Ecotone by Oindrila Ghosal

Ecotone by Oindrila Ghosal

“The Swamp”

“Is it going to rain?”

I mumbled without looking into the eyes of the otherwise well-meaning tourist in a bright yellow and red shirt sitting next to me on the sea facing seat of the ferry.

“It smells like it is going to.  So, I asked,” he offered an unasked-for explanation.

I stuck my nose out and sniffed. I could smell nothing. Perhaps, the wafting fragrances and odours diluted and disappeared on the grey waves of the Arabian Sea. The truth had dawned pretty early on me and now reminded me as a whisper to the ear of my mind – I wasn’t anything like Manu.

He continued, “Are there enough shades? To the caves I mean.”

“There are.”

“Are they very far from the dockyard?”

“Not really. You can take the toy train if you don’t want to walk to the stairs.”

“Are the stairs many?”

“Not many.”

The tourist slid a little away on the seat and flipped through the pages of the pamphlet. I did not intrude in the imaginary calculations in his head and slowly smoothed the crumpled mouth of the paper-pack of roasted peanuts. I chewed and ground the nuts between my jaws while the ferry steered to the other side of the island.

He spoke to me again when the horn blared.

“Have you been to the caves before?”

“Yes.”

“You can guide me, then,” his pink lips thinned into a smile across his clean-shaven face.

“I am not visiting the caves.”

“Then?”

“I stay there.”

Neither I nor he could engage in further clarification for the people were beginning to queue to the gate of the wobbling ferry. I stretched my feet and finished the remaining peanuts through the rush. I pushed my neck on the railing and saw his moss-coloured hat tied at the chin far in the alighted crowd till he was lost to the numerous heads.

I crushed the paper in my hands and thrusted it in my blouse. I rearranged the pleats of my saree enroute – clutching the bag to my shoulder.

The helper’s face broke into creases as he caught my unhurried pace. “C’mon! Make it quick. People need to be taken to the Gateway.”

I pushed the settled bits from the tops of my teeth and replied, emerging from the gate, without his help, on the landing, “There aren’t many people, anyway.”

“Still enough to fill the ferry.”

The sea barely reflected the colours of the sky. But somehow, the grey sky and the grey sea seemed to mirror each other’s mood. I couldn’t hold my tongue. “Is it going to rain?”

He pretended to not be astonished at the question sent his way without a context. A not so firm grip on the arms of the passengers he was aiding to step into the ferry would have cost him more than the job. He answered coolly, “Why should it matter to you? You are at home now. Also, there are still months for the rain.”

I could not take my eyes from the overcast. I spread the end of the saree on my back and sped across the pavement and by the whistling toy train – fixing my gaze to the unchanging clouds. He surely hadn’t minded at the abrupt termination of the conversation. He knew me well to be used to these eccentricities. He had people to commute from one shore to the other. He, like most salaried people, weighed down more on a good recommendation and three-square meals for the multiples of tummies. Our snippets would find a mention some other day in case any one of us remembered.

By the time I reached, huddled under my saree and clutching onto the strap of my bag, the ration shop was deserted. My heart was beating in my mouth. I climbed down the two stairs without tripping. My eyes were still on the sky till the ceiling covered my view.

I wasted no time in elaborate recovery and headed straight to the counter. By then my heightened breaths had soothed a lot. I rubbed my parched lips still bearing the remnants of the lipstick at the creases and blurted, “Is it going to rain?”

The old man kept aside the day’s local daily and peered at me through the convex halves of his glasses. “Yes?”

I cursed my tongue but comforted myself that his senile ears must not have heard my question. I asked instead what I had come for. “Is there rice?”

He nodded. “Which one do you need?”

“Kolam. Five kilos.”

He wore the sandals behind the wooden display and left the periphery of the wall fan. His back to me, he measured the quantity with tremoring hands from one of the many identical barrels storing the varieties he sold. “Do you have a bag?”

“No.”

He nodded and proceeded to fill the recycled cloth tote with that what his balance told him was the accurate weight.

“Anything else?”

“Umm…some moong. Two hundred grams.”

He stole to the lentils section and stopped in front of sacks I couldn’t see. “Green or yellow?”

“Yellow.”

“Sugar, salt, oil…. Anything else?”

“No.”

He walked back to the counter – the bag trembling in his hands. “That will be,” he said scratching the bald centre of his head while turning the calculator on.

