Unravel yourself, my grandfather tells me.

He plays with the ball he wove from coconut leaves this morning. He throws it to me and I catch, the leaves fibrous in my hand, like something strong that can easily tear. “The ball is the metaphor,” he says as it rolls against my palm. The words are familiar, sentences repeated every day, but they do not make sense to me yet.

From the terrace, I can see the jackfruit tree he planted the year my mother was born. The one he named after my grandmother, and the one he goes to every morning. Nobody takes care of our garden anymore, not since Ammachi’s death fourteen years ago, and it has grown wild, vines extending onto the pathway, moss against the stone steps, weeds poking out in cracks, grass in places where it doesn’t belong. The house is small because the garden is big even if it is no longer in order. I place the leaf ball on the floor.

My fingers press into my skin and I push them till they enter my body, grabbing my rib cage, bone against my thumb. I close my eyes and twist, a shock running through me as hard bone vibrates, shivering into strands of thread. I tug, my hand coming out of the fat that layers me, and I pull.

Thread spins out of me, my skin turning into long lines of silver. The sort you could use to stitch a torn pillow. It spills out of my chest, curling as my body tears, my head coming undone as my legs are ripped apart, my organs sucked into my veins as the blood within them turns solid but wispy, like fine hair. My body comes undone till I am nothing but loose thread, silver, almost invisible against the cement floor. I think about my grandparents building this house as they laid the bricks one by one, using their shapeshifting abilities to give their muscles strength so that they could make a home for my mother, still unborn. I struggle to turn back, the threads of my soul folding and flying but not changing.

My grandfather gathers me into a small plastic box and smiles.

I cannot smile back.

*

At dinner, when I am human again, Amma helps me tie my ponytail into a bun as she winds a string of jasmines around it. The string is part of her soul, the thread she has unravelled from herself.

“I made it for you,” she says. “The jasmines grow near my office.” All rakshasas who have passed ten years of age should be able to do this — take out pieces of their soul and weave it into the world around them, transposing parts of the self into an object instead of changing their whole form. I wonder if it is Appa’s human blood that has stopped me, if it is the reason that I am eleven years old but cannot shapeshift properly.

I touch the petals and close my eyes, my mother’s love in my fingers. I stare at the kitchen sink, silver and clean. The fridge with alphabet magnets that form all our names like a crossword puzzle. The photo of Ammachi that sits next to the stove so that we can talk to it when we cook. I ask my next question even though I fear the answer; I fear not knowing.

“What happens when the jasmines die?” I ask. “What happens to the thread?”

Appa looks up from the kitchen stove where he is attempting to cook fish molee. We know it is not going well, the burnt smell creeping into our noses, but we do not tell him anything. Appa is sensitive about his cooking, just as I am sensitive about my inability to shapeshift. He watches me, the only human of our family, and because I can see his concern, I force myself to smile at Appacha.

Amma combs my hair with her fingers, curling a strand behind my ears. “Nobody ever dies,” she says in that cryptic voice she inherited from Appacha. “Aren’t you learning your lessons?”

“Appacha keeps throwing the coconut leaf ball at me,” I say.

Amma laughs as Appa continues stirring a curry that simply needs to simmer on its own. “That’s how he taught me too.” She smiles at her father and he reaches into his fanny pack. He throws it at my mother who catches it.

“She unraveled today,” he says. “Three times. Successfully.”

I can still feel the crochet needles moving in and out, turning me back into human form. The thread of my soul turning into a human body, a metal hook pushing itself into me, curling around me, looping and turning me into a knot. Lungs built from the knotting of thread. One part of the body creating the next. The crochet needles are fast but Appacha can knit a self together without them. I wonder how. I cannot even build my own soul; how do you bring someone else’s back together? The breaking of a body is easy but to fix the self back together? To make something new? Are Appa’s human genes preventing me from changing shape?

Amma smiles as if she knows what I am thinking.

“She is still learning to link herself to other objects, to find herself with the world,” Appacha says.

I wrinkle my nose, frustrated by how they talk about me as if I am absent. I bite my lips. Appa chokes on his coughs and the smell of burned fish becomes unbearable; I get up to help him, shaking my head. It is too late to mask the flavour, the damage has been done. I laugh at the helplessness and put my arms around him. “We’ll eat leftovers,” I say.

“Again?” Appa stares at his hands in despair as if betrayed by them.

I play with the jasmines Amma has wound into my hair.

*

It is not a gift to be a rakshasa nor is it a curse. At least, no more than it is to be human. We’re not really that different, though the legends force cruel attributes onto our nature. They say we eat men, that we are devastatingly beautiful or terribly ugly, that our shapeshifting is our way of entrapment. Myths and fairy tales assume the worst of those who are different and over the centuries we have learnt to erase our past and our present from the histories of humans.

