Something Big, Something Monumental

Subarna Mohanty 

My doctor says I’m a very healthy woman, but I think I'm becoming sand. 

I cannot say when the change started. It could have been on Monday morning when after my husband left for work, I went to the vegetable market near the big roundabout in the town. 

I had to buy coriander leaves. I had run out of them and my husband prefers them so much that if the curry served alongside his chapattis did not have those tender, green things sprinkled on it, he almost wouldn’t eat dinner and then not speak to me for a day or two. 

‘I work so hard for us’, he says when his dinner is cold or stale or both, ‘At least make the freshest possible dinner for me.’ 

He is not an unreasonable man. He is a chemist in a drug company and is just particular about certain things in life. 

So, I went to a shop in the market where, by picking up a bunch of uprooted coriander stems by their stalks, I examined their roots. The more soil the roots hold, the longer the coriander remains fresh and alive. Mother had taught me this, before my marriage, alongside many other things of course. 

The fleshy roots had just the right amount of wet, dark soil sticking to them, which made me so happy that I jumped a little bit in excitement and waved the coriander stems mid-air, between my face and that of the vegetable seller. 

The change could have started then. It was a damp and drowsy day. Whatever little wind blew, blew near the ground. Some of the soil from the thin, brown roots could have flown into my nose, made their way through the nostrils and reached my lungs. I remember coughing and sneezing. 

The woman standing beside me, pressing her long nails into a beetroot to check its firmness, had shaken her head unwittingly and said in my general direction, “Nowadays there is so much pollution in the town. Especially in this season.” I had smiled politely and left with coriander in my shopping bag and dirt likely lodged somewhere inside my body. 

Or the change could have happened gradually. Little by little. Like most things in life.

They are erecting a new building in front of ours. 

The building in which we live, even though it houses around ten families of employees of the drug company, is old and crumbling. Its mustard-yellow walls are peeling and spalling at the corners. Its slabs are breaking away at their edges. 

The outer walls have stains of spit and betel-juice that have, over the years, become black and brown under the sun. During monsoon, the wooden window frames in the apartments get too swollen for the worn-out windows to be closed properly, and in the summer, they shrink so much that the widened gaps underneath them blow all the hot wind in from outside. 

Downstairs, stray cats and dogs sleep under the parked cars at night and trouble the residents during the day. None of the residents linger in the corridors and the stairwells for longer than needed because of the stench of animal stool and urine that wafts up from there. 

Everyone in our building here has been frenzied and excited about the newer one being built across the street, even though it has nothing to do with them or their lives. 

The wives talk about it when they meet in the market area, the husbands talk about it amongst themselves in the office during lunch breaks.Then they come home and talk about it with their wives at their dinner tables. 

“I wonder how long they’ll take to finish it. Even the Taj Mahal was built faster than this.” 

“I wonder who will stay there.” 

“Have you seen the slabs of white marble they have brought in to use as flooring!” 

“Flooring? I’ve heard they’ll use marble on the walls too. It’ll take months to polish all of them.” 

“Have you seen how much sand has arrived till now?”

“They have hired hundreds of men; my husband heard it from his boss.”

“Hundreds? But I’ve only seen a handful there. Always loitering there, doing no work, just sitting.”

“Leave the men. The trucks! The trucks that come in and go out at night, are a real nuisance. They honk their horns and wake up my baby. Then my husband wakes up and gets cranky too. I hope they finish building it soon.”

The construction has been going on for months. 

First, a few men with saws and axes had chopped down the lush guava tree that stood in the middle of the vacant plot. Then the overgrown bushes and the wild grasses growing around it had withered away and died on their own. Eventually the loud men and big whirring machines arrived. 

From our tiny two-by-two balcony and through the wire mesh that runs around it, I watched the commotion for months. I have seen massive trucks carrying sand and boulders arrive in a file, unload it all onto the road and the edges of the plot, and then leave with their bellies empty. I have seen the workers later measuring the sand, mixing it with cement and water, and using it to glue parts of the building together. Brick by brick, they built walls, tall pillars, slabs, floors, and ceilings. 

