text: She picked up the strip of paper lying on the footpath. It was a fairly ordinary strip of paper, white and slightly crumpled, not more than ten centimetres long. Her long bony fingers trembling, she twists the paper once and holds the two ends together. She watches carefully as her finger traces the surface of the strip. It starts out on the inside and soon, without warning, it finds itself on the outside, without having crossed a boundary. To our protagonist, this is not just a neat mathematical curiosity. It is a fact of life. At present, she knows that their is no reason for her to think that her home exists. It had seemed absurd to her at first, but the clerk at the city-council office had made it look trivial - “You see, Ms. Bose, our office does not have any paperwork pertaining to this, ..., this construction. So, I have no reason to believe it is at all there.” “And neither should you”, the man had added with a rehearsed smile as he placed a stack of paper riddled with circular tea-stains on the desk. “Apni Chaa khaben?”, he had gone on to ask. As she walked out of the office, the situation she had gotten herself into slowly began to get to her. At first it was just the sheer hideousness of it all. The idea that her house was non-existent was so inconceivable that it was funny. In fact she let out a short laugh, as if at a fairly good joke - perhaps something she would find in an R.K.Laxman cartoon. The thought of having herself in place of the dhoti-jacket clad ‘common man’ was vaguely endearing. As she walked further down the street, she sank further into the reality of her reality. Her house had been a half-decent place to live in. Had shegiven it enough thought she might even have liked the place. It was a year since her parents had passed on and, since then, the rooms had taken on personalities of their own. The paint peeling off from the walls, the stacks of books in shelves, the grilles on the windows had developed a strange intimacy with her. As she lay in bed at night, waiting for sleep to grab at her, words, spoken in hushed tones, would float about her. It was abundantly clear what the words themselves were, but the way they lingered on in the air made it impossible for her to make any sense of them. She would lie in bed, floating in a stream of consciousness monologue that the room had decided to present before her. The room had been much too loud. And the recollections that were crashing into her now were no good either. The house was gone. There should be no reason to think that it exists. This is when she saw the strip of paper. It was by no means out of the ordinary. Perhaps, in the not so distant past, it had been used to serve jhaalmuri. Looking back further, it may have been used to provide the citizenry with information printed on it in a dark, damp office. At any rate, none of this could be comparable to what came next. As her fingers twisted the strip of paper and joined the ends together, she was pushed into a distant memory. Her mother was standing by a window, a strip of newspaper in her hand. She stood by, staring in excitement as her mother’s finger traced the inside of the loop, went around and ended up on the outside. At the present moment, our protagonists fingers trace the same elusive curve. Her mind glides back and forth through time, like a pianist’s slender fingers trilling on the black keys. The notes alone do not make any sense, yet the whole is tangible, yet fragile. The truth flits around, delicate as a butterfly. It all makes sense, the council office, the paperwork, the paper,her fingers, her house disappearing. They all wind around each other and tie themselves in knots. As the fingers keep trilling on the keys, her mind finds itself reaching for the elusive state of peace that only cold reason can bring. She grabs wildly, clinging to whatever truths she finds, making desperate attempts to hold them together. Her spinning mind weaved a theory into existence:- The house which she called home happened to be on the edge of the city. The city, just like the piece of paper, was twisted in a way which ensured that it had no edge. And this was enough for her home on the edge of the city to be hacked out of existence. A measly, feeble attempt at the truth. The trills spell out a dominant seventh, begging for a resolution. In a crescendo, it all comes crashing down on her. She stands on the footpath looking across the street at the house. The house which she calls home, which also has no reason to exist, but which, strangely enough, does. She walks out across the ever-widening street.