Call of the Greater Coucal

Noomi wakes up early on Sunday morning because her right ear hurts with a dull, regular pulse. Sitting up in bed, she presses a palm to her forehead, which is specked with beads of sweat. Sunshine slides through gaps in the curtains, casting pale slats on her white sheets. According to the Cheshire cat clock on the wall, tail swishing the seconds, it is just eight o’clock but the sweltering heat makes it seem like mid-afternoon. Outside the bedroom window, loutish city crows caw as they weave through a hot pink bougainvillea. Their racket casts Noomi from her bed and out of her bedroom.

The door of her parents’ room has a pneumatic closer, and it shuts behind her with a moody hiss. A pashmina of cold air falls on her shoulders. It takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the room’s hazy darkness. Thick blinds don’t let in a crumb of light. She slips over to the bed and slides under the blankets between their sleep-musky bodies.

Noomi puts an arm over her father, pressing her nose against his back. His muslin kurta slips about under her palm. He stirs a bit, grunts affably. Noomi flings one leg over his side, nudging his quaggy belly with her heel. She is careful not to disturb her mother.

“Papa, my ear’s hurting again,” she says. “The right ear.”

“Uh oh,” Jeh says, patting her arm. “Do you want medicine?”

“No, thanks,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “It tastes disgusting.”

“Well, what do you want to do, beta?” he asks, yawning like a leopard.

“Last time Lily Mama put some oil in it,” she says. “And then it didn’t hurt.”

“Go downstairs, ask her,” Jeh says, pressing a bell for tea. “Just don’t disturb your mother, okay? She’s had a rough night, couldn’t sleep until almost four in the morning.”

The AC turns on with a shudder, and Noomi sneezes. Last month, her parents had her ears looked at by a specialist who’d scolded them both for smoking. And yet, overfull ashtrays still decorate rooms like potted plants. On her mother’s bedside is a blue Murano ashtray filled with cigarette butts, and smoke clings to the walls, curtains, sheets, and her mother’s hair—which looks like black smoke shot across her white pillowcase.

________

In the car the night before, on the way to Gymkhana Club for tombola, Noomi’s mother pulled out a plastic water bottle from her handbag. Holding it between her knees, she lit a cigarette, blowing tusks of blue smoke from her nostrils. Then she unscrewed the top and took a swig before passing it to Jeh, who said something that Noomi couldn’t get over the roar of a passing water tanker. It was funny, whatever he said; her mother tossed back her head, letting out a beautiful, brassy laugh. She hadn’t laughed like that in weeks.

“Ma, look what I’m wearing,” Noomi said, smiling from the dark of the back seat.

Noomi had on a pair of beige polyester pants, and a top with a bib of frills that her mother purchased on one of her foreign trips, with money smuggled in a talcum powder tin. Noomi didn’t like the clothes she brought her: tight-fitting, dull Western outfits which, in their town, invited looks. Her mother would complain to anyone who’d listen how Noomi never wore all the expensive clothes she’d bought. Noomi wore them tonight, hoping that she’d be pleased.

Balancing the bottle on her thigh with one hand, Noomi’s mother turned around to look at her. The car went over a speed bump, and the drink splashed all over her sandals. The car began to smell like the cotton swabs nurses dab on your skin before a shot.

“Oh, fucking shit,” Asha said, jerking her head back to the front, shaking her leg like it’d caught fire. Noomi groaned. She was eight years old, and knew all about hangovers.

________

“Dad, listen,” Noomi says, shaking Jeh...