Exhaustion drives a surgical resident to what many would consider criminal behavior. In a bid to avoid reprimand and unsavory consequences, Aamir convinces a homeless patient to cover for his negligence, leave a wound uncleaned for a week, and tries to make his patient disappear. This story promises to raise eyebrows and leaves the reader with some confusion about who to blame. – Shreya, The Bombay Review

            You – you, Aamir, no-not-the-movie-star-just-named-after-him, lowest person on the surgical residency totem pole, lackey of the surgical unit, drudge, grunt, lickspittle, slothful ignoramus– you, on only the twenty-second day of the first year of your surgical residency, begin this succession of screw-ups.

            You can’t claim that you didn’t know better. Even a medical student on first surgical rotation knows you have to be error-free on Monday morning rounds with your senior residents and Unit Professor: every overnight problem has to have a solution, every preoperative workup has to be complete, every wound has to be debrided, every dressing has to be done perfectly. If you fail at even one task, your senior residents lose face. And if your seniors lose face, they’ll make sure you don’t scrub in on the next several major surgeries. And if you don’t scrub in during those first few months, you’re labeled inexperienced and who wants an inexperienced first-year to assist on the “real” operations? You might as well commit to a lifetime of hernia repairs now and leave all the “real” surgeries to the “real” surgeons.

You know all this. Yet, on only the twenty-first night of your training, tired and post-call, you give in and sneak in an hour of sleep. You don’t just fall asleep, tired – you deliberately, consciously, decide that you are tired, find an empty patient bed, set an alarm for one hour on your cheap imitation black Casio wristwatch and fall into a restful sleep for that amount of time.

It hits you, of course, when you wake up in a daze to the low-key beep-beep sounds emanating from your left wrist. Your heart swells with an impending sense of doom as you mentally catalog how much is still left to do: write all your notes, incise and drain two patients with particularly pregnant abscesses, and, worst of all, debride and re-apply dressings on all the chronic wound patients under your care.

            As the early hours of morning tick-tock into dawn and you re-run your mental checklist, your desperation mounts. You have managed to scribble half-hearted notes- you’ll get into trouble for the quality later, but at least they are done. You’ve drained the two abscesses – it took up more time than you had originally budgeted for, but your seniors won’t know or care as long as the tasks are accomplished. But as the sun starts to peek from behind the tops of the century-old banyan trees outside your government-run hospital and the morning-shift nurses begin to cheerfully stream in, you realize exactly how costly that one-hour error has been: you now have less than thirty minutes to remove dressings on, debride and re-bandage five chronic wound patients. Impossible, you whisper to yourself. A feeling of irrevocable blunder makes it hard to breathe- in less than a month into your first-year training, you will have missed making the deadline for wound dressings by rounding time. Why, just one of them – Syedbhai, the homeless pavement-dwelling beggar with a massive cricket-ball size ulcer on his forearm, gooey with resistant bacterial pus – will take at least twenty minutes.

            Unless. Unless you buy yourself time by simply wrapping a fresh set of bandages over the original, and save the actual cleaning and debridement for later. (You will claim later, when you are safely a senior and able to brag in front of obsequious juniors hanging onto your every word that this was your own idea but rumors of such “shortcuts” have circulated for years). If you do it just for the worst wound, you get an extra twenty minutes to do the other wound debridments properly. And Syedbhai – homeless, family-less and grateful for a bed to sleep in – is the least likely to get you in trouble. You tell yourself that there is no real harm done here- you’ll get to it later in the day and he will be simply delayed by a few hours in getting his wound cleaned. Of course, this plan needs the patient’s active cooperation – one slip of his tongue and you will be exiled for longer than your Hindu colleagues’ favorite Lord Rama himself.

You adopt the swaggering, bullying gait of your seniors as you walk over to Syedbhai’s cot in the verandah of your ward. Your tired but healthy frame towering over him as he looks up at you, simultaneously fearful and pleased at the attention. He pauses mid-breakfast, scrawny body scrunched over the chipped plate. His head is bigger than his ribbed torso as he ingratiatingly looks up at you. You find yourself adept at persuasion that first day- telling him how you want to do a really, really good job and today’s dressing will just have to wait until later, but if he insists you will do it now. Syedbhai agrees, as he knows he must, although he manages to win an extra meal in his negotiations. You hold your breath during rounds as the group pauses at his bed but the patient doesn’t complain and neither your seniors nor your Professor ask to look at the wound.

            This could still have been a one-time mistake, a temporary blip in your efficiency. But you compound the error by letting the day pass without cleaning Syed’s wound. Procrastination always was your weakness, you were well-known as a student for turning in projects at the last minute although somehow you managed to always pull it off. Looking back, you know that afternoon was your one chance to get back on track but you passed on it. Syed reminds you, of course, but you placate him with a cup of chai and win another reprieve – this one for twelve hours, before tomorrow’s rounds. The next morning, however, a perforated appendicitis upsets the schedule and rounds are canceled- you put off wound cleaning again, now into Tuesday afternoon. A “VIP” patient’s urgent admission for an incarcerated hernia alters your day once more, and you end up putting off cleaning and again simply re-bandage the wound Wednesday morning. By Thursday you are actively avoiding Syed, sneaking him off to unnecessary X-rays right in the middle of rounds so none of your seniors see him. The long week runs into Friday, then Saturday, when he starts up with high fevers – the infected ulcer, now buried under two inches of “fresh” bandages, is likely gushing antibiotic-resistant bacteria into his bloodstream, You catch your senior resident at Syed’s bedside in the middle of the day, looking at him worryingly. He asks if you’ve been diligent in cleaning his wound through the week. Luckily for you, the exchange is in English so Syed is unable to understand. Although even if he had understood, by now he is too sick – frail body shaken by chills and rigors and drenched in sweats – to really participate in a conversation. You reply in the affirmative, obviously, but it takes all the limited acting skills you can muster to hide your panic when you’re told to prepare him for surgery “first thing Monday”.

            This is when you realize that you’ve gotten in over your head, and seek advice. The only person you can trust is another first-year, a former classmate of yours. He listens patiently, then shoots down your admittedly desperate idea of a stealth operation on Sunday. A week without wound care – you sisterfucker, there are probably maggots crawling under those layers of bandages. You swallow hard, silently cursing yourself for basically committing career suicide, imagining your parents’ reaction if you get kicked out of residency – the shame, the ignominy. Your friend offers the only way out. Get rid of him. If there’s no patient Monday morning and he didn’t die, it can’t be your fault. Patients come and go all the time. Bursts of practical advice lead to a plan. Put him on the train to the next city, he can go to the hospital there. They’re better equipped than we are, its best for him. Make sure you use a goods train, not a passenger train. The passengers will smell the infected wound and not let him on. Ask the ward boy for help, he’s done worse things for residents before. Don’t give him too much, you’ll raise his fees for all of us.

            You approach the “ward boy” – really, a balding middle-aged government employee with a paunch and a scraggly mustache, but old British terms die hard – with the plan. You are hesitant at first, but the ward boy doesn’t bat an eyelash at what you are asking him to do. He is more interested in negotiating his “fee”. He asks for two hundred and fifty rupees but, mindful of your friend’s advice, you negotiate it down to two hundred. The ward boy goes over the train schedule and the two of you settle on the train departing early Sunday morning at six o’clock – you should be out by five o’clock, when most patients and their families are asleep and there are far fewer nurses.

            The plan goes well early that Sunday. The ward boy loads Syed onto a stretcher and brings him down to a waiting rickshaw, driven by a “friend”. Another seventy-five rupees for the friend, negotiated up from fifty after the driver smells the wound, but you are too nervous to argue. You follow them on your scooter. At the railway station, the rickshaw driver and the ward boy magically procure a wheeled rusty metal stretcher, placing an uncomfortable and weakly protesting Syed onto it. You had placed another fresh bandage over the last one before you left the hospital, but the stench from his wound is nauseatingly unmistakable. You shush the patient as you walk alongside, telling him how you’re arranging for him to be transferred to a different hospital for better treatment. Syed resignedly accepts your words at face value, his sickly body shivering on the cold metal stretcher as the two men push it up the incline and onto the open air platform.

            The three of you walk alongside the stretcher toward the sloped end of the concrete platform. The rust-colored goods train is already there, carriages extending past the edge of the concrete down the tracks. You and the ward boy had planned this final step last night – deciding to place Syed in one of the half-empty goods carriages after the train starts to leave so he doesn’t scream and draw attention to himself until it’s too late. The last thing you want is for Syed to be discovered. Someone this sick would be sent right to your government hospital and, if he recovered, would he have a story to tell.

            It’s been a while since you were at the railway station but little seems to have changed.  Your gaze runs over the familiar sights as you wait for the engine driver to signal departure – the same old open tracks, large rats scurrying between them, the paan-stained walls, hawkers selling chai to early morning travelers. The television sets appear new – large, dusty sets enclosed in rusted black cages, hanging from the ceiling along the length of the platform. Just as you hear the clocks chime six, the screen closest to you flickers to life. In most public spaces, morning programming is confined to classical morning raagas, but the railway employee running the show this morning seems to have other ideas. Madhuri Dixit’s ethereal beauty graces the soot-smudged screen as the familiar opening tremolo from her hit new song Mera dil bhi kitna paagal hai, my heart is so mad interrupts the quietness of daybreak. The stretcher comes to a complete halt, as all three of you look upward, transfixed watching the disabled poet played by Sanjay Dutt limp on crutches next to Madhuri in the morning mists of the Himalayan foothills. Too shy to tell her character how much he loves her, wishing she knew him to be the anonymous poet whose verses she adores and sings. My heart is so mad, even as it loves you, Sanjay Dutt mouths, whenever you come in front of me, it fears to tell the truth. Even Syed feebly props himself up on the stretcher with his rigoring good arm to get a better look, empathizing with the handicapped hero silently in love with the heroine the whole country is in love with. No matter how much I tell my heart, no matter how much I try to make it understand, it’s naïve, it’s innocent, it doesn’t comprehend, all day and night it sighs in anguish…

            The horn from the engine rudely interrupts the music as the train driver signals pedestrians and hawkers to clear the tracks. Slowly, majestically, ponderously, the carriages start to roll forward. The rhythmic clanking of metal wheels on metal tracks is your starting whistle. You nod quickly at the ward boy and the rickshaw driver. The three of you get the stretcher rolling down the slope at the end of the platform, parallel to the slow-moving carriages on the tracks just as Syed finally realizes what is going on and opens his mouth to protest. Ignoring his cries for help, you grab Syed by the shoulders while the ward boy yanks him up by his feet and the rickshaw driver keeps the stretcher moving – a makeshift relay team of sorts. You swing his body between the three of you, picking up momentum with each swing, getting ready to launch him through the half-open side-door of the carriage.

