Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response 
And gradually correct the coward's stance; 
Cover in time with beams those in retreat 
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great; 

Publish each healer that in city lives 
Or country houses at the end of drives; 
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at 
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

WH AUDEN - ‘Petition’ 

My father died of complications from diabetes, and it was a very slow death. He died across a year. He died across time and space, which was the worst way to die, because that way of dying left an entire family’s bowed heads balanced within the open mouth of a beast, teetering for however long it took. Death, death, death, tumbling out everywhere, death like sand in the shoe, death consuming entire shorelines whole. 

Aredhel described that year of anticipatory grief as a stone growing slowly in the region of the chest. Or a void in a silo of grain, some kind of inevitable caving-in. I knew this stone too, though for much longer than a year. It turned within me all my life, shredding parts of me to nothingness and blunting the other edges it touched. It swivelled so long and so constantly that I did not even notice it: it was no imminent explosion but a steady separation of the chambers of my heart from each other. When it finally stung enough to notice, my father was already dying. But by that point it felt less like the world was caving in on me and more like I was standing upon the moon, watching the construction of an opulent palace somewhere down on the grey earth. I would peer, sometimes, to see it closer, to count the bricks, then soar back home. Like a starling skimming the trees. 

You need to cry, Russo, I had told Maedhros, three days after Elros had been killed, the evening of the morning he had smashed down the cliff-house door and chopped it up into unrecognisable shreds of wood. You are holding too much of yourself in. You need to cry.  

He didn’t, because crying on command was a rather unreasonable expectation on my part, but he looked appropriately grateful that I was still telling him what to do. Rain and shine, dead son and lost son, but this, a constant. Finnu wears the pants at home, he once whispered to Elros and Celegorm after he and I underwent a particularly lengthy round of bickering over some stupid fucking Russo-thing. Finnu wears the pants at home, he said, until I rip them off him and shot me such a dirty, outright bawdy wink that I couldn’t help but laugh. I pinched him for it, and he cackled. Because I pinched him, and because while I enjoyed chivvying Maedhros around in public because fuck me he needed to be chivvied, Elros and Celegorm didn’t know that Finnu most definitely did not wear the pants at home—at least, not all the time.

In our fifties we were, yes, grown men, and still somehow Russo-and-Finnu, chronic backbenchers in every classroom, playing our make-believe Russo-and-Finnu games before the nose of every teacher, allowing no other classmate or sibling entry into our secret worlds. We were the Zamindar and the Admiral, we were the Sultan and his Begum, we were Laila-Majnu, Othello and Iago, Romeo and Juliet, Kochunni and Pakki, Unniyarcha and Chandu Chekavar, Lenin and Trotsky (guess who came up with that one), Arthur and Lancelot, Jodhaa and Akbar. We were the blank slates on which we wrote story after story, I was the first to know just how much Russo adored writing stories, just how good he was at conjuring entire worlds. 

As we grew older, more and more stories ended with a kiss. By the time we were in our mid-teens, every story was a love story, especially the ones which could never have been. Back then, I didn’t know that every story was as much for him as they were for me. I didn’t know, even after the time when we were, oh, fifteen or so and Russo had glimpsed me walking back from church, elbows linked with Finarfin’s little sister, my very fashionable cousin Lalwen, whose hair ribbons I had been fondly pulling at to showcase my appreciation for the style she’d done it up in. And Russo, who cared so little for women that they apparently all looked the same when viewed from the back, had assumed it was some other girl and spent a full week refusing to speak to me until he turned up at my third-floor windowsill at midnight the next Sunday and proceeded to burst into tears like the pantomime queen hiding deep within every man. I didn’t realise even after that. I have always pleaded guilty to being a rather dim child. 

(You cannot blame me. When I was but a lascivious twinkle in the vicar’s eye, the Lord asked me to choose between style and smarts, and having looked down at the drab conglomeration of white-hatted koyas, unemployed writers in plaid shirts and lungi-wearing Commies known as the Kozhikodan fashion circle, I chose the road less travelled by.)

These days of course, we know. We know that Russo needs to be the Sultan as much as I need to be the Begum. Because if we weren’t the Begum and the Sultan, we would be Russo-and-Finnu, blank slates for tragedy. A man with a dead son, a man with a dead father. 

You need to cry, I had told him. As if I knew such matters so intimately. And as my father died faster across these last few weeks, Russo looked at me every now and then in a you should know better way, because he didn’t want to tell me to my face that I should cry because I would rightly point out he was too traumatised to do such a thing when Fëanor set fire to himself, but wanted me to know it anyway. But I couldn’t tell him that it wasn’t just one thing I needed to cry about. The devastation was wreaked in the plural, like devastation so often is. I was standing within a chamber of my heart so separated already from the others. Reaching out to feel Turgon’s grief or Aredhel’s did not ground me as it should have done. The preparations for the funeral did not bring me to my knees with sorrow. 

When a loved one dies, everyone knows that all you are left with now are the things you said to each other, the words you had exchanged or hurled, both the kind and the cruel. You hold on to them, whether barbed or cushioned, because they are all you have left to love or hate them with. Few speak of the tithe to be paid for these meagre possessions, the vast voids of the words you hadn’t said to each other, the spaces between the words you had said, things that went unsaid all your life and now could never be said at all. This silenced lexicon of exiled words, encircling the eulogy encircling you. When my father died, all I had were the holes he left in my head: blank spaces stoppered by the fact of his death, doomed to be vacant evermore. 

The call had come late in the evening after I had returned from my trip to Chennai. It had been Aredhel who called to say my father was dead. 

Riddhi?

Finnu, she said. Achan has left us.

I had wanted to cry a little then, more out of shock than anything else, or because Aredhel had been in tears and I hated hearing anyone cry. I didn’t. And then I drove to the station and bought a tank of diesel, because the station that sold cheaper diesel would shut if I left it any later. My father was dead. 

If you don’t believe me, beloved. 

I had told you that Russo and I had a monumental argument the morning of my father’s funeral, which culminated in Russo kneeling and strapping my anklets around my feet, closing the clasp almost viciously. I had thought he was still coming down from whatever it was he had snorted off Legolas’ wherever last night and was thus in a bad mood, or that he was in a bad mood regardless, which was more often than not these days, just a handful of meagre months after Elros’ death. And having lived with Maedhros Fëanorian all these years, having known him since we were—you know it—five, I tended to tune out the fellow’s bad moods to the point I was entirely unaffected by them. That was the trick, see, the one Maglor and Elrond never seemed to be able to master, but somehow Celegorm had. Either that or I was just too preoccupied to care about Russo’s mood, it being the morning of my father’s funeral.

What I’m saying is that if I had been paying attention, I would have noticed the thing I only found out much later (many such things in this story, as you’ll soon find out: nobody likes to tell poor Finnu anything, and this is why I should take a page out of Maglor’s book and eavesdrop in doorways and bug people’s studies to ensure they were doing their homework) which was that technically, the argument was all Cousin Finarfin’s fault. Both of them had been behaving reasonably well thus far, and hadn’t gone beyond verbal sparring. This was not because they made a conscious, considerate decision to not bring the mudpit of electoral politics into a house of mourning, but because Maedhros and Finarfin nursed a pet hatred of my father so passionate that they both made no secret of the fact that they viewed their attendance at his funeral as a reward for their good behaviour in not having killed him themselves, and did not wish to have their invitations revoked. 

“Eh Razul, look at his feet,” Finarfin muttered that morning, moving close to Maedhros, miming waving a flag of momentary truce. He jabbed a thumb in my direction. “I’m fucking pissed off, man. Blood boils every time I see it. Do something about it before I tie dear Sister fucking Finnu to a log and put it in the woodchipper alongside you-know-who’s coffin.”

Maedhros followed the line of Finarfin’s thumb and narrowed his eyes, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “I see what you mean. I just put it together. Well. What the fuck.” 

“Agreed. Please tell me this is your fault and that you were fighting or something. Tell me it’s not because of. Well. The grand occasion. Our joint birthday party, shall we say.” 

“Sadly, for once it is not my fault. Hell, look at him. You know he spent ten minutes this morning stripping off his fucking nail varnish. Fucker wore red nailpolish to my fucking mother’s funeral. God, just look. No anklets even. Fuck’s sake.”

“Razul, this is the man who most people know by his tendency to change into his ‘ration-shop earrings’ when he goes to the fucking ration shop to collect his two fucking kilograms of fucking rice every month.” 

“You think I don’t know that? Although, can I please interject: the son of a bishop shouldn’t be going to the ration shop at all, and you greedy Christians will eat the country out of house and home. Anyway. He had his ‘going to Kochi so I must be even more fashionable’ earrings on until this bloody morning. Anklets too. And he was dripping in fucking diamonds yesterday. Allah mian. I’m going to either fucking throttle him or set fire to his daddy’s coffin. You’re right. This is fucking infuriating. I can literally feel my blood pressure rising. Feel my pulse.”

Finarfin gingerly pressed his ear to Maedhros’ wrist. “Oh, that is elevated. Hm. Perhaps you might bless me with a heart attack.”

“Inshallah, if only the Almighty listened to both our prayers. No, shut up, Allah is the reason why you have to deal with this. Your Christian funeral, correct? Not my place to intrude. Tell him Jesus wore anklets. And like I said, blood pressure is at an all time high these days. Dead son, remember? I am very likely to lose my shit if I start telling him to put his bloody earrings on. I lose it at him on the day of his father’s funeral, I’m never hearing the end of it. You do it.”  

“Absolutely fucking not. If you lose it, that’s a Comrade-problem, not a Daddy-problem. And I heard from the Maglor-grapevine, by which I mean information he offered me the last time I threatened to put him into the ground for making eyes at Eärwen in exchange for not putting him in the ground, that the last time you tried raising your voice to Finnu, he slapped you round the face right in the courtyard. Hence, win-win situation for me if you do or don’t lose it,” noticing that Maedhros didn’t budge, Finarfin sighed explosively and shook his head, as though he were being forced to dire tactics. “You are bringing me down to your level, I see. And I don’t even have a dead son card to play. Though frankly, having shared a room with Finrod for the past two days and realising that he looks at pictures of his wife to fall asleep, I almost wish I had. Fine. Total war. You know what the last words I said to Fingolfin were?” 

“Hoping it is some kind of dire, unimaginable curse he thought about at the moment of death,” wearily, Maedhros tutted. “But alas, you have a tendency to disappoint me.” 

“Actually, it was indeed something along those lines,” Finarfin gave him a swift, conciliatory grin, before explaining in painstaking detail what exactly it was that he told my father the last time he saw him, before informing him that Fingolfin’s actual last words were in fact the direct result of what Finarfin had told him the last time he saw him, a few weeks before his death. And as he recounted the story, Maedhros’ face glowed pink with pleasure before curdling green with envy.

“Which is why it is your turn now. Deal with it. He wears at least one piece of jewelry and I’ll stand you a pack of European cigarettes after we celebrate this burial,” offered Finarfin kindly, knowing he had won. “And bonus. I scouted out a thattukada in Kakkanad, a proper one, apparently it’s all you can eat for twenty rupees, none of this Gondolin silver-spoon frippery. Right on the street next to the sewage works. They probably stir the biryani with their cocks and crush the ginger with toenail clippers. I even spotted the cook in a little white hat, so he’s probably one of your network of fellow jihadis. Pure Kozhikodan cuisine, right here in Kochi. How does that sound?” 

Maedhros narrowed his eyes, mentally calculating the political fallout of being seen enjoying five to six plates of excellent biryani with his lifelong political rival, before he remembered that nobody really knew them in Kochi and also that he did want me to wear at least one piece of jewelry to my father’s funeral. His brow cleared. “Fine. And my brother Curufin, you know, the banker? Motherfucker lives in Kakkanad. We can stop by his house for dessert, then put a rock through his window.” 

