Seam

The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame

42 The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame After she has ducked through the low-slung metal shack, the warraped women she’s come to visit offer tea drowsy with sweet. They begin to speak, unlocking the desiccated coffins of their grief. The video camera’s lens blinks on their dawn-thin faces until daylight spools itself back into darkness. Anything, she says, you would like to tell me, anything you can remember. She ducks back under the clothesline heavy with faded saris out to the main road. After the rickshawallah pedals across town to a small, heat-spattered hotel room, she wraps a dark silk scarf around herself until twilight and rubs her eyes riverbank-raw until she lies on the hard narrow bed and begins to touch herself. After the familiar, arched shuddering, she wishes she could cry, because that, at least, might be redemption for each broken body that can’t be restored. She doesn’t feel shame’s dark-circled tightening after waking to the mirror, dust-webbed, nor when she boards the bus 43 back to the city. Sunlight fades the open windows into white dreams. A child bends down to elevate a pink blossom away from a green field. It’s later: when she arrives back at a borrowed flat, begins to strip off travel-pungent clothes and smells her own body’s resinous musk. It’s when she sits down naked at the desk to rewind and fast-forward through all the pixelated footage of the women’s kerosened lives. It’s when she begins to write about it in third person, as though it was that simple to unnail myself from my own body. ...