It’s only the twenty-eighth day of the first year of your surgical residency and, yes, you have screwed up, but you didn’t get this far by accident – you are smart, you are resourceful, you are hard-working, and by God you will fix this procrastination problem right now.

Alok is a physician currently based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA  but originally from Gujarat, India. His prior narrative works have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Annals of Internal Medicine and Health Affairs, anthologized in Narrative Matters and included in the Best American Medical Writing 2009.

 A brilliant, precocious girl, deemed accursed by her father, grows up to become a celebrated writer and creates a life with everything to live for. Jain gives us plenty to be optimistic about with his heroine until she is struck by a debilitating illness that renders her paralyzed. A rags-to-riches-to-death story crafted with subtlety and perfect pace, Jain’s handiwork leaves us all with a lump in our throats that will not disappear for days. – Shreya, The Bombay Review.

Aral is born with nine toes instead of ten. The odd number displeases her father. In the village, nine is the number of the witch, the demon, the cursed. From the day she is born, her father distances himself from her. Nothing good can come of nine toes, he grumbles. The girl is marked, he says. Ill fate will follow her like a shadow, he rages. His wife listens quietly and tends to Aral in her lap. She isn’t that concerned about the nine toes. She worries more that Aral is dark like her father. Darker. A groom will be hard to find.

Aral is three when her brother pushes her off a cot on the terrace of their small house. Her head finds the floor before her hands can. By the time her panicked mother picks the wailing child off the ground, she knows the wound will scar. In the evening, when Aral’s father returns home, he doesn’t react much to the bandaged head of his young daughter. He looks at the child coiled up next to her mother, glances briefly at her feet, and then, walks into the bedroom.

Aral’s mother worries. What is wrong with this child? She catches her six year old daughter staring at a wall for hours. The bare, tattered wall holds the girl in thrall. She’s seen Aral look at everything so wondrously that it’s worried her out of sleep. What’s so spectacular about a mynah? A mirror? Is the child dull? Aral looks at a wildflower and laughs. She talks to her shadow. She catches and releases butterflies over and over. Smiles at the puddles of color in their wings.

When Aral comes home with a letter from the school, her mother grows anxious. Aral’s brother has never come home with one. What has this nine year old troublemaker done? When she pulls Aral’s ear, the girl begins to cry her innocence. I’ve done nothing, she shrieks. To settle the matter, to end the suspense that has begun to press against her chest, Aral’s mother hurries to her neighbor. Gangalata may be a nag and reek of fish but she can read.

The letter is brief. Aral’s mother has been called to the school for a meeting, Gangalata says ominously. Called for a ‘meeting’? repeats Aral’s mother, dabbing at her perspiring brow with her chunni. She returns home and tries to harry the truth out of the child. I’ve done nothing, Aral insists again.

The next day, Aral’s mother arrives at the school after hours. She’s dressed in her best suit, but is a bundle of nerves sitting across the much younger, sprightly, slim-waisted teacher. Aral’s teacher, Miss Nathmohan, smiles warmly and asks Aral to leave the room while she talks to her mother. Aral glares at everything in her way as she stalks out.

So many words assault Aral’s mother. Brilliant. Precocious. Gifted. Prodigy. Aral’s mother makes little sense of what is said. Pieces of paper are pushed in front of her to survey. Though she cannot make out what’s written there, she recognizes the precise, natty script of her daughter’s handwriting. The teacher is babbling, gushing. She finishes, dramatically, in a word in which she appears to lose her breath. Extraordinary, the teacher says, curling both her hands into fists. By now, Aral’s mother knows her daughter isn’t in trouble. And that is enough.

Rumors rustle amongst the young of the village. All the twelve-year-olds know. On Sunday nights, the teenagers gather at the dilapidated shack next to the peepul. There, they do things. What things they do, Aral doesn’t know. But she does know that all her friends have been to the notorious shack at one time or the other. They have done these things. Every time Aral thinks of the shack, she feels a smile come on. And something turns, flops, jumps inside her belly.

One Sunday night, Aral tiptoes out of her house. As she’s closing the door, her father groans from his bed. She pauses. When no other sound follows, she closes the door gently.

The streets are lit by the smolder of the newly installed street lights. Aral hurries to the shack, wondering all the while if she’s perhaps too early or too late. When she reaches, she realizes she’s neither.

The shack is indeed old and ruined. Though Aral never heard of a fire, the place looks burnt from the inside. Plus, it carries a scent. Murmurs cluster all over the place. There are more people in here than she could’ve guessed. Eyes blink at her from the darkness. Ignoring the stares and the sounds, full of scandal, Aral slinks over to the staircase and sits down. There, she waits for something to happen.

Almost fifteen minutes pass before she feels the warmth of another body next to her. She glances to her left to see it’s a boy. Unlike her, he is definitely not twelve. Moonlight is all that illuminates the inside of this ravaged place. And in the silver of the light, she can see his whiskery cheeks. Eighteen. The boy must be at least eighteen.

The boy stares at Aral unabashedly. After a moment, awkwardly, she stares back at him. Aral wonders if he can see how dark she is. A thing of bones wrapped in more night. Or if he notices the small, disfiguring scar at the side of her head. Before she can speak, say anything, he presses his lips to hers.

The kiss isn’t intimate or tender. It’s hungry. After a few seconds of this, Aral pulls away and leaves the staircase, the place in a rush. On her way back, she stops under a street light. She touches her lips, smiles. There’s warmth there. She hurries home, something in her pleased. As she gets in bed, Aral believes that she has a secret. That she’s no more a child.

The scholarship comes as no surprise to Aral’s mother. After all the prizes, accolades and beautifully inked certificates her seventeen year old daughter has collected over the years, this is something she expects. The discussion for Aral to attend college in the city is a brief one with her beleaguered father. Aral’s father has had misfortunes pile up one after the other in the recent years. Among other things, he’s wracked with a rare neurological disease that has pain throb like a heart in his ribs constantly. Though he hasn’t mentioned it in years, Aral’s mother knows that he silently blames their ill-fated daughter. So, when she proposes to send the girl away, he sighs, momentarily claws his aching, pulsing chest, and agrees.

Fleet-footed, a few months march on. Aral is in love with Bombay. It is unlike anywhere she’s been. The hubbub excites her. It’s a city in a hurry. Everyone needs to be places. Aral watches a flurry of people climb buses, crowd beaches, unfold out of autos and fold into tall buildings. She wears jeans, shredded at the knees, everywhere. She wouldn’t have dared wear these back home.

Back home, Aral read about college in smudged, tattered books she borrowed from friends. In movies, she saw it as a mad place, a frenetic world full of song, color, and manic energy. While her college in Bombay cannot match all this expectation, it does take her breath away. There are all kinds of people. She’s seen a boy with all his hair clumped and spiked in the middle of his head. She’s seen two girls kiss outside the canteen openly. She’s heard rumors about her professors hooking up. At times, to her shock, with students.

Aral is in her final year when she meets Dbek. Dbek has long hair, can quote Sufi poets from memory and has a slight stutter that you miss until you don’t. He is also a year younger to Aral. They meet, bizarrely, in the comment section of a blog. Their disagreements are so strong that they’re forced to meet, to confront. Later that week, Aral experiences her second ever kiss.

A year later, Aral moves in with Dbek. They rent a small, compact flat that is somewhat luxurious by Bombay standards. Dbek writes copy and Aral teaches; there’s enough to make do. Aral also begins work on a heartsong of a book, a pearl of an idea that has taken shape in the back of her mind over the years.

News of the move-in somehow reaches home. When Aral calls, her mother talks in a strained voice while her father yells in the background. Obscene words fall from his mouth more than Aral has ever known or imagined. Her mother abruptly cuts the call or perhaps her father snatches the receiver and slams it down. Later in the day, Aral weeps into Dbek’s shoulder. Nothing he says, nor his usual daffy humor, is enough to calm her.

At a friend’s behest, Aral publishes an excerpt of the novel she’s working on in a literary journal of some reputation. The next week, to her surprise, she’s flooded with calls from agents and publishers. She has no idea how they even got hold of her number. And surely each call surprises her more than the last. Everyone seems to want a piece of her. They call the almost ten thousand word excerpt ‘sublime’, ‘heart-rending’, ‘exceptional’ and more. They call Aral ‘a star’ and that loaded word again, ‘genius’. Aral is overjoyed but also, a smidge overwhelmed. In the end, she makes Dbek take the calls. In the end, she agrees to share the novel, when it’s finished, with quite a few very insistent people.

Aral is in the second year of writing her novel when something happens. The work is only two-thirds of the way done when a strange stiffness takes hold of her hand. On an afternoon when sunlight coats her windows and sears the tulsi in her balcony, crouched on her writing desk, Aral finds it impossible to unclench her left hand. Aral struggles until she lets out a shrill cry. But her hand refuses to unlock.

Had it not been for their insurance, Dbek and Aral couldn’t have possibly afforded all the tests that follow. In order for the medical insurance to cover the bourgeoning charge, Aral is admitted in Breach Candy hospital for a day. Though young and healthful, Aral is taken around for comprehensive tests in a wheelchair. She’s backed up against X-ray machines and swallowed up by CT scanners. They drain bottles of blood out of the wrecked hand with syringes that remind Aral of pictures of needle-nosed mosquitoes from her school books.

After all this, when they approach the doctor, they are startled by his solemn expression. This will grow, he says without waiting for them to sit down. This is just the beginning, he says without waiting for them to ask.

Three weeks. Just three run-of-the-mill weeks. That’s how long it takes for the whole of Aral’s left arm to stiffen. Aral is grinding chickpeas into a paste in the kitchen at the time when it happens. Her arm freezes at the shoulder, bent at the elbow. And nothing she does makes the slightest difference. Though the doctor had warned that the best medication would only delay it, Aral had imagined having much more time. That night, Aral is inconsolable. Dbek calls her home to inform her parents of their ill luck. It is Aral’s father who picks up the phone. He listens silently and hangs up the receiver when Dbek pauses for breath.

The next time it happens, it is all-consuming; it resembles a thunderbolt out to raze a city. Aral is keying passages into her novel with her right hand when the doorbell rings. A glance at the digital table clock reveals that it could only be Dbek. Aral is excited; she cannot wait to show him a sentence of hers she’s grown attached to in the last hour. She leaves the desk and makes a run for the door. And on the way there, she freezes.