Like all the other wives in the building, I liked watching it all. Something being built from scratch. 

But later, my husband said that it was not comely for the wife of a chemist to ogle at lowly workers from her balcony throughout the day. So, I stopped. 

Even though I had nowhere else to go after finishing the household chores, I stopped. Mother had taught me that a good wife obeys her husband and does as she is told to do. 

Moreover, my husband is a smart man. He has gone on tours to faraway places, representing his company. He knows the world better than me. 

So, I shut the windows and doors, even the one that opened into the balcony, and sat inside, thinking about the dead guava tree. Did the men who cut it down atleast remember how green it was?

I have been inside since then, except for my routine tours to the market. 

The dust from the machines and construction must have seeped into the apartment through the many cracks and crevices. The air must have lifted it up and carried it inside, then mixed it with the food I ate and the water I drank. That is how the sand must have gotten in and that is how the change could have begun and proceeded, day by day. Little by little. 

Even though I’m unsure about its origins, I’m certain about when the symptoms first showed. 

Day before yesterday, after dinner, my stomach turned. Whatever I had eaten, along with bile and mucus rose to my throat. From the bed, I had to run to the bathroom, which startled my husband. He was engrossed in his nighttime reading. 

“What happened?” he called from across the house. 

“I think I’m sick,” I answered and threw up into the toilet bowl. 

Along with vomit and tiny bits of shredded coriander that floated in the water in the bowl, there were sand particles. Ochre-yellow, grainy, some covered in vomit, some glistening in the dim light of the bathroom. 

“What did you eat?” 

“Nothing except what you ate.”

When I raised my head and looked in the mirror that hung above the wash basin, I saw some of the sand crusted on my face, near the rims of my lips. I also felt some sand scraping my inner cheeks and some rolling between my teeth and my tongue. My mouth tasted like a memory from childhood. 

I spit it all out and thoroughly rinsed my mouth. But then along with saliva, more sand particles emerged. The more I washed, the more sand filled my mouth. 

I came out of the bathroom and called my mother, like I always do when I’m sick. I cried and told her I was feeling funny. 

“Funny how?” she asked. 

“I don’t know. I’ve never felt like this.”

“Like what exactly?”

“Like something is churning inside me. Something is shifting.”

         Mother laughed and asked me when I had last bled. 

“You two were trying, weren’t you?” she said and muttered a prayer. 

         Yes, we have been trying. For years now. My husband always wanted a child. 

“No, it’s not that. I’m just not feeling good. Suddenly the air is very cold. And it’s only August now, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s August. But don’t you have a testing kit? Take a test.”

“No, this is different.”

I assured my mother that what she was thinking was not the case and hung up.

         Back in bed, I told my husband I was feeling cold. He didn’t look up from his book, only nodded. I pulled the blanket up to my neck and curled into a ball inside it. My feet and palms had started freezing. 

“It feels like it is a deep, cold winter and I am standing stark naked in a snowstorm,” I said and held out my hand to him so that he could touch it. 

“A windstorm?” he said, his eyes still fixed on the page of his book. 

“Yes,” I said as my teeth chattered. 

“When did you ever see a snowstorm?” he said as he closed his book and kept it aside, “Your tiny village was by the sea where nothing ever happened except some rain. And this town, it has been the same since we moved here. When did you ever see a snowstorm?”

He laughed and rolled his eyes. 

“Are you really not feeling good?” 

I nodded and pulled the blanket over my head. He pulled it down and called me a little bird (my little bird).

“If you are really feeling sick tonight, then sleep. We will try in the morning. I too am pretty spent because of the long day. Let us sleep now.” 

         So, we slept and, in the morning, I woke up feeling exactly the opposite.

I was hot, dehydrated and sweating profusely. My throat pinched and squeezed. Like a crisp sandpaper was stuck in there. The joints in my elbows and knees clicked and cracked when I tried moving them. 

When I got up and tried to walk, a piercing pain swarmed throughout my body, like a thousand nails were pricking me from inside. The skin on my hand was dry, wrinkled, and yellow. It looked like a parched riverbed with etchings of water that once was. 