When I wake up in the morning, I realise I have fallen asleep in my parents’ bedroom again. I stare at the picture of Ammachi and I wish she were still alive. I cannot imagine losing Appacha. How can a person be with you one day and be dead the next?

I turn and Appa smiles at me from the study table, getting up to ruffle my hair as I roll over to avoid the affection. He laughs and it annoys me. Even though I am eleven everyone still sees me as child. I push myself off the bed and stare at Appa. I know that he met Amma when they were both teaching at the same primary school and I know that when Appa asked Amma to marry him she said no. It took many years of trust before she revealed what she was and how, in a world that didn’t believe in shapeshifting, she couldn’t ask him to trust her. I know that when she said this, he took her hands and said, “I love you” and everything within her yelled it back to him. I look at this unassuming man who cannot cook or shapeshift but who holds us all carefully.

The jasmines are falling out of my hair, fading to a brown the same colour as the study table. Will the death of the jasmines kill the string of my mother’s soul? Will the life of the soul keep the jasmines alive? Will one die and the other live?

“Do humans have souls?” I ask Appa. “What happens when humans die? When they cannot store their souls in objects.”

He blinks. Outside a crow caws. An ugly sound.

“I do not know what a soul is,” Appa admits. “But humans leave themselves in objects all the time. Toenails in a dustbin. Hair in the corners of a bedroom. Emails on a laptop. Notes in a journal.”

I shake my head, unsatisfied. Appa’s eyes soften. “Are you worried, Molu?”

“I can’t do it. It’s just — it’s not possible.”

“You should talk to Appacha,” Appa says. “Tell him the ball of leaves is not working for you.”

“Maybe I’m just human,” I say. “Maybe I’m not meant to have a soul. Would you be disappointed in me?”

Appa exhales, tired. “Molu, I’m human. Don’t I have a soul? You do not have to shapeshift to be real. Your soul does not have to be tangible to exist. But also, Molu, nobody in the world fills me with the pride I feel when I see you.”

I carefully unpin the string of jasmines and place it in his palms. Amma snores and we laugh.

*

When I go to look for Appacha in his bedroom, I realise he is not there but right on the stool, below the white and black dreamcatchers, is the green blanket that holds part of Ammachi’s soul. When I was seven years old, Amma told me how Ammachi wove this blanket. (“We just found out she had cancer,” Amma had said. “And she came home and pulled parts of herself apart to create a blanket.”)

I have never known my grandmother but I have often seen Amma curled on Appacha’s bed with the blanket in her arms, whispering to it, telling my grandmother all that had happened during the day.

“Ammachi.” I take the seat by the bed, touching the sheet, soft against my palms; the wind in my being picks up the breeze of my dead grandmother’s. I want to tell her my mother misses her. That Appacha misses her. Do the dead hear the living? Can we still communicate to her soul?

I reach into my body, pulling at my stomach, turning all my organs to thread as I unravel myself, dangling off the bed and onto the floor, strands of silver on a wooden table. I try to wind myself back into human form, to give my soul shape but my wishes do not work, and I am unwound and tangled, part of me on an old wooden chair and part of me falling to the floor. I wait for someone to come and crochet me back into a form I am used to.

*

It is two hours later when Appacha returns to the room and I am aware of everything around me. When you are thread, you cannot see and you cannot hear but you do feel, you are constantly aware of what makes each object itself. I can feel the clock moving, the ant that walks over my soul with a piece of bread in its mouth, the solidness of the cracked floor. I try to scream but I have no voice.

When Appacha sees me, he laughs and laughs and laughs. “Molu!” I do not find this funny but cannot reply. His fingers move deftly, knotting the thread over and over. Build a knot over another knot. It is a long tedious process but it does not hurt the way the crochet needles do. I do not feel like I am swallowing metal and blood. He builds my hands first, making a ball and pulling five fingers out of it, stretching the thread to form my arms and my torso.

“You should be more careful,” he says when he is done but he looks amused. “You should not practise without supervision. What if we never find you again?”

“Why is it so easy to break yourself apart but so difficult to fix yourself?”

Appacha pulls another ball made of coconut leaves from his fanny pack and hands it to me. “A metaphor.”

I throw it into the air and catch it lightly, the leaves smooth and soft against my palm.

“What’s the metaphor, Appacha?”

My grandfather looks at the blanket, all that is left of my grandmother’s existence, and his eyes turn gentle, his grin softens. He reaches out, thumb grazing the cloth.

Quietly he says, “I had another nightmare about her last night. Her hands, her feet, all shrivelled and pained, disappearing into blackness. I called to her. But she told me she had to die again. And I was terrified. I couldn’t lose her.”

Appacha never speaks like this, with this pensive sad note. I knew about the nightmares because I heard my parents discussing them and ideas for possible treatment but Appacha never talked about them in front of me.

