KANCHAN

CAROLINE MAHALA

The sun comes out after a number of cold days and people emerge from their homes. Laundry is hung on the line, kids gather along the path, and the elderly doze off on porches. Relatives cross the threshold, wearing fresh tika and sandals recovered from last summer. Kanchan opens the doors and windows to let fresh air tunnel throughout the house and root out the must that has accumulated. It roots something out in her, too. A mischief, like plucking the new shoots of rice from their nursery beds. She rocks back and forth on her heels, impatient, and waits to see what the day will bring. A motorbike backfires in the alley, like the start of a race.
 
Kanchan’s parents convene quietly in the courtyard beyond the backdoor step, shaded by fruit trees and a small garden overrun with tomato vines and marigolds. Her mother has drawn water from the outdoor pump and filled a basin. She squats over a stool and removes her hair clip, releasing a mass of dark hair that tumbles past her hips and lays in spools on the stone floor, then places it beside the other prepared items: a plastic pitcher and a thick, hand-cut piece of soap that’s good for washing all things. Kanchan’s father sits over her in a four-legged chair. The pitcher bobs in the water while he lathers the soap, scraping its hard grain across his palms, and works it into her wet hair, gently gathering the long, black cords into sections. The woman exhales and lets her shoulders drop. The soap smells good, and everything is quiet and bright and peaceful. She dangles her hands in the water and absorbs the light on her skin.
 
The soft sounds of their conversation—the aspirated Ps and Ds—float up to the balcony where
 
Kanchan has secretly been watching.
 
The family lives in the lowlands of the valley, by the river, tucked away behind an endless chain of hills that rise up into mountains in the north. From above, the valley looks like a quilt, having been divided into square plots that hold buckwheat and mustard. The buckwheat turns bright pink before its harvest, and the tiny, yellow flowers that grow from mustard seed are devoured by bees.
 
Migrant birds arrive at the start of fall and stay through winter, attracted by the warmth and insulation of the valley walls. Minerals in the river produce rich, shimmering black soil and tall grasses teeming with small forms of life. There are many resident birds as well. Peer out into the early morning fog and see long-tailed magpies and round, sleeping thrush swaying on the telephone wires. Watch them startle and lose their balance at the sound of dogs barking or a jeep speeding by.
 
Kanchan spots a kingfisher land in a fallow field—its bright colors stand out against the dried mud and pale yellow stumps of corn—and she’s reminded of childhood. A pack of children wandering the hills on hot afternoons. Telling stories beneath the wide branches of a fig tree, or chucking stones at bamboo thickets to watch the camouflaged parakeets burst like a cough of green smoke. Watching water birds fly in over the ridge, then returning home in the evening with the imagery of the day stuck in their minds, wondering how many miles a bird travels before arriving here and how many other villages with children they stop over.
 
Kanchan’s mother makes her way up the steps and joins her daughter on the rooftop, clutching her wet hair in one hand. She removes the plastic bag of hair products and accessories that she keeps on a nail by the door and shuffles toward a chair, wearing her husband’s sandals. “Are you watching the goats? Don’t let them get too close to the garden.”
 
Kanchan used to love watching her on wash days. Sitting there with wet, stringy hair and her t-shirt tied in a knot around her torso, she looks like a teenager again. She can’t do this on any given day; the conditions have to be just right, or else her hair will stay in a bun indefinitely. An afternoon of sustained sunlight, not too much wind, enough water supply, and some indefinable quality that women recognize as having to do with magic and willpower. Now, she cups her hands and brings them to her face, as if ladling sunshine and spreading it across her forehead and cheeks, before applying other lotions from her bag. Kanchan steals a dollop of coconut oil from the jar and rubs it across her lips.
 
For most of her life, Kanchan has had the same hair as her mother, albeit not as long. But one school day last summer, she returned home with an overwhelming need to shed the weight. Throughout the day, wisps of hair had been falling into her eyes or getting caught in the corners of her mouth. The hair around her temples was soaked with sweat and her ponytail rested like a dead, bushy animal on her shoulder.
 
From the top of the hill, where the school building overlooks the market, she could hear vendors calling out mangoes, papayas for sale! There was a fury of sandals smacking against the pavement as people rushed to buy missing ingredients in time for dinner. In the distance, she heard sounds of a procession moving up the lane, getting louder. Horns wailing, a measured drumbeat, and the tinkling of ankle bracelets strung with bells, all to celebrate springtime and preparation of the rice fields. The explosion of sound every time the mallet slammed against the skin of the drum alerted Kanchan to the exact place of her heart inside her chest and all of the empty space around it.
 
She went directly home after her last class, passing the procession dancers and a vendor stationed outside the school gates next to a cart stacked high with wai wai noodle packets and biscuits, waiting for students to pool out.
 
