My Chessmen Wear Red
By Damyanti Biswas
I stand by the river in fading sunlight, wearing a tattered red frock. My father looms, the neighbours in their shorts and singlets watch, laughing, curious, calling out to him as they hold their fishing-rods in place. My scrappy body trembles. I need to pee, my hair covers my eyes, snot on my lips. The salty goo of it dribbles onto my chin, and I try to wipe it on my sleeve. My father wants me to rip apart the warm chessboard, tear it to pieces and chuck it in the river. I’d jumped up and upset the chessmen, in rush to join my friends in play.
Having grown tall, with shoulders mannequin-broad, I take after my father. Only the black lipstick is different, and my dark glasses, to face the world and my smelting fire too bright after hungover nights. I walk and live in straight lines, like a chessman bishop, keeping myself to myself, mowing down all in my path. The river still flows, rank-smelling, quiet, across the street. I make chessmen for a living, because despite a school-teaching degree, a lifetime of fishing and chess, that’s the only way to catch a living: make men of wood, metal, glass, sell them. Most mornings, I wake to a warm, hard body wrapped about mine, and a fading dream of black soldiers and white soldiers marching in chess moves, capturing others in passing, castling around their kings, in the middle of a sandy plain. On others, I wake alone, wet, stinking of grime and sweat. I change out of my pyjamas, and charge across the street down to the riverside, holding my red umbrella during rainy mornings. Stare at the reflection and see my father checking his watch, timing my chess moves against his, screaming, faster, faster, wild-eyed like the last time I tossed him out of my dreams. I imagine the river catching fire, the rain, my long, wet-clingy hair, the vermillion red umbrella on fire. I can’t stay here, I tell myself, shaking. I go back home, and fall sleep on my dead father’s bed.
I stoop now, an old hag, older than my father ever was, by twenty years. I’m aware of the river, of the bodies it has carried. It flows through me now, and through my hands into the chess pieces. They wonder how a crone can still carve and smelt, how my arthritic, spotted, wrinkled hands wield hammers, tongs, and heat chess pieces in the fire. Some days, I wonder myself. The boy who works for me, I teach him chess. He’s good, but he hasn’t beaten me yet, at least not on the days I can see clearly, when my thoughts don’t stumble over each other. He’s not allowed in the workshop yet, only to sand and polish the pieces in the courtyard outside. He wants to paint bright colours on them, he says. Black and white bore him. How about some red? My father walked into the river on my sixteenth birthday, and never came back. For days, I was happy, relieved, before the lost-ness set in. What was I to do, where was I to eat? I found answers to both. I thought I was writing my own story. But the story has lived within me, and I’ve lived in its black-and-white world, my father’s frozen ghost looming over my shoulder. No such thing for the boy. I walk to the river and stare down in the dank waters at my face, my crooked hands. None of it matters, my body, the river. Go get the colours, I tell the boy when I return, and we’ll see. I cannot change how a pawn or a bishop moves, but I can still shape them.
My chessmen shine in the boy’s hands, and they wear a vermillion red.
THE END