I took a long shower, but the water that touched my skin just seeped into my body and disappeared. 

I came out, switched on the air conditioner, and stood in front of it, not wearing anything, but my conch bangles and silver toe rings, which a married woman with a living husband must never take off. Another of Mother’s lessons.

But nothing helped.

         “What are you doing?” my husband said from bed when he woke up.

         “Something is really wrong with me,” my voice trembled. I turned to look at him. I wanted to cry but any tears had dried up. 

“Where are your clothes? Why are you standing there like that?” He rubbed his eyes and sat up against the bedpost. 

“I think I'm becoming sand.” 

“Sand?”

“I know how it sounds, but…look at me!”

His expression didn’t change. He kept rubbing his eyes and yawning. 

“Do you want to go to the beach?” he asked absent-mindedly. 

“No!” I said and turned to look at myself in the full-length mirror in the room. I ran my fingers over my lower stomach where long lines had appeared that made my skin look like a cracked sand bed. 

         “Don't worry. If you feel you are sick, I’ll take you to the doctor today. I can take a half-day off. But I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said and got up on his knees. He crawled to the edge of the bed nearest to me and pulled me into bed saying, “Come on. Right now, we must try. This is more important.”

He got on top of me and pulled down his pants. 

        I said no. 

I said yes. 

I said nothing and stared at the brown water seepage marks on the ceiling above me, when he pushed and pushed inside me. I thought of the half-formed building outside. I thought of how big it would become when it’s done, and how small I felt then and there when my body was no longer mine.

Did my rough, gritty skin not scratch and wound my husband when his hands hungrily pressed into it? Did my torso that was burning hot and red, not singe his legs that pinned it down every time it tried to push him and get up? 

“Stay little bird, stay. This will only take a minute,” he muttered in a voice that either didn’t seem like it was his. Or it was exactly like his. I couldn’t say. This is important, he kept saying. Or maybe he didn’t and I kept hearing that.

I was thirsty, so thirsty. I wanted to scream, but I was out of breath and out of words. My husband, who is a man of his word, did not stop.  

How did my desperation for water not drown him?

*

Once, my mother and I went to a beach. It was summer and we were all alone in the house. I don’t remember where everyone else had gone and why we hadn’t accompanied them. But I remember we both had never seen the sea and the beach was just two bus rides away. 

So, my mother had worn her best saree and put on a blue bindi that matched the blue border of the saree. She wasn’t allowed to have a bindi that was any colour other than red because she was married, but she broke that rule for that one day. She dressed me in a long white frock that had frills at its waist. 

I was nine and my mother was young. 

I had taken a glass jar with me- an empty jam bottle, the size of my tiny fist. At the beach, I had waded waist-high into the sea water and filled the jar to its brim. 

Mother had been sitting far away on the shore, using a towel as a makeshift mat. I ran close to the water and she stayed away, sitting safely on the sand. 

When the sun began to set, she called me back. I ran to her and showed her the glass jar filled with seawater. She said that if I had carried the jar to her without spilling any of its contents on the way, it meant I would become a good wife in the future. 

“Good wives can balance things well,” she said while getting up and patting dry sand off the towel she was sitting on. 

I sat down on the sand and looked at her, really looked at her. A girl looks at her mother like that once and something changes. It was one of those moments for me. 

The blue bindi on her forehead made her look very different from how she usually looked. She looked relaxed and unbothered.  

Then I turned to the sea that seemed much farther than it was and tipped the jar in my hand. I watched the seawater flow out and seep into the sand.

*

In the afternoon, my husband drove me to the doctor’s clinic. He sat in the car and I went in. 

“You won't come in with me?” I asked before getting out of the car. 

“I wouldn't know what to say,” he said, and told me to go inside alone. 

As I got out, I felt extremely weak and drowsy. The scorching sun beat down on me and I had to drag myself through the parking area to reach the entry of the clinic. 

In the glass door of the clinic, I looked at myself only to realise how sunken and wrinkled my face looked. All moisture had evaporated from my body, all signs of life slowly disappearing. 

