Mad Sisters of Esi, page 21
Then there was the time that Isom, lying on the floor of a stone ruin, whispered to Kua: Your daughter is here.
Except Kua didn’t have a daughter. He had a son, who married a kind woman, and they had Magali, a girl born with the sun in her chest and Esi’s will in her fist. And for a long time, years and years even, Kua forgot Isom. He never erased him, but he didn’t think of him every time he woke up, of his brother’s bony fingers and his it’s not your fault.
He only thought of him on that terrible night when his son died and his daughter-in-law followed hours after. The specter of Isom watching Kua cry. Saying, you could have saved them.
Kua could have saved them, yes. He could have taken them to Boba, found the closest craftsman, and the craftsman would have healed them with his magic. But at what price? Why is the goal of something only to have more of it? More comfort, more food, more life? Did that matter more than the quality of the life lived?
But he tells Magali none of this.
Am I mad? Magali asks softly. Double sight is the first sign.
It is the first time she sounds scared. No, he says. Your grandmother had double sight, and your great-grandmother. It runs in the Kilta family, and all of them lived to ripe old ages as excellent memory keepers. It is only superstition that double sight is a form of madness. You shouldn’t listen to it.
But Isom . . .
Isom didn’t have double sight. Isom was what we call a “worldbuilder.” It is the name for those who go mad first, long before the festival arrives. They call them that because their madness takes a particular form. They want to make worlds.
Worlds?
Isom couldn’t explain it either. I don’t think it is meant to be expressed in our language. All I know is Isom found this island and this universe . . . not enough anymore. He wanted more. He wanted it so badly, he would have died for it. He did die for it.
He remembers finding Isom in a stone structure in the red sands, mumbling to himself. He remembers fighting him to return home, Isom clawing at his face and screaming to be released. In the end, Kua hit him with a rock, kept hitting him until he was unconscious and then carried him.
Magali puts her hand on her grandpa’s knee. He looks so old suddenly, as if the years have descended on him in one fell swoop. Why tell me now, Grandpa? she whispers.
This is it. This is when he says what he brought her here for. The colony will turn against your sister, he wants to say. You must protect her. The closer the festival comes, the more scared they will be. And they will want someone to rally against. They will choose her because she came here later, because she has her own ways and because Isom was my brother. Be prepared.
But he cannot say it. Saying it makes it real; it gives it power it would not have otherwise. As long as he does not say it, it is just the quiet fears of an old man. But once he does, it will become Magali’s story as well; she will carry it. Maybe she’ll tell Wisa, even Jinn, and they will feed it too. It will grow into reality.
He cannot bear that.
So he says, I thought you deserved to know.
Magali doesn’t ask him any more questions. They walk back to the cottage, where Wisa has served out the curry into bowls. When Magali looks at her, she sees a flash of the future Wisa, gaunt and terrified. But then she blinks, and it is her Wisa again, well-fed and content. They eat in silence. After dinner, Magali and Wisa play a game of lilta. Kua sits beside them, lost in his own thoughts.
For years after Magali’s parents died, Kua did not think of his brother at all. He thought sometimes of what the ghost of Isom had said on that terrible night—you could have saved them—but even those words faded after a while. The first time he thought of his brother in decades was when he was walking along Boba market and saw Wisa.
She was dancing absent-mindedly in one spot, for herself, the la, la, la of children going about their day. Except her clothes were filthy and her body emaciated, so there was no real “day” to speak of really, only the question of when she would eat next, if at all. Isom came back to him then. He remembered his brother lying on the floor of the stone structure and saying to him: Your daughter is here.
Isom was talking about this child.
Kua felt the certainty wash over him, and for a moment, it was so powerful it was true. This child belonged with him and Magali; it was always where she was meant to be. Isom knew. But Kua shook himself free of the thought. It was just his brother’s madness talking.
When he caught her stealing, he told himself he would buy her a julma and that would be it. When he asked her how she survived and she shrugged, he told himself he would take her home for a good meal and restful sleep. But there is a quality to Wisa that reminds you of a lotus leaf; everything runs off her. She is part of the world but not of it. She accepts kindness but doesn’t expect it. It is like she believes the world has only a finite amount of luck and wealth and love, and she wasn’t made for a share.
When he was wrapping the blanket around her, she looked at him solemnly and stayed still, her trust given without question. When he asked her if she remembered her parents, she shook her head and said: I’ve always been alone. And he knew he would do anything to change that.
Now he watches Wisa doing a celebratory dance for stealing three of Magali’s lilta bones and Magali trying to argue the move. Kua feels a fierce love. He cannot see what the colony is talking about. He has lived with madness. He knows what it looks like. His Wisa is not mad.
• • •
But, of course, she is.
Wisa was mad before she came to the luddite colony. She has been mad since the age of five.
Miqhai, the Seaspider Drifter
I
Four years until the festival of madness.
Esites now feel change creeping up on them. It is not in individuals as yet and you cannot see it in the land, but it exists at the level of the community. Across Esi, communities are deciding what is “not mad.”
