Dispatches From Cinderella

Cinder, noun. A small piece of partly burned coal or wood without flames, but with combustible matter. 

Ella, name. Goddess in modern Hebrew, Terebinth tree in ancient Hebrew, Other in  German, fairy maiden in English, and personal pronouns she/her in Spanish.

The earliest record of Cinderella was in ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE. She is a  courtesan with the name Rhodopis in the story. An eagle steals her shoes, and flying  across the Mediterranean, drops them in the lap of an Egyptian King. He takes it as a  sign from the holy heavens and sets out to find who the shoes belong to. When he finds  her, they get married, and her status in society is elevated to belonging to the throne. 

It fascinates me to think that most marriages concentrate on their affinity with a specific  wealth bracket. This tradition seems to be attached to epochs before ours and explains  the dichotomy of love marriages in India. The antonym of love is this world; whereas the  synonym of the world must be love. 

In a ninth century fairytale from China, Ye Xian, a young girl, embodies the virtues and  ideals of Cinderella. She is granted one wish from magical fishbones. She uses the wish  to make a gown which would help her find a husband. A monarch takes possession of  the shoes which have a gold fish-scale pattern and finds Ye Xian. He is enamored by her beauty and marries her, while the evil stepmother is crushed under stones in her cave house. 

I have come to believe that when reading stories, people have liked a sense of feel-good  narratives. What does justice mean in the context of Cinderella? Does it mean that the  evil stepmother is united with a fate as cruel as her? For the father to step up when alive  and ensure a smooth transition for his daughter into her becoming an adult? For  Cinderella to take the path less travelled? Justice often depends on the cultural and  moral fabric of a society, as what they consider acceptable. 

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In this story, Cinderella takes the path less travelled. She will become a first-generation  migrant in Canada, is born in Mumbai, and has she/her pronouns. 

When her mother dies, a man from the neighboring building says, while giving her a lift,  “Men need women, it is so important, good your father is thinking about remarriage. It  is the right decision.” She inherits silence as a language of response after her mother’s  passing. In the apartment that overlooks her window, she watches a daughter recite  answers from a chapter to her mother from memory. The mother immediately hugs her  and swirls around the periphery. When Cinderella sees them in the neighborhood, she exclaims how seeing their camaraderie made her cry. The mother hugs her and says  “Bechari”.

Bechari, Hindi, noun. Someone who is helpless. 

When she travels with her father, who wants to scatter the ashes of his wife across South  India, he asks her “What will you call someone I marry?”. Instead of processing the grief  of her mother passing, Cinderella conjures societally accepted names. “How about  aunty? Or Chitthi? That’s more South Indian and accepted, right?”. Her father gives a  nodding approval. 

When she travels in the corners of Tamil Nadu, everyone calls her “Paavvam”.

Paavvam, noun, Tamil. Someone who is helpless. 

At one juncture, Cinderella retaliates, requesting “Please don’t call me paavvam”. Her  uncle tells her to keep quiet and accept the love of everyone with grace. “Paavam doesn’t  mean what you think it does.” She listens to him, having been taught that he has had his  arc of struggle. When he was little, her maternal grandmother’s brother adopted him.  He ran back home several times, only to be turned back. Now, he has what society  considers a respectable job as an engineer and a sprawling bungalow in which lives with  parents who adopted him. The language of silence does not disinherit her. 

Her father, on the other hand, had to set off to work at a young age. He had to drop out of gaining further education because his father reiterated the financial situation at their  home. Being the eldest child is often like a curse set upon you. To let the curse trap you further or set you free; however, is dependent upon consent and how blessed you  become. When they travel further south, to a temple beside the riverbanks of Kaveri, he  immerses the ashes at the shore. She remembers her mother, how intensely devoted to  art she was, how she wanted to take voluntary retirement to pursue creative courses.  Her government job would give her the pension and benefits to move in different  trajectories. Cinderella often thought that her mother taught her to become empowered,  to write history in the margins in cursive, to begin to underline and cancel the lines which don’t hold true. 

When they return to Mumbai, a flock of friends come to visit. A man says, “When I  heard that bhabhiji died, I said, now his daughter will make his life difficult, very tough.  Instead, what do I see? He is crying inconsolably, and his daughter is greeting everybody  and being strong.” 

It is fascinating to see how society sits with grief. I refer to society because people  constitute the collective consciousness. Most people are afraid of fully feeling what is  going on inside them. Most people continue to choose to be unaware. It is painful, but  not more than a synchronous mind-body relationship. Most people die without resolution. 

Her father listens to a Hindi song on the radio when returning from a temple in Tamil  Nadu which reminds him of his wife. His brother, and the same uncle who was adopted,  says, “OK, enough. Enough now, don’t again.”

