by Shilpa Kamat
Konkan Coast, 1687
When Aghnashini offered to go down to the river to fetch water, everyone was grateful. The clouds gathered, and the monsoon rains promised to drench the ground soon.
“Come back quickly,” her mother
told her.
Aghnashini let her mother think the worry that showed on her face was a mirror, that she shared her fear that the chill from being drenched would make her ill.
She didn’t mind the rain, though; it soothed her on such hot summer days. Actually, if Aghnashini didn’t want to get wet at all, or if she’d had enough of a downpour, she had the ability to stay dry. But what would people make of such a thing? To see a girl walking in rain without getting wet at all?
Aghnashini assured her mother she would be fast as she picked up the water pot. “I’ll come,” she said, which—in their language—meant goodbye, a promise to return.
As she was leaving, the neighboring family arrived, dressed in their best clothes.
“Namaskar,” she greeted.
They greeted her back—quietly rebellious. Even this simple greeting was forbidden. They came to attend her family’s quiet Ganpati celebration, though she questioned how quiet it actually was; the word had been spread to so many neighbors.
“We’ve done this so many times,” her grandfather pointed out when Aghnashini told him she felt uncomfortable about others joining. “They are all careful like us. It will be okay.”
But an uneasiness nagged, and she couldn’t shake it.
Aghnashini moved “quickly like the river,” as her father would say, barefoot through the puddles, enjoying the sensations. She rushed down to the stream and along its banks to the place where she could best stoop and gather water. When she was little, she pretended it was the Aghnashini River that ran beside her grandmother’s village, far south beyond Goa’s borders. She was named after that river, which her grandmother always spoke of fondly.
As Aghnashini grew older, she wondered how much of her grandmother’s nostalgic connection to the river was wrapped up in the freedoms of that place. In Goa, they had long been forbidden from speaking their language and practicing their religion. For as long as her grandfather could remember, these offenses could cost them their freedom or their lives. It wasn’t that way in her grandmother’s village.
Perhaps the freedom of her grandmother’s upbringing granted Aghnashini’s family the confidence to continue their spiritual practices in secret. And perhaps being named after the river caused Aghnashini’s deep affinity for water—or perhaps it was coincidental.
The older Aghnashini grew, the more constrained she felt and the deeper her capacity for communication with the water grew. It wasn’t just water, exactly. It was the form and flow of it: the currents of the river, the streams of rain, even the steam from a large pot of boiling rice. Aghnashini found she could somehow connect with its moving force, to harness and redirect it at will.
She now reached out with something beyond herself, something that allowed her to brush against the river’s currents and get a sense of them. The river expanded with the rains that had fallen, and its power seemed amplified.
Aghnashini tried to immerse herself as she walked alongside the river, to enjoy the sense of its flow and let it consume her anxiety. As the clouds thickened, however, she couldn’t shake her discomfort. She couldn’t pinpoint the moments when she learned whether to speak or not speak; she had been taught, since before she could remember, that some things shouldn’t be said. Her parents always hid details of the tortures of those who were arrested, although she herself actively avoided hearing these truths. Over the years, she absorbed an awareness of the things that could happen. She remembered the hushed warnings of her friend’s mother that people who prayed in Sanskrit—or any language that the Portuguese priests didn’t deem acceptable—could be burned at the stake if discovered.
If the Inquisitors threw Goans in jail for something as simple as growing a tulsi plant in their entryway, how would they react to seeing her family openly celebrating Ganpati? She knew without asking that her parents would be killed, that the smaller children in the family would be taken away by the oppressors and forced to practice Christianity, to only speak Portuguese. But she didn’t know how she knew such things. The knowledge simply seeped into her over the years, like her awareness of the water.
Some families were too terrified to do anything other than acquiesce, to change their beliefs, language, and way of life. To act like they were Portuguese. These families increased in status under the law, but they could also be targeted if suspected of holding onto their old traditions. Aghnashini’s family feared the Inquisitors as well, of course, but they fiercely resisted the idea of renouncing their language and beliefs. They spoke Konkani behind closed doors, defying the law. They kept murtis, tiny ones, buried in a box beneath the banyan tree behind their house. On most holidays, they didn’t even bother digging them up, quietly setting up a coconut or a stone to represent the divine, quietly singing and praying in the shelter of their home, where no one would even know.
On this day, they dug them up, of course. It was a big holiday, and two neighboring families would join to celebrate. The families at the gathering wanted to believe that praying to Ganapati would make their lives easier, that Ganapati would give their oppressors wisdom and prevent them from bringing harm to their community. But innocent people were accused and dragged off to prison all around them, and Aghnashini knew it.
As she lowered her pot toward the river, Aghnashini remembered the day she came to this place with her older sisters and showed them her talent. Her middle sister had shown she could wiggle her ears, something their oldest sister couldn’t even do. Aghnashini thought it would surprise and impress her sisters that she had a skill they didn’t have.
