Beaver’s Pick
Maithreyi Nandakumar
Photo Credit: glasseyes view/Flickr (CC-by-sa)
The doors around her kept swinging in the breeze. She tried to slam them shut but they were stubborn and wouldn’t close. How could they when everything needed so much maintenance?
Dharini went to make herself some tea and sat on her chair that faced the garden. Some of those doors had rickety hooks to hold them together and had never been strong. When she was in this big old house at night, the sound of their banging kept her company, reminding her of all the people in her life who had come and gone or disappeared. The French window opened into a wilderness, full of thorny brambles and deadly weeds. Dharini examined the scratches on her forearms—she ought to have worn a long-sleeved top before tackling the overgrowth. She struggled with the bindweed wrapped tightly like a thick plait around the wild roses and imagined it winding around her. Here she would stand, take root, become a mummified tree with bindweed blooms to decorate her body. She moved backwards to pull more effectively and fell on top of the wilful plants and lay there, stuck. By the time she extricated herself, her clothes had ripped, and her hair literally had been through a hedge.
Dharini sighed at the brilliant sunshine that was yet to subside on this long summer’s day and it hurt to see everything turned on high volume—the light, the birds, the noise inside her head that made her thoughts play on a loop, in that familiar cycle. She had learnt to live with it, to ride the darkness within and allow those doors to keep on swinging.
First thing that morning, she’d walked to the collection centre of the post office to pick up a parcel that had come in her name. They must’ve tried to deliver when she hadn’t bothered to answer the doorbell yesterday. She trudged all the way up the busy roads, across the zigzag traffic lights, past the shops selling cheap plastic buckets and mops, under the thundering railway bridge, and then that bleak stretch with care homes, walking past expensive vehicles and their bad-tempered grunting in the stationary traffic.
As she stood in the queue, she kept hearing planes up above—some were labouring against gravity, as if climbing an invisible mountain, some sounded like racing cars at peak volume. Dharini waited, sweating in her dress, thighs chafed from the walk, wondering who would have sent her anything. It made her more than a little nervous. When it was her turn, she glanced at the man serving customers, one of her tribe—a painted red streak on his forehead, and clearly unimpressed at her dishevelled appearance. Dharini produced her driving license as ID and collected the box and shuffled out before she blurted out a request for a knife to prise it open then and there to examine the contents and possibly leave them behind. She squinted at the sender’s address, but the box had a dent where the label had been damaged.
All day it remained on the kitchen worktop amongst the overflowing stuff that she had not bothered to put away or declutter. She reached for it and held the lightweight parcel on her lap. She shook it and heard a vague rustle—it seemed empty. Opening the drawer next to her chair, she took out a dinner knife and jabbed at the thick tape. She knew who it was from as she recognised the handwriting and the packaging technique. In a flash, she was taken back to their holiday in Tunisia. They’d come up with a plan to pack a large cardboard box full of dirty clothes to mail it back to England, so that they could carry the fragile colourful ceramics in their luggage. Dharini smiled at the memory of shopping at the Aladdin’s Cave with its courtyard full of tagines and stunning platters hanging on the high walls.
Why now? After years of abrupt silence, was this an attempted rapprochement?
As she tackled the gaffer tape, she remembered an earlier gift, a marble coaster that read, “A friend is one of the nicest things you can have and one of the nicest things you can be.”
Dharini snorted loudly as the tape burst open along with the cardboard flaps. There was more opaque packaging inside, the contents still a mystery. Using scissors to cut the thick plastic, she pulled out an unmarked envelope and noticed that there were none of the embellishments of before. Dharini’s name wasn’t written in glitter pen with quirky sketches. Inside, the card read To Dharini, Happy Birthday, From H, in a carefully artistic swirl. Dharini swallowed down disappointment at the lack of anything personal or remotely affectionate. No more ‘Dear Dharini’ or ‘Love H’.
So, that night, when she was in bed, she pulled open her laptop and emailed a polite thank you note. “Very kind of you to remember my (landmark) birthday, Dharini.” She shut down the machine and placed it on the floor and fingered the thin piece of indigo chiffon with the pattern of fine fronds—it was a good choice, she’d allow her that much.
Where would she wear it, though? Dharini turned off the lamp and heard the door banging downstairs. She lugged herself out of bed and went down to tie this wisp of chiffon to close the damn thing.
Maithreyi Nandakumar is a writer of fact, fiction, and verse. A former BBC journalist, her stories and poems have been published in print, on radio and online. She’s working on a second novel—a family saga tracing back to a 10th century puzzle and meandering through to the present day. She lives mostly in Bristol, UK but can also be found in London and Chennai.
