Chapter 15: Anushka / Baad Mein (After)

# Chapter 15: Anushka / Baad Mein (After)

The feni came after.

Not immediately after, there was the backstage first, the corridor of congratulations and handshakes and the specific kind of post-performance chaos that happened when someone who was supposed to be anonymous became, in the space of four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, a person the festival wanted to talk about. The clipboard woman wanted Shalini's details for the festival archive. A journalist from the Navhind Times wanted a quote. Two women from Margao wanted to know if Shalini gave singing lessons. A man from the Goa University ethnomusicology department wanted to record her singing the full mando catalogue for a preservation project.

Shalini said no to all of them. Graciously. With that specific Goan graciousness that was warm on the surface and steel underneath. The "no, thank you, but truly, no" that closed the door without slamming it.

Then the feni.

They went to a tinto, a local bar, the kind that existed in every Goan village and most Goan town corners, the kind that had no sign and no menu and no pretensions, just a counter and bottles and a proprietor who knew everyone and trusted no one and poured feni into glasses that had been washed in water of questionable clarity. This particular tinto was on a side street off the Rua de Ourem, three minutes' walk from the Kala Academy, and the proprietor was a man named Bosco who was sixty-seven and had opinions about everything and shared them with anyone who stood still long enough.

"Four fenis," Rhea said to Bosco, holding up four fingers.

"Cashew or coconut?"

"Cashew. The good one. Not the tourist one."

"I don't have a tourist one. I have feni and I have water. If you want tourist, go to Baga."

Rhea took the four glasses to the table where Anushka, Shalini, and Prahlad were sitting. table was plastic. That chairs were plastic. This light was a single bulb that hung from a wire and swayed when anyone opened the door, casting the room in a rocking, yellowish glow that made everyone look slightly golden and slightly drunk, which was, Anushka thought, exactly the aesthetic the evening required.

"To Shalini," Rhea said, raising her glass.

"To Shalini," Prahlad repeated.

"To Mavshi," Anushka said, using the word Rhea used, aunt, because Shalini was not yet, not consistently, not in every context, Aai. But closer. Closer every day.

Shalini raised her glass. She had not yet spoken since they'd left the Kala Academy. Not silence of the wall kind — not the defensive silence, not the held note. A different silence. The silence of a person who was processing an experience that was too large for immediate language, the way a computer processes a file too large for its RAM: slowly, in pieces, with visible effort. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger.

"I sang," Shalini said. To the glass. To the feni. To the air.

"You sang," Anushka confirmed.

"Four hundred people."

"Approximately."

"They stood up."

"They did."

"Why did they stand up?"

"Because you were extraordinary."

Shalini looked at Anushka. The held note was gone. In its place was something Anushka had never seen. Not joy exactly, because joy was simple and this was not simple. Bewilderment. bewilderment of a person who had expected one outcome (embarrassment, failure, the confirmation that the voice was gone) and had received a different outcome entirely (a standing ovation, tears in the audience, the clipboard woman crying behind her clipboard), and who could not yet reconcile the expected with the actual. Humidity sat on her skin like a damp cloth.

"I am fifty-three years old," Shalini said. "I have been sewing blouses for thirty years. I have not been on a stage since I was twenty-five. And tonight, four hundred people stood up for me."

"Yes."

"This does not make sense."

"Most important things don't make sense. Making sense is for spreadsheets. Music is for everything else." His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel.

Prahlad laughed. Rhea raised her glass again. And Shalini — slowly, as though the muscles of her face were remembering a shape they hadn't made in years — smiled. The full smile. The one from the stage. The one that had no wall and no measure and no calculation about how much warmth was safe.

---

They found a bench outside, in the courtyard of the community hall, under a peepal tree whose roots had lifted the courtyard tiles into a miniature mountain range of concrete peaks and leaf-filled valleys. The bench was stone, smooth and cool, the kind of bench that existed in every Goan village, positioned under a tree, facing a road or a river or a wall, serving no purpose except the most important one: providing a place to sit and be.

Shalini sat with the posture of a woman who had just performed something she had not performed in decades. Straight-backed, hands on knees, eyes focused on a middle distance that was not the courtyard or the tree or the road but somewhere internal, somewhere the applause was still echoing.

The feni appeared via Conceicao, who had materialized from the crowd with two steel glasses and a bottle of cashew feni that she produced from her handbag with the casual expertise of a woman who believed that celebrations without feni were not celebrations but formalities. She poured two generous measures, handed one to Shalini and one to Anushka, and then disappeared back into the crowd, her mission accomplished, her role in the evening's narrative complete.

Anushka sniffed the feni. Smell was complex: fruit, alcohol, something vegetal, something that burned the nasal passages and then, beneath the burn, something sweet, the residual sweetness of the cashew apple from which the spirit had been distilled. She had tried feni once before, during her first visit, a cautious sip from Shalini's glass, the alcohol hitting her throat like a warm fist, the aftertaste lingering for twenty minutes.