“I will pay you in a few days. Please enter it with the previous balance in the register.”

“Alright. I hope it doesn’t exceed the fifteenth of the month. I have to answer to the bade sahib then. And what is it that you had been talking about in the beginning?”

My fingers had just curled around the straps. “I do not understand.”

“Something about the rains.”

“Nothing. Nothing about the rains.”

“Oh okay. I think I heard you wanted to buy an umbrella but I wanted to tell you that I do not sell that here.”

I smiled.

The white-haired man in the linted blue shirt didn’t.

I rushed out from the fan cooled shop and walked the same way to the toy train station across the now emptied roads.

The tourist wasn’t anywhere to be found. The clouds were. I resisted the temptation to stare upward and rather, put the bags on the edge. Then, lifting the saree several inches from the ankles and tucking the end in the waist, I dropped my feet in the low-lying waters beneath.

I slopped through the water standing that way since the turn of evolution and the labyrinth of mangrove roots. My feet needn’t be told where to step. Under the canopy of fragmented light, I knew from habit where the mud was. I continued under the oblong green leaves and the asymmetric webs of the orbs, with the bags on my shoulders, till the mud under my feet with the water now receded hadn’t yet erased the soft impressions of our soles and sandals. Unlike other days, the overhead sun did not flood me. Hidden behind the screen of impenetrable clouds, it had nothing much to do. The grey-brown mud under the grey sky had nothing welcoming about it. It neither posed unamiability. It stood as the graveyard of three boats with the jungle of the mangroves creeping behind and the hillock still beyond. The brine waters arrived and drained out along their own circadian rhythm to announce the time of the day.

I dropped my bags on the deck of St. Maria and climbed into the sodden planks of the belly that could still passably be called white. I did not care much of the sun. She did. Her surviving skeletons did. Like reptiles, she awaited basking her primeval joints and sutures in the unforgiving scorching rays after we were gone.

I let the lentils and the rice be. I picked my faux leather bag up and walked into the little room that Manu and I had built from blue tarpaulin after stepping out from my dirty sandals.

The incense that Manu had lighted in the morning could feebly be smelt. Who he worshipped I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell if after all these hours the stench of the standing water and the sea had driven the tropical aroma of the ripened pineapples released from the burning stick, out. I wasn’t like Manu. I couldn’t tell one fragrance from the other.

The distinction of the smells was not my priority. My eyes burned. Manu was not unfamiliar with it and so, right after my first complaint, he had promised to offer the incense post my departure. But the morning had been different. He had left before the indigo of the sky had begun to faint. My eyes reminded each other that they had to moisten the still lingering smoke – repeating the morning’s ritual.

I dashed the bag by the pillow and lied on my tummy on the dwindling mattress from years of sleeping on the floor – wrapped in tarpaulin and one of my old oil-stained pink nylon sarees for a bedspread. My toes reached the lid of his box. I closed my eyes, resting my chin atop my piled palms – facing the unusually fluttering entrance of tarpaulin.

“The Marsh”

For good many minutes, my lids were blank – no sight, no sound, no smell. Then slowly, the bulbs studded mirror at the studio gained prominence like an image drawn of water. The pink walls came up next. Familiar sniffing followed. In the mirror, I saw myself standing in the day’s blue saree and magenta blouse behind Kimi’s face masked by her hands. I repeated to her what I had said before. “What is the matter?”

I placed my hand on her sobbing shoulders the way I had. Her slender fingers muffled her cries. “Sapna, tell them I cannot do the hair today.”

“That I will but will you tell me why are you crying?”

“We need to take the train again – back to the Fort. It’s…it’s Phiroze uncle.”

“What about him, Kimi?”

The question sounded unconvincing to my ears. I knew what was to follow and probing the same did not quite make sense to me. Instead, my voice should have choked with my beating heart.

“He passed away…Timmy aunty had called. He died in his sleep. We must go, Sapna. You remember him, don’t you?”

Her hands let go of her face and entwined my fingers. Her tear-streaked cherry blossom countenance – the shade of her shirt – stared back at me with unimaginable grief welling. My share of sorrow seeped in. I did not protest. Though unseeable to the eyes, our beings were paper-thin and transparent to allow the easy passage of everything tangible. My eyes burned.

“Sapna, should we tell the unit?”

“I don’t think they saw us coming.”

“Let us leave, then.”