She cannot move a muscle. She cannot produce a sound. She looks like something stopped in time, someone who’d forever be on her way to the door. The doorbell rings again. And again. After about ten minutes of this, when the ringing has grown worried, Aral hears footsteps recede from the door. She imagines Dbek rushing to the Katyals, their neighbors, to ask for the spare key they keep with them. When Dbek manages to finally open the door and enter, the sight stuns him.

Aral’s eyes move in their sockets. She hears all the sounds Dbek makes. There are gasps, then a strangled cry, then more noises. In the end, there’s crying. Aral watches him frantically bring out his phone. He scrolls through his contacts with trembling fingers. In seconds, he’s on call with their doctor. And from where she stands immobile, Aral can hear the doctor comfort a raving, stuttering Dbek. The doctor sounds patient and kind. But, to a terrified Aral, he does not sound surprised.

After that, as they would, things change. In the beginning, whenever Dbek returns from work, he makes an effort to talk to Aral. He asks questions and answers them himself. Where do we keep the salt-shaker we bought last Diwali? My bad. It must be in the cupboard. Have you seen the remote? Wait, it’s right here. Shall I try and cook something for us tonight? No, too much hassle and I’ll probably burn the place down. And, then, for no reason whatsoever, in the middle of a question, he dissolves into tears.

As months go by, Dbek forgets, more and more, to change her clothes. To clean her unmoving limbs with a damp cloth. To comb her swirl of hair back in place, out of her eyes. On occasion, he forgets to slip water and food between Aral’s still lips. Moreover, slowly, the one-sided conversations ebb away, too, like morning light withdrawing its shapes with the coming of the dark. And now, almost every day, Aral sees Dbek come home drunk. More often than not, to senselessness.

One of such days, he stumbles towards her stilled form in a haze. He stands there awhile, reeking of rum, gazing into her eyes. Then, with the immediacy of the starving, he begins to paw at her body. At her breasts and her thinning waist and her bony behind. He tries to pull her to him but is unable to shake her. He comes to her instead. He nibbles her collar bones, bites tenderly here and there. He presses his mouth against hers. And when, for the first time ever, Aral doesn’t respond, he stops. No, he says, taking a step back. No, no, no. He repeats. No, no, no, no, no. He goes on incessantly, until he staggers out of their home.

It is the last time Aral sees Dbek.

As more days pass, Aral’s stomach finds an emptiness that cries out to the silent room. It growls its lonely appeal. Her bones creak in the dead of night. Her sore muscles have been lulled to sleep. Soon, a quickness, a suddenness grips the way Aral sheds weight, the way her arms grow lean or her face sinks and pales.

A new season breaks. Autumn mats everything in leaves. And in her apartment, over and over, Aral stares at the same things. The door, the couch, the T.V., the stained rug where she or someone else spilled their drink, old newspapers – Pioneer, Statesman – gathering dust on the coffee table, the cordless telephone that has rung all of once since Dbek left. Aral, patiently, lengthily, imagines the rest of the house. Her cherished balcony with its moldering black and green lawn chairs. The kitchen, spare and unpretentious, that has always had room for everything she’s ever needed. The bedroom where, time and again, Aral and Dbek have desired each other both timidly and fiercely like something much younger. Lastly, her study. Where sentences, paragraphs, a world sits, waiting to be touched by senses other than hers.

Aral thinks of all this. She lets her thin breath slip in. Slip out.

Slip in. Slip out.

In. Out.

Tushar Jain is an Indian poet and writer. He is the winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, the Raed Leaf India Poetry Award, the Poetry with Prakriti Prize, the DWL Short Story Prize, the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. His first play ‘Reading Kafka in Verona’ was long-listed for the Hindu Metroplus Playwright Award. His work has appeared in various literary magazines and journals such as Aaduna, Papercuts, The Madras Mag, Vayavya, and others. His debut collection of poetry, Shakespeare in the Parka, was published in 2018.

Barve explores friendship through the lens of everyday argument and eerie magic. Two old men Bhau and Appa discuss the mundane occurrences of everyday life – tiny spoons, a stolen scooter, the right way to make tea. They are overshadowed by the grief of Appa’s wife’s passing and haunted by the apparent supernatural qualities of medicine packs belonging to the deceased. This story doesn’t attempt to make a larger point. Rather, it gives the reader a break by just giving them a puzzle drenched in the light of the comforting camaraderie of two cribbing men. – Shreya, The Bombay Review.

It was always late morning in the house, no matter how many windows were open, no matter what was playing on the television, no matter how stale the newspaper felt in his hands. His chair was right by the window. For a moment, he looked at the shabby Umbar tree in the yard and thought about why time behaved erratically in his house. It was an interesting idea because he knew he would never find an answer to it. He was not the kind of man who saw such things well. Then Bhau, his friend of forty-seven years, entered the house, carefully placing his left foot inside the doorsill, and Appa thought ‘What a hypochondriac’ and forgot all about the nature of time.

            ‘What did you bring bananas for?’ Appa said.

But Bhau would not speak before he had survived the dangers of the doorsill. Twelve years back, he had fractured his left femur, and even though it had healed well, he accorded great consideration to the injury.

            ‘Does the leg hurt even now?’ Appa said.

‘I don’t know. But I am sixty-three years old. I am not taking any risks. And the bananas are fruit,’ Bhau said.

‘What do you mean? I know bananas are fruit,’ Appa said.

‘The wife said, take some fruit if you are going to see Appa. So here take it, fruit.’

Bhau held the thin plastic bag in front of Appa’s face.

‘And your choice of fruit is banana? Since you have to keep on harping about it, I am sixty-one, and I have diabetes.’

‘Don’t keep talking about your diabetes forever. I’ve read somewhere that bananas are good for the bones, and they are also fruit,’ Bhau said.

            Appa grunted, pulled the newspaper closer to his face and started reading. Bhau left the bananas on the teapoy and sat in the opposite chair. He picked up the supplement of the same paper. The house was littered with papers because Appa didn’t know what to do with them. What he knew was that Kumud would have hated the clutter if she had been around. His foot ruffled a sheaf, and underneath he noticed dust had collected like it does in abandoned houses. He raised his hand and looked at it. He wanted to see if his fingernails had grime, but there was none.

            The house was one half of a twin bungalow. Vinu lived in the other half and she, of course, did not live alone. She had two boys, three and five years old, a quiet husband, and a talkative mother-in-law. Kumud used to make frequent trips to that side, to give a bowl full of something, or for a word of gossip. Now it was Vinu who made numerous trips to this side of the bungalow.

            Appa remembered Vinu had once tried to go around the house stacking up all the newspapers, but she had not succeeded. A few days later, the papers had appeared again on all the flat surfaces in the house. Now Vinu had taken to complaining about the Umbar and how it was invading the bungalow and how its fruits were leaving streaks on her husband’s new car. ‘Vinu is just like her father,’ Appa thought. The man had been Appa’s cousin, now dead, but he was well remembered for his acidic tongue.

            ‘So where are you going to live now?’ Bhau said.

‘What do you mean where?’ Appa said.

‘The wife was saying now you will go and live with your son. I hadn’t thought of it like that. But the wife knows these things,’ Bhau said.

‘Your wife seems to know far too much than is required,’ Appa said.

‘Yes, it’s true. She is wise like that. She says, right now you are not thinking of these things. You are still grieving. It’s been only two months. But later, you will feel lonely. Also, how will you keep the house? She says it’s not easy for men,’ Bhau said.

            Bhau was looking at the newspapers on the floor. Appa thought the mess was perhaps too much for Bhau. If it kept piling up like this, one day it might bury Bhau under the paper mound. He was a short man, after all. The thought was oddly satisfying. Perhaps Bhau was thinking about it too. He pulled his legs up and sat cross-legged on the chair. Then Vinu walked in with two cups of tea and Appa forgot about the possibilities with the newspapers.

            ‘I saw Bhau Uncle come in, so I brought tea for both of you,’ she said.

Vinu talked for a few minutes with both of them, and in that time she tried to dust the TV and the showcase in a single wave of the dust-cloth which she always seemed to carry with her. Then she reminded Appa that she was going to Mumbai for a few days since the kids had summer holidays, but the cook would still make lunch and dinner for Appa. When Vinu left, the two men put their cups down without drinking. Appa went into the kitchen and came back with the sugar-tin. He added two spoons to his cup and to Bhau’s cup as well.

            ‘Do you mean you are going to live here all by yourself, buying groceries and doing all those

other things that go with it?’ Bhau said.

‘Why? What’s the problem?’ Appa said.

‘Do you know anything about it? Can you at least make tea?’ Bhau said.

‘Why do you need tea? You are already drinking one,’ Appa said.

Bhau shook his head as if he was talking to a stubborn cat.

            ‘Your son will force you to live with him. When Wahini fell ill, the wife thought he was going to ask you both to go live with him and your daughter-in-law. Cancer is not a simple thing,’ Bhau said.

‘Why should we have left our house and gone to another city? The boy has been asking us to do it for a long time, but I like to live here. I was going to look after Kumud. Look at the table. Those are all her medicines. I had prepared a bag for each day and marked them with time and food instructions and everything. I know cancer is not simple. I had prepared for that,’ Appa said.

            Bhau nodded his head. Both of them dropped their newspapers. They drank tea and did not speak for some time. Appa thought about the time when he had waited outside the ICU hoping they would let Kumud out soon, but he had gone on waiting. She had died of post-operative complications. Gone, just like that. He remembered the glass windows of the ICU had faint smears on the outside. He had pressed his forehead on the glass thinking about the smears, without realising that it had to be someone like him who had been here before, who must have left these signs behind like documentations of grief.

            ‘What are you going to do with these?’ Bhau said.

He had gone to the dining table and was looking at the little bags of medicines.

            ‘What is there to do?’ Appa said.

‘You might want to throw them away before you move out of the house,’ Bhau said.

‘Get lost Bhau. Don’t show me your face again,’ Appa howled.

The next morning, Appa and Bhau met outside the Udupi joint, which was drowning in young people. It was dreadful that people had started labelling old things as retro. Appa and Bhau had to wait for a table to become free. They complained loudly about having to stand and hoped to drive away a pair of college girls from their table. But the girls did not budge. The two men kept standing.

            ‘A strange thing happened yesterday,’ Appa said.

Bhau raised his eyebrows. Appa fished out a little plastic bag from his pocket and held it up for him.

‘Look,’ Appa said.

‘Little spoons. I have never seen such little spoons before. What will you eat with them?’ Bhau said.

‘These are not for eating. These are the tiny spoons they put in the kitchen spice box. I know because I was looking for turmeric to put on a paper cut and Vinu said I will find it in the kitchen. But forget that, look at the bag,’ Appa said.

