Clay Pot | Swayamsrestha Kar

One day, Lata’s little girl came to her and said, “Mama, Nana is hiding inside the clay pot.” But as usual Lata was very busy and very stressed, so she merely said, “Uh huh, that’s nice Putul, is he cosy?”

“I don’t think so. He sounds like he is crying on the inside.”

Aren’t we all? Lata wondered. She had been going through their bills: rent, electricity, Putul’s school and tuition and coaching school fees, and her husband’s prescriptions, and petrol for the scooter, and a thousand other things that piled up each time Lata thought that finally she had some money to set aside.

“When will he come out of the pot, mama?” Putul was asking.

“Who?” Lata asked, having forgotten already.

“Nana, who else? Your father.”

“But he left a few days back. We saw him to the bus station.”

“Then who am I hearing from the claypot, mama!” At ten years old, Putul was already tired of her mother’s flightiness, the casual way in which she eventually tuned out of every conversation or lost its thread. Only to tangle it all up in her messy head.

“Okay, let’s go and check,” Lata said, stepping briskly to the kitchen. She didn’t have time today to teach her daughter the laws of physics, that a big man like her grandfather couldn’t fit into a pot.

Putul picked up the old clay pot from a corner under the sink. Before they had scrapped up enough to buy the fridge—which kept breaking down every quarter—they had used this pot to cool the drinking water. “Nana?” she spoke into its chipped mouth. “Are you there?”

There was no response. “There, nothing there, you see?” Lata said, turning away to reach for the milk; it was time for the evening tea so she might as well—

“… nothing there… to see,” said the pot.

That’s silly, the pot can’t speak, Lata thought.

“Nana? Mama’s here,” Putul was saying into the pot. “Your daughter, remember?”

“My daughter, remember.” A faint voice, undoubtedly from the mouth of the pot.

“Putul, it’s you, isn’t it?” Lata hissed. “You are making that voice.”

“No, I’m not!” protested Putul. “Not,” said the claypot.

At this point, Lata left the kitchen to mull over the madness of it all. Why did she scold Putul? That voice did sound like Nana, but how faint… how desolate. It had been a while since she had heard her father’s voice so tinged with pain. Not to forget that it was coming out of a claypot.

Hadn’t she thrown it away? Or was there something else she had thrown away when she had meant to discard this crumbling, cracked pot? Oh right, it had been kept aside for the next time the fridge broke down. Speaking of the fridge, was it thawing like she had set it to do?

As it turned out, it wasn’t.

“Mama, listen!” Putul tugged at her arm, knowing how often her mother came untethered in the middle of her thoughts, although the little girl had no name for it, yet. “Why is Nana crying?”

“How would I know, Putul?” Lata was fiddling with the regulator on the damned thing when she remembered why she had come to the kitchen in the first place. This is stupid. I can just call Nana and check how he’s doing.

So they spread some newspapers around the fridge and went to give Nana a call. It took him some time to answer because he always forgot where last he had left the phone.

“Nana, are you well?” Lata began without any preamble, and just as the voice on the other end started saying, “Lata? What happened?” she went on to say, “Nana, you forgot to call me after reaching home again, and now Putul is being silly.”

“Arre I was about to call only when the neighbours dropped by. Shanti said the boys were really missing me—”

“Nana, I told you that woman is just using you to mind her sons. So she can work in the evenings as well.” This was of course a sore point for her; she had nobody to mind Putul if she wanted to take up more work.

It wasn’t like that, her father protested, as she had expected him to. In fact, he sounded exactly as expected: absent-minded and naïve. She would have used the word “bumbling” if she had been in a worse mood.

Then Nana started talking about how he had been helping Shanti’s husband fix his old motorcycle, and Lata had no patience for his philandering ways. The old man needed to feel needed, it seems, but she lived in another town, so he had to make do with what he had at hand. Lata didn’t resent him for this. Not any more.

So she ended the call and turned to her daughter. “See? Nana’s fine. He’s back home, slaving away for Shanti aunty, as usual.”

“But you heard him, mama! He’s trapped inside the claypot. Please, can we listen once more?”

And Lata went with her because something still felt off.

“Nana? Are you there?” Putul peered into the narrow throat of the pot.

“There,” the pot responded. “Lata?” it asked after a pause.

“Look, are you some kind of demon? I don’t have the time or energy to deal with you. I can just break this pot, you know.”

“Mama, no!” Putul cried out. “No,” said the pot, and the sadness in its voice—which still sounds like Nana, Lata couldn’t help thinking—halted her hand.

“Lata, my daughter,” said the pot. “I remember.” Every word spoken as if under duress from having lost the things it named–Lata, selfhood, memory.

