text:
MY MOTHER'S LOVER

and Other Stories
MY
MOTHER'S
LOVER

and Other Stories

SUMANA ROY

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7,

Vasant Kunj New Delhi 110070

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in India 2020

This edition published 2020

Copyright © Sumana Roy, 2020

Sumana Roy has asserted her right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes

ISBN: TPB: 978-93-89165-63-0; eBook: 978-93-89165-64-7

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' _I have a disease; I see language._ '

_—Roland Barthes_
CONTENTS

Blind Water

My Mother's Head

Untouchability

The New Provincials

My Mother's Lover

The Mountain Disease

The Seventh Day

Literature and Other Ailments

Sleep

'How Are You?'

Close Reading

On the Brink

'I'm Not Sure'

Beside the Madman's House

_About the Author_
Blind Water

_'Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.'_

—Margaret Atwood

ANOTHER DROP WASTING AWAY. She hears it in her sleep and turns to the other side. Tempted to get out of bed and put an aluminium pot under the leaking tap, she sits up. Next to her is the man she married twenty-four years ago. His face is half-covered – he's drawn the quilt up to his face. She knows that the man she married isn't as young anymore. It's not his face or hair or gait that tells her that. In this soundless dark, his sleep gives away his age. Tiredness has accumulated inside his nostrils and mouth, in orifices that allow escape. He tries to push them out in his sleep every night, but they are like stubborn stones inside a kidney. Though he's covered by folds of sleep now, she knows that he'll wake up as soon as she gets down from the bed. He'll shout at her in his sleep, louder than he does when awake. She's more scared of him now than she's ever been before. It's because of how he ascribes everything to her 'abnormality' – she finds it more hurtful than being called fat or ugly.

She looks at the cell phone – 2:37. Another six hours for them to wake up properly. Even if there was a drop every minute – and she's certain that there are at least three drops a minute, if not more – that would be 360 drops. That's enough for a person to brush their teeth. No, she couldn't let this water waste away.

She pulls her legs out of her nightie as if they were a folding table and tries to cross over the sleeping man. Just then her body betrays her – a cough erupts out of her, it's like a ball running away. She tries hard to catch it, but it's out of her reach already. The ball hits her husband – the cough wakes him up. He is livid, more angry than someone who's been hit by a ball.

'What?' he asks.

The night – its unattested sense of purity – doesn't allow her to lie. She'd decided that she'd say she was going to the toilet, but truth forces itself out as if it were dysenteric. 'Water's leaking from a tap. Why waste...'

'Go to sleep right now! Enough of your madness!' the sleepy man shouts, freezing her movements.

She sits still, waiting for him to return to a deeper sleep. She touches the Baba Loknath locket on her chain and says a little prayer. This moment is important for her, important enough for a prayer.

When all looks well and favourable, her feet land silently on the floor, no less important than Neil Armstrong's on the moon. She waits there, for all sounds to disappear. Then she tiptoes to the kitchen and takes out a handi – she is angry with metals, that they, like infants, make sounds when disturbed. She tries hard to think of something that doesn't make any sound when moved – no, even air and water make sounds. Suddenly conscious, she regulates her breathing to mildness. And she thinks – only my heart doesn't make a sound when it's moved; everything should be like my heart.

The handi travels with her to the bathroom, its floors scaly from dryness. She places it in the basin and waits. Nothing happens, not for minutes. Impatient but pretending to herself that she isn't, she touches the mouth of the tap to check for some hint of wetness. She can't be sure. She turns it on full force and tiptoes back to the bedroom. The bedroom seems to have lost weight since she was away – it looks smaller now, in the darkness. She puts half of her body on the bed and waits, scared of waking up her husband. The bed creaks – all things betray, like all men. She waits, one half of her hanging outside the bed. A little later, that half joins with the rest of her body. The darkness helps this painless surgery.

She lies down and waits. For one sound that'd justify the midnight expedition to her. But it doesn't arrive. She eventually falls asleep.

When she gets up the next morning, her husband is no longer beside her. The day takes him away from her – she has no choice but to let him go. Scared that he'd discover the handi, she leaps out of the bed and runs to the bathroom barefoot. It's locked. She waits there, nervous and slightly sweaty, in spite of the November cold. Then she goes to the kitchen sink and turns on the tap. Not even a tiny drop flows out. She waits, hoping for the familiar music of her childhood, things taken for granted – 'running water', that the maid called 'rani water'.

Rani water, indeed. What prognostication.

It's been nine days since a full-bodied drop of water has emerged out of the taps. The water-carriers, the poor men who ferry water across the town, collecting water from faraway jhoras and lugging them in containers hanging from their heads, have disappeared. Like the water in this town. There are rumours that schools and colleges will be closed from next week. The buildings stink from a distance, the toilets have no water, students have stopped carrying water bottles to school because water is now drunk only after meals, at home – and, if the situation doesn't get better, possibly offices too. There's been an unofficial rationing of the sale of bottled drinking water. No more than four bottles per family. The fifth only if one has a medical certificate to prove that there's an ailing person in the family.

Standing on the balcony of Lama Building, not looking at Happy Valley Tea Estate below but aware of its presence the way one is of the sky even with one's eyes closed, she stares at the Kanchenjunga. Not its beauty, now frozen in the human imagination, but at the snow. Her deprived mind changes its state of being – from solid to liquid, ice to water. If only the mind had greater power.

Uneasy, she looks at her skin, dry, from not having bathed for days. Returning to the dining space, she wonders whether she could use a bottle of drinking water for bathing. The thought, and the two choices, run inside her head from one end to the other, almost as if they were touching ear to ear, endlessly. It exhausts her, she is thirsty – one gulp of water, just one for now.

Her husband emerges out of the bathroom, wrapped like a gift, ready to go to work. He looks the same every day, as if he were an ATM machine. If he were a banker, he might have been granted leave, but he's a policeman. She's asked him twice already, whether they could leave the town and return only when water returned to it. He says he's been refused. It is a time of emergency. She regrets marrying a police officer. Marrying a sales representative would've been better.

'Breakfast?' she asks, like every day, taking out bread from the fridge.

'I'm tired of having bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner.' He walks away.

She feels accused, as if it was her fault that there was no water, and people had stopped cooking because cooking needed water for boiling, for curries and gravies, and utensils needed cleaning. Business for bakeries had gone up – people were eating bread for most of their meals, along with moori and chips and chanachur, things that came in packets and didn't need cooking.

'Let's go home to Malda for just two days. At least we can bathe and drink water and go to the toilet...'

Her husband leaves, her words never reach him.

It infuriates her. She feels like throwing the bottle at him, but no, it's a bottle of water. It's more precious than everything else now.

When she walks to the glass door, to bolt it after her husband, she notices some commotion on the road. They live on Ladenla Road, the busiest street in Darjeeling. 'Ki bhoyo?' she asks, in the little Nepali she's scavenged for survival here.

Two young men respond in Nepali, the rest are busy shouting at each other. There's a red plastic bucket in the hands of one of the men. Someone is trying to take it away from him. It's about water. Drawing this conclusion, she walks back hurriedly to their rented flat and locks it from inside. And then, without paying it great thought, she takes three bottles of drinking water and puts them in the Godrej almirah.

Between phone calls, mostly to friends and relatives outside Darjeeling, who cannot really understand what it feels to live without water, who tease her by joking about it, she cleans herself with Lakme cleansing lotion and cotton pads. From time to time she walks or runs to the taps, opens and closes them, always surprised by what registers in her head as betrayal – taps are supposed to spurt out water as the nose is always supposed to be full of air. With no cooking to do, she arranges her clothes. Instead of the wardrobe, her attention is now on the pile of unwashed clothes that have spilled out from the laundry bag to suitcases and travel bags. She'll have to buy new underwear soon – only a set of fresh bra and panty remains. Is it possible to send bras and panties for 'dry wash'?

'Hello,' she calls her husband on the phone, 'can't we go to Siliguri for a day, check into a hotel, wash all our clothes, fill all our water bottles and cans, and come back the next day?'

'I've heard that the Chief Minister is trying to do something. We might get water in a day or two.' He hangs up.

She controls her anger. She's never understood what policemen actually do when there are no thieves to be caught. What keeps them busy?

Losing control of herself, she calls him again, 'Are you busy?'

'Yes.'

'Busy doing what?'

'Work.'

'What work?'

'Work.'

'What? Did you catch any water thieves?'

Her husband disconnects.

She won't take this anymore, she will leave him, she will leave the town, she will... She pulls her legs out of a pair of warm salwars, then pauses for breath and pulls the nightie out of her head. The cold gives her goosebumps immediately. Her nipples swell up. She rushes for her thermals. Uff, they are stinking. And so only the kurta, made from warm cottswool. Then her yellow cardigan, and over it a black jacket. The dupatta wrapped around her face and head in a way that makes her unrecognisable to everyone, including herself. Socks – which she brings close to her nose to check whether they can be worn for one more day – and sneakers.

She is ready. 'I'm going to Chowrasta to buy a bra,' she types, a text to her husband.

The text fills her throat and mouth with the taste of tea from Glenary's, but she shakes her head at the thought. All the eateries in town – even Glenary's, almost the town's mascot – have been closed.

But it's not for a bra that she's stepping out of home. She will go to Senchal Lake, from where Darjeeling's potable water comes.

She locks the door and drops the keys in the pocket of her jacket where they hit something in plastic. Two tiny bottles of water. In the inner flaps of her jacket are neatly folded plastic bags, a roll of sealing tape and a shaving blade. She has plans that she keeps even from herself. She will get some water. _Anyhow._

The November air is sharp. The sky and its light, both bright, deceive. She keeps walking, her experience on the planet telling her that it is possible to grow indifferent to extremities of weather for a short period of time, that it's like crying – one returns to normal, for one can't keep crying forever.

She's never been there before. She's heard the name, inevitably at moments of crisis – when there's a water emergency or when a dead body's been discovered in the lake. Google's told her everything she needs to know about the place. She knows the numbers – 11 kms from Darjeeling town, at an elevation of 8,160 feet, opened in 1915. The lake that is housed in the wildlife sanctuary is fed by a mountain spring. The route she'd find out – she's walked through Ghoom and Jorebungalow before. The only way to get anywhere in Darjeeling is to walk anyway. (She can climb up through Hooker Road to Mall Road without stopping for breath even once, she reminds herself with pride.)

On the way, past Chowrasta, and straight ahead, towards the train station, past the street where one must stop breathing to survive, because the stench of centuries of urine soaked in walls makes it impossible to breathe, she keeps walking. She's walking fast. How long can it take? An hour's walk at the most? She could've asked her husband, but she didn't. In any case, now it's impossible. She's left the phone at home. There was no space – the water bottles in her pockets, the house keys, the folded plastic packets. And what if she lost the phone?

Walking away from the town makes her feel liberated but also oddly sad. It feels a bit like leaving an infant at home. What if it wakes up before she returns? She feels that way about the taps. What if they begin talking in the old language of water while she's away? Has she turned off the taps? It's too late – she can't walk back to the flat anymore.

She walks fast, faster than she's ever walked before. Soon she's left everyone behind – she's the only human on the road. Tourists have stopped coming, and so there are hardly any vehicles. When she can't breathe anymore, she stops and takes a tiny gulp of water from one of the tiny bottles. Darjeeling has made even her thirst thrifty. She begins walking again. This time a new sound besides the shy squeaks of her sneakers accompanies her – it's the sound of water inside the bottle. Full bottles don't make sounds, half-full bottles do. She smiles as she makes a note of this, to tell her mother and cousin, the only two people who laugh at her jokes.

As she walks intuitively towards the lake, two things begin to happen: the number of humans becomes inversely proportional to the number of trees. Here it is darker than it is in the town. Trees eat light, she always knew. Here they've eaten almost all of it. She wonders why she's suddenly scared of trees here as she's never been in a city, not even in Darjeeling's Botanical Gardens. She thinks of the water running through them and feels jealous. Is there no machine that could extract water from trees from its xylem (or is it phloem, she can't remember) like they extract sap from rubber trees? And then the thought of animals inside the forest comes to her – are they still alive or have they died?

But no, thoughts won't stop her, nothing will. She must reach the lake soon. The cry of an animal somewhere – she can't recognise what animal it is, except that it must be an animal, for trees don't shout. As she walks – not letting anything get in the way of her feet, not the cold, not fear, not her thoughts – she stops. Where could the animals be getting their water from? Should she enter the forest to check?

Year after year in Darjeeling – though it's only been three years since she's been here – she's heard the same thing: Senchal is dry, lake pura dry chha, ek drop pani chhaina. But surely the animals don't feel the same way? They're not as stupid as humans – they don't drink water from a tap. If only humans had continued to drink water from the ground there'd have been no water crisis. And now they're looking for water on Mars! Everything they kill and exhaust on Earth they look for in space! Fools!

But this is not the time for thoughts – thoughts are brakes, they delay. She has to keep walking. She changes idioms and proverbs as she walks, now beginning to run out of energy: not light at the end of a tunnel but water at the end of a journey, and so on. _How much longer to the lake?_

Two months ago, when the water crisis had just started, a surprise because it was immediately after the monsoon, when one usually didn't need to worry about water, she had begun to look for stories and anecdotes about water problems that British engineers, missionaries, botanists, civil servants, teachers, tea planters and, of course, their families might have faced, in letters they wrote to friends and relatives at home in England, but also in various presidencies and sanatorium towns in India. But there was hardly any such news in these letters. It was possible that the white men were not even aware of where their water came from – through pipes, or carried in giant buckets by thin men and women who lost the use of their brains from carrying such heavy weight on their heads. Locals called these innocents 'laata'. She knew a few of these water-carriers – she'd bought water from them a few times. Would she meet any of them on the way? Where were the streams and jhoras that they said they got their water from? Had these people become like animals, who knew where water sources were, from instinct and intuition, instead of relying on visual signs like taps and pipes?

That thought recharges her – if they can, she can, too.

Yes, she can now sense the presence of water, it couldn't be too far away. It is true that water is not like light, that its presence can't be seen from afar, but one can hear it walk, as on a seashore, or fall sadly without fear, when trapped inside a filter or coffee machine. She knows that she is near water. No, that's not completely true. She feels that she's near the presence of something that holds water, like one can sense that people live in houses from the clothes hanging out to dry in balconies. Just a few more minutes and she'd be able to see it – it is just that water's address isn't always as fixed as a human's.

She takes off her jacket – the long walk has squeezed water out of her, her body's dripping in sweat. She's angry and curious – she's hardly drunk any water today, where has the sweat come from? There is more water inside her body than there is in the taps and pipes and tanks in Darjeeling. Is it possible to convert sweat to drinking water? She's heard about a Japanese – or is it African? – company that can convert urine to drinking water. Why not sweat? What if she could cut her sweat glands and use that water? Why isn't it possible to collect sweat like one collects blood in bottles?

The shawl covering her face and head, the scarf that was wrapped around her neck until a little while ago, and the jacket are now in her hands. It seems it's been years since she's bathed. Memories of jumping into the Ganga in Malda, her Malda, the town of her childhood, with the sweetest mangoes in its orchards, come to her – a clump of soil breaking from under her feet and falling into the river almost at the same time as her body, diving into the water greedily on a summer day. How much water there was in the river – it was a universe, bigger than anything imaginable, larger than the sky! Unlike rooms and houses and other places on land, it's never refused her entry.

She doesn't realise that she's crying.

'More water! Where is it coming from?' she shouts at herself angrily, staring at the tears that are now in her palms. She turns her face towards the sky just to check if she'd be able to force the tears back to where they'd come from. Not a drop of water can be wasted.

She thinks she hears a cow moo, but after that, there's the same rigid silence and the unchanging view of sharp pines pointing their arrow-like snout at the sky. The road seems like a dictionary – she wouldn't ever be able to get to the end. Hurrying towards a bend, hoping to get a sight of the water, she stands like a person who can't remember what she's lost.

Instead of water, there are lines, like graphs from her college economics textbooks. The haze of fog separates these upwards climbing graphs from each other. It takes her some time to realise that these are mountain ranges. She takes out a plastic bag from her pocket – fog is water, if she can trap parts of it (what else to call them except parts?) in her bag, they will turn into water later. The plastic bag flares up, its handles like ears, its body energised by air – but no water accumulates inside it. She waits for the fog to travel towards her, for it to behave like water, easier to catch, but no such thing happens. She cannot take it anymore – there's so much water in front of her, the clouds and the fog, the icy peaks of the mountains, but they are inaccessible to her as water. It's like God being everywhere but actually invisible. No, it's worse. She can do without God, she cannot do without water anymore.

Tiny yellow birds fly past her, beginning their descent not far from where she is. That is where water – the lake – must be? She begins walking, angry that the road she has to take is not the same as the birds', that they will get there before her. What if they finish drinking the little water there that remains?

When she sees water at last, it is like sagging skin on the lake. She doesn't recognise it, like one sometimes can't an aged actress, from having only seen her tilted young face on a giant screen. Confused, she wonders why she's here. She's forgotten. The shawl and the jacket and the empty plastic bottles and packets have all fallen on the way. She doesn't remember them.

She only wants to bathe. She wants nothing more. The birds have left. So have the clouds. The sky is naked, like it is at this time of the year, naked for a few moments just before it swallows light for the day. The yellow sweater is wet in parts – underarms and the back, from sweat. But her clothes might as well be a part of her. She has no consciousness of their separateness – they need to bathe along with her, as the rest of her body, her hair and feet. Swallowing the remainders of dryness inside her mouth, she dives into the lake.

'Why did she jump into a dry lake?'

'If the lake hadn't been completely dry, her dead body would never have been recovered. The people of Darjeeling would've been drinking...'

'She must've thought it was the Ganga...'

'At least her death brought the Chief Minister and water to Darjeeling – let us be grateful for that.'

'Was it suicide? Her husband is a police officer who...'

'What was her name? Maybe we can name this place after her, Shahid Something, like Shahid Bhagat Singh, you know? Tourists would love...'

'How about Water Martyr Point when we bring tourists next year?'

'That sounds like matar paneer...'
My Mother's Head

' _I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart.'_

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

NO ONE CAN SAY exactly when my mother's heart became her head.

I do not know which ages faster – the head or the heart. I only knew about legs; responding to gravity made them older than every other part of the body. And my mother's legs had stopped being legs a long time before her heart became her head.

When I was young, not when we were children but when, as my mother likes to say 'we were _her_ children', signifying a time before we began to belong to other people, I ignored her pains as something mysterious. Pain was rare in childhood, and it seemed like a foreign thing when my mother spoke about it or sometimes held the soles of her feet and wept silent tears. I felt helpless but also distant – this thing called pain is like God; one needs to experience it to believe in it. I watched it as an outsider and it was invisible. This quality it shares with ghosts. I was scared of ghosts; I still am. How could I have protected my mother when I feared them myself?

I also did not like my mother very much when I was a child. She seemed to be a distant figure, her life directed by invisible things like pain and love. She invoked the latter in every single conversation until it began to resemble the 'rupees' plonked before a number to give it material value – we were to do everything she instructed us to do because of the love she had for us. I began to detest the burden of that love. Glue is always difficult to peel away from, and when I wanted to move away from the stickiness of that love, it left its serrated half-glued edges on me. I didn't realise it then that when my mother wanted to move away from pain; it had the same effect on her.

And she did try to unglue herself from it. There were the pink painkillers that she kept in her wallet like young adults keep condoms – one never knew when one might need one. But those tablets did not lessen the pain, the heart's hurt. The realisation that she had married wrong came as a belatedly received insight. It haunted her. How could it have not? Her husband – my father – was a man who was so self-obsessed that he did not notice those around him. My mother longed to be noticed. She had the kind of sophisticated beauty that gave evidence of gentleness even in adversity. Physical pain came to give her face a sad grace like it did to the wrinkled skin of fleshy fruits.

There were also the contraceptive pills of the time that destroyed the bones of women like her. They were invisible agents that were part of a barter economy: in return for preventing children from being born, they bleached away the calcium from women's bones. It was a moral: that women had to live with pain as payment for being unwilling wombs. I, of course, did not know all that. I sometimes noticed the names of days written on the back of a tablet strip and wondered whether Wednesday-pain was different from Sunday-pain. Of course, these were things that were so peripheral to my childhood that they never manifested as questions. It is one of the wonders of my childhood and adolescence that I never asked my mother the 'How are you?' question even when her suffering hung like a watercolour painting in our house.

It was only after I'd leave home for university that I'd begin to see what life without the constant punctuation of pain could be like. For we were young, my hostel mates and I, and the only kind of pain that affected us intermittently had to do with the heart. It began in the throat, sucked everything together into a cyclonic lump and then suddenly, out of nowhere, without the show of paths or passages, it was inside the chest, like a skyscraper, its height and its weight crushing the walls of the heart and, then, once again suddenly, it had changed shape into a ball, a ball that couldn't be moved, not with hands, not with feet.

Though we only experienced it individually, we made it sound like a disease peculiar to our age group – heartbreak. We were angry that there were no medicines for the pain, and that our parents and teachers and doctors and the 'system' did not consider it important enough to miss examinations. When a senior committed suicide after his girlfriend married a young paediatrician, I wondered whether this was why people used painkillers – meant for flesh, nerves and bones – in grossly exaggerated quantities to stave off injuries of the heart.

By the time I had reached my early twenties I had grown so distant from the small middle-class world of my parents that I had forgotten that their bodies also had hearts beating inside them. When I visited them during holidays, I saw only the worry and tiredness on their faces. When we spoke – and those moments were few and rare – it was only of sad things, like their dreams for me and my current inability to fulfil them; their physical and financial investment in me and my refusal to let that investment fuel my professional ambition. Then I got married and left them in a climate of permanent sadness.

Only to discover that my marriage was a dull paraphrase of theirs. I quit it immediately.

Familiar sadness was easier to deal with than new pain. I moved back in with them.

It might have been my recent disgust with the man I'd married (a terribly wrong choice as I soon discovered) but my habit of recording and analysing his ways and manners made me look at my parents anew. I was shocked to discover that they had aged – even their complaints had grown feeble. I wondered whether it was my bad marriage that had produced this alchemy. I only knew that I began to feel, for the first time in my life, that I might be related to them after all.

It was around this time that I began noticing some weird habits my mother had developed. She was in a state of permanent absent-mindedness. If she wasn't as old as she was, her forgetfulness would've been mistaken as a symptom of an extramarital relationship. A part of her seemed to be taking notes all the time. Sincerity, her defining characteristic, kept her efficient – the house was managed perfectly, the meals were always on time, the fridge was always full of vegetables, fish and meat, the clothes ironed and the bed linen starched, tucked in tight, with fitted folds. When things are so ordered and perfect, they are evidence of an imperfect world elsewhere. Two ugly relationships and a bad marriage had taught me that.

Living on my parents' money, pretending to be sadder than I was, so as to avoid looking for gainful employment as long as I could, I began to feel a new interest in my mother. I was conscious that it wasn't the affectionate interest of a daughter in her mother. I felt like a detective. I began to follow her around with my old disinterested face, to avoid her suspicion of being scrutinised.

The first of her unusual ways had to do with her post-phone call behaviour. She did not know – or learn – how to look for phone numbers using the 'Contacts' or 'Address Book' tab on her phone, and so she wrote everything down. She dialled numbers slowly, looking for each digit from the back of her notebook, her fingers terribly scared of making a mistake. She spoke to friends and relatives exactly as if they were sitting in front of her, refusing to make a distinction between face-to-face conversations and telephonic speech. It made her look slightly comical, even endearing. The subjects of these conversations were funnier – truant house-help, an accident of burnt milk, stomach upsets of grandchildren, disobedient daughters-in-law. But what followed them was completely unexpected. She would stealthily take out a piece of paper and write down a succession of digits, as if it were a shorthand code for the conversation she'd just had. I gradually began to find these scribbles everywhere, on old newspapers, brown paper packets, discarded invoices, registers and notebooks, everywhere. What were these, and what did they mean?

But their tenor was secretive. I found it difficult to ask – rather confront – her on their meaning. For all one knew, I might have been imagining a connection between the doodled numbers and phone calls.

But one day, when I couldn't check my curiosity anymore, I decided to ask her.

'It's nothing,' she said, as I'd expected.

Later, when I was sitting on the terrace, having my afternoon tea, she walked soundlessly and stood behind me. 'These telephone companies are cheats. They are always cheating pensioners like us,' she said.

'Why, what happened?' I asked, not looking at her.

'They always steal our money from the phone. Once, when you were not here,' she said, and then realising that she shouldn't have brought up my marriage – for they avoided the subject as if mentioning it would bring more bad luck to their daughter (and thus to them) – she clarified, 'I had ₹125 as balance. I went to sleep and when I woke up I found that I had only ₹25. They had stolen a hundred rupees from my phone overnight.'

'Then?' I asked, without interest. I couldn't get what this uninteresting back story had to do with the scribbles on the writing surfaces in our house.

'Then your father called those women at the – what do they call it, wait, I forget – Customer Care. He called them every day, day and night, morning and evening, until they were forced to return the money to me, to my phone.'

I allowed myself the laughter, a relief from the stern and no-nonsense image I'd chosen for myself in this house. 'So much drama for only a hundred rupees?' I asked.

'Only? You don't get even a litre of mustard oil for a hundred rupees anymore,' she replied, stung by my light-heartedness. I was reminded, not for the first time, about my parents lacking a sense of humour. I had no childhood memory of us laughing as a family, nothing except the canned studio laughter that came from watching Jaspal Bhatti's _Flop Show_ or _Wagle Ki Duniya_ on our aged Telerama television set. Laughter seemed foreign to their middle-class sensibility. 'What does that have to do with your scribbles, Ma?' I asked, hoping she'd leave me alone.

'That is what I'm trying to tell you. Why are you so impatient? Listen. Since that day, I've been noting down these details.'

'Of what?'

'Of when I call, when I disconnect, the duration of the call, the amount of money I had before the call and the amount the company deducted. Everything.' She said this with a lot of pride, another show of her bureaucratic diligence that her daughter had not inherited.

Days passed, and my interest in espionage on her passed as well. Until one day my cousin called from the faraway frontier town they lived in. I had avoided my relatives all my life – in each of them was a spud of an annoying habit that had also sprouted in my parents. It wasn't the cliched nosiness or noisiness that bugged me as much as the limits of their intelligence. Their worlds were the size of their handkerchiefs and they, therefore, had to concentrate, with all their energies on staying within its perimeter. My parents did the same. Their lives had the taut focus of nothing except a part of themselves – their feet. The world was lost on them.

It is perhaps the subconscious that drags in the feet as a metaphor here. For it, indeed, is about my mother's feet. So when my cousin, with her full-throated laughter on the phone, told me about my mother's habit of mentioning the exact time at which she had called earlier but which hadn't been received, I began to wonder whether it had anything to do with her feet. Because I hardly spoke to her on the phone – I rarely moved out of my room, I had begun to find the world an ill-lit theatre – I did not know about these tics. But after they'd been pointed out to me, I noticed that they were true: 'I called you at 2:52 pm yesterday and then again at 6:54, but there was no response from you,' I heard her tell my brother one day. Yes, it had hardened into a habit.

When I pointed it out to her, she did not notice anything odd about it. As the years passed softly, without anyone noticing their passage, because everything looked the same and seemed unchanging, as if our lives had been left wrapped in plastic, conversations between my parents almost stopped. Worries had been the glue of their relationship, and now there really wasn't much to worry about. My father, after having performed his role as husband, father and father-in-law, returned to the more comfortable life of a public commentator – he sat in front of the television all day and competed with noisy newscasters in broadcasting his own opinions. My mother, interested in neither the television nor the lone audience sitting in front of it, sat alone on the balcony, sipping from her cup even when the tea had finished. Her legs no longer had the power to carry her for long distances; her voice on the telephone had become weak too. One day, when I saw her calling out to the cook who was walking out of the gate, it struck me that her voice and her legs had become related in a way I hadn't noticed – her legs had the strength to carry her only till the radius of where her voice could reach.

It would have been obvious to anyone that loneliness had abetted my mother's depression. But neither my father nor I – my brother lived in a different country, a different planet really – noticed it. It was because we did not want to notice it. We were used to – and thus indifferent to – her tears. Anything could make her cry, one could never tell. My father, the only time I spoke to him on the subject, said we should treat it like an infant's smile – there was no 'logic' (his favourite word) behind it. When she became forgetful, we put it down to her age, though we knew that she was only sixty-three.

It was on a morning that we realised that sadness – and its allies, absent-mindedness and forgetfulness, for sadness occludes everything else, every other sense, every other emotion – was a gun waiting to fire any moment. When my father woke me up in fear, I rushed to the kitchen to see my mother standing with a matchbox in her hands in front of the gas stove, a look of complete non-recognition and forgetfulness on her face. I was scared. She didn't say a word, didn't respond to our incessant queries. She only seemed to be pressurised by her inability to remember something important. The gas knobs had been left open – it was their smell that had woken up my father – and she, early riser and drinker of morning tea, had forgotten, at the very last minute, what she was supposed to do with the matchbox, and what the relationship between the gas knobs and the matchsticks was.

We saved her from her sadness murdering her – it seems odd to say this, but it's true. Over the next few months, though we paid attention to the things that could cause her physical injury, we remained indifferent to the invisible, to the things that were bleaching her head and her heart. She began forgetting the names of people and places, and we didn't mind. When she couldn't recognise faces of familiar people, we pretended that it didn't matter. If she mixed the rice with the curry but forgot to put it inside her mouth, one of us completed the task with the help of a spoon.

Even the numbers on blank writing surfaces stopped appearing. Her words dried, but not her tears which sometimes flowed even in her sleep. I wanted to be angry with her – surely her life couldn't be so tragic that it had turned her into the saddest person in the world? One can be angry with stone but not with a shadow.

One day, when the doctor came to check on her, he asked her about the pain in her legs. She didn't respond, only released the hair from her bun so that it fell on the pillow. It didn't surprise us – almost nothing about her did anymore. That sadness could make a person do unimaginable things was once a notion completely foreign to us, but it now seemed normal. Then the doctor asked if he could check her heartbeat.

'They say "sweetheart", don't they, doctor?' she asked.

We were surprised to see her talking.

'Yes,' said the doctor, smiling. 'You're his sweetheart,' he added, pointing to my father.

My mother didn't seem to hear – or care for – the man's words. 'Why doesn't anyone say "sweet-head"?'

The doctor smiled. 'You're so intelligent,' he said, as if he'd suddenly discovered that sad people could also be intelligent.

'Sadness affects your legs first. Then it travels upwards. And corrupts the body, the knees, the intestines, everything. I was a physics teacher, doctor,' she said, as tears coursed down her cheeks, 'I taught my students about the laws of gravity, about how one could be disobedient to God but not to gravity. This is the only thing that dares gravity – sadness. It climbs up like we climb trees, and then pulls everything up to the head – legs, appetite, womb; everything is here now.' Her right hand was now resting on her head.

The doctor, startled by this new lesson in human anatomy, looked unsure about where to place his stethoscope.

The patient came to his assistance. She pulled the resonator of the stethoscope towards herself, forcing the doctor to bend towards her.

Putting it right on the middle of her head, she said, 'This is my heart'.

The doctor – either absent-minded or obedient to the natural gravity of sadness – put the stethoscope on my mother's head and recorded her heartbeat.

And my mother's heart became her head.
Untouchability

_'"Things" don't "biodegrade" as one might wish or believe.'_

—Jacques Derrida

MRS CHAKRABARTI WAS ASHAMED of herself, but she was helpless. She washed her hands again, pouring a few drops of the reetha-soaked water into her palms. There was hardly any lather, but she was gradually getting used to it. Bubbles were only a show of cleanliness – there was cleanliness before the invention of chemical bubbles just as there was sweetness in food before the production of industrial sugar. Mrs Chakrabarti was argumentative to a fault – it was mostly herself that she argued with. Hardly anyone knew what was going on in her mind.

All of this hadn't come to Mrs Chakrabarti overnight. She'd spent the three years after her retirement from her teaching job thinking about this. Her husband had died nine years ago – it was unexpected, as all heart attacks usually are, but it hadn't shocked her completely. She knew the phrase: 'lifestyle disease'. Her husband used to travel too often and eat out too often. It wasn't natural, she reasoned later. A lifestyle conditioned over centuries – a diet, a pattern of rest and work – was being uprooted and replaced by one fit only for machines. Her late husband had suddenly been forced to live the life of a machine. When he'd work late into the night, she'd sometimes wake up and tell him, 'You've become a fridge. The fridge works when we sleep'. He'd laugh and ask her to go back to sleep.

Their son, Pinaki, now thirty-three years old, was living like a machine too. At times she wondered whether working with machines – he was an engineer – had turned him into a machine. Increasingly he spoke like one, exactly like the recorded voices on gas-booking numbers and banking services did. She remained silent when he spoke, just as she wasn't allowed to say anything when speaking to automated voices, only press numbers. Indrani, his wife, was a banker. She rolled numbers inside her mouth like Mrs Chakrabarti chewed fish bones. She was terrified of their smartness. When they came to visit – usually for about a few days every year – she was scared and anxious all the time. They measured everything in numbers. A litre of oil each, for one person every month, not more; not more than a tiny spoon of sugar every day; seven hours of sleep; ten thousand steps a day (a watch counted their steps like a PT teacher in a school).

Mrs Chakrabarti felt no great attachment for life, but it wasn't that she wanted to die either. Her only sister, Mohua, had died four years ago. It was cancer. Just a year before her retirement from her school-teaching job, the only person she'd known all her life (her parents were dead) was gone. This had caused her greater shock than even her husband's death. Mohua – whom she called Mou – was two years younger than her. She'd never married – their father's pension and savings had been enough for her. Mou took such great care of herself – she ate her meals on time, ate lots of fruits and vegetables, moisturised her skin, paid electric bills before the due date. How could _she_ get cancer?

Soon after her retirement, Mrs Chakrabarti rented her house to two tenants, on two floors, and moved into what had been her childhood home. At first, she couldn't sleep at night – she felt the presence of her sister and her parents, as if they were lying beside her on the same bed. A week or ten days into her stay, she began cleaning the house, a corner every morning. It wasn't the dust and cobweb that surprised her as something else. Everywhere there were piles of plastic bags, folded and arranged beneath mattresses, inside cupboards and wardrobes, drawers and plastic bags inside larger plastic bags. What had Mou been up to?

Cleaning the kitchen brought greater shock. Inside the cabinets was an inventory of plastic containers of all sizes and shapes. What did she do with them? She cleaned every single one of them – they'd been filled with all kinds of things, ground spices, lentils, beans, bay leaves, many containers of bay leaves in fact, rubber bands, buttons, safety pins, old bills, even coins and some currency notes. Mou's world had been stored in these plastic boxes. After the tears, Mrs Chakrabarti felt something close to wonder: had she become a collector of plastic things, boxes and packets? For in the bathroom cabinet (the mirror was dotted with imprints of stick-on bindis) were rows of empty plastic containers of cosmetic creams. They looked tired from waiting. Mrs Chakrabarti took them out and threw them into a broken bucket where they landed with unexpected sounds, like someone who'd been woken up from a deep sleep.

That is all Mrs Chakrabarti did for the next few months – like a detective she went about looking for, and then discarding, plastic bags and containers. It exhausted her but it was also oddly energising. If she didn't find any the whole day, she felt disappointed. Once she woke up in the middle of the night and began looking inside her pillow case to check whether Mou had hidden any plastic packets there. But, because she was self-conscious about the way she led her life, she soon became aware of what was gradually turning into an obsession. Plastic things meant a lot to Mou – that was all she took away from her discovery.

One day, quite by chance, she discovered a book behind the bed. It might have fallen off Mou's hands, she surmised. It was wrapped in brown plastic paper, and so she couldn't see the title of the book at first. She tore it open urgently. _Cancer._ The title was self-explanatory. Mou had bought it to learn more about her disease. Mrs Chakrabarti read the book all night. When the milkman rang the doorbell, she'd just fallen asleep. Startled by the sound, she woke up slightly disoriented.

The sight of milk in the transparent plastic bag made her furious. She had no control over herself. 'No more milk from tomorrow,' she shouted at Poltu, the milkman.

'Why Didi?' he asked, baffled.

'Why should milk come in these plastic packets?' she said, tying her hair into a bun.

'That is how Himul company sells it, Didi,' he responded.

'Everything in plastic! I don't want such milk. Please collect the money due to you at the end of the month. But not a drop of milk from tomorrow.'

