Worry
By Malavika Rajesh
Many people agree that pursuing a family hobby is important in the age of disconnectedness. Other families bond over a puzzle that refuses to be solved or a kitchen garden waiting to be sown.
Mine worries.
We do it together, instinctively, like breathing. We connect over frantic phone calls, contingency plans that we run out of alphabets to label, and gasps gurgling in our throats when someone doesn’t come home on time. My Ammamma[1] and I have it worst, perhaps—our paranoia paralyzes. Sitting nearly two thousand miles away in Kerala, she worries about fraying relationships, the number of times her two-year-old grandchild may have tripped over himself, the tiniest of our maladies. As if death is waiting to strike as soon as she stumbles into fitful slumber. As if rest is an invitation for the universe to misbehave.
I, in turn, worry about fires breaking out in the family apartment while I’m away at university, the guns in the countries I need to visit, and the existential dread of not having every minute of my life planned out.
In response, my Ammacha[2] says, “Women worry.” My Amma[3] exclaims, “You really are your Ammamma’s grandchild.” Ammamma looks appalled, and I realize that a considerable portion of her time spent worrying may be dedicated to my worrying.
° ° °
The first time Ammini sees fire, she is five years old.
Not that fire had been absent from her life before. It was always there—low and dutiful—licking the bottom of brass vessels as rice boiled over in the kitchen, as her mother scooped it up with sambhar and thrust hot handfuls into her unwilling mouth. It lived in the rows of flickering lamps that glowed each evening, dutiful guardians of devotion in a corner of the home. But until that day, fire had only ever been background—warm, familiar, contained.
At five, she sees it for what it really is. Not heat, but hunger. Not light, but warning. That day, the flames don’t just flicker. They leap.
A neighbor’s house burns, the flames licking at the wooden beams, the roof collapsing in on itself. She watches from the safety of her mother’s arms, the heat pressing against her skin, the smell of smoke thick in her nose.
“It is gone,” her mother says, voice quiet.
Ammini wonders what it means to be gone, to be swallowed whole by something bigger than herself. To vanish into something vast and red and roaring.
But after every fire, there is water.
Her child — fourth in five years — is born in the monsoon, ushered in with sheets of rain, thick as oil. Ammini labors for sixteen hours, her breath rattling through her chest like a bird trapped in a too-small cage. She does not scream. She has learned by now that suffering is best gulped down — little by little, until the lump in her throat is wholly gone. When he finally comes, slick with birth, his cries are drowned out by the downpour. Her mother-in-law wraps him in an old cotton sari[4], presses a dollop of ghee to his forehead, and calls him a blessing. Ammini wants to believe this, but when she looks at him, she only sees a vast and terrible fear, one more body to keep alive.
Her mother had taught her that fear is a woman’s inheritance. That worry coils itself in the belly of every daughter, waiting to unfurl like the fronds of a fern. That a mother must always be alert, because danger lives in the quiet. A sudden silence meant a child had swallowed something he shouldn’t. An unlatched door invited things that had no name.
Ammini is afraid. She dutifully reads every letter from her husband — stationed out north — spelling out each word with her finger, drinking in any vestige of communication she can get. Can’t come home for another month. The trial is dragging out. They’re trying to delay us into exhaustion, and I don’t trust the way one of the junior judges looked at me. People on the other side are not playing around. Ramesh thinks they could go to any lengths here. But my lawyer thinks we have a winner in our hands. Don’t worry; I’ll be back soon. I’m being careful. I promise I’m safe. Each sentence is a stone in her gut.
Her mother-in-law leaves for her own home. Her husband will not return for a long time; a disgraced policeman entrenched in a legal battle with the state. Everyone has left, leaving the house hollow. Everyone except her and her children, who she now must keep safe. A fragile fort with doors bolted against what might come.
She does not sleep for three days. Then four. Then six. When she finally closes her eyes, the darkness behind her lids swirls, shifting in waves. She dreams of blood soaking into the courtroom floor, of a blade tucked beneath a judge’s robes.
“Any lengths,” tolls in her ears like a dull, interminable bell. She knows what it means. She imagines a long road stretching out between her husband and them, populated by all the adversaries he is fighting in court and the criminals he put away. Their eyes glinting, their knives sharpened, getting closer to her children with every step. And her.
Ammini waits in vain for the next letter, the one that would silence the terrible feeling in her gut. The one that would confirm her husband is still alive.
But it doesn’t come . . . and she wouldn’t even know if it did, for she stops letting people into the house. She draws all the curtains, even during the daytime. She keeps the front door bolted, only letting the maid in through the back and having her sleep near the kitchen. The neighbors come asking, but she never opens the door. She hides a knife beneath her mattress. She counts the children’s breaths while they sleep.
Every day brings something new. One night, she wakes up in a cold sweat when she hears hastening footsteps outside the door. She runs into the hall in the dark, and her heart drops to her feet. Shadows drip into the living room.
She asks the maid about it the next day. “Don’t worry, chechi[5],” the maid says, “I’m sure it’s nothing.” But Ammini sees the lie in her eyes.
That evening, she chooses to be brave. She reluctantly unlocks the front door and, with the new baby in her hands, takes a step forward into the verandah, letting the sunlight seep into her skin. Sridevi, her five-year-old eldest, dashes out with her, exhilarated at the prospect of finally being able to go outside. “Sri, no,” Ammini rebukes, as she uses her free hand to push her daughter back into the dark home, “I told you — we’re in danger. We can’t afford to step out right now.” Leaving Sridevi behind, Ammini advances, examining her surroundings.
And then, she sees them.
Perhaps it is the ominous sparkle of a knife that catches her eye—amidst the bushes beside the locked grill entrance to the verandah. Perhaps it is a pair of unmistakably human eyes. She is certain they’re there. “Who is it?” she calls, her voice a feeble tremor.
