In a land ravaged by melting brains, Naag Phalli grew a mouth sore so small, it pained the eyes to find it.

She awoke from four hours of sleep, all six limbs entangled in the checkered sheets. A thumb was beginning to sprout two inches away from her pelvis. She was careful not to chafe it against the fabric or smother it between her and the charpai. She exercised the same practiced caution when she rubbed her skin with a soapy loofah. Wrapped in a towel, dry, bearing a faint smell of clean cotton, she licked her bottom lip, dragging her tongue over the formerly pink, now discolored mound of flesh. That’s when she felt it.

Up close, it was an unthreatening speck of ivory white, its perimeters tinged yellow before it descended into a tight ring of crimson deeper than blood. When Naag Phalli flicked the sore with her tongue, its shape reminded her of the moon’s craters. Beyond the pale, tender dip, the flesh sank soft and spongy, carrying the barest ache, its remote familiarity tucked in a past far away from the reign of Atomi Ifreet. The land of melting brains had not always been so.

Naag Phalli found her mother lying on a bamboo mat, nursing her seventh finger of the month. Their bodies had long forgotten what they were made to do. Most of her mother’s fingers on the right hand were as god had once intended them: five, and of varying lengths. The thumb was stout, the forefinger slightly crooked, the middle finger climbed to a crescendo and fell, as expected. Then came the ring finger. The little finger. The five, in their solitude, embodied nature as it was meant to be. Then came the aberrations. The blasphemous fifth finger stubbornly pointed downwards whenever the hands rose in prayer. A sixth finger so obscene it made the middle finger seem like a saint.

Naag Phalli was unfazed by her mother birthing a strange new digit from the spine of her thumb. The vicious new order after Atomi Ifreet was without doubt incurable and indiscriminate.

But Naag Phalli’s sore eluded the end of possibilities. Modest and unassuming, it called forth the wisdom of old and the timeless hunger that bound pantry to flesh.

Ama Bakhaan could not believe her ears when Naag Phalli told her about the mouth sore. She shoved a finger in her daughter’s mouth, feeling for a gaping hole. There was none, but the flesh at the suspected site had turned puffy and raw. She dragged Naag Phalli under the lantern and tilted her head back. There it was – a faint shimmer of red curving inward. Ama Bakhaan did not find the sore’s head. She jerked Naag Phalli left and right. She pulled her lips down over her jaw and peered in. Beneath the still amber glow of the lantern, Ama Bakhaan searched until tears streamed down her face and her pregnant thumb began to bleed. Naag Phalli’s mouth sore really was that small.

Ama Bakhaan laughed with glee, declared it a sick day, and prayed for more. For the first three months after Atomi Ifreet claimed their land, she had cooked to suit each body. Then she stopped. With six bodies to feed, each with its own constellation of deviations, and little patience, it would have to be one dish for all, whether they could eat it or not.

That morning though, Ama Bakhaan found herself slightly less torpid. Naag Phalli’s sore was too plain not to please the eye, its ordinariness long tutored by ancestral remedies. And so she did not mind cooking twice: talbina for Naag Phalli, bharta for the rest. Standing over the cauldron, she whipped the ladle until the milk clenched into bone. The air sugared thick, misting Naag Phalli’s eyes.

Once Naag Phalli was done eating, Ama Bakhaan took her to the courtyard and ushered in Raksha Bai to see the mouth sore. The fifty-five-year-old woman moved with a strange gait, its heaviness part heart disease, part contrivance. Her two left feet were bare and inconvenienced her ever so slightly. Yet she walked with an amusing waddle, courtesy of the big perky breast jutting from her throat, which cut off her view of the ground — a fact she had long taken for granted. On her right foot she wore a new charcoal khussa as she staggered into the courtyard to see Naag Phalli’s mouth sore. She settled under the banyan tree, one end of her white cotton saree pulled into a paranoid drape over the third breast; she was a chaste woman. Her bare left feet had dragged in mud and an empty pan masala wrapper.

“My, you can barely see it!”

Before Atomi Ifreet, Raksha Bai had worked up a reputation owing to her stubborn pregnancy fat. She announced all her childbirths as miracles. When her husband asked her to shed the extra pounds after delivering their third child, Raksha Bai demanded that he apologize and repent, for she carried within her yet another child whom she refused to birth. Her husband cried and held onto her feet, then only two and dainty. Thirteen months later, Atomi Ifreet unleashed its curse and Raksha Bai declared that she would wait for the worst to pass before bringing their fourth child, Prem Bandhan, to the world.

Naag Phalli posed still for Raksha Bai’s perusal. Between Ama Bakhaan’s multiplying fingers and her own multiplying limbs, everyone in her family possessed hard and greedy hands. However, for Raksha Bai, corporeal malfunction had only come for her lower limbs and neck.   The older woman’s touch with her thin, equally-spaced fingers prying her mouth open to reveal the mouth sore, resurrected within her a forlorn yearning for the normal.

“Oh, you can barely see it, indeed!” Raksha Bai exclaimed again, eyes teary with joy and envy at the prospect of a blemish so ordinary. She instructed Naag Phalli not to touch it with her fingers. “Be chaste. That’s how our mothers braved these sores.”

For six hours after Raksha Bai left, Naag Phalli sat with her knees locked together and mouth wide open. The sore soon began to peck the inside of her left cheek. Only twice did she doze off, her lips reflexively settling into a thin line, sending her teeth knocking right into the sore’s angry crater top. She would jolt awake with pain of a trivial and moderate variety. Then she would swallow with difficulty the impulse to let her teeth rip through the gruesome red border.