It is not a conscious decision. Rather, it is a drifting one, as when you are lost in thought and don’t realize where your feet have taken you. Conversations circle around finding this new equilibrium, a standard against which people can be measured. It is sought in the quiet chatter after meals, in the surprise run-in with a neighbor, in the soft conversations you have with yourself.
No one knows what “mad” looks like. But “not mad”. . . that feels easier to define.
And so communities across the island begin to draw their own lines about what constitutes familiar behavior. Some tribes are more finicky than others: too much pois juice, for instance, can tell you a lot about a person and their inclinations. Other communities gather around their craftsmen. They seek their blessing on what is normal and what is not. Overnight, ordinary men are turned into gods; they are given the power to decide people’s fate. Drifters move across the island and watch as the power-starved abuse what they have been given.
All this happens quietly, unnoticeable to anyone but an Esite. The travelers still come by ship. They still write of the island’s marvels and Esites’ exceptional ability with craft, and Esites feed them well—they make them fat with the gristle of old stories. This is why no travelogue speaks of the change Esites undergo years before the festival actually arrives; the travelers simply weren’t looking. As they eat and write and talk about how glitteringly perfect Esi is, Esites have begun to root out their own.
They are hunting for the worldbuilders.
It is not easy to identify a worldbuilder but it is not impossible. Look for the ones who dream too big, who ask questions about the way things are, who obsess over the festival. Look for the glint in their eye, for long moments spent by themselves, thinking. Ask the drifters. The drifters can sniff out a worldbuilder the way a pig can sniff out a delicate truffle. They are attuned to it. Ask them, and maybe they will tell you. Or maybe they won’t, and then once they have left your colony and months have passed, you will find your wife crouched in a corner of your cottage, whispering about the worlds she could make. You will see madness in her eyes.
Throw her out then, quickly, before the madness spreads. Before the community finds out and they burn your house down to keep the madness contained. Before they hang her from a tree until she stops moving and then throw her body to the animals.
Above all, don’t plead with them to spare her. Don’t tell them, We all go mad in the festival, we must; for seven days, this is all of us. Does it matter that her time came earlier?
Above all, don’t trust yourself.
II
A blue-tailed stork is picking insects out of a hippo’s ear when it spies a girl floating on the river. It settles on her forehead and stabs at her diffused hair, searching for grub. Wisa pulls out of the water and gathers the stork into her arms. It flaps and pecks at her shoulders until she releases it, laughing. It flies off, irate, an old lady tricked into a hug.
When Grandpa had asked Wisa if she had any parents and she had said, I have always been alone, she was both lying and telling the truth. Wisa doesn’t know the people who gave birth to her; she has always been a small girl alone in Esi; she’s always had to figure out how to survive. But it is also a lie. For Wisa has a family. She made one.
It is Esi: the birds, beasts, animals, trees. From an early age, Wisa talked to anything and everything. She spoke in a rush, not caring if the other creature understood her, but slowly she found she could understand them. It was only about forming patterns—once you realized rojk birds twup-twit in a certain way at a certain time, you could tell what it meant. The birds always understood her; they seemed to have been trained better than humans to make sense of languages that weren’t theirs.
And so Wisa made a community with Esi. She scampered up trees and whispered to squirrels. She lay beside the agamids and hit them admonishingly over the head when they tried to eat her. A merchant saw her do this once, and ran to save her; she was only four years old then. Wisa found the intervention foolish: the agamids really would have eaten him; they like merchant flesh. But when he gave her a hot stew of long-stemmed mushrooms and sea molluscs, she decided foolishness had its merits. She drank it straight, tipping it hot down her throat.
Careful now, the merchant said, watching her lick the bowl. Don’t go talking to animals, okay? Or birds.
Wisa was puzzled. Why?
They’ll think you’re mad.
Mad?
The merchant shook his head. Don’t do it, child. It is for your own good.
And so the first time Wisa heard the word “mad,” she associated it with love, warmth and belonging. She associated it with power. For although she didn’t consciously know it, Esi had saved her. It taught her that there are as many forms of consciousness as there are hearts—to find them and understand them, you only had to listen. Wisa listened. And the more she listened, the more she felt free. To Esi, you are another soft animal, an element in a biodiverse landscape capable of flowing into another soft animal; there is no perspective of “apart” or “alone” or “distinct.” There is no concept of “orphan.” Wisa wasn’t a hungry child lost on the harbors. She was simply Wisa, a bird in a human body, and if she opened herself to the island, it would teach her how to fly.
She never considered it was impossible.
Wisa has been mad, then, from one year old, from her first words, from the moment she learned to participate in the world. There are no boundaries for her. Anything she wants, she finds a way to get—she reaches, eager and fearless, to tug it into reality.
She became a worldbuilder at the age of the five.
You want to know how it began? With a word. Wisa was creeping around the edges of a sailor’s camp when she heard two burly women talking. Wisa was looking for dried fish or millet balls, anything to help with her hunger, but she paused to eavesdrop, attracted by the timber of the woman’s voice. It was as rich and deep as loamy soil.
. . . they’ll be looking for worldbuilders soon. Not now, but in the next few years . . .