“But how can Nana get inside the pot?” The question was directed at nobody in particular, but Putul answered. “It’s simple: Just imagine you don’t know your name or anything else about yourself. But now there is a threshold between two worlds and you may learn who you are if you cross it. Wouldn’t you give it a try?”

Lata was looking at Putul in mute, fear-tinged confusion, so the girl went on to say, “It’s what he was muttering when I heard him.”

“Heard me,” the pot confirmed. “Voice in pot.”

“So there was a voice in the pot already? How could that be?” Lata asked.

It took a while to piece together the whole story, but Lata couldn’t have dropped it at that, given how Putul believed it really was Nana’s voice, even though she too had heard him on the phone earlier. From the sparse mutterings of the pot and Putul’s eagerness to fill in the gaps, Lata understood that this was what the voice in the pot had told Nana as he had stood holding it one forgotten night.

And by the time Nana knew it, he was inside the pot. And the one who had lured him there had escaped to live as Nana instead.

“So there was a voice in the pot already? How could that be?” Lata asked, fidgeting with the damn fridge again. It seemed that the more she needed to save, the more her things broke down.

“Maybe every pot has a voice inside, mama,” Putul replied, cradling the one in her arms with some affection. This seemed like a plausible explanation if one were to disregard the laws of this reality completely. But Lata knew children were fanciful at that age. Lord knows she was.

“Tricked… out of my life,” said the pot at this point.

But who would want her Nana’s life? The old man still lived in the same two-bedroom apartment that his wife’s father had given him as dowry and where Lata had grown up. He subsisted on a government pension that shrunk every year as the cost of living kept rising. And he was still working at his age—only he didn’t see it as work because it was for that dreadful Shanti and her stupid children. Who would want to swap places with him?

Only a voice living inside a cheap claypot, whispered her own voice. Anyways, there was a bottom to this matter, and of course she had to get to it. So she called Nana again and asked him how he was doing and did he remember the colour of her first bicycle and how she had fallen off it in seventh grade and could he tell her where she had injured herself—the chin or the knees?

Whoever (or whatever) was on the other side must have had a shrewd understanding of her Nana’s character and capabilities, for he answered each question as her father would—with a certainty that wavered with every passing second, until the answer would be no more than “At least that’s what I remember… I would ask your mother, but she isn’t around… And what does it matter if it was pink or green, didn’t you like that cycle?”

Lata came off the call with no more clarity than she had before, so now she had to find a way to visit Nana. Of course, this would require applying for leaves, which were hard enough to come by where she worked.

In the meantime, thousand other things needed to be done. Lata went through her chores with half—or less than half—of her attention focused on them. Her thoughts kept straying towards the pot. Where had she brought it? Some makeshift stall selling clay and porcelain figurines and other miscellanea, somewhere on the street. Had it ever spoken to her before? Not on any occasion that she could remember, but then she was always so busy.

The next day, Lata put in that application for leave and was promptly informed that it couldn’t be granted in the immediate future, and she had to wait for the manager to get back from vacation, and that would take some time, a few days at least.

Never mind that she hadn’t had a day off for more than a year now, having worked through the pandemic and beyond. Never mind that the manager was rarely seen at work, and when he did appear, was even less accessible than when he wasn’t there. Never mind all this because what else could she do?

So Lata asked her husband to check up on her father. He could get leaves far more easily. “Why? Did something happen to Nana?” the man asked casually, expecting to hear that maybe the old man had left behind something important at their house or maybe he was sick and needed some help.

But he was surprised when Lata replied, “Nothing happened; I just want someone to check in on him.”

“Couldn’t you ask Shanti? She lives right there.”

“No, please, I don’t like talking to that woman, you know that. Just go for a day or two and see if Nana’s fine.”

“But why wouldn’t he be? Did he say something to you?” This was unexpected behaviour from Lata who tended to ignore, or simply forget to resolve, important issues until the very last minute. No wonder her husband was perplexed. But in response, Lata just repeated her request, so that was that. Manoj would leave for Nana’s house in a couple of days.

In the meantime, some of Putul’s affection for the pot seemed to have rubbed off on her mother as well. In the mornings, as she flitted around the kitchen, Lata would chat at the pot about all the worries weighing her down—the fridge, Putul’s fees, the medications, the wheezing scooter, the annoying Shanti.

And the pot would offer choice words of empathy that were increasingly hard to come by, given how everyone in Lata’s circles had the same complaints and the same jaded notion that they were in it for life.

“Just working away, that’s our lot in this lifetime at least,” Lata was saying the day Manoj had left for Nana’s house. “Working away,” replied the pot. “All the time.”

“I suppose it’s the same for you. Must be a hard life in there, no?”