Bhau stooped a little and made himself shorter as he peered into his friend’s hand.

            ‘It is one of your medicine bags,’ he said.

‘Not mine, Kumud’s bag. I haven’t touched these things, since, you know, she left,’ Appa said.

‘So these are Kumud Wahini’s spoons?’ Bhau said.

‘I don’t know. I just saw this in the middle of all the other medicine bags. What do you think it means?’ Appa said.

‘I don’t know. But I can ask the wife,’ Bhau said.

‘No! Don’t bring her into it,’ Appa said.

‘Have you not understood anything about marriage yet?’ Bhau said.

            Before Appa could say anything to that, one of the girls who had been hogging the table began weeping. She did not make any noise, but her shoulders seemed sad, her eyes were bloated, and her sorrow somehow felt like a sound. The two men looked at the girls, bewildered, unsure about what they should do. But the girls dropped some money on the table and left, one of them still weeping and the other holding her hand. So just like that Appa and Bhau got their table.

            They sat in silence. Bhau opened his mouth a couple of times to say something but didn’t actually speak. Appa looked at him but couldn’t think of anything to say either. Maybe it was the money the girls had left on the table which was making them uneasy. Appa looked at the entrance with a vague expectation of seeing the girls again, and he did see two girls, but these were not the same ones. These two were laughing. Then a notion came upon him.

            ‘I think the medicine tablets have turned into these spoons,’ he said.

‘You are going mad, Appa,’ Bhau said.

Appa shook his head. He stopped the passing waiter and asked him to get a plate of idlis and a cup of filter coffee.

‘The same for me,’ Bhau said.

            ‘What about that time when your scooter got stolen?’ Appa said.

‘What about it? I got it back, didn’t I?’ Bhau said.

‘Yes, but how did you find it? Seventeen days later, under the bridge with a garland of hundred rupee notes hanging around its neck. So many people must have passed it by, and no one seemed to see the money,’ Appa said.

‘That was a bad time. It is true. There was that long strike in the factory, half a month’s salary gone, and on top of it, the scooter was stolen. And then I found it just like that with all that money. Now I think, what if it never got stolen? What if my mind had been wandering with all those troubles?’ Bhau said.

‘And now it’s screwed on tight in its place?’ Appa said.

            The waiter deposited the idlis and coffee on the table and took away the notes the girls had left. The two men ate. Appa tried to remember Bhau as he was in school, then later in college, in his forties and his fifties. But he could only see him as he was now. No matter how much he tried, Bhau was always sixty-three years old in his mind. Then he tried to think of how he himself had looked and realised he didn’t remember that either. It jolted him, and he spilt his coffee into the saucer. He felt remorseful, and when the bill came, he paid it with great vehemence even though Bhau kept pushing his hand away and tried to pay it himself. By the time they had stepped outside the restaurant, it had become late morning.

            ‘OK, Appa, I owe you one,’ Bhau said.

‘For a plate of idlis and coffee? Now you have started keeping tab of such things?’ Appa said.

‘No, no. I owe you for the scooter. You never questioned me on what happened with it. I will believe the medicines have turned into tiny spoons,’ Bhau said.

Two days later when Bhau came by the house, Appa was holding a plastic bag with buttons in it, and such buttons as they had never seen in one place before: gold plated ones, simple white ones with four holes, black ones, silver buttons with carving on them, and pearls pretending to be buttons. Bhau took the bag and peered into it. Then he went to the dining table and examined all the bags. There were fourteen of them, twelve contained tablets and capsules and other complicated medications, one bag had tiny spoons, and the last had these buttons.

            ‘Maybe Kumud Wahini’s stuff got mixed up with the medicine things?’ Bhau said.

‘Not possible. Kumud would never use such extravagant buttons in her sewing. She was not that kind of a woman. She was rather neat,’ Appa said.

            Then Appa started thinking, was Kumud really so neat? He went into the kitchen and looked

at the pots, pans and things. He had not moved anything in the kitchen either. It was like how Kumud had left it. Yes, she was neat, the kitchen corroborated. Then he thought about that one time they had gone to Alibaug on a trip. On the beach, Appa had become terrified when he saw Kumud fall into the water, but when he rushed to her, he saw that she had just been playing in the waves. Her saree had gathered sand, her hair had sand, even her eyes were watering with it. But she had kept on laughing.

            He looked back at Bhau and saw he was still lost in admiring the buttons.

That night Appa woke up at an empty hour. He didn’t know what had woken him, but he saw a glow of light on the dining table. He was frightened. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. He wished Kumud had not gone to the doctor for her stomach ache. Everything had been OK before that. The doctor had turned the stomach ache into something malignant. He wished she were here now. She would know what the light in the medicines meant, and she would know what to do with all those newspapers. Then he thought he was thinking just like Bhau. That made him furious. But he also remembered a teenage boy in khaki pants and a white shirt bicycling down the old wooden bridge, shivering in the early morning cold. Then another boy pedalled behind him. He didn’t remember their faces, but there was a relief in the memory, which was only an image and not a story. It brought him peace and sleep.

The next day, Appa ignored the bags altogether. But when Bhau came in the evening, he headed straight to the medicine table.

            ‘Hmm, never seen anything like this before,’ he said.

‘I think none of it is happening. We are imagining it. Let us throw it all away,’ Appa said.

‘Are you moving to your son’s house then?’ Bhau said.

            Appa turned his back to him and went to sit in his armchair. He unfolded the newspaper and began reading. Bhau picked the supplement of the same paper and sat in the opposite chair, but he could not focus on it. He kept fidgeting and making waves in the newspapers that had gathered by his feet.

            ‘OK. I will not talk about your son’s house. But I am going to stay here tonight, and we are going to watch the bags and see it happen,’ Bhau said.

            ‘What? I don’t want to see anything. What if it is dangerous?’ Appa said.

Bhau thought about it for a moment. He passed a hand through his hair which was still as black as it had been when they had been in school.

            ‘I am sixty-three, and you are sixty-one, maybe its time we started seeing things for what they are?’ he said.

            Then he began arranging the bags in a neat row, making sure all of them were visible. Then he returned to his chair and now really started reading the advertisements in the supplement. Appa fidgeted in his chair for some time, and then he began reading too. What else was there to do?

That night they turned the two chairs so that they faced the dining table. They looked at the bags in silence, their eyes darting from one to the other. The house had grown shabbier in the last few days,

now that even Vinu was away. The dining table was the neatest spot in the whole house. Then Bhau started talking about that time when he had gotten his leg fractured, and that made them sleepy, and they dozed off.

Next morning, when Appa woke up, he saw Bhau staring at the third bag from the left. He went to him and saw what was in the bag — a piece of fresh ginger. He hesitated for a moment then he took it out and smelled it. It was ginger, alright. He felt exhausted. He thought the late morning was such a lonely time. It keeps stretching, and there is nothing left to do in it but to lose yourself into the goings-on of the world, which was nothing but bad news anyway. Then he thought it was something about this particular morning which felt ambiguous in some way, or maybe it felt like that because the kids weren’t screaming next doors, or perhaps it had gotten ambiguous even before that. He didn’t want to think further back. It was better to lose yourself in the bad news of the world instead. He looked at Bhau, who was still baffled by the ginger. Appa knew Bhau was going to insist on bringing his wife into the discussion. But that would not do. It was a matter between him and Kumud. Perhaps Bhau also came into it in an oblique way with his arguments and doubts. Appa kneaded his eyes as if it was essential to see clearly for what he was going to say.

            ‘Let’s make ginger tea,’ he said.

            Bhau looked up in surprise but did not argue. They hunted for the pan that Kumud always used for boiling the tea. They discussed at length the amount of water and milk that should go in it. The only thing they agreed upon was the sugar. At the very end, they grated the ginger and added it to the tea. When they poured it into the cups, they saw that it was over-boiled, watery and dark. They carried their two chairs outside, away from the newspapers and put them under the Umbar tree. Then they enjoyed the tea, inhaling the smell of fresh ginger, and argued about what the next bag of medicine was going to bring them.

Nivedita Barve lives in Hyderabad, India, where she is working on her first novel. She is a software engineer by profession, who loves writing fiction as much as she enjoys writing code. She has a Masters in Multimedia Applications and Virtual Environments from the University of Sussex. She is a member of ‘Bangalore Writers Workshop’.

Speculative fiction meets dystopian musings, as Ayan De explores a violent world that shares plenty with our current existence, Lynching, right-wing convictions, and the indoctrination of a young boy provide fodder for visualizing a scary new world. De plays havoc with linear time, challenging the reader to follow a chaotic timeline that perfectly characterizes a cruel, messy society. When cloning technology meets fanatical politics, a magnificent story is born. So are terrifying possibilities. – Shreya, The Bombay Review

Note: This piece was written in April, 2019, and Ayan De, is a pen name.

Three years into the future, I will watch a pirated copy of a film about the man-with-no-name and discover the cowboys of the Middle American Old West; until then, I shall remain a true saffron Cow-Boy. 

I joined my local chapter of the Youth Swayamsevak Corps five years ago, mostly because, as I will be told once I become a father, my parents wanted to delegate the responsibility of enlisting me in various activities to a single umbrella organization. They were not wrong in doing so. I could either have played football on a grassier field across the city, or I could have attended an art class in the interim two hours spent in the traffic–even the ten-year-old-me understood the economics of the situation.

We went camping in the Shri Narendra Modi National Park three years ago. An old man with a white, boxed beard and potbelly had addressed us at the YSC centre before we got on the bus. He spoke mostly in Hindi, but always referred to the country as “The Republic of Hindustan.” He told us that Hindustan belonged to the public, and that we were its future; I recalled this yesterday, prior to a “special meeting” in the basement of the centre.

He exuded passion. We, boredom. A chaperone had introduced him as the founder of the YSC, here on his occasional visit; I will come to think of it as an attempt at sowing an idea in our minds before a night spent in the wild, undisturbed by influences he deemed inappropriate.

A century-and-quarter have passed since Hindustan began rebuilding itself after it gained independence from the British, yet, as we will be told in the next week’s “special meeting,” it still carries today the burdens of the colonial past–poverty, illiteracy, Muslims, and the like. And that we, the future, will need to find the solution.

Fifty-two years after next Diwali, I will be diagnosed with dementia. To keep my memories intact, my sons will sponsor an implant that will retroactively store and let me let me flip through my memories like flipping through my grandmother’s childhood photo album compiled by her mother. I will agree only because it will allow me to remember my wife. She will have passed away two years prior.