The bushes stay still. The world holds its breath.
She waits, muscles coiled tight, the baby pressed to her chest, his breath warming her clavicle. For a moment, there is only the rustle of banana leaves, the sleepy hum of a rickshaw in the distance, a crow cawing as if indifferent to her terror.
But she knows. She knows someone is there.
She lingers a second too long on the threshold, before turning back inside, bolting the door behind her. Sridevi watches, wide-eyed. “Amma,” she whispers, “was it a ghost?” “No,” Ammini says, voice barely above a breath. “Worse.”
That day, they do not eat dinner. The food is poisoned. The milk smells wrong. The water tastes like metal. She sends the maid away and tells her to never come back.
The children whimper with hunger. The baby tugs at her blouse, wailing in protest. But Ammini cannot bring herself to feed them. She sees the shadows from the verandah bleeding into her kitchen, and she knows that they are not done.
They are waiting. Waiting for her to slip. To open the door. To trust someone. To fall asleep.
She will not.
She locks every door in the house one by one, until the air grows stale with the scent of sweat and fear. She gathers the children like a mother cat—placing them in the darkest corner of the bedroom, away from every window. Pillows over glass panes. Saris shoved under doors. Sridevi clutches her little brother and whimpers, but Ammini hushes her gently, pressing a trembling finger to her lips.
“Play a game, Sri,” she whispers. “Pretend we are hiding from the chathans[6]. Pretend we cannot make a sound.” Sridevi nods, her small face furrowed with too much knowing.
The hours crawl, leaking a deep, unsettling silence, while the children fall into uneasy slumber.
For a moment, Ammini relishes some glorious respite.
Then the crying begins.
The baby will not stop. She rocks him, hums, offers him her breast, but his wails rise higher, sharper, cutting through her skull. Ammini presses her hands over her ears, trying to drown out the noise, but the crying does not stop. Her son’s face is dark with effort, his tiny mouth open wide, a cavernous pit.
Over the noise, she hears the unmistakable sound of footsteps. The terrifying screech of metal as someone tries to shake open the grill entrance.
Her son’s sobs grow louder—almost heavy with grief, as if he knows what’s coming. Ammini wonders for a split second if this is the way it is with animals and earthquakes. Do they sit in dread, knowing all they can do is wait for a cruel, inevitable fate?
A voice slices through the baby’s cries. It is from the verandah.
“Your husband is dead,” it calls jeeringly. “Now, we’ve come for you too.” They’ve gotten past the grill entrance. The handle to the front door jiggles, its awful rhythm adding tempo to the baby’s screams.
The realization is like balm to Ammini’s blistered mind. It is her. She is the chink in the armor. The weak link in the chain. The tether tying her children to a world of threat. Her husband is gone; what good is she without him?
The answer has never been more lucid.
She lays the baby down, knowing its cries will subside when the danger does. The door handle jiggles with increasing urgency, but she cannot hear it over the thumping of her heart. She runs to the kitchen and rolls out the kerosene can into the living room. Far away from the children, but close enough for the bad men to discover and leave.
For the first time in many years, Ammini’s thoughts are sharp. Precise. Like the fire she saw when she was five.
“Open the door, bitch,” they cry, menacingly. “Don’t make us break it down.” Her son’s cries only get louder.
Ammini moves like a panther, her breath steady, her fingers only trembling ever so slightly as she douses herself in kerosene. She does not cry. This, too, is an act of mothering. A final one.
She lights the match.
The baby sobs. The front door flies open. In a split second, Ammini sees Sridevi watching her from the distance.
She stands at the far end of the hallway, just beyond the bedroom curtain, barefoot on the cold tile. Her ribbon has come loose, her small chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. Her eyes are locked on her mother—not with confusion, but comprehension far too advanced for her five years.
In that moment, the fire hesitates.
Not in hunger, but in recognition.
Sridevi does not scream. She only watches.
Ammini—soaked in kerosene, her skin prickling with heat, her hands trembling around the lit match—feels her resolve falter. For one instant, she is no longer soldier, no longer shield. She is just a mother. A mother caught mid-step between annihilation and mercy.
But it is too late. The match has left her fingers.
The fire takes her quickly. It is not cruel. It is merely doing what it knows—how to consume, how to cleanse, how to finish what fear began.
° ° °
Sometimes, I wonder if Ammamma feels a pang every time Ammacha calls her “Sri” in a way only her mother used to. I wonder what her five-year-old mind thought when people told her afterward that none of it was real—not the men, the shadows, or the voices; that all of it was a figment of her mother’s imagination. I wonder if she wished she could tell her mother that there was already a letter in the mailbox from her father saying that he had won the trial and would be returning home—a letter she never read. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder.
Ammamma tells me she often wished that her mother would have visited a doctor. But what could she have said? A hint of a fever. And postpartum psychosis—just a smidge. This was, after all, India in 1952. No one cared about a woman’s voice unless it was punctuated by a man’s. Not if she was screaming from the rooftops.
Not if she set herself on fire.
[1] “Grandmother” in Malayala
[2] Translates to “mother’s father” in Malayalam
[3] “Mother” in Malayalam
[4] A garment traditionally worn by South Asian women
[5] “Sister” in Malayalam
[6] a supernatural monster in Malayali Hindu folklore
Malavika Rajesh is a junior majoring in Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. A third-culture kid living at the intersection of Dubai and Kerala, she is the published author of two fiction books, Watch Out! and Runaways, and the recipient of the Chiranthana Literary Award for Best Young Author. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Gulf News, Feminism in India, and a literary anthology, among others.
Photo credit: Photo by Paul Bulai on Unsplash.
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