It's 3:43 AM and I'm awake because of a dream. I'd gone to get water, and on my way back to bed, instead of falling back asleep, I found myself lying there with my eyes open, thinking about second grade. My class was small, the kind of age where you naturally know everyone around you, and they know you. Some of the best teachers I've ever had, looking back.
There was a girl in our class named Soumya. She was often unwell, though none of us -- kids that we were -- really understood with what. There was a delicate, fragile look about her, the kind that made it obvious something wasn't quite right even if no one said it out loud. She had curly hair with a slight oily sheen to it, looked good on her. She was tall too, taller than some of the boys, definitely taller than me. And she was pretty. I don't think any of us would have said that out loud at that age either, but I remember thinking it, even then.
Some weeks she just wouldn't come to school at all. And I remember certain afternoons after lunch or during recess, when the rest of us would go out to play, she often wouldn't join in. She'd just sit there with some of the other girls, talking, while everyone else ran around. Looking back, I don't think she played much at all.
We'd known her since kindergarten -- lower kindergarten, upper kindergarten, all the way through -- so her absences were just part of the rhythm of things, until one day in second grade, our teachers sat us down and told us she had passed away.
This was the first time I was sitting with something like death, and doing it alongside a whole group of friends, not alone. I wrote about my Achamma in my last post, and now here I am again, circling the same thing from a different year of my life.
The school took our whole class to her house to pay our respects to her family -- she lived close by, so it wasn't far. I still have these fragments of that visit. Walking there as a group. The quiet inside her home. That fragile, delicate look she always had.
And whenever she crosses my mind, there's a poem that comes with her -- Mambazham, a well-known Malayalam poem about a mother grieving her child.
In it, a mango falls from the tree in her courtyard, and it undoes her because months earlier, her son had run to her with mango buds in his hands, proud of some small game he'd made of them, only for her to scold him for picking them too soon. He never got to see them ripen. The poem turns that small domestic moment into something unbearable: a mother standing in her courtyard while other children chase fallen mangoes nearby, and hers is gone.
By the end, she carries that same fruit to his grave and asks him to come back and eat it, the way he always did when called. And the wind that answers her is him.
വരിക കണ്ണാൽ കാണാൻ വയ്യത്തൊരെൻ കണ്ണനേ
സരസാ നുകർന്നാലും തായ തൻ നൈവേദ്യം നീ
ഒരു തൈകുളിർക്കാറ്റായരികത്തണഞ്ഞപ്പോൾ
അരുമക്കുഞ്ഞിൻ പ്രാണൻ അമ്മയെ ആശ്ലേഷിച്ചു...
I think I'll go back to sleep now. But if she finds her way into another dream, I hope I get to talk to her this time -- not just remember her.