To Be Violet
by Lailee Zakir
My mules needed rest, as did I. In the distance, what seemed like a village. I dismounted and walked about. I was thrilled to find we spoke the same tongue. An elderly man with yellow fingernails led me to his home. His wife and granddaughter sat atop a floor of littered purple flowers. I noticed as we ate with our hands that the tips of the fingers of the elderly woman and young girl were purple.
When I asked about their purple fingertips, the elderly woman smiled. The young girl seemed irate, and for a moment, I felt I’d been crude. Look at me – in their home, eating their food and drinking their wine – daring to ask why their fingers were tinged violet. How rude! My cheeks flushed red. The elderly woman asked if my heart and mind could spare a story before I retired. I have long been in search of a pen and paper to tell this story once more. I’ve told it to myself each morning and night – I pray I have not lost a detail.
***
The women were orange, and the men sheer yellow; this is as it was in their village. Yellow men loved orange women, and their union would bear them children of yellow or orange forever and long onward. But one child had, on one day, been born violet. How horrified they’d been of touching her, of turning the plum to orange.
The labour had been short. Sterile. The woman at the foot of the tub found it hard to believe. That this child had indeed come out writhing and sobbing beneath the weight of the room and its gazes, without a trace of orange upon her skin. The quiet room. Quiet but the sounds of the writhing and screaming and weary-eyed blinks. The blinks themselves that had been the loudest. The meeting of eyelid to eyelid trumped the sound of all else. And so this violet child with wet eyes and unkempt temper thrashed with fervour. The women of the room huddled around the open-legged mother as she wept to hold her child. The silence and the blinks had deafened her to the sound of the violet child’s cries. Save for the ring in her ears, she could hear only the meek beat of the heart. One, where there had once been two. She asked if it lived or not as she had borne many children still before. The woman between her legs made no motion to answer, and the mother threw her head back in a wail befit for the mouth of a child or a soldier at the losing end of a knife. Together, mother and child wept, a current of perspiration down her temples as thick as that upon the child’s violet tear-stricken cheeks. She wept for her child, who was not still at all but rather violently thrashing about.
This purple little girl had been slipped onto the white cloth along a frightened gasp from thin orange lips. It was there she continued to cry as her mother thought her dead. Her mother, whose ringing ears did not cease as the orange women sprung to action. The orange bodies that moments before had idled about in a dissonant shock now working in a wide-eyed blinking fever. The mother was taken away. Cold orange hands and white handkerchiefs soaked in water tended to her grief-stricken face. She and the child both lie wet with the excretions of her body. Her own body which once held two. Her ears rang with such a force she could hardly hear the hushed chatter of “Purple the girl is purple,” or “violet, really – it’s violet that she is.” No, it was instead the deafening ring that flooded her ears as they knitted her back together with slender fingers. Slender orange fingers unfit to cradle a child of violet skin.
The mother would find later that this child had lived. Much less of her violet nature. She would find out much later as she awoke to yellow men in white coats with hair crowning their upper lips. She’d be lying in a bed wet with perspiration and tears, and what liquid had seeped through the stitches between her legs when they’d tell her that her child had lived. She was to be taken away, as would her child, although to vastly different places.
The men in white coats were curious, of course, if she could bear another. If her looms were laced with violet. The woman lay for a long time with her legs open. Inaudibly, they’d chatter about her. Yellow men would filter in and out, each taking their seat, feverishly scribbling upon papers. They’d nearly piled atop one another at the door, each eager to be the one to make this discovery. Oh, how the people would revere them in their work! As the ones who discovered this purple child! Their victorious huffs at the foot of the bed were little of the mother’s concern as she gazed out the window and wondered the whereabouts of her purple child. Her purple child, who she did not know was purple, despite all this spectacularity. The ringing in her ears had long stopped but she had chosen to stop hearing. She had chosen to stop hearing because her first and only born was someplace other than beside her on the unclean linen sheets, and her womb was barren and empty.
***
The young girl had been sweeping the petals from the floor with much diligence when she remarked she hated this part of the story with the shapes. I remember because I was confused about what shapes had to do with anything. The elderly woman returned to her story with a wave of the hand.
The mother wanted nothing to do with the yellow and orange of the outside. She was rather preoccupied with the hue of the sky and the triangle through which she observed it. The first time she’d speak after asking if her child lived would be to beg them to part the curtains. If she could not have her kin, she would have the sky.
