PodCastle

* Author : Damini Kane
* Narrator : Suna Dasi
* Host : Srikripa Krishna Prasad
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 655: Mariska and Major is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13.
Mariska and Major
By Damini Kane
Mariska is not an Indian name. I think that’s what caught my attention. She looked Indian enough, but there was something otherly about her, as though she spent too much time reliving childhood fantasies in her head. Still, she was nice, and we were neighbours, so we became friends.
She was the newest addition to our town. You wouldn’t know where I grew up; it doesn’t exist anymore. The people who lived there have moved on, their children based in expensive countries with jobs like Doctor and Lawyer and Techxpert. Our town was on a mountain. It snowed in the winters and burned in the summers. The little houses there were like grit in a nail bed, clinging to nooks and crevices in the rock, held together by a thread of a road. Sometimes, a bus would come to take us downhill, but we rarely ever boarded it. I believe my town might have been the last idyll in India, my country now full of choking cities. Today there’s a shopping mall over my home. The mountain was blown to pieces and in the winter, it is ash, not snow, that falls from the sky.
But this is not about any of that. Those are big things, Development, Environment, The Passage of Time. God knows I’m too small for such big things. This story can fit inside a coin purse. You could spend it at the corner store. You might drop it on the street and not even notice.
Mariska was tall for our age, and her hair was long and bounced around when she walked. She said she’d come from a city. I don’t remember which one. She told me her mother had disappeared, the way a dream does as soon as you wake up. Such things happened to Mariska. The things that happened to people in novels.
Anyway, long story short, she didn’t want to live with her unemotional, distant, boring businessman father, and decided to come to our town, to stay with her grandmother.
Her grandmother was another storybook creature. I had known her since I was little, as she was our neighbour. She would smile at me and give me a boiled sweet from her bag whenever she saw me, so I grew up liking her a lot. She asked all the children to call her Major. She used to be a doctor in the military and Major was her designation.
I had never been inside her house before Mariska invited me. “We can watch an old movie,” she suggested. She was always watching old movies. She said they were better than the new ones. I would tell her she was an elitist. For some reason, it made her laugh. “Drishti,” she said my name, “it means Vision, doesn’t it?”
“Yes?”
“That makes sense. You see things the way they are. The truth at the heart of everything.”
Seriously. Mariska would say things like that.
Major’s house smelled of ginger tea. I soon learnt this was because she was always making some, fresh, with great knuckles of ginger peeled and thrown into the pot without chopping. I had never had such strong ginger tea before, but after a few sips, I discovered a taste for it. Major was quick to pour me more, and the three of us sat around the table, chatting for a while.
Mariska loved her grandmother more than any other person in the world. They laughed all the time. They had inside jokes within inside jokes. Spontaneously,