A nurse came into the examination room first and looked at me in horror. “Are you alright?” she said and gasped, “You look so weak. When did you last eat?” 

“This morning,” I said and she took my pulse. 

“And water?”

“I’m unable to drink water.”

“What do you mean?”

I didn’t say anything. 

“Your eyes, they are red. So red. Can you see me?” 

I nodded and gulped. 

“Can I touch you?” 

I said no and she went away. 

I touched my face, beneath my nose and above my lips. My fingers came away coated with dry, flaky sand. A small, eerie hollow remained under the nose. I couldn't see it, I feared touching it lest more of my body crumbled off. But I could feel its palpable presence. Like a broken tooth. 

A sense of dread took over me. I suddenly became too aware of anything around me that could brush against me and send shards of me crumbling away. 

A few minutes later, the doctor came in. He was a short, bald man, with a round face and small ears. The walls behind him and his tie are the same colour- lime green. Only one window in the room. No air, no ceiling fan. 

“I know your husband, we are in the drug business,” he said and chuckled. Then he took my temperature and put his serpentine stethoscope on my chest. 

“You are a very healthy woman. What’s the problem?” he asked. 

“Something is really wrong with me, can’t you see?” I said and touched my right cheek. 

“Did you eat something out of the ordinary?” 

“No.” 

“Then?”

“I don’t know.” 

“When did the symptoms start?”

“A few days ago.”

He turned his head and looked outside the window. He fiddled with his tie, whose lime-green colour looked white under the bright afternoon light.   

“I think I'm becoming sand,” I cried at last. 

“Why do you say so?” he said and looked at me, this time in earnest. 

“I am in pain,” I blurted out, “My bones, my joints are aching. My head is pounding. Something is changing inside me. I was cold last night and hot today. I’m parched, yet can’t drink water. I don’t know where all the water goes. My skin, my hair are all desiccated. Can’t you see? I’m a barren desert. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared, I’m scared.”

“Sand huh? How long have you been married?” He casually looked around the room. 

“Four years.”

“And babies?”

“None.”

“Why not?”

“We are trying.”

“Oh,” he said and shook his head.

“Do you want them?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“Maybe it does,” he said and sat down in the chair across from me. “Tell me, do you want them or not?”

“My husband does.”

“And you?”

“Does it matter?”

Then I told him about the half-formed new building across the street from our place.

“It’s so big, it makes me feel so small,” I said. 

“Must be a thing to behold then, huh?” he said and looked straight into my eyes. 

“Yes. And they use truckloads of sand to make it.”

“The only thing sand is good for,” he said, “No life can grow in it.”

I thought of the coriander roots and the soil attached to them even after they have been uprooted. The doctor then handed me a strip of white pills. 

“I’d generally write you a prescription, so that you can buy these from a store outside. But for your husband’s sake, I’ll save you the trouble. Take these once a day after eating.” 

“Will the change stop?” 

“It will, I promise,” he said, looking into my eyes again. 

I put the pills in my purse and dragged myself back to the car. 

“What did he say?” my husband asked as soon as I got in the car.

“He just gave these pills,” I said showing him the strip. He took it from me, flipped it over and read the name.  

“Oh these! These are to help you conceive. Did you tell him we are trying?”

“Yes, I did. But these are to make me stop the change. He told me so.” 

“No, these are for helping us. You must have misunderstood him, or misheard him,” he said and handed me back the strip. 

“No, he said this is for the change,” I said as he ran his hand over my head. 

“What ‘change’?”  he said and drew back his hand. 

The thing that's happening to me. The thing I was here for. I wanted to scream. 

“Changing into sand?” He turned the key to ignition.

“Yes,” I said meekly.

“You have a wild imagination, my little bird,” he said and started driving. 

When we reached home, he dropped me and left for work. I didn’t walk into the building at once and stood outside for a moment, thinking about the pills in my purse. 

Yes, it’ll stop. I promise. 

I assured myself that I had heard those words coming from the doctor’s mouth and as I did, I suddenly felt as small as I had in the morning. The sting of betrayal was more painful than the ache swarming through my body.

