The Sunshine House

Ammu had painted the whole house yellow. She stood on the grass in front of the house, a big smile on her long face. Mustard streaks were smeared across her forehead and arms, and a loose curl of hair stuck out from her dupatta, dyed in lemon.

“What do you think?” she asked my sister and me as we ambled out the house, still half asleep. It didn’t take long for my sister to wake up.

“What the hell have you done!” Munni stomped across the grass and snatched the brush away from Ammu. Wet paint flicked across the yard, spattering sunshine against green blades. “We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile.”

“Yellow is a happy colour,” said Ammu, smiling at her handiwork. “It’ll make everyone happy—you’ll see.”

There wasn’t just one shade of yellow because I could see it all: the soft powder of haldi, the velvet petals of a daffodil, the loudness of lemon. There were swirls of dandelion, flecks of gold, the lustre of amber. It was as if she had enchanted the paint and the colours shimmered together, rippling across the rust brickwork. Our house was a patch of sunshine on top of the grey cliff we lived on. I watched the colours swimming in front of me, entranced.

Munni broke the spell.

“Where did you even get all this paint? That money was meant to be for logs of wood—we’ll die of the cold in our beds tonight!”

Empty wooden casks were strewn under the front window. A cold wind bit at my neck and arms, scratching at me beneath my thin night dress. Munni gripped the dripping paintbrush tightly.

“Do you need to jump to assumptions?” said Ammu in that gentle voice that irritated Munni. My sister flung her hands up in the air—the brush flew in an arc before hitting the grass—then placed them on my shoulders. Her jaw was set; I could almost feel the grinding of her teeth. I always heard them when she slept.

“Why can’t you just act like a mother?” she said, voice almost breaking, before she yanked me back into the house.

***

We didn’t know our father. Ammu said he was a spiritual man, a free-thinker. He could tease a smile from you in the depths of your misery, she’d say. He could pluck the happiness in your heart and place it in a fireplace to warm your toes. I don’t remember much of him, and neither does my sister. Our parents were married for five years. My sister and I were born on either side of that marriage before my father simply disappeared.

“He didn’t leave us,” Ammu had told us, though she never elaborated on that point. She didn’t want to stick around for the stigma that would soon become attached to her new status as a single mother. Instead, she left the town she grew up in—the town we barely remember but called our first home—and took us across the country. We’re free-thinkers too, she’d tell us. We moved through our land of sunshine and angry mosquitoes until we reached a new country, one that spoke a language of straightforward sentiment, free from the lyrical rhythm of our native tongue.

After a year of free-thinking, Ammu settled us in a house that no one wanted on a cliff near a rainy village on the coast, where most people’s faces were the pale shade of an eagle’s egg. She became a seamstress, the people calling her very talented until they spoke to her and saw her thoughts were not always sewn in a straight line. Well, that’s how Munni described our mother.

“Always a bloody mess,” she spat that morning as she sat me down at the kitchen table. She pulled out a sack of porridge oats and scooped some into a bowl. “Why does she never think? A yellow house! Like, actual bright, shining-in-your-face yellow.”

“I like it,” I said, feeling foolish the moment she glared at me.

“Don’t you start.” She stirred the hot porridge on the stove. A sweet smell drifted through the kitchen; Munni had saved up to buy us some honey. I thought about the colour of honey, the golden gleam that shone whenever sunlight spilled into the kitchen. I wanted to ask Ammu if she could put honey yellow into the walls of the house, make it glimmer and glow like the jar would. Before I had finished the thought, Munni slammed a bowl of porridge down on the table.

“Eat it quick. You’ll be late for school.”

“I don’t want to go today.” I muttered the words, knowing what the response would be. We argued back and forth for a few minutes before Munni stomped out the kitchen in a few loud bangs. Sometimes I thought she wore shoes like a clown, trying to fill out a pair of boots that were far too big for her.

***

I said I was sick the next day, too. Ammu and I were on our way into town to deliver some customers’ clothes when I started the question game. Before we left the yellow house, she asked me to put on Baba’s cloak. She didn’t want anyone noticing I was playing truant. His cloak hung loosely off my small shoulders, wrapping me in seawolf fur that never lost its softness. Ammu said Baba had bought it from a merchant in the North, though I didn’t ask the north of what. The fibres of the fur reflected light away from the eyes, making the wearer invisible. I cuddled the folds of the fabric and breathed in. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was hugging my father.

The question game began as always:

Was he a merchant?

No, but he could sell you stories for a piece of your heart.

Was he a sailor?

No, but he could reach the depths of the ocean to bring you back a pearl.

Was he a carpenter?

No, but he could fashion a cradle from the trunks of fallen jadewood trees.

Was he a king?

Yes, and he was the king of all our hearts.

“Was he human?” I asked, my mind wandering elsewhere as the words left my lips.

Ammu turned sharply towards me. The wind blew against her green dupatta. It fell off, exposing greasy dark curls matted against her head. “Of course. Don’t ever ask something like that again.”

I’d never seen her look so fierce, so unlike my mother. I shrivelled where I stood. She turned back to keep walking the path to town, unaware that my limbs began to shiver beneath my father’s thick cloak.

