Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(64)

Soundless, the doors of all cages slid up. The inmates rose and stepped outside.

I was surrounded by the wedding procession now. My nostrils filled with a smell as organic as it was old.

In a flurry of blue and green and black we marched to the couple’s cage. Their door swung open, revealing a three-step deck carpeted with red feathers and fall leaves. The crowd surged forward, elbow to elbow, carrying me on its breast. Their footfall was perfectly silent. I couldn’t even hear their breathing.

We halted before the stage.

Two men in raven black swept across the hall, up the stair deck, into the cage. They held a bowl of milk. The bridegroom swung his veil of burnt feathers aside and sipped. The raven men presented the bowl to the bride. She dipped her head coyly (but not before I saw that her eyes were large and different-colored) and drank until the man gently removed the bowl from her lips and placed it on the step deck.

Mano the wedding cat appeared from behind the stage. He sauntered up the steps and began to lap up the remaining milk. Come to me, Mano, I tried to say, but the words wouldn’t leave my lips. Satiated, Mano yawned, licked his haunches, and started circling the wedding cage.

A woman in all white with a birthmark beneath her left eye was beside me. She was built like a briefcase, short and squat and business-like. She gazed at me for a moment and pointed at the ceiling.

I looked up.

The hall’s ceiling was covered in the fresco of a giant bird. The bird was perfectly captured in mid-flight, its golden-dark serrated wings scything a blue sky. It had a rainbow plumage, black horns, and a peacock tail. Glinting feathers, like embers, showered from its underbelly. In the flickering light, the painting appeared to cast a vast shadow over the proceedings.

I lowered my gaze and the woman was gone. In her place was one of the raven men. Gray sparrows sat on his shoulders and pecked at his hair. He held out an enamel basin in front of him. Liquid sloshed inside. Its vapors made my eyes water.

The raven man bowed and began walking to the wedding cage.

Now rose excited chittering as the guests removed the card-like objects from their mouths and showered the wedding couple with them. Prayers, cheers, shouts, and the wailing of women overcome by the prospect of a daughter’s separation mounted, until you couldn’t tell if the procession were celebrating or mourning.

Mubarak! Mubarak! Be blessed in your husband’s house.

May you never have cause to leave that home. May you never be short of dowry.

May your firstborns be healthy baby boys.

May your mother-in-law never hate you.

May you never return to your parents. Should you return, come only as a dead body

and

may you stay safe from the stove, the stove, the stove!

Now burst the wedding songs from a hundred throats, ancient, powerful, entrancing, loving, imprisoning, humiliating; and yet the raven man walked, he walked toward the bride with the basin of slopping liquid that gave off fumes.

She sat in her cage, placid as a sea, ageless like a vow unfulfilled. Only when the man reached her and doused her in the vaporous liquid did she stir. Her jewels slid and chinked. The tapestries on the walls darkened. The groom’s veil of charred feathers dropped from his head and the red of the bride’s dress deepened until it turned a perfect black.

The procession rejoiced.

May you stay safe from the stove!

Mano was between my legs. The wedding cat flicked his tail and tripped me. I flailed my arms, stumbled, and when I looked up, the wedding hall was gone. The cages, the guests, the beautiful bride with her splendid mismatched eyes (which I have seen in dream many times since), the elegant ornamentation—all vanished.

Just an orphan’s room, empty of poise and promise.

I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid. I was crying. I went back to the courtyard and looked at the sky. So many stars that night, and the blue moon, it watched the world as it always had. A bulbous bird staked to the heavens, it spread its vast gaze over all our affairs. Its eye was filled with something deep and raw. Now when I close my eyes and imagine that moon, I think what I saw was mystery and memory and a longing so old it makes me shudder.

I went to deliver the tobacco (still in my pocket) and as I passed Sangeeta Apa’s door, the sounds of hushed conversation came, as did soothing odors of incense, earth, and rubbing oil. When I returned from Bibi Soraiya’s quarters, the door was ajar. Leaves rustled. I glanced up to see a figure, bulky, as if with a thick garment, clinging to the tree (which tree?) outside her room.

The moon fled behind a cloud. When it returned, the ghostly figure was gone.


The wedding dinner was short and sweet. There was biryani, sweet lassi, mangoes, and lychees (it was summer). Rumors of silver-papered firni-in-jotas from Gawal Mandi floated for a while before Bibi Soraiya dismissed them.

The groom was a looming, forbidding man who bowed his head again and again and made squeezing gestures with his fists when too many of my sisters crowded him. Sangeeta Apa and he wore matching wedding outfits. She wouldn’t look at him but peeked from behind her ghoongat, smiling, when Neha and I tried to steal his brown leather shoes—Joota Chupai is an accepted custom. Bibi Soraiya yelled at us and we reluctantly returned them.

They left for Gujranwala the next day by train.

I have not seen nor heard of my Sangeeta Apa since. If she called or wrote letters, Bibi Soraiya didn’t tell us, which was strange because my others sisters stayed in touch—for a few years, at least, before life overtook them. The unsettling shadow of Apa’s absence grew, but even after I was all grown up, if I asked about her, Bibi’s eyes would change. With age, Bibi developed a tremor in her face and limbs, and mere mention of Apa would send her shaking to bed.