“Deal.”

There stood two grown men, actually spitting into their palms before shaking hands to seal the deal. And so, regardless of their mental ages, my fate was sealed. Russo had shamelessly sold my emotional wellbeing on the morning of my father’s funeral for a pack of cigarettes, six plates of biryani and the chance to vandalise houses alongside my dickhead cousin Finarfin, whom he had despised all his life. It was, to be fair, extremely unsurprising to me. I tell you, had I never existed, or had I not been enough of a princess to cater to Russo’s characteristically misogynist taste in men (more on this later, thanks to Legolas), those two would have been fervently fucking each other in the arse by fifteen at the latest. 

Apparently, me wearing my anklets was not enough for Cousin Finarfin. Because he gave me a once over when I got out of my car at the church, shot Maedhros a reluctant thumbs up and tossed over the packet of expensive cigarettes, before beckoning me over. I narrowed my eyes, because Finarfin beckoning anyone over was normally a signal for a beating. Was I afraid he would hit me? No. However, I was also certain he was up to no good. I turned to Russo. 

“Want to come and see what he wants?” 

“Hm. No,” Maedhros cleared his throat, looking over at the church. “No, I don’t care what he wants. I’m going to go help your demon of a sister usher your daddy’s Britisher buddies in. And maybe tell your brother about all the illicit substances and little green-eyed succubi floating around his little establishment, ready to hook upstanding men.” 

I blinked at him. “Turgon knows full well what is floating where in every establishment he owns. In fact, Turgon takes a twenty percent cut from each of them. And excuse me? You want to play usher? Is that code for you wanting to start a fight? Russo, I have told you. You can’t start arguments here—“

“No, no, I told you. I am perfectly behaved today,” Maedhros pressed a hand to his chest and adopted a pleasant smile. “Which is why I’m going to go play usher. Finnu, half of the upper echelons of the church are here, and I can see at least five yellow haired blue eyed motherfuckers who have shipped themselves back over apparently. You know how fucking happy they all would be to see a humble Muslim man—“ he gestured at himself—“wait on them hand and foot? I’m not going to start any fights. I am in fact off to make their dreams come true and cure their homesickness.” 

I watched him actually walk across the courtyard to join Aredhel, my sense of foreboding doubling at his odd choice of departure. Finarfin wasted no time, grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me behind his monstrous Jeep. 

“How was I to you, when we were kids?” he demanded, crossing his arms. 

“A bit of an arse,” I replied honestly, though terribly confused as to why this was his line of enquiry, now of all times. “But not too much of one. What’s your point, cheta? I need to start heading inside, I’m giving the—“

“You are indeed,” Finarfin stalked even closer to me, grabbing me by the shoulder in an embrace that might have looked brotherly to anyone unfamiliar with my cousin’s style of wrestling. Which was, in this crowd, everyone except Maedhros, who at that present moment was making himself unbelievably useful by taking an extremely wizened old British man on a walk around the grounds he almost certainly didn’t consent to, yapping like a hyena. “Which is why I wanted to catch you beforehand, Sister Finnu. I need to tell you something important about this eulogy you’re going to deliver.” 

“Which is?”

“Give him a good one and I’ll break your fucking jaw.” 

I pushed him off me, because one of the side effects of being acquainted with Russo and Finarfin both, was that neither of them particularly frightened me. “What do you mean?” 

“Just what I said. Give him a good eulogy, and I’ll break your fucking jaw. See if I don’t, Sister Finnu.” 

“Can you stop calling me that? At least here, Finarfin, have some class, I beg.” 

“I started calling you Sister Finnu when I was five and you were four,” hissed Cousin Finarfin, actually shaking me by the shoulders. “I am blessed with a memory that makes elephants look like goldfish, so I can recall the first time I called you that. I called you that because, like you said, I was a bit of an arse. And because the day I called you that, you wore a shitty little necklace and braided your hair like a shitty little schoolgirl and it was just after Mass so there were nuns buzzing about to give me the idea, and I don’t even remember why but you were being so fucking annoying that day. I knew it was a shitty thing to say and I knew it would make you cry. So I said it, and then said it two more times, just to make you stop being fucking annoying. And what did you do then?”

I huffed out a laugh through my nose, because I couldn’t remember much about that day in particular, having sadly known Cousin Finarfin since I was born, and Cousin Finarfin having only ever called me Sister Finnu for much of that time. “Cried, I suppose.” 

“Exactly. You sat there and cried and cried, because you were a fucking baby, and you didn’t know why I said what I said or what it meant, and neither did I. You just cried because you knew I was being nasty to you, and I only said it because I thought it was a nasty thing to say.”

“If you’re coming to apologise, it’s fine,” I was still laughing. “You can call me Sister Finnu. Believe me, I don’t mind.” 

“I wasn’t looking for your damn permission. Four fucking years old, Finnu, four and five. And you know our fathers were just behind us, those brothers who knew each other well enough to discipline each other’s children. Remember how often my father tweaked your ear over your shitty Maths marks?”

“I do,” I smiled. “It got to a point he started tweaking my ear on results day even before I told him my marks.” 

“And your father gave me such a spanking when I pushed you over just a few days before that, even though you only skinned your knee. Chewed me out for hours when I left you behind at the market, even though you came back home quickly, had fun on the way and nobody touched a hair on your pretty little head. Hell, he’d scold me when I cheated in games with you! And yet that day in the church, when you were wailing your eyes out because I called you Sister Finnu just to make you cry, your father said fuckall to me. The man who would smack my hand any time I pinched you to make me cry, there he stood, silent as a corpse. Not even a gentle caution, not a damn word. As if he didn’t hear, as if you weren’t sat on the fucking ground bawling. It was my father who boxed my ears, my father who told me to say sorry, my father who took you on his lap until you shut the fuck up. And my father is a fucking dickhead, so what does that say about yours?” 

“Are you telling me you wouldn’t have called me Sister Finnu for the last five decades, had it been my father instead of yours who told you not to the first time you did it?” I raised my eyebrows. Knowing this fellow and his Communist doppelgänger, I also knew all the ways former schoolyard bullies justified their adolescent violences. This, however, was a new one. “I feel like that would not have been the moment you chose to listen to my father for once in your life.”

“Oh, like fuck would I have listened to Vicar Fingolfin of all people,” he snorted. “If I didn’t stop when my father boxed my ears, you think I’d have stopped for yours? No, I’d still have called you Sister Finnu. But I’d have had a shred of respect for him. I wouldn’t be at the fucker’s funeral making plans to kick his grave in before your little boyfriend gets the chance to. And I damn well wouldn’t be standing here threatening to break your fucking jaw.” 

I always hated it when Maedhros and Finarfin agreed with each other. It made me feel somewhat… well, incestuous. Never will I forget the sinking feeling in my stomach as I returned from the bathroom on the day Idiot Elros and his idiot friends including Idiot Finrod had formed a music band titled The Oyster Slurpers and performed multiple Western rock covers replacing the English lyrics with Malayalam poetry about performing oral sex on various species of shellfish at a local cultural festival. When I noticed that Maedhros and Finarfin, though sitting on opposite sides of the audience with multiple armed men between them, had identical looks of barely-disguised nausea, confused disgust, and utter horror written across their faces. Allah mian, haye Rabba and Jesus fucking Christ what have I done to deserve this, whispered in the exact same cadence from both stage left and stage right. They were almost the same shade of green. 

And yet. 

Who were they to tell me what I should feel?

“You don’t know what I’m going to say in this eulogy,” I informed him quietly. “You didn’t even ask.” 

Finarfin nodded. “Perhaps not. But I fear what you might. These days—every time I walk into a church, incidentally enough, I feel like I might turn into a missionary any moment.”

He edged ever so close to the truth of what had happened to him a few weeks ago, but refused to let me know. He would refuse to let me know for another five years. 

“The brave apostle,” I winked at him, waving a hand vaguely, but in a way that conveyed to him that I cared little for his theological turmoil because he spent the majority of his time treating congregations as votebanks and proselytising from truckbeds. “On his mission to win the municipality corporation seat.”

“Precisely,” Finarfin replied coolly, shameless enough that my barb bounced off his skin. “I’m a bloody expert in brave apostle-ing. It’s dangerous, you know, the mission. Not only for the converted but the converter too: you spend long enough diminishing reality by insisting that what happened actually meant something other than what it plainly was, and you become incapable of observing the unforgivable, blinded to the unbearable.” 

The mask was shedding, though I didn’t really see it then. Whatever stone armour Finarfin ran around the world in was crumbling, though too slowly to be visible to the naked eye. But even then I could sense that his shift from viewing my father as an object of individual hatred to a cog in the death-machine had come only recently, because he was speaking as if he were delivering a sermon. And because I knew Cousin Finarfin for ever so long, I knew very well that he believed in no virtuous sermon, Christian or otherwise, and so his sermon voice was the voice of the deeply uncertain. 

“What did you see that was so unbearable?” I asked him frankly. “What did you see that you haven’t seen already, having been so embedded in this life?” 

“What I saw has nothing to do with the church or the life I was embedded in. But if you must know, I saw the Commie cavalcade, two weeks after that Elros was battered to death.” 

There had indeed been a Communist cavalcade two weeks after Elros’ death, which the entire Fëanorian family had walked in. Maedhros had strictly forbidden me from attending, and I hadn’t minded very much, as it had been organised by a few of the national Party leaders as a political memorial, and I had never cared very much for the political. In fact, I had actually seen Finarfin walking somewhere near St Joseph’s that day, quite a distance away from the procession route. He’d looked no different from how he usually looked, his face as impassive as always, his expression characteristically inscrutable. The only difference was that when I cupped a hand around my mouth and called out to him, he looked at me in a way he’d never looked at me before. 

There had been some trouble at the memorial as I recall: but there was trouble at most political funerals around here. 

“And what I saw there made me think of the boy’s death itself. Four stations, the cops made your cocksucker of a boyfriend walk to, just for the corpse of his son, and he walked it in the rain. Do you know how many kilometres that is? For a fucking corpse, Finnu, he walked the circumference of the town for a corpse,” Finarfin’s voice trembled as he continued, and he raised it as if to compensate for his momentary weakness. “He did that for his son. Knelt before them and shamed himself by pressing his forehead upon their boots in supplication when they asked him to, just to get a fucking corpse. FUCKING HELL, Finnu! Fucking hell! Every fucking MOMENT I think of that, I want to wring your father’s neck. Oh, if it were up to me, I’d torch the bastard in bed. Because what did your daddy do, hm? Did he walk the circumference of the town in your name? Did he shame himself to keep you? No. No. Bastard made you walk it for having shamed him. Afforded you less dignity than a fucking corpse.” 

Was that what it was? I wondered, as Finarfin stopped speaking. Was the death of Elros what brought him to the realisation that he, unfortunately, had a conscience? It explained how furious he looked as he spoke of it, the sickness in his face as I called out to him that afternoon. We were, after all, Syrio-Catholics of the Malabar coast, overeducated and underchallenged: we despised being made to feel by the external forces of the world when our theological turmoil already had us looking so deeply within ourselves, despised being made to look around ourselves and find ourselves not as persecuted as the rest, find ourselves almost at the top of one of the smaller food chains. It was the only way for this sudden fury to make sense. Finarfin had singlehandedly ensured the political relevance of the church in Kozhikode, knowing full well what it permitted. He argued for its inclusion in councils, its preservation in culture, having always known what it failed to protect. And yet, he hated my father. 

What did that contradiction make Finarfin? 