***

The town square was filled with whispers. They washed over each other like slippery ghosts, coalescing into something new before spilling into my ears. Ammu took no notice as she marched straight over ashen cobblestones, not turning once to see if I was following her.

There were always whispers about Ammu. Hisses about how her deft hands could weave clothes fit for a prince at a fraction of the price. Murmurs about how she had never raised a palm against her two feral girls. How those hands painted a house so garishly yellow it must be an omen.

There were whispers about our house, how it always felt warm despite the growing cold. Whispers that no one could get their fire to work, that all the wood was damp, that the winter winds were fast rolling off the sea clouds and into the village that evening. That children would go cold in their sleep and perhaps not wake up the next morning.

There were snarls about my father and who he could be. About how Ammu had no husband to keep her in line. Whispers that my mother was a witch.

I ran on to catch up to Ammu, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. We stood outside her first customer’s door, a shabby beige with specks of dirt. It stood in a line of houses, all clumped together as they often were in town. I hid behind my mother’s skirt despite knowing no one would see me.

They exchanged some words: short and clipped from the stout woman’s end, gentle and smooth from my mother’s. The woman examined the dress, looking at it from hem to hem, pointing out what she thought were mistakes before my mother corrected her in that same soft voice that infuriated my sister.

Finally, the woman handed over the payment.

“You haven’t put a spell on these clothes, then, have you?” she asked with more than a hint of malice, a sneer on her ruddy face.

My mother smiled at her. The woman’s smirk dropped from her face.

***

Ammu woke me up in the middle of the night. Munni was fast asleep, exhausted from her schoolwork and the chores around the house. Ammu brought me down to the hearth in our front room, sat me in front of it in the dark.

“We’re going to play a little game,” she said softly. “It was one your Baba used to play with you, before you could remember.”

Sleep clawed at me, but I paid attention at the mention of my father.

“He played it with Munni too, but she was never very good at the game.”

“Why not?” I asked. I shivered a little and wished she would wrap her arms around me.

“She lives in this world,” said Ammu. “This game should be played outside it.”

She placed my hands on my chest and asked me to close my eyes, to think of the happiest thing I could remember. I told her I was too sleepy, too tired to think any further back than the softness of my bed. Ammu did not relent.

“Your Baba would be so happy that you remembered how to play this game,” she said. “It’ll only be for a few minutes. Then you can go back to bed.”

“I don’t want to play,” I moaned. When she did not respond for a few moments too long, I opened my eyes. In front of me was not my mother, but a man. A man with rough skin as dark as the trunk of a jadewood tree. A merchant, a sailor, a carpenter, and a king.

“Your mother needs your help,” said Baba, his words a melody filled with warmth. “She can’t do this without you.”

“But I’m tired, Baba,” I said as casually as if I had spoken to him all day long. “I want to sleep.”

He smiled, cracked lips spreading broadly across his face. He knelt closer, bunching his broad shoulders as he took my tiny hands in his. He was a big man, yet his eyes were sunken in, his warm hands wrinkled and weak. He looked as if he needed to sleep for a long, long time.

“When are you coming back?” I asked. Baba nestled the tip of his flat nose upon mine. He said nothing, but his breath washed over my face with the smell of cedarwood and lemons. My nose wrinkled. “Baba, why did you leave us?”

His grasp tightened around my hands, the gentle pressure like the heat of a summer afternoon on bare skin. He was so real, so very present in front of me, filling all my senses like a sunset that I wanted to last forever.

“I did not leave,” he said at last. “But I could not stay. This world no longer wanted me like it wants you, my little pakhi.” My little bird.

Heat rose in my chest as those words fluttered in the air. Darkness shrouded Baba, swallowing him up until I saw Ammu half asleep on the floor, her head in a chair. The warmth in my chest spread across my arms, tingling down to my hands. A glow came from my palms, and there sat a flame, the colour of the sun, of saffron threads, of deep amber. Of honey in a jar.

“Who are you talking to?” came Munni’s voice. I turned to see her standing on the bottom step, wet eyes glistening in the glow of the fire plucked from my heart. As if she had been crying in her sleep.

“Look, Munni, look what I did!”

Ammu awoke, startled, and looked at my hands. A wide smile broke her face. She placed her cold and calloused hands on my cheeks before placing a kiss on my forehead.

***

We lit the hearths in all the villagers’ homes. They would never have seen me with my seawolf cloak. We walked home under cloudy moonlight, but my small legs could go no further, so Ammu carried me and held me close. I think it was because she was cold. Munni walked beside us, her silence a strange veil that I did not recognise. And then she spoke.

“But they say bad things about you. I hear them in the market. If it was me, I’d tell them to sod off.”

Ammu laughed at this turn of phrase, so out of place on my sister’s tongue. Words so foreign and yet ours to own now that this rainy town was our home. A home of sorts. Ammu’s steps swayed slightly so she bumped into Munni. The gap between them shrunk.

She held me tighter as she listened to Munni’s chatter that flowed as fast as a dam that had burst. My thoughts swam between Baba and the fire and the casks of paint still beneath our window.

“Am I a witch?” I asked quietly as I saw the edges of our sunshine house bathed in moonlight appear before us.

“No, shuna pakhi.” My golden bird. “You are your father’s daughter.”