I promised a friend last week that I would accompany him to yesterday’s “special meeting about the country’s history for the ‘big boys.’” My parents had no problem with a history lesson at YSC. Three months from now, I will call it the stupidest thing I had ever done. Tomorrow, I will wake up with a newfound sense of pride.

A fortnight after the previous Independence Day, a car bomb exploded outside Siddhi Vinayak Temple, killing forty-two people. Charred beef was found along the interior remains of the vehicle, but only after twelve years will the public be informed of the traces of hog fat used in the primer, through a leaked forensic report.

Seven summers have passed since the pure-clone of Narendra Modi reached his adulthood. His genes were sequenced from a strand of hair preserved in the National Museum, New Delhi. The embryo, as I will learn in Biology, was synthesised in a lab and later placed in the womb of an anonymous virgin surrogate. Some criticized this exact process to be offensive to its biblical parallels. Some have argued about the philosophical and ethical implications. Most were just happy that there will finally be another great leader.

Today, Modi II is the country’s youngest Prime Minister. In his campaign to be re-elected, he made promises that he could not keep–some exactly the same as his progenitor kept making during his four successive terms. His critics blamed these hollow promises for frustrating the groups waiting for benefits, leading them to bombing the temple. I will be told in the third “special meeting” next month that a radical Islamic group in its nascent years was responsible, having claimed their credit in a private message to Modi II and had the public found out Muslims were responsible, there would be riots.

Protests twenty-eight years ago led to a ban on the government cloning a figure from the past to gain political favour in the future. Fifty years later, the ruling party will use a similar procedure to produce an heir to a kindling dynasty, but this time using a separate ovum–an elegant leap through a loophole hidden in the vague language of the law. The donor will request to be paid an undisclosed “negative amount.”

The Neo-Modi dynasty will thrive in the right, at least until moments after I will look at my five grandchildren for the last time. I will be proud of all of them, and will hope that the twins don’t mind me confusing them for each other.

In that moment, I will look back to my wife closing her eyes for the last time. She will look peaceful. I will ask for the kids to be ushered back outside. I will not want them to remember me as a distraught old man, worrying that I am not as peaceful in the arms of death as my wife was.

Two years prior, my wife, her lips chapped more than she would have ever liked, will tell me that I am yet to forgive myself. My futile protest will only prove her point. She will remind me that she still has more hair on her head than I do. Not believe it when I say I have accepted my past.

By the ninth meeting, the number of attendees will increase fourfold and our mentor will be known to the public as Pandit Hindutva. My wife will later suggest that even Hitler had the self-awareness of not calling himself “White-Supremacy, PhD.” Anti-Islamic sentiments will be high, fanned by rumours of the radical Muslims we will have unwittingly spread.

Sixty-five years ago, some Pakis had terrorized the streets of Mumbai. Sixty-five days from today, we will terrorize Muslims on the same streets. Pandit Hindutva, will inform us of something highly distressing–Muslims trading beef. He will ask us, the apparent future of the nation, to do something. History told us that protests have been a decisive part in leading us here today. He will encourage this, but demand that we be careful of the dissident media and those feral Muslims. We tell him that we are prepared. He will call us true saffron Cow-Boys.

The week after, a man beaten to a pulp, will lie naked on the street, his lungs begging for air. He will have woken up that morning looking forward to the biryani his wife had planned for the dinner with his in-laws. He will go to the market to buy mutton, oblivious to the brewing crowd on what one calls the Meat Street.

I will first taste beef on my honeymoon in the backwaters of the State of Greater Travancore. The hot sun will warm my drink and the slight breeze will carry with it my napkin, but I will be lost in the exotic texture enrapturing my tongue. It will also be the first time I use the word “enrapture.”

Someone will incite the crowd, claiming that the red meat in the plastic bag is that of his Mother Cow. After a moment of frozen panic–a deer in headlights–this unsuspecting Muslim will be hit with the force of a thousand vegetarians.

We will trample the signs we made, like any Muslim in our way. We will show them what years of satyagraha builds up to, every strike flashing them back to the pressure cookers that blew up our trains, every fall reminding them where the temple was built, and every slur proclaiming who Hindustan belonged to.

My bride will have succumbed to food coma, affording me a moment of solitude, something I won’t seek on the trip, but appreciate nonetheless. This will be the first time I will face my guilt by eating it, and it will be one of the more cathartic experiences yet.

After moments of vitriol, something will pull me back from the crowd. A crowd of savages. I will barely be able to see the sobbing shopper, bleeding on the ground, tattered clothes covering nothing, and rush back home. I will not tell my parents of my involvement, avoiding them when I rush to the bathroom as they watch the day’s events unfold on the news. Riots will break out throughout the city as I sob under my shower, trying to wash away blood and bile.

Some weeks after receiving my implant, I will look back to the time I first fractured my arm. My mother comforted me, calling me a brave boy for having climbed the tree I fell off of. A very peculiar thought that will come to me on my deathbed as a fickle form of reassurance–perhaps I will have been brave for just trying to confront who I was, regardless of how I come out on the other side. Ma will have to be proud. Though that will not be enough.

The night after my oldest is born, guilt will swallow me whole and give me a panic attack. My exhausted wife will have to nurse two bawling bags of meat after I lose my sense of being. I will hold her close as she reminds me to let go.

One-hundred-and-eighty-two casualties. Three arrests.

When I first tell my future-wife about my hindutva days, she will tell me about the skeletons in her closet, in her chest of drawers and under her bed. She will deem the incident, though a significant one, not momentous enough, unless I actively try to convince myself of it. A literal skeleton from my youth will not haunt me for the rest of my life if I don’t want it to.

This immature interpretation will then be overhauled by the wisdom one finds under the deathbed of a partner–I will finally realize what my wife meant. However ineffable this revamped insight may be, I will never be able to act on it until I lose my ability to care about the syntax.

Progress will grant me the ability to look back at the events of my past that I will not have remembered without the implant. Ma believed in me trying. My wife will have believed in me accepting. So, I will look back for the last time. I will find the day I most rue and relive it with a sense of foresight.

Today, I chose to attend the coming meetings of Pandit Hindutva. Today, I am a naive boy eager to learn the Hindu history of a formerly secular country. Tonight, I will sleep with a smile. On my deathbed, I will let go; with my dying breath, I will forgive myself.

• Hindutva: an ideology that seeks to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values, highly critical of the secularism.
• Satyagraha: Sanskrit for ‘Truth-Force,’ non-violence.

Ayan De, a student of aerospace engineering, can be found wandering the city with a camera, entranced by a movie or curled up with a book whenever his head is not in the clouds. Sometimes, he picks up a pen.

A withering man from a forest-dwelling tribe lives in a dying world in which “development” has crushed the lives of his land and his people. Jogi reflects on a once fertile, happy world that has been devastated as he sits in the reservation that his tribe has been crowded into. In this heartbreaking description of a dying Earth, Unni is able to offer her protagonist a few moments of freedom but never lets the reader forget how bad things are. – Shreya, The Bombay Review

The evening sky over Runool’s Kimthi Colony was crimson onto turn purple. After hours of faceoff with the sun, tin-sheet roofs were cooling down and the tin-huts yet again sufferable. Noises of children skipped through and glided to curl around the shanty huts, all in rows of six. Their undue mirth echoed against the skimpy pith of the refugee settlement.

Kimthi colony was the aftermath, a miniscule portion as it may be, of the damming of a river, of the eradication of a valley. The colony was fabricated, with tin-huts and creaky water pumps, on the fringes of the once abundant valley of Runool. Valley of Runool was nestled in the uttermost region of the Indian southeastern ghats, a grand mountain range. Apart from a whole world of bees, bugs, beasts, birds, serpents, trees, flowers, clay, dirt, goats, cows, pigs, chickens, laughter, love, hopes, dreams, words, songs, tales, children, babies, and half a million people, the valley also was a paragon of what the world ought to be. A blameless, peaceful, warless land; where the trees stood for centuries, where the river flowed eternally, an idealistic reality and an improbable truth.

And then it was reversed, remade. The nemesis blew in like a deadly storm to shock, to terrorize, to leave in its wake a morass of devastation. A decision was made, an ultimatum without a negotiation. A river was to be dammed. A forest was to be eliminated. A people were to be extirpated.

Like a mean neighborhood bully, the incorporeal enemy with its infinite forces, snatched away cherished pleasures, loved homes, essential earth, one after the other, then all at once. He sniggered as the bullied howled. He was ruthless, a real threat.

The valley of Runool was inundated by power, by brutality, by the impending submergence by an exorbitant dam. Its forests were felled. Its creatures crushed. A haven was wiped out, a heaven helled.

Kimthi colony was set up for nineteen chosen families from the valley. They were one hundred and nine number of people, indigenous, noble. They were plucked off their roots by grisly fingers of a faceless clout, and discarded into what was imperiously, generally, called rehabilitation settlement.

It lidded a doomed people. It muffled their despairing pulse, stripped their rightful skins and shrouded them in ceaseless contempt. It seemed to crumble and die every night, over and over again. Its inmates corroded.

In the land sitting pretty and unthreatened by the prospect of submergence, the Indian Army had come to roost. To protect, to defend, they said. A stray bullet, from their restless rifles, often caught a tree, or a squirrel, or a bird. Like ripe fruits they fell dead, gutter-classed collateral damage.

People of Kimthi witnessed their homes wrecked, stripped, smashed. They subsisted on jobs that killed them, torturously. Farmers they were, but now scavengers, menial laborers. Their knowledge of the earth, the saps, the seasons, and the skies, ceased to matter. Their cries were muted. They drudged for the ones that wrested their lives away, and quelled their kernel.

That evening as the sky turned purple from crimson, as any other bedeviled day in Kimthi, the women returned as a crew after a tiresome day of grind. They were all clad in sarees of colors tainted with building grime. The men of the colony were still awhile away. They only arrive in the dark, one by one, drunk and deadbeat. In the openings in front of tin-huts, frail oldies crouched and hunched in clusters like troops of chimps.

The colony was ostensibly trite but in its lair, in the hearts of its timid people, dwelled numerous behemoths, hydra-headed. They raged and roamed in the subdued people, a force laid dormant.

One of the behemoths, unseen but berserk was in Jogi, a hoary old man. He was an enduring member of the one hundred and nine (minus fourteen, dead). He had twig-thin legs and arms that suggested bygone wiriness. His saggy skin, shiny black, lay in folds on his gaunt belly, like women’s after birthing. His sunken eyes held in them a slight unaware leer. His lips were partly buried under a royal mustache. His age was revealed everywhere especially his face, which seemed like a sculpture that was melting.