“I’m not an idiot,” Finarfin broke the silence, turning back to me. I know it would have been bad for you even if your father didn’t exist. Because honestly Finnu. you fucking ask for it. You’re a middle aged man scurrying around trailing bangles and ribbons and nail polish and spending hours in fancy-shops like a little schoolgirl and we live in Kozhikode, which is already known as cocksucker central. Hell, I actually like you and I still think you’re a fucking freak. But believe me Sister Finnu, it wouldn’t have been half as bad for either you or your beloved goatfucker, had your father not made you parade before the town that Easter. With Mother fucking Mary in your arms and golden fucking ribbons in your hair. What a different life so many people would be living, if the Vicar Fingolfin didn’t wake up that Easter weekend and put an enormous fucking kick-me sticker on his firstborn son’s back. Would Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur’s corpse be lying in a ditch somewhere at this very moment, had your father not made you head that procession? Or would he still be running around like the fucking jackal he is, giving shitty speeches in clouds of smoke?”

It was thirty years ago. It was thirty years ago. It was thirty years ago. 

“I have thought about that procession so often since. And I used to think he was just showing the town what you were like, or what a sinner looked like, and even so I thought it cruel. But that was not it. When we got back that day, my father, though furious at what I did, I heard him tell my mother—Fingolfin could have made the boy wipe all that eyeliner off at least. He could have made him take those earrings off, at least ripped that flower from his hair.”

Could he have?

The image of me at the procession redrew itself in my mind, wispy and unsure of itself, like Russo’s first sketches: he had been a good artist, yet far too concerned with the accuracy of his drawings to ever draw anything aside from the things he saw right before his eyes, like foster-sons and forest-dams. Finnu at the procession, with that flower in his hair. Achan had not plucked it from my hair, had he? No, though he was never shy about asking me to strip my nails of polish when I went to church, always strict on ensuring I tied my hair back and dressed in plain white, if only on Sundays. That was not a Sunday. That was a Friday. So he left the flower in my hair and let me keep the polish on my nails. An abundance of fripperies, laid out before the town. 

“He didn’t need to show anyone what you were like, because everyone already knew, because fucking look at you. The conglomerate of sewer rats in Greenland are probably fully aware that Finnu of Kozhikode likes it up the ass. No, Finnu. He was not parading around your little sin. He was giving his blessing to those who wished to hurt you. He was sanctifying the stones to be hurled at you. He was saying take him. Take my son. Take him and eat him alive! Just as it always is with him.”

I was always ensconced within the spectacular. My ugly humiliation at the procession always coloured the image with a sky-eating red, the ruby-red of the flower in my hair. The lines of people at their gates watched us go past, all seeming humbly green and grey, watching the void at the head of the horizontal pillar, wearing too-big vicar-white robes with a ruby-red flower in his hair. 

How do you slaughter a lamb? 

Where is the first cut made? 

How do you bring yourself to continue, after seeing that first bloom of sickening colour?

Like this, said my father. Like so. 

“So what is worse, Finnu? All these years and I still cannot tell what is worse for my uncle to be. An ungodly man who disobeyed his vow of compassion and the teachings of his church by being cruel to a child over fucking nail polish,” For the first time in my life, I caught a glint of sincerity in Cousin Finarfin’s furious eyes. “Or a man of god who looked a wailing four year old in the eye and thought—faggot. Which one of them was the brave apostle?” 

He sprung then, right at me with the leonine grace that led to local schoolboys selling tickets to his and Maedhros’ campaign rally fights, and pinned me to the back of his Jeep. I rolled my eyes at him as I brushed him off, bending to adjust my shirt.  

“You jaw, Finnu,” he growled again. “I’ll break your fucking jaw. See if I don’t.” 

“Are you done?” I asked him, feeling my cheeks flush. “Done with your speeches? Or do you and Maedhros have any other sermons on what you think I should do based entirely on what you’ve already assumed I’ll do if you don’t tell me what to do? Do you both truly think Achan acted alone? That his hand wasn’t driven from above him and all around him? You know what you do day after day, cousin. Which version of you am I meant to accept? The one who snatched the altar from me at the procession, or the one who led the procession every year since?”

The fight seemed to leave Finarfin, and he sank back against the Jeep himself, fumbling with a second pack of the same European cigarettes he’d tossed to Maedhros. His face was pale, his fingers shaky. “Think I’m telling you this because I think you’re weak, do you?” 

“That’s what it looks like, so yes. That is indeed what I think.”

“I don’t. I don’t think you’re weak,” he said softly. The light fell slantways across his brow, casting half of him into shadow. He was very fair, so fair that his skin seemed translucent in the late morning sun. I could see the muscle twitching irregularly in his cheek. Always strange how falling light can halve men and double them at will: all of my life, I had only ever seen the half of Cousin Finarfin he had wished to show me. The everchanging half, never the same pieces, and here too he was holding it up against me, clearly wishing I wouldn’t go looking for the other portions, the hidden quarters. “I think you’re brave. Ridiculously brave—” he waved a tired hand vaguely at my feet—”like I said. Middle aged man in bows and ribbons, teaching in a convent of all places. Fucking freak. Et cetera. That’s the problem. That’s why I’m telling you this. Because I know you won’t take the coward’s stance.” 

“The coward’s stance,” I reached over and snapped the pack of cigarettes shut because whilst I was fine with him having one, two would be impossible to launder from my clothes: it had taken me five years of begging and threatening before Russo stopped smoking inside the house. “Where the coward’s stance is… what? Coming to his funeral without my aforementioned bells and whistles? Coming to his funeral at all?”

“No. The coward’s stance is standing up on the stage and giving him the shitty fucking eulogy he deserves when he’s no longer here to defend himself,” Finarfin said wearily, stubbing out his cigarette and obediently placing the pack back in his pocket. “That’s the coward’s stance, isn’t it? And I fear, Sister Finnu, that you are too valiant to take the coward’s stance. That’s what I’m afraid of, as someone well-acquainted with the stance in question in every which way, more acquainted with it than you’ll ever know. I’m afraid that you are far too practiced at bravery to take the coward’s stance at this moment, and that you’ll regret your moment of valour all your life.” 

I will tell you in due time what happened at Finarfin’s final visit to my father. 

But what of the final time Finnu saw his father?

I saw him a week before Finarfin’s visit. I sat beside him the first night of my final visit, an aimlessly mute oarless boat tethered to his sickbed, watching the stars gradually reclaim his breath. That had been the first time I consciously pictured an orphaning and realised with a jolt that the state of fatherlessness was not so far removed from the life I had always lived. Achan’s hand was hollowed and his palm opened at last, laying between mine, adorned with glittering tubes like a courtesan’s ankle. I was three and a half when my mother died, and from knowing Elrond and Elros, I knew that three-and-a-half was the most active, the most affectionate of ages, and I had been bright with starlight too, silver-edged enough to cut through his grief and dovetail it into a life worth living. I had been his salve, so he had committed himself to forever be mine, and swallowtailed my own life in return. 

This was after I was told by Turgon: Etaa, come home. Achan is fading so fast. He’s asking for you. Oh, Finnu-cheta, there is so little time left. So I had visited my father, though it was not Christmas. And he had been so happy to see me framed within his doorway, bells and flowers and all. I kissed his forehead, picturing him already gone, and breathed deep, swallowing lungfuls of the sickness that hung around him. I wondered what would happen when he was at last declared dead. I realised then that it would be I who delivered the eulogy. His eyes were closed in bliss and his face turned to the sun, more at peace than I had ever seen him before. 

He knew where he would go after death. 

He knew how his eulogy would go. 

He was certain of the fact. 

On that last visit, I took him to his church. Aredhel had asked if I could, because she had to pick Maeglin up from somewhere and Achan had wanted to go and for once was well enough to go, and I obliged because despite everything that had happened, St George’s Edapally was a remarkable building. So I situated him in his plush wheelchair and not only drove him there but wheeled him inside, took him anywhere he wanted to go, rolled him to the very heart of the structure, his old altar, towards which the floor was very slightly steeped. I felt a sudden twinge of fear of getting lost, of falling and getting stuck or losing my way, but I pushed onwards. It was a mesmerising place, as I said. Row after row of birch pews, velvet brocade and spiderwebbed stained glass, all of it so loud and dense I felt almost choked by it. 

My father looked around the place like it was his very first visit, not his final one. His face was ever so lit up, and I thought—imagine you have never seen a cathedral before. Imagine you have never lived daily with sights like these. No, not cathedrals visited on day trips or camera-snapped from a distance or fluttered in for baptisms and funerals, but really lived with them, the actual reality of them, the high-gloss varnish peeling from the oldest walls like silvery sheets of foil, the sills, yes, the sills full of dead insects and live ones both. In halls like these, you would be forgiven for truly believing that light could emerge from nothingness, you would be forgiven for believing something could be different, for wanting it, for praying for it. It rang around me, my father’s cathedral, promised revelation after revelation, and I prayed for the stone to burst free from my heart. 

“Would you have understood?” I asked him, taking a seat by his side.  “If I was more like Russo, would you have understood me more?” 

It had only truly dawned on me later, how grateful I was to the unconscious urge that made me ask that question. For me, bringing my dying father to St George’s had seemed in the moment to be reasonably commonplace: you must know, I don’t avoid churches. I teach in a bloody convent, surrounded by gaggles of nuns. My siblings were both practicing Catholics, though nowhere near as practicing as bishops’ children (that rare, almost extinct breed) should probably be. 

Wheeling my father down the aisle was just a gesture to me, like turning a key to a room behind you, unaware that the door would never open for you again. Many ordinary days contain within them unseen conclusions. The present always masquerades as continuous and so you feel like there will always be another morning to wake up and do the things you had put off doing yesterday. Or like those moments that seem indistinguishable from all the moments that preceded them until time reveals they were the threshold, the point where one thing became another, and that you crossed it without ceremony. Had I not asked that, I wouldn’t know what I do now. I would never know. 

“Russo? What Russo?”

He had forgotten. It was understandable. Of course it was understandable. He was dying. He shouldn’t be expected to remember trivialities like the nickname I called Maedhros by. Still, it prickled. It prickled for long after the conversation we had in the church. It prickled for far longer than it should have prickled, outlasted its own sell-by date, far beyond the time I should have gotten over it. 

Gotten over it. 

(I have never understood the phrase 'I got over it', as though an upbringing is something you can shake off like a cold. It sounded like the kind of thing people say at dinner parties when they want to signal they're past all that now, evolved beyond the superstitions of childhood and no longer take pains to avoid cracks in the pavement. 

But you don’t get over childhood the way you get over a chillblain. You only stop letting it dictate the roads you take. The mechanism still runs, and my god does the mechanism still run, and you simply must route around it. Some might successfully quarantine their hearts and recognise when they’re about to apologise for their presence upon the earth. They might even feel something less complicated when they pass vast white churches, a feeling that touches neither loss nor relief. But that negotiation bore about as much resemblance to actual freedom as knowing the scientific explanation for thunder resembled not flinching when it cracks overhead. 

There are days I feel it is the very sky.)

Like that day in the church when my dying father forgot whom it was that I called Russo. 

Russo only existed because of my father, it was a little word he conjured a very long time ago, when he was bright and alive and I was the dying thing. I have called my beloved Russo all his life. Everyone calls me Finnu, but only I call him Russo. But I never did, not to start with. We were in the same class, you see, and though he was only known as Maedhros, you weren’t allowed nicknames in school, even when your forename was as common as ‘Mohammad’. Still, that was what I first called him, Mohammad or Razul, because that was his name, Mohammad Razul bin Faraz, and it meant apostle of the risen one. 

Until one day when I was seven or so, and I was telling my father a funny story about Maedhros in class, and he asked me to call my friend something else. Kindly, he suggested Russo, and told me it was a loving shortening of Maedhros. I was only seven. I did not know that Russo was not a loving shortening of Maedhros, he had just made it up, and it was simply a sign that the vicar Fingolfin got tired of hearing Mohammad, Mohammad, Mohammad all day long, an errant pulse against the cruciform set of our house. And Maedhros had only been Russo to me since, though he remained unaware as to why. 