The truth was that Mrs Chakrabarti had had a dream that Mou's cancer had been caused by her obsession with plastic. Though she wasn't afraid of dying, she'd decided that she didn't want to die of cancer. Scared – even slightly embarrassed – of sharing her thesis with anyone, she let it harden inside her into a conviction. She'd grown up in a world where illnesses came mostly through contagion, and conditioned to attributing both physical and mental disorders to touch, she decided to change her ways of living dramatically. Food poisoning, common cold, skin diseases, not just these physical ailments, but even the case of bad company, the proverbial rotten apple spoiling the rest – all of these were the result of touch. And the most deadly disease, whose name she was scared of uttering even silently in her mind – AIDS. It was only a matter of time before scientists confirmed what she now knew intuitively – it was the intrusive touch of plastic that caused cancer.

Was there cancer before the invention of plastic? She'd find out gradually. But she wouldn't wait for knowledge, scientific and historical knowledge, to kill her before that. And so began her single-minded devotion to the eradication of plastic from her life.

She started with all the plastic containers in the kitchen – it made her slightly sad at first, throwing away the yellow Dalda containers that had been permanent members of the kitchen, and had actually become family, but no, they had to go. She didn't want to touch them, and so she put her gloves on – then, realising that the gloves were made of rubber ('Plastic!'), she took them off immediately, screaming in panic, as if she'd been touched by a poisonous wind. She took out her husband's black woollen gloves from the almirah and continued with her job. Her hands were quite obviously smaller than his had been, and so they slipped out of her hands as she worked. She found two rubber bands and tightened the gloves at the wrist, so that they didn't fall off. But soon she was shrieking in fear – the rubber bands were made of plastic. She discarded them immediately, replacing them with the sterner grip, if not grasp, of safety pins.

Every day was frustrating – it filled her with awe and wonder how plastic had taken over the world, the entire world. Getting rid of it was turning out to be more difficult than getting rid of pigmentation marks from her face and neck, or even pubic hair. Just as parents often find it difficult to remember what their lives had been like before their children took over their lives, the world had forgotten life before plastic. Plastic packets and nylon bags – no one remembered the jute and cotton bags anymore. And plastic pipes, plastic doormats, plastic plates and bowls, forks and spoons, plastic curtains and table covers, even plastic flowers! Was there nothing that was not available in – and sometimes only in – plastic?

So thinking she entered the bathroom, sweaty, but also oddly proud of her mission. She'd begun thinking of herself as a gardener weeding out the unnecessary and life-sucking elements from life. But barely had she taken off her dull sweat-patched pistachio-coloured blouse, she was screaming again. The buckets and mugs were made of plastic! She stopped bathing and ran out naked. It was as if plastic had turned into a monster and chased her away. The next moment she was making phone calls to people to help her buy iron buckets and mugs of the kind that now almost belonged to museums.

'Ma go!' she screamed in the middle of the conversation with Nupur, the geography teacher in the school where she used to teach.

'Are you okay? What happened? Did you fall...'

There was no response. There never would be, again. No, it wasn't because Mrs Chakrabarti had died. It was because Mrs Chakrabarti would never touch a phone again in her life. She'd just realised that the outer case of the phone was made of plastic.

When Nupur came to see her after school, worried that the retired woman needed help, all Mrs Chakrabarti would do was request her former colleague to stop using the toy globe in her geography class. 'Better to use the Frank School Atlas, isn't it?'

'The children love spinning it, you know...'

'It's made of plastic...'

'So?'

Just as the eye looks for the moon in a naked sky without being aware that it is this that it is seeking, Mrs Chakrabarti's eyes sought – and found – plastic. As Nupur spoke, Mrs Chakrabarti's eyes registered, with concern, the plastic strap of her watch. 'The world's become plastic, space has become plastic, time has become plastic,' she said, pointing to the watch with her eyes.

Like fear finds corners, like water, from where it drips, the ageing woman's avoidance of plastic caused plastic things to return to her more regularly than it did others. This was the law of nature – what we avoid pursues us.

'I brought you daab,' said Nupur, taking out a tender coconut from a black plastic bag. 'The electrolytes in tender coconut water are good for you...'

'Aren't black plastic bags banned in this town?' said Mrs Chakrabarti, without any show of gratitude.

'Oh, it's an old plastic bag I found in my handbag,' said Nupur, laughing.

Old plastic is even worse than new plastic, Mrs Chakrabarti wanted to say but didn't. She herself wasn't absolutely convinced of her thesis yet.

But when Nupur affectionately pierced the exposed membranous lip of the coconut with a drinking straw, Mrs Chakrabarti couldn't hold herself back any longer. 'Nupur!' she screamed, scaring Nupur, who dropped the coconut from her hands.

'What...'

'That drinking straw is made of plastic!'

Nupur left soon after, certain that something was wrong with Mrs Chakrabarti, but unable to make out what exactly it was.

When she saw her many months later, sitting on the balcony of her house, Nupur thought she knew what had been missing. 'What happened to your specs, Mrs Chakrabarti?' she said from the moving cycle rickshaw.

Mrs Chakrabarti's answer didn't reach Nupur. 'I discarded them. They were made of plastic.'

Neither the ophthalmologist nor the opticians could convince her to wear glasses again. 'You'll go blind,' Matri, her young neighbour, told her.

But she didn't listen, of course.

When she developed an eye infection, she refused to take eye drops because the medicine would have to be administered to her with a plastic dropper. She'd stopped writing a long time ago – there were hardly any pens which were not made of plastic. Now she'd had to stop reading – the eye infection at first, then the discarding of eyeglasses.

Mrs Chakrabarti grew thinner and lonelier. Though she wasn't rude to anyone, friends and acquaintances stopped visiting her – it is easier to and commiserate with the physically ailing than one whose suffering is invisible. They began to think of her as a person who was being purposely difficult – they had nicknames for her, names of female politicians: Mamata, Mayawati, Indira Gandhi. One of them, a distant relative she used to call Tapan-jethu, called her 'Scheduled Caste'. No one really understood what it signified until the ninety-three-year-old man explained it himself: just as the lower ('Scheduled') caste people were considered untouchables, Mrs Chakrabarti had turned plastic into an untouchable, 'Scheduled Caste'.

Did all this gossip reach her? It was unlikely – she'd discarded her phone and, in the process, lost contact with her son and his family; no one visited her anymore. Even if it had reached her ears, it wouldn't have mattered. What she did didn't reach them either. So it wasn't until she was seriously ill that Matri, not having seen her in the garden for weeks, went to see her and found her unable to get out of bed. There was no food in the kitchen. Matri quickly got two packets of Maggi from her house and put a pan of water on the boil. Then, noticing her dishevelled appearance, she ran to get a comb from the dressing table.

'I'm making Maggi for you,' she said, like only an enthusiastic twenty-four-year-old can, someone who'd had an opportunity to be of some use for the first time in her life. And then making her sit up on the bed, she began gathering her hair towards the back of the head. The underside of her feet was stamped by dust – she'd stopped wearing plastic hawai sandals.

'Nooooo!' screamed Mrs Chakrabarti as if she'd been struck by a bullet.

'Ki holo?' said Matri, embarrassed of her youth, her lack of experience.

'I can't have Maggi – I don't eat anything from plastic packets.' She was shaking, as if on the verge of a moment where she'd cease to be.

Matri receded from her desire to be good – she wanted to run away and complain to her mother-in-law and cry.

Taking the comb from Matri's hand suddenly, she screamed, 'I don't use that plastic comb anymore! Where did you find it? I use a wooden comb, and when I misplace it, I don't comb my hair at all. Why did you let plastic touch me? I will die now!'

Matri ran away in fear.

No one had visited her since then. They weren't even sure whether she lived in that house at all – for no lights were switched on in the evenings. How were they to know that Mrs Chakrabarti had stopped switching on the lights because the switches and switchboards were made of plastic?

No one could quite say who it was that took Mrs Chakrabarti to the hospital. They later speculated that she might have walked to the nursing home by herself. The doctor, who had once looked after her sister Mohua but now avoided her for her refusal to take medicines that came in plastic vials and containers, might have felt pity and admitted her in. He didn't realise that he was making a terrible mistake.

Once in the nursing home, Mrs Chakrabarti refused to let saline and any other medicine be administered to her. The reason wasn't hard to guess – they came in plastic bottles and would enter her body through tiny plastic pipes. She would allow neither a catheter nor an oilcloth to be spread under her. And, of course, no injections and blood tests – there were the plastic disposable syringes.

Though no one was physically present there, they knew of the last conversation she had. It was with the doctor.

'Why are you doing this to yourself, Maya?' he'd asked. He knew she'd stopped eating almost completely – there was nothing, almost nothing, that didn't come inside a plastic container or packet anymore – rice and dal, oil and spices, vegetables and meat; in fact, she'd told him about a rumour that China was now producing plastic rice and eggs in its factories.

'Because I'm Maya,' she'd said feebly.

No one could say what he'd said in response, but they knew her last words: 'Everything is made of plastic now. Everything except Maya. How can Maya be made of plastic?'

In the 'Cause of Death' column, the doctor wrote 'Plastic'. When his assistant looked at him, he added a line: 'Unnatural death caused by trying to avoid natural death.' Dissatisfied with the formulation of that reason, he struck it out twice with black ink and wrote again: 'Plastic.'
The New Provincials

_'I've always been famous. It's just no one knew it yet.'_

—Lady Gaga

LOOKING AT THE PHONE on waking, Shubhro yawned to push the remainder of his sleep away from himself, as if it was a blanket that had become unnecessary with the change of season. The light from the phone fell on his face in the early morning darkness of the room – it stained his skin a sleepy blue and made him look like someone in a movie. If Shubhro had known that, he'd have been happy. He was a performer. He played Shubhro every moment. On the phone screen was a new Facebook post from Deep Mukherjee. Embarrassed that he did not completely understand what it meant, he clicked on 'like'. Then he read it again. He'd be like Deep Mukherjee one day. This trigger for daydreaming was interrupted by his mother blowing the conch. Oh, it must be Thursday – Thursday already? he calculated. Thursday was Lokkhi-bar, when Lakshmi was worshipped with fanfare, with sweets and a surplus of devotion.

_Shonkho bajiye tomaye ghar-ey enechhi_

_Shugondhi dhoop jeley aashon petechhi..._

_Esho maa lokkhi bosho ghar-ey_

_Amar ghar-ey thaako aalo korey._

His mother had begun muttering the panchali – tales of good wives being rewarded by Lokkhi. She knew the words by heart, but reading them from a book through her foggy glasses made her feel important. She prided herself on being almost identical to the ideal woman described in the panchali. Lokkhishri – it'd become an adjective for the good, kind and domesticated woman. This was the only book she'd read in her life – she was grateful that there was at least one book about an ordinary woman like her. All the other books, unread as they were, seemed to be only about _important_ people. That word came to her in English even though she did not know how to read the Roman script. _Important_ people, _successful_ people. She didn't like them.

Shubhro saw her – actually a part of her, her hands folded in prayer – through the gap between the curtain and the door. In the background was the damp green wall he'd seen all his life. He hated it. It signified to him all that he wanted to reject about his life – the poverty and the lack of sophistication that he'd unfortunately been born into. He believed in self-fashioning, he was his own artist and model, he'd turn himself into someone as attractive as Deep Mukherjee.

He moved his eyes away from the corridor that his mother was filling with her chants and incense sticks to the walls in his room. That was the first thing he'd done after getting a job – getting the walls of his room painted, not cheap lime-wash but with Asian Paints and Jenson & Nicholson. Even the names had gravitas, the sound of elsewhere that he wanted for his life. The conch was blown again, thrice. It irritated him. How stupid his mother was. Lokkhi's days were gone. It was the time of Deep Mukherjee.

Leaving the pink-and-purple painted room – three of the walls were pink and one purple, as it was in the catalogue – he came to the bathroom. His father, who'd been trimming the sharp ends of his moustache with a tiny pair of scissors, one that seemed older than him, hurried out. The small rectangular mirror that he'd hung from the bathroom door fell to the floor. It seemed as nervous as the aged man. Shubhro's parents were scared of him. God had been kind, he'd given them a son. And not just a son; he'd given them a son they didn't deserve, far too smart and educated for them. They felt it most in his proximity. He made them nervous, and they made mistakes they wouldn't otherwise.

'Why don't you shave off your moustache?' Shubhro asked his father.

His father took it as an instruction and replied, 'Maybe...since you say... But it's an old friend. I've known it even before I knew you.'

The past again! Shubhro hated this urge to give everything a history. Shubhro hated history – it was a monster, it was biased against people like him. It only cared for ancestry and pedigree. He didn't have a moustache – no successful man in the world today had one. He'd shaved it soon after it'd appeared on his upper lip. Successful people were clean shaven – the Ambanis and Sachin Tendulkar and Salman Khan. It was the first step towards success, and he'd taken it.

Everything since then – he was twenty-seven now – had gone according to plan. Everything except the problem with language. He'd identified this early too, that language was the new caste and the new class, that how one spoke and what one said decided how the world saw – and _rated_ – him. But he wasn't scared. It was only language, a thing that could be learnt and mastered, not a face one couldn't change.

He shaved before brushing his teeth – that he kept for the end. The leftover smell of the toothpaste made him feel _polished._ He pushed the air out of his mouth occasionally, and it made him feel different from those around him, men he imagined as clerks and daily wage labourers or, at the most, school teachers. He was an assistant professor at a government college, the only one from Balurghat who'd managed to _crack_ two difficult examinations in succession to get the job. The gravity of the job had made the 'assistant' redundant – relatives and acquaintances said he was a 'professor'. He'd stopped correcting them. It was, after all, _only a matter of time_ before he became a professor – a PhD degree and fifteen years, that is all it took.

What was complicated was mastering the language that people like Deep Mukherjee spoke. He'd studied at the same university as Deep, and covered the same syllabus in school, but neither of these had taught him to speak this language. The grammar books – Brighter Grammar, PK De Sarkar, Wren and Martin – he'd gone through again and again; _texts_ too, Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Defoe, Tennyson and Browning, Yeats and Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence, Auden and Spender and, in the Special Paper, Achebe and Rushdie. None of these writers wrote in this language; their writing gave pleasure, this new language created bewilderment. He kept the bewilderment to himself, not just from his colleagues in college but from the world – for Facebook was a universe that he'd created for himself, sending friend requests to people he found in the bibliographies of books and essays he read, sending messages of appreciation (always the same message to everyone) to scholars from Europe and America he found commenting on mutual friends' posts. He was a soldier, he was building a bridge.

Today, he'd write a letter to Deep Mukherjee, invite him for a seminar and, after his acceptance, he'd request Mukherjee for help to go abroad, and if that wasn't possible, to at least help him get a research paper published in England or America. UK-US, UK-US, tick-tock, tick-tock – he was in love with the way people like Mukherjee used the acronym.

The wind rushed in from the mustard fields – was it the smell of cow dung or a co-passenger's vomit? Shubhro stood up to close the window. His hair, set carefully by his fingers and a wide-toothed comb, was being blown away. He wanted to get into the examination hall with students, particularly the girls, admiring how the hair fell on his forehead.

It was true that Balurghat was changing, he thought to himself as the bus braked through the streets. There was a crowd in front of Big Bazaar. A balloon-seller so early in the morning? Three balloons – red, green and yellow; the rest were air-filled cut-outs of Chhota Bheem, Doraemon, Ben Ten and a few more characters he couldn't recognise. He blamed his parents – how they'd never bought him any of the comic books that children in the cities read. His childhood, once happy, seemed impoverished in retrospect – no _Archie,_ no Enid Blyton, no _Nancy Drew._ He'd read them later, but it was like comfort food. There was a time for conditioning, for impressions to solidify to taste and the instinct for taste, and that time had gone. He regretted it often – if only he'd been his parent, how well he'd have raised himself. But _there was still time_ – that was the best thing about time, about how generous it was, how some of it always remained, not just for the living but also for the dead.

The bus was filling up. He felt like he was watching a video. He'd seen something called a 'time lapse' video once, a camera recording the blooming of a bud into a flower, time on speed. The bus was filling up like that, the seats being taken, the sounds and smells amplifying. And just as the bud wouldn't become a flower until all its petals had bloomed, the bus wouldn't start until it had filled up completely. He waited, like a cook waiting for the gravy to come to a boil.

He took out a book from his bag. The energy in that action cheered him – he was the only person in the bus who'd be reading. He felt educated – that was more important to him than being educated. Deep Mukherjee had once posted a photo – was it of England or Germany? – of his co-passengers reading on the metro. Why was there no such culture of reading in India? he'd asked. Now Shubhro felt like he was one of them, the cultured and the enlightened, the book reader. It was an accident that he happened to be on this bus and not the Tube. That would change soon. _It was only a matter of time._

_Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life._ A fat book – was it this and not the bottle of water that was adding to the weight of his bag? He'd have to teach it next semester. Why had the Syllabus Committee chosen such an obese book? He'd mentioned it to the Head of the Department once – 'It's a great book,' the man had replied, as if greatness must be measured in size. Eighty chapters! What was it? An encyclopaedia of provincial life? What was there about provincial life that needed so many pages? Ignoring the epigraph from Beaumont and Fletcher's _The Maid's Tragedy,_ thinking it to be a show of unnecessary information – not self-aware enough to realise that this was a mark of the provincial's life, the inconsequential display of knowledge – he read the first line. Twice. He couldn't make much sense of it.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible – or from one of our elder poets – in a paragraph of today's newspaper.

He hadn't read the Bible. He'd read _Paradise Lost._ He didn't know the Italian painters – was Michelangelo Italian? Picasso? How did it matter? It was as useless to him as _Archie_ comics and _Nancy Drew._ What did Nancy Drew look like? Mona Lisa? Leonardo da Vinci – he knew the name of one Italian painter at least! Comforted by that thought, he studied the sentence again, telling himself that he couldn't afford to read every sentence thrice, particularly in a book of eighty chapters. His eyes chose two words from that long sentence – _provincial fashion._ What did it mean? He studied his clothes. _Brands,_ he declared to himself. Everything except the muffler – no, he would teach himself to say 'scarf' instead of 'muffler' – which his mother had bought from Siliguri's Bhutia market. No, this wasn't _provincial fashion._ He was wearing the kind of clothes that wealthy actors wore in their movies. He closed the book. He'd read it later, in the examination hall.

The phone stirred in his pocket. The noise had drowned its beep. A Facebook notification. Deep Mukherjee had 'liked' his comment. He read his words again, with pride.

_Yes, the subaltern can speak, but only on Facebook._

If only Spivak had seen this – was she on Facebook?–it'd be worth more than even his PhD degree. Just before he was about to leave the page, he saw someone's post about _weekend plans._ The phrase spoiled his mood. It made him feel deprived. What exactly was a weekend? Many things had been imported to this country, to small towns like Balurghat, but not this thing called a _weekend._ It was an invention, and as useless an import to poor countries as the bathtub.

He felt sad without reason. The memory of taking an online quiz came back to him. _How many of these 100 great books have you read?_ 63/100, said a student from Delhi University. 72/100, declared a girl who'd studied at Jadavpur University. He'd read only 18 of them – they were the ones that had been prescribed on the university syllabus. He hadn't even bought a hundred books in his life. And there was no public library in Balurghat. How was he expected to read them? _Privilege._ He said the word really loud in his mind, as if he were shouting a cuss word. (He remembered the time when he'd shouted the word out at home and his mother had come running, assuring him that she'd kept his favourite part of the fish, the lyaj for him. Privilege, he'd told her, not lyaj, the tail, and she'd returned to the kitchen feeling illiterate about the name of some fish in English.) Not one to be cowed down by such invisible bullying, he calculated with all his might – 82 more to be read; if he began today, as he just had, and finished a book a week, he'd need about one and a half years. It wasn't impossible at all – he'd cut down on his sleep, an hour borrowed from there, and another from Facebook.

Was _Middlemarch_ in that list? He'd lost the link now; it didn't matter. He'd have to read the novel anyway. How else would he teach it? With that sense of utilitarianism pushing him, like a tongue through a bubblegum, he opened the novel again. And again the first line. Okay, Miss Brooke was very beautiful. Couldn't George Eliot have just said that? He read the second half of the line, the words after the semicolon (he hated semicolons – they were useless, like speed breakers).

...and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible – or from one of our elder poets – in a paragraph of today's newspaper.

_The impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible._ Now, it was this phrase that stuck in his head. He'd ignored it before, from an amorphous sense of guilt, the guilt of an underprepared examinee, but it was sticky, like a cough in the throat. The last nine years of a life in literature, first as a student and now as an academic (that word pleased him – it was a prop, a make-believe halo that he took off only when he went to sleep), had taught him the value of the quotation. It was more powerful than name-dropping. Facebook was full of quotations, from books and essays. When he came to it first, three years ago, his mind had likened these to medals of honour on an army man's uniform. He'd asked his father, a clerk in Hili High School, about all the quotations he knew. A few everyday proverbs, that was all. How the world had changed – his father had gone through life without needing very much, not clothes, not quotations, but here he was, when everything seemed insufficient.

He'd hidden the ambition even from himself. But now, that wispy phrase, 'the _impressiveness of a fine quotation',_ had made him aware of the desire – he wanted to be the creator of sayings that people would quote to validate their thoughts and arguments. He felt a philanthropic urge – to be useful to people in debates. To have his thoughts held between quotation marks – that was the greatest respect one could pay a scholar; no, a person. He temporarily forgot all his difficulties with learning quotes for examinations, how he'd relied on three dots to cover up for his memory, forgetting words and phrases. He was working on his doctoral dissertation. Below every page was at least one footnote. For nothing was it called a footnote. The words wouldn't walk to the next page without it. In them was the display of hard work, of learning, of a family of ideas and thinkers with whom one was claiming a relationship, in them was an acknowledgement of gratitude. All this he understood, but what he didn't was the obsession to attribute every thought to someone who'd come into the world before him. Though they called it plagiarism – thievery – what it actually meant was that no one would take responsibility for their thoughts – someone had said it before him, he was just quoting people, it wasn't really his fault.

When he mentioned it to his father once, calling it, at first, 'the anxiety of the footnote', then simplifying it for his comprehension, the aged man couldn't make out what the fuss was about. Shob boi-ey aachhey (everything's in the books). Didn't we say that once? the poor man asked. It was true, just saying that was enough once. Now no one believed you. So you had to show who had said what and where, on which page in which book and in which edition. That culture of distrust had come to them from America, where this culture of citation must have originated.

Something else he'd discovered about America without going to it. Everyone discovers a wrong America first, like Columbus – Deep Mukherjee had once said that in a Facebook post. Ever since then, he'd been careful about imagining his impressions about America (he still couldn't say 'US' or 'the States'). It was while reading _Provincialising Europe,_ a book by an Indian historian telling the truth about Europe, that it was, in spite of its show of great cosmopolitanism, actually exceptionally provincial, that the thought had occurred to him – that America was the most provincial place in the world. He'd soon tell the world why. The title of the book had made a home in his consciousness – _Provincial America._ It'd make him famous, it'd turn his words to quotes.

It didn't matter to him – for the real world didn't infringe upon his imagination – that the students he taught in the college in Raiganj, where he was now travelling to, spelt 'quote' as 'coat'.

'Quote,' he'd said to a boy during a viva-voce examination last year.

The student had been answering a question about _Robinson Crusoe._ 'I don't have a coat, Sir. It's summer,' he'd said in response.

No one had understood the relation between 'quote' and 'summer', not until the student had left and tea had been served.

It didn't strike him as odd, the difference between his ambition and where he was. He wouldn't repeat the mistake his father and uncles had made – of growing roots. Roots were old things. He wanted to be new. Roots were invisible, like his father and grandfather had been. He wanted to be the focus of attention every moment, he wanted to be visible, he wanted to be not a root but a flower, to have the flamboyance of flowers. His father had spent his life looking at his image in the handheld mirror – he hardly looked at it. But Shubhro was his own annotator – he wanted his mind to be available to the world in quotation marks, he wanted to be revealed, his face recognisable to acquaintances and strangers.

He took out his phone again. He'd post something. Everything needed riyaz (he liked to say 'riyaz' instead of the Bangla 'reyaj'), Haripada Sir, his Mathematics teacher in school, used to say – everything, singing and listening, English and Mathematics, even walking. To become quotable needed riyaz, too – so many practised it on Facebook. He'd do the same. He looked out of the window – the bus still hadn't left Balurghat. Everything moved slowly here, time and people, even the bus. An old man was selling tamarind – the pods stuck to each other in a way that resembled a beehive. As the bus crawled towards the corner where the man was sitting, a shivering statue with nothing moving except his teeth, the smell of tamarind throttled the bus. They seemed unable to move – the bus, the driver and its passengers. Shubhro swallowed the rush of saliva in his mouth. He was embarrassed that he had no control. It was a sign of his provinciality. Would a sophisticated man have succumbed to the sight and smell of ripe tamarind? In all likelihood, they'd never even have tasted it. He was angry with the University of North Bengal. Titora – five rupees of that sweet-sour thing that one sucked out of a tiny plastic packet; the Nepali girls had got him addicted. Then it had seemed so _cool_ – the girls with their straight hair and modellike faces sucking something from a packet. He'd copied them. How he'd changed from that person. It was because his ambition had changed – he didn't just want to look smart, he wanted to appear sophisticated. He wanted to spit out the saliva. But that'd make him even more plebeian. He swallowed it again, surprised by the resilience of the body, how it could accept everything. If only his mind were more like his body. That would happen. _It was only a matter of time._

The bus had become crowded. The driver was braking to make more space, the way his mother beat a container against the table to make space for more moori to get in. He hadn't noticed that a young girl was sitting beside him. It wasn't the girl that surprised him as much as what she was doing. She was reading a book in English. It filled him with mixed emotions: maybe the bus in Balurghat was gradually turning into a metro in a European city. He surveyed her book from the corner of his eye. Charles Lamb. Was she a student taking an English Honours exam in a college nearby? If so, he was angry that she hadn't recognised him. He had the record for the highest marks in English Literature by a student from Balurghat in his name, but, quite clearly, it was a useless distinction. He longed to be recognised, to be asked for his opinion, or to pose in a selfie.

_Dream Children._ The page in the book was open at this essay. The girl was muttering something to herself, in a rhythm that wasn't very different from his mother's Lokkhi panchali. He remembered something and suppressed his laughter. At a viva-voce examination, he had a question for a student: 'Name one essay by Charles Lamb that's been prescribed for your reading by the university.'

The answer was prompt. 'Dream Girl'. The name of the Hindi film alongside the potency of that youthful expression had had him confused.

'If there is no Dream Girl, how can you have Dream Children?' he'd replied.

He returned to his phone. He wanted to post a quote, something that was seemingly simple but deeply philosophical. He looked for inspiration outside the window. 'Blow Horn'; 'Buy One Get One Free' on the blue shutter of a store that still hadn't opened; 'Where will you go?', from the bus conductor; 'What's your size?', a hawai chappal-seller; 'Dekhbi, jolbi/Luchir mawto phoolbi' ('You'll watch and burn with jealousy, and swell up like a puri'). All of these lines had resonances besides their immediate meaning. Like poetry or philosophy. Putting them in quotes would give them gravitas. Should he do that? He spent time on Facebook posts and comments, weighing them, as one would an examination answer.

The girl sneezed. A water droplet fell on 'M' – 'Lamb' became 'Lab'. She didn't say 'Sorry' or 'Excuse me'. English Literature hadn't taught her _manners._

Comedy of Manners, he thought. The girl sitting next to him wouldn't know what it meant (a question on the subject hadn't been asked for the last few years – students only studied for _important questions_ in exams). She also wouldn't know that she and many like her, whose ambitions were incongruent with the roots of their lives, were living their lives as if it was a Comedy of Manners. Ah, that was it, that'd be his post. He juggled the words in his mind, feeling nervous about making a mistake, aware of the destructive gravitational pull of bad grammar. Dissatisfied with the permutations inside his head (All the world's a stage, and we actors in this Comedy of Manners – this was his favourite, and it hurt him slightly to abandon it), he took out all the words, like his father sheared a coconut. Just the kernel. And so only the phrase from where the thought had begun: Comedy of Manners.

Gangarampur. The girl got down. So she was a student of Gangarampur College. As he stretched his legs slightly, he felt relieved without reason.

A man took the vacant seat almost immediately. Shubhro turned away from the smell of hair oil. He tried to guess the brand – Dabur Amla or Parachute? He knew this smell but couldn't identify it – it was like a school friend whose face he could remember but not the name. Was it an insult to those whose names we couldn't remember? Like the old classmate one wants to forget and has therefore forgotten.

He grew slightly impatient to post something. Angry that life gave him so few opportunities to represent it as interesting to the world, he, by default, thought of his parents. How ordinary they were, how lacking in beauty and humour and interest, how non-photogenic, both they and their surroundings. That proverb about lotus and the dung had to do with exceptions – _he_ was that exception. He'd be the first breakout, the first person from Balurghat, from his family, both pathetically unremarkable, to arrive into the world. The PhD was a side dish. It was like a comb, giving his hair form. His real energy – he called it 'mangsho-bhaat energy', in contrast to 'doodh-bhaat energy', meat-and-rice energy, not baby-food rice-and-milk energy – was in what he was doing every moment: self-fashioning.

At moments it felt that he was really like Sisyphus – it was impossible to fight destiny's obedience to its own laws of gravity. But he wouldn't give up without a fight. That is why every moment was important to him, containing the germ of a victory. The opponent was an abstraction, it was true – though his father, an amateur astrologer, saw it clearly drawn in the lines on palms – but so was the reward: the _future._ There was such great hope in the assurance that the future was elastic, that it could hold so much, the possible and even the unimagined. It was perhaps this that gave him secretive energy of a seed – but it also made him feel trapped inside himself, crouched, shrunken, waiting for time to water him to fullness. Every moment was a stop, a station that wasn't his.

But, for now, for the present, a moment for which he had little respect, he had to reach Raiganj. He was the exam invigilator.

'Aaj ki baar?' the man sitting next to him asked.

Shubhro wondered whether his mother had ironed his hankie. Had she put it in his back pocket? The man's breath was stained by beedi.

'Thursday,' he said, looking out of the window.

'Third day?' the man repeated. 'Ki baar?'

Shubhro had found his post. 'Brihaspati-baar,' he said, moving to the Facebook page on his phone. He'd report this conversation, about 'Thursday' becoming 'Third day'. He'd seen Deep Mukherjee post about such things; also Professor Seturaman and Dr Singh, the latter from America.

But how did Rita Banerjee, in Jalpaiguri, more than 500 kms away, know about this?

'Third Day.' That was her Facebook post. Shubhro was bewildered, and, almost immediately, scared. Had he been mispronouncing Thursday all his life? Was the 's' silent? Only a couple of years ago – or was it last year? – he'd discovered the correct pronunciation of 'Wednesday'. Not Wed-nas-day. He was filled with embarrassment thinking about the number of times he'd mispronounced the word. Was 'Thursday' actually 'Third Day'? He unzipped his jacket to his stomach – the nervousness made him hot. He was counting the sequence of days on his fingers: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday... No, it was the fifth day, not the third. Not even if one started counting from Monday.

But he had to know, he had to find out. So he commented: 'Third day?'

Rita Banerjee's response was prompt. 'Yes, third day of my period.'

Unable to enjoy his relief of knowing that he actually hadn't been mispronouncing Thursday all his life, he grew anxious about what he should say in response. He'd read articles in _Huffington Post_ and _Buzzfeed_ about the need for women to talk about their period openly, as if it was nothing more than a headache (no, no, not a headache, something more normal). But he didn't know what men were supposed to say in response. He decided that he'd stay offline for some time – he imported his strategy from real-life quarrel situations into his online life often. But he was also two different people – the Shubhro Mitra on Facebook wasn't the same person as the Babu who woke up in the house with damp green walls in Rathkhola. He'd never heard the word 'period' being said in his life. His mother had kept it a secret from him. He was still without a girlfriend – he longed to hear her _say_ the word. There was such a difference between reading a word and hearing it being spoken.

'Look at what's happened to Gangarampur,' said a male voice.

'Population problem,' said another, in English; the phrase had sneaked into Bangla a couple of decades ago.

'I used to take a morning walk on this road. Even three years ago...'

'Yes. And an old brinjal-seller would sit there – right over there, under the lamp post (it was wooden then) – with the best Panjipara brinjals. You know, those that melt in the mouth...'

'My mother, if she were alive, wouldn't recognise this Balurghat...'

'It is good that Mashima's not alive. Think of the pain and confusion it'd cause her.'

Shubhro hated such conversation. He was not a nostalgist. His attachment was to the future, not to a past over which he had no control.

The vegetable market – less a market, and more a street lined on either side with baskets of fresh produce – would have looked like a painting (Gauguin, he said to himself, pronouncing it like 'penguin', then correcting himself) had it not been for the smells. It had once been full of wonder and beauty when he would accompany his father to the Saturday haat as a child. He remembered the smell of fresh vegetables bursting out of his father's bag, the stems of the young bottle gourd creeping out of it like an infant's curious fingers from a cot, and, returning home, his dusty feet. The dust-soaked water running from his feet towards the moss-mouthed drain – what a thrill there was in watching these journeys of things flowing out of one's bodies (the urine on the dry bathroom floor, no less colourful than his mother's alpona).

How gross childhood was. He congratulated himself on having reached where he was, unstained by it. He looked at his maroon socks briefly – his feet would never get dirty again.

He felt pity for the vegetable-sellers, how they'd not see the world beyond this street, and how the world would never know of them. Did such a life have any value at all? Was it really true, as an American professor lecturing in their college had said, that a vegetable-seller affected more lives than a teacher? Did the man selling brinjals know that 'begoon' was called 'brinjal' and 'eggplant' and 'aubergine'? Would it have made him happy? It was, after all, like having London, New York and New Delhi editions of one's book. Poor man, he thought: _Ish._

The smell of his co-passenger's hair oil brought him back, not in space but in time, for he lived more in the future than he did in the present. He was addicted to the future, to the rewards it held and which the present continued to hold back. Resisting the urge to sneeze, he turned towards the cause of the sneeze and asked, 'Where are you going?'

The response was prompt. 'Goose-rat.'

Shubhro knew what it meant. Gujarat. Gravely, he said, 'There are no z sounds in Bangla. Only j and jh. Gujarat. Not Goose-rat.'

The man was startled, not by the piece of information, which didn't mean anything to him, but that the barrage of English was directed at him. It reminded him of the time he went to a restaurant and the waiter thrust a menu card in front of him – how could this be food, all these things in English? English could only be medicine, those difficult names on bottles and strips of tablets.

In response now, he uttered the longest English sentence he knew. It was in a song – Amitabh Bachchan coming out of an egg, in a hat, a stick in hand, saying these words like koo-jhik-jhik, in shai-shai-shai speed.

_You See The Whole Country Of The System Is Juxtaposition By The Haemoglobin In The Atmosphere Because You Are Sophisticated Rhetorician Intoxicated By The Exuberance Of Your Own Publicity._

Shubhro was shocked – it might have been that shock which had turned 'verbosity', the last word of the utterance, into 'publicity'. Again, not by these polysyllabic words coming out of a man with peeling dry skin, in a sweater and lungi, not to mention the stink of his hair oil, but the epiphany in the words themselves. He recognised the nonsense in them, the arbitrary arrangement of the words, their rejection of meaning – they'd been chosen and then set beside each other only because of their polysyllabic nature and their comic foreignness. And then he saw, though still as a blur, the way one sees things immediately after waking up, that the symptom had been diagnosed much before the disease had turned into an epidemic.

Everyone spoke like that now, college teachers and PhD students, collating words together without creating relationships between them, so that the sentence seemed not like a home, a place of rest, but an inn, where people were unrelated to each other, where there was no conversation. He decided to post this on Facebook.

'What's on your mind?'

_You See The Whole Country Of The System Is Juxtaposition By The Haemoglobin In The Atmosphere Because You Are Sophisticated Rhetorician Intoxicated By The Exuberance Of Your Own Publicity_

As he was typing this, another minor epiphany came to him – this line, unfriendly to meaning as it seemed, was an appropriate description of Facebookers too: _The Exuberance of Your Own Publicity._

The first like had arrived. Or perhaps the first liker (last February, on Valentine's Day, he'd got an anonymous letter from someone who'd written, 'Sir, I promise I'll be a good laugher'. She'd meant 'lover', of course, but 'laugher' was probably how she pronounced the word.).

Julia Kristeva.

He wasn't surprised. She was almost always the first person to like his Facebook posts. It wasn't the real Julia Kristeva, of course. A student who, like a few others he knew, used a pseudonym. Almost inevitably, the pseudonym they adopted was the name of a critical theorist or philosopher. His colleague, Manojit, called himself Man Chomsky – Shubhro had once mistakenly said 'Man Chomsky' instead of 'Noam Chomsky' at a seminar. Such assumed names were disorienting – he could no longer remember the real Kristeva's face. When he heard the name, it was his student Pinky's face that came to his mind.