Ama Bakhaan brought over to her charpai a second serving of warm talbina. As the mother and daughter waited for the meal to cool, Ama Bakhaan lifted the candle from the dusty table near Naag Phalli and searched her mouth under the flickering flame. The notorious bulge reared a queasy yellow head.

News of Naag Phalli’s tiny sore traveled quickly. By nightfall, she found herself the center of attention again. This time her family played host to three well-wishers. The pain in her mouth no longer felt familiar.

“It is so very small to the point of being almost nonexistent,” Karima Machhi punctuated his appraisal with wonder. His singular eye narrowed as he beheld the puckered lesion, now aglow with a jagged streak of green.

“It’s the heat from the stomach. Get a tall glass of cold milk and swish it around in your mouth. Then drink it,” Karima Machhi advised. He was an established matchmaker, surviving more on reputation than practice in the reign of Atomi Ifreet.

“It’s a speck of dust! Blink and you’ll miss it!” Umme Razaq shared Karima Machhi’s fascination, but not his trust in the promises of milk. “It’s the body resisting the external. The last thing you should be doing is putting something inside it. Just gather your saliva first thing when you wake up and pack it into the sore with your tongue.”

Umme Razaq had no patience for remedies. Every now and then, her ears would fall off – during an especially rough bathing routine or a frenzied sprint of hide-and-seek with her children. Her legs were four, providing ample balance that caused many to resent her. There was nothing enfeebling about her mutations; they were as gracious as her god-given genetics had once been. Perhaps it was the pride she took in flaunting the speculation as nature’s gift to her, that every time her fragile ears dislodged, she would wet the frayed, blood-soaked tendrils of vessels with spit – sticky and warm, like some primal adhesive – press them back into their ragged, bloodied positions, and will them to reattach.

Farooq Mistri’s bodily fluids were not as amenable to sheer will and faith. So when he observed Karima Machhi and Umme Razaq lean forward, necks and backs taut with poorly disguised competition, he relaxed in the stiff, cane chair. A few steady, languid motions later he rolled up a piece of old newspaper into a tight coil, spinning it into a needlepoint that he stroked against his tongue. He could not attempt to be inconspicuous even if he wanted to, as he inserted the drool-soaked paper roll into his heavy, gaping ear like a makeshift cotton bud. Just when Umme Razaq was prescribing spit as a handy fix for mouth sores, Farooq Mistri administered a similar routine to clean his ear. A disconcerting squelch kept them company while Umme Razaq and Karima Machhi took turns sharing centuries of ancestral wisdom about mouth sores. When the two said their last words, everyone turned expectantly toward Farooq Mistri. The thirty-seven-year-old man pulled his thin, lanky frame reluctantly out of the comfort of the chair. As he stood, his long, flaccid ear lobe reached his waist and gave a jerky wobble.

“It is small alright,” he assumed an air of authority. “You must not buy into these old ideas, Naag Phalli. Take a glass of water and add two spoons full of cornflour. Mix it well. Then gargle.”

Farooq Mistri snuggled his dangling earlobe like a child in his arms, the sloppy paper bud jutting out of the ear canal, odd and forgotten. All eyes were fixed on an open-mouthed Naag Phalli.

After the three guests left, another three propped up unannounced, armed with more remedies.

Dab coconut oil on it. Do not massage.

Neatly fold a muslin cloth, immerse it in ghee, and place it in your buccal cavity.

Find an incorrigible rat, pluck a hair farthest from its rear, and slide it through the sore, secured with a single knot.

When everyone left and the family went to bed, Naag Phalli worked her hair into a loose braid. The left side of her face was swollen as if she were hiding a tennis ball in her mouth. The red pucker had deepened into a purple fester. A shrewd eye could detect a thin, filmy layer of pus stretching across the yellow indent. Naag Phalli laid out all that she needed between herself and a big mirror. Then she swished around cold milk in her mouth for fifteen minutes. Next came a thick, cloudy suspension of cornflour. She did them all: the coconut oil; the ghee-soaked muslin rag; a coarse chin hair pulled from an old, naughty rat.

Moments after she put her head on the charpai, she heard a commotion outside. In the courtyard stood Anjum Rana, supporting his large belly in a brown, chipped wheelbarrow. He used one hand to guide the tool carrying his magnificent abdomen. In the other three, he held a bunch of waxy leaves. “I hope it hasn’t healed yet, I have the perfect cure for you!” Naag Phalli was summoned and she indulged the man’s fascination by showing her the cranky lesion living in her mouth.

“If it were any smaller, it’d be a rumour,” Anjum Rana said in all seriousness. He thrust the leaves into her hands. “Spearmint. Chew on them for ten minutes. Then swallow. Slowly.”

Naag Phalli obliged.

The taste of mint lingered on her tongue when she woke the next morning. She remembered Umme Razaq’s counsel and pushed the stale wetness of sleep into the sore with her tongue. After bathing, Ama Bakhaan seated her in the softest chair in the house. Tales of her miraculously small mouth sore lured in six new faces. Hi. Hello. Salam. Wasalam. She waited for the courtesies to expire. Then she opened her mouth wide and revealed a dull yellow abyss the size of a fist, her tongue and teeth lost in pulsating mounds of pus.

“Oh, it’s so small, you can barely see it!”