomer, and she said the moon was falling.
“Is that a saying from these parts?” I asked Shaida.
I could not speak to the lady directly. I did not know any of the local dialects save a few words; my guide translated between us.
The good lady muttered, her voice low and taut.
“No, she means it literally,” said Shaida. “She is a teacher at the university where her grandfather used to work. She is using the telescope for some research and needs a couple more days before she parts with it.”
Meher-un-Nissa pulled the loose end of her sari over her head in our presence, strands of greying hair poking through. Her lobes were unadorned with the customary gold earrings of someone of her class; her fingers and wrists were also bare. But she kept her dignity with a chin pointed high and silver rimmed spectacles perched on the bridge of her flat nose.
I took off my cap as we stood in her study, a room with windows so large and clear that the late afternoon light flooded in with abundance. Fresh sunlight washed across rows upon rows of books that lined the walls, lapping over a woven rug spread across bare floors. A wooden desk sat near the windows. Next to it was the telescope: a slim device with a body coated in emerald green, gilded gold embellishments snaking up and down its length. I had never seen one of these devices made so beautifully. I knew telescopes were used by scholars to examine the heavens, but what did that concern me: a poor boy from Qing, raised by a drunk farmer?
Meher-un-Nissa had sent word for a buyer for her grandfather’s telescope. A working telescope, one built by the scientist himself, was very valuable to my master. But it did not matter whether I closed the deal or not; I would receive my wages either way. And once the money was in my pocket, I’d see to visiting my sister. It had been over a year since and I had not left her in a good way.
#
The lamp-lit harbour was lined with its evening food vendors: crowds of merchants, travellers, sailors and dockhands puddled around each stall, eating and drinking at an insatiable pace. Shaida lamented his newly pregnant wife, cried over how he missed her so and was filled with the sadness of a thousand men. Many a traveller had confessed similar inebriated words to me on the roadside, but not before launching into a tirade laced with violence and hate against the same woman.
Not Shaida. A merchant of many tongues, he found himself far from home in our small village at the bottom of the eastern slant of the Himalayas. Enamoured by our culture, Shaida married the cousin of an old friend of mine. He was a good man, as far as men went.
I wondered how it would be if my sister had met a good man instead of being exchanged to another family for a meagre bride price. I often wondered if her husband, that greedy drunk fool, would have similarly lamented his wife’s condition with each of her five pregnancies. All my guilt-ridden wonderings asked the same question, and I ignored it.
I let Shaida’s dazed, delirious words wash through me, refusing his hand as he offered a bhang-laced treat. Some moments later, my guide was deep in conversation with a group of merchants from Arakan. Finished with dinner, I told him that I was taking a walk.
I ventured away from the crowds and approached the end of the wooden walkway. Several ships were docked in the distance, their great shadows looming in the inky blackness of night. I lay down on the jetty, bones tired from the day’s travel, mind in desperate thirst for something greater than gold. I watched the moon, a day or so from fullness, as dark clouds tried to obscure its glow. In another lifetime, Lulu and I sat on our father’s rooftop when we were supposed to be in bed, pointing at the shapes the stars made and giving them names. I saw the donkey, she saw the squid. I saw a rooster, she saw a dragon. Lulu would punch a finger into the air and draw the shapes, joining dot to glinting dot and exclaiming at her spectacular discovery. And the next night, provided our father had sufficiently passed out, we would draw the shapes again. Again and again and again until the thatched rooftop left marks on our backs.
Baba said I wasn’t too pretty, she’d said one night after we found a goat. Not pretty enough for the dancehouse but not too pretty that I couldn’t be someone’s wife. Men don’t like their wives to be too pretty.
Lulu, half my height but with a spirit as thunderous as the actual name our dead mother gave to her, said she wanted to live with the animals in the stars. I asked her why not the moon, it was closer to home. She’d said she wanted to be as far from home as possible.
My father did not intend to break my sister’s spirit. He never laid a hand on her. But she broke anyway, and her pieces were scattered across our childhood, far away from my pathetic reach.
#
The good lady pointed to the clear sky through an open window. Meher-un-Nissa lived in a quiet district away from the brash, lively docks I had embarked on yesterday. She lived on her own, I noted, which was unusual for a woman of her standing. I saw no pictures of family members anywhere as she’d led us through the darkened hallways, though I knew those of the faith of the Musalmans did not display portraits, to encourage the presence of angels in the home.
“The moon is larger than normal, she says. Increasingly so. It has been for some time,” said Shaida.