My husband is a smart man, after all. Only he could have known that the doctor’s ‘No life can grow in sand’ translated into ‘I know what’s hurting you better than you.’

I could not.

   *

I am standing on the street. Tilting my head as back as possible, I am looking at the half-built structure across from me. 

It is concrete-grey and looks rock-strong. Its pillars look like the trunks of giant trees, its walls thick as mountains. The iron rods, that are its bones, are probably not iron at all. 

For the time being, the machines on the ground are not whirring and stirring. The men, with their tired faces and hunched down shoulders, have spread their legs on the steps and are eating their lunches. Heaps of sand, stacks of bricks and bundles of rebar rods surround them.

The building towers over all of us - me, the workers and the passersby not knowing a thing about it. 

I have been standing here for a long time-  an unusually long amount of time for the wife of a chemist, and have been ogling at the structure and the men taking a break from building it. None of them have noticed. 

Or maybe one of them has. A man sitting on the lowest staircase with folded legs, raises his head from his lunch box and looks at me. He is bald like my doctor. He whispers something in the ears of the man next to him, who then looks up and they both laugh. 

“What are you eating?” I shout before I realise. A sharp pain radiates through the back of my head. 

The men don't say anything, only look at me, perplexed. Which I understand. 

So, I shout again, this time a little louder, “Do you have fresh coriander sprinkled on your curry?” 

Another jolt of ache, this time in my shoulders. 

From the men, silence again. But this time more heads rise from their stainless steel tiffin boxes. 

A mad woman screaming at them. They had to see. 

“What are you all building here?” I ask and try to ignore the intense pang that grips me at my neck and flows down to my stomach. I hear a faint snap, like a twig breaking, as I raise my hand and wave at the men. 

“Don't know exactly,” the bald man shouts back, waving his hand. A few of the men around him burst into laughter.  

The man next to him yells, “Something big, something monumental.”

A gust of wind blows and the hollow beneath my nose tingles. I take a step forward. A motorcycle whizzes past me and the resultant draft of wind, blows the tip of my nose off. 

It’s gone. Dissolved into the wind. No pain, no blood. 

Just the unsettling feeling of running out of time. My hands and legs seem only another current away from unravelling. 

Can I touch you? The nurse's words echo in my mind. Your eyes are red, so red.

I check both sides of the road and take another step forward. A few cars screech to a sudden halt beside me. I hear them, but I don't look at them. I focus on my steps. One, then another and then another. 

A part of me is still at the beach, this time with my husband. He is telling me he likes my frilled frock and gently stroking my hair. 

I take another step forward and then another. The men with their open lunch boxes and open mouths stare at me from across the street. I can feel their eyes on me. 

At the beach, my husband is suddenly yanking me down and getting on top of me. 

We'll try in the morning. Take your pills, little bird. We'll try at night too. Take your pills. We'll try and try and try till you are so small that you disappear. 

Look, even the wild grasses gave up so easily. The guava tree had to be cut for this grand building to stand. Nothing grows in the sand. Nothing dies there too. You stay inside, little bird. Stay inside. The men will take you away. The wind will blow you away. 

“Do you need more sand?” I yell as I reach the middle of the road. Suddenly a strong draft of wind blows. Strands of my hair flow away, after turning into specks of dust in front of my eyes. My toes wither next. My fingers shrivel after that and I quicken my pace. 

I have to reach the building before all of me disappears, I tell myself. 

“Lady, do you need help?” a man amongst them yells. I look up and another, even stronger current blows from behind me. This time, I’m not sure what part of me stays and what part goes away. 

***

About the Author

Subarna Mohanty is a Pushcart nominated author from Cuttack, Odisha. Her works have been featured by Metaworker Literary Magazine, Alipore Poetry Post, Indian Review and Sparks Magazine. Her sci-fi short fiction is upcoming in an anthology titled "Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy" by Canada-based Worldstone Publishing. She is an engineering graduate and likes reading and writing. She is currently an editor at Cawnpore Literary Magazine.