Silk, Cocoons, and Leaves

After Baba lost his land to pay off Grandpa’s debt, the village witch gave him a bag of mulberry leaves and silkworms in exchange for Ma’s gold bangles. Thrice a day, the label read. Steeped with caterpillars and mulberry leaves, Ma gave the soup to my sister, Sana, and me for weeks until our earlobes curled, our chests swelled like cocoons, and our pores released resham. 

In the beginning our secretions were slow, threads with the width of an eyelash, the color of eggshells, oozed from the edges of our fingers and toes. Sometimes from our ears and chins. Every morning, we sat with our legs and arms spread out, and Ma reeled in the soft yarn. She talked about how throughout life we’re unwinding from a cocoon of self and when we’re done, we go back into the earth to find a new cocoon. As daughters we should always serve, she said, both of you are doing the right thing. Later our parents dipped the threads into dyes and sold them in the weekly street market.

When our neighbors found out, they visited the witch too and came back with a bouquet of kesar flowers—purple blue with yellow and saffron pistils. In the afternoon, through the window, we watched our neighbor feeding a potion to her daughter, Murad. She threw up a blue and orange vomit, while we dutifully sipped the algae-green colored tea, dismissing the horrors of dead moths sunk at the bottom of our only food, a mulberry leaf stuck next to Sana’s lips, a worm wrapped around my pinky.

A few weeks later, we saw Murad screaming on her terrace, yellow stamens with saffron tips dangling out of her armpits. Her father held her arms and tied her feet so her mother could clip the stamens—one extra-long sweeping the ground. Over the week, her mother told Ma there was an ounce of saffron to sell, more expensive than gold. Often, Murad sat in the sun—threads of kesar hanging behind her knees and ears, an ensemble of purple blue petals in the center of her head, crowned with bees in a honeyed hum.

Ma and Baba renovated the house and no longer looked for work, their spines fused to the second-hand couch they bought from Nina’s parents who fed her kasturi, for weeks, and sold their daughter’s scented saliva. Sometimes Nina and Murad visited and untangled our threads, scoffing at the larvae of silkworms nibbling on the leaves in half-finished cups around us. We asked each other what we wanted. Nina said it wouldn’t be too hard to find love with her musk-scented glands. Murad said she wanted a break from blooming, she could feel the flower bulbs bursting inside her stomach. After they left, I tugged at a yarn stuck between Sana’s teeth. Leave it, she cried, it might pull my insides. 

Sorry, I said and placed my hand on the small of her back, as her fingers and toes spooled silk on the floor, a few threads raveled in a beard around her chin, her tears caught in them like dew drops.

Will we ever be free from resham? she asked. 

Soon, I said, hearing the laughter of our parents from the other room, probably drunk at this hour, filling me with despair.

The worms stained us ill. Sana complained that her stomach felt muddled, her organs mummified. My joints ached and felt weak, as if my bones were sucked away by the caterpillars. Sometimes we rubbed ourselves on Nina’s skin and floated in the intoxicating scent for a while. Murad decorated us with petals and claimed we all looked like brides. It was then we asked if they could help Sana and I to visit the witch. 

One evening, when our parents were drunk and asleep, we dragged ourselves outside. Nina and Murad helped us to the witch’s doorstep and ran away because they didn’t want to get caught. The witch took us in. I was helping your parents, but you have to redeem yourselves. Through the kitchen window, she pointed at the forest filled with mulberry trees and bushes, not far from her home. Go in there, she said. Maybe the forest will forgive you for taking away what belongs to it.

It had been a while since we had been outside, so we stretched our legs in the grass before heading to the forest. Do you remember what a rainbow looks like? Sana asked. Her face appeared like a clock with no hands—her eyes smaller, her nose—a pebble in the center, her lips—a silk thread ready to split. Probably, I looked the same. Sitting in silence, I felt like coasting out of time, outside of my skin. Perhaps our bodies were more than reels of silk spun into bones and muscles, openings, and closures with sacs of want in between. Or this was all we were and nothing more. Above us, the viscous night was barbed with stars, the moon was a giant cocoon wound up with light, ready to unravel until it was empty. We sat until it became whiter, smaller and a swarm of moths circled us—their transparent-heart-wings, fluttering in our ears. They followed us into the woods where cocoons lay in the dirt, shining, glistening like eyes sliding by. Some moths tapped on the surface of our bodies, as if knocking to get their ancestors out. They care for their own, Sana sighed, a better family than ours. 

The worms wriggled out of our feet and palms, then went up and down our bodies, threads of resham sticking on our skin like a dress, until we drowned in silk, cocoons, and leaves, rainbowed with the mulberry juices and the last image we saw was of each other’s faces—aglow, astonished, moths flying out of our open mouths into the moonlight.