I poked my head out the window: the moon, a whitish smudge in the sky, was notably not falling. I said as much. I was not an astronomer: my sister and I had barely finished our basic schooling before our father ordered us to sell his meagre produce. He tried to push my sister into worse custom but was refused when the madame of the nautchery saw her gaunt body. She would not last a single night, let alone become a reliable regular. Once I’d found another merchant to sell for, I left home in exchange for a trade stall, and then another, and another until I finally came under the employ of my master—an antiques trader for a local landlord. My sister came under the employ of her marriage before she was sixteen years of age.
I stroked the gold edges of the telescope with a vacant finger.
“She says the largening of the moon is a gradual process that has been recorded for the last five years.” Even Shaida did not understand. “She has an appointment with the local government board later this afternoon to discuss this and what it means for Tanda.”
Meher moved swiftly to the desk, littered with books and papers. A few sheafs floated to the floor. I examined one: detailed sketches of the moon with a fine hand, its shadows and curves and caverns delicately drawn. I pointed this to Shaida, who told me they were labelled ‘craters’. A new word. I glanced at the telescope as a deep want welled inside me. It was sliced by bitter guilt. Why did you not let her live to see the moon?
“Her grandfather’s research,” gestured Shaida. “She says, ‘The moon and the rivers are linked in an ancient bond. They move with each other. Our land is governed by the water, so much so that it is said the people of Bengal are spiritually connected to its rivers, and by extension, the moon.’”
He paused.
“This is taking longer than I thought,” Shaida whispered to me. “I don’t think you will get an agreement today. How about we find some dinner?”
I nodded, eager to come back the next day. “Let’s humour her a little longer. I’ll pay you double for today. Dinner is on me.”
#
My feet dangled at the end of the jetty, the water already lapping at my knees. A hot wind slapped against my bare skin like a wet blanket. Ripples of the inky black water billowed away from me, glinting moonlight.
The second time I’d tried bhang, Lulu told me off. We were a little older, a little wiser to the erratic tides of our father’s moods. I sat behind the house, about to eat the treats I’d stolen off the merchant from Kalikata before Lulu slapped them out of my hands.
“Do you want to be like him?” she shouted. “You want to listen to the demon inside you?”
I shouted back that she couldn’t tell me what to do. Before I knew it, she grabbed the treats off the ground and gobbled them up herself. That afternoon, I watched her vomit several times behind the house, swimming between laughter and tears as she clapped at whatever hallucinations played out in front of her. Eventually, she fell asleep on my lap.
Later, I asked her why she was stupid enough to do that. Later, she told me she already lived with one man who worshipped his own whims. She did not want to live with another.
#
We returned the next afternoon. Like an oracle proclaiming a prophecy, Meher-un-Nissa spoke of the city’s doom.
“She says, ‘The board dismissed my claims, my research. The city’s officials do not care for their people. I have spoken to a colleague at the university: the water has already risen to a dangerous level with no sign of receding. I thought we would have more time, a month or perhaps two, but it is far worse than I feared. It is too late for Tanda. The river will soon swallow the land whole, making way for a new path.’”
“So we must leave?” I asked.
Shaida bent his head to my side, whispering, “I think we should cut our losses here. She is making lies to avoid parting with the telescope. You’ll have to find an excuse for your master.”
“I don’t care about the telescope!” snapped Meher.
We stared at her. “Since when could you—”
“Please,” she said, glaring at me. “Did you think you were the only person from Qing here? I have students that speak more eloquently than you. To live in this city, you must know the common tongues of all her travellers.”
I remained silent.
“You can have the telescope for all I care. Don’t even bother paying me. What will I do with heaps of taka when we will all be dead in a matter of days?”
“You are serious?” I asked. “Will the city really be destroyed?”
“The council did not take my grandfather seriously, and now they do the same with me. There are ways, many ways, that we could predict which towns and villages would next be in the river’s path of destruction, by observing the moon. But our leaders are always too little too late to listen to science.” Her command of my native dialect was somewhat rusty, but the bitter lamentation was clear.
Shaida let out a yawn. “So you won’t mind if we take the telescope? We’re on a tight schedule.”
“Hang your schedule. You will not escape the tides now, either. You can take the telescope but it will soon be destroyed along with whatever boat you came along in.”
“That’s good enough for me,” said Shaida. I placed the pouch of taka on the edge of her desk, my eyes cast down under the frightening glare of Meher-un-Nissa, before the two of us hauled the telescope out the room.