“For the longest time I thought she blamed me. That I had done something wrong. That in finally allowing her to die, I was killing her.” The fuzzy sound of age in my grandfather’s voice reminds me that I am still a child even if Appacha has forgotten it. I do not know what I can say but I think I know what he is talking about, because Appa has a term for it — the guilt of the living.

I try to remember the other thing my father said as I put my hand over Appacha’s, his wrinkles as old as his voice, and I quote my human father to my rakshasa grandfather. “Spirits of love are not vengeful. But when you hold grief, sometimes you turn in on yourself.” I don’t fully know what this means, but I think it might help.

Appacha stares at me. He puts his arms around me before he walks towards the large windows. “You must know that, Molu. The nightmares aren’t from those we love but they come because we feel love so strongly.”

I look at the ball of coconut leaves in my hands. “Appacha, what’s the metaphor?”

He stares outside as he throws a question back at me. “What’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile?”

I know this. “A simile uses ‘like’ or ‘as’.”

“What does that mean?”

I stare at Appacha till he looks back at me. His voice is soft. “In a simile, something is merely similar to another thing; in a metaphor one becomes the other.”

Sometimes I wonder if adults know what they are saying. My grandfather presses his head against the window, the mosquito mesh touching his forehead. “You are the ball,” he says. “Together you make a metaphor.”

I still cannot understand but I do not feel ready to try so I move to stand beside him as he opens the window, pulling back both the glass and the mosquito mesh. He presses his finger into his forehead, pushing it deep into his skull, unwinding himself. I watch as his body seems to lose its bones, turning limp and liquid, thread streaming out of his skin and flying to the window, folding over itself, knotting itself, pulling, pushing, purling, yarning, braiding till my grandfather has turned into a crow, his preferred form of change, his beak tinged the slightest purple like his glasses.

Appacha caws, his crow feet moving against the sill as he bows to me. Then he takes off, one wing slightly broken as he flies towards the coconut tree. I look at the ball of leaves in my palm. Maybe he wants to mourn alone. I don’t know how to deal with that thought.

My mother walks into the room, a pen stuck in her mouth. She grins at me, pulling it from her teeth. “Where’s Appacha?”

“He became a crow and flew away.”

She nods. “Did he say if he’d be back for lunch?”

*

Appacha does not come back in time for lunch but this is not surprising. On Sundays, he likes to wander the skies.

“He’s searching for something,” Amma says as she serves herself the palappam. “But I don’t think he knows what.”

I imagine Appacha, flying for hours. The wind rushing around him, wings carried, moving forward. I imagine the streams around him slipping through a landscape of green, rubber trees with blotches of white and brown standing below and as he flies, full of an inexplicable want, he looks below, wanting the world. I think it’s clear what he wants, what they all want. After all these years, they want Ammachi back. He is still searching for her.

*

I am putting my books in my schoolbag when Appacha returns with a ball in his beak. I touch his feathers and he caws. Wind wraps itself around his body, feathers fly loose from him till he is surrounded by a hurricane of black feathers. They surround his body as he shapeshifts till he stands before me, wearing an old shirt and lungi. He kisses me on the forehead, hands me the ball, and climbs the steps to the house.

“Tell your parents to come to the bedroom,” he says. “We all need to talk.”

His body seems stronger and there is a brightness to his face that I cannot remember seeing before. He looks like he has exciting news but my stomach growls and something within me begins to unravel. Something is going to change. Something terrible is about to happen.

I yell for my parents and follow Appacha to his bedroom. He hands me a scrunched-up piece of paper, closing my fingers over it. “Not right now,” he says, when I try to open the fist. Amma walks in. She is smiling but when she looks at Appacha, standing near Ammachi’s blanket, she stops short, staring at her father as he picks up the blanket that was once my grandmother. She knows. She sees something in his face. But what?

“No,” she says.

He steps towards her, presses his lips to her forehead and says, “I love you. I’m with you.”

He looks at Appa and grins. “Thank you, my son.”

He turns to me and with a small smile says, “Don’t worry about the shapeshifting. It’s only a metaphor.”

He closes his eyes and turns his head to the ceiling. He wraps Ammachi’s blanket around his body, covering his head. The cloth twists over his torso, falls to his feet. It covers him. And so fast that Amma is unable to reach him, while I stay stuck in my place, the cloth folds and folds and folds as if there is nothing beneath it. Like a bedsheet, folding and folding, till we can see nothing.

My grandfather is dead.

*

Appa places a blanket over Amma as she lies in the bed. He shifts his hands through her hair as she whispers that her father didn’t even leave a part of him behind, nothing that she could hold. She curls and curves, unwinding herself, tearing herself apart, and then she lies down as threads on a bedsheet, unable to pull herself back together. I leave him alone with her as he sings her an old song, his voice not at all musical but that never mattered to Amma.

