The Stolen Girl by Renita D'Silva

taken to the cremation. But she can imagine how it happens. She can see it in her mind’s eye. So clear. Even though she does not attend.
    She sees the crematorium nestling snug beside the river that stole her parents, the expanse of calm sapphire giving no indication of the carnage it perpetrated just days before. Two wooden pyres, side by side, flanked by the desolate huddle of villagers. The swollen effigies that masquerade as Vani’s ma and da sandwiched between the stacks of wood that make up her parents’ last bed on this earth. She sees the chief village elder, Nagappa, walking towards the pyre, pouring kerosene over the two mounds. A match is struck, and doused instantly in the brisk wind that has started up. Nagappa strikes another match, which flickers but does not die. He holds it to a stick whose mouth is tied with white cloth smothered in kerosene. A flash, staining the air golden yellow as the stick catches fire.
    It is evening, that hour just before twilight, the sky the dusky pink of newborn skin. Gulls circle. Crows cackle. The air smells of death and sorrow, of wasted lives and abandoned hope. A cloud obscures the setting sun, a sudden shadow cast on the mourning crowd swathed in the white of woe.
    A breeze roils the mud, it swirls red and accusing. It almost extinguishes the light. Before it can go out, Nagappa touches the makeshift torch to the twin pyres. They are alight almost at once, the flames licking and dancing, bright orange and gold. The pyres slowly disintegrate, auburn flames pirouetting towards the rainbow-hued sky now obscured by thick, blue-grey clouds. The mourners shiver as the clouds shed tears bemoaning lives plucked at their peak, a weak rain trying and failing to douse the flames. A dog barks somewhere, mournful, punctuating the eerie silence that has fallen over a village that is never quiet.
    It is dusk when the villagers leave, in clumps of twos and threes, propping each other up, husks of exhausted grief, their white mundus flapping like ghosts, shimmering in the darkness, the sky the exact shade of the soggy mess of charred ash and the couple of half-burnt twigs which is all that remains of Vani’s parents.
    While the villagers are at the cremation, Vani hides. Amongst her mother’s saris and her father’s clothes. Breathing in their smell, imagining their arms encircling her, the feeling of safety, of being anchored, cushioned by the opening and closing brackets of their bodies. She refuses to acknowledge that the bloated bodies the boatmen dragged out of the river, gorged on by fish, are her parents. They are coming back, they have promised. And so she hides from the truth, hides from herself. She breathes in the faint whiff of their smell which lingers in their clothes and she remembers, memories engulfing her, enveloping her, warming her.
    Cremation – take the M away and it becomes creation. Years later, when she has learnt English and is proficient in it, she will wonder how those two words, life and death, could be separated by just one letter. Because it is that easy to lose someone, she supposes. Blink and they are gone. When you go to school, you have parents who love you, whose life revolves around you, and by lunchtime, you are an orphan.
    Sitting among their things, she pictures their last moments. Chattering to the boatman – her mother was never silent. The boatman laughing, his smiling visage morphing into a grimace as the boat jerks suddenly and he falls backward from standing, almost losing his grip on the wooden paddle. The boat dizzying as it is trapped in the throes of a whirlpool, sucked into its spinning eddies. Turning and tossing like a little plaything. Vani’s parents’ eyes meeting, the distress in them. Both of them, thinking, at that minute of Vani. The smell of fear; feeling the years they will not live slipping through their hands; the sound of everything they have yet to experience reverberating in their ears. The flavour of water: as pure