"To the singer," Anushka said, raising her glass.

"To the song," Shalini corrected. "Singer is temporary. Song is permanent."

This feni was strong. Cashew feni always was, it burned on the way down and warmed on the way up, the specific Goan alcohol that tasted of the land, of the cashew trees that grew on the laterite hills, of the copper pot stills that had been producing this drink since the Portuguese brought cashew trees to India in the sixteenth century. Two glasses and Anushka felt it, the loosening, the softening, the removal of edges.

Prahlad was sitting next to her. Not deliberately next to her, the table was small and the seating was dictated by geometry rather than intention, but next to her nonetheless, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his arm through his sleeve, close enough that when he turned to talk to her, his face was closer than social convention suggested.

"Your accompaniment was perfect," he said. Low. Not a whisper but a private register, the volume of a conversation that was intended for one person. "The way you played beneath her. Most pianists can't do that. They hear the piano as the main voice. You heard it as the, " The cold marble of the floor pressed against her bare feet.

"The river."

"Exactly. The river. That voice is the boat and the piano is the river."

"I wrote that in my notes."

"Show me your notes sometime."

"They're one page. And most of it is a reminder to make sure Shalini doesn't forget the second verse."

He grinned. "Did she forget?"

"No. She sang it like she'd been singing it every day for thirty years."

"Maybe she has. In her head. Maybe the voice that we heard tonight is the voice that's been singing in her kitchen, in her head, in the spaces where nobody can hear. And tonight it just. Came out." Her pulse throbbed in her wrist.

Anushka looked at him. The feni was making her honest. Not reckless — she was not a reckless person, had never been, would never be — but honest, the way a third drink made you honest, removing the filter that stood between what you thought and what you said.

"You understand something about her that I didn't expect you to."

"I understand musicians. Musicians are, a type. We all have the same disease. We all carry something inside us that needs to come out, and the coming-out is the most terrifying and most necessary thing we do." He set his glass down. "Your mother has been carrying a song for twenty-eight years. What she did tonight, that wasn't a performance. That was an exorcism." The cotton of his kurta was damp against his chest.

"That's dramatic."

"I'm a pianist. We're dramatic by nature. It's in the job description, somewhere between 'must have long fingers' and 'must suffer beautifully.'"

"Do you suffer beautifully?"

"I suffer adequately. This beauty is aspirational."

She laughed. And the laugh, the real laugh, the involuntary one, brought her face closer to his, or his face closer to hers, or both, and for a moment they were close enough that she could see the individual lashes of his eyes and the small scar on his left eyebrow and the way the tinto's single bulb made the brown of his irises look amber.

"Prahlad."

"Anushka."

"This is. I'm not good at this."

"At what?"

"This. The, talking. The closeness. The part after the music where the people are supposed to, figure out what they are." She squeezed the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger.

"What are we?"

"I don't know. I've known you for thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours ago you were a WhatsApp message about Debussy."

"And now?"

"Now you're a man who played Clair de Lune like he was drowning in it, and who understands my mother's voice, and who just called her performance an exorcism, which is the most accurate and the most frightening description I've heard." The rough weave of the jute rug scratched her ankles.

"Frightening?"

"Because you see things. And people who see things are. They're either very good for you or very dangerous. I haven't figured out which one you are."

He didn't respond immediately. He looked at her with the expression she'd seen on his face during the performance. The immersion look, the look of a person going inside the thing rather than observing it from outside.

"I'll wait," he said. "While you figure it out."

"That could take a while."

"I'm Goan. We're patient. It's in the water. Literally — the backwaters move at three kilometres per hour. We're genetically incapable of urgency."

She smiled. He smiled. And across the table, Rhea and Shalini were talking. Shalini animated now, the bewilderment converting into something warmer, the post-performance energy that Prahlad had described (exhaustion masquerading as adrenaline) fuelling a conversation that Anushka couldn't hear but could see: two women leaning toward each other, laughing, Shalini's hands moving in the air as she talked, the hands of a seamstress describing something, shaping something invisible.

Anushka sat in the tinto on the side street off the Rua de Ourem. The feni burned pleasantly in her stomach. The man beside her was warm. Her mother was laughing. night was happening. The Goan night, warm and salt-scented and full of the sounds that constituted Panjim after dark: motorcycles, church bells, a dog somewhere, music from another bar, the distant rumble of the Mandovi heading for the sea.

She was, she realized, in the middle of something. Not at the beginning, which was three months ago, and not at the end, which was — when? She didn't know. She didn't need to know. She was in the middle, the place where the story was happening, the place where the notes were being played, the place where you didn't know the ending because the ending hadn't been written yet.

The middle was enough.

For now, the middle was everything.