My inheritance burrows into me

I was born with a kaan khajura curled into my hair.

My grandmother noticed it first, a single black curl at the crown of my head that seemed to ripple, almost alive. I think my mother leaned in close, scoffing in disbelief, and there it was: slick, jointed, its feelers twitching as if it were already listening.

They knew what happened to children like me, so my mother decided not to nurse me and instead sent me away to the aanganwadi she grew up in. Baa said that babies were always a little strange at first, and maybe it would crawl away on its own, but it never did. It became my companion and jailer both; it wriggled loose when I played in the courtyard, curled against my neck when I laughed, and tapped its tiny legs across my scalp when I was afraid of the dark.

The day I bled for the first time, the kaan khajura stopped hiding in my hair and began burrowing deeper. I felt it trace the edges of my ribs, sharp and impatient, like it was writing something only my bones would remember. At school, when the teacher scolded me unfairly, I felt it grip tight between my teeth and swallow the complaint whole. It kept growing, and soon, I felt its weight sliding across my tongue and pressing down until my words dissolved.

By the time my marriage was arranged, my body felt less like mine and more like a house the insect had been quietly renovating. I smiled without showing my teeth, bowed and touched the feet of the elders, and when my husband pressed his hand too firmly against me, the kaan khajura scuttled down my spine with a hunger I had never felt before: scratching, chiseling, moving faster than his touch, until I could not tell where I ended and it began.

I froze, my lips shut tight. He did not notice. He thought the stillness was obedience.

My scalp burned. My bones ached as though something had been carved into them, lines I could not see but could feel whenever I breathed too deeply. The kaan khajura rested in the hollow of my collarbone, its small legs tapping softly as if counting. It was then that I finally understood what it had been doing all those years, why it had stayed when it could have easily left. It was not my companion.

It was my dowry. And like all dowries, it belonged not to me, but to the world that demanded it.