#
I fell asleep on the jetty and woke up to my legs submerged in water. The revelry of the market had long disappeared. The jetty felt barely solid underwater. In the wet darkness someone called out to me, a voice I knew too well. The waves soared above me in a frightening arc before her sickly thin frame swam at me from the darkness in all her wedding finery, wet cloth pasted against dry bones. Her gaunt body reached for the ends of the jetty’s wooden poles. She dragged herself up, gasping for breath, and grabbed my collar. White makeup sloughed off a haggard face. At half my height, the bridal clothes drowned her. Lulu was just a child.
You could have told him no
You could have told Baba I wasn’t ready
“We had no other choice for you!” I spluttered. “There are never good choices for girls!”
I pushed the frightening thing that wasn’t my sister away until it fell back into the water.
You knew he was a brute
You knew he took to the bottle just like Baba
You knew and you knew and you knew and
you did nothing
And then, there was nothing but darkness and simple words, words that did not leave me, have never left me
Why did you take his side
We could have run together
We could have gone to the moon
We could have run to the stars
#
In the early evening, I returned to Meher-un-Nissa’s home. She sat in the study behind the desk, eyes closed. It was perhaps not proper for me to remain in the room alone with a lady, but she did not seem to care. The money remained on the desk, untouched.
Meher barely opened her eyes as she spoke. “If there is something wrong with the telescope, it is too late to rectify it now.”
“We cannot sail today. The tides… the tides are too high. They say we should try again tomorrow.”
A soft chuckle escaped her lips. “Yes. Try again tomorrow.”
“They did not seem so sure. I think you may have been right in your prediction.” When she did not reply, I continued. “Why did you not speak to me directly?”
“I was about to. But your man was all too happy in his role, so I thought I would play along. I did not expect the two of you to stay so long.”
I stepped closer. The room was darkened, no longer filled with fresh light but the murky grey of storm clouds.
“You will not look for safety? To save your own life, or your family’s?”
“I am the only one left in Tanda. I have lived in this city my whole life. My parents and grandparents died here, as will I.”
A silence came over us.
“I have no family left, either. Perhaps that is why I am not so bothered if I die here or in Qing.”
Meher’s eyes opened. She stared at me for a moment before glancing out the window. Perhaps she wanted me to leave.
“But I did want to visit my sister’s grave, one last time.” The words caught in my throat. “I owe her that much at least.”
“An older sister?” asked Meher-un-Nissa.
“Younger, my only one. Died some years ago after the birth of her fifth child. I pay for the upkeep of her grave. Sometimes I visit it myself to clean it. Her husband cares less for her in death than he did in life.”
The good lady nodded, her gaze now fixed at the sky. “My grandfather outlived my parents. My brothers and sisters barely attended his funeral. We are a family of friction, not fondness. I have no others here, neither spouse nor offspring.”
I nodded in turn, twisting my cap in my hand. “It must be quite peaceful to live as you do.”
“Peaceful, yes,” she said gently. “But lonely.”
“And quite a generous life, with no husband?”
Her lips pursed tightly before she spoke. “Life is often more generous and forgiving when spent with good people. But it has not been easy. Teaching does not bring much wealth. I sold all my gold and jewellery and whatever else was of monetary value in this house, which includes my grandfather’s telescope. I did not want to part with it, but I knew such a handcrafted item would fetch a handsome sum. Now, all I keep are my books, my grandfather’s books, for company. But I suppose it is all for nought now.”
“You have resigned yourself to this fate?”
That sharp glare returned to me before softening.
“No one can outrun the tides.”
#
My tears merged with the river. My limbs were leaden underwater; I had no strength to move. Our fingers intertwined like seaweed, her pulse deep and strong, but then I did not know if it was mine. The moon had disappeared behind the storm clouds. There were no stars; no donkey or dragon or rooster. And now, it rained.
Only Lulu swam next to me, bridal makeup washed off a face so thin and wrinkled and waterlogged. She smiled at me, keeping her chin above the waves before I choked on salty water. My head dipped below and I saw nothing but black. I hoped the end would be quick, painless, unlike hers.
Perhaps Lulu was the moon, commanding the rivers to engulf me. Perhaps Lulu beckoned death to me, just as I had not lifted a finger to prevent hers.
Madeehah is a writer and pharmacist from London, UK. Her first novella, ORPHAN PLANET, was shortlisted for the 2021 Future Worlds Prize for SFF writers of colour and will be published with Luna Press Publishing in 2025. Her short fiction has been published in several print and online magazines. You can find more of her work on her website madeehah.carrd.co and follow her on Twitter @madeehahwrites.
Photo by Theo Hewett on Unsplash
