Cosmo Short Stories: "You Can Be Anything You Choose"

“Till the end of the pitted and dusty lane, she was a dry, brown leaf swiftly floating down a clear stream. Part of it was easy, the part about being brown. ‘Brown as mud and common as mud,’ Aaji would scream every morning waking her up. The rest of the way, down the row of tiny rooms lining the pond with water the colour of old oil and ducks like old cotton spilling from Aaji’s quilt, she was an earthen pot filled with cool, gently rippling water. Once she was out of the earshot of the jeering boys yelling obscenities, she could select from a wide array of choices—she could be the pretty red car parked at the curb, the striped kitten walking on tiptoes along the boundary of the old bungalow, blue shadow of a chalk-white seagull. Anything, absolutely anything. The possibilities were limitless. She chose to be a pale spot of sunlight gliding along the dark tar road till she reached the big intersection and crossed into the maze of sunless lanes. She couldn’t be a pale spot of sunlight any longer. She had to hand over the steel box with two meals to Aai, who worked the early shift at the municipal hospital. Aai was in the main hall, resting between rounds of swabbing the floor and cleaning the sh*t of the sick. She always smelt of phenyl, and incense smoke, and sweat. ‘You are late again,’ her mother took the box from her hands, ‘My break’s over’. She lowered her eyes and considered turning herself into a broom that Aai would pick up in a moment to sweep the wards. ‘Get going,’ Aai said and walked away.

The woman with the soft, pretty face visited from time to time and brought packets of snacks, bottled juice, plastic flip-flops, and picture books for them. ‘You can be anything you choose to be,’ she had said one day, ‘absolutely anything’. She had listened attentively even as other children had sniggered. ‘You just need to work hard on it and be focused.’

‘Could I be you?’ She had wanted to ask, but instead blurted, ‘Could I be an ant?’ She had wished to be an ant many times and disappear wherever the ants disappeared at the first sign of disturbance. Ants were tiny and invisible and safe.

Amidst more sniggers the woman had looked at her with her pretty eyes that were not puffy, nor their whites veined with red. ‘Sure, if you like. But wouldn’t you rather be you?’

The sniggers had turned into guffaws of derisive laughter. ‘Who’d like to be her? Her drunkard father beats the cr*p out of her mother every day! Her mother cleans latrines! Her brother fell down a borewell and squealed for hours like a sewer-rat! She is a half-wit! Can’t speak without stuttering like a toad!’ They were right. Who’d want to be her, brown and common as mud? The woman had continued to look at her.

Outside in the lane the children had kicked pebbles and sand at her— ‘I...I...I w...w...want...’ they had mimicked.

‘Hey, you there, ant! Watch out, I might step on you!’ 

‘She is crazy like goat-sh*t!’

‘Imbecile! She believed that woman! Listen wood-brain, it is just some nonsense people like her say. It isn’t true!’

She had turned away from them. Despite what they had said, she wasn’t a fool. She could tell when people were lying and when they were telling the truth better than all of them.

Later that night she sat alone on the broken-down steps of the pond. ‘Do you still want to be an ant?’ She had turned to find the woman with the pretty, soft face beside her. ‘Shall I show
you how?’

She watched Aai enter the dark corridor beyond the hospital’s lobby. Then, turning into a petal, she floated away.”

 

Author Anukriti Upadhyay