This is all she heard. The sailors moved away, still talking, but she couldn’t follow them without being caught. By the end of the night, she had collected only two small dried fish, each no bigger than her little finger. She ate both slowly, thinking of what she had overheard.
Worldbuilder.
She liked it. The word had merged with that loamy voice, and it sounded rich and promising to her. It reminded her of a house so large, you could wander its rooms forever. She rolled it around her tongue.
Worldbuilder, she said, trying it out in different voices. Wooorldbuilder.
But no one else said the word. At that time, Wisa lived in the wilderness, creeping out to the market to steal. At each forage, she listened carefully for someone else to say it. She looked for explanations. When she didn’t hear it in the market, she began to eavesdrop on conversations between drifters. She lay belly down on branches and tried desperately to hear the word again. She even snuck under the windows of seaside dhabas. But it was as if only one sailor knew the word and the rest of Esi had never heard of it. Wisa wondered if “worldbuilder” was a secret of the sea, but it didn’t sound like it. It didn’t belong with salt, spray and the see-saw of a boat. It sounded of Esi.
So Wisa asked the island.
More specifically, she asked the turtles. Huwas were a small tribe of giant turtles that swam into a sweet-water lagoon near Boba to rest from their journey across the black sea. They were cosmic turtles and they made their homes in many islands, but they were familiar with Esi. They had been visiting this lagoon for half a million years. Wisa becomes friends with them in the same way she did most things—without any awareness that a friendship may not be possible. She simply appeared in the lagoon and swam with them.
What did a seven-year-old human girl have in a common with a tribe more than two million years old? But two-million-year-old tribes tend to be kind and very patient, and the turtles were no exception. If the human animal wanted to be their friend, well—why not?
And so that was how Wisa found herself floating on Kin’s shell, listening to gray seagulls screech above them. Kin was a baby, only five centuries old, and her shell was still blue and silver, instead of the pure silver it would become. She swam slowly, in gentle strokes, not really feeling the human on her back.
Kin, Wisa said, do you know what a worldbuilder is?
Kin had never heard of a “worldbuilder.” But she had heard of “worlds.” A century ago, she spoke to a swarm of ants that came from an anthill in a stone structure. The ants themselves had never seen a festival of madness, but the anthill had lived through one, and knowledge had been passed down from ant parent to child.
So Kin knew about the worlds that appeared during Esi’s festival of madness. But she didn’t know how to explain it. She could repeat it in ant language and she could describe it to her brothers and sisters, but how to say it to a human girl? She flapped her fins slowly, thinking.
Think of it as if other islands appeared in the stone structures, she told Wisa. Glimpses of them. Pieces. The other islands were not really there, but they could be visited. She described it like two ocean currents meeting—one hot and one cold. You feel strange when you are in it, but in the end, it is all water.
Wisa pondered over that. She didn’t grasp what Kin meant about the currents, but she could see what she was trying to say. It was like cottages, she decided. Each of the stone structures was a different cottage, but they remained closed for a hundred years. When the festival happened, their doors opened and you could look inside, at their different rooms. Except they weren’t rooms, but glimpses of other islands.
For a while, Wisa fantasized about it. She had never lived in a cottage. They must be places of wonder. She decided a cottage mirrored its owner’s personality, and if you lived in a cottage long enough, it would talk back to you in your own voice. Or in a voice of what you loved. Wisa’s cottage would speak to her in the language of the trees, and the shrill, jumping song of the blue-tailed stork. And if her cottage was a piece of another world—well then. She could live quite happily with that.
But over time, the dream lost its allure. Cottages were small. Even the stone structures, although impressive, were not as large as where Wisa currently lived. She lived on Esi. A whole island. She didn’t want to wander into a piece of someone’s cottage and sit in a tiny space. She wanted to make one, as large as an island. Larger. She wanted one as plural and teeming as the landscape she had come to love.
It is commonly assumed that people shape their dreams in their own likeness. They understand themselves and what they want, and so they make a dream that reflects these desires. But dreams have a life of their own. They choose you, slipping into your mind when you least expect it, and suddenly you find yourself changing for them. This is what Wisa’s world was like. The more she imagined her dream world, the more she became herself. It made her. She didn’t want logic. She didn’t want tameness. She wanted surprise and danger—wilderness, curling up the sides of her world, imbibing it with delicious unpredictability. She wanted the opposites of the black sea crammed, arguing and bickering, into a singular space.
But she didn’t know how to say this to herself. It was only a feeling, skittering at the edge of understanding, waiting for her to grow up and articulate it. Wisa turned eight years old, then nine. She got better at stealing; almost no one noticed her now. Some evenings, she climbed onto the branches of an old magnolia to listen to a merchant tell a story. It was a story in five parts, each about a genie that grew and grew and grew out of a shell, ready to grant anyone’s wishes. Wisa was so enthralled, she forgot she was meant to be hiding; when the fifth part ended, she clapped harder than anyone else. Then she fled, jumping from branch to branch, as the merchant chased her, demanding his coins.
That night she dreamed of the genie.
