"The Story of the Woman Who Fell in Love with Death," by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Illustration by Mel Paisley
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Editor’s Note
Many of the stories in Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut collection White Dancing Elephants explore themes of trauma. What makes them stand out, though, is that the point which marks the climax of most stories is often the middle or even the beginning of Bhuvaneswar’s stories, which are as much about aftermath as they are about the moment of violence. In this story, we see not just how abuse affects its direct victim, but also how the consequences of abuse continue to echo throughout another person’s life, leaving a void that can never truly be filled.
Episode Credits
Host/Narrator: Mike Sakasegawa
Production & Sound Design: Mike Sakasegawa
Music: Blue Dot Sessions and Sound of Picture
The Story of the Woman Who Fell in Love with Death
by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
In an armchair at the center of a Starbucks, nearly hidden by its arms, a young boy reads, perplexed but concentrating hard:
Once upon a time, there lived a man of little importance. But his fine young daughter did belong to him: her lovely face, the soft and the angular parts of her body, her hips, her strong legs, her glorious laugh—everything that made her worth the highest price.
Naturally, the father had to search for some suitable person to bid for her. Every day the daughter offered a million prayers, begging for the blessing of a lover who wouldn’t pay money, and every night she lit a million candles, facing the lights away from where her father was always watching her. She’d occupy herself for the whole night with this one task, so that her father would be asleep by the time the sun came up, too tired to come into her room.
The god of death was fed up with the piteous pleas of that tenacious girl, who asked for a salvation he would not be able to grant. Finally, either to avoid hearing the subterranean, growled prayers of her father (which the girl also heard), or out of some divine mercy, the god of death performed a miracle. But neither the girl nor her father were aware of it at first.
The god of death sent her a lover. The lover who would become the husband of the girl had to walk fifty miles.
With time, the lover found their house, but he limped like an old man. The finest clothes awaited him, but the blisters on his feet prevented him from standing up. But once he healed, the girl could see how strong and independent he would be, how the god of death had sent her the right one after all, if she could be patient with him.
After anxious days of waiting, the girl broke down and begged the man to marry her.
He barely walked. He lacked the strength to lie on top of her. But the clever girl found a palanquin meant for brides and promised that, after the wedding, he could rest on its cushions. And since she had no horse, she promised that she would carry the palanquin’s long handles on her shoulders.
The first night, instead of making love, the man slept a dreamless sleep. The girl stayed awake. When the sun rose on the marriage bed, there he was with his feet in bandages, the girl with her gown tightly fastened.
The girl then stole a bigger palanquin that would allow more room for making love and sought out men who could take up her burden, so she could lie with the man. There was another sunrise, another dreamless sleep, and the restless girl searching out another palanquin, to be carried by a litter of strong fearless men whose legs could easily outrun her father’s, and another when her father seemed about to track her down, and another, and so on.
Soon enough, the girl was left penniless with just the man, who could walk, albeit slowly, and without a sense of where to go. But soon, the stranger promised her, when he was healed, soon they would make mad, fierce love. As the hours crept on, the girl’s father pressing on their trail with his good horse, the girl and her husband, who had still to become her lover, lay down on the fifth night of their marriage, on the road next to their last broken palanquin, whose carriers had gone. The road was still. The girl and her lover rested, drifting to sleep then waking and kissing passionately, and every time she kissed him, she gave him strength.
Just when he had almost recovered, a horse with a masked, heavy rider slashed the ground with steel-shod feet, striking the man in the head before streaking down the road.
Instantly the god of death appeared.
As the horse and his rider stopped, seemingly preparing to turn back, the god of death cushioned the dying man’s head in his hands, silently urging him to close his eyes. To stop her from lamenting the man, the god showed the frightened girl his own solemn face.
But he is so beautiful, she thought with joy.
The girl knew, from the stories she had read, and from the story that might be told about her, that she was to bargain with the god of death. Plead for her husband’s life. Show that her devotion extended beyond tears. Inspire the god of death, by her courage, to spare them both.
But she could not look away from the god of death’s bleak, handsome face. The sound of the horse with its rider—deafening against the night’s silence—pressed closer and closer, growling desire, impatience.
The girl unfastened her dress, offering her bare skin.
“Hurry,” she whispered, winning him.
In the Starbucks in Greenwich Village near West Fourth, the boy shut his book and sighed in contentment. He wasn’t old enough yet to drink coffee, let alone see the illustration in the book of the girl’s bare chest, though he lingered over it, not realizing that a barista with floppy soft hair was looking over his shoulder, admiring her breasts too.
“My man,” the coffee meister purred. “My little man. What you got there, huh?”
