Weaving By The Moon

By Hiranya Mukherjee

Faded memories whisper in my ears sometimes– in those moments when I lie down, on my bed, and the silver beams slither through the rusty window grills to lick the sides of my eyelids and steal my sleep away. I remember when I was eleven years old, I used to sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to slip into the kitchen in the darkness, when no one was looking, and take multiple sips from that cold water bottle kept in the fridge. I was prohibited from drinking chilled water, a thirst that I would vehemently sate in the nocturnal hours. Sometimes, in one of these heists I would tip-toe across my grandma’s room and I would take a peek inside to see her knitting. She knit and knit all through the night, I would think perhaps she was weaving a dreamcatcher or maybe weaving me an annoying sweater for the coming winter.

My grandpa had passed away, seeped into the other side and had taken grandma’s voice with him. A boisterous vivacious lady, she had become more and more silent as the days went by. His absence would weigh hard over us, made thicker with her ever increasing reticence. She didn’t seem depressed or sad– she just seemed “not happy”, and lost in some deep thought, all the time. It was only in those surreptitious moments of nightly weaving that I would see her smile from time to time and mumble and whisper certain things to herself. I couldn’t make out her words, or maybe I did and just didn’t understand it back then, or maybe I just forgot about them, anywho.

One night I saw her body being devoured by a cocoon that she kept weaving around her in spirals. She buried herself alive inside that silver coffin, smiling more and more as the hole that slowly swallowed her head grew smaller and smaller. She lay there, in complete stillness, in her rocking chair, in that cocoon as the air started to feel heavier and heavier and suffocatingly stuffy. Suddenly, there was a loud gasp, it felt like the walls of the home shivered and startled out of a daze– and then it came out. A butterfly, shimmering like a star, with cloudlike wings. Its mournful eyes filled with dewdrops as it stared into the distance, at the moon. It seemed to smile, my grandma’s smile– happier than my grandma’s, but it was my grandma’s smile nonetheless. It stretched out its wings, and flew into me, through me– it felt like a gentle caress, like how she used to wake me up for school with a gentle nudge in my left ear…

My grandma passed away the day after. I had woken up in the morning having pissed my bed from the deep slumber I apparently had lost myself in. She left me a small woolen butterfly on her table, in her room with a note inside it that read– “whenever you drink from that bottle from here on, do not forget to refill it and keep it in its right place. You always used to forget, I used to fill it up, otherwise they would know. I won’t be here anymore. Dadu’s calling. Remember to refill. And don’t have too much of it, lest you actually catch a cold. Love. Didu”.

By Hiranya Mukherjee