Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi Read Free Book Online

her. We lived in Troumaron as escapees, as refugees among refugees. Living there while insisting on being somewhere else, something else, refusing to accept the signs that we were no different from all the others. At odds with ourselves.
    I decided to leave good old Savita, the good girl, behind for good. I didn’t know where I’d go. But it wasn’t Troumaron I wanted to escape. It was my family. Troumaron was my place, my struggle, my anchor. I’d never experienced anything else. I grew up here. But my parents’ eyes saw only another Savita, a sweet girl, a trooper, a winner. I had been forced to fit into that image. I couldn’t do it anymore. She wasn’t me.
    And then, at school, I came across a shipwrecked Eve, her face drowned not in tears but in the shadows of the tree she was sitting under. I saw the walls encircling her. I saw the other schoolchildren’s looks, furtive, treacherous. A loneliness so deep it was nodifferent from death.
    The most frightening part was that I had the impression she was me.
    I went weak. I was riveted by her sadness. Through the opened doors of her sides, her life was escaping. I had to console her, take her in my arms like a mother or a lover, and make her forget, however briefly, why she was shaking.

SAAD
    Miracle of my life. The flame trees are in bloom. Thousands of red lips have gorged on the tree, then blossomed all at once. The lychee trees disappear under their fruit. An almost indecent explosion of color, as if shutters have opened onto a body of pure light.
    Everywhere I look, the same colors fill my view. My heart sways. Even here, even here, in this city of cement, summer has come. A shrub turns slate blue. The grass becomes momentarily green before yellowing again. On their balconies, women struggle to preserve miniscule blossoms in pots. They no longer feel weighed down in their bodies and so they sing. At night, the smell of fruits can be discerned from that of trash. For a very, very short while, the fruits win out.
    Summer numbs us at first, before the heat revives the landfill’s call and stirs anew our shadows, our sleepy dregs.
    And I, sitting by my window open to everything that could rouse the night, I keep thinking about her. Her eyes’ resonance, her body pushing away and feeding fantasies. The kind of body that could completely disappear into your own. That could be eaten. The kind of body that could be folded into all sorts of positions to reach its impossible nooks. And that, from its toes to the end of its hair, would be a place to lose yourself in. Her toes would taste like longan. Her hair would be filled with smells of seaweed and night. Her sex would have the tuberous odor of frangipani flowers and the half-rotten warmth of mangroves.
    Oh, I’m off and away, like always. I’m imagining her with someone else, with everyone else. Which makes me even more excited.I’m jealous, but at the same time, I know I’m the only one to love her. She’s waiting for me. I know it. I feel it.
    I’m young; take my hand .
    Yes, he, the poet, he said that at seventeen, with all too much hope. Too much belief, too much promise. He could write. And then one day, he set aside this too-heavy gift. I want both: to write, and to have Eve. Eve and writing. Hand in hand. Having only one of them is as good as nothing. They are the fruits that will sate me, the seeds that will sprout more plants and multiply my voice like a banyan tree swallowing up land.
    I know that, for now, I can’t create anything. I can only copy. My voice isn’t my own. This language isn’t my own. I don’t even know who I’m talking to.
    But this room will end up becoming something real. I reread madness on the walls, in black and white ink, and I tell myself that I’m also in the process of creating, even if it’s with other people’s words. I was a child who stumbled over words. I’ll become a man who tames them.