The boy, small for his age but nearly twelve, nodded with solemnity. Yes, there was something fruit-like and dark and perfect about the girl’s breasts in the book—without wanting to touch them, exactly, the boy felt content looking at them. He wasn’t a boy who had ever seen Playboy. His father wouldn’t allow it. And his sister—once long ago he did have a sister, though no one in the house, not father, not aunt, not the mother who had died when the boy was three, none of them ever mentioned her, the sister-girl, with breasts like these. He’d seen them in the other photograph, the one in his father’s sock drawer, the place where a picture of the boy’s lost sister was hidden, buried under softest cloth, dust motes like petals on her cheeks, her skin a lustrous color and unlined, his father’s fingerprints confined to the very edges of the photograph, as if that might keep his sister from being consumed.
No one at school asked the boy anymore, “Where’s your sister? Did the cops ever find her?” No one seemed to worry about her. Only the boy, who’d once missed her whenever she ran away from home, the boy who had promised when he was four or five (though he didn’t remember saying the words) that he would somehow rescue her.
Now in the Starbucks the boy licked the foam off the plastic lid of his paper cup and put it down, reflecting, wondering.
“What if she hadn’t gone?” he thought, and couldn’t get that question out of his head. Of who he would have become, if she had stayed. Of what would have happened to them.
•
In college it became worse, the wondering, once it was coupled with an edgy curiosity. Not only just: Where did she go? But also: How do I bear it, that she left for good?
By then, some of the questions were answered, of what the boy’s father had done. The family knew, but no one else imagined. By then the boy could make sense of some things—loud arguments, crying and shouting, slapping, pushing, pulling, then silence, the girl emerging afterward, quiet, appearing overcome.
In the years since the boy discovered his favorite storybook, there had not been any news. Silence again, but this time not following any loud noise; only silence following on silence, building in its intensity, proving the truth of what happened—she was gone, no one could dispute it. “Must have had her reasons,” the neighbors said.
At first when the boy had become a young man—post-sex, post-fumbling around, post-fantasies, counting himself lucky for the one summer he had hitchhiked before college, not telling anyone, breaking away from the quiet house with his glowering father and talkative, overbearing aunt—the boy also felt he was lucky to have been younger than the girl, younger and small for his age, no threat. No one could ever think him the reason for the girl leaving.
“You should have taken me with you,” he’d say softly, touching the book that he still had in his dorm room, turning to the place where he had tucked the stolen picture, the one his father had stolen before him.
In the city, the boy had felt anonymous. Walking through the whole Village or sitting in a public square where construction workers watched pigeons just as closely as women; sneaking coffees at Rafaella Café or eating a slice of pizza slowly, to savor it, at Two Boots; or waiting, just waiting, not really doing anything.
But out in the country, where the college was, the boy felt exposed, even when others were not drinking or looking for a tall boy to go home with. Their gazes settled on him, not knowing how much his face resembled his beautiful sister’s. He felt put upon. Girls expected him to prove to them what boys were like: shallow, callous, laughing animals that could smell irresistible. Other boys wanted to see if he realized he was handsome, if he knew how to use it against them. And teachers mistook his quietness and matter-of-fact diligence for respect, when in fact the boy just didn’t know what to say to anyone, in the small, cool, underground classrooms he could have mistaken for tombs.
No subject moved him to express himself. Art history, geology, architecture, engineering, poetry: he liked classes about things, objects he could draw inside of books, whose intricacies absorbed and distracted. Protected him from being left with a blank page.
Without fanfare, he finished his studies. The father called. The aunt came to visit, only once or twice, enough to make his neighbors look at him with sympathy. A querulous woman whispering too loudly about all the foreigners, the slutty girls, the subpar cafeteria. The aunt’s presence hadn’t always been noxious. After his sister disappeared, the boy remembered his aunt making hot chocolate and frosted cakes, day after day, as if by feeding herself and the boy, and sometimes the father, she could fill the absence, as if she were preparing extra food, stocking a wake.
The aunt had been married once. The boy could remember an uncle. This uncle, his father’s brother, had taken his sister aside and said in a voice probably meant for others to overhear: “You deserve better. You can get out.”
Then the uncle had driven a long way, for miles, returning in a bleak snowstorm. He passed through country and city, driving on high roads, on the most remote mountains. The father had gone to help the uncle with a jump but then come back alone, refusing to say when the uncle would follow. When the aunt heard that the uncle’s car was lost, she hadn’t wept. “Foolish beast,” she’d said. “He never would listen to me. He’d never behave.” Hoping to bring back their uncle, the boy’s sister had gone out in the same snowstorm without wearing proper shoes and walked and walked alone.
