Ancestral Bones

Chapter 1

She could see the reddish hue of light through her swollen eye lids. She didn't want to wake up. Not yet. She wanted to float through the red haze just a bit more.But concsiousness is a bitch and it just wouldn't let her enjoy a second more of her ignorant bliss.

"Meenu, wake up. Maa's calling for you."

Meenu sucked in a breath and slowly exhaled the quick spike of anger that lanced through her heart. She could feel Nani's hand grabbing on to her shoulder, nails digging into the soft flesh there.

"Meenu!"

Nani gave her shoulder a quick, hard shake.

"Fine, I'm awake!", Meenu grumbled her displeasure at being woken up. Her eyes couldn't quite open fully with dried crust sealing half her eye lids shut. Letting out a groan, she lifted her left hand and carefully picked at the crust around her eyes.

"What? Want to watch me pick my nose too?"

Nani poked her tongue out and made a face, but didn't move herself from her crouched position beside Meenu. Her slender nine year old frame folded in on itself with her hands circling around her skinny knees. Butt firmly planted on the cool, smooth floor beside Meenu's sleeping palette, her body was bare except for the strip of cloth tied to the end of her long braid, hanging over her left shoulder.

It wasn't weird that she wasn't wearing anything. Meenu's family always slept naked. It was only her mother, herself and her two younger sisters living in this hovel afterall. No males. Only females. The night time was always too humid and hot for them to bundle themselves up with cloth when going to sleep. It'd just saturate their clothes with sweat and result in doubling the amount of laundry they had to do.

Sleeping on the woven, rush sleeping palettes is not the most comfortable thing in the world. The weave digs into your skin uncomfortably and leaves it's imprint there. But it's either the palette or the floor for them. So, Meenu learned not to be too picky from a very early age. But still, she felt that it's perfectly within her rights to be envious of the other well to do families of the village, who probably slept on soft, stuffed cloth mattresses bought from travelling tradesmen.

Meenu observed her younger sibling's face. Partly shadowed by the gloom within their shack and illuminated by the soft rays of sunlight filtering through the gaps of the woven palm fronds on their roof, she could faintly discern the patch of lighter, white skin dominating the left half of her face, brought into stark contrast by the dark brown skin on the right half of her face.

Meenu has always thought that Nani had beautiful skin. White and brown battling against each other to take up space on her soft, supple skin. Once when Meenu was a kid, Maa took her to a market place temporarily set up on the village square by a rag tag group of travelling nomads passing through their village. In one of those dreary looking tents, Meenu saw heaven. Scores and scores of colourful fish, glistenening scales and shimmering fins darting about in the still waters of the display cases. Meenu decided that the most beautiful of them all were the ones they called 'Koi carps'. She had never seen such beautiful patches of contrasting colour on any of the fish the village fishermen caught. They mostly caught drab, grey and ugly fish. She begged Maa to buy her one of the pretty Koi fish, but Maa refused. It was the first and last tantrum Meenu had ever thrown in her entire seventeen years of living. Maa was livid that she dared to embarrass her infront of the whole village and her poor little butt payed the price for her misbehaviour.

And then Maa had Nani. Meenu felt as if the deities had sent her the little thing to make up for not taking her side when she wanted that Koi fish. Nani had beautiful pinkish white and brown patches on her skin. Meenu couldn't quite figure out if they were white patches on a brown background or the other way around. As Nani grew, Meenu observed that the white ate up more of the brown on her sibling's skin. Meenu knew that Nani hated her beautiful skin. The village kids gave her a hard time over it and they avoided touching her as if she carried a deadly disease.