DEVAKI DEVAY

2022 Prose Contest Second Runner-Up

Ayurvedic Puberty

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When I first started to grow there was pain. My body always changed at night, when it thought I was asleep, crumbling dry and papery at the toes like reptilian shedding. My mother slept next to me on a cloth mat loomed with a thousand shimmering threads, loose and weaving rivers under the moon. When the whine in my throat escaped through a sliver beneath my wet lip my mother would curl up into the air, the drowsy dark, and arch herself over my tendons. Her strong red fingers plunged to the thin bone, excavating. Rock in the cool sand, the gritty wind of her breath. 

The growing began to go wrong. Worst were my lungs, mounds of dough sucking oxygen dry like sour-purple jamun, so all breath was a clenched fist. A body too small for the big air, my mother said. Again when night fell I was heaving from the bottom of an ocean. My mother smeared her fingers with sharp-scented white paste and branded my chest, Vicks, she called it, slabs of ice to slice open the trachea. A creak from my father’s room resounded. It twisted the building, apartment walls cracking their cement backs. My mother went completely still. The frost in her jar began to boil. 

When sleep drifted into the blue sky my mother would sweep me into the morning to take the fresh day on my tongue like a newborn, forget about it all, capture a robin between my palms and let it go just to feel the force of its flutter, the muscle. In an open field I leapt barefoot over a fence into the mud, took fistfuls of leaves off the trees bowing their ornaments to my cheeks. This leaf smells just like the ice, I told my mother, she called it eucalyptus, I dug my heels into that tree to climb, scraped my knee against the eucalyptus-bark and rubbed my thumb over the eucalyptus-blood. A bone glinted from the cut, gleaming white, finally free. 

* * *

Once I began to breathe my legs ballooned with a thousand boils like bulging lychee skin. They glistened with oil, tiny red pearls scattered over my chest, the closed lips of my thighs, my clumsy just-formed hips. My mother put me shivering and naked in the dusty shadow of a closet, undressed it, picked it clean down to its newspaper linings. There was a chicory-brown clay stick laying limply in a stone bowl. She licked her fingers and ground the powder in front of me, the branch shrinking slowly into the rock, teardrops settling the dry clouds to form a paste. This was slathered on me, with worry, what to do with a baby like this, where to go? 

The hospital brimmed with toothpaste-white light, blinding, peering into my pores. A doctor held me sweetly and cooed like a pigeon. I heard my father’s deep breathing creep under the crevice of the door like a boneless cat, my mother trembling beneath him. I drifted into a dream. In my dream the doctor delivered the verdict: her body is rejecting the American air, there’s nothing we can do. In my dream my mother sobbed and my father held her gently. In my dream I unfurled his hands searching for his rage only to find a sparrow singing softly over oceans.  

My father said I didn’t have enough heat. Sugar so deep it scrapes the scales off my tongue, that would make me well. The jars he brought home were thick glass, swinging pendulously in his arms, their copper lids twisting red half-moons into his palms. A metal cradle of gulkand down my throat, the dry rose petals curled like cockroaches in sweet syrup. Chyavanprash too, gooseberry jam laced with metal and seeds pricking at my teeth, a stinging scorpion. Fire in my throat. My mother was a ghost behind him as he fed me, her dark eyes flooding into the early winter sunset. I was angry enough to swallow, fill my gut with anything, make myself stronger than her.

* * *

The pain had trickled deep into my bones. I was old enough now to keep it like scalding blades of sun slipped under pockets of skin. No one knew. I lifted a yawning box from the trunk to the mouth of my mother’s apartment. She sat barefoot at the door’s rim, her feet tickled by the welcome mat, jeans rolled and tucked to her knees. There were her fingers sinking deep in black soil and clay pots bursting with buds of green. Crumbs of soil clung to her wet wrists, tumbling down to the pink patio layered with cool green leaves full of summer chlorophyll. 

Beside her was a golden pot of tiger balm. I sat in its place, lifting it up, the two of us kissing the ground, brushing shoulders, shoulders of clouds. The crevice between us held a thousand skies. I missed her. My mother watched me tense the knobs of my knuckles, the knife-bones of my wrist. I had let my hair grow to bushes along my legs, in the valleys of my arms, tightening and filling like a tree. I was afraid of how much she knew she didn’t know, how peacefully she knew it, how the sparrows tumbled with leaves and flowers when the breeze blew, forgetting their wings. 

I pressed the ointment in a red patch over my bones. It burnt like a fresh bite into ginger root — that was the remedy, a second pain to distract from the first. 

* * *

There are many Hindi words which hold the syllables to my name. I hear them when my mother slips into song in the morning, the notes tumbling from her tongue in shards of glass, piercing and beautiful. I love how it sounds in pieces, reminiscent, a bluebird lighting at the windowsill to finish off our crumbs of bread. My mother pours a chest of water to her seedlings, and I wonder how, how can she grow another thing, knowing that my name is only her name for me?

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