***
Her uterine lurch for the sky had especially shut her ears to the findings of the doctor between her legs. She hardly noticed this one at work. They told her, but she did not listen or rather did not hear. She did not hear and would not ever hear or listen or know why she had borne this violet child. Or that it had been violet at all.
But we know, of course, and it would be wrong of me not to include it here. I thought it would be a better fit for the end of the tale, but worry it may escape me… The doctor’s findings were as follows: the woman had borne so many still children her womb had been bruised. Changed colours. Turned purple. For each time, the child due for birth would fight to stay within her, within her warmth, she’d only ever borne still yellow boys. The last had resolved to scratch at her insides in concerted desperation. They’d battered her womb. In some stroke of motherly ambition and biological miracle, this violet baby had been born.
The young girl scoffed as her grandmother explained. She seemed especially bothered by the notion of a bruise.
The yellow men in white coats told the orange women in white coats that were fitted at the waist. They told each other, then their yellow men at home. The story spread. This purple-wombed orange woman who bore a violet child! They rejoiced. They rejoiced, for at last a new fate had befallen them. Perhaps their orange women, too, could bear violet daughters! Should luck attest, violet sons…
The people took to their beds in hopes of purple children. The women continued their expanding and retracting, eating poorly through pregnancy to starve the children within them. The village saw still child after still child- never another violet.
This would be the case for a long while in the village of orange and yellow people. All because of the story of the purple-wombed woman and her violet child.
At this, the young girl who had finished her sweeping and was now folding purple and yellow stained linen added: “The purple-wombed woman and her violet child who had long belonged to the Earth by the time the villagers learned they’d perhaps never happened to begin with.” Her grandmother persisted.
Before the people had taken to their beds, and before the little orange girls would dream of having beaten wombs and purple children, the woman had lain on filthy linen and been told her child had lived and died. This, of course, she heard. What would be spared from the tale told to the people, or perhaps what had not been spared but willfully forgotten, was that the very doctors meant to preserve this child’s life had let it starve to probe its mother. That they were busy filling rooms debating the feasibility that the child should be at all. Far too concerned with the qualms of the womb from which it had been birthed, the doctors had let the child starve. In fact, the only touch the child had felt was that of the woman who had received its slippery body from the womb. It had lain there on that very white linen it had been dropped with a gasp. There, it had starved.
She’d been shamefully wrapped in the white linen in which she’d lived only a day. Swaddled by the thin-lipped orange woman who had delivered her. Delivered to both life and death by she who had been so afraid her orange fingertips would spoil the supple purple skin. The child had been buried in the fields, and that was where she lay.
At this, the mother was animalistic. Frothing at the mouth. She wanted to rip the stitches apart and reach within her to find another herself. To hear the second heartbeat once more. She would never lay with a yellow man again, she declared. Ah, but a childless eternity seemed a far more miserable fate. Her looms had finally bore fruit, and they’d left it to rot! They’d left it for flies and the worms and the soil! She fled.
She fled to where they had wrapped this child in white linen and buried it in the field. She threw her body upon the soil and cried. She cried with such force her heart could not bear it and so it left her there, mere flesh flush to soil, sobbing and weeping for the child she never once held. Long after her heartbeat ceased, her body continued to weep and cry and wet the soil. It wet it so that when the rain did not fall it was fertile nonetheless. That the relentless gaze of the desert sun could not dry it. It remained there, earth lush with salted tears, a violet child, and a mother whose anguish ceased the beating of her heart. The mother’s body had lain there as the seasons changed, becoming less body and rather flesh of the planet. Together, the soil digested mother and child.
A purple flower blooms, for only a day. Picked, violet petals fall away, the yellow roots discarded. All that remains is the top, the orange.
***
I sat before the elderly woman. Tea cold, mouth ajar. The young girl sat a large bowl of orange spice between us on the floor. Her grandmother knelt down in the way elderly women do, with great determination and strength, fingering a flower from her basket.
She said it lives only a day. I’d been blessed to find them for harvest. Delicately, the elderly woman pressed the centre between her index finger and thumb. With a small movement of the wrist, the orange and yellow centre of the plant came out. Like an organ. Pinching away the yellow root, all that was left was the top. The orange. She asked me then if I’d ever tried saffron in my rice.
My ink supply is leaving me, and I still have many days left of my travels East. If I could, I would write forever of this village and this elderly woman and their spice of great magic and heart.
Saffron.
WENSUM 