Parth Shah
Nimbu mirchi
Beds are nocturnal objects. Staying in bed too long after dawn is cruel, Shakuntala’s uncle would say. The bed needs rest, too. As a child, she obliged. She rose before the adults in the house, showering with the first burst of hot water.
Decades later, she lay beneath her blankets like a fossil. Depressed, alone, waiting for excavation.
Shakuntala was late for work. The stove clock read 10:30 a.m. when she finally stepped outside. The asphalt was vivid from the full night of rain, the air humid. She walked down the street and crossed behind the house that crested her cul-de-sac.
A line of loud mallards waddled out of the creek and onto the wet grass, marching around a crown of beer cans. Shakuntala wiped the purple maple leaves off her meditation bench and crossed her legs. Meditation was prescribed by her uncle, to soften her to the incoming workday. Shakuntala was not good at meditating but she wanted to be. She wanted to be a person in the present, living without lingering or longing. She wanted to be a person who doesn’t set their clocks fifteen minutes fast. She wanted to be a person who doesn’t fight time.
She straightened her spine, closed her eyes, and aligned her breaths with the babbling ducks.
Her uncle once told her a story about a man who built a house of rocks. The rocks came from the bottom of the river and were bearded in moss and algae. Neighbors rose early to help the man haul the rocks out of the water. Instead of building a house they built a castle, vast enough for the village to share. The castle had no turrets or spires. The castle was a mound. The villagers celebrated their transformation of huts into a kingdom––a new kind of kingdom, with no royalty, no monarchy. But when the spring rains came, their celebrations ceased. The river was moving fast, flooding outside the banks. Soon, the river was trying to come inside. We cannot return your rocks, the man shouted as the water knocked on the doors. You’ve taken from my culture, the river replied, what will you give me from yours? The man told the others to gather their pots and pans. They waded into the water and threw their cookware in, and the river contracted some. Then they gave the river their furniture, their clothing, their copper. When every last treasure was in the water, the river returned to her reliable restrained hum.
The folktale followed Shakuntala to the office. The building Shakuntala worked in was a brutalist gray box, like a Rubik’s Cube with all the stickers peeled off. Outside, the pale stucco begged to be power washed. Inside, fluorescent lights and plywood paneling. Aside from the occasional transom, there were no windows in her wing of the building.
Shakuntala used to describe her office as snug. This was the only place she had ever worked––not counting the weekends in high school spent at her family’s Exxon. The job spawned from her undergrad work-study. Degree analyst––she wrote reminder emails to students about graduation prerequisites. When she first started full time, she was thrilled to have such a boring job. A straightforward, safe paycheck, shielded from the dangers of entropy. Now she feared the job had irreversibly dulled her.
A few years back, an old classmate (now a field biologist) sent Shakuntala a photo of a tadpole that failed to become a frog. Instead, the creature swelled and elongated like a plantain. Shakuntala felt pity for the neither-tadpole-nor-frog. Awe, too. The postcard was taped to the bottom corner of her computer monitor. She still hadn’t written back to that friend.
“Shakookoo.”
Shakuntala’s cubicle mate never asked for consent to nickname. She had started working there that summer, a few weeks after graduating from the university. Her grandfather had a dorm named after him. Shakuntala lived in that high-rise her first two years of undergrad.
“What’s for lunch, work wife?”
Shakuntala tilted her salsa jar, revealing her minestrone.
“Remember my cousin, the wellness influencer? She’s going to India next month for a retreat. I told her you’d have recs. She’s going . . . she’s going somewhere here.”
She flashed her phone screen to Shakuntala. A map zoomed in on Rajasthan. The state where her mother and uncle grew up. The last time she was there was the summer after sixth grade (or was it seventh?) A memory of a picnic surfaced in her mind: cross-legged in the shade, a pearl of rice in her fingers, her mother telling her not to be disturbed by the carpenter ants on her banana leaf plate.
“Fall and winter are the best seasons to go. Weatherwise. Not as hot.”
Shakuntala kept her eyes on her lukewarm soup as she spoke. Her coworker couldn’t hear the yearning in her voice.
“Girl, I can’t tell her that. You know we love the sun. When we came back from spring break in Hawai’i, I swear . . . we were your color. See?”