He'd returned to _Middlemarch._ The bus had moved out of Gangarampur. The sun, though anaemic, was blooming gradually. It had reached the edge of the agricultural fields and would've reached them too had the bus not run away. The bus had picked up speed as it always did once out of crowded towns – the speed created an illusion of warmth, as if the passengers were running and would soon begin sweating. It was a cold day, so cold that it had almost stunned the passengers into silence. There was no sound in the bus, except cell phones ringing and someone from the last row of seats, possibly a man, making a shivering sound – uuuuuuuuu.

Shubhro's phone rang. He looked at the name of the caller (sometimes, like at this moment, he couldn't forget his father's face of disbelief at the name of the caller appearing on the phone screen; the old man was from a world where ordinary things were imbued with a sense of mystery – no one knew who was calling until the voice announced itself from the other end of the line). Ashok Sir. His teacher in college, now retired. What was it _this_ time? How would _Shubhro_ know when his pension would be released? _No,_ he didn't know anyone in Calcutta's Bikash Bhavan. He ignored the call. The phone rang again. What an insistent caller.

Hello, he said, though he was on the verge of saying 'uff'.

'Shubhro,' the voice said, 'Kaymon aachho, baba?'

He hated being called 'baba' and 'babu'. That old-world familiarity and infantilisation at the same time. Intolerable.

'I'm good,' he said, in an accent that wasn't completely his, but one he wanted to use, to show Ashok Sir the difference between the two of them, two generations of college teachers of course, but particularly between Shubhro and the man. He was as new as America, as Facebook – his teacher an old provincial. He wouldn't let that word taint his life.

'Will you help me with a quotation, baba?'

'Sure,' said Shubhro in his self-absorption.

'That Fool...'

'Fool? Ke?' he asked, curious. Was it any of his classmates? Himangshu?

'That Fool who says something about greatness.'

Shubhro was suddenly annoyed. 'Fool?' he asked.

'Yes, that fool-like man in _Twelfth Night._ That man who says something about greatness... What's his name?'

'Do you mean Malvolio?' he asked, conscious of replying in English.

'Yes, yes, baba. Do you remember the quote about greatness?'

'"Some are born great, some achieve greatness,/and some have greatness thrown upon them." That one?'

'Yes, yes, yes. Thank you, baba. How are you? I've been thinking of these lines for the last few days, but they just wouldn't come to me. Do you know why?'

'Why?' said Shubhro politely and without interest.

'Well, it started like this. Sadhan – my son, you remember him, don't you? – bought me a new phone. And then he showed me something called Friendsbook...'

'Facebook, Sir, not Friendsbook.'

'Yes, yes, yes,' the aged man replied; saying 'yes' thrice was one of his tics. 'So this is what I see on Facebook – people using quotes all the time, as if it was a quote-emitting factory. At first, I didn't want to add to the effluent, but even to criticise it, to stop people from feeling celebratory about it, I thought I must use a quote myself. It was then that I thought of this quote.'

Shubhro was exhausted by his teacher's English – it seemed like he was listening to a book being read, he even heard the commas and periods. Realising that he was expected to reply, he said, 'You don't necessarily have to post a quote, Sir. People share news and other people's posts, too.'

'Yes, but news reports and other people's posts are quotes too. Why do you think people do this, baba?'

Irritated by everything around him, but mostly Facebook, which wasn't helping him to become famous in the way it had so many, he said, 'To become famous.'

'Oh,' replied the old man, 'perhaps they will now have a subject in school – that teaches students to become famous.'

Shubhro was eager for the conversation to end, to check responses to his Facebook post, for comments confirming his intelligence to himself. 'Sir, I'll have to get down from the bus very soon. Let's talk later again?'

Only three likes. It had been nine minutes since he'd posted. If Deep Mukherjee had posted this, there would have been 300 likes by now.

He looked into the bus. A man was trying to insert a broken umbrella inside a plastic bottle – the Aquafina bottle would serve as the umbrella's temporary handle. Shubhro knew the name for this – jugaad. Indians had come to be identified with it, he knew. Deep Mukherjee had extrapolated the concept of jugaad to explain why Indian academics, particularly those who taught and wrote about literature and the social sciences, had begun to write in this strange language that neither belonged to them nor to anyone identifiable. He had likened the quotational fabric of Facebook to academic papers – their language was a practical and material problem, Deep had argued. It came from the lack of resources in the provinces. Just as the plastic bottle was serving as an umbrella handle but could be replaced with a stick or anything else, similarly, scholars were looking for a quote from any possible theorist to make their paper stand. They had no ideological affiliation to the thinker – the quote was enough. It was the provincial's bricolage – it depended purely on the availability of books and texts in these small places. The Indian scholar had become a walking Facebook – reproducing quotes and thoughts. One didn't hear his voice but the voices of those who'd spoken before him.

Shubhro knew this was true, and tried not to be this parody. But how was it possible to escape this epidemic? How else would he become famous?

The first bell had rung before Shubhro had entered the examination hall. Digonto, his colleague, who lived nearby, had distributed the answer scripts. They looked at each other but didn't speak a word, as if they too were bound by the examinees' code of silence. The students had begun writing their names and other details on the cover page of the answer script. Digonto came to him and whispered, 'Have you noticed how many students have coloured their hair? I've been teaching in this college for twenty-three years. This is a new phenomenon. I don't understand why they have to...'

'Should we give out the question papers now? Only five minutes remain...'

'Yes, here, you take half the bunch...'

Shubhro peeled dry skin off his lips. He felt the urge to look at his phone, to check for responses. Something told him that he was on the verge of being famous. It was no longer _a matter of time._ It was about to happen. It was possible that this post would make him famous – if it did, he'd be sharing the glory with Amitabh Bachchan, but did that matter? Academics co-wrote books and essays often after all.

The sun was behaving like a paying guest – it was only a few minutes past eleven, but it was checking out for the day. Shubhro's hands were freezing. He rubbed them and started walking, hoping to bring some warmth to his body. Who'd believe that Raiganj could be this cold in January? It was too cold for him to hold _Middlemarch_ in his hands.

Examination time behaves in a bipolar manner: it seems too short for examinees and too long for invigilators. Shubhro noticed something odd in the third row. He'd forgotten the girl's name – was she from History Honours? – but he'd seen her on Facebook, and on the bus to Balurghat a few times. She got down before him always. She seemed to be copying from a tiny piece of paper. Shubhro walked swiftly towards her and put his hand out – it was a friendly way of asking for what students called the 'cheat chit' or 'micro-xerox'. The girl pretended not to see. He stood there, his palm facing her.

'I follow you on Facebook,' the girl said.

Shubhro saw her name on the answer sheet. Prarthona. 'Give me the piece of paper, Prarthona,' he said, his voice soft and calm. He'd let her go – he'd just take away the piece of paper, he wouldn't report her.

'It's only a quote from Ambedkar,' the girl replied. 'Please let me copy this, Sir.'

He shook his head.

A silent battle continued for some time.

'You just posted a quote from _Amar Akbar Anthony._ Isn't that cheating too, then?' the girl said. 'I'm quoting from Ambedkar. How are they different? Ambedkar is more important than Anthony.'

Something in Shubhro snapped. He leapt at the girl, trying to get the piece of paper out of her hand. The girl had, in the meantime, put the piece of paper inside her sweater.

When Shubhro reached home, he saw he'd been tagged 126 times on Facebook. The girl's post had gone viral:

Professor Shubhro Ghosh molested a Final Year student in Raiganj College. He pulled her by the hand, and also tried to put his hand inside her sweater. We demand his immediate suspension.

Prarthona and her classmates, who had jumped at him and fought him, scratching his face and neck, had made him 'famous'.
My Mother's Lover

_'Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never understand such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.'_

—George Orwell

I DISCOVERED HIM IN a poem. My mother's lover. But that was not until I had made other discoveries about her.

I had been expecting the phone to ring every morning. She had been ill for some time and the doctor in Varanasi had said – quoting a poetess I did not know then – that she would be with us until 'salt melts in the hands', by which he probably meant the end of summer. He had not been wrong. It was the ninth morning of September.

'She left us last night.' That was all Tina would say. She would not use the words 'died' or 'expired'. Those were always used for other people; not for those whose cold scaly feet we smeared with red ink for impressions of footprints to frame on walls next to our favourite gods and goddesses.

Tina refused to tell me anything else or, even if she did, I had perhaps refused to hear because I'd been making mental journeys of my own, like calling the Singapore Airlines office for my air ticket and leaving the trash outside the door. She had sent me an email, she said, crying; I, too, had been crying while talking to her, but her tears sounded different, even odd, soaked more with anger than hurt.

I wouldn't have checked my email at the airport had she not insisted, for though I was the older twin, I had grown up listening to her; it was not really pampering a younger sister, as maintaining the illusion of being the older sister.

'Mrs Srivastava used to write poetry,' her email began.

I stopped reading; Tina had sent me a wrong email by mistake, I thought. Curious, I read on. I couldn't understand why my sister would write an email about a poetess on the morning after her mother's death.

Yes, you are reading it right – Mrs Srivastava used to write poetry. In case you are confused, let me clarify that she was the woman we called Mother. No, this is not a secret that we hid from you. We only came to know this morning, half a day before you...

When we were preparing to take her body to the cremation ghat, a few strangers arrived. Their white clothes led me to mistake them for grieving relatives from her side of the family. Soon Babuji and I found ourselves pushed to a corner in our own house. This group of men, led by a pot-bellied man whom others were addressing as Gupta-ji, let us know that we would not be allowed to take Ma's body to the burning ghat until the television crew from AajTak and CNN-IBN had arrived. We were surprised, rather shocked. Neelima Bua asked them why. That Gupta man shouted at her saying, 'She's not your property. She's the property of the nation, of Hindusthan, of Hindi-sthan.' By this time I was sure that these were a bunch of mad men who had fled from the sanatorium in nearby Ranchi, but I was too exhausted to take control. And Vikram wasn't at home; he'd be able to reach Benares only at midnight.

OK, let me cut the story short. This is what we learnt: that Gupta-ji was a publisher, that he had been publishing Ma's poetry for the last twenty-four years, that she had written under pseudonyms all her life and yes, that she was a 'celebrated' poet, an 'asset', 'one of the most important female poets in post-Independence Hindi Literature'. These are not my words but of those stupid TV journalists.

Do you realise how I feel? How Babu-ji feels?

How do you feel?

Why did she need to hide this from us? Why?

I can never forgive her for...

I couldn't read any further; I felt like a student who, on entering the examination hall, discovers that she's prepared for the wrong subject. Unexpectedness was only part of the curse, the most significant emotion, after the initial shock of betrayal. It took me a long time to realise that what I had felt was not betrayal but the pain of exclusion; she had played word games with the world after putting us to sleep.

The flight was on time. I went through the security check, opened my handbag and socks, let my most precious things go through the scanners. My mother had done the same in life, and yet she had hidden what was most important to her.

It would perhaps have been easier for me to accept that my mother had been a flautist, someone who had accumulated and then put all her breaths into a piece of wood to let the world hear her; that would perhaps have been easier to accept because I'd have been able to fill the auditorium with dark silhouettes of strangers. But the thought of her being a poet, someone who had made dealings with the world on a page in daylight in a language that I no longer use in my daily conversation with my American husband, my divided children or my colleagues in Boston, infuriated me.

On the plane, sitting next to the window, I began to think of my childhood, to search for her in a time when she was only ours, Tina's, my father's and mine.

We grew up, my twin sister and I now realise, without stories. My mother must have been busy telling stories to other people, more important and more understanding than us, two little girls quarrelling, at bedtime, about who would sleep near the window. I remember my mother coming into our bedroom once, with a pen in hand, her hair tied into a drooping knot and acting judge, with almost the same verdict every day, 'Who sleeps near the window sleeps closer to God.'

We didn't argue with her then, but when we'd grown up and moved to a new house with separate bedrooms for the two of us, we didn't give in so easily.

'I don't want to sleep with God,' Tina had said to her one day but my mother hadn't been surprised.

'I wouldn't like to either,' she'd answered without a smile, and adjusted the curtains on the window before pulling the door behind her.

Our father was a sales manager who changed jobs often. My memory of him is a blur of blue shirts always opening doors – doors of the house, of the garage, of his bedroom, of the car and, sometimes, the bedroom. I try to remember him otherwise and I fail – the blue shirt and tie, the bluish-grey suit, sometimes the blue marks on his hand left by an outdated stamp-pad. Only, I can't remember whether he wore blue shoes, but that might be because I don't remember looking at his feet. In fact, I don't remember looking at him at all; children never look at their parents because they need no meaning to interpret two people who act as traffic police in their lives. Parents, I have discovered, though only after becoming one, look at their children, study them in their sleep, in photographs and even during school sports or concerts, just to confirm, again and again, that the object of their love is worth their sincerity.

'My mother is a housewife,' we said to friends in school or to quiz-masters in competitions, sometimes with embarrassment, especially when Rohini, the girl who came first in our class, said that her mother was a scientist. What a blessing to have a scientist-mother, we thought; to live in a house full of beakers and test tubes full of important liquids, _doing_ something for the world, inventing new things and planning to go to Mars or Jupiter for summer vacations. Our mother did nothing; she didn't even cook, except sometimes on Sundays; she gave instructions to the maid; she wrote something all day, all our childhood.

We find it strange now, when Tina and I talk about her, that we were never interested in what she wrote; it never occurred to us that she could be writing something _important._ 'Important' – that's the word they used for her in the obituary, 'important writer'.

Why did we not ever ask ourselves that question? _'What_ does my mother write all the time? _Why_ does my mother write all the time?'

Perhaps because her writing never interfered with the rhythm of our children-lives; perhaps because what she wrote, and sometimes in spite of it, she remained our mother.

Tina discovered it, only a part of it, before I did. She was always good at discovering new things; she even discovered her menstrual cycle a few days before I discovered mine. And love.

We were in a bookshop, only the two of us, looking for love poems. It was Tina's idea, to surprise the man she loved secretly, with a poem on Valentine's Day. We must have been about seventeen then and had tired of 'Roses are red, I won't come with you to bed', but her secret love was a lecturer in Hindi Literature, and he _loved_ poetry. We hated poetry, Tina and I. It only made our life more complicated by not speaking directly to us. But Tina was so much in love with this balding man, she could do anything for him – read poetry and speak in complete grammatical sentences, even during dinner.

There were hardly any poems about love on the bookshelves. Tina said that it wasn't the time for love and I agreed.

We did find a book of poems at last; it was, however, in Hindi. Our Hindi was poor, but it was enough to help us to translate the writer's words into English and pass them off as Tina's. 'Good, Professor Singh won't even find out that I didn't write the poem. He'll think I'm the perfect girl for him.' I remember that we paid only twenty-five rupees for the book.

'The writer must be a woman,' Tina concluded as we entered the house.

It was early spring and we hadn't carried warm clothes with us; our mother scolded us as soon as she saw us.

'Ma, Tina's bought a book of poems,' I said, trying to divert her attention. I'd come to realise that she liked listening to poetry. She would turn on the radio in the afternoon on certain days of the week and listen to a man or a woman saying difficult words, painfully, the lilt of the faraway in their voice, and whisper 'Wah wah' as if she was speaking to them.

'Are you in love, Tintin?' Ma asked Tina. She called her Tintin just as she called me Tush-Tush, affectionately, but, in front of the world, even the maid, we were always Tina and Tushi.

'No, Ma. I want to be a writer,' Tina replied, unprepared for the question.

'And what's the first book you've bought for that?' she asked, smiling.

_'Sweeping My Self,'_ Tina and I replied, translating the title from Hindi.

I didn't notice it then but when I think of it now, I can see that my mother hadn't even asked to see the book.

We discovered the name of the poet much later. The publishers of _Sweeping My Self_ could afford to spend on only one photograph – they had chosen the photograph of the brown broom on the cover over a photograph of the writer. But it is strange that we, who'd grown up in a culture of naming a poem followed by the name of the poet – ' _Africa_ by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore', _'The Unknown Citizen_ by WH Auden' – hadn't cared to even find out the name of the poet of _Sweeping My Self._ It was perhaps because Tina had only wanted the words; she hadn't needed the voice.

The poet of _Sweeping My Self_ wrote under a pseudonym, Kutumb; it means 'family'.

'What a strange name for a man, Kutumb!' said Tina, the next morning at breakfast.

'A man?' asked my mother.

My father was away on a tour, selling generators to managers in tea gardens.

'Yes. And I had thought that it was a woman...'

'But Kutumb could be a woman as well?' asked my mother.

'Don't be stupid, Ma. Imagine a girl with a name like Kutumb...'

'Why not, Tintin?'

'Oh, Ma! Imagine yourself with the name... Kutumb Srivastav...'

'I don't think I'd ever write with the baggage of a surname,' Ma had said then.

Now, when I think of the room in which my mother spent most of her day, perhaps writing, I can remember the faint smell of cigarette smoke behind the decaying curtains. My father was away from home most of the time, even missing our birthdays and annual concert days in school without regret. He was a heavy smoker, and Tina and I came to associate the smell of cigarette smoke with his temporary return to the saltiness of our lives. I can still remember the unsettling smell of cigarette in the damp house hitting our faces when Basanti, the maid, opened the door. We'd think that our father had returned. We'd take off our shoes and leave our school bags in the living room and go upstairs to his bedroom to meet him. But he wouldn't be there.

Who smoked cigarettes while our father was away? Was it our mother or someone else? Was it the man whose 'back was full of green grass in which Radha lost her toe-ring'?

Tina told me once – I think it was a week after I discovered the man in the poem – that she'd had a nightmare in which our mother was smoking cigarettes, one after the other, and stubbing the burning pieces on Cuddly, our pink teddy bear, and then stuffing her pillowcase with her poems, her manuscripts. I told Tina that the woman in her dream couldn't have been our mother. Our mother smelled of lemon (how often she'd say, 'Like a lemon, I'm turning bitter with the world's squeezing!' after a tiff with Father). But Tina's been insistent – she'll have me believe that it was our mother who smoked those cigarettes. She thinks that, like her writing, there are other things about our mother that we do not yet know.

Sometimes, especially when I have to scrape burnt milk off a steel vessel at the end of an afternoon, I begin to believe in Tina's words. My mother, during these moments, becomes someone else, a woman strangely younger than when I saw her last, a woman at the bus-stop whom men refuse to forget for a few nights, a woman swinging her legs on a sewing-machine in the middle of the night, a woman who stores cough syrup in her wardrobe. I do not know why my mother is never my mother in my dream. After her death and after my discovery, she's become someone else for me, a pet name on a spine in a book on a shelf, like the name of an expensive but necessary drug at a chemist's, or, as Tina's husband said to me over the phone, like a newspaper in an unfamiliar language in a foreign country.

Sometimes I feel that I'm beginning to miss her, to think of her in the way my South Indian neighbour Bharati feels her mother – in the style of her plait, in the hot flush of her ears, in her underlined horoscope that she scrutinises for new stories whenever her husband is away on a sales tour. I realise that I've begun to miss my mother the most when my car passes by a bookstore. Even the magazine vendor in train compartments reminds me of her in a way I cannot explain.

I remember an obituary I read on the train from Delhi to Varanasi. It'd been published in the supplement of an English newspaper whose name was new to me, one of the many which had appeared after I'd got married and left India. People bought them more for the daily supplements of gossip than the emaciated news pushed to the margins by half-page advertisements of things that had come to the country after I'd left – cell phones, apartments in planned mini-townships and mutual funds. It was written by a man whose name sounded familiar to me. Abhimanyu Singh. I couldn't remember whether it was the name of a friend or relative.

'Failing Successfully: _Atithi,_ the guest-poet at home.' This was the title of the obituary. It was a well-written piece although it came to my ears, perhaps because of my long stay in the United States, as the voice of a second-language English speaker. I read the article at one go and it left me with a sense of unease, something I cannot put in words in any language I know, something I once felt in the proximity of a lake at night on my first visit to England, when the water could not be seen, only sensed from a distance from the fearful reflection of the dull sky. The words in the obituary seemed to make an effort to remind me of someone I couldn't remember. Abhimanyu Singh's words had wrapped my mother in lace curtains making her seem even more distant after our late discovery, like blurred pictures of familiar objects in my mind, a toothbrush, a pair of blue-strapped hawai sandals, a pair of oil-fogged glasses, things I knew, could identify, but not put into a map to locate the woman from whom I'd begun my journey into the world.

'Home is where we must make a name' – the obituary had begun with a quotation from Nissim Ezekiel, the Indian English poet, writing about returning to India to harvest a reputation more than a quarter-century ago. The comparison between the much-travelled Indian Jew and my mother who'd never been abroad and had visited only four states in India in her entire life struck me as odd. My mother had known only Uttar Pradesh, where we lived; Bihar, my father's ancestral home; Bengal, where we sometimes accompanied our father to the tea gardens in the Dooars; and Orissa, the place where my mother had once said she'd be happiest to die.

Orissa, pick me up,

Let your trunk wrap itself around me

While the mahouts of the world bathe you

With their moonlight soaps...

Hurry up,

They are sending guards, I know,

To prove that I stole the wombs you'd lent to the papaya tree...

When I see the books on her shelves now, I see them full of the Oriya writers – Mahapatra and Mohanty, Senapati and Salabega, their symbols of all-remembering tigers and deep silent wells – and I begin to see how much she loved reading them. She loved Orissa: our drawing-room cloth decorations from Pipli, their cut-and-paste routine that always brought other things from other places on the same canvas, which Abhimanyu Singh had related to the aesthetic of the patchwork in my mother's poetry. It struck me, suddenly, that the writer of this obituary was someone who'd visited our house in Lucknow, someone who had known my mother. I cannot explain why that thought unnerved me instantly. I felt as if someone had seen my mother in the nude, seen her wearing a sari, as if through a keyhole. I know that it was a strange thought to have, but I felt that my mother had been violated, that some thief had touched her stained undergarments. For he was right; my mother, I began to recollect, had indeed been 'fascinated by disparateness, by dissonance, by disturbance'. Unlike most mothers of twins, she'd never made an effort to dress Tina and me in similar clothes. In fact, she'd insisted that Tina grow her hair till her waist while I had mine cut to near my ears.

I continued reading the piece. He had quoted from another of my mother's poems, talking about her fear of heights, something I had not known about her:

People ask for ladders

To go and come,

Give me one,

Too,

I say,

So that I can see

The workshop where He

Shapes the toes on feet

Those that walk on streets,

And climb ladders

Through the skin-bruised indigo highway...

Singh's translation was poor, or perhaps my mother's words themselves had been vague making them look even more insignificant in translation.

My mother had very little hair on her head. We learnt later, as we were growing up, that she'd lost most of her hair when Tina and I were born. Only a few roots had remained alive after our birth. A few strands of hair emerged shyly and occasionally. I do not remember her ever blaming us for that loss. But, as Abhimanyu Singh had written, her poems were full of women who had an ambiguous relationship with their hair. His translations failed to convey the violence of the shearing of the widow's hair, her shaven head, the burnt hair on the head of a woman who had tried to commit suicide; even schoolgirls' pigtails; and another short poem on wigs –

Don't pretend that you could've been my mother,

My mother's body could cast no shadow,

She forgot to carry her wig with her in death,

I could lend it to you, her wig, you know,

In return for the sound of your pigeon's gizzard...

My shadow saw her last, biting the tasteless

underside of her lips,

While trying to tie herself to life, desperately,

With the uneven end of her long plait,

Standing, falling, standing, like water's cousin,

Dancing, without joy, in the middle of a lotus leaf,

Without the borrowed conscience of a wig

In her life, my mother had betrayed her self. In her writing, she'd refused to be her other; in life, she'd been a bun of hair hanging sleepily at the root of her neck; in her writing, she had slipped, with the agility of a barber at mid-day, into various wigs, wigs fashioned out of fragments of strangers' roots.

Abhimanyu Singh had said that my mother had failed in all that she had attempted to create: the series of seven-line poems that she had cheekily titled _Sonnet – The Daughter's Share_ were too full of half-suggested meanings to demand a reader's attention; her longest poem, _Future Tense: The Despot,_ had, cruelly, been called 'an elephant's miscarriage' by an influential reviewer; two of her most popular collections, _I'm God's Elder Sister_ and _Fingerprints on a Sugar Pot,_ in spite of being minor bestsellers, had been accused of being 'telegrams to Kalidasa'; and her last book, _Love's Laboratory,_ a collection of dialogues between men and women in various relationships, the men speaking in rhyme and the women in blank verse, had been thrashed by a critic named Shukla as 'an insult to Indian womanhood, to her time-honoured image of sobriety...making the writer one of Vatsyayana's courtesans'. I laughed as I read these sentences; perhaps my mother had done the same. But, all these failures, Abhimanyu Singh maintained, these gulfs, big and small, between intention and result, had given my mother's poetry that ineffable charm that perfection has often snatched from the best craftsmen, Alexander Pope and, sometimes, Byron.

My mother, Abhimanyu Singh had succeeded in convincing me by the time I reached Varanasi, was a great lover of incomplete things, of the half-burnt candle, of masons who ran away from work leaving behind unfinished buildings, of undeveloped film rolls and negatives, even ruins, and unresolved court cases. His obituary quoted from her poems liberally and the words in those poems constructed a woman who was the name on a spine, of a book, rather than the woman I thought I'd known, with a broad discoloured beige belt near the base of her spine worn to help her to stand erect when she got up from a chair or sofa. She loved birds, he said, and I believed him. She loved the colour of poverty, darkish yellow, the colour of bile and vomit, the obituary said, and I believed him. She loved stealing flowers offered to gods in temples, he said, and I believed him. She loved tearing ends of envelopes, he said, and I believed him again. I had no choice: it was as if my parents had shifted house while I'd been away and I had now come to a place of which I was expected to have a memory. All I could have done was succumb to belief, to neighbours' myths about the sounds in the kitchen in the new home and I did that.

I think I know what pigeons say

When we talk of the heat or cold

I think I heard one say, today,

While getting wet in the late rain,

How sad men feel time and again,

That they can't fly, that they can't eat stones,

That they can't live without breaking alphabet's bones...

What could my mother have meant? It was painful reading her poems in Singh's article: it felt like reading a letter written in shorthand from a loved one. His interventions, wise as they must have been, made him look like a goldsmith in my eyes, a man beating and boring through fine sheets of gold to get the shine on the light's side while leaving the underside unmade and undiscovered. This was my first encounter with my mother's poems, and he was telling me a fable about her, a mixed fable in which the sour grapes were really sour and the thirsty crow refused to put the stones in the pitcher to drink the water. I was irritated. They burnt my mother's body before I could reach India. I wouldn't let a stranger comb out half-truths from the soles of her slippers. Little did I realise that I did not have a choice, that this man, Abhimanyu Singh, whose name came to me like the sound of the referee's whistle, leaving me unsure of beginning or ending, had won the race by increasing the distance of the marathon, leaving me confused and unprepared. He had introduced my mother to me in a way that all future introductions that I would make on behalf of my mother to the world had been rendered redundant.

I waited.

I had other stories to hear. Only, no one would tell me.

I continued reading the obituary:

Mrs Srivastava, as the postman called her, took refuge in pseudonyms. Hers was not the fear of rejection or criticism of the nineteenth-century women writers which demanded a cloak for the self; her guises, significantly not just the refuge of a single pen name but a few, were not the multiple-personality disorder as she's recently been accused of. Rather, the dance of her selves, from Anjani to Kutumb to Atithi, marked a trajectory of her changing aesthetic as the meaning of her pen names imply, the unsure stranger of the first collection _Coming_ to the letters to her relatives in the third collection _Letters from a Lizard_ to the hesitancy of the surrogate mother in _Blue Eyes, Blue Blood: Yes, Yellow._ Her writing, time and again, talks about the problems of translation obliquely: in the poem _Punctuation,_ from _North Pole, South Pole,_ where she talks about her unease with the way her daughters have stopped using punctuations when speaking in their mother tongue, she ends with the biting last lines:

It's like dieting, a new fashion, speaking without commas or semicolons,

Only full stops, endless, a handful at a time,

Like cornflakes in milk, emaciated, sweetened without sugar,

Chiding me, my round Hindi alphabet, for being obese,

The unwanted grease of the _matras_ threatening to kill with a 'heart-attack'

Her short poem, _Mrs Basnett, My Tongue-tied Translator,_ begins with an Englishwoman knocking at her door with a bouquet of bougainvillea, a flower she'd never seen in a bouquet. The encounter between the two women is narrated in a few nouns rather than adjectives – 'sugar', 'spoon', 'shoes', 'socks', 'stabiliser' and 'skylight'. This gives way to the climax of the final lines:

I scolded her, shyly,

trying to extract some smell from the bougainvillea,

That I couldn't stand being translated

In a lonely language where I had no friends

Whose names could begin with the last four letters of the alphabet,

W, X, Y, Z

This, of course, was another way of refusing to surrender to what she had, in another poem, called 'the piracy of poetry/By long-distant swimmers with bad breath/Across the Channel/Tempting us with chairs with a comfortable backrest'. This short-sightedness was her failure but as another woman had proved before her, 'Without failure, no ethics'.

She died, without pleas to anyone, her two fingers touching her blocked nose. My mother had failed. He had been right, as I was to discover when I reached home.

No one came to receive me at the railway station.

My train was late. I'd expected Tina or her husband to come. Most of the coolies were drunk after Janmashtami. An autorickshaw took me home through the deserted streets. The gate was open, as if indifferent to entries and exits.

There was no one downstairs. Tina's three-year-old son whom my mother used to fondly call Keeda, meaning worm, lay sideways on the divan, sleeping. I called out Tina's name and then for my father. No one answered. I suddenly felt scared and ran up the stairs.

I can't remember what I'd said when I entered my mother's room. I only remember seeing Tina sitting on the edge of the bed looking out towards the verandah. She didn't respond to any of my questions.

My father had burnt all my mother's manuscripts before the smell of smoke could reach Tina. It was not anger, he explained. Her things, the sticky words which had been dearest to her, had to be burnt like her to be allowed their journey from her room to her new home; it could not be otherwise, he said later.

That night I lay awake beside Tina, talking about things we'd never spoken about, death, spirits, planchettes and our mother. We spoke about her in a way we'd never done before, allowing her passages to the deepest parts of our memory where only those who have no more journeys to make live, in that invisible region from where recall seems easiest but is actually impossible, for no child can describe a dead parent except as the protagonist of an imagined fantasy. Suddenly, conscious of our tears, we tried to avoid talking about her, as if words would bring greater sorrow, not realising that she'd come to our lives, from then on, like a favourite tune, unbidden, but always welcome.

As Tina fell asleep in the early hours of the unlit morning, I suddenly saw my mother walk across the room and take the pillow from beneath Tina's head, shake it and take out a piece of paper from its inner fold. She looked at the piece of paper and then dipped it in a bucket of Robin Blue liquid.

I screamed.

When I opened my eyes that morning, I found the maid Ramdulari's face close to mine, as if trying to see where all the sleep had come from.

I, who'd never believed in spirits or even the soul, began to believe in the dream. A piece of paper I had seen only in a dream would perhaps not have acquired such significance had my father, unthinkingly, not burnt my mother's handwriting the previous night.

I found three sheets of paper tucked in a pillow that noon. It wasn't my pillow, neither Tina's nor even my father's but Ramdulari's. I don't know why I've never tried to investigate how those pieces of paper found their way into the pillowcase of an illiterate maid.

I am giving up on understanding. I only look at the fingers of people who walk into my dreams without shoes, people like my mother.

The sheets of paper revealed a long, incomplete, unpublished poem.

She'd written it for herself, a rare indulgence for a 'famous' writer, and bared her soul without recourse to the beam-balanced ethics of autobiographising.

I translated it, almost immediately, and thus poorly and almost thoughtlessly, over the phone for my American husband.

'Life will not stop here,

Not even after you die, on the way, to the next station;

I've told the guard

He'll wave the red flag

And the world would know,

Only after me though,

That you've disappeared without your husband's last name...'

These were your words, weren't they, in that letter You wrote from Cochin?

I decided to lose the words before I lost myself in them

As my hands had, so often, without your permission,

Lost themselves in the warm depression

That you left behind on my brown sofa

On soggy afternoons

I've also lost other things ever since,

Abhimanyu,

Domestic gestures that you, worldly life's bachelor,

wouldn't know:

A catalogue of prayer flags,

An ashtray full of burnt words,

A bucket with a broken handle,

full of myth-wet clothes I forgot to hang from the clothesline,

A flowerpot in which I'd planted the grass from your back,

The grass in which Radha, love's eternal loser, lost her toe-ring,

And my daughters' ribbons, black at home, white in school,

Black and white,

Ribbons which tied me to the posters of my bed every night

And a few other things too,

Things you made me lose,

Things so precious that they caused discomfort;

I have thought of losing you too,

Losing you like I once lost those things,

Mindlessly, without adverbs;

Then I have hidden you

Which is just the same

For isn't hiding about losing

From view?

Don't move from behind the curtains I say,

Don't.

When you enter the classroom and open the book

To page number seventy two,

And ask Lakshman or Urmila

To read out the words

Which, as you say,

sounds like damp breath inside a winter quilt,

How do you feel?

How do you feel to snatch them out of my mouth

And put them in the mouths of strangers

Who care for them as much as they do for bird-droppings?

You, after the world, called my solitary hiss, _poetry,_

You, with the world, called me the tree-hole's poet,

I laughed,

I hadn't bargained for more

Poets do not love men, you said once

And I agreed,

Persuaded by my favourites –

Kalidasa and the bumblebee

I loved once

You, who came crying into the world, fifteen years after me,

Were still at your mother's breasts then,

You could've been my son, unfit for this late love,

That would have been better,

Perhaps

Dying with a disease whose name is difficult to spell in English,

In what would perhaps be my last autumn,

The last season of sunning my thoughts,

With the pillows, in the withering backyard,

I think of that moment of

Coincidence in the corridor

Near the Town Library

Where we first met

You had come to look for a book of poems

And I to look for bookmarks I'd left behind

I found a reader who read like a saint

And you a poet who'd forgotten how to count

backwards, you said later

We were looking for neither

Abhimanyu,

I met you

When I'd tired of the world's monologues,

I (wife, mother and the late parents' second daughter)

Had become a plant,

Always spoken to,

Whose silence was to be its sap,

I was learning a new language then,

Of an imposed maturity,

In other words,

on how to draft a report

about the theft of childhood at eighteen,

I had learnt two languages already,

The first, speaking under water, with bubbles, like a fish

The brown language of secreting unwanted resin at the nodes, the second

But this was not sufficient

The master at home knew only one,

The language of numbers, in ledgers and account books

He was impatient with my slow learning

And my daughters, my paper-boat twins,

Who I thought had come to me like two quills

dipped by Saraswati in her milk ink-pots

Spoke only in English

Which came to my ears residually, like eavesdropping,

They grew up, suddenly, without informing me;

I,

Who for so long had hidden my words from them,

The people I lived with, the crew of my soul,

Adopting pen names like cheap masks,

Changing them, nervously, like the parting of my hair,

Wanted to tell them – my daughters –

That I was also more than I,

Or perhaps less, if they said so

That I, who they'd seen as a tablecloth that could

not move

Unless re-moved

Had another life

Beyond night and day

Beyond the domestic lifeboats of saucers and nail cutters

That I could,

If only they spoke in their mother's tongue

– In Hindi, the only language

in which the word for 'life' and the 'love' are the same,

_('Jaan')_ –

Be the words on a printed page

In a bound book

From which their favourite teacher,

Abhimanyu Singh,

Read out a poem or two

In 'Compulsory Hindi' class every week,

Where they sat as close to his table as possible

To see the words move from the page to his eyes

And then from there, without show of passages,

To his lips

They sat there

Looking at his lips

Touching the words

And they wished the words were longer

So that they could see him being touched,

As if bitten by a mosquito,

Making the poem seem like an auditorium of bites

I heard them talking about you,

One wishing that you spoke about love in English,

The other asking me once, while I hung the mosquito net,

What 'Abhimanyu' meant,

And on discovery of how your namesake had been killed,

Hacked by geometry and trapped by the enemies' mathematics

In a concentric code which only let people in,

Killing them by making them enter,

She had cried

And bought an English translation of the

_Mahabharata_

With her pocket money the next day

I wanted to console her,

Ask her not to cry,

To tell her that the 'chakravyuh' that had killed

Arjuna's son Abhimanyu

In Kurukshetra

Was only a poem

Which enticed a reader in,

Leaving him without escape,

With only the possibility of surrender

To the soft quick under the poet's dirty nails

I wanted to tell them other things

To show them my poems,

The half-torn tickets of my wig-less afternoons,

I even wanted to tell them

About you, the kind bat's shadow on my dark night

But their words made me insecure

Like the water near the brim in a glass,

Incapable of translation

Only you let me be a cloud

Let me change every moment

before you could give my shape a name

These are things you already know

But don't forget that I am a poet,

That by calling me a poet

You have asked me to repeat what you already knew

Without sounding like a multiplication table

Or a wife's nagging,

That you have asked me to mimic,

Though with the illusion of distance that the glasses

on your nose creates,

The rhythm of the breeze squeezing out sunlight from my wet clothes

And the metre of my asthmatic breathings

The Poem

My poem,

My horoscope of uncombed desire...