Away from the other elders, the troops of chimps, in solitude Jogi was perched atop a stump. He suffered constipation. He was indisposed. And that evening, his desolation had ratcheted.

Months ago, since the period the valley of Runool with its forests and river and creatures were in totality closed off and razor wire fenced, Jogi’s functioning, his equanimity, eluded him. His biological clock crashed. His bowels eschewed movement. And, it was not in the least a mode of protest.

The trouble was that, for all his life he defecated in the open, in bucolic surroundings of the valley of Runool. It was a mundane bit of life, as it should be; he hardly considered it blessedness. While he had it, he was unsuspecting of its fragility. It never occurred to him that it was plausible to be wrenched off of that plain, primitive routine. Never in his wildest of nightmares did he apprehend it becoming a harbinger of death. Until the doomed day when he was forced to attempt shitting indoors, he was utterly oblivious of the sacramental bond his bowels, the nexus of his core, shared with the earth.

In retrospection he continually relived the act he had feebly come to so dearly miss, the intrinsic freedom it bore. To strip, to be still, to be close to the earth, the blades of grass and their shades of green, to watch the enchanting scurrying bugs, to twiddle dead leaves, to crunch red ants, to sniff the smell of their unjust death, to spot spider webs, to count their strands, to choose a leaf for a wipe when done, to listen to the birds, the toads, the crickets, the thoughts. And like a wild animal, to be intimate for a while with one’s land.

Perched on the stump under the crimson sky turning purple, Jogi stared over the faraway barbed wire that he could only faintly see. The distance diminished its menace; it looked like a work of weaved threads, each quadrangle a motif of downfall.  

He ached for the felled forests, the choked river, and its raped lush. He felt a throe as he recalled the once verdure land, the variety of food they had, and the skies that upheld essential promises of rain and sun.

He was purblind towards the emerging engineering, the patrolling soldiers, and the exterminated old world. He failed to understand the language they, the powered, spoke, the papers they showed. They were strapping men, in clean clothes that smelled like crushed flowers. They made chicanery promises for the benighted. They had force and they wielded it. They bought valleys and rivers with fishes in it. They had a purpose and the audacity to carry it.

At a time when Runool was an outlying valley, it was intact and sheltered by Chittal, Goromat, Lethi and Aachim, all mountains and remarkable. No road was laid, no visitor probed, mainland was only a notion. Food grew on the banks of the river, beloved Yaami, one of eternal flow. Large groups of wild gaur roamed, muscular beasts that traversed the terrain, they invoked myths of forest and man. Up in the mountains so did the big cats, tigers, leopards. Vultures were aplenty; at the scent of death they shot to the spot like arrows from ether. Dead cattle vanished as soon as they died. Dead people too, if they were out in the forests. People were few, clans of tribes. There were brawls but no wars. Jogi remembered from his youth, long nights of celebrations for full moons and espousals, of dancing and singing, drinking and feasting.

Men didn’t cower as they did now, they walked light, they sweat, and they laughed. Women were inviolable unlike now, they were unabashed, and they were proud. Children that survived were hearty and they were green. Elders had their voice, they didn’t waste away in corners of grime, stooped and omitted, hanging wretchedly for death. Wisdom was real.

The trees had the right to their leaves, their twigs, and their fruits. The river had the right to its lull, its rage. The sky had the right to its sun, its blue. The earth had the right to its seeds and its roots. Animals lived as people lived, and people lived as gods did. None owned another, inconceivable thoughts for the now. 

Freedom was costless. Justice too.

The sky over Kimthi had turned purple. Jogi heard faint water sounds; the women were washing themselves in the toilets. The toilets in Kimthi were government-initiated, pursuant to one of its sinuous spawns, Mission Clean. Missions were many, but Jogi knew, had learnt the hardest way, that their blows were all the same. Nobody escaped, some perished.

They, the show masters, combed through forests and valleys and villages, tidied their contents, the trees, the rivers, the cattle, the people, and their beliefs and vestiges of dreams. They collected the treasures, discarded the surplus. They tiled over the grass. Built over the hills. The poor were brushed aside like dust, they lay in a pile waiting to be scooped up and dismembered. But during the wait, the ones in Kimthi had the toilets and the tin huts, a refuse-lump universe.

Before the river was forbidden to its people, the women used to flock to the river to bathe, they took the children too. There they sang between laughs, there they reveled in gossip, and spent hours together. And back home they came radiant, robust at heart.

Jogi slowly stepped off the stump; he had stiffened from the sitting. He floundered along the rows of tin-huts. Some women were hunched out, cooking. Evening smells of meager meals permeated the air. Boiled lentils, rice.

Mangoes, cucumbers, bottle guards, tomatoes, potatoes, fish no more. They too were combed away, uprooted, erased.

Jogi moved towards what he had grown to dread.

They were stodgy concrete structures shaped like ugly boxes, four feet long, five feet wide. For the nineteen families of Kimthi, there were four such boxes. They had drains but no taps. On days when the water pump squeaked without water, (an irony, as it was on the peripheries of the dam, which plighted more water, not less), the boxes stank with swimming shit and bubbling urine. Their sources of light were narrow vents, four slits like squeezed giant eyes. Strips of light pierced them in the day and at night, only absolute darkness.

Jogi entered one of the toilet-boxes, in the dark, he was as good as blind but his nose flagged up to the reek. He breathed through his mouth, stripped and squatted. Over the months of his blocked bowel syndrome, his stomach had hardened as a rock. He was desperate to loosen it – to retrieve his appetite for food, to sleep, and to breathe easier. It was his very own version of Mission Clean. It was not out to kill.

He grunted with the effort of trying, of pushing. It brought him recollections of Prabata years ago, his wife, pushing out their son. She had grunted and wailed for hours before his birth.

He had been grunting for months, a wail was brimming too. Somebody was banging on the door, he called out to wait and the banging stopped.

And Jogi tried again. Nothing.

Runool was first infiltrated with roads. It was years of ordeal, to mutate the terrain in ways that nobody prior it had thought possible. They sliced, carved and bent familiar acreage. Through the sliced up gaps, like molten lava, in seeped the mainland and its tumult. Language altered, demeanor too. Money came in, biases too. Greed was tapped, woken up and tested, proved.

The careen towards ruination of Runool and its people, for a long time was kept under the guise of reform. It dazzled, people believed, really believed. Until it seared and then it was quite too late.

Lethi and Aachim were quarried and finished. Goromat, the tallest, was touristic. After years of ransack, Chittal was a declared reserve, and its kosher foresters expelled. Jogi’s behemoth, Runool’s people’s behemoths took roots and sieged their hearts, first as fury, then fear, and as dying men’s vehemence.

Jogi settled in front of his hut. Lilly, his son’s wife was stirring a pot of Kanji, rice gruel. Even after the wash, her cracked heels retained the dirt. Her hair was wet, and dwindled. She had borne two, both girls. They were running about, both were still young, seven or eight or nine. Like the other young men, his son would appear drunk in a while. Some nights he beat his wife. Some nights he didn’t. Jogi never raised a word; he presumed it not his place to meddle.

Soon after the toilets were built, even before the valley was altogether barred off, the women began their use of the toilets. In the valley unlike before, lurking dangers hid behind bushes. They pounced on women, and they devoured girls. Women were no more inviolable; they harbored fear.

The aroma of Kanji was making him sick again. A shooting pain cut through his innards. He clutched his gut and sat still for it to pass.

Beside the hut, and before the adjacent hut, Lilly’s black dog, Kaki Kaki, spun around and round. His four feet spry and tail stilled. Like two dense mountains, his ears stood tall. Golden marble eyes rapt and mouth clasped shut, he whined. His brown-back a convex; on the earth he snuffled holes. His cold dark nose trembled. After about a dozen spins, he froze. Legs apart, posed like a squirrel, he pooped. There was climactic exultation. He buried his deposit with sand in a few swift hind-leg kicks. He bounded about like a hare. Then he jogged away.

Freedom was still costless for some.

Lilly offered Jogi a bowl of gruel, which he declined. She muttered something. She was always vexed. The girls ate, Lilly waited for her man to arrive. Jogi unclutched his gut, the pain had passed, and the urge was back again.

He walked back to the box as fast as he could. It was not very fast. Not fast enough. Inside, in the dark, he was back at it. He trembled with chagrin.

Nothing.

From the reek he stepped out. For a moment he was pacific, but soon sheer impulse overran him. His desolation had summited. He moved like a reigned horse, an old lurching horse. His berserk behemoth was the jockey.

It was a reckless resolve, not steely, doltish. Nonetheless, the resolve was set. Jogi was going to trespass. He was going home. To the dammed, cemented and raped river valley. He was going to walk the land, and to rest on the soft earth.

There was an utter lack of plan. The soldiers might deem him an infiltrator, an insurgent. They may shoot to kill. He may die. He was willing to die, he realized as he walked. He had lived a long life, a pathetic one for the most part. Death was welcome.

Behind the tin-huts, it was a swamp, and piles of rubbish lay in heaps. In the dark, he walked over strange textures. Soggy, squeaky, supple, sharp, he was barefoot. Few feet away a street lamp was lit, it was over the fence. The barbed wire looked as uncompromising as ever. The gut-cramp returned and tightened.

Exhaustion swept over him and he waded like he was under water. It was after an unreasonably long plod that Jogi found a passage. He could hear voices of men. Soldier men. Leader men. Men who smelled of crushed flowers.

Over the fence, in forbidden territory, in the wrenched homeland, he sought darkness. He slinked as he could, away from the risen buildings and voices of missioned men, from the lampposts with lamps lit, from felled trees that left gaping stumps, from alien-like transformers, from thrumming current generators, from smells of fumes. Jogi was steered to the heart of the valley. Fading, moribund spaces of Runool’s core, where the moonbeam was bright, and owls watched over. Where the fireflies romanced, the bats too.

Jogi knew, his bowels too. He was home. Altered, broken, perhaps dying, but home after all. And that was monumental.

Beneath a silver oak that crooned to the night sky, Jogi stripped, squatted and stilled. The crickets grew loud; their social ousted all other noise, all vibrations of babel. The blades of grass had dew on them, little beads; each cradled a moon. A ladybug was spotted, and another. The lovers in polka dots, they scurried along over their earth.

And it happened, the much-awaited milestone.

Jogi’s bowels moved. His heart raced. It was sudden, the long suspension of months, the indisposition, simply vamoosed. He waited for more. There was more.

Then there was climactic exultation.

Privately, intimately and fervidly, freedom was briefly won.

A Bakula leaved wipe, and sand burial later, Jogi walked further into the night. He was elated. It felt right to be home.