There was a knock on the door and the chord was broken. The door I couldn’t see was pushed and from a yet indiscernible mouth floated, “The set is almost ready. The actress has just arrived. In half an hour she should be ready.”

“I am not working today,” she stood her ground with her broken voice.

“You don’t get paid for today, then.”

“I cannot work today.”

“Let the production people know. Find a replacement before you go.”

I could not see him pull his face out and swing the door. The floor, the mirror, the lights around it and the cleaned hairbrushes infront of them tremored. Kimi rose to leave but sat down again. She pulled a jute bag from behind the mirror and slid it to me. Her almond eyes almost did not blink as she twisted her neck to me. “You are not fasting on the Sundays, are you?”

“Not at this time of the year.”

“I had packed some dhansak for lunch. I am not supposed to have any of that through the mourning.”

I obliged. She did not have to plead. Kimi never pleaded to me. I accepted the dhansak – still hot to touch – and passed it in my bag among the stray hairpins, a comb, a lipstick tube, a cold cream tub and a bindi strip. She had been holding my hand throughout.

Her grip tightened around my hand as she left her seat of aged leather. I wrapped her in my arm and she dropped her head on my shoulder.

The set, the lights, the cameras, the trolleys, the fabrics, the carpentry, the chaos of the people working – all seemed to sublime and disintegrate as we continued. We hadn’t bothered to look for a replacement. They hadn’t bothered to look at us.

She remained the same as we sat in the kaali-peeli taxi to the railway station and paid the driver. The desolated platform of Goregaon Station could hardly imagine the crowd it bore each morning and evening. We knew that distant dreams were best unreminded. The platforms and the tracks glistened in the sun (if it was soft, I couldn’t tell) as if a stranger had shaken the hand stretched in friendship at not pricking at her other life. We reciprocated to its offering of a seat.

Neither of us spoke. On the cemented red painted railway seat, the seeded question that had just begun to root, now furled its foliage. My first meeting with Phiroze Mistry had been with Kimi at a hospital he owned. He had spoken with humour and affection and explained to me again what she had rambled through the train journey. I remembered his eyes squinting from laughing at his own jokes and dissecting the same. A distant relative of Kimi – more distant than Phiroze uncle – had stashed sufficient money to raise a child but failed at bringing up one of her own. The kin settled across seven seas with her husband had been in dire need of a womb to rent. Kimi had promised me I would be fine and when the doctors had tested me suitable to carry a baby to term, her naggings had intensified. I hadn’t been able to quiet her. More so, why should have I? They had been offering me enough to leave the mangroves and build a home of our own far away from the wetlands. Manu had said nothing about the berry like clustered cells implanted in my womb after months of preparing me. The masked doctors in white coats and the masked nurses in white aprons had spoken in a language they understood and I, under the knife, had been struggling to understand how my body would soon be a tended garden in spring. They hadn’t offered to help.

They had coaxed me to stay confined within the mint green walls, the draperies and the needles dangling from the drips but I had refused. If Manu had had any experience in birthing a child, I was unaware. He must have grown around the mangroves that reject the rules of spring-summer-autumn-winter.

Kimi had clicked her tongue and whined, “Which man lives in the swamps?”

When I had reasoned that I had lived there the entire life with Manu, she had maddened. “You know the baby is important to Kuku Didi. Sapna, you cannot afford to be reckless!”

I had put a finger on Kimi’s shrieking lips and returned to St. Maria. Unlike her, neither he nor St. Maria had asked so many questions. She had cocooned me in her bony belly and he had curried me fresh catches at dinner. Time had resorted to monotony. I had the scope to estimate the exact rising and setting of the sun but I had preferred the shadow of the stretched tarpaulin instead. I had at times asked him about the time of the year and he had ferried me to the mainland. Kimi’s tiffs would start again at my time-to-time visits. The cold gel pressed against my tummy by the probe had sent images in black and white on the screen and the doctors had nodded in secrecy. Only when a month had been left, they had not let me have my will. They had pinned me to my bed. Manu had rowed me to the shore that fateful day and hadn’t visited me till I had taken a ferry home.

