Fireflies

She was seven years old the summer she caught her first firefly. Cupping her palms, she showed it to her brother, Bishnu. She kept them in a glass bottle her mother once used for mustard oil, its label long since scrubbed away with time. "If you catch too many of them in one bottle, they stop glowing!" shouted Bishnu, though Maya suspected he just made that up to keep her from being too greedy. Her father, Dil Bahadur, worked in the fields on the hill nearest their house and came home each evening with the smell of earth on him. Her mother, Sarita, wove nettle woollen hats and sold them at the local market of the village, and in the evenings she sang the same three or four songs while she cooked. A set of rumours had moved from village to village. A teacher was taken from Dhading, a police post was burned near Rukum, and an ordinary man was shot in his own courtyard for refusing to feed a couple of men passing by. Fortunately, Mudula had not, so far, experienced such rumours.

In the village of Mudula, the quiet shift of the night came as it always did; the herd of mountain goats was faint and gave Maya a sense of home. Her bottle was already half full of fireflies caught that evening, sitting by the door, where she usually would be before her mother called her in to eat. Nine men, each with a rifle, appeared before her. Their leader, a young man not much older than her brother, stood upright in front of her. Dil Bahadur said he had never spoken to the police and that they only grew rice. But it did not matter. It was never going to matter. Maya's mother was pulled by the arm into the storeroom by two of the men, and the door was shut. Bishnu tried to step between the rifles and the rest of his family, shaking. What happened next took perhaps four seconds. Maya would spend three decades trying to make sense of those four seconds, so that she might understand them, but she would fail every time. She ran... She ran down the fields, in the dark, barefoot, fireflies knocking softly against her arm. She did not stop running until she was too cold, crouched behind a boulder near the riverbank. She watched her house catching fire...

Years had passed. Maya had nothing left to live for. She did not weep. She had already, by then, stopped being able to. She does not remember deciding to become a porter. She was carrying loads twice her weight up the trails, which broke even some grown men's ankles. Some traders paid in rice and, occasionally, in nothing at all, and by seventeen she had learned the unique survival techniques of being a girl alone. She knew which houses to avoid after dark. She was, in almost every way, self-sufficient. One day, an old family friend, an old man who had known her father, somehow tracked her down. Her mother had lived alone in the ruin of that courtyard for six more years, the old man said, before she climbed to the top of the hill above the house one morning and jumped. Grief would have made sense of it, but Maya felt something not even she could put into words.

In the spring of that year, she went back to Mudula, for the first time since the night of the fire. A new road had made its way up to the fields her father used to work on. Maya had carried weights a hundred times harder than this one without her knees once shaking. But somehow, they shook now as she approached the place. The house was gone, of course, but the foundation stones were still there, the lush green of moss covering the old stone walls that were still standing. Her body was turning cold, her hands turned cold too, her throat was dry. She found herself on her knees in the wet grass without having decided to kneel down. She could only think of that time, when she could maybe, in time, have done something... anything... other than run. The night had already turned upon her. The fireflies came by as they always did, each day, all through the years. Maya did not catch them this time.