For the past forty years, I have spoken his name dozens of times each day. 

Russo, I call him. 

Russo, Russo, Russo. 

You must understand that my father never meant it badly, this suggestion. This little thing, it was never about his aversion to the way I was, only an expression of the way he was. A vicar not wanting to hear the word Mohammad, Mohammad, Mohammad all day long in his house, had less to do with his love or lack of towards the individual Mohammad in question and more to do with his feelings about Mohammedans in general. Still, with that momentary command I followed for the rest of my life, Achan stole Mohammad’s name. 

Russo, for god’s sake, pick up milk before you show your face at home this evening. 

And if a name could be stolen with such ease, then perhaps dance master Finnu with the ribbons in his hair, dance master Finnu, the vicar’s son!, who obeyed his father and called his beloved Russo, maybe that Finnu was no valiant rebel. Maybe he was simply a small misplaced screw in the awning of a towering factory, simply an illustration of how systems reproduce themselves through the people caught within them. Every major religion trains its believers and commands its clergy to replicate their own formation in their children, and though the methods remain varied, everything from an inventive nickname to catechism class, it creates remarkably consistent results across generations. 

Still, it was strange to realise that day in the church, that for all these years, a version of myself had been living within my father's understanding of what I should have been, a version that frightened me. And this too was natural, I supposed. I had been prescribed fear all my life. Perhaps this was me, Finnu with the ribbons, being a very good cog in the machine rather than a spanner in its works. This anxiety was by design, and by rights, as someone who got over it, I should not be afraid. 

But I was terrified. I was terrified because there I stood, having built an entire life of my own and having repudiated his entire cosmology as one which will forever remain hostile to me, and still could locate him beneath my thinking, determining the boundaries of what I can imagine myself being. 

Russo, Russo, Russo, I say, day after day. 

Russo, you have to pick me up from the convent today, the car’s in the shop. I beg you, do not stand in the school grounds arguing with the Anti-Chauvinism League president again, she is fifteen years old. 

Think of it this way if, having never inhabited such conditions, you cannot picture it in any other form. 

These days, I am only ever dance master Finnu with the ribbons in his hair. Different ribbons each day, and flowers on auspicious occasions. Sometimes I was the Sultan’s Begum, but that was private. What was public were the ribbons in my hair. It took the average hair-ribbon 20 to 30 years to decompose and subsequently disappear. A skeleton might, under the right conditions, last for thousands of years: everything from housecats to vicar’s sons. What a terrifying thought it was: centuries from now, someone might unearth my grave and find a stranger to the man who was lowered into its depths.

Do you see it now? 

“Razul,” I told my father. “Mohammad. My friend. My Razul. Remember?” 

“Yes. Yes, the one who took in those children, hm? Those jolly little English babies… What did we call them? Daffy Duck…? How are they?”

“Fine,” I bit my tongue. He was dying. I was not going to tell him he would probably meet Elros up or down there pretty soon. “They’re fine. Can you answer my question, Acha?” 

“Mohammad Razul bin Faraz,” my father rolled the name on his tongue, his eyes brighter than I had seen them for ever so long. “Bin Faraz.”

Russo, Russo, Russo. 

“Son of Faraz,” I prompted, thinking he had forgotten the Islamic naming tradition. “Faraz was his father, Acha.” 

“I know Faraz was his father, boy,” he clicked his teeth and actually pinched my arm, sounding so crotchety that I felt a horrifying surge of new affection for him. “Don’t try to teach your Achan. Of course I know Faraz. Fëanor. Fëanor and I used to play together all the time—we were cousins, you know?” 

Well, technically, they weren’t. 

The family history was somewhat complicated, and I only bothered to look it up properly on the day Curufin, aged only fifteen at the time, poor thing, had found out about Russo and I and had gasped in horror, but that’s incest, ikka! Maedhros had hidden his relief at not being outright rejected by his little brother by boxing Curufin’s ears, putting on an American accent and telling him to fuck right off before he ‘incests my fist inside that asshole of yours’. And I, of course, dutifully jotted down the very-extended family tree and showed it to Curufin to assure him that while it was not really incest, it technically would not matter very much even if it was incest, because Russo and I were not exactly capable of procreation. 

Let me try and untangle this for you, because the Fëanorians tend to act like all this is very normal, probably because it was very normal for them. Maedhros’ grandfather Finwë’s first wife was named Miriel, and they married in an Islamic nikkah when the two were fourteen. When Finwë was twenty, he met and fell in love with Indis, who was from an old Syrio-Catholic family, married off at fifteen and left widowed at nineteen with two children: Finarfin’s father, to whom she had just given birth to, and my father Fingolfin, who was three or four, the same age as Fëanor had been. 

Oh, it had been the talk of the town apparently, when Finwë took Indis as his second wife. Not the second wife part, mind you. Muslim men were allowed four at any one time, Miriel had taken very well to Indis, and the two had been great friends by all accounts. No, it was the fact that Indis was from a Syrio-Catholic family, and not only that, Finwë had been completely fine with her continuing to practice her own religion, and raise her sons as Catholic. I hadn’t known, however, that Fëanor and my father had ever played together: Islamic polygamy, at least when practiced by wealthy men like Finwë, generally involved the wives being settled in their own houses and raising their own children, and Miriel and Indis lived a few streets apart at least. 

“Sorry Acha,” I mollified him, stroking his arm. “But go on. You played with Fëanor? Your mothers were friends, weren’t they?” 

“Oh, blast our mothers, who cares about them! No, Finnu. Fëanor and I were such good friends, the best of friends,” he raised a hand and pressed two fingers together. “Just like that, we two boys were. He was sent to the madrasa of course, and I was taught at the church school, but he would always sneak in at break and bring me… what was it… aha, neichooru, that his mother made. Ghee-rice, and sometimes even mutton curry. These Mappila Muslim women, Finnu, say what you want about them but you can’t deny they’re the best cooks on the Malabar coast. Even your mother’s food couldn’t reach it.”

I never knew that. I never knew the person he was when he was Fëanor’s friend. I didn’t know when it stopped and I didn’t know why, I couldn’t remember very much about how they were in our childhood, only that when Russo and I were fourteen, they stopped speaking to each other almost entirely. And I knew that when Fëanor died, my father’s face was the palest I had ever seen it, that he’d demanded I go to their house and stay with Russo to keep him company. And I knew that Fingolfin watched Maedhros watch Fëanor die, because it was Fingolfin who dragged Maedhros home that day. 

Perhaps —

“Was that why?” I asked him, trying to banish the childish eagerness from my voice. “Was that why you never liked me to be with Russo? Because he was Fëanor’s son?” 

“No.” 

“Then what was it?” 

“Because he was so tall…” he trailed off, shaking his head. “So tall and brash and boorish. All that streetfighting and backtalk and swagger. Always showing off his muscles and cheeking his elders, that boy. To this day. To this day he’s a thug, isn’t he? Just like that Finarfin. If only… if only you’d gone for, oh, that brother of his, maybe. The one with the big mouth. Carried around a sitar and wrote all that Urdu poetry. Or even that younger brother, the slim, soft-spoken one who wears specs… the one who looks like Fëanor.” 

“Truly?” I leaned forwards, eyes shining. An awfully hopeful ember fizzled in my chest. “Was that it, Acha? Was it just because it was Maedhros… because you didn’t like him? Because he was rude? Was that all it was?” 

Because if it was him, then it wasn’t me. Then it was never me. And that I could live with. That I could count as yet another little thing I was too dim to notice. That it was just like Mohammad turning into Russo, a side effect of my father’s genteel conservatism rather than a war waged against a child. Or perhaps the aftermath of whatever had gone on between him and Fëanor. Something, anything. If it was Russo, then I could bury my father wholeheartedly. I could give him the eulogy he wanted instead of the one he deserved. I’d have taken the battering from Finarfin. I’d have taken it gladly. If it was just Russo, just because Russo was a rude little shit, then—

“I never said I didn’t like Razul. I liked him well enough. He’s like that cousin of yours, like I said. Needs a good kick in the backside every now and then, but not a bad sort. He took in those children, remember? No matter the circumstances of the taking, he took them in. He’s not so bad at all.” 

“Then what was the problem?” 

“You, Finnu,” he turned to me as he continued, his death mask smoothening out into the blank, closed-off visage. The vicar’s amicable snarl. “You, beside him. The choice you made.”

“It was no choice.” 

“It may not have been a choice. But you had a choice on who: that, that you cannot deny. You had a choice in who, and you chose him.”

“We were children.”

“You, riding side-saddle on his bicycle, following him around, nagging him and simpering. How you, with all your bells and whistles, looked beside a boy like that,” he shook his head, eyes clouding over. His voice remained smooth, even. He stroked my hand gently. “My little Finnu, so slender and slight, licking that boy’s bruises, telling him off for fighting. You, bringing him tea in the morning when he stayed at our house. Like a woman. Like his wife. Because whenever I see you with him, that is all I can think of. That my boy, my little Finnu—“

“Please don’t.”

“—my boy, whom I loved and love, chose to be a wife.”

It was what I had feared. 

For this was what I had feared the most. What I had feared all my life though I said nothing of it because saying it might make the feared thing real. I told myself that the problem had been the Bible’s take on homosexuality alone, of men laying with men alone. We all wish to believe in the apocryphal, we all wish to live our lives by universal standards that either confirm or deny our impulses. I had told myself that my father’s sorrow was confined to the breaking of a single unsaid law, the one forbidding men from knowing each other as truly as they could. But here he sat, here he spat like his wife, because that was the worst thing of all. 

That Finnu did not choose to love men like Maglor, slight, fair second sons and younger princes, men who wrote poetry and played the sitar. Finnu had gone for the big, brash, boorish Russo, who liked boys adorned like princesses, Russo who spoke with his fists yet never touched women because he was brought up never to touch women who were not sisters or wives, who held my hand as he pulled me onto his motorbike. Finnu chose a man who made him look like a woman. Not that Finnu loved Russo and Russo loved Finnu, but that Finnu might as well have been Russo’s wife. 

And that was what warranted all this. That was what warranted my life. 

It didn’t end in the church, that final day with my father. 

It had been past lunchtime, late afternoon by the time he finished up at the church, and the two of us liked eating on time, unlike Aredhel who ate only after her snakes ate, or Russo, who ate like a snake. I took him to a small-ish hotel and we ordered dosa because we liked breakfast for every meal, and I watched him sprinkle a thick layer of sugar on his. I didn’t realise I was raising my eyebrows until he looked up at me and smiled. 

“What?” he asked. “I’m dying already.”

“That you are,” I shrugged, agreeing, and took the spoon from him to liberally sprinkle my own plate. “You know Acha, Russo thinks having sugar on dosa is a sign that the world is about to end? Says the Hindus are probably right about this century being kaliyug, end of days, and according to him, this practice is the sole reason.” 

Fingolfin snorted. “Your Russo’s nutritional opinions are the reason this century is the end of days. I remember his face when I gave those twins of his a bar of chocolate. The boy looked like I was strangling them before his eyes.” 

“Unfortunately, the entire household is like that,” I told him morosely. “Maglor pretty much convinced them that every sweet sold in every shop was actually laced with rat poison. And one time I saw Celegorm actually leap out of his chair like a shorted electrical wire when he accidentally took a sip of my tea.” 