That night my nerves had twitched and throbbed. Manu had not been around. My skin had been strewn with sweat. Manu had not been around. Violent spasms had begun inside of me. Manu had not been around. My insides had been rattled in menace. Manu had not been around. My water had broken and drenched the sheet and the blanket. Manu had not been around. Pain had clasped my lungs and my throat had been hurting from crying. Manu had not been around. Smeared in my mucous and blood, the baby had begun to emerge head first from between my swollen legs. Manu had not been around. My bladder had been the first to lose control, followed by my breasts. Manu had not been around. I had been shuttling in and out of consciousness. Manu had not been around. The help by my bed had been almost dozing when my plight brought him back to what he had been assigned for.

He had left and returned with a team of doctors and nurses behind him. A few of them, armed with their instruments and syringes, had pushed something in the veins of both my arms and the rest had engaged in lugging the baby out. A matron by me had been constantly asking me to think of my mother and how mothers at this phase are unmatched. I had not given in. From her voice, I had known she was the one who had knitted mostly through her working hours.

Why I hadn’t imagined my mother, even at the behest of the one who often regretted during my stay of being unable to slip a bit of her pickles in my meals due to the restrictions in place, had nothing to do with rebellion. It was an impossible imagination. Whose umbilical cord had held me, I did not know. The easiest person to think of through the excruciating pain of childbirth had been Manu instead. The syllables of his name, leaving home from my soul, had succumbed to death on the rugged expanse of my uphill throat. I do not know for sure when they had tied the severed chord on his navel. Everything had passed like a fantasy – more fantastical than our stay amidst the mangroves. I had not woken up to his cries. I had not seen him ever again. They hadn’t placed a crib by my head. I had not asked why. No one had explained. A week had passed chained to the drugs and pus till they were assured there wasn’t any milk left to be leaked. Even when I had walked empty handed – swollen and black – across the disinfected corridors on my way out, my breasts hadn’t warned me to stop and feed him.

“She,” Kimi had corrected me at the dockyard, “Is doing fine. Kuku Didi shall be flying with her later this week.”

I had pretended to not hear.

“Sapna,” her voice had quivered, “I hope it hadn’t been hard on you.”

“It hadn’t,” I had lied.

“They say it breaks your body and mind. It isn’t easy. You stay depressed for months. Should I talk to Phiroze uncle again? Maybe he can talk to the doctors and get you some more medicines.”

She had grabbed me in my arms and cried. I had petted her fragrant curls and dug my nose in them. She had passed ages in my sighing bosoms it seemed. I had no hurry either and no resistance. The sun playing hide and seek with the clouds had reprimanded us whenever it could. The crowd awaiting the ferry at the Gateway had begun thickening at the roaring motor cutting across the waves. Only then she had loosened the grip – her rightful grip.

I had boarded with the remnants of our trailing conversation.

“Sapna, Kuku Didi had been asking about the payment. You need to share the bank details.”

“I don’t have any.”

“What about Manu?”

“He might have.”

“Why don’t you open your own account?”

“Manu is there for me.”

“You do not trust a man who has nothing but a broken boat to call his own.”

I had limped and slopped through the high tide to St. Maria – wrecked but oozing the warmth she had seeped through most of the daylight. I had climbed up the mud and into her. On the deck I had sat – my feet stretched – watching the rhythmic waves and the endlessness in which they broke – till the sky had shown me all the colours it held in its prism.

A brush with something prickly on my non-chalant hand had punctured the bubble of my reverie. In the feeble twilight I hadn’t mistaken the empty nest. A sea gull had built it. I had no recollection of it being there when I had sat down. Manu had come home by then. From the door flapped above the roof, I had seen him tend his fishing net by the lamp. Perhaps, he had left the nest there, purposely.

I had walked by the tarpaulin jamb. “What about the money, Manu?”

“What about it,” his teeth gripping the beedi had not bothered to face me.

“They want to pay us for my baby.”

“Why should they pay me?”

“The money is for us, Manu.”

“You take the money only for what is yours. Can you claim the baby to be of your flesh and blood?”

I had failed to answer. The straws of the nest had begun to pierce my heart one by one. I had stressed on if there were egg shells – if the eggs had been laid or hadn’t yet. I must had been trembling with the clutched tarpaulin for it had prompted Manu to soothe say, “You won’t understand, Sapna. The time hasn’t come.”