This man, to whom she had dedicated one of her poems, calling him 'Sahrydya' in the title, the writer's other heart, for whom she had brought down her once-lavish curtains of guilt, in whom she had found what we, her 'blood's bakery', had not been able to give her, the incompleteness of a relationship that she so valued, like 'torn slippers...stopping me in the middle of my pilgrimage...stranded in the bliss of non-fulfilment'. Abhimanyu Singh, the man whose name she'd taken for the first time in this poem, had provided her poet's soul with an invisible scaffolding, of hinges without the noise of a creaking footnote; he had lit the lamps of her heavy-hipped evenings while we'd chased kites in coagulated skies. And he had loved her without lying.

He, her dark-striped confidante, I still find it difficult to say, had been my mother's lover.
The Mountain Disease

' _I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness – a real thorough-going illness.'_

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

IT WAS ADMISSION SEASON in college and I was tired of being a recorded message. Explaining the logic of the admission process, filling up forms, and repeating the instructions to all the candidates individually on a hot summer afternoon can be more exhausting than running a marathon in a hot desert. The waywardness of unexpected questions would bring a mix of annoyance and comic relief. Rajak would wink, Jha laugh, Pramanik work hard to suppress his amusement, I would look at the candidate's face and summon up my greatest reserves of empathy.

Prerna was the last candidate to buy an admission form on Saturday. Her face revealed newly acquired confidence, the kind that makes young people attractive to their fellow mates and slightly repulsive to their teachers. After the routine explanations, she raised her hand slightly to intervene with a question. I smiled, asking her to go ahead.

'Ma'am,' she said, 'is it true that people from the plains are more intelligent than those from the hills?'

None of us, not me, neither my colleagues, had done our homework on the subject. We looked at each other, ignorance annotating our hesitant smiles. We could – should – have been prepared. Our college was, after all, situated right on top of a mildly sloped hill.

Prerna had applied for Honours in English Literature, choosing Political Science as her second option. I felt a strange kinship with her self-doubt, the kind I have often been ridiculed for feeling for incompetent Hindi film actresses from small towns. My sense of victimhood, when it came tied with geography, was terribly prickly and sensitive.

'Just as whites imagined themselves as superior to blacks, so people from the plains like to think of themselves as more intelligent than hill people,' I said, trying hard to choose my analogy so as to be intelligible to an eighteen-year-old girl.

The best – or the worst – was yet to come. 'But whites _are_ more beautiful than blacks, Ma'am,' she replied.

Rajak looked at me, Pramanik hid his face inside his cloth bag where I imagined his teeth touching newspaper-covered books. I looked at the Nepali girl – she was fair, wore her straight hair up to her waist, her mouth was painted in a pink shade of lipstick, her eyelids were crowded with a few shades of eyeshadow. Like most young people from the eastern Himalayas, she looked good enough to be inside a fashion glossy. I checked that thought as soon as it arrived in my mind – I did not want to be guilty of the same essentialism as this prospective student.

'Isn't Michelle Obama beautiful?' It was Jha. He was a new appointee and had just arrived from Bihar's Chhapra district. His admiration for the American president's wife was easy to spot. He was wearing a white T-shirt that made his ample infatuation evident: in studious black, on the wearer's chest, was a bust-size image of Mrs O, but her name had undergone an epiphanic transformation, as things usually do on pop tees. Michelle Obama was now Michelle ObaMa.

'Who? Oh, Obama's wife? No, Sir. How can she be beautiful? She is so dark and has ugly teeth.'

I admired the girl's straightforwardness. I even envied her uncomplicated worldview, but I was a teacher. My side of the table did not allow me to forget that.

Jha, however, was not one to give up so easily. This son of Michelle Ma got up from his chair and asked, almost like a student, 'Isn't there a single dark-complexioned person whom you find beautiful?'

'Sir, who has ever found a crow beautiful?' she replied promptly.

This was going to be a difficult semester.

The days following that short but semi-quixotic interaction with Prerna were filled with various kinds of speculation in the faculty staffroom. Biswakarma, who was the lone Nepali professor in college, watched the discussion from the sidelines. He told me that he had been stung enough times to know that he should be a lizard on the wall.

'I won't even do the lizard's teek-teek-teek,' he told me, as if partaking of a vow.

There were very few people he spoke to or trusted. I was one of them because he believed that northern Bengal, where both of us had lived all our lives, bound us together like 'Calcutta tied _all_ South Bengalis'. And though we had never said that to each other in words, we were aware that a common dislike for Calcuttans had made us friends, the kind of temporary friendship allowed to colleagues.

Jha looked visibly disturbed every time I ran into him. 'Something must be done to change this racist outlook,' he pleaded with me. I later learnt that he had done the same with everyone except Sen, a professor of Botany. This wasn't because Professor Sen was what they call 'the senior-most' teacher, but because Jha believed that botanists wouldn't really understand racism.

'Let classes begin,' I consoled him. I had spent enough time in educational institutions to know that the classroom was a self-enclosed chamber and that the 'learning' inside it rarely influenced life outside the window. Male professors who taught feminism did not let their wives seek employment for fear of the workplace 'corrupting' their innocence. This was a male colleague's confession to me.

But Jha was young, in his late twenties – he had been a student leader once and that contagion of idealism had still not left him. I wanted to be on his side. But I did not have his reserve of time. My life was structured so tight that even a delay of a few minutes could lead to a family capsize. For at home, where my mind lived, even as my body walked through classrooms and corridors in college, I had a fourteen-year-old son who had been diagnosed with multiple ailments. I only knew that he could not speak the language we used and that I was the only one who understood what he wanted. I was in my late forties, late enough for the fire of idealism to seem like a light-and-sound display in a historical monument, and youth, like Jha's, was a vulnerable historical monument.

It seemed strange to me that everyone turned to the Zoology professor for an answer. _Was there evidence, was there evidence_... Everyone had the same question. Biswakarma and I looked at each other when Sengupta mentioned empirical details from journals ('with high impact factor') that proved that Prerna's apprehension might indeed have been true. There was iodine deficiency in the hills, a government survey had found out, and, hence, the introduction of iodised salt in the country, he paraphrased for science-ignoramuses like me.

There were amateur let's-take-a-guess scientists like Chaturvedi who said, 'Walking in the hills takes away so much energy. The brain doesn't get enough food to develop properly. See, it's like this – a donkey is a donkey because it walks all the time. Have you seen a donkey sit down to think?'

This was followed by a-horse-is-not-a-donkey arguments by the end of which Biswakarma and I were still staring at each other in disgust and disbelief. Even those who were making a case for the donkey had decided that in this election through popular mandate, the horse was the symbol for the plains and the donkey for the hills.

Jha, always enthusiastic, asked the horse supporters what he considered a central question. 'What colour is the horse in your imagination?'

Some said white, a few others brown, the Botany professor was the only person who offered a metaphorical – and what to him was a superior – answer. 'Black Beauty.'

Jha's thesis had been proved – his anger showed even in his hair. Or so the movement of the spiky ends told me. 'As if "Black Beauty" were an ox... What do you call it in English?'

'Oxymoron,' I said.

Prerna had thus, even before she began attending classes, become a celebrity student. What she would never know was how her innocent question had divided the faculty staffroom into fractious denominations. It brought out a side of our characters that we might never have known, the kind of bitterness that sometimes rises to the surface in a quarrel between a married couple, for instance. Biswakarma and I had so long identified ourselves as residents of northern Bengal, but I was from the plains and he from the mountains. So Prerna's question broke our team. It left Biswakarma lonely but it left me lonelier. The 'plains-wala' – as Biswakarma now referred to the people from the plains of Calcutta – had never considered me one of their own. I was a hybrid in their mind, much like the Dooars region where I came from, a mix of plain land encircled by mountains. But they were purists.

If it had remained contained within these silly binaries, it might have been only a temporary damage. One students' agitation and all the teachers would get back together, plains and hills. But because Prerna's question had given birth to many such discomforting queries in the staffroom, the wounds we had inflicted on each other were still raw. I doubted whether they would ever disappear. I, for one, knew that I wouldn't – couldn't – ever forgive Chaturvedi for suggesting that my son might have been born 'normal' had I listened to my in-laws and gone to Calcutta for the childbirth. I had come a long way in the last fourteen years to know that there was no one 'normal'. Kali-di, the Group-D staff who served us tea with generous servings of office gossip, seemed to have been severely struck by the battle of words that flowed in front of her. I noticed that she now spoke only with Jha, who had metamorphosed into a patron of the dark and beautiful people in her eyes. Jha's Bangla was unsteady and Kali-di's Hindi acquired from watching television serials, but the conversation they had was charged with the energy of the unstable.

'That is the problem, Kali-di,' I heard Jha tell the aged woman one day. 'If you'd been born very fair, your parents wouldn't have named you "White-di". As if fairness – whiteness – was a norm and anyone who was disobedient ought to be punished with a name like yours: you are dark, you must be called Kali!'

I saw tears gather in Kali-di's eyes and then propel words that I'd never heard coming out of her. 'That is why no one married me, bhai.'

In another corner of the staffroom, I eavesdropped on a conversation between the zoologist and botanist about the centrality of coconuts in such a discussion.

'If only coconuts grew in the Himalayas, the Nepalese would have some intelligence,' said the zoologist.

'Yes, coconut water is better than mother's milk,' supported the botanist.

Both had decided that the mountain people were indeed of inferior intelligence.

Adhikari, who did not like being addressed by her surname, preferring her Tagorean name of 'Charulata' instead, added another angle to the debate. The Nepalese had a natural talent for music, for style, but she wasn't sure whether their brains responded to books in quite the same way as it did to the guitar. 'The musical beat is not the same as the paragraph,' she had concluded in her self-important manner.

I'd never liked her. How could I, after she criticised my taste in saris, saying yellow suited only flowers, not women?

'But you're from Santiniketan, where women wear yellow saris to celebrate spring,' Biswakarma had spoken on my behalf.

'Yellow saris on red soil – only that.' With those words, the debate had been closed.

It was this snobbery and superior air that Biswakarma and I detested most. We laughed at it sadly at times, how the people from Calcutta – it was an amorphous planet to fit the types we disliked – moved about in college behaving like missionaries on a civilising mission. They were saviours who would rescue the poor Nepalese students from their own culture.

There were so many theories to explain the presumed low intelligence of the Nepalese. Adhikari's was hilarious – at such moments, I thought of the saddest events of my life to stop myself from laughing. Charulata was a professor of Bangla, but because not a single student had enrolled to study the subject in this 'Nepali-speaking area', she'd taken up the role of cultural ambassador of the plains of Bengal. The only things that came to our ears about her experiments were her complaints about the lack of dedication and discipline among the Nepalese people, their limited vocal range, their inability to remember long dialogues in plays, their focus on costumes and make-up; it was a long list of lacks. If I hadn't been angry, I might have laughed at her silliness in making these deductions about a community from such a small sample size, but I did not like talking to her.

My fluency in Nepali, a language I had picked out of love for its music, its onomatopoeic sounds, was dismissed as an affluent person's disease, like someone seeking out biri after smoking a fine cigar, an aberration from expected decent behaviour. The generalisations were tragicomic: Nepali cuisine was momo and thukpa, Nepali music 'MTV copy-paste', Nepali literature a thing of wonder. 'Really, so many writers?' or 'That old? I thought it couldn't be more than a hundred years old or so. Did they have a written script then?' If it had been a tourist's ignorance, there might have been laughter, but it was all a case of I-told-you-so.

When annual results came out in the summer, the analysis inevitably turned to anthropology. Biology was to blame, not the teaching skills of teachers, these imports from the plains. Lack of sunlight, lack of oxygen, lack of nutritious food, poor parenting, poverty, short days, all the boxes were ticked without guilt or self-questioning. Adhikari inevitably led the trip on speculations. She could begin from anywhere.

'Rabindranath Tagore has so many songs about the eyes, you know. How light enters through the eyes and turns into knowledge...' No one paid her soliloquy any attention until she arrived on how the 'small eyes of the Nepalese people' was preventing them from being intelligent learners.

The zoologist said that he would use this opportunity – his posting in a hill college – to study the relation between straight hair and low intelligence.

The racist nature of these assumptions and discussions did not strike anyone as odd. In fact, quite the opposite; their words had the impulse of the do-gooder's kindness.

By the time Prerna would begin her first class in college, her question, and the consequent trail of explanations, had turned the Nepalese into a people suffering from an epidemic of low intelligence. This was a natural outcome of living in the mountains, it was concluded, as natural as the birth of deformed children in Chernobyl or Hiroshima and Bhopal.

On the morning of 20 July, when everyone was busy rehearsing for the Orientation Programme for the students, Charulata Adhikari inaugurated the discussion again.

'Have you noticed that there isn't a single classical singer from the hills? A single Nepalese classical musician, can you believe it?'

When none of us responded, she teased us, 'All of you must be eager to impress that girl – whatshername – with your political correctness? But the truth is that people here, from the Himalayas, have low intelligence. Like Africans. It's not their fault, poor people. They were born here, what can they do?'

I noticed Jha from the corner of my eye, fighting this assault on his beliefs and politics, but I chose not to respond. As I said, I did not like speaking to Adhikari. I had, in a bout of bad temper one day, made an unkind remark about how her husband and children tolerated her snobbery. In spite of the cultivated silence of the staffroom, Adhikari did not stop.

'It is common wisdom – the best scholarship of centuries has been produced by people from the alluvial plains of the Indian subcontinent. Why, you tell me why?'

Rao, a professor of Philosophy who, like Adhikari, had found no students in this college, had not participated in the discussion at all. He looked depressed all the time – it was possible that he missed his family, I could not say.

'What about Tamil Literature and Philosophy, Dr Adhikari? And the allied literature south of the Vindhyas?' I had never heard Rao speak like this.

But Adhikari was nonplussed. 'It's the same thing, Professor Rao. Water. Water is what the brains need. Water for intelligence. We have the river, you have the sea. Same thing, you see. This water, that water...'

Jha cut her short. 'There's more water in the jhoras and streams and rains in the Himalayas than there is in the anorexic Ganga.'

The bell for the first day of the academic session had rung.

Jha returned happy after the students' Orientation Programme. Prerna was in his class. He'd convert her into someone like himself. I sometimes overheard him speaking to students in the corridor – I was once particularly struck by his weighty scolding of them for calling the local coolie 'Laata', meaning someone deaf and mute. The man was indeed deaf and mute, so his name was a cruel tautology, but it was a common colloquial in Nepali. Jha had immediately given an assignment to his students: they were to compile a list of cruel and racist expressions in the Nepali language.

From time to time, I'd congratulate Jha on his endeavours. The young man only smiled politely in response – I recognised his disappointment in me, in my lack of collaboration in his mission. Only once did he let his personal disappointment out of his gate.

'I know how it feels to be abused and judged inferior on the basis of where you come from. All my life, even in Presidency College, I have always been "the Bihari", the cunning hard-working donkey, without taste and culture, dirty, miserly, parasitic, a coolie on a railway platform.'

That Prerna had not quite forgotten her sad question became evident the day the Inspector of Colleges visited our college. The team wanted to see whether this hurriedly assembled college was obeying university regulations, they wanted to meet students to listen to their complaints. It was difficult to prettify the tiny rented building. Two bottles of Phenyl had just been emptied into the bowels of the commode to abolish its history of stink.

Prerna stood up to ask a question to the College Inspector.

'Is it true, Sir,' she asked the marigold-garlanded man sitting on the dais, 'that students from the plains get more marks than students from the hills?'

We were all prepared for a careful and politically correct answer, but Dr Sengupta, backed as he was by the current regime in power, said it like it was. 'Yes, statistics will tell you that is indeed true. Part of the reason is that there are more colleges in the plains than there are in the hills. Also, the quality of education offered by the feeder schools in the plains is better.' The words were said without any emotion.

Prerna seemed to be possessed by the question. It looked like she had joined college just to find an answer to that question. She wasn't letting go so easily.

'More marks by students from the plains imply that they are more intelligent, doesn't it?'

Dr Sengupta pulled the broad end of his tie away from himself. 'Did I say that?'

The Principal looked at our faces, indicating that we should get Prerna to stop her questions. Quite strangely, none of us moved from where we were.

Adhikari took over from Prerna, using the opportunity to house her own grouse. 'No one studies Bangla here, Sir,' she began.

Dr Sengupta smiled. 'That is a choice we must let them exercise, Madam.'

'What I meant to say is...if they were forced to study Bangla. You will agree with me that intelligence cohabits with language. Man is more intelligent than other animals because his language is more developed than theirs. Students here only speak Nepali. Their poor marks, their low intelligence might be... You know, if they could be forced to learn Bangla.'

I was looking at Prerna's face as these bizarre words moved in the freshly painted hall. There was no anger on it. It seemed to me that Prerna Subba from Kalimpong subdivision wanted to be convinced that a Prerna Roy from Calcutta would be more intelligent than her.

'Is it true, Sir, is it true...' It was Prerna again.

The Inspector of Colleges looked at his watch and said, 'Things collect at the bottom. And so marks in the plains'.

'There is no Nepali Philosophy that I know of,' Professor Rao was telling Jha in a near whisper when I entered the staffroom. 'Only six students have opted for Philosophy as their Elective Subject. They're just not interested in the subject. It's an old man's subject for them, one of them was kind enough to explain to me once. How can you expect me to give a public lecture on Nepali Philosophy then? C'mon, Jha, try to understand.'

'Pardon my ignorance, but anything that helps them understand their mountain-life better? Well, let me rephrase that – any philosopher, any philosophical text that helps to rid them off this new inferiority complex about hill people being unintelligent?'

I was coming to this conversation after being harassed by Prerna. Why wasn't there a single text about the hills in the Compulsory English syllabus? Quite naturallyI did not have an answer. A tiny group of people at the centralised university designed the syllabi. I was merely a spoke in the wheel, implementing what I'd been asked to. I was narrating this to Rao without looking at Jha (I don't know why I was angry with him) when Jha told us about a similar predicament.

'I was telling them about various kinds of political structures and their histories of origin when Prerna asked me whether the hills – the mountains – had given birth to any political structure or philosophy. That is what made me seek out Professor Rao's help.'

Rao was a kind person, and now that he had become a grandfather, he tended to look at his students as older versions of his grandchild. He had confessed to this 'long-distance grandfatherhood' himself.

'It is sad to see these children suffer from such mass inferiority complex. That thin girl,' he said, trying to recollect Prerna's name, 'she asked the History professor – I forget the young fellow's name – why not a single important treaty had been signed in the hills of India.'

'What did Laha say?' asked Jha.

'He's a smart fellow. He mentioned the Shimla Agreement,' said Rao, laughing.

I was a bit ashamed to admit that I could remember almost nothing about the Shimla Agreement.

Rao was ever-forgiving. 'The one signed between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, remember?'

'And what did Prerna say to that?' I wanted to know.

'That is the saddest thing, Madam. She said – perhaps because it was signed in the mountains, in Shimla, it's been such a failure.'

The Independence Day celebrations in college would be different this year. Professor Rao would deliver an open house lecture, the students, and not the Principal or Chief Guest, would hoist the flag, and not _ladoo_ and _nimki_ but squash and onion _momos_ would be served with milk tea.

Professor Rao said a few lines about Martin Heidegger, about the significance of his work in Continental Philosophy, and then he began reading from the German philosopher's short essay, 'Why I Write from the Provinces'.

The gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow – all of this moves and flows through and penetrates daily existence up there, and not in forced moments of 'aesthetic' immersion or artificial empathy, but only when one's own existence stands in its work. It is the work alone that opens up space for the reality that is the mountains.

I was studying the faces of the students as they tried to catch or ignore Rao's reading. Would it rid them of the inferiority that was torturing Prerna? Most of them looked bored – they would be happy for the programme to get over. My eyes searched for Prerna. Where was she? I expected the stylish girl to be in a tricoloured sari like many of her classmates, but I couldn't spot her in the crowd.

Rao's lecture – a reading actually – might have been considered a success from the thunderous applause. But Rao knew better. He smiled sadly.

When the time for the flag hoisting arrived, I spotted Prerna at last. She looked lovely in her green sari. She was one of the six students who'd been chosen by Jha to hoist the flag.

When the flag was unfurled and rose petals fell out of it on to the heads of those gathered below it, the national anthem shivered out of the lips of students. All of them were shocked at what they saw moving to the beat of the air.

Instead of the rectangular flag of India, there was a triangle opposing the wind, mimicking the obstinacy of the mountains.

Prerna, who had cut the Indian tricolour diagonally, had decided that rectangular flags stood for the flat plains. The hills needed triangular flags.
The Seventh Day

_'For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death.'_

—Exodus 31:15

IT IS CLOSED AGAIN.

We use words of annoyance in Bangla, aware that no one will understand them here. It's the third time now. When we see the shop from our window, people get in and come out with packets in their hands. Some come out eating, carrying half-eaten food with them. We can't make out what it is that they eat, but we are curious, very curious. Greed is perhaps more contagious than fear and tears, and so we make plans to get our lunch from there. We want to eat what they are eating. We spend time speculating whether beef might be mixed with other kinds of meat – this we have learnt only a few days ago, from other tourists. We are tourists too. Italy – a dream, sold to us by Henry James. _We_ were classmates studying Literature at university, and then we got married – to other people. But we knew we had to come here one day. (We say 'we' as often as we can – life hasn't allowed us this opportunity, and so this is our real holiday, to use the plural pronoun without dust.)

It's been three days, but, also, only three more days remain. We have to be back on Sunday. Our feet are tired – the cathedrals and the monuments, the streets and the houses that punctuate them, the language as unfamiliar as the weather, all of these are meant to be experienced, and they must be experienced only on foot. The pain from the foot climbs up, like age does, moving northwards, from knee to back to eventually rest painlessly on the hair – that white is the colour of rest, of afternoon sleep, the space between paragraphs. We put our feet on each other, we become each other's resting places.

Near the Duomo in Milan, where pigeons behave more like tourists than the humans around them, showing an extravagant curiosity about everything, we stood next to each other, still shy and unsure about the show of proximity of our bodies. It would be the first time we'd be in a photograph together. The photographer – he was Pakistani, from the Punjab, he said, while establishing familiarity with us in Hindi – would throw a handful of corn around us, and the pigeons would rush towards the grains. That was supposed to be the photographic moment, an equivalent of standing in front of the Taj in Bombay. Birds are better than a monument, we agree, while standing like two teenagers in their early fifties. And yet, when we asked for double copies of the photograph, one for him and one for me, the brittleness of the moment became evident. But we allowed it to blow away, treating all weather as good, as the dying perhaps think of life.

We would condense a life into a week – it was possible, it was in the Bible, wasn't it? The seventh day we'd have to go away – the relationship's long rest, if we ever saw each other again, or the end, if we didn't. We have families to return to – we were ships, our families ports. That awareness makes every moment heavy – we try to load each moment with as much as we can, events and expectations, as children load food and toys on trays, when allowed such a treat. Every moment brings an odd mix of exhilaration and frustration – the cup never fills. We laugh when a smile would've been enough, we gag on exclamation marks when just a stare would've worked. Everything has become amplified – perhaps we're trying to make up in depth what we'd lost in time.

We walked into a Prada store in Milan knowing we wouldn't buy anything. How ugly the bags were. People came here not to buy things but to admire price tags. Yes, to look at price tags the way they'd just marvelled at the old and lustrous sculpture outside – numbers were all, the age of the statues, the steep prices, the greater the number the greater their value. We'd been formed by a different aesthetic – to not say everything, to keep something to ourselves, the beauty of hiding. Who'd stitched our clothes or who'd woven our saris was as hidden to us as the names of those we loved. The world had changed – everything had to be said, spelt out. The name 'Prada' was on every bag. They looked like school uniforms. When we walked out together through the narrow corridor leading to the door, our bodies so close that it felt like the intimacy had escaped from inside us and had now returned as an avalanche that was rolling us together, he told me, 'I didn't know that Jaya Prada was so wealthy.'

'What do you mean?' I asked, not getting the context.

'These bags, with her name on them – they cost more than I earn in a month. Who buys them? They're making her rich.'

'Prada. No relation of Jaya Prada.' I couldn't stop laughing.

The other stores that fell on the way we mispronounced too – Gucci, he said, almost saying 'luchi'; Versace, I said, proud of my pronunciation, to which he said, 'Like attache'; Leonardo da Vinci we knew, but not Caravaggio, which we mispronounced as if the last syllable was 'go'. It was liberating – after a life spent on aiming to do only the right things, it was in these mistakes that we built our nest. The statues tired us – we were exhausted of meeting strangers whose names we knew we'd forget immediately. And the angels – they were everywhere, with their wings, resting on walls and pillars, friendlier than birds but more reserved than humans. They never looked at us, no matter how close we were to them. More angels in this country than humans, we said, before we returned, again, to our very first enthusiasm that had turned into this trip. Tapan-da's canteen in university, our friends inside, singing with spoons and steel plates, and the two of us, sitting on the moss-eaten stairs, asking the same question to each other at the same time (how, how could it have been possible?!): DH Lawrence and Browning before him, and Henry James – _what had Italy given them?_

We liked these writers, vastly different though they were from each other, and we wanted to know what a culture – a country – had given them. We decided that we'd find out – when we were older, when we had jobs and money, when...

Everywhere we went we looked for an answer – or answers – to this question. After visiting the houses of the gods and their attendants (who else were the angels except for efficient housekeepers of the gods?), we went to see how people lived. There was a fancy word for it – architecture. We mispronounced it purposely – Archie-tecture, since everything in this country had the 'ch' sound: Dolce, Vercelli, and so on, the few words we'd begun pronouncing like residents here. We stood at the head of streets and watched families of houses. Some of them were tired from standing for too long. It was the balconies that we loved most. We looked at them as if we were watching a film – it was a place of action, of the outside meeting the inside, like our mouths. The balconies in India, in Jaipur and Calcutta, in the Mughal monuments, even in temples, had somehow seemed different – it was as if they'd migrated from these lands and acquired girth and volubility on the way. Here they were shyer, more secretive, even intimate, but also proud, happy to be watched. That explained their ornateness, of their grille, of flowerpots brimming from their margins – these were eyelashes to the balcony's eyes. We pointed them out to each other, choosing favourites. We noticed how certain shapes invited the morning light while others tried to shy away from the afternoon light. We imagined the personality and habits of the inmates, turning them into characters from fiction, but most of all, we gave personalities to the houses. We'd come to them from watching ceilings of monuments, of churches and cathedrals – the murals on the ceilings, their ornaments, replicating an imagined life in the sky, with its quasi-human-like gods. The gods and their wealthy worshippers demanded a craning of human necks, an imitation of looking up at the sky, where humans have imagined their creators' residencies. The balconies were a liberation from that perspective – it allowed its occupants to look down at passersby below and, more importantly, to look at each other across streets. It was the equivalent of prayer at the altar, a spatial proximity to God – one could be in one's house while also belonging to outside it, almost, but not quite, on the street. This difference I came to hold as the difference between marriage and love outside law – how one allowed oneself to look at it. Marriage was ceiling, love without its seal balcony.

In between the houses on either side were stream-like streets with the air of amateurs, as if they were not really meant to be there, hesitant because they were not as professional as roads. The sky felt like a ceiling – its unchanging nature, that arrogant blueness of an amnesiac summer sky that's forgotten its grey and gloominess. We swallowed everything with the zealousness of tourists – at times I watched young couples kissing on streets and escalators as if they too were part of the experience of being in Italy. We watched Italians eating pasta, rolling the linguini on forks with the kind of expertise that only South Asians have for eating rice with their hands. I sometimes looked at him like a tourist too – so many years, a lifetime, had passed since we'd been together like this. Student life had meant sitting beside each other – in the classroom, on buses, in cinema halls. It seemed like this was the first time we were sitting opposite each other in restaurants. These little things were part of the tourism too. All through this, and never stopping for a moment, was the fear and anxiety of it coming to an end.

We'd made our excuses to our families – a conference on Shakespeare to be attended, lectures to be given, the seven-day period filled with made-up events. And yet, both of us were not Shakespeare scholars. We were ordinary lecturers who'd managed to find jobs in Bengal in the late 1980s. We'd taught the same things for years. Family, housekeeping, raising children, savings in the bank – all of these had taken over our lives gradually. We had no illusion about our ordinariness. That, too, we shared in common. We were so aware of the unremarkability of our appearances that from time to time we asked each other – particularly me to him – whether I was spoiling the view with my frizzy hair in a bun and my salwar kameez.

How old was Italy? How old was human love? Far away, without really bothering us, are the Alps, a mix of fog and ice sticking to the mountains like a cold that would never leave. The light towards the end of the day is like honey – there are times when I want to lick it off the ground or wipe it with my fingers, using them like a spatula. The mountains, the light, honey, the stars and the night – all metaphors of aged and pickled time, of a seeming unchangingness, of near-permanence. Following them is my feeling of deprivation – how these have been denied to us. Nothing helps, not literature, not philosophy. The celebration of the present, contentment in something as tiny as a moment – how could it not leave anyone thirsty? It is strange how guilt rarely scratches at our actions, or perhaps even our imagination. We'd returned to a past while having become different people from those who'd lived in that past. Sometimes, when I looked at him, I wondered whether we were still alive or whether this was a dream, or perhaps a life after death. It is impossible that this is true, that we, who'd lost each other to others, have managed to find each other again. As I thought of the seventh day, God's day of rest, a metaphor that just wouldn't stop coming to me, I never stopped wondering whether we still loved each other. Love comes to rest too – it must, after the exhaustion of activity, of fighting bad weather and anxiety. The end of love – like the end of life – must be an unchanging straight line. Would we reach that on the seventh day, since we'd set out to compress a lifetime into a few days?

We lie awake night after night, looking at the mountains outside our window, but always outside our reach. They are our planetarium. We know we are looking at the same thing, the same light, the same night, but I can't help wondering, again, whether we're thinking the same thoughts. Once, when my overgrown nail scratched against his skin in the darkness and it chipped but didn't break, I thought of it immediately as the equivalent of the seventh day – would something similar happen? We do not really know what we're doing – we'd wanted to become fish and that desire had made us jump into the water. Inside the water everything looked plumper and mobile – our seven-day lives did too.

We'd come to Italy, we'd told ourselves in our youth, in a time when travelling abroad was uncommon and only for the wealthy. It would've meant nothing – a half-joke, like travelling to Mars – had air travel not become easier and affordable. Now that it'd come true, we were surprised at ourselves – as if we'd invented something with which we didn't know what to do.

The simplest things seem new to us because we've forgotten that these experiences had once been ours. We now lived in flats – he on the third floor, me on the fourth, in different cities of course. Living in this rented apartment on the ground floor revives our older selves – memories of pushing open a window, but always carefully, so as not to hurt the creepers lurking outside. Outside are houses with sloping roofs, like they'd been in his village and in the town where I'd grown up. We discovered something that we hadn't in our early lives – that these roofs had more grace than the flat roofs of our apartment blocks. It was the grace of letting go, of not accumulating what did not really belong to it. These little things make us tourists of our own lives. It is almost the equivalent of time travel. And yet, at the end of every such discovery are the lines we'd learnt together from Shakespeare: _But at my back I always hear/Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near._

When we got onto trains, not always to go to places but to be in travel, for it fermented our sense of togetherness, making it grow in volume larger than it actually was, I'd grow jittery when the last stop came. The Italian word 'terminal' would be announced by an invisible speaker. The last stop – as if aiding our rehearsal of the seventh day. I'd be listless, wondering what to do, taking our actions as foreboding for what would really happen on the seventh day. The anxiety was perhaps because while we'd planned the six days, cramming them with tours and visits, and keeping the nights to ourselves as if it were pocket money, but we'd not discussed the final day. I was in a queue to get down with the rest of the passengers when he pulled me by my hand. We waited for the train to empty out and then fill up again – we returned to where we'd started from. Would that be...

In Turin's Piazza San Carlo, we'd been told how the streets had been broadened to control the mob, possibly during the time of Mussolini. For a moment, I imagined the heart as such a street, one that was capable of being widened from time to time. Why didn't social conventions widen like that? My mind reached out to metaphors all the time – I know that it is turning into a disease. The metaphor, I taught students, is a passionate reaching out to another world, for comparisons are possible only between different things. We had become metaphors ourselves, in hurtling towards this foreign place and, once here, we seemed to encounter people who had had the same urge – to imagine man and God as metaphors and the space between them as a relationship. For this, they'd turned their love into stone, into statues. But the flesh is a gymnasium, and the muscles of our hearts had turned us into gymnasts.

I'd spent years cutting paper – blank paper, newspaper, packets, every kind – with a pair of scissors. It was a secret habit, one that I'd managed to keep from the world, including my family. I knew exactly when it'd begun, and I tried to push the memory away – his last letter to me, a naked postcard, giving me his new address, his new place of work. I didn't allow myself to memorise it. With an old pair of scissors, that was as old as my parents' marriage, I cut the postcard into thin strips until our old maid Maya-mashi said that she'd like to take them to burn and create a dark kumkum powder from it. She appeared with a dark brown bindi on her forehead the next day. I remember thinking – that is how addresses disappear.

That moment comes back to me often when I see him, particularly as he types messages on his phone. We don't talk about our families – they were a given, they existed, like God. Wi-Fi connects us to them – they've become flattened in our memory, their dimensions in our consciousness smaller, as their bodies are inside phones. We didn't ask about each other's families – as if they were untouchables in our conversation. It is from them that we've taken a holiday. And yet, by the fourth day, in spite of the exhilaration of taking a lift up to the sky-like ceiling of the Mole Antonelliana in Turin – the city's highest point, from where it seemed that it was possible to see the world, even our houses in India, a thought which made me want to climb down from there immediately – something has begun to loosen in me. Desire congeals, becomes a bolus as wide and long as our body, so that we feel nothing except it. What happens to desire when at low tide? I begin to feel something like that, muscles of habit hardening inside me. Sometimes I mishear female voices for my daughter calling me. It has begun to seem slightly artificial – this time, this borrowed time, like time borrowed from life for living a vicarious life inside a cinema hall, that it is not like living inside a painting, chained by the frame.

We rarely left each other alone, except for making short phone calls to the people we knew as home. Only once, when he wanted to sleep, I rented a taxi and asked Alfredo – the driver we'd come to trust – to take me to its suburbs. The paddy fields, submerged in ankle-deep water, and some with plough marks on land, their agricultural script as it were, made me miss home. I felt the weather changing gradually, for emotions are the real weather, just as desire is ceiling, asking us to imagine how much we can extend beyond ourselves. Returning to the city meant a return to a skyline pockmarked by civilisation, by the unequal height of exhausted chimneys. In that too I looked for meaning. When I opened the door to the rented apartment and found him sleeping, unaware of my going and coming, I felt an urgent desire to wake him up and remind him of how he'd left me nearly thirty years ago. I didn't.

Instead, I walked to the shop to buy some food. I'd eat whatever was available – though my body longed for rice and ghee, for saltiness.

The shop was closed, yet again. This was my fourth attempt. Outside, on the wall, was a tiny sign in green: 'Fresca'. I'd never heard of any dish by that name. It began to seem personal to me now, even racist – that this shop should choose to be closed whenever we visited. I returned to the apartment and ate biscuits. How similar they were – the man I'd married and the man I was with now, both of them addicted to sleep in a way I could never understand. I wondered whether his wife's frustrations were similar to mine – did holidays become sleeping days for her husband too?

Eating biscuits that air had hardened, I felt curious about his sleep. Was he dreaming about his family like I had? It'd felt like cheating, that I should think of them when I was with him. A waiter's words came to me – _Coppia_ and _Duo,_ couple and two respectively, when indicating seating space. They'd turned away a man who had come to eat alone, they didn't want to waste a table on him. She called us a couple, and it felt good because it wasn't true. I held the thought in my throat, not letting it pass out of me – that it was a relief that we were not a _coppia._ I looked at him, trying to eat his pasta with failing efficiency.

