Published in Issue 64.1: Winter 2025
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The evening Amma left us began like all the other evenings of my childhood. I sat at the old dining table with its powder-blue Formica top peeling at the edges, pretending to work on my long division exercises while watching Amma chop snake gourd in the kitchen. She tucked an imaginary strand of hair behind her ear, the way she sometimes did when she worried. Her eyes darted to the old clock on the wall. Appa was late. Although my parents worked at the same bank, Appa often stayed behind for union meetings. He was a union leader, and he told me once that unions fought for their workers by organizing strikes against management. When I asked him if Amma was in the union, he laughed and said no.
—She is management. Your Amma is who we strike against.
At dinner Appa ate quickly, indifferent to what was before him. He finished his food and waited. Amma stopped eating to spoon a second helping onto his plate.
—How was school today? Appa asked, his right eyebrow arching.
I shrugged and picked at the snake gourd kootu. I was not a first-bench hand-raiser, twitching to answer the teacher’s question. I sat at the back of the classroom and gazed out the window at vendors selling peanut cones, street kids kicking around a deflated football, and buses arriving in a cloud of smoke.
—I hated it too, Appa said, and Amma’s lips turned down at the corners like she’d tasted something bitter.
—Oh, there’s a present for you in my briefcase, Appa said.
It was a stuffed bear. White with pink ears. I grinned and hugged it to my chest. Amma wouldn’t think of getting me a toy like this. First, it was white and would only get dirty; second, it wasn’t a book.
After dinner, Appa turned on the television to watch World Cup Cricket while Amma cleared the table and piled dirty dishes in the sink. Her movements were usually brisk, but I sensed tension in the taut lines of her body. Seeing me hovering in the kitchen, she said,—Get ready for bed, Divya. I’ll read to you once I’m done.
I drifted into my parents’ bedroom, where a cool breeze from the balcony billowed the curtains. Appa’s clothes—a sleeveless undershirt, pants with the belt still looped in, and a work shirt stained brown at the collar—were hanging from the wall hooks. On the dresser was a picture of Amma and Appa on their wedding day. She looked younger, more alive, with a slight, secret smile. She was dark with small piercing eyes and bad skin. He, by comparison, was distractingly handsome. Light-skinned, with silky hair and a square, impudent chin. It was not until much later that I understood why a man like him had married someone like her.
At night, I heard them talk about the baby brothers Appa wanted me to have.
—She shouldn’t grow up lonely and headstrong, Selvi, he said. Amma said she already had her hands full. —Quit your job then, he said. In the bedroom I noticed a duffle bag wedged behind the green Godrej Almirah. I’d have missed it altogether had the shoulder strap not slipped out. Inside were a few sarees and blouses. Bank papers and a checkbook. A few dresses Amma had made for me but no school uniform, I noted with some relief. Maybe we were going on a holiday, I thought, but there were no clothes for Appa. I jammed the duffle back where I’d found it.
When Amma came to me that night, she reached for “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” She liked that story more than I did. She always praised the ant, but I hated how the ant left the grasshopper to die of hunger. Even on Sundays, Amma got up at six in the morning. She ground batter for idli, made breakfast, prepared lunch, watered plants, washed clothes, hung them on the clothesline, and swept and mopped the house. After lunch, Appa took me to the movies while she ironed clothes or peddled her sewing machine. She was the ant of our household. She wanted me to become a doctor, a diplomat, or something equally noble, but Appa held no such ambition for me. I took this to mean that he loved me more. But she must have understood something I didn’t back then: I was like him. I was a grasshopper.
She turned a page, and I said —Where are we going? She shot me a sharp look but kept on reading. —Is Appa coming?
She looked at me for a long moment. Her deep-set eyes were drowning in dark circles. Acne marks speckled her jawline. My grandmother never failed to remind me how diligently Amma studied and how hard she worked to become a branch manager of a national bank. But she didn’t look like a branch manager. She looked like one of those girls who began working as house help at a tender age and decades later was still sitting on her haunches, scrubbing dirty pots and chewing betel leaves.
—The grasshopper sang, she read, and Appa walked in. —Enough, Selvi. Give the child a break. I never read books, and was I not good enough for you?
She closed the book and tucked me into bed. When she tried to smile, her smile caught like a stuck zipper.
That night I cuddled my stuffed bear, determined to remain awake. If she was going away, I wanted to stay with Appa, but I worried she’d be alone. Maybe she preferred to be alone. She seemed happiest when she was peddling her old Singer sewing machine. It would appear from the undercarriage of a cherry wood table, bringing with it colored chalks and pinned newspaper cuttings in the shape of blouses and skirts. She’d snap the bobbin into place, wetting the thread with her lips before passing it through the eye of the needle. Humming a low tune, some old Tamil song, her feet worked the pedal in a steady rhythm while her fingers slid the cloth forward. Her face seemed much younger then, as if she had escaped to some place where neither my father nor I could follow.
I have always been a heavy sleeper and that night I fell asleep despite my best efforts. Amma must have carried me down the stairs because the next thing I remembered was waking up in an auto rickshaw as it bounced over a speed bump. Amma pulled me close and whispered —Hush, it’s okay. Don’t worry. Her voice trembled.
—Where are we going? The cold night air whipped my face, covering my arms in goosebumps.
She didn’t answer.
In the rearview mirror, I caught the rickshaw driver’s eye. I recognized him from the auto stand by our house, where he was always smoking a bidi. The rickshaw dropped us off at Parry’s Corner, where buses arrived and departed. The smell of urine and sewage shot through the air, and children dozed on top of suitcases while the adults tried to find their buses. They did not look like they were going on a holiday. Does anyone go for a holiday in the middle of the night? I wondered if our leaving without Appa had something to do with that baby brother I did not even ask for. Only now is it clear to me that a thousand little tyrannies had led her to this moment.
—I got us tickets in a deluxe sleeper coach, Amma said with a nervous smile. Having bitten down my nails, I was now biting the toughened skin around them.
On the bus I huddled in the window seat, away from her, my face pressed to the glass. She tucked a blanket around me. —Divya, I’m doing this for you.
I could only think about Appa waking up in an empty house and how I’d miss riding on his motorcycle, hugging his waist. I thought about all the stuffed toys and dolls I had left behind. How would I explain my absence to them when I saw them again? If I saw them again.
I fell asleep and started dreaming. In my dream, Appa called me—kutti chellam, sweet little one. His voice was a tender whisper. He had the stuffed bear with him—the white one with pink ears. I reached out. Appa pulled me into his arms. I nuzzled my face in the warm space between his neck and shoulder, squeezing the bear as tightly as he was squeezing me. He smelled of sweat and Liril soap.
When I opened my eyes, I was in the auto rickshaw again, shivering. The driver caught my eyes and winked conspiratorially. —See, I saved you, he said with a wolfish smile. —From that oodugari.
That runaway, that whore.
Confused, I turned to Amma. But it was Appa sitting next to me. He squeezed my hand, his gold ring digging into my palm.
Read more by purchasing our Winter 2025 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Hema Padhu’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Pinch, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, American Literary Review, Litro Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an Indian immigrant living in San Francisco. She is currently at work on a linked stories collection.
