Mayuri spread the saree on her bed, folded it four times, and rolled it up. Not too big, not too small.  Something easy to burn. She couldn’t believe that two weeks had gone past after the scandalous event, for it still bled in her mind freshly.  Whenever she opened her cupboard, her eyes lighted on the saree she wore that day, sending a sharp pain in her stomach.

    Once, gasping for breath, she ran into the balcony, looked to support herself on the balustrade, but because beads of sweat were running down her hands, she slipped and lost her grip. She flopped backwards to gain balance. For a moment, she found herself gazing down at the tiled courtyard below, imagining her body plunging down onto it. She ran back to her room, threw herself onto the bed and clutched the pillow. From somewhere she could hear children chanting a nursery rhyme. The sound of their voice drilled into her skull. She wished they’d shut up.

    She should burn the saree, so that it would disappear from her view forever, and with it, memories of her shame. And it deserved to be punished for having been an accomplice to the horror of what that man had done. It was supposed to have protected her body – but instead, it had attracted his attention, and his hand. The thought gave her creeps, and she jumped out of bed.

    The man had been stalking her; of that much she was sure. Otherwise, how had he spotted her in the back row while getting ready for the photographs? The plan must have been brewing inside him, for a long time, perhaps.  He must have been watching her and thinking about fondling her right through the birthday celebration. Had he watched her dancing? When her mother rolled her eyes at her and her friends, had he observed that? She sighed heavily. 

She looked out through the window.  The backyard of the house was carpeted with layers of dry mango leaves and tufts of grass.  The right place to burn the saree, just a matter of striking a match and it would turn into a heap of ash in an instant.  She wondered if the fire would be dangerous, though. People in the neighbourhood would notice the column of smoke and would crowd in demanding to know who had set the fire. They would ask, what was wrong with the girl? Why was she burning a saree that she had worn to her brother’s birthday? Her mother would be caught by surprise. A different kind of inferno lighting up her eyes. People would ask what sort of a principal she was? Why should they send their children to her school? Confronted by such questions, she would shrink like a snail in salt.  All because of her secret shame. And it wouldn’t only be the reputation of her mother that would suffer. Her own, as the sweet little girl in the neighbourhood, would crumble like a sand artwork. “From here on, no girl should associate with her,” parents would pronounce.  Her friends would lower their heads and walk away from her. Would Lucy, her best friend, would do that, she thought for a second.

She unrolled the saree, folded it onto the floor in layers and pulled out a pair of scissors from the pen stand on her table. Holding it firmly, she cut the saree first along its length and then across its breadth.

She watched the saree falling into a heap of red petals covered with red and black filigree. She thought about the flowers in the florist in town which mourners brought by the kilogram to adorn their loved ones as they burnt to ash on their funeral pyres.

She gathered up the scraps hurriedly pushing them into a paper bag.  She had already packed up the jewellery and bangles she had worn on the party night into another paper bag. Both the bags she placed side by side like two funeral caskets and bound them together with a length of cellotape. Then she shoved them into the gap between her dresses and the wall of the cupboard.  Moving a few steps backwards and sideways, she checked whether anyone would spot the bags accidently.  No, she was satisfied.  A sigh rose from what seemed the very bottom of her heart.

“May, where is that saree, you wore on Avi’s birthday party,” her mother would ask one day. Then she would reply, “it’s safe in my cupboard, Amma.”

***