It is Friday already. We haven't made love in all these days. It hadn't happened naturally. Losing practice in our marriages had perhaps made our imaginations lethargic. We touched each other delicately – once I felt like a teapot that was being touched to check its price tag. He turned my wrist to read the time on my watch. It was as if we were in a store, and though we'd set our minds on something, we hadn't yet made the purchase. We didn't really belong to each other. The feeling intensified at nights as the walls between us grew, as sleep took us away from each other. We didn't speak very much to each other – the things I'd wanted to say to him for years were now lost, as one loses things when changing houses, and he'd lost the innocent verbosity of youth to the adopted quietness of middle age. At night, as we lay beside each other, I felt as if we were the hydrogen and oxygen of our school textbooks that were waiting to turn to water. But that didn't happen. Would that happen on the seventh day?

Nothing that had happened so far had been a surprise, an unexpected gift. Perhaps Venice would change that. Venice, where we were supposed to go the next day, before flying to where we'd left our houses, hoping that they'd still be there, obedient and expectant.

Sitting on the bed next to him, still thinking about food, about the eatery which wouldn't open for us, I also noticed the map of approaching baldness on his head, like one can predict the rains from sooty clouds. I'd tell him about the abortion I'd had to have, I thought. I arranged the words carefully in my head. It wasn't his fault that I'd got pregnant, but that he'd left without thinking that he might have left something behind... How could he have? I would tell him at last, though I hadn't come here to tell him this.

My fingers were suddenly in his hand. He was playing with my forefinger. It made us young again – an old habit returning at an older age.

'Ah, you voted,' he said, smiling at the ink mark on my finger. Who did you vote for, Jyotsna?'

'You?' I asked.

'The BJP, who else?' he said, still rubbing his thumb on my index finger. When we were students, I used to call this action 'genie', as if rubbing my finger would make a genie appear.

'What!' I said, unable to say anything more. This staunch leftist, the young boy leading all marches and protests with a red Students' Federation of India flag in his hand – those eyes, broad forehead and beard about which friends teased him, for their supposed resemblance to Marx – had voted for the BJP.

'And you?' he asked, not noticing my incredulity.

Before I fell asleep, I remember thinking of all the slogans we'd written together before student elections in our university – the red ink on our clothes and bodies, where we became extensions of the office of the SFI. I heard him laughing in his sleep after midnight. When he went to the toilet, I was still awake, reclined against the headrest.

'You didn't say who you voted for?' he said.

I saw his teeth in the dark. The beard of his early adult life was gone – it was as if every part of his face had suddenly become visible to me after all these years.

'Huh?' he said, touching the dark bluish mark on my index finger again.

I didn't say anything. We'd left a day after voting. Election results would be out three days after we'd reach home – on Thursday.

I felt myself being gradually – and noiselessly – pulled towards a pond of sleep, a pond after a day of swollen heat.

The road hits the sky as if it were a wall. Only softer, so that if it actually hit it, it'd pass through it as water does through a sponge, not be rejected as a ball is by a wall. The word 'rejects' stirs anxiety in me. I wonder how I'll say it. All through these years, I've imagined the moment when I'd say yes if he'd ask me the question. But now, as I sit beside him as he drives us to Venice, I am thinking of the opposite. How do I say no?

The car brakes. I'm woken, as if from a lost life. He touches my chin. I think he is smiling. But I don't turn to look at him.

I think – what has brought us together?

I think – what is taking us apart?

To both I say life, and my mind goes quiet, as if it's reached the end of a catalogue.

His finger touches my chin again – like the sun touches an inverted mountain peak on a lake. So, not really touching, but a preparation for subsequent touches. His finger feels like a foreign language, like the Italian I see splattering out of people's mouths like crackling popcorn (I don't like popcorn, nothing about it except its sound sometimes; I imagine that my skull will crack open with the same sound when I'm put in fire at the end); no, not popcorn, but long and sticky, like melted cheese that doesn't let go of lips.

I try to smile, but I've become the mountain of my simile – frozen. I'll crack if I move, if I smile. I now understand why relationships are imagined as brittle – why it's called 'break'-up. Only brittle things break.

The sun is like light bandaged to the sky – it is of the sky and yet not of it.

I do not ask why he is getting out of the car. I feel like I'm about to die, that I'll die inside the car, but I push the thought away, as one swallows a cough, keeping it away for as long as one can. The clouds hang from the sky like bats – I think of them as the sky's lungs. They shrink and swell like those things inside my chest, only slower.

I've seen this place from the sky – this red-tiled roof city, its sloping roofs echoing the mountains in instalments. From the car they look like they belong to the sky – that they are the sky's turbines. My eyes follow them, as if seeking their end, waiting for them to stop, but the eye, so used to seeking calm in a flatland of green or bluish water, can't rest. The mind looks for echoes – the shapes of roofs and conifers and mountains are like one quoting the other, the sea has its family in the volatile postures of the palm. I look at him without looking at him – he's outside the car, but I can see him even with my eyes closed, as I have all these years. I am moving the words in my head – no, not like a juggler, but like a jeweller, setting them as one would for permanence...

The mind has many sites of injury. Even after years, the impression of bandage strips remain.

Like death, the mind is lazy. It stops at too many places on the way.

It takes me some time to realise that this was a dream. I feel deprived, as one does from not having been able to see a dream to its end. I pack my things while he sleeps, grateful that clothes are not infants, that they don't make sounds when moved. I know I'll never see him again. For a moment I wonder whether it is this that made God rest on the seventh day. I fumble to write him a last message. What could I write that would explain my leaving? My mind trawls memories, and suddenly an oft-used phrase that did the job as slogans rises to breathe: 'Go Back...' Student unions in my college used it even now – _Go Back._ I began typing on my phone: 'Go...'

On the table, next to where I'd kept my tickets and passport, is a blank sheet of paper. In my bag are pens with blue, red and green ink. I take out the red-inked pen and write something that I'd last written about thirty years ago as a student union leader: GO BACK. This is not like music, it doesn't need riyaz. I have a visual memory of my students using it recently. Was it 'Go Back Modi'?

I leave the poster on the dining table: GO BACK.

Later, in the taxi, I wonder who the words were meant for – him or me. _Go Back._

I also wonder whether these were the same words God used on the seventh day – for himself or for man. _Go Back._
Literature and Other Ailments

_'Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.'_

—Jane Yolen

I KNOW SOMEONE _WILL_ die today.

Something bad _will_ happen.

'This will be our goalpost.'

'This? These two trees?'

Little boys can turn anything into a game – the world exists only as a prop for their sport. But it is the sight behind them that is new. A football is now travelling from one pair of feet to another, as if it were a kind of dialogue. The feet belong to the two little boys, cousins and occasional friends. This is the only way they can talk – with their bodies. For, at seven, they have no shared memories that make conversation possible. They converse like animals – with hands and feet, even with their chests, hitting, beating, pinching, pushing, kissing, kicking, licking, even biting. Joy moves through their bodies like fire eating paper. Leaves, now waterless, crack under their feet. They pick up a few from time to time and break them. They test their brittleness – that leaves can break and not have to be torn is still a discovery to their young fingers. In this, too, they compete with each other – whose leaves crackle louder. They behave as if they were the producers of the brittleness of these leaves.

Behind them are their grandfathers – too young to be grandfathers, too young to think about death. And yet, it is their fear of dying that has brought them together. To this forest of dried leaves, to this, which they are calling a picnic. Five brothers, four sisters – that they are related seems like a fantasy now, so different they have turned out to be from each other. Middle age, its tiring endlessness, has pushed out everything that existed before it – childhood, when they turned from newborn strangers to siblings, scraping against each other's skin and wounds, seems now to belong only to others, like their grandchildren. But this place, remote and inaccessible, seems to have unwound something in them. The forest has become a time machine that has taken them back to the time when their legs were exposed to the world without a thought.

Winter, 'picnic season', is almost over. Plastic packets and bottles lie with the leaves. They make almost the same sound when squashed by feet, making one wonder whether they were once as alive as the leaves. There are others who are here for a picnic too. They are invisible. Hindi film songs from the 1990s declare their presence – it also marks their territory. We don't want to go near that sound, as if it were a dog's bark scaring us away.

From here, sitting on what is the remainder of a tree trunk, I see them all as if they were inhabitants of a silent film. Only the silence has been replaced by the sound of dried leaves, like a scratchy cassette. I can't hear anything from here. Everywhere, including from the sky, there is the sound of leaves – being crushed, stomped on, resisting the wind, as if 'nature' were being munched like potato chips. I see my aunts laughing, laughter stretching their bodies like bows, laughing urgently as if laughter's expiry date would be over by day end. From this distance, it looks comical, this exaggeration, this dependence on bodies for what their words are unable to do.

I know that they do not like each other. They share a history of periodic affection and withdrawal from each other's lives. But it is as if these quarrels were created by the walls and doors and ceilings and windows of a house, not its inhabitants. They've left that behind them for the sunlit day, as they have their toothbrushes. Or it might just be the forest – its openness, and that of the blue-swept spring sky – which have opened up the minds of these people.

I see them calling me, their hands waving at me, the fingers moving towards themselves, as if I was rice on a plate that they were drawing towards them. I hadn't wanted to come here. But pressure from family is like the weather – it forces us to wear clothes we don't like and do things against our will.

The fragrance of basmati rice has taken over the forest. It moves faster than men, than animals, for the dried leaves are deceptive – they hide stones and pits, and one has to walk as one does on a swamp. I don't know the rest of the menu. I wonder whether there'll be fish fry. It is not the fish cutlet I love as much as the onion slivers in mustard that is served as an accompaniment. I see them eating something – even my mother, the anchal of her green sari now protecting her head from the sun in an ad hoc manner, has forgotten me. I'm slightly anxious that it might be the fish fry.

So when they call again, waving at me as if they were on a boat that was about to leave an epidemic-ravaged island, I decide to walk towards them, measuring my steps, trying not to compromise my dignity in the face of my greed for a fish fry. When I reach them, their attention has shifted from me to the two boys. They're all counting – 66, 67, 68, 69... The football is thrown up in the air and collected safely. The count is therefore of the number of times the football has been saved from falling on the ground; no, not the ground, but the leaves. Humans will invent anything to bury their time, I say to myself. They're all counting, made delirious by the increase in number. At that moment it seems to me that the ball will never fall from Tojo's hands. It is not an unhappy thought – to be here for the rest of one's life with one's family and relatives might not be as difficult as having to deal with the strangeness and strangers of the world.

But the ball does fall. The urgent sound of tortured leaves competes with the chorus of adult sighs. Both sounds die equally fast.

And everything is immediately forgotten. For out of nowhere, like adulthood, a new game has started. They are blindfolding Buro-kaku with a dupatta. There's a stick in his hand. Far away – about fifteen steps away – is an upturned clay pot. The blindfolded person will have to break the pot. It seems like a straightforward game to me. I don't understand their excitement. I think it is as fake as their laughter, all a performance of human joy.

What I haven't allowed to climb to the surface is my fear. No picnic – except innocuous school picnics, sometimes not even them – ends without a tragedy. It's not the newspaper reports that have accumulated into a bad vibe inside me. It's the literature and films – someone is lost, someone dies, someone drowns, something irreversible happens in excursions. It couldn't be superstition. And so, as I watch them play, I also wait for something that they are innocent about – _I know that someone will die,_ and if not that, _something bad will happen._

Why does something unexpected always happen during picnics? Perhaps our bodies are too tiny to contain our excitement. Why the outside – being in the open, a temporary life without walls – should create this surplus energy in humans is beyond the comprehension of science.

I tell myself that nothing will go wrong – that it's a bright day, that we are only thirty-six kilometres away from the town where our home is, that we have cell phone connectivity, that one of us is a doctor, one a banker, another the owner of a petrol pump, and so we won't be short of money or petrol or even medical help.

Everyone else is on their feet, everyone except my mother and the two maids. The underside of my mother's feet is like a riverbed: the calluses are stones; the boils, leaking pus, become dense streams. Walking is a punishment for her. Her lips quiver all the time, like water on the sea, tremulous, waiting to host excitement any moment. Pain has distorted her feet, but even when one can't see her feet, one recognises it immediately in the shape of her eyebrows, for they look like damaged ferns to which one hasn't bothered to pay any attention. The maids, sitting on the red plastic chairs beside her, have been instructed to do just that – to sit and enjoy, to do no work at all, to be on holiday. They smile when our eyes meet, the three of us aware of the artificiality of the situation.

But everyone's eyes are now on Buro-kaku. A chorus of voices is guiding him towards his target. My mother, who hardly speaks nowadays, says 'Poor clay pot, what has it done to be beaten like this?' in a whisper. It's a rare moment of relaxation from the leaves, which do not let us hear anything, no conversation, no music, unless from inside headphones.

_Straight._

_No, no, right._

_Not so much._

_A little to the left._

_Keep on walking straight._

_Stop now._

_Stop, stop._

_Hit. Hit. Hit._

_Uff._

Instructions flow in from all directions. Everyone's waiting for Buro-kaku to hit the pot with the wooden stick. I notice the stick – its beauty, the gentle curves where the tree wanted to be aberrational. One of my aunts pulled this out from the pile of leaves. She has a gift for excavation – a few days after her wedding, she found a stone resembling a Shivalinga from the family pond in the village. That established her superior status in the family.

'Hit,' she instructs, laughing.

'Should I, really?' asks Buro-kaku.

I close my eyes and plug my ears with my fingers. I cannot bear to hear things breaking – even the sound of someone chewing chicken bones makes me nervous. My mother's whisper returns to me – what has the innocent pot done to deserve this? My teeth chatter from fear of the pot breaking.

But no such thing happens. After what seems like a long silence – the quiet of resting slippers, before they are employed, again, for walking – sighs and laughter follow. No, the pot is still whole, unhurt. I turn to look at my mother. I think I see tears in her eyes. When I gesture to ask what is wrong, she says something that I can't really hear, that I read from her lips as 'insects'. Yes, it is true – there are these tiny black insects that are aiming for our eyes. They are like tears – they are uninterested in any other space other than the human eyes. They know they will die there, but they still fling themselves at the face.

My mother says something that I can't hear. I ignore her words. What is so urgent that can't be repeated later? Age has taught me that apart from an intimation of death, no message is really urgent. Surely she, a poor innocent woman losing her memory like her teeth, isn't telling me about death.

It is my cousin's turn now. Her hair is long, left open, so that its ends reach below her shirt. She's getting married next month. I wonder why she had to grow her hair for that. My youngest uncle is tying a piece of cloth on her eyes. She's always been his favourite niece. 'This is my dupatta,' Puja declares.

The blindfolded person is held by someone and made to move anticlockwise to disorient their sense of direction. My youngest aunt is doing that to her. 'Stop, stop, my head is spinning,' says my cousin.

Everyone laughs. That seems to be the source of joy of this game, of most games – someone's discomfort, someone making mistakes.

Puja, taller than even her uncles, takes long strides. The little boys are the opposite of the adults – they want every blindfolded person to break the pot, the adults want them to fail, to walk in the wrong direction, to see them make mistakes. It is what differentiates children from adults – not just their bodies but their different joys.

Her mother tries to help: 'Turn to your left, why are you...'

Puja stops walking. She turns towards where she imagines her mother is. 'Why don't you play instead of me?'

We're all shocked by the anger in her voice. What no one knows is that the mother and daughter have been arguing since morning. I could only hear a snatch of a line from their conversation: 'This phone is the root of all your sadness...' The dried leaves had carried away the rest of their words.

Puja begins walking again. One of the little boys – I always confuse their names; I see them so infrequently – tries to help her by holding her elbow. 'This way,' he says.

'Don't touch me! Who is this? No one will touch me,' she says, lifting her stick as if about to hit him.

The little boy moves away. He looks like he will cry right now.

Puja keeps walking. Her favourite uncle shouts: 'Hit, just hit right now, don't move an inch, hit hit hit hit, hit baba...'

Puja hits. Everyone claps in joy, as if she's hit an over-boundary. And immediately after, an echo follows: 'Oh no... Eh ma...'

The clay pot lies broken, but something else too. Everyone looks at each other and then at Puja. Who hid her phone inside the clay pot? Though the smartphone can do almost anything now, it can't answer this question.

Puja turns to look at her mother. She is standing a few feet away, her hands raised to her head, frozen by the shock of what has just happened.

'You?' Puja asks, asking her mother to confess.

'Are you mad?' Her mother breaks down. She's now squatting, her face in her hands.

The uncle quickly intervenes. 'I'll get you a new phone. I would have anyway, as a gift for your wedding. Let it be.'

'All my photos and texts?' It feels like someone has hit Puja with the stick.

Is this the beginning of something that'd turn into a catastrophe as it did in stories about picnics?

But there's nothing that can stop the game. My oldest uncle has already volunteered to be the next player. He's taken the stick from Puja and is now waiting for someone to blindfold him.

'Hurry up, it'll be time for lunch.' His voice is urgent.

My father walks up to him with the dupatta in his hand. My uncle is taller than him, and he has to crouch for the piece of cloth to be tied on his eyes. My father, always efficient with his hands, has finished tying even before we've realised, but he isn't letting Himangshu-kaku go. Uncle is bald – my father is moving his hands on the poor man's bald pate and laughing. Someone – a female voice – compares the bald head to the clay pot. The rest of the words are lost. The breeze has turned into a restless wind. The chorus of dried leaves would've scared a lonely traveller in the woods – it has become the voice of an invisible person.

The little boy who'd been scolded by Puja has returned as the cheerleader again. He's shouting out instructions to his grand-uncle. 'Straight,' he says.

'Forward,' says Himangshu-kaku.

'No, straight,' the little boy insists.

'Forward,' the man insists.

It becomes a rally between two players – straight-forward, straight-forward, straight-forward – until the man reaches close to the pot. One hit and the pot will break.

'How many clay pots did you get with you, Anu?' asks my father, always a stock-keeper.

'Two dozens, Mama,' she replies. She's my father's favourite niece.

The number makes my father happy. He begins counting the number of people still left to play the game. I've counted before him. Twenty-three still left. Eighteen pots remain. My father isn't bothered, I know. He hasn't counted the maids and the driver, and possibly not even his wife. Eighteen pots, nineteen people by his calculation. I even know the rhythm of these words in his mind. It'd be exactly the way he says, '18 balls – 24 runs', while watching the final overs of a Twenty20 cricket match.

Himangshu-kaku has hit the pot. Human voices have managed to drown the sound of leaves at last. There is celebration. Buro-kaku gets a bottle of drinking water and sprays it over his brother. 'Champagne, champagne,' he says.

The children repeat after him. 'Champion, champion.'

Himangshu-kaku wants to make a speech. 'I've never broken anything in my life,' he begins.

We laugh at his parody of 'I've never won anything in my life before this...', which is often the opening sentence of award ceremonies.

'Yes, it's true. I've never even broken a glass. Today, for the first time I forced myself to break something. How could I die without breaking anything in this life? My time is near...'

There is silence, even from the leaves. His wife died in October last year – her cancer was diagnosed very late. He has cancer too. All of us know but we pretend we don't.

Tonu-kakima, who everyone turns to when in trouble, begins laughing.

We are shocked.

'You have broken something, Mej-da,' she says, laughing again.

'What?' he asks, guiltily.

'You broke someone's heart when you got married, Mej-da.'

Himangshu-kaku is staring at his shoes.

'I know her, Mej-da. She never got married...'

'Really?' he asks, as if life is giving him a second chance.

'Yes. Tapati-di used to teach in my school.'

'Teach? Teach what?'

'You don't remember? Mathematics.'

'I used to fail in Maths. How could we have...'

A strong wind begins again. We cover our eyes and mouths. We stop talking.

'Keka, where's my shawl? I'll cover my ears... Keka...'

It's one of my aunts. Keka is her house-help – it's difficult to remember a time when she wasn't part of their family.

My eyes are closed, as I imagine everyone else's to be. There's only the roar of the leaves and my aunt calling Keka by her name.

'Keka's lost. She's gone!' she screams.

We open our eyes, as if doing that would bring Keka back, or that we'd be able to see what my aunt hasn't been able to.

'How can she be lost? She's not an earring,' says my mother, always speaking like a schoolteacher.

But Keka is _really_ not there. The two boys, who are used to finding hidden things only as part of a game, move chairs and look under tables, and, a little later, behind trees. They don't even know who Keka is and what she looks like, but they still want to find her.

My aunt is near-hysterical. 'How will I answer...'

'Isn't she an orphan? Whom will you have to answer then?'

I turn to look back at whose voice it is, but something gets into my right eye. I rub hard, and it's possible that it leaves, but it leaves my eye feeling heavy. I can't see clearly either.

'Let's go to the police station,' says my aunt.

'Now?' asks my father, angry to have the game interrupted.

'Yes, right now, before it's too late.'

'What'll happen to all the pots then?' my father asks.

'A girl has gone missing and you're thinking of your pots!'

I fear my aunt is about to faint. 'Ask the driver to get the car...'

'Shonku,' my father shouts. 'Shonku, Shonku...'

But where is Shonku?

Now there's a chorus of 'Shonku, Shonku, Shonku'. People are looking for him everywhere. One of the little boys begins scraping through the dried leaves to look for Shonku. I feel like laughing, but my fear takes over. Scenes from Satyajit Ray's _Aranyer Din Ratri_ sprint through my mind – of the tribal girl Duli being abused by the man from the city (I can't remember his name now). Has something similar happened to Keka?

Everyone is walking in different directions – to look for Keka and Shonku. Everyone except my mother and me. She can't walk without help, and literature has limited my chance of appreciating the world. It annotates every experience of my life – reading, and consequent knowledge has been such a burden. As a child, it was a complaint – why my mother couldn't cook the food that the _Famous Five_ ate. A few years later it turned to slotting men as Darcy or Heathcliff.

Literature turned me into a complainant, and it took away the joy of surprise and unexpectedness from my life. I could predict things as they'd happen, not because I was an astrologer, but because I'd seen similar events and circumstances happen in books and films. This picnic that we were in – too many such picnics and outings had occurred in the pages of a book or in films. It was impossible that anything new would happen. Someone would be raped, someone would be lost, someone would die. It had to happen.

My mother is calling someone on the phone. She isn't getting through. I can see it from her face and gestures.

'Whom are you calling?' I ask.

'I'm calling Shonku,' she says.

'Why?'

'What's the use of looking for him when you can phone him to ask where he is?'

I'm surprised by my mother's common sense.

She clarifies: 'That's what I always do. I can't walk. How will I go looking for people?'

I sit down, waiting for bad news to arrive – a dead body, or a bleeding piece of cloth. My specs are in my hands – my eyelashes are too long, their oiliness scratches the glass. I have to struggle to see the world, as if through a translucent curtain. I can't say exactly what happens in the next few minutes, but when I am conscious – alert is perhaps what I mean – I can see that Shonku and Keka are standing not too far away from me. As I stare at Keka, inspecting her for what she might have been through during her short excursion, I sometimes see Simi Garewal's face instead of hers. Simi, who'd played the tribal girl Duli in Ray's film, the girl molested by the man from the city. When I turn to look at Shonku however, I don't see the man from the film. Aware of being repeatedly misled by cinema and literature, I caution myself against making too much of Keka wearing her red kameez inside out. I can see the stitches distinctly from here. Had she been forced to take off her clothes? Had she been violated? Raped? No, no, it couldn't be. She is smiling. What is she saying? Why can't I hear her words? Why isn't anyone else noticing this except me?

I hope that literature is wrong, that art is wrong. The only way to escape from literature is to escape from life. Since that isn't possible, we can, at least, escape from this place. But no one pays my words any attention.

The game continues.

It is one of the little boys now. The darker boy in the blue, striped shirt. But the other boy – who resembles his father so much that one can send him to his father's office on a day when his father isn't well – also has a stick in his hand now.

He walks beside his cousin. But this time he's silent. He doesn't offer help. The adults are kinder. They direct his body towards the direction of the pot when he goes astray. When he's very close to the pot, his cousin touches his stick with his own. Scared – blindfolded as he is – he hits at the other stick. The other boy is unprepared – the stick, loose in his hand, flies into the air.

I scream in fear. This is the moment I was waiting for – _someone will die now,_ or _something bad will happen._

The stick is up in the air. There, it'll land on someone – Prem? No, Shiuli. No, who's that in the brown sweater? Someone will die now.

The stick lands at last. The humans are safe. The pot breaks. Everyone claps, even the adults. The young boy looks at my father to ask whether this should be credited to him. But people are rushing to clear the debris.

'How did this get here?'

That's all I can hear. I'm eager to see, but nothing is visible. A thalamus of heads. What is it?

Could it be my phone? My turn now, after Puja's? I touch the pocket of my pants – no, it's still there. I wonder whether technology will make it possible for phones to escape out of tight pockets in the future.

'Who put this...'

A broken egg lies between shards of clay. 'Whose egg?' I ask by mistake.

'Yours.' It's a female voice behind me. I meet them so infrequently that I can't identify their voices.

'Count the eggs, Partho,' my father says, having found some work to do. He is like a fly hovering over a ripe fruit – he has to move around it even if he's not interested in eating. That is his idea of busyness, of work – to be present everywhere, standing on attention, waiting to be summoned.

'Why?' asks my brother. Only his silence can calm down my father's excess voltage.

'Then we'll know whether it was one of the eggs we brought or an egg of some other bird in the forest,' my father explains. He doesn't like to explain anything, but when he has to, he does it to the tiniest detail, as if he was reporting an accident to the police. Fear is his primary emotion – he doesn't want to do anything wrong.

'Look at the shell – it couldn't be a hen's,' says someone.

'Then?'

'Is it a bird's or an animal's?'

'Does a snake lay eggs?'

'Yes.'

'No, no.'

'Yes, of course.'

'A dinosaur egg.'

'No, that would be much larger.'

'It doesn't matter whose egg it is – a dinosaur's or yours. The most important thing is to find out how it got there, inside the pot.' It's my brother, the youngest of the adults in our generation. He's a mathematician. Everyone takes him seriously. There's a thing about numbers – people who deal with them are treated with more respect than those whose disciplines are invested in the imagination. I feel victimised for having studied Literature.

'Yes.'

'Yes.'

'Not just the egg, but Puja's phone. Who is putting things there?' As if to accommodate my brother's long sentence, the wind has stopped.

'Yes.'

'Who?'

'Who do you think it...?'

The wind starts again, and nothing can be heard anymore. I close my eyes and try to walk towards my mother. 'Close...' I hear a male voice being dragged away by the wind. I imagine everyone walking with their eyes closed. I'm slightly envious of those who've just played the game – that they've had practice at walking blindfolded.

After what seems as long as a season, the wind recedes. It doesn't go away completely, like a child's tears that return even in its sleep. But it's just an occasional murmur. I call my father aside and tell him what I feel – I am certain that something will happen. He looks at me as if I'm mad. He calls his siblings and reports my apprehensions to them. Nothing will happen, they say. I tell them that someone who's about to die somewhere in the world says this at some point. They laugh it away – they are old, they've seen the world, this is a picnic, not a war, I mustn't think of dead bodies. I plead with everyone to stop the game. They laugh at me, again. But believe me, I've seen it happen – in books, in films, in... They make fun of art as if it were astrology.

By now everyone is hungry. The smell of mutton, with its buzzing garlic, strings the air. Tonu-kakima returns from the cooking place and says that if it's mutton, why are there bird legs and wings? They might be feeding us crows, she says.

What does crow taste like? asks one of the little boys.

The conversation moves to eating birds. If pigeons and water-hens and chickens and turkeys are food, why not crows? asks someone. Because the crow is our national bird – comes the prompt reply. No, the peacock is our national bird, says the little boy. Why not sparrows? asks another. Where's the flesh in a sparrow? Why not an aeroplane? Because it has no flesh.

'Why do we eat birds, Ma?' asks the shorter of the little boys.

'Because it's powerless. We can only eat what has less strength than us.' My father replies on behalf of the boy's mother – he wants everyone to be satisfied with the day.

'Do the Japanese really eat sharks? Aren't sharks more powerful than us?'

My father's fled the scene.

Such inconsequential conversation goes round and round in circles. Literature has prepared me for this too – the spinning of words, its flatulence, and the amplified show of attachment that disappears as soon as one has left the site.

Soon we're eating, even my mother, who always eats last. There is a purposeful re-creation of an older world, of the way Bengalis would eat once: a tiny anthill of salt and next to it, as if offering it obeisance, a slice of lemon and green chillies, the same pair of vegetables used to ward off the evil eye. A little farther away from this outpost, there is another white hillock, of rice, and reclining on it a corpse of a brinjal. The brinjal has a tail – it looks like a dead rat. I won't be able to eat it. Most people are saying no – not in words but putting upturned palms over their sal-leaf plates – to the potato and cauliflower curry, the florets having been minced by the harsh iron spatula. Even the promise of green peas speckling the gravy isn't tempting. Everyone's waiting for the mutton curry to arrive.

'It's not goat, it's crow meat actually,' says Sumit-kaku to the little boys.

'When I grow up, I'll go to China and eat cockroaches. I'm not scared of anything,' comes the prompt reply.

And then the mutton arrives, like a bride, its perfume first. Everyone is shy but eager. Everyone wants the best piece – the best part of the goat.

Buro-kaku can't hold back his greed anymore. 'Give me only two pieces, but both must have fat,' he instructs.

The boy serving mutton begins looking into the bucket from which he's serving – it's suddenly become a well from which a lost ring must be recovered, so hard is the task of finding a piece of meat with a blob of fat sticking to it like a sock from a foot.

'I want crow legs. I love chicken legs,' shouts one of the boys, impatient with expectation.

Suddenly, without any kind of prologue, a dust storm begins.

Everyone is unprepared, everyone except me that is. I knew _something bad would happen._ But a dust storm is still a surprise. I try to remember whether I've read about a dust storm interrupting a picnic in any book that I've read. The genre doesn't matter.

We're all sitting with our eyes closed. I at least am, and imagine others must be too. Instructions follow: Close your eyes and don't move – to the boys. Cover the mutton curry – to the boy who was serving.

'It's not Baishakh – winter's not left yet. How can we have a kalbaishakhi...'

'Don't talk. Sand will get inside your... chhya what is...?'

'It's like a game of statue. You're not allowed to move.' It's one of the little boys again.

Our right hands, still messy with food, are of no help. I feel sand collecting on my wet fingers. Without caring for table manners I open my left eye slightly and look for my glass of water. I don't know whether it's mine but I dunk my hand in it with relief. I imagine that the women are in an advantageous position, we with our dupattas and anchals of saris. But the men?

Do people die in dust storms? Since my reading of literature doesn't suffice, I wish I could look at my phone. Google knows everything – everything that has happened in the past that is, though not the future. If someone has died in a dust storm, it'll be able to tell me. But it has no power of prediction – it can't say whether a dust storm can kill someone. I wonder whether literature is like that too. No, there's the imagination – but can imagination help to predict things? My thoughts tumble over one another, I feel asphyxiated. This is the moment – we'll all die. Or _someone will die._ I am that someone.

'We must leave.' It's my father's voice. Even the storm hasn't changed that baritone.

Sand particles hit against our skin, just as the insects were a little while ago. Our bodies are now the sand's dartboards.

'Do you all know how to swim?' My eyes are closed. I think it's my eldest uncle's voice.

'Swim?' A chorus of the same question.

I'm certain my uncle is drunk. I've seen it in films – how men smuggle alcohol into family picnics. I sniff the air, but sand gets in. I sneeze. I sneeze again, and then again.

'Let's walk through this to the cars. I mean, let us walk as if we were swimming. Let us pretend that the sand is water.'

There – this is the beginning of the end, I'm sure. The first sign of insanity – I've read about this in novels, how the entire pack will now accept the mad person as their leader. This is the beginning of the doom. And so I say 'No, I don't know how to swim. And this is not water.'

I can't see the responses on their faces. I can't really say whether I have everyone's support. What is the use of the power of prediction that comes to me from literature if I can't avoid a calamity?

There is a weird kind of silence – not silence as we understand it, but the absence of human sounds. The noise of the storm gets louder every minute – higher than I imagine the music is inside a claustrophobic disco. Sand competes with sound to enter my ears. I have only two hands – but there are the eyes and ears and the nose and mouth, too many orifices to cover. I begin walking with my eyes closed. I should've played the game – it'd have given me practice. I imagine that it is night and I am going to the toilet with my eyes closed. I can even manage to find my slippers with my eyes closed. So I begin walking, telling myself that I am walking towards the toilet.

Is it possible that they've abandoned me, that they've forgotten about me and left me here? They might've been in a rush to leave, but even my mother? Am I walking too slowly? Will they never find me? I turn to the only source of information I have – literature, to _Robinson Crusoe._ They found him, they'll find me too. I only need to be patient and wait, like Crusoe. But Crusoe survived because of provisions he managed to save from the ship. How will I survive? There's the mutton curry, but it must be run over by the dust and flies by now.

'Why are you walking like that?' It's my father's voice.

Oh, they haven't left me. I wonder how I should feel – what did Crusoe feel when he first met the sailors on the rescue ship?

'Open your eyes!' my father instructs.

I think I've misheard. All my life, particularly my childhood, I've heard him say the opposite when I wouldn't sleep: 'Close your eyes'.

When I open my eyes the world is as I had left it, as after a sleep – clean and dust-free. Everything's packed and ready to leave, as if this outing was a school day, and one must leave for home because it's afternoon. I'm sure that this thought is not mine, that this must have nested in my consciousness from some poem by Tagore or some Bangla adhunik song.

My mother is sitting by the window of the blue car whose name I've forgotten again. I can't remember the names of cars – hardly any writer takes them seriously. I don't even know the name of the car in Ritwik Ghatak's _Ajantrik._ My mother is calling me. I know she's kept a place for me to sit beside her. It's an old habit, a continuation from my childhood. I wonder which novel or film she picked it up from – putting a hankie to keep a place.

Everyone is washing their face and neck and arms. The little boys are throwing water at each other. 'What a storm!' someone says; 'And how sudden!' says another. There's more splashing of water. Someone scolds the boys.

My mother is looking at me. Though my glasses are dusty, I can see her gentle smile – the equilibrium in its curve that has made acceptance of everything, every joy and every adversity, possible. Though I take after her, I will never have her smile – mine is forced laughter, a late acknowledgement of the world. She is still looking at me, as if there was nothing else to see. She worries for me – she only wants me to eat and sleep well, that is all she wants for me from life, she is certain that just that is enough to keep someone well.

An incident from my childhood, about her giving me wrong medicine, comes back to me, as it does to people in such situations in films and novels. I had to be hospitalised...

'What?' my father says loudly, interrupting my flow of thought.

We are never surprised by his high-pitched voice, and so we don't pay it much attention.

'What?!' my father says again. 'How?' he says after some time.

I turn back to look at him. Who is he speaking to? The boys have gathered near him, as if expecting the next instalment of a story, as if the picnic were a story. 'What happened?' they ask, almost together.

'A crow was killed...,' he says.

'A crow?' asks a woman's voice. I don't turn to see whose voice it is.

'We eat birds because we are more powerful than them,' says one of the boys, quoting my father.

'A crow was killed,' says my father.

My mother, who's behind the glass window of the car, can't hear anything. She's gesturing to me to get into the car, to sit beside her. She's not interested in anything else.

'A crow,' repeats one of the boys. 'Ma, does man eat crows? Do the Chinese eat crows?'

'Only a crow was killed... electric wire... short circuit... my house... the two wooden ceilings on the terrace... books, drying clothes, my university certificates... everything... They've called the fire brigade... we need to reach before everything is... But thank God, only a crow was killed...' My father says these words to no one in particular, as if it was a public service announcement.

I want to hold my father and tell him that I knew this would happen – that it was destined to. How could it not? It had happened – and been rehearsed – too many times in the pages of books and in film reels to not occur as soon as life created an opportunity. Everything was, after all, only a rehearsal, a part of a cycle – life imitating art, art imitating life, endlessly. But it was only the wooden ceilings of two storerooms that had been gutted by the fire – the rest of the house was still standing, waiting for us. I move these words inside me just as a writer does, before they leak out of him on paper.

But when I walk to him, to pull him towards the car, to sit next to my mother, literature rushes out of me like vomit: ' _Only a crow was killed by India's first nuclear bomb test at Pokhran on 18 May 1974.'_

I try hard, but cannot remember where it's from. That's the thing about literature – like the cold, one doesn't always know where one gets it from.
Sleep

_'The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.'_

—Leonard Cohen

_S LEEP IS AN ALLERGY, a reaction against the day's useless welfare programmes. It is alright for people to have no memory of dreams in their sleep, but to have no memory of sleeping is a nightmare. But truth be told, insomniacs sleep much more than they think they do. Only their definitions of sleep differ from the person they sleep next to. They suffer from persecution complex every night, never forgiving those who sleep well or better. Their nights are a study of deficit._

I write all this in shorthand on my skinny notebook as the teacher in our sleep therapy class explains _11 Methods on How to Sleep Well_ in bullet points.

'What's your problem?' he asks a woman in the first row.