“Just like their father,” he tutted, and I fought the urge to ask more. Instead, I watched him eat, knowing the pattern so well: he started with the ends of the dosa, the crispiest parts, and made me laugh by asking the waiter to replenish the sugar bowl, waiting till the poor fellow came back with the refilled bowl before informing him that he was, in fact, on the way out after a decade of waging war with insulin, and that diabetes was no small concern for the South Indian population. It took Achan a while to finish eating, because as chirpy as he seemed at mealtimes, he was still. Well. On the way out. I watched him get closer and closer to the centre of his plate, watched him pick the last morsel up. 

“Right, open up,” he said, businesslike, holding out that final scrap to my mouth. He clicked his teeth. “Quick, Finnu, it’s getting on the table.” 

The sugar had soaked into the middle of the dosa by now, I could see it glittering on his fingers, and I’m afraid it made my mouth actually water. It wasn’t strange, this offer, wasn’t a suddenly remembered part of my childhood that he unconsciously gravitated towards as dying men do. He’d do this whenever I ate at his table, every Christmas dinner, every breakfast as I ate at his table for those ten or so days each year. Save the very best, the sweetest part of his plate for me, and feed it to me with his own hand. I always took it, and I’d say nothing because this was simply a part of every meal I took with my father. I opened my mouth, and let him place it there as gently as he ever did. 

I don’t know why, but this time, I said thank you. 

“Don’t thank me,” he muttered, turning away from me and wiping off his fingers. “For this, you don’t thank me, Finnu.” 

For this.

There was a difference, see, between a parent who gave freely, and one who gave because he wished to be thanked. A lot of the time, my father was the latter. He had instilled excellent manners in us, we said please and thank you so often that Maedhros banned the words from the bedroom, telling me that nothing killed an erection quicker than wanton gratefulness. But yes, my father always liked to hear the words thank you, I knew he’d waited all his life for me to say thank you for raising me in the way he did, for me to finally understand my wrongness and thus his rightness. But for this, he never wanted any thanks. 

I took the mouthful and chewed it, and after I did so, tears began sliding down my face. I wished I’d chosen a better place to cry. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to cry in front of an entire small-ish hotel, more that I didn’t want to cry in front of Achan. Because it was clear to him from just how hard I was crying, how loud and awful and ugly it was, that it wasn’t because of what he said to me in the church, wasn’t because of how much I hated the ways in which he stole my father from me, but because my father was dying. 

“All over now,” he said, placing a hand on my wrist after some time had gone by. “Hush, Finnu. All over now.” 

All over now. 

Achan used to say, when we were very small, up till six or seven at least, and we cried after falling somewhere or fighting someone or fearing something, that’s that, then. All over now. Now wash your face, blow your nose, and put on your shoes. And though we knew what was coming next, we three would always ask shoes? why shoes, Acha? just so that we could hear him say it, hands on his hips and an expression of mock-horror on his face, deep offense at us not remembering. Why, to go get our ice-cream, of course! Don’t you remember, he would check his watch, we made plans yesterday! We said, let’s go get ice cream at exactly five minutes and thirty six seconds past three. So let’s stop sniffing and start slurping! 

And if it was me who was upset, he would always say Finnu—what say you we stop at Fëanor’s and bring little Razul along? 

Little Razul was a total freak of a child who didn’t even like ice cream, and he would always order plain water and a singular biscuit around two inches in diameter (and even that only because Nerdanel told him it was rude to refuse everything), gingerly nibbling away at it across the hour and looking at our towering iced delights with lofty disdain. I could actually hear the precociously judgemental little cogs in his brain start to figure out the concept of cholesterol and high blood pressure at the age of six. Still, Achan would invite him along because Russo always cheered me up, or at least tended to be annoying enough to make me so aggravated that I would spend the entire journey home complaining about how annoying he was, having forgotten that I was ever sad at all. 

All over now. 

I have gotten over it. 

The first time I saw my father after the Good Friday parade was Easter morning. Achan had knocked on my door at the crack of dawn, having evidently waited for the moment Maedhros left for his morning run. He asked me to come home for Easter breakfast, that he’d asked the cooks to prepare all my very favourite foods. I shook my head and he started listing them one by one, as if I was still only knee-high and would come running back somewhere between appam and stew. I felt a horrible urge to cry then. Not because my father actually thought I would return after such a humiliation, but because he was listing my favourite foods, and because he got them all right.

I did cry later that evening, after he sent Aredhel and Turgon around to my place, weighed down by a series of platters holding everything he’d promised me. I sent them off with thanks and kisses, shut the door behind them, opened up the trays and sobbed. Because he’d got them all right. Because there were two savoury dishes and at least fifteen desserts. Because my father and I loved our sweets, see. We liked the same cakes and jalebis, possibly a little too much. We had sugar on our dosas every morning and saturated our tea with the same. My father and I would go to Regal Cakes every Saturday and pick out enormous Dairy Milk chocolate bars to share across the week, and god, he used to order a great slab of Kozhikodan halwa, the best halwa in the world, every single month like clockwork and let us have it for dessert even if we didn’t clear our plates. 

And Russo didn’t even like ice cream. It was such a ridiculous thing for a twenty year old to cry over, especially after the great and terrible humiliation of Friday, and yet I couldn’t help but cry over it all the same. Russo hated ice cream and considered dessert an insult to his dignity. The hot-sweet-bready smell of bakeries like Regal Cakes genuinely made him feel sick, he avoided chocolate at all costs and he drank only bitter, unsweetened black tea. I was so afraid this was the final time I’d look at a Sunday spread like this, all my favourite foods, handpicked by my father. 

No single person contains you entirely.

There were things about me I only shared with Maedhros, like the hidden face of my heart. And there were things that I only shared with my father, like enormous weekly Dairy Milk bars, things he only shared with me, like this, the final, sugariest bite of dosa left on his plate. But there were also versions of myself he never saw, never wanted to see, the self I became upon the stage, dance-master Finnu who trained troupe after troupe of Youth Festival finalists, the Finnu I was when Russo and I went to get groceries on Saturday evenings, the Finnu I became with the queens of Gondolin III. It took all those people, all those contexts, to compose a life. One person's love, no matter how foundational, could never be sufficient. And that was the worst part: my father’s refusal to love me truly could not erase the fact that in his limited way, we knew each other in ways no one else did, gave each other things no one else could give. We all contain multitudes, and we need multitudes to see them.

When my mother died, I was not yet four. I had only ever been hand fed by her: I was too coddled, too much of a beloved firstborn, to have had the cook or maids feed me. When she died, I would kick up the most enormous tantrums every mealtime, wailing and kicking my legs, because I didn’t want the cook or maids to feed me and I didn’t want whatever they gave me because their fingers were rough from work and I was the firstborn of a tharavaadu-house and I wasn’t used to such fingers on my face. So my father would hand Turgon and Aredhel off to the maids, them being young enough to not know a difference, place me on his lap and feed me from his own plate, with his own soft hands that had never known a callus. 

You’d have cried too, if you’d thought it was the last time. 

You’d have cried too, when it actually was. 

That was when it started, his giving me the final bite. That was why. And that was also why I went back every Christmas, why I, having broken free from the suffocation of my upbringing, returned every year of my own free will. Maedhros and Finarfin both considered it masochism, both made it clear what they thought of such things. I saw Aredhel and Turgon several times a year, I stayed with their families often, and in their minds, I didn’t need to return for Christmas at my father’s house, didn’t need to take the coward’s stance and obediently head home in the short window he allowed me. But for three hundred and fifty five days of the year, I was Russo’s beloved and Finarfin’s friend. I was dance-master Finnu, I was Elrond and Elros’ reluctant taxi-driver, I was the finest choreographer in North Malabar.

I was in a place where I could look at myself and say, honestly, that for ten days a year, I wanted my father to feed me the last, best bite on his plate. I wanted Christmas cake with the raisins picked out, and I wanted three helpings of halwa. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to want. But as you know, I have quite the history of wanting the wrong thing, of wanting to be the wrong person. 

I need you to understand that I am not telling you that I loved my father and my father loved me because I am blinkered in some way, or blind to the harm that was done to me, that you can somehow see what is apparently obscured for me. I need you to understand I am not telling you that because you know my heart better than I ever could. I am telling you that because I loved my father and my father loved me. 

That makes it worse. Don’t you see how much worse that makes it? 

After I gathered myself, we began heading home. We stopped at a small botanical park because of all the birds flying overhead. My father liked birds very much: it was why he had confirmed me as Francis, even for my sins. I didn’t know the gardens of Kochi as well as I knew Mananchira Park in Kozhikode, but this was quite a resplendent offering, ring after ring of flower-bushes and neat green grass divided by grey pavement. Dark leaves and rich buds, his frail hand stretching out towards a thrush, the thrush actually hopping onto his finger. 

“What of the heron, Acha?” I asked him, though he didn’t know. 

“It was his favourite bird,” said Achan, an unconscious smile playing on his lips. “My cousin and I used to watch for the Kumarakom flock. The wayward strays, who would sometimes find themselves in Kozhikode. He used to have a pair of field-glasses… extremely expensive, they were. And we used to sit in the bushes for hours and hours on end. We used to wait for so long, though they would never come when we waited.” 

Which cousin?

Which one? 

Was it—

What was the use of asking such questions? 

I'd spent decades constructing a father from fragments, assembled a person I could understand, could hate and love cleanly, could reduce to his worst moments and his kindest words. But the man sitting before me contained histories I'd never know: what made him choose the priesthood, what he'd wanted before life narrowed him, whether he'd ever doubted, whether in private moments he'd loved me in ways he couldn't demonstrate. My eyes showed me the man who rejected his son. They didn't show me the boy he'd been, the defeats that shaped him, the people he’d loved before he loved me. Who he waited with in dark-green bushes, waiting for the heron to alight. 

I would never see that fuller picture. He would die and take those rooms of himself with him, and I'd be left with my partial accounting and justified rage, my incomplete portrait of a complicated man I'd needed to stop drawing in order to survive him.

On our way out, I pressed the lever on the wheelchair and brought it to a slow stop. 

This garden only existed because of the birds, Achan had told me as I first wheeled him in. That was why it was so ungraspably foreign, impossible to denote what flower-bush started where and ended where and why. It was because many of these flowers grew in other parts of Kerala, other districts of Ernakulam, not only in Kochi, and they were brought over only because the birds liked what had first been planted here, the only purposeful part: Japanese honeysuckle, usually found in the Idukki district but transplanted here by someone’s daughter. 

And so when the birds came to feast, they dropped undigested seeds from elsewhere, from times past, into the rings of soft soil, and across the years all these undigested seeds bloomed and hybridised and tangled splendidly with each other, their existence weaving the possible and impossible with each other until one became inextricable from the other. There was no more honeysuckle, but the birds still came, and with them came newer seeds. 

Not all the seeds fell on fertile ground; some germinated in cracks of stone, sustained themselves on what dim light penetrated, growing toward nothing but their own brief existence before the drought came and they died with all the rest. One such little red bloom fiercely glared at us from the paving stone, daring me to run the wheelchair over it, grazing my father’s toe as if challenging him to a fight. I bent to pick the blossom, and put it in my hair. 

Finarfin last visited my father around a week or so after I did. Aredhel and Turgon had followed him into the sickroom because honestly, I would have done the same. Unlike me and unlike Russo-because-of-me, Finarfin had never made a secret of his dislike of my father, going so far as to send him a box of American donuts when he was first diagnosed with diabetes. Being a bit of an arse had not, in Cousin Finarfin, faded with age. However, this time, he seemed perfectly sweet, so sweet that Turgon began running through test cricket scores in his head, no longer listening out intently for the inevitable barb Finarfin would hook with vindictive pleasure. 

He had behaved so well that Aredhel had, not without the slight disappointment of a lifelong soap-opera and sports-drama addict, conceded that Finarfin had chosen to walk the higher path, and clearly decided against tormenting a dying man. When it came time for him to go, Finarfin sat down on Achan’s bed, gently clasping the wiry, bone-thin hand in his ruddy paws. He gave him news from Kozhikode, how Finrod’s dog breeding ventures and electoral prospects were going, and how Galadriel was coming close to breaking Maedhros’ old kalari high-kick record. 