I open the paper Appacha gave me. I have been holding it so tight that I might have torn it slightly. In his almost illegible handwriting are instructions.

How to Make a Ball from a Coconut Leaf

 1. Cut two leaflets from the midrib.
2. De-vein both so they split into four. We will name them Leaf Appacha, Leaf Ammachi, Leaf Appa and Leaf Amma.
3. Tie Leaf Appacha and Leaf Ammachi into a knot at their base.
4. Repeat with Leaf Appa and Leaf Amma.
5. Look at what you’ve done. There should be two v-shaped blades.
6. Hold them so that the knot that joins Leaf Appacha and Leaf Ammachi is over the one that joins Leaf Appa and Leaf Amma.
7. Lock the two blades together. Leaf Ammachi and Leaf Appa will be at either end.
8. Let your fingers guide you as you learn from the intuition of your ancestors, their collective memory showing you how to weave the leaves.
9. Watch as a curve is formed.
10. Weave, Molu. Weave.
11. Once you are satisfied with the size, tuck what remains of Leaf Appa, Leaf Amma, Leaf Appacha and Leaf Ammachi into the pockets you have formed.
12. Your ball is complete, Molu. You are the ball. You are us.

*

I put the note under my pillow and fall asleep immediately. The exhaustion of emotions washes over me and I hope for a world where all is darkness. I still don’t understand the metaphor. I don’t understand the ball.

When I wake up in the morning, I find I have unwound myself. A nightmare. Appacha stood in a field of flowers that grew taller and taller till it swallowed him into them. I try to take a form once again but I cannot. It is Amma who brings me back together when she comes to check on me. Amma uses knitting needles, purling, and yarning in a way that makes me feel like I am being stretched, like my veins are being pulled out from my heart. Metal on metal. Soul in soul.

“Amma,” I whisper once my body returns to physical form.

She gives me a weak smile. “Molu,” she says.

I throw my arms around her and she holds me.

Amma does not say much, kissing my forehead. “Your father has burnt the egg,” she says. “We’ll have to have bread.”

The complete normalcy of the statement provides me with a sliver of comfort. Amma leads me to the balcony and I look out at the garden. Appa puts down his cup of coffee and holds me. I look at both of them. I watch a crow fly past Ammachi’s jackfruit tree. I think of Appacha’s instructions. I’m not sure I’ve learnt how to make a ball. Four leaves becoming one ball. Leaf Appacha. Leaf Ammachi. Leaf Appa. Leaf Amma. If I am made from them and I am made from me, maybe weaving is remembering those within you.

The jackfruit tree stands tall and I leave my parents with their coffee, jumping down two steps and into the garden till I stand next to it. I look at Amma and Appa, watching me from the balcony.

I place my hand over my chest. I feel the thud of my heart. I listen to it beat, the way it sends blood through my body, pumping life into my being. I close my eyes and breathe in. I force my heart to cleave, the right (with less oxygen) and left (rich in oxygen) to separate. My body tears into two.

I hear music, my body is unravelling.

Thread spins out of my skin, my lungs lose their air, scrunching into themselves, wisps spin from within me and pull themselves outside. The hair on my head turns silver and pulls itself out. I am coming undone and I think of Ammachi and Appacha. I think of Appa and Amma.

What is family? What happens when you tie two people together and braid their lives into each other? Do the living hold the dead, just as the dead hold the living? Can you die and still be alive? Can you be both human and rakshasi?

The thread of my soul flies in the wind and I stop forcing it to listen to me. I allow it to fly, allow the wind to catch it as it spins and spins, curling over itself, curving into itself. My soul is made of all the other souls and I listen to their voices. Appacha did not shapeshift his soul into an object but maybe he didn’t need to. Appacha is not me and I am not Appacha but I am not myself without him. None of us are ourselves without the other. Human. Rakshasi. Thread winds around thread, twisting till it forms veins and arteries, and I am simply a bundle of blood vessels suspended in the air. One becomes the other. I think of Appacha as cells divide around me, a growing dividing mess of bone and muscle and organs and love and love and love.

I open my eyes.

I look at my hands, the same they have always been. Brown. Nails too long. Ink stains against my palm. I turn around and see Amma and Appa. Appa’s arms are around Amma. I have not become something else, at least not visibly. I run into my parents’ arms and think of what Appa told me. Everyone leaves themselves in objects. The act of transfiguration changes our bodies, our cells, our shape, just as dying changes the form of all creatures. The body is only a vessel, it is not life itself, shapeshifting

Hold the ball in your palms.   I bury myself into my parents’ embrace. I listen to the sound of the world. The crow cawing. The wind blowing. You are the ball, Molu. You are us.

Throw!