I'm a backbencher. To me, she looks like the most attentive student in the class. Even her hair looks sleepy – in an obedient way – to me.

'My nights are a replay of my days. It's like watching a home video, you know – I watch myself performing the events of the day when I try to sleep,' she says, stressing on 'performing'.

'Why do you do that? Do you like watching the same movie on repeat?' asks the sleep therapist.

The woman shakes her head, her eyeglasses fall to the floor, she doesn't notice. It's as if her sleepy eyes are stuck to her specs. 'I don't know,' she says like a schoolgirl who knows she's going to fail a class test.

The sleep therapist walks close to where she stands, picks up her glasses and asks, 'Can you do me a favour? Can you leave your eyes on the bedside table like the way you leave your glasses on it?' He is very clearly a patron of sleep.

The woman says she will try.

I draw cartoons of everyone's sleeping disorders. A woman who treats the phrase 'sleep cycle' literally – I draw her riding a sleepy-looking bicycle (the horn is the alarm clock). The man who forgets to sleep – I make Sleep look like a librarian who scolds him for forgetting to return a book on time.

By the time my turn comes, I am bored. And who knows, maybe even a little sleepy. 'What's your problem, Mr Z?' the therapist asks and then laughs at his silly joke. The 'z' is a play on my being the last person in sleep class as well as the zzz sign used for sleep. The cartoonist's joke is now on me. I imagine myself being turned into a comic strip as I stand up to speak to him.

'My problem is that I don't think it's a problem at all,' I say bravely, quite aware that I'm drawing the attention of twenty-nine insomniac students to myself.

'What do you mean?' asks the therapist in a sudden change of accent.

'I said that I don't think it's a problem at all. I don't sleep...'

'You don't get sleep is what you mean,' he says interrupting me.

'Whatever. It's the same thing to me. I don't sleep. But I don't think it's a problem. There are many who find it difficult to keep awake during the day. If that's not a problem, why should sleeplessness be a problem?' I say, making it a point to answer with a question mark. That's my version of arrogance.

'Sure. Why did you enrol for this course then?' he asks, moving away from me, putting his hands into the back pockets of his denim pants, a coming-into-late-style posture that I notice a lot these days.

'My wife insisted I do. In other words, she paid for this course!'

The entire class bursts into laughter, the first time this has happened in the six lectures we have attended together. Otherwise, we all pretend to be sleepier than we actually are. It will help us to get better, we are convinced. Sleep is a serious thing, it's keeping awake that is the laughing matter.

'Why can't you sleep?' probes the therapist, his tone warmer now.

I make a weird facial gesture, one that I imagine would make me look smart in the mirror. It clearly works. The class gets laughing again.

'Okay, let me put it this way. What do you do when your wife sleeps?' the therapist asks again. Clearly, he is not one to give up. That, or he values my wife's money more than I do.

'I wait for her to wake up,' I say matter-of-factly, for that alone is the truth.

The therapist now folds his hands into a box and asks calmly, 'What do you do until she wakes up?'

But before I can answer that one, he clarifies, 'Besides waiting that is...'

I want to cooperate with him but I don't have the mental furniture. So I end up sharing my most private secret. It's the one I've not shared even with my wife, but I don't know what happens to me at that instant – I tell him the truth. Clarification: my truth.

'Every night a new word appears in my mind. It's like a fish that's risen to the water surface. I feel it coming out of my forehead. Sometimes I slap my forehead in despair. I don't want it there. I don't want it anywhere. It swims in my mind, inside my head, inside my brain, even inside my eyes and ears. I chase it. I don't know how I chase it, but believe me, I do. I know that if I manage to catch it, my restiveness will disappear and I will be able to sleep. Every night I fail. And so I get no sleep,' I manage to say. A little later I realise that I've been speaking with my eyes closed. I feel embarrassed and open my eyes wider: it's as if I've become a surprise to myself.

'Are you sure it's not a dream – a recurring dream – that you have every day?' the therapist asks.

I've been forewarned about how sleep therapists are actually shrinks in hiding. So I say no. 'No, no, no.'

'Is it an unfamiliar word every day? Which language is it in?'

'It's always an English word, always.'

'English?'

'Yes.'

'What's your mother tongue?' a woman who must be someone's mother asks.

'I grew up in an orphanage. I'm not sure what my mother tongue might have been,' I say. I am suddenly reminded of my father-in-law's face, his reaction to the same words when I first met him.

An awkward silence fills the room. Thirty people observe an impromptu silence for my deceased parents thirty-three years after they died or abandoned me. I join them, pretending to be grateful.

'Which language do you use at home?' Questions begin again.

'Assamese, Hindi, English, Silence,' I reply. I am irritated.

'Four languages?' the therapist asks, and, perhaps reading the sarcasm on my face, asks, 'What's the fourth language you mentioned?'

'Silence,' I say, as if it's Spanish or some other foreign tongue. Everyone laughs.

The therapist is clearly irritated. The muscles on his throat reveal their tectonics when he tells this to me in a near giant whisper: 'Perhaps you should be practising the last when you sleep?'

I realise that this is getting nowhere, so I tell him that I'd like some time to sit and think. He looks relieved. After spending a few moments practising silence, I say, 'I think I don't have a sleeping problem. I have a problem with sleep.'

Everyone in the class nods. They are happy for me, happy – perhaps even grateful – that I've made this startling piece of self-diagnosis.

'What do you do for a living?' someone asks.

A worthless question, but I decide to answer. 'I'm not sure whether that has anything to do with my lack of faith in sleep, but I teach writing.'

I notice estimates being formed about my daily routine, my personality, my pay cheques, and reasons for my insomnia deduced from that particular declaration. A sudden surge of self-worth fills my being. I feel superior to everyone in that room. I sit down and untie my shoelaces when a woman suddenly turns back to look at me and asks, 'How nice! And I'd thought no one taught cursive writing these days!' Her mouth curls at 'cursive writing', mine swears silently.

'Paragraphs. Sentences. Words. Punctuations. Voice. Tone. Things like that. I teach students how to...' I don't complete my sentence. I've begun feeling like a word mechanic. Perhaps I should have told them the truth, but 'political cartoonist' sounds so scatological sometimes.

'When was the last time you slept, slept well enough to feel happy?' the therapist intervenes. He looks at his watch; the next batch of insomniacs must be getting restless in the lobby.

'As I told you, sleep has nothing to do with my happiness quotient. But to answer your question, I really can't remember when I slept the last time,' I say. I'm not lying. 'You need to be really stupid to sleep well, you know. I don't know one intelligent person who would choose to sleep over staying awake.'

Whatever bravado I might show to the world, only I know how greedy I am for a night's – even a single night's – sleep. I have read an encyclopaedic amount of literature about insomnia. I have heard lullabies in twelve different languages. I have tried lavender aromatherapy and temple-massage techniques. Every night, I hold my wife tight, wake her up into concern, ask her to remind me when our day should begin. I do all this with my eyes closed so that she can't see what's in my mind. My eyes are worse than bad breath – they give my immediate past away. Semanti pats my eyelids, draws their outlines, and even after all this indulgence, when sleep does not visit, she scolds me – she can't bear to see how sleep deposits itself into fossils of wide nights below my eyes.

'Why do you not try, Prakash?' she pleads with me some mornings. Then she pets me. And then I don't regret being sleepless all night.

Every night it is a new word. It is Moby Dick to my Ishmael. I chase it all night. I catch it in its middle age. If only I knew where it comes from and where it wants to go, I know I shall be cured. But all night we play serve-and-volley. No one wins. Though I am defeated. Semanti sees me as a victim all day. Sometimes I just give in: 'How do you sleep so soundly?'

I know the question is in poor taste, it is ambitious in an ugly way, too much the poor man's jealousy at the haves and so on. But if I can't ask my wife, who can I ask this to?

'I switch off completely,' she offers kindly, making sleep sound like a technological invention. Clearly, I'm a Luddite in this regard.

'How?' I ask, like my mother-in-law asking 'Where?' when asked to 'Enter' on her cell phone.

'You know you forget the day, you forget your work, you forget the maid, you forget your enemies, you forget your friends, you forget yourself, you forget your partner...' she chants.

I'm clearly not hypnotised, rather alarmed, 'You forget me?'

'Yes,' she says cruelly.

To sleep one must be cruel: that is the lesson I learn for the day.

To begin with, I wash only my plate and glass after breakfast. I spend an eternity in the bathroom. I fill only my bottle of water from the water filter. But Semanti doesn't even notice. Selfishness, I learn, is a social vice, entirely a comparative one. I have failed. And so I cannot sleep.

'I'd like to be Rip Van Winkle, Simu,' I tell her at midnight. She pats my face in her sleep, indulgent, like a mother who tells her six-year-old son that he'll play cricket for India one day.

The rest of the night is spent working against that ambition. I'm again a deep-sea diver. Sleep is a speck of dust forming into something precious inside an oyster. One day it shall be mine. Though I deny it to everyone, including Semanti, I try to obey the sleep therapist's dictums to the dot.

The first principle is to shut your eyes, he's told us. I do that.

The second is to flush out all office gossip from one's being. I do that.

Get all the gas out of your belly. I think I've managed that too. _Pawanmukta Asana._

I run all the eleven dictums in my mind. I tick mark them. If sleep was a theoretical exam, I'd be the first boy in class.

When I wake up the next morning, I am confident that sleep will come to me that night. The last night was a dress rehearsal – I've got all the props ready, also the costume. The stage is set as it were, sleep will begin its night-long monologue and I shall wake up to claps the next morning. It can't get wrong the next time. I've got everything ready to perfection.

With that knowledge, I go to sleep therapy class after office. I am the first one to sign in. The therapist (it's hard for me to call him sleep professor; I've known many sleepy professors in my life) asks me to sit in the front row. 'Which word was it last night?' he asks.

No one's ever asked me that question. I think hard and say the word: 'Secular'.

'Secular?' Clearly, he'd been expecting something sexier.

Yes, I say sadly. That's my fate – chasing such words at night when my friends and colleagues are adapting to wet dreams Version 3.0.

'So what did you do with "secular" all night?' he asks like a policeman speaking to an underage boy caught red-handed at a nightclub. 'I mean, you surely couldn't have chased secular in any sense?'

I fidget for a response, and then I am suddenly angry. 'I didn't run around trees with "secular", if that's what you mean.'

'No, I thought you chased proper or common nouns in your sleep. I still can't fathom how one could chase concepts, especially in a sleepless dream.'

'I'd rather a very common noun called sleep chased me,' I say, trying to sound clever but also meaning that sincerely.

'Imagine chasing "democracy". Oh my God!' he says, shuddering at the thought. His facial expressions make of me a Cartoon Network Pied-Piper figure who lures a billion men and women into a polling booth. 'Have you ever done that?' he asks sincerely.

'I think I did a few days back, I'll have to look,' I reply.

'Look? Where?'

'People write what they did during the day in their diary. I record my nightlife in it. Every morning write down the word that killed my sleep the previous night.'

He makes me promise that I shall get my sleep notebooks for him in the next class.

I find myself unable to tell friends the truth about my evenings. I'd have found it easier to tell them if I was being treated for infertility.

'Is it a new woman?' Suvir asks me in the office one day.

Before I can guess where that question is coming from, Suvir proceeds to help: 'I saw Semanti alone at the DLF Mall the other evening. I don't find you in any of the office parties. _Kahan rehte ho yaar? Kiske saath?'_

I smile. Can I tell Suvir? I'm not doing anything illegal or immoral after all. Suvir is my closest colleague, and even though I envy the way he sometimes snores at office meetings, I think I can trust him with this bit of a secret. Some day, when I'm a master of sleep ('MS' – Semanti's mischievous title for my MS degree), a real pro, I'll be able to laugh about the fact that I had to take tutorials for sleeping. Who remembers one's first bicycling lessons after all?

But before I can answer, Suvir begins speaking again. 'I asked Semanti about you. She seemed to fumble for a reply. I didn't probe any further.' His right hand is now on my shoulder, _'Dekh bhai_ Prakash, Semanti is a nice woman. She is attractive, even at this age. She packs your lunch box, _yaar._ Which wife does that these days? Listen to me. Keep her happy. Be happy with her. _Ulta seedha mat kar._ Don't sleep with some young woman, _yaar.'_

Suddenly I am very angry. 'Sleep?' is all I find myself being able to say.

_'Ha,_ don't sleep with a girl, _yaar._ Don't flirt even. These days you flirt with a girl and the next thing you know – she wants to sleep with you.'

'How do you know, Suvir?' I ask. It's my time to get back at him.

'I know.'

'But how?'

'I see it in the movies...'

'Which movie?' I ask, genuinely curious. I once tried watching a home video that Semanti made for me – a set of songs where the characters are in bed, singing or being sung to, adult lullabies, love songs, snippets of conversation followed by the Beatles's 'I'm only sleeping...', and so on. All was going well until I came to the last bit of a film credit. The film was _Sleepless in Seattle._ Semanti had clearly forgotten to erase that portion. Perhaps I'd have fallen asleep had that disastrous title not hit me, who knows. One can never guess with sleep. It's like a thriller.

'I can't remember.' Suvir walks away.

It's Friday evening and I'm sitting before the sleep therapist. He looks like a man in his fifties. His specs are dust-spotted, I've never seen him from so close. My fingers itch to scrub out what looks like a drop of solidified dal. I notice that the black thick-rimmed glasses hide the man's dark circles.

'When were you born?' he suddenly asks me.

I'm hesitant about declaring my age. I know I look younger than many – the women who sit in the first row, who can't sleep because they worry about sons eating beef and dying of mad cow's disease; men who wake up in the middle of the night thinking about white men in their daughter's beds.

'Obama and I were born on the same day,' I say.

'Really?' he asks. 'Or is that a joke?'

'It'd be a joke if Michelle O paid for the president's sleep therapy classes. America couldn't sleep if its president was counting sheep at night, could it?' I reply.

'Did you suffer any head injuries – collisions – as a child?'

'No.'

'Do you think about your dead parents a lot?'

'No.'

'Religion, if you don't mind?'

'I'm a convert. Buddhism it is,' I say self-consciously.

'You're a Buddhist?' he asks in disbelief.

'Yes. Why?' I ask.

'I never thought Buddhists could be insomniacs, you know,' he confesses.

I am irritated. 'Why, sleep is easier to find than nirvana?'

He offers me a glass of water. I refuse.

'If you slept – please, please imagine this as a hypothetical situation – would you snore?' he continues.

'That's like asking whether I'd be able to blow out all the candles on my one hundredth birthday cake!'

His phone rings. He looks at it and makes a face, his first show of familiarity to me, and ignores the call. The phone rings again. 'I'm busy with counselling, dear,' he says. I overhear a woman's high-pitched tone passing down what seems like instructions. It is an unfamiliar language: Semanti never speaks to me like that. After he's hung up, he smiles like a schoolboy and says, 'My wife ... just woke up. She couldn't find the toothpaste tube.'

'Now?' I ask. 4:52 pm. 'She doesn't live in the country?'

'She works at a call centre. Inbound Call Centre,' he replies, stressing the name of the BPO.

'Oh, you mean, you don't sleep together? Sorry, I mean at the same time? That's interesting.'

'Interesting?' he asks, clearly peeved.

'Yes. I mean ... how does it affect a marriage if the husband and wife don't sleep at the same time? Together? That _is_ interesting,' I say, fumbling for words, and thinking of how Semanti would have scolded me for this.

'How does it affect a marriage if the husband remains awake while the wife sleeps beside him? Like yours? Isn't _that_ interesting?' he asks.

The next morning, when I note down the word that kept me awake the previous night, Semanti tells me, 'I couldn't sleep a wink last night.'

'Fraternity,' I write down. Above it are last week's words: 'Justice' and 'Equality'.
'How Are You?'

_'Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.'_

—Virginia Woolf

AT ALL TIMES, A student's life is most difficult: the war-like attention to details during examinations, the guilt of failing to wake up at six every morning, the shame of not following the ideal student's routine, the tentative search for the perfect future, the secret worship and imitation of a senior, the bird-like attention span, and the mixture of joy and agony at the realisation that of all roles played in a lifetime – child, employee, spouse, parent – this was the most temporary. And yet, like all students who forget their roll numbers within a year of passing examinations, she anticipated the forlornness of a life without the busyness of annual examinations, year-end trials of commitment to a life that seemed unnecessary to those who lived it, and felt sad without knowing it. She also did not know that she was a devotee of the examination system: she liked to 'get' marks on her report card. It made her feel important and worthy – a few numbers (not without reason was it called _'grand_ total') could do what no word of praise could.

But that year there would be no examinations.

Or that, at least, was the rumour.

War had been declared; it did not matter who had declared it. India or Pakistan, it was all the same. It didn't matter who had begun the quarrel, mother or father; either way, it was her parents fighting. (No, she didn't like the analogy. She could never be a writer.)

The violence of living to a regime set by unseen paper-setters and examiners was gone. And with it the indolent silence that followed examinations. But there was no peace. For the familiar sound of rustling paper that accompanied examinations like breathlessness was everywhere. It wasn't the sound of pages being turned, the hurried gulps of knowledge that was an accompaniment to examination eve. Instead, it was something more brutal, more urgent, and less temporary. They were tearing all the paper they could see – newspapers, magazines with thicker pages – all kinds, the literary _Desh; Nabokallol, UltoRath, Cinema Jagat,_ full of the make-believe gossip of the film industry; the latest issues of _Khelar Maath,_ filled with metaphorical descriptions of the Indian cricket team's first success in the West Indies and dull grainy pictures of a young Gavaskar, then still without a skull cap; even old examination questions compiled as 'Test Papers', the typist's diaphanous 'copy paper' and the imitative but always helpful 'carbon paper'. (Her mother later told her that only toilet paper had been spared.)

Paper would turn Calcutta into a dark continent; paper would, like a magician's handkerchief, fool the enemy; paper, like a womb, would hide and protect them from planes and bombs and men and martyrs. So they sat all day, all nine of them in one room, and cut out pieces of paper to fit into the untidy squares of the windowpanes. They became paper-tailors, cutting and stitching their lives from danger. 'No, this doesn't fit,' shouted one; 'Smaller, smaller,' said another; 'Oh, this is too tiny to fit into the big square here,' said yet another. No one seemed to be able to cut out the perfect size of paper for the window squares.

When they met for lunch, happy and sad at the same time, like children who had lost a game but were just happy at having been allowed to play, they confessed and consoled: they were bad at geometry; it was good that their parents had forced them to take up Home Science; if they couldn't cut out perfect squares from paper, how could they have ever calculated perimeters and areas and a hundred other complicated things of 'real' squares which had names like ABCD? 'Home' was, after all, no 'science', they knew; it was cruel, they said (though what they really meant was ironic), that the boys from Science College lived in a hostel just next to theirs. Never would they quarrel with the boys again when they said that 'home' was only an abstraction, like a Pi, a 22/7, a 'black hole' which sucked people (especially women) in, who, in turn, sucked other things and people – everything, sleep, dreams, ambition, food, water, soap, money, and lies.

But after lunch (increasingly frugal these days: think of what our soldiers are eating, the hostel superintendent had begun to say every morning), they became tailors again and however ill-fitting the burkhas (Razia called them that) they had stitched for their windows, they glued them to the wooden frames patiently while the boys from the Science Hostel taunted, 'Aar koto din ei amabashya cholbey?' (How long will the moonless nights continue?). They stuck the last square piece on the bathroom window and signed their names on it, all of them – Rina, Shipra, Mou, Puja, Shefali, Aruna, Ila and Mandira. Only she signed her pet name – Tiya; it meant parrot and she wanted to hide behind her nickname. This was because she wanted to confuse historians in the future: if they all died, as the Jews had a few decades ago ('Students are the new Jews,' a Naxal student union leader had shouted from a microphone a year back), the historians would not know where she had disappeared. She, coward at all other moments, was courageous only about her imagined death. One girl, two names; one found, the other missing. It was so easy: a name was all it took to confuse historians, professors whom the Science Hostel boys called 'scientists of time' in their own manner.

Then they all washed the rice glue off their hands, said their evening prayers, and suddenly, they all felt safe.

At first, she thought that it would last only a few days. She was, in fact, inwardly grateful for it: a break from the teeth-brushing monotony of student life, she thought that the war would be like a holiday. A few red-inked days on the calendar and it would be over, in four or five days, like Durga Puja. But it didn't go according to plan, at least not hers. Did wars ever work to anyone's plan? her daughter would ask her exactly twenty years later when an American president called Bush – whose surname would remind her of the name of a Naxal leader during her student days, a man called Jangal Santhal, 'jangal' meaning forest – would attack a country called Iraq. It was a strange name for a country she would think; the bigger the name of a country, the more powerful it was, she was convinced. United States of America, United Kingdom; look at what happened to USSR – two years ago, it became Russia, and it immediately lost all its power! That is why she was sure that India would have been a more powerful country if its name had been Hindustan.

First, it was the strangeness of the familiar. After sunset and the prayers, their hostels grew darker with the hour. Not allowed to switch on lights and shielded from enemy planes by paper windows, the place suddenly became unfamiliar to them. The routine of 'study hours' was gone, and with it the charm of untimely gossip. Dinner began to be served early, the chewy rotis, which they called Bata sandals, and a curry of the cheapest seasonal vegetables (nothing was cheap now, the Oriya cook would declare at lunch, nothing except men's livers), and this they ate without pleasure, warding off mosquitoes with one hand and stuffing the roti hurriedly into their mouths, as if this was a punishment they wanted to be relieved of. 'Thank God it's winter,' one of them would say occasionally, imagining a life in this darkness in a sweltering summer in Calcutta, and immediately someone else would respond in this single candle-lit darkness, 'Oh, I'm sure the enemies wouldn't be able to make us out from the humming of our ceiling fans'. They said all this without hope, without joy, often without will. They spoke because it was the only activity that was possible in that darkness. Perhaps they also spoke to distract attention from the tastelessness of the food. War food was always bad, these students of Home Science told each other while washing their hands, as if they'd seen and survived many wars in their lifetime. But then, one war was exactly like the other: everyone, loser and winner, went hungry.

Then they banged into tables and chairs and beds and water jugs and glasses and they almost fell and luckily regained balance by clutching onto the tail of a friend's shawl. Then they stood there and let their breath crawl back into themselves. And all this because of the darkness. Then they huddled together, like it was only possible in winter in Calcutta when someone's feet warmed another's back and someone's hands begged for the warmth of someone's body. They climbed on two beds, making sure they were never completely comfortable there, their bodies always asking for a little more space than what was available, and in these peculiar postures where their bodies looked broken but happy, they cursed the enemy together. Someone inevitably knew someone whose relative had been killed in the war and then they clicked their tongues and said 'Ish' for the widows and fell into a silence. They were incapable of feeling the sadness left behind by war, and for this, they felt sad. A little later they felt scared because they were really not scared of the war.

Words dried gradually, not into sleep as they'd done before, but into repetition, for what was there to talk about in such times? They were all women, scared of talking about the dead in the dark. And just when it seemed that the conversation had died, someone would mention Debdulal Bandopadhyay's inspiring talk on the radio at half-past seven that evening and then they would begin talking again. Yes, he was right, we should donate the little jewellery we have for our country, they said; then, being Bengalis, a few of them would recite a few lines of patriotic poetry self-consciously, a few others would slap themselves in vain, not out of appreciation for those lines of verse but in a futile attempt at killing the troublesome mosquitoes. And suddenly she would ask a strange question (a habit her daughter would inherit from her), something like 'Do you think the people in East Pakistan would be inspired by Debdulal-babu's talk on the radio as well... and if their women would also donate all their jewellery like us? Then?'

Troubled by the possibility of such an eventuality, they would all climb down from the bed, search for their slippers in the darkness, touch one another with their feet while doing so, until it would seem that they were kicking each other in slow motion, and then find their way to their rooms and their beds, cursing two things all the while – the darkness and Pakistan. And she, having hurt her big toe at the leg of someone's bed, would utter the ultimate abuse that was possible, the dirtiest word that her Sarada ashram-school upbringing would allow: 'Loafer'.

Yes, they were both loafers, the darkness, and Pakistan.

Then they would all pretend to be asleep until their bodies too would believe in the lie and they would really fall asleep. And just when they would be on the verge of falling into a deeper sleep, at that moment when the control of their bodies was gradually being taken away from them, at that very moment, Bishu, the boy who stammered even while singing, would shout _Bo... Bo... Bomb_ from the first floor of the Science Hostel. His voice would fill the dark silence and they would all sit up and look at each other in the darkness: so they were dead and that was what life after death was like – owl-dark. A few of them would begin crying, mourning their own death; someone would ask, 'What does a bomb look like?', and another would ask, 'Ei, are bombs made in Bombay? Is that why it's called Bombay?'

Everyone would fall asleep, only she'd be awake. In that darkness, she would take out the inland letters from her pillowcase and touch them. There would be the sound of paper; somehow the sound of paper always sounded different to her ears in the dark. Unable to read even her name on it – his name for her, Tooki, a Bengali child's colloquial for hide-and-seek – she would count the number of inland letters with her fingers. Nine: one every week. Two weeks ago they had stopped coming.

'How are you?' she wrote to him, the first line of the letter, just below 'God is Good', which is what she usually wrote at the top of the inland letter. (She had learnt it from a friend: this wasn't just her brief character certificate for God, but something else. It was a mark of the power of 'O' without which the sentence would become meaningless: 'God is God'.) She didn't address the letter to him. It was part of the code of a Bengali woman's love: she could not call him by name since he was older than her. He, like other Bengali men, would be nameless to her until he'd become a father and she would begin referring to him as 'Tirna's father'.

'How are you?'

This was the first time she really wanted an answer for this question. The war had turned the rhetorical into a literal question. _How_ was he? _Where_ was he? _Why_ hadn't he written to her for two weeks?

'How are you?' she wrote for the third time and paused. She didn't have anything else to tell him at the moment. Then she got up from her chair and looked out of the window. A dead crow was hanging from an electric wire. Was it, too, a war victim?

Would this letter reach him?

A shalik came and sat on the window sill. 'Ish,' the sound escaped from her, and the tiny sparrow flew away. She was superstitious: 'One for sorrow, Two for joy...' She would have to begin looking for the second sparrow. Otherwise, her letter would never reach him.

Winters were so dusty, she said to herself; there was a film of dust on the window sill. She had wiped it yesterday evening but...Perhaps this too was also because of the war. The war was, after all, like a ghost, an invisible presence that did things when one was away.

'How are you?' she wrote absent-mindedly on the dusty window sill with her first finger. Then, suddenly conscious of the presence of her roommate behind her, she wiped the dust with her cotton sari and began thinking something that had never occurred to her. 'How are you?' What kind of a question was this and where had it come from? How old was this question in human history? What had made the first man ask this question? Wasn't this actually a doctor's question? Why, then, had it become a civilisation's bird call? What made people pick up words like these and put them in history's gizzard? 'How are you?' Did the two warring nations ask each other this question every morning before they began fighting?

Perhaps this was also what the war did: it filled even the simple words with violence.

She had many things to tell him but she would wait. After the three 'How are you?' questions, she only wrote one more sentence. She did not like being a student anymore, she said. She would be a better wife than she was a student. And then she signed her name: she drew what she thought was a parrot, 'Tiya'. She did this not only because it was her nickname but because this was what she thought would be her role as a wife – to repeat after her husband, to copy and look at the world with his minus 2.25 eyeglasses.

Then she opened her tiny Santiniketan batik-leather wallet and looked inside. Yes, it was there, just one remained from the five she'd bought. A red on white 'Refugee Relief Stamp', worth five paisa, that the government had recently made mandatory postage. She looked closely at the grave faces of the imagined refugees on the tiny stamp. No, she didn't want to be a refugee, not even love's refugee; that is why it was necessary for the letter to reach him. They were not just on her stamp, they were everywhere. The city suddenly became crowded; forced to accommodate the swelling numbers who crossed the border for a 'future' every day. It had become what she feared most – an ugly carbuncle.

That was also what the war did: it changed the face and character of Calcutta forever.

One her way to college, she looked at them from the corner of her eyes. The smoke from the clay ovens in makeshift kitchens, a life of bathing and defecation in the open, an infant at a mother's breast, and common to everyone, a look of disbelief in destiny in every man's eye – a direct gaze was impossible during the war. What scared her most was the abruptness of it all and the realisation of how a man's destiny was inextricably tied to his land, how the wares of sophistication could turn into luxury overnight, and how war in winter was so much worse than war in summer. But more than anything else the war made her realise how useless she was and how utterly useless were the life of a student and education, especially the arts!

Occasionally a farmer would come to ask for money, and he, who owed his job to Indira Gandhi's nationalisation of banks, would look at Soumen, his trade-union colleague. The two of them had, even until a few months ago, said, 'Give the money to the agriculturist, give loans to Hariya Mahato.' One of them would tell the farmer, 'Uncle, what will you plant in your fields when all that lies there now are dead bodies?' The old farmer would look at them, say 'Jeebon', and begin crying. Jeebon: Life. The two bankers would be surprised by the power of the illiterate farmer's metaphor until the peon would come and tell them in a whisper, 'His son's name was Jeebon. He is missing...' Then there would be another shelling and they would all bend low with their hands over their heads and crouch into the tiny leg space of the cash counter.

There was hardly any business during the day. Sometimes, they played carrom after the lunch break, turning the wooden board into a battlefield and themselves into soldiers. Although they took turns in being 'Indian' soldiers one day and 'Pakistani' the other, the man who lost when he was 'pretend-Pakistani' did not feel sad after losing. But such days were rare because most often the game was left without conclusion. They would hold the striker in one hand, say 'Wait' or 'Watch out', hit the white and black round pieces into the four pockets and say, 'See, there you are, dead', pointing to the wooden tablets in the pockets. And just when both of them would think that the blood-red piece at the centre would be theirs, the peon would come. Someone wanted a loan or a dead relative's money.

War did that as well: it left all tasks, including living, incomplete.

'Death certificate?' they would ask the relative, and the poor man – never would a woman come, not even if she was the wife of the victim – would shake his head. Then they'd explain in Bengali, where it was much more difficult because the word for death in one's mother tongue always sounds closer and harsher. How could they have found a death certificate? The doctors had all fled Balurghat. They wished they could give the money to him but their hands were tied, they said. If they didn't follow the rules, Indira Gandhi would be very angry with them and if they did anything wrong, the banks would be denationalised again and all the money would go back to the cruel moneylenders and the poor would become very poor again. So they wouldn't be able to give him the money, they said.

Instead, the account of the dead man became 'dormant' and then 'inoperative' and the money went to the Reserve Bank of India.

And the poor remained poor.

'Tooki.'

A solitary cry and then silence.

'Tooki.' Again.

It was the Bengali child's call during hide-and-seek, a less challenging find-me-if-you-can'.

'Tooki.'

It couldn't be him. No one knew his nickname for her, and what use was a love-name if the world called you by that sound?

She opened the window pretending to throw the hair that had fallen from her head and which she had gathered into an ill-formed circle. 'Thhoo,' she said, spitting on the mass of hair; it was a ritual of condemnation of the act of hair falling off a Bengali woman's head. I'm spitting on you, don't do it again, the woman seemed to be saying to the hair.

'Thhoo.'

It was him.

She was so ashamed of herself. What had she done? Welcomed him by spitting?

She closed the window, turned her back to it and smiled. This wasn't an instinctive gesture on her part; she had seen a few actresses doing it – Madhabi Mukherjee, Aparna Sen, even Suchitra Sen – and she suddenly felt proud to be a part of that tradition of welcoming one's lover by closing a window and turning her back to him. She was sure – and assured by his knowledge of Bengali films – that he wouldn't take offence at this gesture. Rather he would know, in spite of not being able to see her, how she would behave in her room. Films and literature had that power – they could make one belong to a community without one's active participation.

But these days, even the war had acquired that power.

She grabbed her cotton towel and ran to the bathroom. War or not, she needed to smell good. Perhaps he would take her to watch a film. She'd seen a poster of _The Guns of Navarone_ on the way to college. It had come to the Lighthouse. Or was it the New Empire? She wasn't sure. But he was here; he would find out all the details.

She didn't like watching these English films. When he had taken her to see _Sunflower,_ the first film that they'd watched together, she had, at first, enjoyed the experience. It was like going for a holiday, going to places and observing details; from time to time she would look at him from the corner of her eye and try to see, in that artificial darkness of the cinema hall, what he was really looking at. She was certain that he was looking at the actress's bare legs and hands and all that he wanted to see in women like her but couldn't. These two parallel experiences – of watching a film and trying to guess the effect the series of moving images had had on her lover – exhausted her. But _The Guns of Navarone_ was, she expected, a war film. It was a film suited to the mood of the times, possibly about war and fights and cannons and blood and all that she hated, but they – and everyone – needed to watch it.

When she went to watch a Bengali film, or even a Hindi movie, she tried to dress like the main actress in the film. It made women like her happy, to emerge from the cinema hall looking a bit like these actresses, and she liked to believe that it made their men proud to be with them. But when she watched an English film and came out of the theatre, she remained unchanged. There was no actress whose style she could copy – she wasn't like them at all and they were not like her. She couldn't, after all, wear those dresses or cut her hair short up to the ears or walk with her chest held tight outwards. The English film did not change her at all – she emerged from the experience, her being unaffected, like a tourist.

But then, her experience of the war was also that of a tourist.

'We will be show caused,' he said without looking at her. All six of them, for closing the bank and running away.

It was a new word; perhaps it was a military term, she thought. Also, she thought that 'we' meant Indians, she and his countrymen and 'show causing' was something like 'shelling'. She would go back to her hostel and stick a few more pieces of paper on the window – that would perhaps protect them from 'show causing'.

'Oh,' she said gravely and looked at his feet. There was a film of white dust on his feet and his sandals.

He then told her about the deserted town of Balurghat and how they – a handful of bankers – had been the last to leave the place. His family had left for Pakur, a small stony town in Bihar where his eldest sister lived in a joint family of ninety-three members; his father and his brothers, all goldsmiths, carrying gold biscuits with them in their underwear. Even the cows and the goats were dead; the tulsi mawncho in the courtyard had also been destroyed. His mother, he had heard from a relative, had stopped talking ever since that journey. No one knew whether they would ever be able to return; no one was sure whether they wanted to return either.

He would later tell her other stories, about discovering the dead bodies of seven hundred Indian soldiers at a railway station in Bangladesh. That station was also called Hili. In brackets, however, was the important difference: this was Hili (Bangladesh), not the Indian Hili. But the story that she liked to remember was about him: he had hidden a pair of gold earrings that he'd bought for her, for their wedding, in his underwear. The sharp edges had pierced his testicles all night, making him scream in pain every time the bus jumped on bad roads. Here it is, he said putting it in her hands. He wasn't sure whether they'd be able to get married; he wasn't sure whether they'd be alive. 'Who was?' he asked her. 'Do you know anyone,' he asked, 'anyone who is sure that he won't die in the war?'

'Indira Gandhi,' she said, suddenly proud of herself.

No, he was sure that even she wasn't sure.

'Wear them. Let me see how you look,' he said sadly.

She didn't open the thin, dark pink paper wrapping; instead, she tried to guess their design by feeling them with her fingers.

'Wear them, Tooki,' he said again.

This nickname in his voice brought tears to her eyes. She looked at him.

'They're not dirty anymore. I washed them with soap and water this morning.'

Both of them smiled, he allowing the smile to change into gentle laughter.

The earrings made a little tinkling sound as she walked, as if they were cow-bells. This was his analogy and she pretended to be angry for a few moments. I'll be your cowherd, he said, your cow-bell earrings will call me back home at dusk. (Many years later, when her daughter would ask her to recall the most romantic thing he had ever told her, she would name this incident. 'Baba called you a cow and you think it's romantic, Ma?' her daughter would taunt. But it was the times – love was always a metaphor. They never told each other how much they loved or whether they loved at all. Language was all gesture, in spite of the war.)

She sat talking to him, flirting with her earrings and holding them with her hands, looking like a girl whose teacher had punished her by asking her to hold her ears. She was happy. The sound of the earrings, innocent and unchanging, oblivious to the currents of time, made it possible for her to believe that the war would one day be over.

He shelled peanuts for her and they ate together, he rubbing the peanuts between his palms and blowing the husk away into the evening breeze, she eating them whole, like her Home Science professor had asked them to.

'Where will we live after the war?' she asked him, the evening light increasing the forlornness and gravity of her question.

He wanted to say that he didn't know but that would have been too cruel. Instead, he said – a place where both of them had never been to, of which they had no memories, so that everything would be new for them and they would discover this newness together.

The answer pleased her, but only partly.

'Here?' she asked, meaning West Bengal. That word, of course, would gain wings over time so that when, twenty years later, she would ask her children whether they would move from 'here', it'd mean a journey abroad, away from definitions.