The sister came back to the house with blistered feet and face chapped from crying, not telling the boy that the police believed the uncle had been killed. His aunt was the one who shared that truth.
After the uncle disappeared, the father relaxed some but watched more carefully, controlling both the sister and brother, warning them that if he ever caught them doing wrong, he’d cut off their hands, no questions asked. Even once the threat was no longer a promise the boy believed in, he fled the house as often as he could. The Village Starbucks became less than an ordinary shop, instead a kind of dirty, well-loved living room, where the boy knew each upholstery intimately, knew where the crumbs had spilled and by which newspaper-reading man, knew the barista’s name was Stan, short for Stanley, that he liked reading dirty books behind the counter before sweeping his floppy hair aside with a broad hand and granting the customers, especially the pretty girls, an even broader smile.
If only his sister had run off with a Stanley, the boy thought, watching the baristas play and laugh, dance to the same prepackaged music as if it were new, watch the clock even while customers waited. If only there had been some boy—strong enough to rescue her. Some boy to carry the palanquin, the kind that protected young women. A friendly boy she could have used to get away, and then get away from, if he bored her.
A boy like me, the brother thought. A kind of older brother to them both.
Once the boy finished college, paid his dues, worked for a time in a Starbucks. It wasn’t the one in the Village, where he first read that book.
Then, when he saved enough, he saw the world. He saw a brilliant red palanquin bearing a rich man’s wife in the middle of a rushed street in China, then a white elephant in India gravely bearing a wealthy groom. Bejeweled princesses; palaces that might be considered relics, their walls made of mirrors, where the boy could see his reflections.
It was never deliberate, how he would look for his sister, backpacking and hitchhiking and sleeping in rough places for cheap. It was just that he’d never believed that she was dead. She could have been a thousand places—on a movie poster, pouting out at him, or peering from the window of a café, or mindlessly shopping, wearing furs, or teaching a classroom of children, looking out the window at the precise moment he passed.
The boy imagined life for her, a life she might reveal to him, her children and his children playing together, his wife coming to love her as a sister.
The images eventually made him get married, and in the marriage, he was happy but waiting. Waiting for his sister.
There was life in between the years of searching and imagining—a job for him, first at another Starbucks, then medical school, because it fully distracted him.
Then a fine day at the hospital where he worked as a doctor and where, through no accident, the body of his sister was brought in, though he wasn’t sure at first.
She looked the same. He knew not to tell his father—and that was a great gift, not telling, not even whimpering out loud in front of anyone—because in the end he only had his memory to reckon with. How did he know for certain it was she? It was a young woman his sister’s age, face still familiar and beautiful but body wrecked—a car accident, her husband’s or boyfriend’s or lover’s car struck by another motorist. The man, too weak from some illness to turn the wheel in time, deconditioned, had died at once. But she had been six months pregnant, and there was the pale gold band on her ring finger, and wedding pictures in her wallet too, of gorgeous red palanquins from an Oriental honeymoon, a Doli for a bride, the kind meant for queens and deities, the inside obscured by curtains, and pictures of a smiling family, probably her husband’s relatives. But not a single one of him, the boy and the brother she had left, or the father, the mother, the family she started with. Only the family she had been trying to make.
The boy, the brother, couldn’t bear to conclude that his sister had been defeated. So, he would say to his own wife, instead of saying his sister was dead: “I couldn’t be sure that was my sister. I never had the proof. She had a slightly different name—unless she changed it, I suppose. And how could I remember her body? I was so young. So, I don’t really know. I really don’t.”
But the story stayed, a story that he knew—though his sister had left him behind when she escaped. Though she’d left him alone, to remember. Though her body had endured—what? He couldn’t know. Only that she’d left so that her body would be hers to give away.
“The Story of the Woman Who Fell in Love with Death” first appeared in The Bangalore Review in 2016.
It also appears in Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s collection White Dancing Elephants, published by Dzanc Books in 2018.
© Chaya Bhuvaneswar, 2018
About the Author
Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a physician and writer whose work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Millions, and elsewhere. She has received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Henfield award for her writing.
Image credit: Ainsley Floyd
About the Illustrator
Mel Paisley is a writer, illustrator, and organizer based out of Savannah, GA. Mel has been previously published with Polychrome Ink, Meerkat Press, The Port City Review, Vox Poetica, Wussy Magazine, Dystopian Future, and The Harvard University Press, and has worked for Big Lucks Press, Winter Tangerine, and Madhouse Press. When not making things about mental health, queer history, and the Asian-American diaspora in the Deep South, they write strange fables about petty gods and dangerous dreams for The Nobility, a bi-monthly illustration series concepted by Brian Woodward.