“A warm darkness, not much else,” the voice in the pot said after a while, as if choosing the words carefully. “Out of time, out of mind.”

What a curious thing to say, Lata thought as she went about her day. Confiding her sorrows to the pot had made her realize that the voice spoke in the same cadence of grief in which Nana had voiced his gentle melancholy after the loss of his wife—the one who had kept him together. With time, this sadness had deepened into a general aloofness from daily life, from the normal way of doing things: Why else would an elderly man be talking to a pot in the middle of the night?

And now his daughter was doing the same.

“Peaceful in here,” said the pot next, without any prompt from Lata.

This was new; so far, it had only spoken when spoken to.

“Quiet too,” it continued, while Lata wondered if this was the start of a spell. Or a trick.

The phone rang. It was Manoj. “How is he?” Lata asked as soon as she heard her husband’s voice.

“Seems okay,” he replied, sounding as puzzled as before. “He’s not sick either, just pottering around the house, forgetting things. As usual.”

“Are you sure? He doesn’t seem… different?”

“Different how? Will you tell me what’s going on?” Manoj sounded frustrated now, and she couldn’t blame him. But she couldn’t think of a way to phrase the truth that wouldn’t sound wildly unbelievable.

So she said, “I’m not sure, but I think he was having some trouble breathing. Maybe his heart is weak? Just stay and observe him for a day or two. See if he gets too tired too quickly or if he has chest pains… things like that.”

“Oh all right …” Manoj sounded unconvinced. “Mind you, he seems just fine to me. He’s also fixing a motorcycle for Shanti’s husband, and he doesn’t seem to tire easily.”

Of course he was fixing it himself, instead of helping the man fix it, like he had told Lata. But she was used to Nana’s fibbing, the way he would slightly twist the truth so as not to worry her. Or because he couldn’t remember.

“Anyways, just keep an eye on him, okay?” Lata said and hung up the phone.

That night, she was preparing dinner when the pot spoke again. “So much work… all the time,” it said, as she sweated over the stove.

“It’s okay, I don’t really mind,” Lata replied. The pot stayed silent, an emptiness that she rushed to fill in by saying, “I have a good family, you know. Manoj is a caring man and Putul is a bright girl. What else could I ask for?”

“Going places… living by the sea,” the pot replied, startling her. Those were self-proclaimed goals from when she had been a mere girl.

“And peace,” the pot continued.

“How do you know that? You’re just a voice in a pot,” Lata said with some heat.

“My daughter… remember,” the pot said, and Lata knew it was her father’s voice. She was sure of it now—how? she couldn’t tell—but it was the voice of Nana himself and it was speaking to her from the inside of a claypot. She picked it up and put her ear against the mouth of the vessel. Like listening to a sea-shell. But what she heard sounded like sighs from someone’s dreams.

“Come…” said the pot faintly, “listen… how quiet.”

“What else do you remember?” Lata asked in a teasing voice. “What about my first cycle?” And before she could continue, the phone rang.

“Hello, Lata?” It was Manoj again. “Listen, something might be wrong with Nana after all.”

“What is it?” Lata asked hurriedly, as if longing to resume her conversation with the pot.

“He was fine the whole day. We had dinner and he went to sleep. But just now, when I was passing by his room, I saw…” Manoj hesitated, searching for the right words. “He was lying on the bed, and his eyes were open. He seemed to be saying something; it looked like he was talking to the ceiling.”

“Maybe he was having a nightmare?” Lata asked in a small, trembling voice as an unnamed fear fluttered in her belly.

“I don’t know what it was; the man looked like he was wide awake! And anyways, he didn’t respond when I called his name. Or when I waved my hand in front of his eyes. Just kept mumbling.”

“What was he saying?” Her ears felt muffled, as if she was speaking from the bottom of a well. “Did you hear what he was saying?”

“Nothing too clear. Something about a cycle? I couldn’t quite make out. Listen, I will call the ambulance now. What if he’s having a stroke?”

But Lata was not on the phone anymore. She was in the kitchen, with the mouth of the pot pressed to her ears. “Green cycle,” the pot was saying, “sea-green… like silence… and peace… come, my daughter.”

And it was at this point that Lata went out into the backyard and dashed the damned thing against the ground. Over and over till her hand ached and the pot shattered into a thousand pieces and nothing remained but a handful of dust.

Swayamsrestha Kar (Swayam) majored in English from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, in 2016 and has been working as an editor ever since. She wants to write feral and ferocious words, much like her idols Grace Paley, Denise Riley, and Ismat Chughtai. Her fiction has been published on Kitaab and has been shortlisted at the Bombay Review and Indian Ruminations.