He nodded.

And suddenly they felt married.

He touched her earrings and her earlobes. She wanted a little more.

And suddenly there was the sound of the airplanes. She, who had so long held her ears affectionately, out of love for the new earrings, now held them tight. The noise was deafening.

He pulled her away to a cycle shed.

After the plane had gone, he touched her earrings again. But their sound was lost in the fear.

'We'll get married,' he said, 'war or no war.'

She looked at him, touched his day-old beard and asked, 'Even if we're show caused?'
Close Reading

_'The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.'_

—Nikolai V. Gogol

MY PARENTS ARE DIVORCED,' Amla says proudly, as if that were a part of the code of her teenage rebellion.

Some of her classmates are angry – they feel deprived of this experience. Their parents are still a team, more than eighteen years after they were born. It's a surprise to them, that 'forever' could be that long, longer than _school life._

I pretend to not notice. I'm not going to let a student's divorced parents hijack the reading of a poem.

But Amla is insistent. 'Your parents are divorced too, right?' she asks Sabiha, who's sitting next to her but behaves as if she's far away. She speaks to everyone in the tone of someone who's at the other end of a long-distance call.

No is the answer.

But she doesn't have to remain disappointed for long. Two seats away there is endorsement and identification. 'Yes, I read it like you too,' says Priti. 'My parents are separated'.

I've heard that tone before. I keep thinking where. It comes to me soon, Akash saying to me, 'I am gay,' when we met eighteen years after school. I'm not an immigration officer and you're not declaring your citizenship, I'd said. Forced humour. Six years ago.

The rest of the class is looking at the poem we will read together. This piece of information that comes from two of their classmates are like red highlights in their hair that they don't care to notice. When I tell them to read it to themselves once, before we begin working as literary detectives to decipher codes in the poem, I pause for breath. And pay wholesome attention to each of their faces as they read or snatch a glance of a friend reading. I compare, though I don't want to: they are half my age; I didn't have a single friend whose parents were divorced. That was only two decades ago. What happened in these twenty years? I turn divorce into a disease and I look for its causes. The Internet. I blame it first, like every parent today, though I'm not a parent. (I'm not even married.) Satellite television. The workplace that hijacks the day and its possibilities of togetherness.

My time for investigation is over. I return to the class, to the students. But something has changed in these few minutes. I sense an annoyance in me whose source I can't locate. It is as if I _want_ to be angry.

'Close reading,' I correct Shruti, 'not closed reading'.

Shruti apologises. I don't look at her.

'Stanza. Not paragraph,' I correct again. I feel uncomfortable with the sharpness in my voice but don't know how to rid myself of it.

'Do you like the poem?' I ask, and am immediately angry with myself. As if liking should be the trigger for close reading! The intelligence services closely study only what they are suspicious of. And the words tumble out of me, though I didn't mean to say them at all. 'Are you suspicious of the poem?'

They raise their heads together. It's a rare moment when I have their attention. (We used to study every pleat of the saris our teachers wore, even notice missing stones in wedding rings. My students wouldn't know the colour of the shirt I wore yesterday.) I feel slightly nervous. Their collective stare reminds me of the time I was in college, when groups of boys would study me as if I was a dead body and they students of anatomy.

I notice that Jyoti is about to say something. I must stop her. I sense my word turning into a question in her mouth. 'Suspicious?' That's what she'd say. She loves questions. We – all her teachers – know that about her. I suddenly remember the remark I left on an essay she showed me last week: 'There's a difference between "last love" and "lasting love" – in no other place perhaps has "ing" been so powerful...' But now I can't remember what her essay was about. This betrayal by my memory shocks me. It makes me conscious of my birth certificate.

In a flash I've imagined the parents of all my students. I've given their marriages health certificates – the faces and body weight and clothes of my students, their children, are enough. Jyoti's parents couldn't be divorced, I am certain. She smiles a lot in class. But so does Amla. I'm not getting it right, I am not. I abandon the thought.

I return to the poem I'd left. How kind of the poem to wait for me, how kind of poems to wait for us. How well-behaved they are, never to show their impatience. How restful poems are.

_When to the sessions of sweet silent thought_

_I summon up remembrances of things past_

I have been intoxicated by these lines for years, for decades. The sibilants – _sessions, sweet, silent, summon, remembrances, things_ – are whispers, I've told my students. Thoughts are whispers, close your eyes and imagine someone saying them – you'll feel the breath of these words on the back of your shoulders, as if a lover was standing behind you and saying them to you. The eroticism of those lines makes me shiver, I get goosebumps. I think of the man I wanted to marry.

No, no, I'm not a lover. I'm a teacher. I'm supposed to teach this poem, not be drugged by it. I have to be the poem's surgeon, expose its veins and arteries and hidden tickling places to this group of fifteen girls. I'm not its masseur.

'But we finished reading Sonnet 64 last week.' It's Jyoti. This statement ends with a question mark even though she can't see it.

I return to my senses. I have to bluff my way out of this now. 'Yes,' I say, 'I wanted to remind you of these lines so that you notice how the character of intimacy is different in every relationship. The proximity of bodies, of whispers, in Shakespeare's sonnet is not for this married couple. Even when they sit next to each other it is a long-distance relationship.'

I sneeze. It's the air-conditioning. I hate its taunting cold air.

I notice Jyoti laughing, as if a sneeze were like a fall, a prompt for others to laugh. I am annoyed – I want to tell her that her teeth are always stained with food from her last meal. I scold myself. I find myself turning into a stereotype – the cranky spinster. Do they think of me as that, my students, even though I teach them the most passionate love poems in the world?

'Every poem is a love poem,' I tell every group on the first day each semester. Let us not categorise them as anything else. The teenagers agree without resistance. Love is my religion, one of them will inevitably declare seriously every year, and I will air my fake-funny remark: 'But that doesn't mean that every poem is a religious poem.'

It is true, I read every poem as a lover. I wonder whether it is because I wanted to marry a poet. Something stirs in me suddenly. I feel guilty for my annoyance with Priti and Amla.

I think of the history of reading – how every reader reads from his own sense of victimhood. All philosophy was born from a sense of deprivation: Marxism and feminism and postcolonialism and race and class and caste, everything. We pine for what is not? That is the code of reading – we seek in literature what life will not give us. That is why every poem is a love poem for me. And why Amla reads her classmate's poem about a long drive as a poem about a divorced couple.

'Failing and Flying' by Jack Gilbert. I repeat myself twice. A teacher's tic.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I read the poem once and wait. It's like waiting for the meat to marinate.

'What's the title?' It's Shruti, the quietest student I've had in fifteen years of teaching. There's the preface of a cough in her voice.

'Failing and Flying,' I repeat.

'F-words!' says Mayurika. I can never be sure of her, whether she treats me as one of her friends, or whether she is indifferent to my presence. Her responses in class are a bit like the bed hair with which she walks into class every morning – an indifference to decorum.

I pretend not to hear. Increasingly these days, I have to do that – pretend to be air.

'Why does everything bad begin with F? Failure. Fuck. Fuck.' Mayurika again.

I'm not going to give up so easily, I decide. 'Really? What about "first"?'

'Flower,' Shruti adds to the list. I look at her. This is the first time she's speaking in class this semester.

'Fool.' That's Mayurika.

'Fountain.'

'Fox.'

They've begun treating this like a badminton match. I'm losing control of the class.

'Flying and Failing,' I say.

'Failing and Flying,' Jyoti corrects me.

I smile, trying to hide my nervousness. Why do these young girls make me anxious when I know more about everything than they do, more about life and literature, more about love and loss?

This thought, instead of calming me down, takes me on a different route. 'Look at the words beginning with "L", how beautiful they are,' I find myself saying, 'Life, love, literature...'

'Lust...'

'Laziness...'

I want to tell them that lust and laziness are not necessarily bad things, but I must return to the poem.

'Are we studying this poem for sounds?' It's Mayurika.

'Why do you ask?' I adjust my hair.

'With the exception of three – perhaps four – lines, all the lines have "L" sounds.'

I rush to investigate the poem. This fact, undiscovered so far, wasn't a part of my reading. I don't know what to do with Mayurika's discovery. It's like an unnecessary dish ordered at a restaurant, one that doesn't fit in with the rest of the ordered dishes.

Mayurika doesn't stop. She never knows how to. 'I mean, if it's the sounds that are important for poets, why not more "d" sounds. Die. Divorce. Doom. Why isn't the poem called "Dying and Divorcing"?'

I feel unprepared to teach this class anymore. All my years of teaching – and learning, all the nights spent with the French thinkers and English writers and American academics – seem useless against what these girls, half my age, are telling me. I am partly to blame for this, I know: I've spent the last week telling them about the use of sounds in poetry. It'd been a fun class. We'd walked out of the classroom talking about the similarity of sounds in words across languages: the 'ap' sounds in 'slap', 'thappar', 'jhaapar', for instance.

I smile and begin reading again.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake...

I pause to breathe. It is September. The humidity has affected my asthma like it does every year. But there is no space for the illness of teachers in a classroom, not unless one is on medical leave. I don't like the classroom, its cold artificiality, its elision of emotions, its turning of relations into input-output ratios. Only once did I tell my students that I wanted to finish the class three minutes before time because I was famished, that I couldn't carry on anymore. I said it in fear, not knowing whether it'd be held against me, not just in my student evaluations but for generations of student gossip that would follow. Later, walking back to the faculty residential quarters, I thought to myself: how hunger and thirst are rarely, almost never, discussed in the way we respond to literature.

Returning to the poem seems to get more difficult each time. Before the ten-minute break, we'd read a poem each written by them. Sabiha's poem had been about her parents talking to each other in a car, after dropping their daughter in boarding school. 'Why did you marry me?' That was the refrain in the poem – the mother's words to the father every time the car braked. I'd been touched by the affection in the poem, the quasi-rhetorical question that brings in immediate intimacy. The surprise of Amla's question still hadn't left me. _'Your parents are divorced, aren't they?'_

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

'Apart from the leaping reference to Icarus, you'll notice that there are no metaphors in the first seven lines of the poem,' I say.

'Why, is it to represent the seven-year-itch?'

It's Mala. She's smiling at me, like someone who's just discovered her smartness.

I'm flummoxed. I smile at her, and then at the rest of the class, which is, for the moment, an abstraction.

'Look at the verbs in the lines: fails, work, doing... They seem borrowed from a capitalist work-life, don't they?' I say.

'There's a fridge magnet in my father's new apartment which says – "Marriage is a lot of work. I opted for Voluntary Retirement." These words remind me of that.' It's Amla, chewing the end of a curl of hair.

'My mother says that she's working all the time. If a relationship also needs work, then she'd rather not be in it. I agree with her. Who wants to be an employee 24X7?' Priti joins in.

'Notice that the poem is relying on axiomatic and idiomatic lines. See the first line about Icarus – you could take it out of the poem and it'd stand alone. Almost like a proverb...'

'Almost like how a marriage stands out in the history of all relationships one makes or breaks in a lifetime.' Mayurika – she doesn't complete her own sentences, she doesn't let others complete theirs.

'I agree,' says Priti, 'they have "Marital Status" on all these stupid government forms. They don't ask you whether you're someone's brother or sister or friend or enemy!'

'"But anything worth doing is worth doing badly." See how this adage is used to justify...' I feel my asthma returning. I am angry that no studies of victimhood will consider a teacher in a classroom a victim even if she's asthmatic, suffering from diarrhoea, dysmenorrhoea or heartbreak.

'Why don't we have a discipline – or a course – called "Relationships?" It'll be far more useful than studying race and gender and caste and...'

'And Marxism!'

Priti and Shruti are completing each other's sentences. I wonder whether they know that my relationship didn't work out. Students find out everything. They are worse than detectives. This generation that decides on the value of books from reading blurbs before reducing them to an 'ism' – the fault of the education system that taught them to do this – will they understand that my parents refused to let me marry Arup because he was a poet who did not have a steady income? Will they frame our relationship within a Marxist framework? If this was not a classroom, I'd have laughed at myself, at these inconsequential and hilarious imaginings. And so I force myself to return to metaphor.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch.

'Notice how after the generic lines about love and marriage and their success and failure the poet begins chasing metaphors...'

'Like chasing women once you have acquired a wife!' Mayurika is laughing at her own joke.

Before I can intervene, Amla imports her own interpretation. 'I know what you mean. My mother says that my father did exactly that! But my understanding of these lines is different. The first few lines are the equivalent of taking the saat pheras or a walk down the aisle. It's the same for everyone. Only after that does the marriage begin to become customised. Hence the metaphors.'

I like her interpretation though, of course, there is no theory to back it. No ism, as my students say in shorthand, particularly before exams. Once, I overheard a conversation between two girls in a women's toilet:

'Which ism will be asked this semester, you think?'

'Feminism and Socialism were asked last year.'

'We might get that multi-ism this semester then.'

'Not multi-ism, man, multiculturalism.'

'This paper should be called Multiply-ism, so many isms, just too much yaar!' The reliance on isms bothers me as much as it does them. I suppress laughter thinking of Priti's suggestion to have a paper or course called 'Relationships'. Surely no stupid theorist will turn that into an ism – Relationshipism?

This is what they've done to Literature – like photo filters on our cell phones that exaggerate or diminish something from the original and seemingly imperfect or incomplete photo, these isms, imported from across the corridor, from the Social Science departments, are supposed to be filters through which we look at literary texts. It is as if these texts have no existence outside of this, as if everything is to stand for everything, to mean something. I call it 'Meaningitis' in class sometimes. The students laugh, I imagine that as their support, their call to be liberated from these isms.

Sabiha, the best poet in this group, quiet for so long, speaks up at last. 'It is as if the poet has decided to treat "My Better Half" literally.'

'What do you mean?' I ask. I sense all the students looking at her.

'Like the person's discovery of his partner, his "better half", the poem too follows that pattern – it is the better, no, the best, part of the poem. Marriage might be generic, as Amla said, but his partner is not – hence all these unique metaphors and comparisons. Her infinity, which is what must seem to a newly married man, is quantified through metaphors of the unmeasurable: the summer ocean, the huge sky, the stars...'

I am loving her interpretation. 'Whoever compares a lover to an antelope?' That's Amla, the principal dissenter in class.

'If you can compare a lover to a teddy bear, why not to an antelope?' Priti will always have something to say.

'That's for a reason,' says Sabiha calmly. 'The man's gaze is narrowing – from her seeming infinitude, the ocean and the stars and the sky and their vastness, the distance between the man and the woman is growing smaller. He can now see her – she is the antelope, with horns yes, but don't miss the word "grace". His vision in the marriage is growing sharper: the endlessness of the ocean and the sky, the blur of the misty dawn, and even the halo that she seems to be carrying around her... At last, we – and he – can see her up close. For even when he sees her in bed, she is distant. Then she sits opposite him, eating lunch, this creature of light, an angel, and she becomes a woman. And, therefore, the marriage must die...'

I want to clap. But Amla is a bull waiting to strike. 'So, distance is best in all relationships. Even in marriage. Is that the moral of the poem?'

No one answers. I've decided that I won't.

'What is the moral of a marriage? If a marriage has no moral – I don't mean morals – then how can a poem about a marriage have a moral?' I sense a hint of annoyance in Shruti's voice. She rarely speaks in class, and certainly not in this assertive tone.

Amla ignores her, as she does almost everyone else, beginning with her parents. 'I noticed something else,' she says, and without waiting for us to ask – she never does – continues, 'I notice that as long as the woman is only an object to be seen and viewed, things are fine. The marriage and the metaphors are beautiful. As soon as the woman begins speaking – "Listened to her while we ate lunch" – the marriage begins to collapse, at least in the poem. It reminds me of an essay by someone called Mary Beard, on the history of women's forced silence...'

I'm beginning to grow tired. I feel like a marriage counsellor. I am relieved that I'm not married.

How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I read these lines very slowly, almost coaching myself to believe in them, as if they were a DIY-thing for happiness in relationships. 'We are returning to Icarus at the end of the poem. Why?'

'Return to singlehood. As alone as Icarus after the marriage.' Amla again, her responses almost always immediate.

'Is the man going into the forest the same as the man coming out of the forest?' asks Mayurika. I know she's a philosophy minor. 'We see the marriage and its end in the poem itself. And then we see the lonely man, failing after flying, and hence the title – "Failing and Flying" – of course. But it's not the same man. That is why the first and the last lines of the poem are not the same. How can they be? I'm not the same girl I was before the summer vacation.'

We look at her, all of us – the effect of her words are immediate. Her face is in her hands. We see the tears we can't see. The silence that follows is unbearable, longer than any stanza break can accommodate. I don't know what to do – it'll be an hour soon, and I still haven't spoken about the craft in the poem. I'm unable to get myself to Mayurika's chair, to comfort her. The place was pretty but its food greasy – the thought from the poem refuses to leave me. It comforts me – how prettiness is not all. My insecurities about my appearance return. Would my marriage have ended the moment I became visible from a close range?

I am brought back from my self-obsessed thoughts by the sound of sobbing. Sadness is contagious. I feel the urge to cry but I fight back my tears. I think of Arup – I wonder which of us is Icarus, him or me. I wonder whether he still writes poems. I still read poems, like I used to. Why would he stop writing then?

There's mascara on Mayurika's cheeks. Sadness is pretty only in a poem.

The classroom is handicapped by decorum, the students and I paralysed by some invisible glue that doesn't allow us to move towards the girl in tears. It is as if the governing ethic of the academic essays – with their yoke of objectivity that keeps the self at an antiseptic distance – has seeped into our blood. The isms are all good theoretically but they do not penetrate beyond the skin, they do not change us. There is no ism for sadness, for failure of relationships, for tears.

'What happened in the summer, Mayurika?' I ask, walking towards her, slightly unsure of whether I've used the correct preposition. Should I have said "during"?

The girls get up from their chairs as soon as I do from mine. We walk towards her. There are no words. Later, when we've gathered around her seat – and she's the only person sitting – she pulls the sleeves of her sweater to near her elbow. Near her wrist is something that looks like a scribble but must be a tattoo. I adjust my glasses to look closely. The girls have their heads focused on the tiny inscription (what else does one call it?). Their eyes are like microscopes.

'What is it?'

'I can't make out either.'

'Yeah, it's like a smudge.'

'Is it a fly?' Sabiha asks shyly, as if saying something inappropriate.

'K.' That's all that Mayurika will say.

'Kafka? A spider? You like...'

'K for Krishna,' Mayurika clarifies.

'The K looks like a fly.'

'That was the idea,' she explains, wiping her nose on her sweater sleeve.

'What happened? Why did you break up?'

'Where is he now?'

'Flown away. Like a fly.' It's Amla.

I'm scared – and sad – that it's a cruel joke, but I see Mayurika sniff and then smile.

That gives Amla courage. 'Failing and Flying,' she says.

I leave the classroom three minutes before time. Just before the door closes behind me I see Shruti inspect the tattoo closely.

'Close Reading,' I hear one of them say.
On the Brink

_'For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted – made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world – as did Anne Sexton – as do we all....After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can't be very important.'_

—Joyce Carol Oates

I'VE COME HERE TO die.

I'm sitting in Café Weiner Platz. Though the weather prediction says heavy showers, I've chosen to sit outside. I sit in a corner at a table for four – as if I'll be joined by my family soon. But I'm by myself. Company blinds us – humans distract, human talk distracts without consequence, we fail to notice things. I see things I've never seen before. I see myself in the glass window to my left. There is always the initial shock – is that really me? I adjust my hair (since one cannot adjust the nose or the eyes) – that unsettles the self.

The waitress asks where I'm from, when I ask for an English menu.

'Ah India,' she says, 'that's why so pretty.'

I know I'm not pretty, and that this is part of her job etiquette, that her words are the equivalent of a ticket collector's 'Ticket please', but I allow myself to smile. I soon notice that she begins all her half sentences with 'So'.

Gnocchi and a glass of fresh orange juice.

It is afternoon though I'm confused. I'm still living to Indian time. The day has almost ended there. Here the sky is still choking with light. Summer, the enchantment of Europeans. I say this phrase to myself as if I were a writer. I'm not sure whether I smile when the phrase erupts like acne. For, two men pass by smiling at me. No, it's not because I'm pretty. It's because I'm alone.

Poor men, I say to myself. Not having a range of options with their clothes – shirts and tees, shorts and pants – they have concentrated all their experimental energy on their hair. The first man who passed by, the one in the yellow tee, has a reptilian mohawk. The second – I've already forgotten the colour of his clothes – has some secret code in his undercut. Their hairstyles give them an odd mix of hilarity and seriousness.

A few feet away from me is the traffic crossing. On the other side of the crossing is a fish house. The smell of fish frying in deep oil, as if it were an extension of its life in the sea, the hot oil a natural continuation of the cold seawater – the smell moves like a fly in my brain. The fresh anchovies – I've so far seen them only in food shows on YouTube – remind me of morola, boroli, and other small fishes. The fresh orange juice is here. At first, I want to push it away, as if it were someone else's order, or an order placed by an older self. Its citrusy fragrance is like a moral, an indictment against the deep-fried fish.

People collect around the traffic lights as if the signal were food and they animals congregating around it. For some reason, only the women stick to the eye. The men pass by like clouds. The women walk with focus – their destination is written on their faces and in the pace of their walk. No, it is not the women I notice but the children with them. They are everywhere – straight out of fairy tale storybooks, inside prams and on their feet, still unsure about the world and how the world was a thing, a noun. After long minutes of observation, it suddenly strikes me that there is something new about them that I hadn't noticed before. I begin to look like a scientist.

Yes, I wasn't mistaken. There it is, another pair. It's this new trend called 'twinning' – people, usually a pair, a couple, siblings, friends, wear 'matching' clothes. I've seen it on the Internet, on fashion websites and on Instagram. All the mothers are twinning with their children. Just as the gnocchi arrives and I spend a few moments thinking that I've ordered wrong food again, that I wouldn't be able to finish such a large serving even if it were divided into my next three meals, a mother and her daughter cross the street hurriedly. I'm not sure whether I'm seeing correctly – I wipe my glasses with the loose end of my shirt sleeve. No, there they are, walking on to a connecting street. Though I say walking, they're not really walking – the two of them are on their bicycles, and their bicycles are twinning. Even their hairstyles are – both have their summer hair collected into a messy bun on the top of their head. Their dresses are replicas of each other. Everything else – their faces, of course – matches each other's. Everything except the mother's pink bra strap, visible even from this distance.

After this, that is all I notice. Mothers and tiny daughters, related to each other not by blood or facial similarities alone, but by clothes. If the child is a boy, it's usually the colour of the pants that matches the mother's trousers or dress. How did this come to be? My mother never wore anything to resemble mine. But that might also be because she had hardly any saris except the ones she wore to work, and I had only a few dresses – clothes were bought twice a year, during Durga Puja and the Bengali New Year. Also, how was a sari to twin with a dress? Other thoughts crowd my head – about how the mother's clothes make her look like a girl and how the same clothes sexualise her little girl.

The gnocchi burns my tongue. I rush to the glass of orange juice, almost dunking my tongue in it for relief. I don't have children, I remind myself. There is no regret in that statement, only an awareness of what is not allowed to me – I will never be twinning my clothes with my daughter's, just as I won't wear purple lipstick or heels.

There's a man I hadn't noticed until now. Perhaps he was lying dormant, and is suddenly active, now that his food is here. I see him rolling long threads of noodles around the teeth of his fork. It seems that this process will never end. At the centre of the table is a tiny pot of cactus with a red flower. The red flower could well be a blob of ketchup. But my eyes are back to the man's wrists – he's like a weaver, a craftsman. Anyone without hands wouldn't be able to eat spaghetti.

I've come here to die, I remind myself. Destination Suicide, like Destination Wedding.

I wear no make-up. I have no ideology to back this decision – I tell myself it is because I want my face to be as clean as the inside of my mouth. Wearing no make-up in a world, where almost everyone does, makes me feel slightly naked, as one would feel if you wore no clothes in a world of fully clothed people. To wear make-up is to presume the presence of one more person besides myself in this world. But I'm the only inhabitant of my world. (I want to die.)

Not make-up alone, everything seems to be structured for socialising.

Cafés are places to socialise. There are no social places for solitude. Go to a forest – that's the dictum, turned into colloquial. And where does one go after the forests are gone?

There's another solitary woman beside me. She's drinking beer. No, she's finished. She's getting up. I read the note on her T-shirt. It's in English, and I'm surprised by the joy of that familiarity – it's perhaps also because I know the quote. _I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing._ It's by Anaïs Nin.

I make a sound with my drinking straw. It is a childish sound. I want to remember the age of this sound inside me but I can't. I can't remember most of the things I want to. It's not the problem of my memory but the nature of the things I want to remember – my first spit-bubble, my first moment of sexual passion, my first drawing of a line. What did it feel like? Will I remember all this tomorrow, after I die? If death is the opposite of life, then all the things we were denied in this life ought to be given to us in death? What use would it be to die otherwise?

The café smells of fries. That smell reminds me that I'm outside the house. No kitchen or house smells like this.

My eyes turn to the wall, to the wine bottles arranged on it – full and semi-full, how they're décor, in a way plates of French fries would never be.

I think too much. I don't like myself very much. I dislike that I have little control of my self. My fingers feel for the undulations of the strip of ten tablets inside my bag. Yes, they're still here. I trust them more than I've trusted people. I change 'people' to 'men'. I'm tired of my life as an editor. My head runs to 'track changes'. My dreams run to 'track changes' too.

I ask for the bill. There's always a moment of eroticism in this waiting.

I wish I could understand – or know – what the couple at the neighbouring table is talking about. I remind myself that love, like death, is a foreign language, that I'd never completely understand them. But I knew love once. Perhaps.

I've been in love. It is possible that I still love him. (Someone is bashing ice cubes with something heavy – what did people drink before the invention of ice?)

The four mirrors reflect light multiple times. What is their use? I love light, but I do not like to see its source – lamps, bulbs, nothing, with the possible exception of stars. I don't spend any time looking at stars though I notice them now, sometimes, on Instagram – they've remained unchanged since I first saw them. Everything is changing – changing too fast.

I notice a woman's nipples as if they were stars. I'm certain that no one except me has noticed them. She's not wearing a bra. I wonder whether I am a man. I take out a notebook and begin doodling. I find that I've drawn stars on a blank page. And though I never intended it, every star has a thought bubble. I check to see if I'm wearing a bra. All these stars look like nipples to me.

Two girls – when did they come? – are quarrelling. They're throwing out their arms as if they were swimmers.

Oh, they've made up, I think. They're smoking cigarettes together – sharing a fire, and now the smoke.

Aged men and women are passing by. (I won't live as long as them.) I say aged because the joy on their faces is anachronistic, one of looking at the world at eye level, not with their heads bent down. They look like the aged cast of _The Sound of Music,_ if there were to be a sequel. They might be rejected by the casting director – their agedness is not photogenic, not the circles of wrinkles and folds of wasted skin on faces in photography magazines but one where age hasn't accumulated, just slapped them, as if it were an accident, a case of mistaken identity. Are they going to church? Plaid skirts, white shorts and tops, hats that now belong only to films.

How beautiful they are. They don't want to die.

I check for the pills again. Yes, they're there, all ten of them – enough, enough to kill. We know less about life than we do about death. We don't know what might create life, but we do know what will end it. _These_ sleeping pills.

I feel powerful.

It is Saturday morning. Men are running. Five days for walking, one for resting. And this, the one in between, Saturday, is for running. They run without looking at anyone, as if the gaze would cause them injury. Their seriousness is scary. They are devout, their own worshippers. I doodle lines in my notebook: The body is a temple: _Walk_ is Worship. Later, I scratch them out.

Are our minds altered by running? Do they ever feel like dying while they are running? Do they ever feel like they're dying because they are running?

'Orange juice?' the waitress asks me, familiar with my order by now.

I smile. Everywhere I notice moles and freckles on the arms and chests of women, sometimes more freckles than on mosaic floors in India. I feel the urge to touch the waitress's freckles, as if her skin was bubble wrapping that I want to puncture with my fingers.

Am I a woman? I wonder.

A tram goes past. I stare at the passengers as they stare at me – a brown woman at the window. We'll forget each other the next moment, like we do the things on our newsfeed as we scroll through them, or people who die, like I will soon. And yet we look – we love looking out of the window. What is it that we like to see?

A double-decker sightseeing bus. Like a child on a father's shoulders. Everything – every machine invented by scientists – is a version, perhaps an advanced and more efficient version, of the human body or human action, or adapted from the natural world. The woman with blonde hair on the last seat of the open deck – why is she leaning out of the bus? Is she suicidal too?

I order an omelette with champignons and spinach on the side. I could cook this at home in a few minutes, but I've come here. One can't die at home unless one is ill and dies a natural death. Why spoil someone's house by dying in it? I smile to myself thinking how living will not spoil it, but a body, severed from life, will be handed down generations as an unpleasant memory, an inheritance of fear. I have a good landlady. I won't do this to her.

Why is the food taking so long? It is as if the slow music is cooking the egg. Everywhere there is music, everywhere there's the same music, music that no one remembers or listens to, that is made to be forgotten, like a co-passenger on the metro. Why are we living like this, without the backrest of memory and memories?

The food is here. She puts the plate in front of me and asks gently, 'So you see all places in Munich?'

I'm nervous about answering her question. She might as well have been asking me whether I've tried everything on the menu. In my head, it's a kind of end-of-life question. Does she know that I won't come back again for another meal? 'Not yet,' I say, wondering what the German word for 'yet' might be.

'Don't miss walking through the English Gardens,' she says kindly, pushing the basket of bread towards me.

We live like tourists – we have the anxiety of tourists, we're alert to not miss anything that we've been asked not to miss. We take photos – our cameras remember more than us. We've outsourced remembering to other centres – usually a memory card. Social media is also our memory card. We post the same things twice – we've forgotten that we've shared it before.

I wonder how the news of my death would be shared on Facebook. How would anyone know I died here?

A dog is walking with an old woman as if it were an old woman. (Dogs are trained to behave like humans. Machines are made to behave like humans. I don't understand why. There are already too many humans on this planet.)

There will be one less tomorrow, I console myself, or perhaps I'm consoling the planet. It really does not matter anymore. I try to think of myself as a child. Did I want to die even when I was a child? No child wants to die. I'm certain about that.

As if on cue, a little boy in a black and white striped long-sleeved tee enters the café. He is smiling. It is the smile of someone who's been smiling ever since he was born, who has learnt only how to smile. No, children don't want to die. I shake my head in guilt. The mother is pregnant. The little boy probably understands that, or perhaps he doesn't. He smiles, in knowledge and in ignorance.

We don't remember our adult lives as well as our parents and their parents once remembered them. Perhaps because we still remember our childhood (our phones had still not become our memory-keepers), we ascribe all our pain to it. Our adult life is a colony of hurt. Because hurt – and the anxiety to not get hurt again – is the strongest feeling in our being. We make wrong decisions. Moments of joy – even of happiness – do not enable our decisions anymore. 'I was so happy with him. I want to spend my life with him because I want to be happy like I was always...' Never like this but 'He hurt me that day, I don't want him to hurt me ever again...' is how we make our decisions. I know this, and yet...

I was hurt. I will be beyond the reach of hurt soon. I have my tablets. Ten of them. They'll be enough – I've checked on the Internet.

I can predict all the things that will be written in history books about us – The Age of Hurt, The Age of Victimhood, The Age of... I don't care. I won't be there to read them. I don't have to edit them either! What a beautiful gift from death this is – that one doesn't have to hear oneself being criticised.

Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier, Funf, Sechs... The mother is teaching her little boy to count.

We rely too much on numbers. The number of likes and shares. Our democracies run to the dictatorship of numbers. We think numbers will bring us equality. Is it possible to teach that, when she teaches him how to count?

When we die, they measure our life in numbers too. She was thirty-three years old, they'll say.

I'm back again. I'm still not dead. I'm trying. I'll get there. The sleeping pills are all there, waiting.

I'm not embarrassed. The waitress wouldn't know that I'd thought that that was my last meal. Or did she? A ten Euro tip – she might have guessed?

I order a gazpacho.

Most cars are black here. Or navy. I wonder why. Why do I ask myself such inconsequential questions?

An ambulance, there. The colour of an ambulance is white. The colour of a wedding dress – just behind it, in a shop window – is white.

One. Two. Three. 4. 5. 6.

Six people at the traffic crossing. I see them from behind. Six butts in fitting pants. (Should it be twelve butts? Is 'butts' plural, used for a pair?) If it was a woman in a sari, I might have imagined a face. Is it that the fluidity of the sari abets the imagination?

Someone orders calamari. I hear the sound. All around me is the sea – not water, but its residents, on plates and pans, losing their water. I've never been inside the sea. Do people inside it also feel the urge to die, to commit suicide? Like humans, creatures of land, do?

_There are too many women in publishing._ I remember a male author tell my male colleague in a whisper. I felt like a cliché – unwanted, like a female foetus in a North Indian village. There's a ready-made response to that observation: the male writers on university syllabus, and in book catalogues. But you don't throw hot water on a fly. No, no, it is not for this that I want to die.

Why do I really want to die? Will death be worth its imagined promise?

I want to be assured that the sleeping pills are still with me. I dip my hand into my tote – a pencil comes out. Its sharp nose scratches the dry skin of my right hand.

I think of the person who invented pencils. Did he invent the sharpener too? Life and death. Root and shoot. Action and reaction. Life's rule is in pairs. If I die today, will someone else die with me? Or will someone be born in my place?

Someone behind me is reading the cocktail menu: Munich Mule, Baby Blue, Batildsa Brasil. Alliterative pairs. There's no escape from life's room-for-two rules. No, it's not over. Another one – Harry's Girlfriend.

Are life and death really a pair?

_Links. Rechts. Links. Rechts._ I know this pair. _Left. Right. Left. Right._ It's the little boy with his mother.

Is it possible that someone could spend one's life walking only in one direction all their life? If I walked out of home and took only the left – _only the left_ – would I ever reach home? (The question takes my mind to my neighbour's doormat. _HOME_ printed on the coir mat. _Home_ – left outside the house door.)

Did he ever love me? Where is he now? Does he ever think of me? Will he be sad to hear of my death? Am I dying for myself or for him? Why am I always so confused? Why do I never know?

I notice after some time that the fingers on my right hand are moving as if I was touching his wet hair. How they'd slip out of my fingers the moment he moved. There's a mole on my left hand. I touch it. He used to touch it.

He expected me to be as perfect as a restaurant, where there's no sign of burnt food.

The café's beginning to fill up. Women in groups of three and four, hair displaced from a magazine on to their heads. I touch mine – is it greasy? How does it matter? Life has many fashion rules, I'm quite sure death has none. Many before me have died with greasy hair plastered to their scalps – I'm eligible to die, I remind myself.

'Is it good?' the waiter asks.

'Ya,' I say, quickly stressing it with 'Yes.'

He stands there, trying to make conversation. 'Tina go to Venice,' he says.

'Tina?' I ask.

'That woman,' he says, and moving his hands to his ears, indicates the length of her hair.

I smile and nod my head in understanding.

'Venice.'

I smile again.

'Her last wish. She ask from God. God give her. So now she go to Venice. Shoo shoo shoo...' He makes that sound to the accompaniment of his hands – I can't make out whether it is her flight he indicates or the movement of gondolas on water.

_Death in Venice._ The phrase scalds my mind. She – no, she has a name: Tina – couldn't have gone to Venice to die.

Death in Munich. Exactly the same number of syllables.

'You writer?' he asks. (I don't really know why I imagine his name should be Tin – a male Tina.)

I shake my head. 'Nein, nein, nein.' My only German must come to some use.

'Editor.' With food in my mouth, it probably sounds like 'waiter'.

He's surprised. 'Really?'

'Yes,' I say.

'From?'

'From India.'

'Apfelstrudel on the house,' he says.

I'm surprised. I don't know what to do or say. Anxious – as if I'm about to miss my appointment with death yet again – I put my hand inside the bag and take out the strip of Alzolam.

'Sick?' he asks, sniffing to ask whether I have a cold.

I push the first tablet out of its circular home and wait.

I want to tell him that what I have is incurable – life is my disease, I want to be rid of it.

I push out a few more of the pills. It is the opposite of bursting bubble wraps. I feel happy – I feel closer to the destination, as if I'm getting my ticket punched.

But the apfelstrudel is here. Apple and cinnamon, in a lake of vanilla-scented custard. Outside, there's a building – that one, on the right, just behind the fish house, where the people from _The Sound of Music_ disappeared – that resembles this dessert in front of me.

It is dark now, when we begin to miss the sweetness of light.

