With my thread, I write murderer. I write colonizer when I patch up the soldier’s clothes and I hope they wear it to their graves.

Ma, you taught me threadwork charms on a kitchen smock, just like your mother taught you. On your lap, I learnt to embroider love onto my future husband’s shirt for when he goes off to fish. I would bind hope to his heart on rough days and when the ocean lashed his cheek with cold sprays, maybe he would remember my warm hand and follow the thread back home.

I am not sure if I believe in these old housewife’s charms anymore. The law of nature is clear. Swords cut through gentle threads and no husbands return home.

Still, like every girl, I learnt to sew well with steady hands, to repair old, worn away charms and to knot prayers onto our fishing nets. You taught me how the prayers for fortune were really prayers for trickery. A good trick catches enough fish to eat, to gorge ourselves on, to salt and pickle and keep.

It has served me well to know it. They need women to mend, to cook and clean, which keeps me and Janani alive long enough for the priests to find us. When I am scrubbing the black off the pots, one of them approaches me with a rosary and asks if I want for salvation.

“By who?” I ask, but he doesn’t understand my language well. He teaches me to say yes in his tongue. It would do me and my daughter well, he says. 

Yes, yes, I do. I want to be saved.

So he saves me with a few words. He cleanses me of the sin of desire, gives me a rosary to carry and gives me to a good soldier for taming.

“Keep him well and you are saved,” he promises, holding my hands, with black still under my nails.

The soldier does not … hold my hands.

Here, my bed is warm, if not gentle, and I have many clothes to mend. I meet and crouch with other girls. We share our labors. I gut the fish and make my Janani roll flat breads for the camp. Someone else bakes them on the open flames. We are better off, we tell each other. Better this than dead, like our family, like other heathens.

Over time, the girls talk of home and what their mothers have taught them. They teach me charms from their mothers and aunts and I grasp what I am collecting on my smock. I am building a language.

When I embroider nettle on the sleeves, the soldier laughs at my art. What else can he expect of a small Veran girl won of conquest? She will always be uncivilized, believing in quaint superstitions. Still, he indulges me in my quirks. 

The invaders never bother to learn the language of the people they crush, so I don’t bother to hide what I am writing. There is not much my needle and thread can do, but if as wives we can write prayers, then as concubines, can we not write curses?

“Do you want to learn?” I ask Janani, who has your sharp eyes and quick hands. She is just as young as I was when you taught them to me, Ma. Perhaps it is time. 

I teach her the beneficial ones first. The ones you embroidered all over my smock to remember. One for the first night so she bleeds none at all. One for childbirth so she bleeds slow. One for endless dreams. 

You thought much good of the world and of my future. If you were alive, you would say, this will end, Masha, and I would believe you.

I teach her trickery too. I teach her to soak the thread in blood that drips from their armor and to sew terror into their heart. I teach her to smear the thread with molasses, so their feet slip the ground in the face of an arrow. 

Upon their return from razing our neighboring homes and shores, we smear the thread with filth so the wounds fester and rot. If our hand can draw the grace of a god, I am betting on the ire of a demon. 

Someday I will take her back to the life we lost. Until then, I teach her to remember. I teach her to remember you, Ma, and what it means to remember.

* * *

Ⓒ Vijayalaxmi Samal