Soup in hand, Shakuntala walked out the room and into the kitchen next door. Her cubicle mate followed like a rolling suitcase. She didn’t flinch when Shakuntala slammed the microwave shut.
“Shakookoo, I need your help. Apparently I’m the top pick for the new comms opening in study abroad. Did you see that posting? Someone to be the point-of-contact with all the sister universities around the world.”
Shakuntala pressed into the linoleum counter. She had emailed their manager months ago about transferring to the study abroad office, when gossip first came her way about that position.
“They’re offering you the promotion? You haven’t even been here six months.”
“I know, and I’m flattered and all, but,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, “I kinda wanna quit. My uncle is building houses in Maui, and he said I could come down there and help with the redevelopment project. You know, after the big volcano eruption? I just want to make the world a better place. I really wanna go, at least for a few years.”
“Don’t move to Maui.” Shakuntala said the words with heat.
“Yeah, I know you’re from a strict background, but I’m really feeling called to devote at least my early twenties to volunteering.”
“You think that’s volunteering?” A bubble of soup popped in the microwave. Tomato and parsley freckled the walls. Shakuntala had forgotten to use the cover. “If you want to volunteer, do it here. If you go to Maui, you’ll be even more of an asshole colonizer than you already are.”
The tears began to stream, and Shakuntala felt an apology skittering up her throat like a spider. She swallowed it fast and walked out of the kitchen, down the hall to her manager’s office.
Shakuntala used to split rent with her uncle. This past year was his personal renaissance: he sold the family gas station and enrolled in a coding bootcamp. At the end of summer, he accepted a tech job across the country, and moved out. Shakuntala had yet to visit. He wanted her to come in December, to spend the winter holidays together. It was strange that he worked as a software engineer because he was otherwise a Luddite. He liked to make purchases in cash, he used his phone for phone calls only. When she called him that afternoon, he first commended her on quitting because he assumed there was a twist coming in her story, where she’d say she quit because she got offered a new, superior job.
Then his words came out hot. He called her résumé weak. He lectured her about professionalism.
“And why did you need to call this girl an asshole colonizer? White people are the colonizers, and we’re settlers. We’re not as different as you think.”
Shakuntala said they wouldn’t see eye to eye. He was an immigrant, she was an anchor baby.
“Get out of bed.”
“How did you know I’m still in bed?”
“From the sound of your voice. Tell me, how much money have you saved up?”
Shakuntala had enough in her bank account to make rent for two, three months tops. Her uncle took a deep breath in before giving her his financial advice.
“Go make a nimbu mirchi.”
“Lemon pepper?”
“You’ve seen them before. Lemon and green chilis, hanging on a string. You need to ward away evil eye.”
He was right. She’d seen the nimbu mirchi work for him. It reminded her of a bird toy, something she’d once seen dangling inside the cage of a parakeet. He hung it up at the gas station after a robber shot her mother.
When the rain paused in the late afternoon, Shakuntala put on boots and chose a tote bag. She unbraided the white cord of her earbuds for two blocks before putting them in and dissociating into her music. Bollywood oldies. She could barely understand spoken Hindi, but in songs, understanding the words doesn’t matter. The walk to the Indian grocery was less than twenty minutes. When she was growing up, they had to drive nearly an hour to buy masala. At the end of every trip, her mother lingered at the register, studying the binder of pirated DVDs.
On the other side of the automatic doors, the smell of basmati. Shakuntala grabbed a hand basket and floated past the grains, into the snack aisle. Dazzled by the metallic packaging, magenta, marigold, cerulean, she dumped a dozen different items into her basket.
A bell chimed through Shakuntala’s headphones. The music stopped. Her phone was out of battery. Sober, she restocked all but one packet of cookies, then made her way to the chilis.
On the walk back home, without her soundtrack, Shakuntala kept far from the curb, startled by the sound of tires cutting puddles. The light poles were hairy with staples and verses of capitalized poetry, Jesus Saves, We’ll Buy Your House, Cash For Diabetic Test Strips. Waiting at the long crosswalk, Shakuntala opened the sleeve of pineapple cookies. She chewed them like rice, taking only two bites before swallowing.
The cookies tasted creamier when she was a kid.
Shakuntala discarded the topaz wrapper into the last trash bin before her house, gently releasing the foil into a bog of wet coffee cups.