I cut a tiny piece of the apple and pastry and wrap it in a coating of custard. I lick my lips – I want everything inside me. It tastes like something that will stain anything it touches, a stain more permanent than light, a permanent stain, like life. When I look out of the window, it feels like the top of the house is gone. Have I been eating it? I feel something in my throat. I cough. Is it the window of the house, or the edge of the conical roof that's stuck in my throat? I want water, but the waiter's disappeared. I wave at the little boy to catch his attention. But he is playing with the salt and pepper pots. _Links. Rechts. Links. Rechts._ I put a few more spoons of the custard to push the window down my throat. It's still hot. It helps to push slightly, but it's a poor lubricant. The coughing stops temporarily. I wait for water and the waiter. I put a bite of the apfelstrudel into my mouth again. Its taste is irresistible, like death. The coughing starts again – there are doorknobs and tables and chairs and pots and pans from the house inside my throat. The sticky custard has glued them there, as if this was their home. I don't know what to do. Should I vomit and return them to their owner, to where they should be? There's a lamp – a bulb – that's burning my throat now. Where's the waiter? I need water.

There's no water.

There, there's water, two tables away. The man in a white shirt is looking at his phone. I run to his table and empty his glass of water into my throat.

I don't explain anything to him.

I am walking home. Am I walking home?

Am I still alive?

I am certain that I'll die someday. But today's perhaps not that day.

I'm swallowing doors and windows, even the sky, I'm eating people and traffic lights. I think I'm still alive today.
'I'm Not Sure'

_'Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.'_

—Jessica Stern

'I'M NOT SURE.'

I pretend that it's fine that she doesn't know, but it's not the first time she's used that phrase. I let it go.

The cold wind scratches my face, my hair is like sharp thread on my skin, my fingers behave like insects in my pocket, but none of this matters to Paulina. She's intoxicated by herself – every visit by a foreigner energises her patriotism, she discovers something new about Wurzburg and consoles and convinces herself that she was right in having chosen this tiny town over metropolitan places. I'm the foreigner this season, her catch as it were.

'Do you like flowers or trees?' she asks.

It's not her English that disturbs me as much as this distinction. Isn't it like asking whether I like someone's fingers or her entire body? 'I don't care for the glamour of flowers,' I say, pausing to check whether I actually mean it.

She stops walking and turns to look at me. I might be wrong, but I imagine her slightly angry, as if I've said something offensive about the shape of her nose.

I clarify. 'I don't like flowers in vases or bouquets, I mean. Nothing is more glamorous than life. The living are glamorous. There's no glamour in death...'

'If you come here in the summer'– she tells me in the tone of someone saying 'If you were to go to the moon...' – 'You'll be drowned in the smell of roses from this garden below.'

'Roses? When did roses first come to Wurzburg, you think?'

'I'm not sure...'

There, again. To make her feel at ease with her ignorance, I take a photo that I know I'll delete as soon as I'm back in my hotel.

'Look at the river below. That's the Main. It froze last winter, you know. It started in that direction. _Ich neissnicht._ I mean, I'm not sure – was it this? Or that? I can never quite figure out which way is upstream. That must be downstream?'

I'm not interested.

'Isn't this a majestic view of the town? You can see the entire city from here. Even the vineyards. Look at that hill over there. That is called the North and that the...'

Before she can complete her sentence, her right hand lands on my ears, the pointing finger almost into my eardrum.

'I am sorry,' she apologises, laughing.

I don't laugh. 'Where do you live, Paulina?' I ask.

'Oh, that's easy. Imagine my nose as 12 o'clock. Look at where my finger is pointing. Around that 2 o'clock – see where I'm pointing, look – is where my flat is. You see that red building with a greyish roof? Just behind that. Well, I'm not sure you can see it from here. You'll have to imagine it...'

'Then it's not completely true that everything in Wurzburg is visible from the castle up here, right?' I'm teasing her – I sense a sudden affection for her that takes me by surprise – but she is serious.

'I am sorry. I come here for the view. As a child, I was fascinated by NASA photos of how the earth looked from the moon, and when I first came here six years ago, all those images from my school books came back to me. This castle was Wurzburg's moon. I see this view from my window every morning and evening – it's unchanging...'

'Like we see only one face of the moon from the earth, you see only this face of the castle...'

'Yes, I've had the same thought myself.' Then, pulling me by the hand, she says, 'Let's go. I'll show you something that I've never shown anyone before.'

I don't know why I'm not excited by the prospect of becoming the owner of her secret. I'm borderline-bored.

We take the stairs. An aged woman is trying to get a pram down to the garden. I check to see if there's a baby in it – my instinct to help is balanced by the rust-coloured shawl that I've wrapped around my head to avoid the wind from sneaking into my ears. I feel like a Muslim woman, suddenly self-conscious, as white men and women in this Catholic town pass by and try hard to look like they are unbothered by my religion. I feel as fake as them – I'm not Muslim and they are not tolerant. I might be taken for a kidnapper, a baby-snatcher, and so I look away. Paulina is saying something that I cannot hear.

I feel happy to be alone in the midst of this crowd of tourists. I note the things that are more important to me than the Marienberg Fortress – how does it really matter to me, this baroque home of prince-bishops for more than five hundred years? I'm indifferent to monuments. It's not my politics but my temperament – as a child, I preferred spending long afternoons watching processions of black ants to trips to zoos in Calcutta and Darjeeling. Even architecture, which I've begun to see as the only kind of art that capitalism will allow to survive, seems far less interesting to me than what is affecting my body: a thin breeze; heels on stone; singing. Yes, someone singing, someone invisible (all music is, of course, invisible or, at least, once was). The music is clothing us.

'Who's that singing?' I ask Paulina.

'I'm not sure,' she says, 'I've never heard it before.'

'I thought it was part of the light-and-sound display,' I say as a joke, though I almost half-believe it. 'What is it that you wanted to show me?' I ask, uninterested. I'm hungry. I'd rather be eating a hot meal than doing culture.

'I first came here when I was twelve,' she begins.

Background. Context. Always the English professor. The words vibrate in the godown of my mouth. I suppress a yawn. I miss sentences. As if the castle's history wasn't enough, I will now have to deal with her personal history. Childhoods are as unnecessary and annoying as history. I've seen both take over literature. I pretend to act as patient with her as I am with the historical novel. 'Sorry?' I say, because I've missed too much to be able to create even a semblance of a narrative.

'My grandparents brought me here. It was summer.' She stresses 'summer' and then stops. Summer becomes a thing of the past, like her childhood. As if it won't ever return again.

The male singer's voice hits the stone, it hits us. Something breaks in both. It nudges Paulina to speak, long minutes after she stopped at 'summer'. 'I've heard this voice before,' she says.

'Where?'

'I'm not sure.'

'On the radio perhaps?' I say, just to keep the flow of words moving, like a game of table tennis. If we stop, the game ends. If we stop talking, something will end. I don't know what that is, but I can sense that something will. Perhaps the song will end? Does history end with the end of a song?

Paulina shakes her head. I feel like a student. Neither of us knows why we've stopped walking.

'Your secret?' I prod, and the question fuels our footsteps.

Paulina turns to look back a few times, as if she were expecting someone to join us. It could be a coincidence but it's one I can't help noticing. She looks back only when the song seems to be on the verge of ending. As soon as she does that, the volume revs up, as if her backward glance were an electronic button. If we were younger – and if she was a friend and not an acquaintance in a foreign land – I might have teased her about it.

She points to something, as if by mistake, not half-heartedly, not even absent-mindedly, but as if she were possessed. It's not clear what she wants me to see. I follow her as one follows a poor thief – lazily, without greed.

'I hid something when I came here as a girl of twelve,' she says, smiling, as if trying to convince herself of this piece of truth.

'We always leave behind a part of ourselves wherever...'

'Only in my case it's literally true,' she says, interrupting me.

'What do you mean?' I almost exclaim, though I'm not really invested.

'I hid a tooth here.' She's giggling. It washes away all accumulated feet-ache. A strand of blonde hair sticks to her teeth. She continues laughing. I can't stop looking at her – she's suddenly become attractive, as attractive as vulnerability.

'Where?' I ask after some time, as if it was a task.

'I'm looking for the place,' she says, rubbing the ground with her right foot, almost like a dog.

'Do you take a look at it every time you come here?' I ask.

'NO!' She says, as if I've said something scary.

I don't say anything. I miss having Wi-Fi on my phone. I take it out, hoping, impossibly, to see an open Internet connection. I pretend I'm not with her when she bends down and looks at the line of decorative bushes. My elbow behaves like a walking stick, giving me support. Soon I'm leaning on the wall, my face in my hands, my head like a globe on stilts. Only, the world is in front of me. The river, indifferent to everything, including its own safety, is marching along. I'm suddenly jealous of it – it is as amoral as memory.

'Why do the ducks never leave the shore? Why do they float near the margins of the Main?' I ask.

'I'm not sure,' she says. 'I mean, I'm not sure where I kept the tooth.'

'You lost a milk tooth at twelve? Is that common among Germans, I mean Caucasians? Indians get their permanent set of teeth by nine, I think.'

'It wasn't my milk tooth.'

'Then?'

'Let me find it first.'

I begin to associate this sternness and stubbornness with all German women. But I don't really care. I'm leaving for home tomorrow.

People pass by. Their gazes are mostly sterile, untouched by curiosity. It is as if life were a hospital and they are doing everything they can to maintain good health. How can they not turn to look at a woman on her fours, digging the soil with her hands? If it was India, the crowd would've joined her by now.

'Maybe it wasn't here. Some other place...' I say. I really am not interested in her tooth.

'No, I remember it distinctly.'

'What?'

'A man slapped me.'

'What? Who?'

'A stranger.'

'A stranger?'

'I mean – a singer. My German and English... They sound the same sometimes.'

'A singer slapped you? Why?'

An airplane divides the sky over our heads into two, almost equally. The white smoke on this business-blue sky looks like the trail of a nail mark on dry skin. I look at the cambium-like mark on my ring finger. The ring is gone, the giver of the ring gone before that. I look away from my hand to the trees in the distance. They are shedding their leaves. How easy they make it seem – the art of losing isn't hard to master. What is my loss compared to Paulina's? She lost an adult tooth at twelve. It can compare only to the hardship of losing a parent at a very young age. That silly – and wrong – analogy makes me turn backwards. There she is – Paulina, digging for her tooth like an orphan might dig a parent's grave.

'Have you found it?' I ask, sincerely interested for the first time.

She shakes her small head.

'If this is the very spot you say it is, what could have happened to it? It's dissolved into the earth perhaps?'

'The sun is the giver of life. But it is also the killer of life. Anything that lives in the sun will have to die. Everything. That is why I planted it inside the earth, to protect it from the sun. You know about bunkers, don't you? Hitler's bunker, Saddam Hussein's? The darkness of the soil preserves things,' she says, without looking at me, as if I was the darkness that had betrayed her trust.

I want to ask her whether she knew all of this at twelve or whether this knowledge is only retrospective. Instead, I sit down beside her. I try to look at her face from the corner of my eye. Is she going to have a breakdown? Then I allow my eyes to rush back from that blurred territory to her fingers. I notice the dirt in her fingernails, but it's a weak moment for my politics: I notice that even European soil is fairer than Indian soil.

'You think that the man who slapped you and broke your tooth could've taken it away?' I ask, like a lab assistant who feels useless unless he's speculating aloud in the presence of his superior.

'We'd come from the Residence, to where the prince-bishops moved, from this castle here, in the mid-nineteenth century. It was summer. I'd played in the garden, after getting lost in the south wing of the palace. It's gigantic – one of the largest in Europe, a hundred and seventy metres long – and it's easy to get lost. While everyone was taken by the grandeur and opulence of the gold and the mirrors and art on the ceilings which I couldn't see with my neck craned – I lay down on the floor and decided to look at it, angering my grandma whose voice was louder than the guide's. I was curious about where the toilets could be. I feel ashamed that I had no sense of history. I had no idea that attached bathrooms were very recent, but I was surprised that these dazzling rooms had no toilets in their vicinity. Also – and this is the first time I'm sharing this with someone; I couldn't have obviously told my grandparents – I was addicted to the taste of toothpaste then. I was curious to see which brand of toothpaste they used...'

'You're still addicted to toothpaste, aren't you?' I ask. I have no idea why I say that.

'How do you know?' she asks, standing up from her haunches, dusting away the sand from her hands.

I smile. 'I'm not sure,' I say, making it sound like a quote. Her words now almost a refrain.

'There are these lovely statues in the garden adjoining the palace – statues of two little boys playing with each other, wrestling, fighting, climbing trees, eating grapes, one even trying to gorge out the other's eye...'

'What are they doing there? Paedophiles in that palace?' I ask. The memory of a priest runs through my mind. Dark hands taking off the safety pin from the pleats of my mini-sari. Saraswati Puja, when even the tiniest Bengali girl wears a sari. How old was I then? Sixth grade. Twelve years old.

'No, I didn't mean that. It's possible, I know – we now know what happens in monasteries all across the world, right? – but I wasn't thinking of that. I wanted to be like those little boy-statues. They didn't have to go to school. They were always playing.' She takes out the phone from her jacket. 'I'd completely forgotten this. Good that I set an alarm on my phone. I have a meeting with Sebald at 3 today. But we still have an hour to go.'

'Enough time to find a tooth,' I say, smiling.

Paulina opens her bag and begins emptying out its contents. For a moment I have the sense of watching a video on YouTube – a live demonstration of the genre _What's inside your bag?_ Instead of a table is the earth. Surely things couldn't be precious if you kept them on the ground? My middle-class self rises to annotate this observation. Small vials of creams and potions, two lip balms, keys, cards, a baby toothbrush, and something that she hides immediately in her left hand before I can see it.

'I thought I had a pen,' she says feebly.

I suppress a bad joke – is she writing a note to the absent tooth, to say that it didn't keep its appointment? – and ask, 'What do you need it for? I might have one.'

'To dig,' she says matter-of-factly.

I don't bother to look. I'm not going to sacrifice my pen for her whimsy about excavating her tooth.

She's poking the soil with the nose of a long key. 'The singing has stopped, hasn't it?' she asks.

It has, indeed.

'Good!' she smiles, like a child, for only a child can live completely in the present.

'Why did you bury your tooth, Paulina? And why did he...?'

She is no longer where she was. I'm suddenly running to catch up with her. She's talking to strangers in this strange language which I can only presume is German. I don't understand a word, but the nervous energy trapped in it reminds me of the desperation of lost children to find their parents at fairs in India. It's almost as if I've seen a proverb come alive.

I stand behind her, preparing to hold her if she fell down or backwards. I don't know why I have such a thought – Paulina certainly hasn't given me any indication of being unsteady on her feet. She suddenly begins laughing. I, unable to guess the reason behind her laughter, investigate her teeth – which of these is a false tooth? The next thought follows so closely on its heels that I'm unable to keep it away. Does a false tooth imply false laughter too?

'Freud associated dreams of losing one's tooth with sexuality, you know,' she says.

I know. I have recurring dreams about losing teeth. My roommate used to complain about my teeth chattering in my sleep. I want to say something about the past being the sexiest thing in this country. 'Which tooth, Paulina?' I ask instead, looking at her.

'I'm not sure,' she says.

'A front tooth?' I ask, feeling mine with my tongue.

Paulina can't hear me. She doesn't hear anyone. She behaves like a Brownian particle, hitting against surfaces, deflecting from them, a life of velocity. Now she's standing close to the wall again, staring at the Main. She looks back for a second. A group of sombre tourists pass by – they look like students walking towards the exam hall. She blows her nose.

'You see that bridge on the Main? See, those are the patron saints of Wurzburg. Do you see the Japanese couple there – the woman in a velvet top – drinking wine? It's a tradition here – to stand on the bridge and drink wine.'

'Why?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Why are there so many Japanese tourists in Wurzburg?'

'I don't know.'

She returns to me intermittently, answering my queries as if I was conducting a survey. She's treating space as if it were time, moving to places when she's actually trying to recover her past from them. It's an old formula – I recognise it from the way I used to feel on my wedding anniversaries.

'Frank. I think that was the name.'

'Whose?' I ask.

'The singer.'

'Frank Sinatra broke your tooth?' I say, conjuring laughter. But it vanishes before my teeth can be bared to the air.

'Sin? Yes, it's a sin to...' She doesn't complete her sentence.

Paulina runs, faster than anyone I know, so fast that it seems she might flow out of land on to the river. I find my eyes crinkling at the thought – the pain it'll cause water, how the skin of water will puncture from the implosion. I begin running after her, pulling my red scarf like a parachute. Things begin dropping from her bag – the zip is open. I collect them like someone who'd been training to collect these things all her life. Things that I hadn't seen until a moment ago grow familiar to me, like things from history suddenly do – a monument returns to its hairy life as a house, cutlery in museums becomes creatures touched by spit.

Something unfamiliar drops out of the bag. It's a tiny steel jar.

Paulina's disappeared and my feet are tired.

I am curious. It's only a jar. An image speeds through my mind – Paulina hiding something urgently. Is it this? The lid is tight. My fingers, slightly numb from the cold, are inefficient. I turn it clockwise and anti-clockwise. It doesn't yield. German jar! I taunt it, sure that there's some invisible technology keeping secrets from me. Soon the oldest technology reveals its contents to me – the jar falls from my hands. It lies there on the floor, its stomach burst, like a coconut. But instead of water, there are tiny white skulls on the ground! I'm scared, I'm shocked, I'm nervous. I panic. I kneel down, deciding to pick them up, before I'm accused of killing children and preserving their tiny skulls. But this tiny? Are these Jewish skulls? I wonder for a moment. I'm not wearing my glasses (I wanted a few photos of myself without glasses, but Paulina has disappeared; there'll be no photos to post on Facebook, alas), and so I hold a skull close to my eyes.

No! These are not skulls. How could they be? They are teeth, old teeth, old baby teeth, the tiny hillocks and undulations on them resembling the sockets on skulls. Jewish teeth? I ask myself again. I try to think of one Jewish child whose teeth these could be. I fail. I've seen only adult Jews, smiling and successful, no Jewish babies.

And then the name of the only Jewish child I know slaps my memory.

Are these Anne Frank's teeth? Is this the 'Frank' Paulina meant? Or Frankfurt, from where Anne Frank's father moved his family to Amsterdam?

I feel my thoughts turning into a ghost. My palms are beginning to sweat, my socks are cold, from soaking the panic leaking out of my soles. I wipe my upper lip. I never liked history. But this? History is the fourth dimension of life in this country. It surfaces everywhere – as guilt, as memory, as tourism. Everything in Germany is supposed to have a history; it is almost illegal to forget anything. Everything must be preserved, and preserved in a manner that keeps the dignity of the object intact. Two days ago, I saw a student – I think her name was Diana – wrapping her chewed gum in a tissue paper. It seemed like this thing that she'd throw into the trash bin a few minutes later was being archived as well. Yes, this country is an archive!

I hate archives.

But if there's anything I dislike more, it is the overload of information that I force myself to carry inside my head.

The teeth in the steel jar cannot be innocent. I know too much. Friedrich Pfeffer, a dentist, was Anne Frank's 'roommate' in Amsterdam. He used to treat the inmates of the house for 'bad breath' and other dental problems. Did he keep the extracted teeth of the Frank family in this jar?

A part of me is aware that I might be hallucinating, but that is suppressed by the stronger urge to believe. I find the two parts of my self at war. This is the effect of history, of it coming to us in corrupt versions – everything is speculation. This is the country of Walter Benjamin – his ghost attends every seminar and conference here. Just yesterday, I heard a woman say 'Angelus Novus' a few times. She read out quotations in German. The English translation moved like an ant through my head, from left to right.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

'His mouth is open' – are his teeth visible, or have they been extracted?

History here is more alive than men. It is a disease, an epidemic. I am scared that I might have been touched by its contagion.

Am I turning mad?

Where is Paulina? Has it turned her mad?

'Paulina,' I scream, running towards the sky. I think it's her, standing on the edge of the wall, about to take flight, as if she were the angel of history. 'Paulina,' I shout again. 'Whose teeth are these?'

Although she doesn't answer, I can hear her say them. 'I'm not sure.'

'Paulina, you'll fall down. Get down from there. Please.'

She doesn't respond.

I throw the teeth at her. Or are these only pebbles that I've been imagining as teeth? Are they peppermint tablets?

'Have you gone mad?' she shouts back, rushing towards me, braving the shower of teeth. 'Have you gone mad?' she says again.

'I'm not sure,' I say, as if I were History. Or Benjamin about to swallow morphine. Aren't both the same? I'm not sure.
Beside the Madman's House

_'Madness is the acme of intelligence.'_

—Naguib Mahfouz

EVEN NOW MY FRIENDS use the old description to give directions to my house: 'Right beside the madman's house.' My parents too, when explaining the location of our house to courier boys, will use the same phrase: 'Right beside the madman's house.'

It is evidently easy to spot landmarks – a shop, a temple, a school, a restaurant – but how is a stranger to identify a madman's house? From the time I began to get a sense of things, I would look at the house and wonder how different it was from ours. The same sloping asbestos roof on a single-storeyed house, a patch of ground leading to a confused pair of stairs that took one to its insides through a lazy verandah – our house was painted blue, the colour made gentler by rain and time; the madman's house was painted... It must have been painted once upon a time, but it was now almost impossible to tell its colour. Was its colour a giveaway then, to the madness of its resident?

I still remember this. One morning – I think it was in 1986, when I was in the sixth grade – I woke up crying from a dream. My parents, who usually paid no attention to our dreams, all their energies being spent on how to survive a month in a couple of thousand rupees, stopped by my bed.

'Why are you crying?' my father asked.

I didn't know that I was crying. And so when my mother asked me the same question, I turned to look at my sister sleeping beside me. She wasn't there.

I told them why I'd been crying in my sleep. The madman next door was giving directions to someone on the phone – 'Right beside the mad person's house.' He was calling our house a mad person's house.

My parents looked slightly disturbed about my dream, but soon explained it in their characteristic matter-of-fact manner: 'Like the night is the opposite of day, what happens in our dreams is the opposite of what actually happens in our lives.'

Later, I tried to remember what the madman looked like in my dream. That was because I had never seen the madman. But I couldn't.

All through my childhood, he was the tourist attraction – my friends would ask to see him when they came for my birthday parties, as if he was a magician or joker whom my parents had paid to entertain us. 'Where is he?' they'd ask, pointing at the house. They'd all leave disappointed, as if a ghost hadn't kept an appointment with them. A few times, when I'd ask them to yet another birthday party, they'd ask, 'Will we get to see the madman this time?'

This made me angry, as much with them as with the madman. Living next to a haunted house would've been easier – people wouldn't have come with the complete assurance of sighting a ghost. There'd have been a little mortgage of fear too, and the disappointment would've been annotated with a sense of relief. But a madman? Why, why did they want to see a madman?

Apart from a skinny man in rags who pretended to be a traffic sergeant at the crossing near Panitanki More, I hadn't really seen a madman. I didn't know whether he was really mad – my friend Ankur, who sat next to me in class, told me that he was actually a 'spy in borrowed uniform'. Although those rags didn't resemble the police uniform, I believed him. So I spent the first few years of my life knowing nothing about madness and mad people. Whether it had identifiable characteristics such as vitiligo or birthmarks or a particular kind of pimple or a permanent fever I didn't know.

What I did know was something that my mother taught us – it was wrong to call a madman mad.

My sister, always argumentative, wouldn't accept that instruction. 'Why? You say I have a fever when I have a fever. Why can't we then...?'

My mother ignored such inconsequential rebellions. As long as we passed in Maths and English and didn't have lice in our hair, she remained unaffected.

And then in grade six, I discovered the first madman. He was in our History textbook. I was surprised that the writer had ignored my mother's instruction – they'd called a madman a madman. And it was no ordinary madman – the madman was a king. His name was Muhammad Bin Tughlaq. But our History teacher did not spend a minute on talking about his madness. Only his mad actions were enumerated – we even had to rote-learn them for our exams, that he was called 'a mixture of contradictions' (though I wrote 'a mixture of contraries' in my exam paper!). I was angry – for I was old enough to realise that characteristics of madness were individual-specific, that Tughlaq's madness would be different from Akbar's, if the latter was mad at all. How did one identify madness then?

The specialised field of madness was reiterated in an idiom that surrounded me – 'Send them to Ranchi.' In Ranchi was a sanatorium for the mad. Shiraj, a classmate, had heard about the 'electric treatment' there – that those who were mad had two electric wires which fed their heads with voltage. This piece of information energised our imagination but scared us equally. We knew that we didn't want to be mad.

'Why don't they take the madman to Ranchi?' I ask my mother one day.

She's in our tiny prayer room, offering nokul-dana and water to the gods and goddesses – everything is shrunk in this room, its size, the size of its residents, the utensils in which the food and water are served, the length of the garlands, the tiny bodies of the worshipped, as if heaven, where the gods lived, was a version of Lilliput-land. My mother pretends not to hear my question. She always does this, when she's in that room, relinquishing powers of speech and hearing as soon as she enters it, as if God wanted worshippers to behave in that manner.

I ask, again.

She makes a gesture with her face that I can't understand. The prayer room is like Ranchi, I think, though I haven't seen the latter – it turns people who enter it into strange creatures.

By the time she comes out of the room I am impatient. 'What does the madman look like, Ma?' I ask.

'Who?' She is walking towards the kitchen, her wet feet leaving imprints on the floor. It is cold, and she is walking on her toes, so that the floor is stamped with only a pair of three marks each.

Do madmen walk like that? I wonder. I'll get all my answers out of her today, even if it means being scolded. 'Who else? The madman, the madman in that house.'

'There's no madman anywhere,' she says. 'There's mustard oil in a steel bowl next to the soap dish in the bathroom. Rub your legs with it. Look at them – scaly, as if chalk was falling off a blackboard!'

I hate how secretive my parents are, how they never share their adult worlds with us, my sister and me, but are angry if we keep secrets from them. But not anymore, I decide. 'You have to tell me what the madman looks like,' I insist.

'Don't be mad,' she scolds me gently, 'why are you obsessing about a madman?'

I get angry with her use of the word 'mad' for me, but I am decided, I won't let it get in the way of my answer. 'It's part of our school project,' I lie without thought.

'What?'

'We have to write about a madman we know.'

'Really? Which subject is this for? I've never heard anything as ridiculous as this!'

'History,' I say, thinking of the mad king Tughlaq.

'History?' Her voice is slightly softer now. It's possible that she's beginning to believe me. 'But why would your History teacher – what's her name? – give you such a project?'

'How would I know?' I say, and then thinking hard – very hard – I add, 'She said that we must find out histories of people without histories.' I wasn't making this up completely. Mrs Ghosh, our History teacher, had actually said that on Teacher's Day – 'When you grow up, you must write the history of teachers like us. You must ask why there is no history of a single teacher in the History books you read.'

'Oh, really? And what are your friends doing? Surely there aren't as many madmen in Siliguri as there are students in your class?'

'Please tell me what our madman looks like, Ma.'

'There are no photos of him in our albums...'

'But you've seen him, haven't you?'

'How would I know?'

'How would _you_ not know...'

'I came to this house after he'd become mad. Like you, I've only heard about his madness,' she says, as if that is explanation enough.

'Do madmen become invisible after they become mad?' I ask.

'Don't ask stupid questions. Now go and bathe.'

It was eventually my Music teacher who took me to see the madman. Perhaps he had no choice. He was teaching me Raga Bhairav – ' _Jago mohan pyare.'_ I was too young to know the near-uselessness of words in Hindustani classical music, that one could repeat the same phrase over and over again and never really reach the end. I, however, practised with the sole longing to reach the end. It was more tortuous than physical sports, athletics and track events in school, in all of which I came last. I hated singing to beat and tune. I had no use for the song – addressed to 'Mohan', one of the many names for Krishna; it was meant to wake him up. I didn't understand most of the lyrics that followed the first line, and I thought them redundant – if I sang close to where someone was sleeping, the person would wake up anyway! The rest of the song was therefore unnecessary.

But there was My music teacher, trying to get me to sing to tune. I wanted to ask how a sleeping man – so what if he was God in this lifetime! – could be bothered whether I was singing in tune or not. But I was only twelve years old.

'Dha. This _dha_ is different. Listen to me,' he'd say, playing it one more time for me.

Like the raga, the singing session seemed never-ending. I tried to pour my voice into the _dha,_ but it spilled over. I just couldn't get it right. My stomach complained in hunger. It is possible that its _dha_ was more tuneful than what was coming out of my throat.

Suddenly, I heard the sound of things breaking, the noise drowning my teacher's _dha_ at last. I ran to the window, my teacher to the door. 'It might be my bicycle tyre... it's burst,' he said, slightly embarrassed, as if he'd farted.

It might have been the sound of thunder, for lightning was scratching the sky. I turned back to say that to my teacher. But he was gone.

And so I stood by the window, looking at the madman's house. Things were falling out of it like spit from an old man's mouth. Perhaps the kitchen had caught fire, because pots and pans and plates and ladles were storming out of it on to the ground. But there was no sign of smoke at all. Then pillows, then towels and bed sheets, then a bucket and plastic mug, then things I couldn't identify, tiny things (they might have been medicines) and then books, one after the other. This continued for a long time, an unending procession of books landing on their stomachs on the ground, some of them breaking their spines. The energy was so infectious that I was tempted to throw the harmonium out of my room exactly like that. I might have, had it not been so heavy – I'd have blamed it on the madman later.

My music teacher had returned to the room. 'I went to check my bicycle downstairs. The tyres are fine. But...'

Disappointed that he hadn't left yet, I decided that I had to get rid of him somehow. My sister and I had done that once – she'd thrown stones on our tin roof and mugs of water on the pathway, and I'd told him that it was a hailstorm and that he should probably leave early, in case it grew worse. Unable to think of anything, I began to play the harmonium. Fast, very fast, so that my fingers slipped from the keys and it seemed that the harmonium would either cry or collapse. Accompanying it, inside my head and ears, though I hadn't orchestrated it, of course, was the sound of things being thrown from a little while ago, an unexpected accompaniment. Together, the sounds created a kind of claustrophobia – it made me want to throw up, I couldn't be sure what it did to my Music teacher.

'Stop,' he shouted.

Although I'd been waiting for him to say that all afternoon, I couldn't stop. It was as if the keys of the harmonium were playing with my fingers and not the other way round. I'd lost control. Was I pretending? Even now, when I think back to the moment, more than thirty years later, I cannot explain what'd happened to me. I still remember the sound – my finger slipping on _dha,_ pressing it again and again, like a mountaineer slipping and falling off a slope but not giving up. Repeating something, the same note, for instance, I learnt that day, creates not boredom but cacophony.

'STOP!' he shouted.

But it was beyond my control. I can't remember anymore whether I was pretending to do this, of being unable to stop.

'Stop, stop, stop!' He was now saying the word in English, either to amplify the sense of emergency or perhaps because he thought my English medium education would make me more alert to the word.

But I did not – could not – stop.

'Are you going mad too?' he said. He meant those words – the fear showed on his face, it wasn't just the casual use of 'You are mad' or _'pagal.'_

'Too?' I wanted to ask but probably didn't. I can't remember exactly now.

I do remember that he looked ill. 'Do you know why someone goes mad?'

Before I could shake my head – I didn't know, of course – he was answering the question. 'When they lose _sur_ and _taal_ – for man is a composition of notes and beats, both moving together, though they might not look like it. Just as our hands and legs move in the same direction, or even the heart and our eyes, though their coordination might not be visible to us, our happiness comes from being in tune, of everything inside us being in tune with its outside. That is why you must sing in tune...'

'Why?'

'Because no madman sings in tune.'

I had, at last, found one characteristic of madmen. That they couldn't be singers. Happy with this piece of knowledge, I asked, 'So there are no mad singers?'

'You're so young, so innocent. How do I explain? All artists are mad. Without madness there'd be no art, no song, no dance, no writing. Who lets out such sounds from his throat and tries to match it with an imagined perfect note? Only a singer! Who moves their body and hands and feet and eyes like that? Not a normal person. Only a dancer can!'

I wasn't interested in any of this. Did this mean that the madman next door was a dancer? I cannot say why the figure of the magician who'd shown us games in school came to me. 'So it's like being a magician? All the magic is in the magician's hands. Where is the madman's madness?'

'It's invisible,' he said.

'Why?'

'How do I know why? It's like love or God or hunger, I suppose... I don't know why! Don't ask me questions like a mad person.'

'How will we identify madmen then?'

'Why do you need to?'

I didn't answer. I had no answer. I couldn't be sure whether madmen were actually harmful or dangerous for those who were not mad.

'Can you identify a singer by looking at him?' he asked.

'Only when he's singing.'

He looked at me, as if that was the answer.

'Oh, so one cannot be mad always just as a singer cannot keep singing all the time?'

'I don't know. Perhaps.' He wasn't looking at me anymore.

'How frequently is one mad?'

'Don't confuse this with _riyaz_ – it's not like practising singing of course!'

'What is it like then?'

'How would I know?' He wasn't irritated but curious, as if he too was interested in the answers.

'How do they know that the man next door is mad?'

'Perhaps because he throws things? I don't know.'

'Others throw things too – sportsmen throw balls into baskets. They are mad too, you think?' I laugh when I think about my response now. I must have been a precocious girl.

I only remember parts of the conversation. There were more silences than sounds. At one point, I think, I asked whether the voice of men sounded different from those who were not mad and he asked me what I meant. 'Like a rainy sky sounds different from a sunny sky?'

I now wonder where my parents and sister had vanished for such a long time. Had they taken my sister to the dentist to get her braces?

'Will you take me to see the madman, please?' I suddenly told him. I hadn't known, until then, that I was capable of imagining such a request.

'But... how would you know it's him?' asked my Music teacher. He was winding his watch. Had it stopped? He did this often, so I couldn't be sure.

'Please take me there once, before my parents come. I promise I won't make a sound. I'll just see him and come back, like I look at gods in temples – I won't open my mouth, I promise,' I said.

I don't remember the rest of the pleading and bargaining, nothing except the silence that followed. The only sound might have been the screeching of the iron gate of the madman's house being dragged over concrete.

There was nothing inside the house. Not even light. It had been emptied of all its contents, as if asking why houses should only be containers. Emptied of its residents too, for there were no humans anywhere. All the things – and there really weren't too many things – I'd heard being thrown out of the house lay on the ground, resting, calm, their passion all spent. They had a kind of poise that fallen animals and humans lack. They didn't look like they were in pain. These were not my observations but my Music teacher's as we came out of the house and on to its compound.

We found no madman and no mad things. Except one which my Music teacher carried home in a cycle rickshaw.

A harmonium whose black keys had been scooped out. I put my fingers inside the holes. Suddenly the harmonium, a thing of no interest to me, became a toy, a thing of the imagination – a piggy bank where one could store more things than musical notes. 'I'll take this, please?' I asked, restless to show it to my sister as soon as she was back from wherever she'd gone.

'No! It's mine!' It seemed to me that he might cry. 'How can there be music without opposites? See, they've taken away all the black keys. Only white? Why did they? These are the mad keys – without them there would be no... Can't you see that this is why we don't touch the black keys of the harmonium with our thumb when we're playing?' He said all this while trying to fit his fingers into where the black keys had been.

Later, when I'd study William Blake at university and use 'Without contraries there is no progression' as an epigraph to write essays on the poet, I'd find myself thinking about that evening in 1986. I'd ask myself whether a girl – or a 'little boy' – like me had been Blake's neighbour too. I'd read these lines from his poem 'Mad Song' and wonder whether he had given us one truth about madness, a madman's insider truth: 'For light doth seize my brain/With frantic pain.' Did madness hurt, like a headache, like stomach cramps, or a growing pain in the legs, or even like a heartbreak?

My Music teacher stopped coming after that. His last words to me, as he put the black key-less harmonium on his lap on the cycle rickshaw, were: 'The world always wants to take away our black keys... Those who are mad are lucky. Madness is only for people on earth. It doesn't exist anywhere else, not on heaven, not in death.'

My parents didn't believe me when I told them who the madman was. 'Are you mad?' my mother screamed at me, again.

I still check nervously for the black keys on the harmonium when I attend concerts. And I wonder about what happened to the black keys on mine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, and Out of Syllabus: Poems.

Her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, LARB, Drunken Boat, the Prairie Schooner, Berfrois, The Common, and other journals. She lives in Siliguri and Sonipat, where she teaches at Ashoka University.

# Table of Contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Blind Water
  7. My Mother's Head
  8. Untouchability
  9. The New Provincials
  10. My Mother's Lover
  11. The Mountain Disease
  12. The Seventh Day
  13. Literature and Other Ailments
  14. Sleep
  15. 'How Are You?'
  16. Close Reading
  17. On the Brink
  18. 'I'm Not Sure'
  19. Beside the Madman's House
  20. About the Author

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