Eden Abandoned

by Shinie Antony

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; YA Fairy Tales & Folklore

Synopsis

'Women are born in survival mode. Their job, they are told, is to love. But what is this love they neither know nor see – this illiquid, no-return-on-investment, invisible land they must buy with all their soul money?'

Lilith. Wild, untameable Lilith. She is the love of Adam's life – the only woman for the only man on Earth. Until Adam replaces her with Eve. Biddable, meek, subservient Eve. 'Lilith is demanding, short-tempered and unnatural in her sexual desires,' Adam complains to God. Cast out of Eden, Lilith roams the Earth, masters the dark arts and fights the system: dissent is delicious. She is now the Lilith - night monster, seductress of demons. And child-killer. Lilith, from whom the word lullaby comes – 'Lilith, begone,' sing mothers to protect their sleeping babies. Lilith, the irresistible temptress. Eden's controversial once-occupant goes on a rampage to discover all that she is and all that she could be. Beyond Adam. Beyond Eden. Beyond God.

In this gripping take on female rage and agency, Shinie Antony sculpts a ferocious woman born from the ashes of her former self. Exuberant, unapologetic and unrestrained, Lilith shines, soars and persists - a historic villainess and a modern-day heroine.

Release date: February 5, 2024

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 144

Sample

13

The fawn wriggles in my lap, eager to be set free, to run blind into the tall grass. I don’t blame the little one. Bark skirts need getting used to; I am angry at these new strictures passed without my consent. Wearing leaf garlands is one thing, but to rip the dry, hard surface of trees and wrap them around the hip right up against the skin! It affects my walk, cuts off thoughts, infuriates me sitting or standing and gives me a rash. I swim most of the time, the water both raiment and rest. The animals don’t care when I come out of the pond; they are naked, and they don’t know it. And with shame, being told of it is the basic requirement.

I first thought it a joke. ‘Wear this, wear this,’ came the whispers from Heaven. ‘Why?’ I asked, looking down with suspicion at my reflection in the waves. And once that doubt was planted in my head, that all of me better go hide somewhere, the whispers only grew. Modesty would never be appeased. My belly and knees, earlobe and lips just flaunting themselves. Shh, someone will hear you, someone will see you. Quickly, I came out of the cave and wove myself a rectangle from whatever I plucked off the first vegetation I saw, and wrapping it around me, I pretended it wouldn’t change anything between me and nature, between me and the others, between me and me.

You know nothing, that’s what he said and now he is with Eve, teaching her everything. She is childlike with small breasts and hair growing limply down her back. She nods and smiles and looks eager to please my Adam. Made from his own rib, her body came from his body, he is more parent than husband. He and I, though, were made from the same clay, constructed as a ready-made pair, a couple crafted in the same kiln. Heed my word, sisters, men who want partners lie with men. Those who crave a slave come find us. They dream of this softness from cradle, from boyhood, this prattle, this… acquiescence. It is the natural order in Heaven and on Earth, the strong commands the weak. Oh, you may have dreams, too – dreams where you walk hand in hand, side by side, in step, alongside, even ahead. And one day, like me, you will call yourself a fantasist and fall behind. There is a reason you cannot mount a man, a reason you bleed and the blood stops as you swell with child, a reason you lactate and hold the little mites to your breast. Because (and I will say this silently, so you better watch my mouth) God is a man.

Adam – how do I put it so you won’t think me licentious – could make me sneeze inside my cilice with just one look. Which I began to slip on under my hair shirt to keep out the cold, not to mention the inquisitive desert dust that gets into the most private of places. When I’d hear the twig snap under his returning footstep, I trained myself not to arrive running into his arms. He did not need animal fur to stay warm, for he carried summers on his skin. And a heart that pumped honey into his veins, so fluent in sweet was he. Loving too much is an incomplete feeling. We all do that with one man or another, and Adam was my that one man. That kind of over-love only elicits under-love, bringing on the most primitive hierarchy between two people – one’s want more than the other’s. From then on, don’t talk of equality. I ran faster, skinned a rabbit less messy, always got his jokes while he seldom got mine, but by competing with him in love and winning, loving him more than he could ever love me or, for that matter, anyone, I colluded in painting womanhood an emotional lot.