Finarfin had asked then: “do you remember the little boys, the ones that Razul and his brother Maglor adopted? Toddlers, two-three years old, English children, pink cheeks and dishwater eyes. They were crawling all around the place the last year you were around, remember?”

I feel like this was the point my siblings’ ears should have pricked up, but clearly, they were dimmer than I gave them credit for. 

Of course Achan remembered the twins: partly due to his being a reluctant Anglophile, he liked those children very much, even voluntarily babysat the boys any time Russo brought them around to our place (or kept an eye on Aredhel and Turgon any time they begged to be allowed to look after them), and had regularly bothered Maglor about getting them baptised since they were almost certainly Christian by birth. In fact, I was almost certain he probably shoved some holy water into baby lotion and secretly baptised the two at some point in his babysitting ventures. As you know, he even asked me how the two were doing as adults, and had often asked me the same. So yes, Achan remembered those babies, and the memory brought a twinkle to his eye that Aredhel hadn’t seen for weeks. 

“Daffy Duck?” he asked, using the silly nickname he had given Elrond, who had been slower than his brother at picking up Malayalam yet had a tendency to nonsensically mimic Maglor’s ‘scolding voice’, wagging a finger and going babbababbabbabba, complete with an exaggerated pouting expression because his more long-suffering foster father had a rather large mouth. 

Finarfin informed him that Daffy Duck was now an Oxford professor with a French BBC journalist for a wife, and that he had a daughter in her mid-teens, who was a gold-medallist at school sports (Cousin Finarfin had a tendency to arrange his mental inventory of all the people he didn’t give a fuck about purely by what he judged to be their athletic achievements or lack thereof: Fëanor was bound to lose every three-legged race, the asthmatic and deceased Elros was potential sprinter disqualified due to cardiovascular catastrophe, Curufin was chess cunt and even Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation and sole selling point of the Congress party, was filed away in his mind palace as almost certainly dogshit at darts). 

“And Tweety-bird?” asked Achan eagerly, after expressing his renewed delight at Elrond’s achievements. Aredhel raised her head at this point, though personally I think she should have raised it at least five minutes prior. 

Tweety-bird had been Achan’s nickname for Elros, because baby Elros, by far the more talkative twin, spoke in a constant high-pitched babble and was for some time scared to death of our rotund and psychologically unstable tomcat, running away and hiding in our heavy brocade loft curtains every time the poor creature padded into the room, before proceeding to scold the cat from behind the curtain in his squeaky little voice, chanting go away, go away, go away, bad fat cat. It was a very good nickname. Achan was very good at silly-little-nicknames. It was he who first started calling me Finnu, informally rechristened Aredhel as Riddhi, and started calling Turgon ‘Turkey’ after he whined about not having a nickname. 

And Russo. As you know, it was he who gave me Russo. 

“What about Tweety-bird?”  he asked again. “I remember… Finnu said he entered politics, didn’t he? Such a chatterbox he was, really, the perfect line of work for him. What’s he up to these days? Don’t tell me he’s a thug like you.” 

“Oh, he’s doing absolutely fuck all,” Finarfin gave the frail hand a gentle squeeze. His smile curved wider across his face, taking on a predatory air. Sylvester in the flesh. “Literally fucking nothing, uncle. You know why?”

“Oh? Why?” 

Finarfin leaned closer to the prone figure, his eyes glittering with wrath. He looked like a man about to sink a knife into a sleeping enemy. His voice was even, and cold in its evenness. Aredhel felt a cold shiver run down her spine. Belated and avoidable, may I just add. 

“Because Tweety-bird is dead,” Finarfin simpered through his placid smile, almost nose to nose with his dying uncle, “Tweety-bird was in fact beaten to death—“ 

“Finarfin, cheta, please, not now,” Turgon rose from his chair, making a placating gesture with his hands. “Please, he’s ill, let him res—“

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” roared his cousin, spinning to glare at Turgon before turning back to Fingolfin and resuming his soothing bedside manner. “You see, Tweety-bird was beaten to death by the Kozhikode Police some weeks back. Tweety-bird’s father, our mutual friend, that monkey’s asscrack named Maedhros, was forced to kneel before the police and publicly walk the circumference of the town centre, in order to humiliate himself sufficiently so he might earn the news that Tweety-bird was, in fact, dead. And plot twist: he ended up going back empty handed regardless. They didn’t even cough up so much as a little yellow cock-feather in the end.” 

“Karthave,” whispered my father, ignoring the shouting and profanity for once, ignoring Aredhel trying to pull Finarfin out of the room, shaking his head in disbelief. My Lord. “Was it… was it a political murder?” 

“In a way,” Finarfin started stroking the hand soothingly. “You see, the cops only dragged him in because the chief constable despises Maedhros—Razul, that is. And you know why the constable despises Maedhros?”

“Because… Communist? Or… Razul is Muslim?” 

“Of course not, uncle dear. In case you have forgotten the demographics of your place of birth, there’s a Jumma Masjid on every second fucking corner. Farting in Kozhikode is like crop-dusting Mecca. And believe me when I say Tweety-bird was even less of a Communist than his father. No, no, nothing as silly as all that. It’s because Razul, as you and I know very well, is a massive fucking faggot. No, not that. It’s because everyone knows that Razul is a massive fucking faggot,” Finarfin raised his voice then, and it shook at everyone knows, and to Aredhel’s horror, she saw that his eyes were full of tears. “Everyone knows that Razul—“

“My boy, please—“ Achan croaked. “Don’t—“

“Everyone knows that Razul likes to give it up the ass, simply because everyone knows who it is that likes to take it up the ass. And everyone knows that giving or taking it up the ass is grounds for public humiliation,” Finarfin straightened up, holding his hands out to denote a small height, talking incessantly all the while. “Don’t trust the Lord to deliver His punishment right, do we? Must start here itself. Correct? Of course I am. How little he was, remember? Dear old Tweety-bird. Just this size, sitting on your lap and trying to eat your rosary. Even smaller than our little Idril, hm? How much fun you had with him and his brother when they came to your place“—his words tumbled over each other almost incomprehensibly, his hands still held up—“Ah, remember the time dear Tweety-bird put an earthworm in his own hair and cried every time poor Riddhi tried to take it out because it was his worm? I’m so glad I was at your house that day, to see you practically keel over with laughter. What a naughty little creature he was! So much to him, even at only two.” 

Finarfin suddenly brought his palms together, his uncle’s hands sandwiched between them, and made a deafening CLAP. “Alas, now Tweety-bird is dead, and Sylvester will go straight to hell, once the Lord figures out which bloody tomcat it was that swallowed him whole,” he said quietly, looking down at each frail, empty hand as though it actually contained a dead yellow canary. He sucked his teeth, blew on his own fingers to disperse imaginary feathers. “Such is life.” 

At this point, Turgon had finally recovered his senses enough to drag Finarfin from the room, Aredhel moving to comfort Achan, who had tears streaking down his face, his expression frozen in terror. 

“For Christ’s sake, cheta. I assume this is what you drove seven hours for, because of course it is. Are you happy now?” 

“I’m fucking delighted. But don’t you dare imply I take any damned pleasure in cruelty,” Finarfin hissed at Turgon. “I know what it is I did. I know it is but needless torment of a dying man. I simply do not give a fuck that he is dying. Every graveyard is populated with people whose death meant the freedom of another. Anyway, why am I tormenting a dying man, is that what you’re asking me in your stupid little way?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking. Because for all my life my cousin Finarfin has been one of the bravest me—”

“Little do you fucking know,” snapped his cousin, before rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, exhaling shakily. “Oof, fuck me, I hate this emotional warfare. But god fucking forbid you let me dislocate his jaw while he’s lying there in bed. If you think about it, bowl-cut, this is your fault.” 

“One of the bravest men I knew, and here he is, doing one of the cowardliest—” Turgon continued, valiantly struggling past the single unfortunate bowlcut he had in his youth and attempting to forget the time Maedhros tied him to the playground goalpost and whacked him to hell and back for daring to bear such a haircut before his eyes. “One of the cowardliest things I’ve seen anyone do in my life.” 

“I’m doing it for Biblical reasons, dickhead. Because even the Bible makes it clear that nothing is certain, and sadly that means there’s a slight, slim, miniscule chance that there is nothing waiting beyond death to absolve us of what we have done in life,” explained Finarfin, toeing on his shoes and rolling his eyes at Turgon. “So that means there’s that little possibility that this world is our only chance, the one place we have to choose differently, and dear old donuts over there spent his time here building walls around everything that frightened him. He could have opened himself up to what existed instead of what he insisted should exist, could have let life be incomprehensible and not crying out for his judgement. But he spent his years fortifying himself against the world, and now the time for anything different has run out, and thank fuck that is Fingolfin’s tragedy and not mine, and for your own damn sake, Turgon, I hope it never will be yours.”

“Here he comes with the philosophical drivel he doesn’t bloody believe in,” Aredhel snapped, closing the door behind her. “You think the two of us think Achan was right on every front? Do you even know what I’ve gone through because of him? But this is too much, cheta.”  

“If you want a non-philosophical, perfectly-physical reasoning, here you go. Because when we got home after the Good Friday procession, after I snatched that idol from Finnu and told him to run, my father thrashed me for cheeking the bishop and humiliating him and dear old donuts over there,” Finarfin lied smoothly, jerking his thumb over to my stricken father’s bedroom. “Haunts my arse to this day, that licking I got. Oof, the ghostly sting of it, every morning shite. I just wanted to deliver a crumb of revenge, and I thought this was a better route to take than whipping the skin off a dying man’s arsehole. Especially considering I see that he’s being tube-fed right now, so I presume the arsehole isn’t even in service. Just a measured decision based on pros and cons. Nothing personal, Riddhi.” 

What a liar he was. 

Well, technically he did get thrashed by his father for his actions that evening, but what he’d left out was the fact that Finarfin, much like Russo, was a complete nutter so dedicated to causing chaos that he tended to view ‘being thrashed by a parent’ as a reward for a job well done or a bonus mark on an exam, rather than as the punishment it was meant to be. When we were children, those two used to compare the results of their respective thrashings the day after each time they’d been caught fighting: whoever had been licked worse was the true winner. I once watched thirteen-year-old Maedhros, fuelled by zero functioning brain cells and a bucketful of newly budded testosterone, take a switch to his own backside just to win. Of all the things that might or might not haunt Cousin Finarfin’s derriere, being on the receiving end of a rather half-arsed beating was most certainly not even in the top ten.

What did haunt Cousin Finarfin was the sliver of hurt he let me see in his slumped shoulders on the morning of Achan’s funeral. Which was caused by the Communist cavalcade after Elros’ death but before he finally visited his dying uncle, though this he refused to explain to me for decades because god forbid the fellow ever makes a direct point or acknowledges his own humanity. The procession had been decided on by the higher ups, that much I knew because Maedhros had been told to walk in it, alongside the rest of the family, and he had done so because he alone knew why his presence was vital. Finarfin had, alongside his own family, been in the church courtyard that morning, for it was only a few minutes before the services began. 

“Daddy, they’re saying the family’s walking in this one,” Finrod had muttered quietly, hearing the procession turn into the church road bordering Mananchira Square. “The Comrade too. Tell the Party fellows to go back inside—if one of our guys even so much as makes a gesture, it’ll turn bloody.”

