Mandira Pattnaik

Unlike Hermina, you’ll stop by the rooms, each opening into the other through a door, each colour coded, so you don’t risk yourself like her. You’ll seek her relentlessly, because you are a twin sister, and you don’t believe she went to the sea rushing past each room like a maniac being pursued, abandoning the home you shared, and if she did stop by, how would you know she is there? How would she know if the sea is blue or green and if that green is the green of the plants, that Mother would call glas, or if it is the artificial green of dyes, that she’d be fine with uaine, or if that blue is plav or teget or modar or sinj, because it's the colour that’ll tell her what it means. Hermina would wander by, not knowing where to pause. She might not stop at the Red—color of blood, color of dawn, color of convoluted happenings; and like your dead Father, collide head-on with a rich brat’s car. It is the color-coded room, each a different color that must’ve attracted her on this path. You know she was always fascinated by her multi-coloured ribbons, and the patterns on the carpet you had brought with you from Nanyang. So, if they must have lured her, it’d be through this — varying wavelengths.

Unlike Hermina, you stop and notice: Simple unadorned rooms of brick and mortar tastelessly white-washed, a single skylight to let in whatever luminescence the day allowed helping it to transform into colours that have meanings, and possibly opening lastly beyond the cliff where identical grey squirrels race up each other through the jagged rocks like it mattered who won the race to plunge to the depths of the sea.

You pause intermittently, then pass each room. They must have said: You’ll meet your mother, and Hermina would be convinced. Hermina was always so naïve, but so increasingly sensitive as she entered her teenage years, closer to Mother than Father. At home, while you’d been habituated to Mother being in the kitchen, rustling up baby spinach and cottage cheese, sometimes coriander paste with the pork, Hermina would be the one querying if she needed help, massaging her weary feet and talking to her when Mother felt alone. She’d want her to watch the TV shows, be at her studio, together painting landscapes. You know she loved Mother more than you had ever.

When Mother disappeared suddenly, you realized you’d never noticed Mother’s hue --- it did not matter, you’d say, echoing your absent father. But Hermina would call mother’s face pale, or dark, or bright, occasionally deep and royal, sometimes the color of rust—the shade of abandoned or neglected, and often the toughness of steel—unbendable and unbreakable, but rarely bling or colors that manage to sing. You’d know what she meant, and know it concerned her, disturbed her.

“Did they call you, Po?” Greta, your schoolmate, had asked, before the English language class on Friday. You had nodded a no and told Greta that had to go and look for Hermina, no matter what.

Greta had suggested it’d be this corridor of connected rooms, which is the shortest way to where they take people they fancy, and you had wondered if you should tell Greta, you did see a flash of colored light that night Hermina disappeared, and you could only describe the colour related to physical phenomenon if you tried. Like you would perhaps call it iridescent, and metallic, even glossy, but wouldn’t go so far as to compare it with relevant things one can easily imagine, such as saffron, or lilac or salmon. It would not describe the light, but it’d describe the dynamic nature of the light.

But in any case, the white rooms wear different colours as you pause and wait for Hermina to show up, though you are unbelieving, and you repeat like a prayer, It can’t be, but I wish, and hope either Mother or Hermina appears.

On the wall to your right, after you’ve counted and crossed nine rooms, is the Chinese character pronounced qīng in Mandarin, and ao in Japanese. It makes you remember Father taught you a bit of numbers soon after Father and you came here from Chongqing. You’d need it, Father said. They didn’t like your skin here, nor your language, convinced that you were here to rob them, or kill perhaps. Father was aways so busy, and Mother and you sisters, stayed cooped at the home you rented, like animals marked for slaughter.

Mother must have disappeared because she felt miserable here, everything was foreign and she felt unwanted, cursed and demeaned as she went about in the streets, humiliated like she wasn’t even human but a pest.

Qīng, the Chinese character means both blue and green, and so you know it is a sign. It’s the sea Hermina has chosen, without doubt, always either green or blue, not land—the surface with countless colours. At sea is where they keep their armoury of life-material. It is the heraldry of your ancestors, and Hermina must have wanted to find out where Mother went. You are convinced she sought the sea where everything went in the end after all.

When you race to find the opening that’d lead to the cliff, and onwards you prepared to dive into that sea, the door ahead is a wall, sprinkled with so many colours it is its sum — black. Stunned, you freeze.

Now you realize that the blackness means where you and Hermina and Father and Mother came from—dark of the universe. It holds both land and sea, and there’s where you all mingle. You press your ear against it, and you’re sure you can hear Hermina’s and Mother’s feeble but happy voices, laughing and chatting. Hermina was so right in choosing this door. Father would be proud.

Across, it’s a world you’re familiar with—there’s home, there’s greenery of paddy fields waiting to be harvested, people with faces like yours. Standing there, you wish you never had to leave home for livelihood in the first place.

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Mandira Pattnaik is the author of "Glass/Fire" (2024), "Where We Set Our Easel" (2023) and "White, Hot Moon" (forthcoming Fall 2025). Visit her at https://mandirapattnaik.com.