I stroked her hair the same way. She rubbed her chin on my shoulder. The train arrived at the scheduled time and she and I boarded the empty ladies compartment the same way. I sat by the window and she, next to me. A few of her escaped curls from the braid were flirting with the blemishes on her cheeks. The death had taken a toll on her. She wasn’t to be blamed. She had grown up in the modest half of the city with her well to do kins on the phonebook, living a life of dreams in the other half. She loved talking about and remembering her great grandmother who in her youth and the nascent days of the talkies had taken the celluloid by storm only to be forgotten by a trail of fresher faces. Her grandmother had not walked in her shoes. Neither had her mother. But she had chosen to. She had initially tried making her face big and glossy on the billboards across the tinsel town by adding her great grandmother’s legacy on the portfolio but she was quick to learn her lesson. People only preferred to dip shallow in the pool of remembrance. She had hatched a deal to eventually be featured in films and had taken up the job of a hairdresser at the daily soaps. And so, she never shied away from grounding me whenever I went overboard with my set of dreams. “Oh Sapna, you dress like we are still stuck in the ‘90s. Look around! And on top of that, you age yourself up. They won’t even consider you for the role of a mother.”

“Why a mother? I am better than most of them to be cast as the heroine.”

And she drowned the two of us in peals of her laughter.

She was unbelievably quiet now. It was nothing like the mornings when I would wait for her at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus and watch three trains for Goregaon leave. She wouldn’t apologise for the delay and blame it all on the water that cascaded down the croaking tap late or not at all or that the queue broke into a fight before her turn. She would bite into the banana for breakfast in the next train that stopped and we took – cramming with people – and declare that I didn’t know what water scarcity was for I lived in it.

It wasn’t anything like the Sunday mornings either when I was unaccompanied by her. Visits to the fire temple and cooking the dhansak occupied most of her early hours and she rushed into the studio right before the actress drove in. This Sunday too had begun the same way but now the moths of melancholy were chewing her whole. And I was scared to even look in her drooping eyes.

She didn’t utter a word when we sat in another kaali-peeli at the Fort. The driver was having a tough time manoeuvring across the bylanes and the cobbled streets and she wasn’t of any help.

“Arre ma’am, where exactly do you want to go,” he burst out after skirting the Flora fountain and the Kala Ghoda in circles.

“To Phiroze Mistry’s place,” I squeaked at last.

“Which Phiroze Mistry? The one who built hospitals?”

“Yes…yes.”

“You should have told this before. Anyway, I will charge hundred fifty rupees more for wasting my fuel for no good reason.”

He pulled the meter again.

She was distant. I tried warming her in my embrace but I believe, the thought of responding did not cross her mind.

I paid the compensation along with the red stick figure digits and we walked through the giant open gates of the mansion and across the pruned garden, with Kimi reclining in my arms. The durwan in a matter-of-fact tone informed us to go upstairs to the bedroom.

Once inside the carpeted and air-conditioned mansion, Kimi’s eyes began to water again. I had almost forgotten that she hadn’t shed a tear through the commute.

“It’s alright, Kimi,” I rubbed her arm.

She tried holding it but eventually ended up crying louder – turning her pink lips outward. Another wailing of “O khodai” of a woman joined force with hers as we ascended the stairs.

Phiroze uncle could barely be seen. Mourners and relatives far and near had wreathed him in their sobs and grim. She let go of my hand at the door and flung her arms around the wailing woman in grey. I kept standing at the threshold.

Kimi joined me some time later. Sniffing, she explained, “Timmy aunty doesn’t have a strong heart and she is crying her lungs out.”    

She went onto sing-song the rhapsody of the battle between the light and the dark and how Phiroze uncle had lost to dark. Was he aware of the tussle of the two forces in his sleep? I wanted to ask her. He had been claimed by the impure now, she added. Earth, fire, ether and water had taken their faces off him.

I did not thank Kimi for the illustrious elaboration. I could see her veins throbbing in the temples. The death to her had been like the account she had just narrated but with the darkest shades on the palette. She had been thinking of the dakhma and the vultures that would peck on and savour the flesh. How many vultures had been flying across the sky? I chose not to ask.

Out of habit and an overpowering concern, I put my hand on her reddening forehead. “Do you have a paracetamol with you, Kimi? Mine are over.”

She smiled. “Fever reminds me of Phiroze uncle. He often said that lavender oil and liquorice oil cure like no other. My earliest memories of him and fever are of the fragrant oils. The room smells of them, now. He’s around, Sapna. Can’t you smell?”

I tried but caught none of the notes.

She didn’t feel sorry. She rubbed my arm and said, “We won’t stay here long, I promise.”

