Flash Fiction: Everything That Falls Must Rise
Set in coastal Karnataka of the 1970s, this story has traces of Southern Gothic. The title was inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s classic Everything That Rises Must Converge. Readers of Purple Lotus, Veena Rao’s debut novel, will find other echoes as well.
My clammy hands feel the weight of the words that I have phrased and rephrased a million times in my head. I am getting married, Amma. I’d be happy if you and Daddy come to give us your blessings.
My fingers waver as they punch the numbers to reach my parents. I pause. I look out the window at the cluster of pines, still against a blue Georgia sky, but what I see is a distant memory—grainy at first, sepia-toned. Three women on a walk. Then the colors come to me, the shapes, the sounds. The blazing red earth of my childhood, the mossy laterite brick compound walls that we pass by, our faces—it’s Amma, her belly round like a balloon, walking with her youngest sister Kavitha and me. We are strolling in the narrow gullies of Amma’s father’s neighborhood, our ears filled with the sweet melody of temple bells from the nearby Udupi Sri Krishna Math.
Aunty Nanda, Amma’s second sister, wasn’t with us. She couldn’t risk deepening the brown of her skin, not even in the weak light of the 5 o’clock sun. She stayed in the girls’ room, curtains drawn, smearing turmeric and sandalwood paste to her face, neck, and arms. When we returned from our walk, she was in repose on the teak bed, her long hair spread out like a Japanese fan on the checkered handloom bedspread, her thoughts veiled by the wood-scented mask that covered her face.
“Aunty Nanda, you look like a ghost,” I said with a giggle.
“Are you sure he is a sub-inspector of police and not a constable?” Kavitha, my teenage aunt, wanted to know.
“Of course, he is a sub-inspector,” Aunty Nanda retorted.
“Why is he coming to see you?”
“You are such a black-hearted, jealous witch.”
“Do you think he has a fancy house?”
A sigh escaped the caked lips on her ochre face. “All I am hoping for is a house with ceiling fans in every room, a phone, and a Godrej cupboard.”
“A phone, fans, and Godrej cupboard,” Kavitha said, giggling again. “That will make you happy?”
“Yes, nothing more.”
“What if they demand a big dowry?”
“All families ask for dowry.”
“Tara’s daddy didn’t.”
“He thinks he is Amitabh Bachchan, out to save our society.”
The next day, Aunty Nanda draped herself in Amma’s bottle green Dharmavaram silk sari. Her lustrous mane was gathered demurely in a black barrette. The elongated bindi she had painted on her forehead was a sleeping third eye, stark against the layers of Vicco turmeric cream and Ponds talcum powder that covered her face and neck. The potential groom’s family arrived around mid-morning. They were seated in the inside sitting room, on a maroon faux leather sofa—father, son, mother in a file, Grandfather and Amma on rattan chairs opposite them.
Conversation was made—the new bus service to Udupi, the rains, the Emergency.
When grandfather called out her name, it was a cue for Aunty Nanda to bring out a large stainless-steel tray bearing plates of steaming upma and sweet Mysore pak for the guests. The tray rattled; the weight of it all too heavy for her slender shoulders.
“Come, sit,” Grandfather said to his shivering daughter after she had set the tray on the coffee table.
The “boy” was short and stocky. He sat hugging his chest with heavy-set shoulders and pumped-up arms but did not speak. His mother did most of the talking, his father the bobble-head nodding.
“So, you have four daughters,” the mother said.
Grandfather looked with great concentration at his hand as he conjured three fingers up.
The mother shook her head and tsked. “Kalyuga!” she said. “We just heard about her yesterday from my niece in Mangalore.”
“What did you hear, sister?”
“About your second daughter, the one who left.”
Grandfather cleared his throat as if it were constricted by his Adam’s apple. “Sister, we have performed the last rites of the one who left. She is not a part of this family. Besides, Nanda and Kavitha are of impeccable character. They do not even talk to boys who are not related to them.” He handed a plate of upma to the father. “And Nanda is a wonderful cook and housekeeper. Taste her upma, you will agree with me.”
The father bobbed his head, either in agreement or in thanks, but the mother spoke. “I am sure the upma is tasty. But brother, you cannot stop people from talking.”
The white on Aunty Nanda’s face came close to getting washed away in a streak under her eyes. She tied the end of her sari pallu into knots, snatched a quick look at the boy’s face. She saw nothing except a waxed mustache.
The Mysore pak remained on the plates.
“That boy was not suited for our family. No personality at all. Wonder how he became a policeman,”
Grandfather said after the family left.
Aunty Nanda locked herself in the girls’ room. Amma and I positioned ourselves outside. My ear was to the door, Kavitha sat cross-legged on the red oxide floor, peeling away the dry skin from her heels. Amma was bandaging raw wounds.
“Marriages are fixed only when the time is right, have faith in your father,” she said to her sad sister on the other side of the door.
For a long time, we heard nothing. Then it came in waves—long whimpers that ended as shrieks. Aunty Nanda had turned into a banshee. “Feeding the crows her favorite dish of rice balls and grated coconut sweetened with jaggery wasn’t enough punishment,” she finally cried, her words seeping through the closed door like smoke in a fire. “She didn’t think what her running away with a boy from a different caste would do to my prospects; who would marry the sister of a fallen woman? Such a woman deserves only death. I hope she is dead.”
“What about my prospects? I am also the sister of the fallen woman,” Kavitha mumbled.
“Where did the fallen woman fall from?” I asked.
Amma’s face was grave when she said, “You’ll understand when you grow up, Tara. And it will do you well to remember this day.”
A quarter-century later, I remember. I understand. And I tell myself as I steady my fingers to make the call: Everything that falls must rise.
Veena Rao, the founding editor and publisher of NRI Pulse, is the author of Purple Lotus, which won the 2021 American Fiction Award and the She Writes Press and SparkPress Toward Equality in Publishing (STEP) contest. Rao was a Georgia Author of the Year (GAYA) awards finalist in 2021.
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