Like today, the doors on either end of the first floor hallway were open to let the air in. She scouted the perimeter for signs of her mother and stepped lightly across the concrete floor, carrying her shoes rather than leaving them on the doorstep. She snatched the scissors from the kitchen drawer, crept as carefully as she could up the stairs, and shut the bedroom door behind
 
her.
 
Once finished, she sat down on the carpet to study her work in front of the mirrored wardrobe.
 
Her hair now brushed the tops of her collarbone and she could tuck it neatly behind her ears. There would be no more buns, hair clips, or ponytails. The severed pieces laid in a circle around her, strangely auspicious, like the endless knot or a spiral. She flinched at the sound of the door hinges squeaking open behind her and locked eyes with her mother’s reflection in the mirror.
 
After Kanchan left to shake out the towel and pick off the hair that clung to her arms, her mother swept the remains and thought about Kanchan’s first and only other haircut as a baby. How she squirmed as the priest shaved away her little curls. One of the curls was saved and placed in the back of a picture frame that showed the family standing in front of their newly built home, only two stories at that time. Rebar stuck out of the corners of the roof for future building, or what would become the rooftop patio. Looking at the pile of hair in the dustpan, she thought to pick up a strand and tuck it into the waistband of her skirt, later to join it with Kanchan’s baby hair in the back of the picture frame on her dresser.
 
A swallow flies back to the nest she’s been building beneath the door frame and Kanchan’s mother starts humming. It’s good luck to have a swallow build a nest in your home.
 
“Kanchee, do you remember this song?” She hums the melody. “When you were little, after your father left for work, I would turn on the radio and let you dance around the kitchen.”
 
Kanchan remembers spinning around the small room, her feet gripping the vinyl sheet floor (there are several gashes in it now because of this), and bending over backwards while being held in her mother’s arms. Her mother purses her lips and scrunches her forehead as she hums, putting real feeling into the song, and she looks so young and beautiful that Kanchan could cry.
 
She has always had the kind of hair that other women dream about. Remarkably soft and consistent, and unadulterated by scissors or other means of breaking the connection. It grows longer with every brushstroke, fed by memories of her as a child, a teenager, a wife, and then a mother, bestowed with a kind of sentience.
 
In Kanchan’s dreams, it spills over the side of her parents’ bed as they sleep and fills the second story. She hears the bottom of her bedroom door scrape against the floor as it enters and crawls toward her, climbing the bed posts. Paralyzed, and gripping handfuls of the bed cover, she watches breathlessly as it escapes through the open window and out into the night.
 
Unbound, it moves through the dark, sleeping corridors of the market and up into the hills, where homes made of wood and stone have stood for hundreds of years, and from where the brick kiln chimneys emit a smoke that shines metallic green against the night sky. It reaches the big temple, slipping past a couple of sleeping travelers and the blue, grinning Vishnu who stands guard.
 
It spreads throughout the valley like a root system, destroying gardens, swallowing nursery beds, and leveling terraces across the hillside. When it reaches the river, it curls around embedded rocks and tangles in the reeds. It lays fat and heavy between the banks, like a fiber log that soaks up the rushing water until it floods the surrounding fields. Kanchan will sometimes wake from the feeling of choking, as if it has filled her airways and consumed every autonomous part of her being.
 
Farmers lead livestock back up the path, yelling commands in a language that only they and their animals can understand. Kanchan studies her mother’s expression, made somewhat mysterious by her stiff, wind-burned cheeks and the deep lines that run perpendicular to the corners of her mouth and across her forehead, formed over time from working one season to the next in tandem with the elements, a continuous cycle of planting, transplanting, harvesting, and preparing for the next phase. She has lived her whole life within these valley walls, and unlike Kanchan, never confuses its reliability with boredom.
 
She pins her hair back into place and hangs the baggie of miscellaneous goops and ruined lipsticks on the nail—the ritual is over. She stretches in a big salutation to the setting sun and starts downstairs, saying over her shoulder, “I need help in the kitchen, Kanchan. Come down soon.”
 
At dusk, the village becomes an oasis. Storks and white cranes pick through the mud on either side of the river alongside grazing water buffalo. Women carrying loads of grass and firewood retreat from the forest in a serpentine march. The hilltop wears a ring of fog like a white apron, exposing its bare chest and red clay scars from where the land has collapsed, and even the old, brown leaves of the banana trees sparkle in the light of the setting sun.
 
Clumps of black hair are caught on the balcony wall and Kanchan thinks about keeping one as evidence of her mother’s shedding. Instead, she runs her fingers through her own hair and smiles at the broken strands that fall to the floor.