We had only each other; we could have no one else. And that, what was later called my arrogance, my mood swings, my utter femaleness, led to my exile. Eden was no longer home. It is strange to think that Eden goes on without me in it, plucking its flowers, milking its cows, climbing its trees, picking fallen peacock feathers. Eden is a table for two. And if I am out of it, Adam has someone else in my place.

Don’t listen to the rumours about me, that I am a rabble-rouser, that I disobey. People will say anything, as all of population to this day are those born to Adam and Eve. As a second wife, Eve, however naïve and gullible she may be, will have a natural hostility towards the first wife, towards me. It is easy to demonize me, to give me red eyes in later paintings, with my tongue hanging out in permanent impudence. In reality, I ached for a long, long time for my Adam to come to his senses and come back to me. How could he forget the mating, how could he forget me? He sang little songs after coitus, each time about a body part of mine. The back of my thigh excited him as did my pout, my delight his only delight. Back then, I wore my hair almost like a formal garment. It was long, growing past my ankles, and I couldn’t be seen at all unless someone parted the hair and found me inside it smiling cheekily.

He spent whole days playing with it, forgetting to water his precious plants, letting fruits ripen and burst on the branch. The hair that I later pulled out ringlet by ringlet, howling in agony – to muffle the inner agony – in order to exorcize him and his love lies. He washed it and dried it and combed it and put me to sleep, and himself to sleep, by stroking it, stroking it long and slow. Men in love tend to make a toy out of you; this is right after the pedestal stage, and the toy doesn’t notice the subtle spasm of that demotion. He struggled to take the weight of my hair in his hands, tottering under it, playing peekaboo with it, inhaling deeply the fragrant gold of it while I soaked in the sun, trailed my fingers in the green-mossed ripples, and nibbled at berries. My mane more his than mine.

‘All you eat goes straight to your hair,’ Adam had said, implying also that the rest of me was this delicious, narrow-waisted, delicately boned fragility. I had a head full of coquettish hair back then.

Once banished from his Eden, I tore it off my scalp with my own hands, this tangled mess. I couldn’t bear to have it trail after me everywhere, reminding always of his touch. He wouldn’t let me plait it or knot it at my nape. Charging furiously at me from some corner of the garden, he would loosen the hair back to the ground. And I’d smile archly, coyly. This was my power over him, I thought foolishly. My beauty, seeing it as I did through his eyes and his acts, I believed in implicitly. Eve, I hear, is less stunning. And it is easy to be compared. We are the only two women our age here on all of Earth.

And I talk not of now, when she be harried and hassled by childbirth, with her eldest daughter now the midwife, and the whole family is busied by populating the world as decreed by the divine, but of then, when Adam had last seen me and first seen her. I have thought of this so many times that sometimes I feel I was there – at that moment when she came into being. A strip of empty air that turned into Eve. Sherbet to my brine.

Even now, I close my eyes and can easily imagine that small sigh escaping his lips, because she was who she was, another creature totally. Obedient, yes. Meek and slight in build. But majestic in her bearing and frank in her mirth, saying what came to her mind, trusting and lusting with innocent lunacy? No.

She was not me, I was not her. To Adam, that was enough.

12

Time, time, time, everyone wants to know the time. When did this happen and when did that? Because then they think they can control the truth. Timekeepers manipulate chronology – there, don’t say I didn’t warn you. That hour I came gasping to life, with a brand-new mouth gritty with the flying sand, my eyes opened to Adam. God, of course, was watching me carefully, but then He is God, not a man – one took Him in axiomatically as one did the sun-sky-surf; Him the bigger picture and minor detail. But in Adam, created mere instants before me, I saw my reflection. I saw the same protectiveness in his eyes for me that I felt for him at once. We were, I thought, at par.

True, God had not started with me. It was Adam who arrived before me, a bobblehead, neck on a spring, nodding. But in a factory of two there is still a queue, a conveyor belt that sees one, and then two, drop off into an assembly line. Just a coincidence then – isn’t it?. . .