“If one of our guys even so much as makes a gesture, I’ll shatter every bone in his hand so thoroughly that washing his ass will be a traumatic experience for the rest of his life,” Finarfin replied, loud enough for the rest of the men to hear. Many went into the inner complex, and most hurried their wives and children inside, but a few stayed out to watch the convoy pass because this was no ordinary victim of political violence. The Fëanorians hadn’t been seen in public since Elros’ murder the week before, though their Party workers had been smashing up buildings and torching vehicles left, right and centre on orders sent directly from Celegorm. 

Though you’d be forgiven for assuming it was a memorial for an ordinary victim of political violence, looking at the slow moving convoy that edged across the road. It looked like every other Communist cavalcade: vehicles draped in red flags, bordered on either side by men wielding knives, enormous placards balanced on lorry-beds featuring Elros Tar-Minyatur’s election portrait, grinning like an idiot with a fist in the air. REVOLUTIONARY MARTYR, read the placards beneath the portraits. MARTYR. At the front of the procession walked the national Party leaders, from Kochi and Kannur and Calcutta. A party worker was singing into a microphone, standing on top of a reinforced Jeep surrounded by a chorus of schoolchildren (because of course there was a chorus of schoolchildren), something low and mournful and familiar, about a revolutionary killed in the line of action. 

He who bears the red flag has no cause for sorrow,
From this red soil will rise another revolutionary bud. 

These fucking Commies, Finarfin had thought, pale and furious. He wondered whether his own Party would have slathered MARTYR on Finrod’s own campaign posters, had it been Finrod who was killed in action, which it should have been, because it was Finrod who had begun the car chase. 

Killed in action?

Elros was not killed in action. 

There was no point to the death of Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur: it had been a pointless death, a death so pointless there was no body to bury, a boy beaten to a pulp not for his beliefs or his actions or his anything at all, but simply because the police constable had called Maedhros and Fingon pansies a decade ago and Maedhros had thrashed him into the ground for it. And here they were, touting the death like it had not only meant something, but meant the revolution. 

Finrod too, Finarfin’s own Finrod, had taken to that definition, had accepted it as a political murder and stood down from the election for that reason, because outside of campaign seasons, Elros had been his dear friend and they had spent much of their wayward youth smoking kanjaavu in public, trying to toddy-tap coconut trees whenever the district brought in liquor bans (when Maedhros, who was strictly teetotal with a zero-tolerance policy to alcohol, and Elwing, who valued normal behaviour and public decorum, heard about this, they simultaneously and separately hit the roof from opposite sides of the globe so hard that the firmament probably cracked in two) as well as starting multiple ill-fated and ill-equipped ‘Western fusion’ rock bands and making such public nuisances of themselves that one of their performances actually brought Maglor to tears of shame. And after you start even one ill-fated and ill-equipped public nuisance of a rock band with someone, you cannot not bear to see their death as having been completely pointless. 

The song then swivelled sideways from Elros and crashed into the marching song the Party sang at campaign processions, a bullish anthem about the Comrade himself, who would be riding atop a lorry or bus or some other ridiculous contraption. The very same song, this time sung as a dirge. 

The good Comrade has no cause for grief,

He who is carved by the fire itself

Has no fear to tread on the ashes of yore

Every lash of the whip fuels him forth

Oh, for fuck’s sake. 

Then the family came into view, walking just behind the Party seniors, with a respectful gap left behind and before them. That was when Finarfin came to the realisation that there was, in this hundreds-strong convoy, at least a singular group of people who knew full well that Tar-Minyatur’s death meant precious little. A stifled sob from Finrod at the sight of the little boys—Elladan and Elrohir—carried by a Maglor who looked like death warmed over, like he would rather be anywhere else, even six feet under. The unsettlingly identical toddlers had been waving and blowing kisses at everyone who stood by watching, and Maglor had not stopped them doing so because they were not even two years old and had only just learned how to do flying-kisses and nobody knew better than Maglor that children so young could not possibly understand what an orphaning entailed. 

Celegorm and Curufin, who had seemingly regressed from the propagandist and banker back into the joined-at-the-hip bastards they had been in their early twenties, dressed almost identically to those two youths who had burned down half of Chevayoor district after getting carried away in a riot, serrated knives strapped to their belts. Caranthir and Haleth were not there, and somehow that put a bitter taste in Finarfin’s mouth, because he knew very well that at least one of them was a Maoist insurgent, and their absence at this procession meant that the Party had well and truly processed the pointless into the political, and thus Elros’ death meant even less than it did in the first place. 

And before them all walked Maedhros, as tall and undeniable as ever, the flagpole slung over his right shoulder as it was in every procession. His face was blank, eyes covered by a pair of opaque dark glasses. The good Comrade has no cause for grief. Which gave Finarfin a pretty good idea of what the glasses hid. He knew, anyway. He was a father too. And he and Maedhros had spent all their lives physically wrestling, beating each other into the dirt, and so Finarfin knew all the choke-points, the pressure-gauges, the indices of a good battering. The man was walking straight and proud and yet Finarfin could see that he could hardly walk on his own, his steps small and unsure. Someone was subtly supporting him from behind, an arm wrapped around the small of his back, hidden scaffolding behind a cardboard cutout. 

Finarfin wondered whose idea they were, those glasses. Celegorm, perhaps. Or perhaps the state Party leaders, or the Politburo members walking out in front. Perhaps both. Because he couldn’t bear to look at Maedhros, he looked at the person who was holding him up, one arm around his waist under his shirt, the other hand grasping his arm. The hand was slim, its fingernails clean, a boy’s hand that hadn’t yet stopped listening to a mother’s wash your hands before and after every meal, and clean under your nails each night. Attached to the hand was, yes, a boy, around twenty years of age, with a thin, slightly bloody bandage around the base of his neck: Maedhros’ nephew, Finarfin knew. Curufin’s boy, the one with the stammer, whom Curufin was extremely irritating about: clever Celebrimbor came first in his class again, clever Celebrimbor will go overseas to study his Masters, clever Celebrimbor’s girlfriend is the prettiest girl in his school (which was one of the most elite schools in Ooty, because clever Celebrimbor and his father’s easy access to dirty money passed the entrance exam with flying colours), clever Celebrimbor has the cleanest arse in town, this, that. 

He wondered why Celebrimbor was the one walking beside Maedhros, walking at the front of the procession beside him. It made no sense at all, unless the boy nurtured a secret devotion to his uncle, which Finarfin was certain he didn’t, because Curufin didn’t even live in Kozhikode and Maedhros didn’t seem to even notice that Celebrimbor was walking beside him. Having led at least five a year and ten every election, Finarfin knew that political processions were intensely hierarchical, that there was a reason Maedhros led the rest of the cavalcade yet walked behind the national leaders: even in the family group, someone as young and green as Celebrimbor would tail the back, perhaps relieve Maglor of his burden by carrying one of the children, certainly not walk arm in arm with the regional President, even though the President in question was clearly dead on his feet. Finarfin appreciated the logical and the consequential, and there was neither logic nor presumption to this. There was no reason for the boy to be placed at the front like that, where Elros used to walk, unless…

Ah. 

So clever Celebrimbor would not be going overseas. Clever Celebrimbor stammered as beautifully as Chief Minister Comrade EMS Namboodiripad. Clever Celebrimbor would be the CPIM’s next candidate. 

He didn’t know why the fact bothered him so much. It wasn’t like he pitied the boy: both of Kozhikode’s major political families were, by virtue of being political families, intensely nepotistic, and both Finrod and Elros had joined their respective Parties at the same age Celebrimbor appeared to be. And frankly, Finarfin thought it was extremely funny that Curufin had sold his soul to a desk at the State Bank so that Celebrimbor had prospects and opportunities, only for the boy to join the Party anyway. Still, there was something nauseating about this artificial placing of this little prospect, the general air of dream-transplantation, that made his stomach churn. Knowing that the boy was probably supporting his uncle of his volition, and that he was placed there by someone who knew he would do such a thing. 

As the procession inched forward, thankfully not stopping at the church gates, Finarfin took a second look at Curufin, walking shoulder to shoulder with Celegorm. There was a stiffness to his face he hadn’t noticed before, a slight perpendicularity to his gait, as if he didn’t wish to even look at his favourite brother. Well. It was clear who decided on Celebrimbor’s position in the procession. He wondered who was right in this case, and thought himself a decent judge in the circumstances, considering he couldn’t fucking stand either of them. Who was right? Celegorm or Curufin? The buyer or the seller? 

Finarfin had, across the years he and Eärwen spent raising four children, developed a remarkable ability to tune out their arguments, and nowhere did this ability shine more than when it came to Finrod and Galadriel. Born merely two years apart, his oldest children had coasted through their entire lives bickering like two homicidal parrots in a claustrophobic cage built for one, about everything from what the best condiment to sprinkle on dosa was, to what exactly should be done about Indira Gandhi if either of them were to, god forbid, end up as Prime Minister. In fact, one of my favourite memories of this branch of my family was of Galadriel’s wedding, where, in sight of not only multiple priests but also five hundred guests, the unblushing bride had stuck up a finger at her older brother the moment she finished her vows, with reference to a bet she and Finrod made in their adolescence regarding which one of them would get married first. However, the sound of his adult children arguing like rats in a sewer pipe at church and whilst a memorial parade passed was incongruous enough that even Finarfin turned around to glare at them.  

“Edo! Boys!” he snapped, using the collective name he used for all four owing to being too lazy to make an exception for Galadriel and Galadriel herself being an insufferable tomboy. “Shut up, you’re not six. Show some fucking respect or they’ll think you only gave your seat up for show.” 

“Daddy, I am deeply offended at you including me in this,” Finrod crossed his arms over his chest and appropriated a saintly air, his bulldog snapping in his stead. “When that is a memorial for my dear friend and it is in fact your witch of a daughter—“ 

“Every time you prove you’re as stupid as you look, I worry for Daddy’s intelligence, making you the golden boy of the Party’s future,” Galadriel scoffed at him, before shooting Finarfin a dirty look. “How do you not see what’s going on? It’s not guilt he’s hiding, idiot. It’s shame. Clear as day, it’s shame.” 

“Why on earth should he feel ashamed about his son’s death?” Finrod countered heatedly. “And how do you know anyhow? If you tell me it’s because of the time you kissed Elros and somehow gained extr—“

“I didn’t kiss Elros to get a window into his empty brain, Finrod, I kissed him out of pity for his horrible little beard and powderstache, and because both Daddy and Mummy swore they’d flay you alive if I ever went near that Commie-sahib Elros and I wanted to see if they actually would,” Galadriel, who had gone through a succession of boyfriends before deciding to marry Celeborn after her father had referred to him as somewhat poncey, and only a Nair, gave Finrod a sympathetic look. “And I was delighted to see they kept their word, if you and your backside recall.” 

“Get to the point!”

To his surprise and slight horror, Finarfin found himself silently chorusing alongside his daughter’s rather prissy tone: my point is that this is a sham. A cruel sham, with no good reason for existing, which everyone with half a braincell, present company excepting, apparently, knows is a sham. As if Elros was arrested for Marxism or political thuggery… it was you who started that chase they arrested him for, not Elros, and our Party is just as in the bad books of the government just as much as they are but nobody arrested you. The only reason, as it’s pretty clear to everyone else, that it was Elros and not you, was that—

Of course it was a sham.

The procession stated most clearly that Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur was killed in action, which meant that he was killed in service of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Which in turn meant that the Kozhikode district president of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was not a massive fucking faggot, because the Kozhikode district president of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) could not possibly be a massive fucking faggot.

However, everyone and their mother knew very well that Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur was not killed in action, because the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was holding only a simple memorial procession like they might do for a lowly youth cadre of a caste and class that one could easily overlook, instead of setting fire to the station he was battered to death in like they would have done for the son of the Kozhikode district president of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who could not be a massive fucking faggot.

Which was to say, the Kozhikode district president of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was most certainly a massive fucking faggot. 