He glided towards the sound of water. His feet pressed against little stones and waned leaves. He had found a slender stick, smooth, primed by the wind. He swung it as he walked to clear the cobwebs in the path, to tenderly stroke the tall grass. His body capered to the familiar rhythm, to the ingrained melody.

Way before he caught a glimpse of the water, the mammoth engineering loomed over him. The massive dam was higher than what Jogi could perceive. It barred the moon’s shine. He walked and walked until the water surfaced. It was inaccessible, walled, barred.

Jogi lingered, he was pleased to be near it, trammeled as it might be. It was not Yaami, he was certain, but its morphed avatar. The dam was a macabre tomb of a once worshipped river.

He wondered if the water was cold. He wondered if the water was still brisk. Jogi lay back on the soft, wet, weeping land. The sky above was cloudless, clear, stars were scattered. The sound of water against concrete felt thick to his ears. No crystal clear pebble rocking was heard.

After months, he was hungry. He craved for millet roti and spicy onion chutney, for fish; fried Pearl Spot or curried Tilapia. Some rice beer and few long drags of smooth chillum. Some banter, some laughter, and a promise for a new day, full of sun and happy sweat. His youth. His valley.

Then inevitably cleaved in the thoughts of the tin-hut, of the rice gruel. His son must have arrived. He may have thrashed his wife. Jogi closed his sunken eyes; they fluttered under the lids, two shaky globes.

They were demolished people, Jogi knew, he and his children. Their minds were in disarray. Inside out. Upside down. Ulta-pulta. Life was going backwards. The world was imploding. Turning vacuous. Men were infantile. Children were greying. Rivers were entombed.

The night was still young. A jungle fowl cried.

Jogi wouldn’t go back to the tin-hut, to the refuse-lump universe. He would breathe through the night, dance to the rhythm of his ephemeral freedom, sing to the trees, and fondle the breeze, wander, wonder, fly, and away.

As long as he breathed, he would be free. As long as he breathed, he would be human. And then he would become a bug, or a pebble, or a fish, or a cloud. He would become an improbable truth.

Jogi’s behemoth roared.

Anagha holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mass Communication and a Diploma in Screen and Media Studies from Sydney Film School, where she won the Best Screenplay Award for her work titled Maya, which later she directed as a short film.

Anagha is a documentary filmmaker who currently lives in Kerala, India. She is a writer by night and hopes to work her way to becoming a writer by the day.

Alina flies down to attend her best friend’s wedding, and it becomes a backdrop for introspection, anxiety and finally, epiphany. Battered emotionally by the sparkle of wedding festivities, she stumbles through multiple moments of exhaustion – a scenario familiar to the more decided introverts among us. However, all is not lost. Alina finds a semblance of resolution towards the end of her tale, “I begin to understand why it’s hard to let go of old friendships even when they distinctly seem to have run their course, why I would take the time and energy and money out to wear a saree and a smile each time my best friends expected me to, if it meant making them happy.” – Shreya, The Bombay Review

The airplane felt stuffy, too hot, the seats too cramped, the aisles reeked of pickle and mustard oil, the air hostesses’ make-up wasn’t blended right. Everything was overdone, stereotyped, wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on why. I realised the vowels of the foreign tongue grated my nerves; foreign yet within my own country. I found my tired brain jumping to hateful clichés when I heard a man sitting behind me on a phone call. My education prompted me to ask him to shut up; the flight was about to take off. Exceptionally irritable, I’d been feeling little of the snugness that a best friend’s wedding is supposed to bring. I felt anxieties and fears – familiar and new – sitting at the base of my navel, sitting as tightness in my chest. Inhale, exhale, repeat the steps, go through the motions until I can manufacture some of the heady happiness I’m supposed to be feeling. I suspected that the discontent stemmed from me.

Chennai seemed familiar and alien all at once. The weather was balmy, the air smelled of a pungent, tired sea, knock-off designer perfume and cocktails made with cheap alcohol. What was it about this over-the-top, bourgeoisie wedding nestled in the posh but ultimately, trite quarters of a boutique hotel by the beach that summoned my inner critic? Was it the expensive, rather gauche bar where a highly mediocre Negronis cost 800 rupees? Was it the attractive North-Eastern sommelier’s disapproving brows, disappearing into his hairline when I chose the least expensive wine on the menu? Was it the oblivious American working-class hero from Wisconsin with his steady diet of greasy cheeseburgers and coke, or his Asian-American girlfriend, with a sixth-generation Chinese father and first-generation Chinese mother (the right degree of exotic?), who steered every conversation towards herself and her modern-day immigrant inconveniences? Why was I trying so hard to disassociate?

At Radio Room, the bar where everybody congregated for an informal ‘meet and greet’, I finally saw Naina, my childhood best friend, who’d been sending me increasingly excited voice notes in the weeks leading up to this. Despite warm greetings and liquor trying its best to smooth every social interaction, I was out of place amidst the throng of guests making small talk. I missed my former best friend, even though she was right there. The cruelest distances are the ones with people next to you. She was my first real friend, at a ridiculous time of unshaven legs and acne and crushes on boys with dull personalities. At fourteen, she’d chucked my first packet of cigarettes out of the window of my eighth-story home and in retaliation, I’d thrown her phone to the floor. She was everything I wasn’t. Charming, warm, open, loving. I was everything she wasn’t. Assured, aloof, unpopular, slightly feared. Best friends have an interesting way of complementing each other.

We’d taken to each other without judgment, Indian schoolgirls in Dubai, and fallen into our own groove of friendship. We’d stalked young Arab boys in libraries, walked by the beach in a strange land where we didn’t know the language but couldn’t get enough of the exotic sights, sounds, smells and strange social hierarchies. Together we’d understood what it meant to be cool or rich, to live in a particular pin code, to have the means to pursue a PhD abroad, to allow yourself the freedom of studying philosophy. We’d been through our first heartbreaks and first major bouts of depression together. Most cultures attach so much significance to romantic relationships that we easily forget how for many of us, the first real adult foray into love comes through our closest friendships.

I moved from event to event, cocktail dress to Indian attire, with a lingering sense of nostalgia and an abject lack of pathos. I was there for Naina, but I didn’t feel the need to be charming or friendly or approachable or distant or sexy, I didn’t feel the need for anything. I found myself imagining how, decades ago, my parents had their whirlwind romance that spanned continents and religions. I know how that turned out. I wondered if I had believed that I, too, would meet the right person at 16 and marry them and live out the various boring but ultimately safe rituals of a high school romance turned life-long partnership. Well, now I felt an immediate discomfort with anything not characterised by the brand of cynicism and hopelessness that had marked my twenties. Increasingly, the idea of a wedding, of a marriage, of a life shared with one person was beginning to look like some other girl’s dream. At a bar called ‘The Library’, its name legitimised by a wall lined with first edition hardcovers locked behind a glass panel, doused in angled mood lighting, their dusty sadness proving they’d never been opened, I sat across from the American couple. “Do you meditate?” Wisconsin boy asks me. I catch myself before an audible groan can slip out. He briefly tells me about his brush with drugs, how he’s debating selling his DJing gear since he’s been unemployed for four months, how it’s beginning to take a toll on his Brooklyn life. We discuss siblings, growing up Catholic and their desire to move to New Orleans. The Asian girl wants to get married at Monterey Bay Aquarium and only asks me questions about film because she works as a copywriter in New York. I marvel at their easy, almost simplistic relationship, the blind spots that come with growing up with an American passport, the myopia that comes with believing the country you’re born in is the only world you’ll ever need to inhabit. The girl whips out her phone and shows me her Chinese family in LA. The genteel, shrewd looking grandmother, the grandfather with an oxygen tank, the conspicuously masculine pit bull, the buff younger cousin, the straight-edged ‘work hard, play hard’ second cousin, the matching Christmas sweaters. I realise her ease with her dissonant identities and her doting boyfriend make me slightly jealous. We smile widely at each other, we take sips from each other’s drinks, we exchange antique silver and gold-plated neckpieces for an event later and hug goodbye. Away from the wedding bedlam, I feel a grudging affection for her.

The sangeet begins with all the aplomb one would expect at a fancy Indian wedding. Copious amounts of liquor, a lavish buffet, a DJ spinning house remixes of Bollywood classics from the 90s, generations and nationalities brought together by the blend of tradition and intoxication. I hadn’t been eating well since my break-up. Food was mere sustenance, but that meant I couldn’t keep up with the drinking. Naina’s eighteen-year-old brother grabs me by the wrist and pulls me towards the bar. A pale, lavender liquid in a shot glass materialises, and I clutch it with desperation. The brother’s eyes glazed with a post-charas haze, he bounces on his toes as a group of people – including his parents – form a circle and clink shot glasses. I slip away, handing the shot glass to the bartender. “Hide it.” My best friend finds me through the crowd and makes her way to me. “Are you not going to dance to shitty Bollywood songs at my wedding?” I shake my head vigorously, accompanying her to the dance floor despite my inability climb out of my head and be present for her.

Naina’s family were diamond merchants from Gujarat who’d immigrated to Dubai – the erstwhile land of opportunity, lack of taxes and material abundance. Her father had chalked up enough money to raise three kids in a palatial beachfront home, send them to one of the better schools in Dubai, and finance their move abroad for their respective universities. The kids, all said and done, possessed a certain humility that others our age conspicuously lacked when thrust into the obscene power of new money. The shots were a celebratory indulgence, an attempt to impress overlaid onto their endearing Gujarati simplicity. The husband’s family hailed from Tamil Nadu and Punjab respectively. His father was the CEO of an Indian airline fast fading into obscurity. Despite more access and exposure than the average Indian, the acute consciousness of their own class led to a gnawing lack of acceptance of what they deemed to be a lack of sophistication from the other side. Religion wasn’t the divisive factor here, but their different backgrounds and predilections were.

Naina’s father’s best friend’s son makes his way to me across the carpeted dance floor, his face streaked with red and green neon. A flash of a house party in Friedrichshain at 5 AM on New Year’s Eve, two years ago. Neon lights, spindly bodies snaking across a makeshift dance floor, my then boyfriend behind the decks, me whispering into his ear, trying to convince him that Eric Andre was at the party. Life’s displacements were like tectonic plates shifting beneath you, the heart and mind struggling to create and conquer old meanings in new contexts. The boy went by Nemo and complimented me on my hair, my moves. I smiled a sincere smile and excused myself. My initial response to compliments was now to accept them and then look away. This wasn’t a tactical move, nor a sly maneuver meant to elicit a reaction. Maybe it was shades of discomfort, that slight consciousness at being put on display and yet aching to be put on display. Either way, I really just didn’t know what to say.