At the kitchen table, Shakuntala laced black thread through a needle and punctured the amphibious skin of the first chili. She sewed the remaining peppers before threading the needle into the center of the lemon and tying a knot. A searing drop of citrus swam into a hangnail. Shakuntala took the nimbu mirchi outside and hammered the talisman over the door frame.
Above the spicy mistletoe, cement clouds concealed the sunset.
The stove clock was blinking when Shakuntala came down to the kitchen in the morning. Buttery sunlight bounced off the counters. She looked out the window above the sink into the backyard, a cemetery of branches under a clear sky.
Shakuntala put on her garden gloves and went outside.
Birdsong. Chickadees and cardinals and squirrels shared the seed hill created by the broken bird feeder. Earthworms groped the damp earth. Shakuntala lifted branches and flower pot pieces, assembling the debris in piles by her compost bin.
A skink crawled through a pyramid of tree limbs. When the lizard noticed Shakuntala’s eyes on his electric blue tail, he rocketed out of the pile and around the house. Shakuntala followed.
While her neighbors’ front yards were tousled from the thunderstorm, Shakuntala’s small lawn was relatively tidy, free of stray branches. She looked up at her door and thanked the nimbu mirchi.
Tipped over in the middle of the street, a shopping cart. The metal frame shimmered with dew. Shakuntala lifted it upright.
The road was coated in garbage: plastic bags leaking their juices onto the asphalt, loose egg cartons, cardboard––lots of cardboard. Shakuntala picked up a box, damp and soft, and put it into the cart. She uprighted her neighbors’ runaway trash cans. She patrolled the street like a vacuum, collecting loose refuse.
At the stop sign, Shakuntala found her pineapple cookie wrapper from the day before. In an alleyway, a broken television satellite. She thought about all the stories and songs the plastic channeled from outer space.
This could be made into a bird bath, she said to herself as she hauled the gray disc into the cart.
The cart was full.
The handle said Food Lion. To avoid getting further splashed by cars, Shakuntala decided to take the scenic, unpaved route to the grocery store––a ten minute walk along the creek.
The honking surprised Shakuntala when she pushed past her meditation bench. A group of geese on the other bank. Emerald turds studded the ground. She remembered learning about the resilience of geese in an avian biology class, how subpopulations abandoned nomadism and claimed new homelands. A pair of geese stared at her, their heads tilted. She thought they sensed shared kinship, until they began flapping their wings, hissing.
Dejected, she pushed forward, bowing her head in respect of their territory. Mud caked around the wheels. Moving the cart over the mushy earth required more strength than Shakuntala anticipated. Her empty stomach grumbled, vibrating into her fingers.
I should’ve called her an invasive species, Shakuntala thought to herself, replaying her last day at work, energizing herself with anger: she was always crossing boundaries . . . she says she wants to make the world a better place . . . probably to cover up the crimes of her ancestors . . . she would never get her hands dirty like this . . . if you want to make the world a better place, you have to start with the world around you . . . stupid colonizer bitch . . .
Shakuntala stepped into a spiderweb. She spat and pawed at her face. Spiders are the world’s finest architects, her uncle would say. Webs are lucky omens.
Her phone vibrated and she swallowed the threads on her tongue. A series of texts from her uncle:
Shaku. End your lease. Become a crane. Migrate to me. Your mother would tell you it’s time to leave.
He sent a picture of a lime green Victorian house with a For Sale sign out front.
I’ll buy this house and you can have the whole top floor to yourself.
A rain droplet magnified the text bubbles.
Shakuntala felt an unexpected buoyancy. He’d mentioned being ready to buy a home, but she didn’t know San Francisco proper was in his budget.
The grocery store parking lot was just up the hill. Shakuntala sent her remaining brawn into her thighs. She was so ready to be done with this impromptu volunteer project. She pushed with her eyes closed, letting her imagination take her to a different time zone, three hours in the past, in the fog. Her uncle wouldn’t make her pay rent. She would be free to focus on herself, on transforming.
She thought of the picture taped to her work monitor, of the neither-tad- pole-nor-frog. Shakuntala was ready to escape limbo.
Thunder shrieked through the roots. Shakuntala screamed, a reflex, and released her hands from the handle. She ducked down, barely dodging the shopping cart as it careened backwards into the creek.
Shakuntala crossed her legs. The rain melted into her skin. She focused on her breaths, and watched the trash surf.