It was all an exercise in balance: the balancing of inaction with an action. Every political procession both asked and answered the same fundamental question. Who belongs, and so who does not. Who is courted, and so who denied. This one was much the same. Why the Party did not act in the case of Comrade Elros, and so whose fault it truly was that Elros was killed. 

Whose idea was it, those dark glasses? 

Celegorm, who knew that any sign of vulnerability in the demon he had carved his brother into would be doubling down on the political suicide that this parade was intended to be? Or perhaps the Party leaders, who knew what they were doing and asked him to wear them so the sham had flair, so that he looked more like a grieving father rather than the reason his son was dead? Finarfin knew now that the most likely option was that it was Maedhros himself, because those dark glasses were clearly the decision of someone who had ridden a stolen motorbike towards another slow-moving procession, and had beheld, straight on, the dying eyes of the boy at the front of the mass. 

The cavalcade inched closer. 

He had cultivated, over years of deliberate practice, the kind of composure that might let him, say, lay waste to a dying man without blinking an eye. But witnessing this, knowing that Maedhros would witness him witnessing it, made fear flutter in his chest. This was the boundary of what he could accommodate without flinching, exceeding the categories he’d built his life around. This was destruction, and the thing being destroyed was a man much like himself, who thought along the same lines as himself, was so much like himself except in one way, in which he was like that other boy, from that other procession. 

Finarfin wanted to turn away. He knew what he would see if he looked right at the flagbearer, and knew that what he would see then would probably undo his own political career henceforth. Hell, he was afraid he might burst into tears, or do something equally ridiculous: Maedhros had done so, after all, thirty years ago when faced with the same sight. 

That procession thirty years ago had sanctioned the stoning of a son, the perpendicular public punishment of dance-master-Finnu with the ribbons in his hair. 

What did this procession sanction? 

The extrajudicial murder of Maedhros Fëanorian’s son, who should rightly have been Finarfin’s own son. 

He turned to Finrod. 

“Listen to me,” he said quietly. “Get Celeborn and some of the bigger fellows out here.“

“Eh? Why?” Finrod’s eyes practically popped out of his head. “You told them to go inside five minutes ago. What on earth could you possibly need them for right now?”

“Stop asking questions and do as I say,” snapped his father. “Tell Celeborn I need either him or one of his heavies to throw a lit torch into this crowd. Now!” 

“What the fuck? That’s a guaranteed bloodbath, look at them, they’re armed to the teeth!”

“Yes.”

“Daddy, forget the election, I already forfeit my seat—to attack a memorial parade—it’s the most cowardly thing—there are children—“

“Precisely, Finrod. You forfeit your seat. Which means I still give the bloody orders around here. Memorial parade, fuck me, hasn’t hatched from his egg and is trying to give orders to his father. If this is a memorial parade then I’ll suck Stalin’s cock in hell. Get!” 

Finrod did get!, but the look he gave his father before he got! made it perfectly clear what he thought of him.

“Christ, Daddy,” Galadriel murmured, looking almost in awe. “Empathy before breakfast? You have grown soft in your middle age.”  

Of course this one saw right through him. 

Finarfin didn’t stay to watch what would happen when Celeborn threw the torch. He knew perfectly well what would happen, having thrown many torches into many processions himself, most of them headed by Maedhros. He knew the face Maedhros would make, the exact twist of his snarl, where his fist would come flying from and where it would land. I can assure you too, that Maedhros did everything you might expect him to have done in that situation. Came home bleeding and limping and livid and the most alive I’d seen him for days, alive in a way I thought he never could be again.

And so Cousin Finarfin left his children in the compound and turned away from the cavalcade, cementing Finrod’s view of him, which he never spoke of again yet never forgot. What was worse than a man who ordered a lit flare to be thrown into a crowd of mourners? The man who didn’t stay to watch the aftermath. He walked out, though the bells began ringing for service. He felt sick and rudderless, and sought comfort in the physical act of walking away from the possibility of rationalising destruction, because if he started rationalising then the bells would tear him apart with it should have been Finrod, it should have been Finrod, it should have been Finrod. 

He walked towards Kasaba Police Station instead. As he walked, he fought the stone in his heart, the hole in the grain silo that had opened decades and decades ago, when he first called me Sister Finnu in church and my father did not tell him off, and had been circling within him ever since. He walked from Kasaba Station to Marad Station, then Nadakavvu Station to Vellayil Station, then back to Kasaba again. 

And by the time Finarfin looped back down to Kasaba, his legs were numb, his knees ached to hell, and the hole had caved in entirely. God had been packing His bags for some time now. Finarfin told Him to close the door silently behind himself because despite his extreme efforts, the walls of his heart turned out to be as fragile as those within other men, and instructed Him to leave no trace of His presence. He walked back to the church compound and sat on the wall as the service went on, like a lazy bailiff overseeing a peaceful eviction. Finarfin had never been a very good Christian: but until that moment, he truly had tried his very best. He had measured his choices against what he intended to measure his choices by, and that meant he had tried to be a good Christian. A religion was a group of people who had once agreed (or were made to agree) to make the same choices, and spent the rest of their lives using the choices they promised to make as the benchmark for the choices they end up making. Balanced precariously on that wall, Finarfin found himself wondering how many choices had been made since the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth until the CPIM memorial cavalcade after Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur’s death. 

Then, he turned around and walked home. 

How homeless he must have felt. How destitute it makes us feel, that first, momentous realisation: I have lost faith. 

Destitute in a manner entirely detached from brickwork and masonry, because there is no sadder sight than a godless cathedral, grieving alone in rubble because the deity, or loved one, or abhorred one had held the vast building together with the sheer force of their presence. Trust him to lose his faith in a thunderclap, a single defining moment, instead of in dribbles and dripping fountains like the rest of us normal souls. Trust him to redefine his entire existence in the aftermath of a calamity that befell a man he couldn’t stand the fucking sight of.

But was that what truly happened? 

I saw him that morning, like I said. He looked at me as though I were an anchor. 

I saw no grief in his face, though he must have been grieved. God was no small trinket to lose so easily: the church was always there in our family. It sat in the heart of our house, its corridors extended along every road we walked, its tendrils curled into all our children, all our lives and loves. Ancient and self-renewing, outlasting individual damage, continuing and comforting and crushing, every generation of the harmed balanced by a new generation of the faithful. It did not rest. It did not answer for itself. 

Finarfin did not leave all at once, and for many years he balanced private atheism alongside public devotion because like he would go on to tell me five years later, he liked winning elections and had very few qualms about hypocrisy. But one day, soon afterward though perhaps not soon enough, he would stop altogether. No more bucketloads of silver dumped in the courtyard’s institution. Did that loss of faith happen in a thunderclap? Or in increments? Did it truly start with a coward’s stance in the face of the memorial cavalcade? Or did it begin with a snatched altar and a run, Sister Finnu? Or did it begin at the age of five, when he called his cousin a nasty name, expecting a rebuke but finding none? 

I know what my father did. You don’t have to tell me. 

I can recite each lesson that was meant for me, trace the spine of every silence, name the mechanics through which love was offered and withdrawn. Believe it or not, what I cannot access is the why, and that gap is where I remain stuck. Childhood survival required certain fictions, and those fictions allowed me to live in that house. The house leached into my life as houses do. The fictions leached into my life, as fictions do. 

What if Finnu and Russo were facsimiles of Fingolfin and Fëanor? What if that was the problem? Perhaps that could become the new ideal that I will never truly inhabit, the new shadow I might as well worm my way through and take Russo with me. We could play Begum-Sultan on some days. On other days, we could play Fingolfin-Fëanor. I could spend at least a few years seeking the validation of that story and replicating its cruelties by turns. I could live with it. 

The facts are available to me, my friend. 

More facts than are available to you, or to Russo, or to Cousin Finarfin. The facts have always been available to me. The work is not in accepting the facts as my cousin and my beloved have done, but in accepting that no explanation and no direct revenge can make the facts tolerable, that understanding my father’s love for me and my love for him doesn't unmake my childhood. Realising that if I want a life not governed by those years, I must stop waiting for the why that will retroactively justify what happened and simply hold onto what I now know is true. 

My father did not want a wife for a son. Any sign of wifehood and so, any sign of happiness in me, triggered a tightening around his mouth, a sermon about godlessness or a week of pointed silences. I will never be whole and his at once. I will never build anything new while pretending that choice he made was anything other than what it was. In this way, Cousin Finarfin was both right and wrong. 

I feel like I say this far too often, but I could never place Cousin Finarfin. 

He was neither a good man nor a bad one. He pinched me every ten minutes when I was a child and would call me Sister Finnu all his life. But he saw what was done to me, and through a myriad of his own little ways, he never let anyone forget that they had seen it too. He was a politician cut from the same cloth as Maedhros, and thus knew all spectacles were made to be witnessed. Even when it happens in the gaps between the said and the understood, even when there are no witnesses except the ever-changing, forgetful sky—even then, the world is full of people who could have intervened and didn't. Sequestered within their own desire for bearability, they remain present at the edge of the unbearable, and the unbearable feeds on that adjacency, requires it, could not persist without it. Years later, when the damage is done and undeniable, they will say my god, my god, I had no idea, and they will mean it, having perfected the skill of seeing without letting the sight reach the part of themselves that might have been moved to interfere. 

The world adores the spectacle of contrition so much that it builds entire systems, multiple, around who must apologise and who must shrink and who must be humiliated. The only way to avoid being implicated by these hierarchies is to take part in either their construction or their destruction. That is a choice we all face. It had been the choice Fëanor faced, and Fingolfin, and Finarfin. Who constructed what and who destroyed what? What were the costs of Fëanor’s choice, and what were those of Fingolfin’s? What future is worth complicity in the horrors of the present? I don't know. I will never know. 

But I will tell you this: my cousin Finarfin turned back. 

He turned back at the cost of appearing a spectacle of contrition himself. Two weeks after the death of Elros, when he stood face to face with a Good Friday parade disguised as a political funeral, my cousin Finarfin turned back. He would make the same choice again five years from now, the same choice he had made during the procession which ended my childhood. The same choice he made on my father’s deathbed. The same choice he made over and over again, would continue to make over and over again, even though each individual choice seemed to him to make no difference at all. 

People ruined each other constantly without noticing, which was what made ruin the default condition of this world rather than the avoidable exception. It was the axis upon which the earth turned, day after day, life after life, so mundane as to be near-invisible. And if you could somehow view these instances of ruin from outside time, maybe they'd form a pattern, and the repetition would mean something beyond the individual failures. 

How many choices lay between the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and the CPIM cavalcade after Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur’s death? 

But there is an anchor. There is always an anchor. 

How many choices lay between Finarfin snatching the altar from my hands thirty years ago as he told me to run, Sister Finnu!, and a brutal exhumation within a police station courtyard five years from now, the one which gave Comrade Elros Tar-Minyatur a crumb of dignity in death? 

Why did I lie at my father’s funeral? 

Why did I humiliate a man who could no longer defend himself? 

Why did I do something so cowardly? 

Like I said, there are several reasons. This is one. 

Dickhead Cousin Finarfin the Nutcracker, my playground tormentor and only friend in the church, who took the coward’s stance because he could not bear the alternative. Just another soul in the ranks of those who did not have to and could easily have not done, yet did. Who couldn’t do it all at once, so did it in incremental steps that seemed to take him nowhere, yet did. Whose towering figure I glimpsed circumnavigating the town that Sunday morning, who looked across at me when I called out to him. And when he looked at me that morning, his head held high yet bearing lost, searching eyes, I felt just as I did at the about-turn of my father’s eulogy. Hemmed in by life and bent-backed by grief, old clip-marks swelling from wing to wing, and still, and still, the bravest creature to fly across this earth.