Aghnashini made them both walk to the riverbank with her, then proudly showed them how she could convince the stream of water to move up toward her pot and fill it rather than having to bend down to collect it. From her sisters’ faces, she quickly saw that she should not be smiling about her newly honed ability. Eyes wide with distress, her sisters said it was a terrible thing, that no ordinary person could do this.
“They’ll think you’re a witch!” her eldest sister whispered fiercely. “We’ll all be unsafe!”
***
As Aghnashini grew older, she better understood that what she showed her sisters was far from ear wiggling, though it felt very natural to her. Their Portuguese rulers could target such a difference, and so might others in their community.
She couldn’t entirely give up her ability, though. It was too much a part of her. Just as her family kept their traditions going in secret, Aghnashini began quietly continuing to hone her abilities. Not even her eldest sister noticed. After a year or so of intermittent warnings never to mess around like that again, her sister relaxed, satisfied that Aghnashini listened.
Aghnashini sometimes wondered whether her sisters or other family members were suppressing such abilities themselves, but she knew better than to ask.
Now, Aghnashini timidly tilted the pot so that the river’s current would quickly fill it. She knew she could easily command the current to enter, that no one would even notice. She whispered a prayer to the river, the one that made her feel safe and connected. But the knot in her stomach grew. And then she saw them in the distance: hard-faced men moving urgently, deliberately, toward her family’s hamlet.
Aghnashini’s qualms turned to full-fledged terror, but she felt something else as well—determination. she couldn’t let what happened to the other families happen to hers. She wouldn’t!
With only moments to act as the men rode toward the hamlet, Aghnashini let something in her belly and in her hands grasp at the heaviness in the clouds. She doubted she could succeed after so many years of suppression. What she needed to do now was much more forceful than anything she had ever let herself unleash. Something inside rose to squash her doubt. She wasn’t little anymore, and she wasn’t playing. Aghnashini was ready for battle.
The sky burst open. Aghnashini stood still even as enormous raindrops pelted her, and as the gushing rain created waterfalls along the banks. For a moment, she hestitated. She didn’t really want to hurt the men—just to stop them.
Then, one of them looked at her with a cold sneer, and she sensed his intent. He wanted to obliterate everyone who wasn’t just like him. He had grown comfortable inflicting harm.
A lifetime of fear that she had pulled into herself, that had balled up in her belly, charged outward, towaard her fingertips. Aghnashini squeezed her fists together. A gentle flick open of her fingers brought the full force of the rain and knocked the men off their horses. They tumbled toward the river, grasping at shrubs to steady themselves.
Then Aghnashini entered the river, connecting with the water’s malleability, with the current’s strength. Perhaps the soldiers saw her standing there, unaffected by the rain, controlling it all. Perhaps she only imagined so, the instant before she dipped into the currents and directed their full force toward them. The river swept unnaturally upward to meet them and washed them downstream, their screams fading with the current.
Aghnashini picked up her pot of water and ran. She was unsure she would have nightmares about this day, even though the soldiers were monsters who had tortured and killed so many innocent people. She worried the church might send more, that she had merely delayed the inevitable. As she approached her house, Aghnashini let herself get drenched, too careful to show up unaffected by the downpour.
She could hear her family, her communiy, their fervent singing, casting a warmth, a sense of safety. Her heart was beating hard as she entered, greedy for connection.
“Aghnu!” her mother shouted, alarmed, and ran to her.
Aghnashini let her fuss over her, let her dry her off, and change her into brightly colored clothes. She had never felt so grateful for home, for the innocence of her younger siblings, for everyone’s ignorance of how close they had been to destruction.
The news spread the next day. Two of the Inquisitors’ soldiers were found washed up on a riverbank in what appeared to have been a freak accident—a mudslide from somewhere upstream caused by heavy rains. Aghnashini was more relieved that no one would be interrogated than she felt guilt for what she had done.
At least one of the soldiers had been conscious and described how it seemed the river came to life and pulled them in. He blamed the devil, but he did not blame the girl who stood on the banks of the river. He didn’t mention seeing her hands turn into fists and then release, fingers splaying open as the water surged out toward them.
Her mother grasped her arm. “Are you okay?” she asked, brushing back a lock of her hair.
“I’m good,” she assured her.
Aghnashini knew how to keep secrets.
Shilpa Kamat is a poet, educator, and healing arts practitioner with an MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing, which ranges from ecopoetics to speculative/experimental, has been published by Strange Horizons, On Spec, Zocalo Public Square, sPARKLE & bLINK, Jaggery, SAND Journal, Fantasy Magazine, Willowherb Review, Solarpunk Magazine, Colossus anthologies, Kweli, Plainsongs, The Margins, and Cutleaf Journal. Her chapbook, Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet, was a finalist for the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound. She is working on a multigenerational novel based on her story in this anthology. You can read more about her work at shilpakamat.com.
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