Nightwave

CW: Substance abuse, Mental health

It’s always the oil lamps. Every cyclone season the power grid is spotty. Meela paid no attention to the breeze brushing her skin or biting at her one long braid: in the worst case, the storm room on the second or third floor for a few days with nothing but cold rice and lamps. The days melt into each other with no demarcation but sleep.

Chalo’s very name reminded her of wind and moving. For generations, the entire family tended coffee and coconut and banana trees. They harvested sugarcane and fished and farmed live animals. Meela’s grandmother Lali made red and orange-yellow and purple dyes from flowers – and cosmetics. Chalo’s college background blended with tradition to produce strange medicines. He made a small fortune by selling painkillers as strong as opiates. Meela invented a sleeping-milk called nightwave.

Nightwave made an overwhelming sense of calm wash over anyone who drank it – with none of the side effects of wine or whiskey. At high doses it caused the loss of time and a loss of awareness of one’s surroundings.

“Meela, areyap dhyandiya,” Yuli urged, moving as many things as she could from the shelf onto the center of the blankets they would need. Meela, she meant, don’t let your mind drift too far. The wind howled and the streetlamps flickered until completely gone out. The sky was dark but it still appeared to be early evening – water was everywhere. No one was outside and no one indoors could be seen past wooden or metal shutters. In a few hours, it would be pitch black.

“Tallam, pallam, pandaram.”

One by one, Yuli folded the blankets.

“Tallam, pallam, pandaram.”

She and Meela slung some over the shoulder and onto their backs.

“Tallam, pallam, pandaram.”

They didn’t unpack until reaching the storm room, a room designed by the architects for this.

“Tallam pallam,” Meela said aloud. She repeated what Yuli said out loud to herself.

In the storm room, she lined the wall and baskets with priority items: disinfectant, soap, water, steel canisters of instant coffee, steel canisters of nightwave. There were already flashlights, a radio, a small fire-powered hot plate, hygiene pots, cloth towelettes, perfume, and straw hand fans.

Next to the storm room, the lamp room is just a short walk down an outdoor pathway: it radiated heat even as freezing wind and rainfall shook the spaces around it. Its walls were stone and brick with not a single window. Always, all of the lamps lit at once were both sweltering and blinding.

Yuli hoped that Chalo would come home soon. Most people evacuated inland during cyclone season. Chalo stayed inland for weeks if his client demand was high. The power grid was stable away from the moody ocean. Ventilators, sterilizers, electrocardiograms, the brightlights of delivery and operating rooms – all of those things were reliable only in the major inland cities. Meela, Yuli’s sister-in-law, was native to the countryside. She arrived at the family home on the coast four years ago in gown and veil and garlands, clink-metal and pearl and amethyst over her wrists and neck, diamond-drops in her ears, small diamond on the nostril, heavy black pigment emboldening her large hazel eyes. Chalo followed in garlands and gold and white, as nervous as a teenager, newly graduated from university and shaking with disbelief that such a beauty would tolerate his erratic hours. The only memory of that night now rested on Meela’s ring finger, a gold band with a single diamond always singing Chalo!

Thunder rolled and rolled. Lightning streaked the rolling blue-black. Rain fell like water stones – splat, splat – everyone was silent.

Why hospital? Chalo never wanted to become a doctor. It was his fear of doctors that made him study pharmacology. One childhood day on a routine visit, a doctor drugged him and he woke up bleeding. How can it be that someone slips away alone in panic and returns as if torn open, he wondered. One final day in microbiology he decided blood was its own healer: it carried water to wound sites, trapped and barricaded foreign invaders, it metabolized the chemical that could target the source of the pain. Not once in any of his adult days had nightwave or his drugs and anesthesia created bleeding upon waking. But Meela…

Meela had already drank half a tall canister of nightwave. The lamp-light floated in the black night like a ship at sea. Meela always had trouble sleeping – especially when Chalo was away. Nightwave made the room longer. Nightwave made the hours shorter. She drifted in and out of sleep while never leaving the sea-float feeling. How many hours had passed already? Yuli was sound asleep, one container of boiled white rice almost empty. It was Yuli who had taken an open flame to every oil lamp and made the lamp room glow and furnace.

A few hours into the next morning, Meela twisted the top of the canister. Nightwave poured down her throat. Floodwater poured across town. Lungs ballooned and deflated. A cat in her chest meowed. She brushed a stray hair back behind the ear.

That’s when she saw it.

Sudden light and fog and light across the sky. It wasn’t lightning. Peering out of the doorway, over the stone stairs and into the distance, she saw solid light as if it were walking across the ceiling. Crawling and then stumbling to her feet, she squinted and peered into the distance. Her eyes traveled and her feet followed. Water was everywhere: on her head, on her shawl. The ground would be cold if not for her rubber sandals. She ran to the lower floor and back into the house: every window was shuttered.

The light continued.

“Meela!”

“Who’s there?,” Meela answered. There was no explanation for what felt like wind.

Brightness swam around her legs, around her head, across the recreation room. Brightlight spun throughout the emergency pantry. A Chalo who was not Chalo flickered. His reflection flared in a mirror, on a burgundy tabletop: solid light.

“Meela!”

Light was everywhere.

Meela jumped.

“Meela,” someone continued. Rice-eaten Yuli asked, “Why did you leave the storm room?”

“Yuli,” Meela said. She sat up and looked around. The lamps glowed in the lamp room outside of the doorway. It was still morning. “Why did you leave the storm room?” Yuli repeated.

Meela was covered in blankets on the daybed across from the daybed that Yuli was in. Her feet were pale olive-colored and bare, toenails painted an orange-yellow the color of Lali’s dye – almost the same shade as her feet. Meela my gold channa, Lali used to say of her – like a garbanzo bean. Yuli stretched her arm out and offered a raw tomato. Smiling, she said, “There’s also dry-fish.”

“Did I leave the storm room?”

“Yes,” said Yuli, “You did.”

Tomato juice wiped away from Meela’s chin. Whole tomatoes and green chilies were supposed to go in the same pot as boiling rice: desperate times made everything cold and nonsense.

“You should cut back,” Yuli said. She was nodding towards the canister.

As she chewed, Meela thought about walking into town. In the clear light of morning, all of the roads and neighboring homes would be seen shimmering with sunlight and cloudy water. She would only have to get back on her feet and walk to the middle of the bridge. Why couldn’t she?

The wedding band on her finger glowed as if it held breath. “Well,” she said aloud, “We might get pneumonia. Or bug bites.”

“Right,” Yuli said.

“But it’s not dangerous, is it?”

“We should wait for Chalo,” said Yuli.

Meela turned and stared for a while. Then slowly, “Let’s go downstairs.”

It might be the first time in at least 5 seasons where anyone left the storm room for no purpose. After all, all of the suspense was in making it to the storm room to hibernate. If you stayed behind instead of going inland, the natural assumption was that you did not want to go outside for various activities. Yuli was not going anywhere. She had lived on the coast her entire life: from seawater upon beach-water and rain-water upon rice fields, all the way to the courtyard fountains and water in baths; there was nothing new or exciting to her about floodwater or water where road had been. She picked at dry-fish that was skinned and deboned and roasted in salt and peanut oil; merely picking. This was about as exciting as cyclone season was supposed to get.

Meela shook her canister and stared at the others left.

Water, nightwave, dry-fish, tomato water, nightwave.

That same night, she made the decision.