Outside the basement ballroom, an oxymoron in itself, I light a cigarette and observe the flames across the expanse of water flanked by Grecian columns on either side. I lie down on the cold marble, lehenga askew, hoping to see some stars in the sky. A whiff of Versace. I chuckle inwardly at the contours of my hyper-capitalist upbringing as a slender boy with impeccable sartorial sense slides in next to me. 

“I cried this morning after three years. It was so beautiful,” he says in a distinctive drawl, his diction chiseled with private education as he begins to roll a joint.

“Hash?”

“Crying is cathartic, isn’t it?”

“Yes, anti-depressants don’t ever allow for that sort of release.”

I’m unsure how we’ve slipped so easily into such an intimate conversation. I find myself drawn to his pale skin, freckles and eyes with schisms of empathy and impenetrability. We smoke lying on the freshly trimmed grass, discussing the merits of the male contraceptive, the current political climate in the country, and raising puppies. I find myself withdrawing slightly as he showcases a certain shade of martyr complex, placing himself at the centre of the nation’s political turmoil. He pulls me back in by telling me about his mother’s internalised patriarchy, and how hollow victories feel when they’re against your parents. Our effortless conversation is interrupted by a local gentleman who’s down a few drinks, slurry as he shakes our hands. Arnav gets up to address him. I feel a familiar flicker of irritation despite the pot’s pleasant haze and excuse myself yet again.

Back inside, hearing about some perceived insult by the groom’s father, I wonder why institutionalised marriage even exists anymore. Why is the bride’s father’s identity inexorably tied up with the grandeur of his oldest daughter’s wedding? Despite coming from a fairly regressive North Indian family, my father only ever mentions marriage as an afterthought, a private joke shared between the two of us on a phone call late at night, the thought only really occurring to him in passing when I say I want to shift jobs or cities or continents. I remember him threatening me with marriage when I failed my 11^th grade exams. I remember regarding it as an act of betrayal – succumbing to the idea of women as property to be passed on from the father to the husband. Perhaps his intended outcome was what happened next year, with me acing my school graduation exams. After my parents decided they wanted different things and that more importantly, they didn’t want them with each other, he could never use marriage as a threat. We all developed an almost sinister sense of humour to deal with the separation. All talk of marriage faded into sardonic jokes about how they should have expiry dates, feeding into my fatalistic assertion that being alone is the only constant.

I was sharing a room with Naina’s other best friend, who I’d methodically avoided despite years attending the same school. She’d lost her voice on account of spending the last two months attending a slew of weddings. When I returned to the amber-lit darkness of the room, I found myself unable to focus. The girl was snoring like a truck while I tried not to breathe too loud, lest I wake her up. Later, she helped me tie my saree almost perfectly as I took my place beside her in front of the bathroom mirror. We both lined our faces with powder in silence, me conscious of the music playing from my laptop. She wants to borrow my eye shadow palette; I apologise for only having nude colours. She laments the weight she’s put on through her adult years in Bangalore, working through late nights with erratic food schedules. I glance at her sideways.

“You’re beautiful.”

“Thank you, you’re kind.”

“I’m not being kind, I’m only being honest,”

She meets my eyes and smiles – a genuine warmth filling up her eyes. That’s all it takes. One sincere interaction after years of avoiding each other, not having much in common except a best friend and suddenly, I feel the warm rush of winning somebody’s favour when you least expect it. Over the next couple of days, when I find myself slinking out of parties early or hiding behind marble columns to smoke, I often receive texts from her, checking in. I reply with platitudes but don’t go back.

The next morning, I managed to steal an hour or two for myself. The wedding was done, after a hazy sequence of ceremonies and rituals. Still, there was a drunken brunch and some sort of reception to follow. I go for a swim, savouring the solitude of the cool water, until my thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of Mariliria – the chubby Greek girl with no understanding of personal boundaries and a propensity for flattery. She tries to make conversation with me as I continue my swim. It is a strange dichotomy; how comfortable I can make others feel in my presence and how quickly I tend to withdraw from them if they reveal anything true about themselves. Mariliria wants to talk to me about the guy she hooked up with last night. I passively notice the tension between them as he comes out to the sun-beds. I vaguely wonder what sex looks like when Mariliria has it, how conscious is she of her body, what the boy finds attractive about her. She says she thinks I’m the most beautiful girl at the wedding, after the bride. I’m flattered but later bemused by the off-hand comment, as though beauty superseded anything else, I might have to offer as a woman; as though such a compliment was anything but definitive and entirely suffocating.

Later that morning, Naina and I get a few moments to ourselves. All her friends flock around her, air kisses and goodbyes one hopes would be finite ones. I observe her cycle through the hugs and the pleasantries with the ease and charm of a politician and I laugh to myself. I think of how I’d always been a bit of a ‘back pocket friend’ – neatly tucked into the compartmentalised folds of somebody else’s life, my value increasing with the need to be hidden, preserved and I could settle into the backwash of somebody else’s limelight. I wonder what I can ask her that will not be weighed down by shared histories or stories. A couple of evenings earlier, I’d immediately asked if she still planned on pursuing her PhD, my head swaying and my eyes brighter than usual with the wine. I want to ask if she thinks of a time where she might not want to be with Tarun anymore, if she plans on only doing this once, if she knows what the moment was when we drifted inexplicably but surely from being attached at the hip to living such different lives? Did she know or remember?

 Instead, I find myself faltering when she wants to know about my love life; my mind turning over the various threads of romance resistant to definition, paling in comparison to the weighty, resounding certainty of marriage. I lay my head on her shoulder and we take a few selfies – ephemeral moments to be captured and stored. Moments that make sure that once I recede into the comfort of my solitude, I can still reach out and indulge in a past that no longer exists.

To everyone’s surprise, I had made a concerted effort to dress up for the brunch. Something about being away from the mundanity of Bombay made me want to exploit the opportunity to pretend to be someone else, hoping that this physical transformation would enable an emotional one. Instead, as I bitch on the phone to my other best friend while she mocks my privilege, I’m overheard by Naina and Tarun. “You’re just a pretentious writer who’s entirely self-involved,” he tells me as his face cracks into a self-satisfied, silly smile. I’m disconcerted but nod along to his assertion. The day’s too bright, the conversation’s too dull for me to defend myself. Naina breaks out of her post-wedding haze, the unremitting lull of satisfaction only some of us can afford, to defend me. “Alina has a tendency to agree with anything negative said about her even if it isn’t true.”

I wonder why I’m there, why I missed the memo and turned up overdressed to this event, why my facades are so brittle, why I haven’t slipped away to meet an old friend who is in Chennai – a cinematographer I know through my ex who’d once advised me on a script that never went anywhere.

Slipping out that evening wasn’t difficult, given everyone’s exhausted mental and physical state. After a forty-minute rickshaw ride I found myself at a rundown rooftop bar overlooking a beach, barely visible under the night sky. Advith was a good listener, unafraid to wear his limitations on his sleeve, leading a wilder life than his slender, non-threatening frame and kind eyes suggested. We’d last met years ago at a quiet, nondescript wine bar in Neukölln, and I worried about the unsaid discomfort of knowing each other through my ex-boyfriend, the longest relationship of my life that almost felt imagined at this point. Yet, I found myself relaxing in this presence, the tension in my shoulders and back receding as my tongue loosened with the wine. The conversation went from film to collective anxieties – the lack of money in attempting to pursue an artistic life in a developing country, the possibilities for art in a nation on the brink of outright dictatorship, his brother’s pending wedding, the absurdity of legal contracts and gold bands meant to bind people together. Despite all the wine, it was ironic that I felt more comfortable talking to somebody I’d barely known three years ago than to my best friend who I’d known for decades.

The attendant baggage of old relationships is that people tend to want to pull you into directions they remember you from, into patterns they constructed with you. If, like me, you have a habit of wanting to give before somebody can ask, relationships can often exist in eternal limbo, in a space where finding words to express exactly what is it that you need becomes harder each time you nurse the idea of expression, and then reject it. Physical distances can often make way for emotional ones and as women grow up with the idea of being somebody’s somebody, the phone calls taper out, continents change, text messages are few and far in between, time zones and husbands and kids (I’m told) get in the way. Childhood friendships are now defined by making the effort to turn up at each other’s engagements, weddings, baby showers, anniversaries – the gradual, inevitable shift into ‘acceptable’ constructs. I can barely wrap my head around the present, much less the deceptive nature of the future. I find comfort in Advith’s uncertainty, in the humility that comes from not pretending to know all the answers, in the shared identity of being an outsider. 

We finish our drinks and walk through empty Chennai roads towards the main highway, dodging stray dogs, lazy bulls, parked cars and buses. We stand by the highway as he calls me a taxi. We chat absent-mindedly about the incoming rise of right-wing supporters in Tamil Nadu. I argue that the state’s political mechanics would never agree to a largely north Indian political party gaining and exerting majority control; he’s dubious – the fast deteriorating state of the nation relegated to an intermediary chat before the taxi arrives.

Inside, I feel a pang of longing for the private jokes Naina and I share, how easily my dumbest comments make her laugh, how widely I grin when she’s impressed by my most transparent ploys and most ordinary expressions. I remember how often, at social settings, she rolls her eyes at me after running out of patience or charm, how often I’d called her up beset with tears, hiding in my room as a teenager, fruitlessly attempting to drown my parent’s rising voices with some insipid pop album, how she’d defended me against bullying senior boys when I refused to grant them the respect they felt entitled to. I begin to understand why it’s hard to let go of old friendships even when they distinctly seem to have run their course, why I would take the time and energy and money out to wear a saree and a smile each time my best friends expected me to, if it meant making them happy.

I remember, vividly, the moment from two nights before, when all the girls – the loud ones from New York, the shy ones from Dubai, the conventionally pretty ones from Chennai, the rich Gujarati aunties with large hips and larger jewels – congregated in the bride’s suite, attempting to help each other with the folds of our disintegrating sarees, charming and laughable in equal parts. I remember Naina, decked head to toe in a bejeweled lehenga that weighed over 10 kilos, her skirt unnaturally starched, standing across me, arms akimbo, against the setting sun, a complete silhouette, asking me how she looked. Her hair perfectly coiffed, swathes of make-up across her elegant face, her expression as vulnerable as the text messages I hid behind. In that moment, she was all of twelve years old again and I couldn’t help but smile.

Alina Gufran is a fiction-writer and poet who writes about urban alienation and female identity based out of Mumbai. She is an alumna of the 2019 Dum Pukht writing workshop and her work has appeared in The Bangalore review, The Swaddle and Sister-hood magazine.