Cinderella tries to decipher the semiotics behind the meaning of stopping to grieve. She  is eighteen, still in college, without a job or salary attached; thus, nobody thinks of her  as being the one to give advice. When she grows up, she will understand that a woman is  always either too young, too middle aged, or too old to be taken seriously by the wounded masculine. 

She still tries to unravel the meaning of the sentence, tracing a plait through the fallen  coconut tree leaves. Each appears like an arc of a bursting green. Her mother referred to  various shades of green, bright green, bottle green. Once when they traveled to  Rameshwaram, the waters appeared cobalt green. Every tincture of moss stores a  memory. 

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One of the earlier versions of Cinderella which bears resemblance to the tale we know  today was written in the 17th century. The short story titled Cenerentola burgeoned from  Italy. The narrative includes a story of forced marriage and six wicked sisters. Sixty  years later, in France, the story of Cendrillon introduced the elements as we know them.  The glass slipper, pumpkin, and the fairy godmother.  

A commonality between all versions of Cinderella story is cruelty. Cruelty and suffering.  According to her birth chart, she will become the main character, embodying the energy  that comes along with being one. What we become out of being the protagonist is up to us. 

You thought Cinderella wanted new shoes and a husband? No, Cinderella wants to mourn  with her father and grandmother, to evolve together as a family, to ascend into people who heal. Who says that a death within a family structure must lead to divergent paths?  

Instead, her father remarries P. When she was born, P’s father did not come to the  hospital to see her since she was a ‘daughter’. He will only know this after over a decade of  being married to P, when he brings up something about her behavior from the past. P says she married at a young age against the wishes of her family. He left her and went away when she was pregnant. She has one son. After a decade, she will explain to my  father that she was subject to torture by her first partner. He put cigarette butts on her body. She is regretful of marrying him and doesn’t know his whereabouts anymore.  

About Cinderella, she says to her father, “I cannot be her mother because I’m not her  mother”. When he visits Cinderella in a new country, they talk about goddesses.  Cinderella says she is a bhakt of Maa Kali since courage is a vital virtue which brings a  person to other things. Her father alludes to the incident with P, calling her  philosophical, almost admiring her for saying she can’t be her mother because she isn’t  her mother. Cinderella is flummoxed at the time and place he chooses to speak about  this. It is a square full of people and children, with sensory overload. Her father tells her to lead the way, and that they will talk as they walk. Without knowing it at that time, she  walks in circles. It is representative of their relationship through the years in myriad  ways.

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They call it the trope of the evil stepmother. Some vehemently contest the term. What  does it truly mean to become a part of a family which is mourning? A second wife does  not need a list of things, they need to allow the space for several relationships to grow. Cinderella does not believe in remarriages not as a trauma response but for  transcendence. The greatest relationship one can have is with themselves. 

P passed on the burnt remnants of a wound she was carrying from her father upon  another father. They were married legally, and for her husband, it meant he had to carry  every behavior of hers by enabling it. Cinderella often wondered if that meant her father wondered that people don’t really care for him beginning a new life and that is why they  didn’t offer support. The ones who are left in the background grappling the strands of  life after the death of a beloved realize the importance of shapes. When light is put over  an object, the reflections begin to disappear.  

When Cinderella lives for a brief interlude of a year and a half with her father and his  bride, she recites many chapters from her books aloud. It appears this is the only time  she hears her voice in the house. Of all she recites, she remembers the theory of  mimesis. She is repeating the words— 

Socrates. Plato. Aristotle. All art is imitation, but not all imitation is art. 

The Socratic method is to question each belief until you arrive at its core, undistilled.  The process of learning language does not replicate the ideas we form through  conditioning. Cinderella is twenty. She is looking forward to the bright lights which grow  into sunrises. She has begun to revere each day which sprouts like the sky is preparing  for an anvil of festival.  

When it is Ganesh Chaturthi, she cries as the pandal is being set. Among the last  photograph of her mother was a beautifully decorated pandal with lamps and flowers  and a Ganpati idol. “He gave you to me”, her mother often recollected. When she cries,  her father does not know how to hold grief. He thinks he has to forget the fragments  holding the past in order to celebrate the future. 

Cinderella takes a piece of paper and draws lines on them, some circles, most not  intersecting with each other. The synecdoche for two separate families living under one  roof. At night, her grandmother and her exchange their tears with the stars flooding the  sky. It was a rare occasion for so many stars to be visible in Mumbai due to the light  pollution. Tonight is different. There is a star for every grief in their body. There is the  prospect of tomorrow as the last orange of gloaming moves into fuchsia. The  emulsification of something which is moving and creating a chrysalis of movement.  Cinderella and her grandmother slept near the window, the night sky coming into the  bedroom. 

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