“You must, Kimi. He was your uncle.”

“He had many nephews and nieces, anyway.”

“But…”

“You are not liking being here.”

“But…”

“Ah, it isn’t about me always. Sapna, tell me your displeasures the way I do. Also, I remember now, there is a blood donation drive in his memory.”

The cloud of my days of captivity fleeted across my face.

“Don’t worry. We won’t be going to that hospital. These people are from his cancer hospital. Timmy aunty had said over the phone. His sons cannot wait actually. They knew only about his philanthropy and they agreed that a drive as this would make him happy. Maybe they were right. Who knows? So, before they fly in, they want it done and save themselves from being labelled as unsuitable sons. Atleast, they have their brains in place. Cancer hospitals are never a good place to visit. You see people with or without acquaintances eating from a drip on the corridors. From one therapy to another they flock. They do not mask the stench of medicines. That is a luxury. You see hope dying slow deaths in their eyes. Cancer hospitals are not a place of happiness,” she paused, gulped and resumed again, “His sons and my cousins have set it in the guest room downstairs.”

“I haven’t donated blood before. I am scared of needles.”

She smirked.

“Will you be donating alongside me, Kimi?”

“I can’t. Unlike you, I am not scared of needles. I have leukemia.”

I was taken aback. Kimi knew me like the back of her hand and she hadn’t told me of a crucial aspect of her being. Do your wear wig and cake your face with make up, then? I held back the tongue I had just tasted betrayal on.

My fuming ears and cold pace had not deterred Kimi from alighting hand in hand down the stairs.

The stairs were the first to disappear. Kimi’s arm in mine lost the opacity within seconds. The red of the carpets, the black of her hair and the pink of her shirt and cheeks faded in the air. A strong stench of crude beedi was beginning to gravitate. The scene was melting but the hurt remained.

There was a prominent clearing of throat in my ears. I knew it was Manu. The dream was gone. The day too was gone. I hadn’t realised. I was preparing to sit up but he cut me short, “You shouldn’t have brought him home.”

“Brought whom,” I yawned.

I knew from behind the closed eyes that he, true to his routine, had turned the lamp on when the darkness had begun to set. The buttery yellow glow was somehow therapeutic to my heart.

“You know him.”

“Him? I don’t understand, Manu.”

“He has come with you. There isn’t a bit of doubt about that.”

“Who is he, Manu?”

He read the confused fear in my voice. “A man who had lived his life very well amidst the richness of the rich. He passed away in his sleep…”

I could not resist straightening my spine and sitting folded legs on the creased bedspread. My eyes spilled out of the sockets. I asked him in my racing breaths, “How do you know, Manu? Had you read it in the papers or had anyone told you?”

“No.”

“How is it, then?”

“I know. But he mustn’t be here. Where had you been, Sapna?”

I stayed mum. I had to guard from him that after filling a blood bag, I had taken a bus to the Gateway. I hadn’t had a heart to bid Kimi good bye. On the seats above the sea overlooking the Taj, I had uncapped her round steel lunch box. I had dropped my clubbed fingers in the centre of the cold lentils and meat chunks. I had scooped a bit between my iron jaws. Had her cardamoms, bay leaves, nutmegs and cinnamons crackled with the prophesy in the warmed oil on low flame? I had eaten her dhansak – first, from the box and then from my fingers. Her dhansak, her Sunday meal, her slow cooked non-chalance hadn’t spelled magic on me except to thicken the urge to hoard lentils and rice. I forced my muscles to remain taut and not spill a bean.

But he caught me red handed, “How many times have I told you that you do not lure them with food? Even if you had been there, you should have changed.”

“I’m sorry, Manu,” I softened, “I had fallen asleep.”

His glance was resting on the circular band-aid on my arm. I shrugged.

“What is that for,” he pointed the burning end of the beedi at it.

“I donated blood.”

“In his memory?”

I nodded.

“Twenty-four hours haven’t passed and they have put their hearts to earning a good name!”

“Are you angry at me, Manu?”

“What for? Do you think I am one of those men who demand requests for permission for everything one does?”

“I didn’t mean so.”

“I was in the middle of the sea. Your call would have never come. Also, it isn’t the first time you have done something out of your will.”

“Are you again referring to the pregnancy?”

“I have never wanted to discuss that with you, Sapna.”

“Why does it then always come to it?”

“I don’t bring it up.”

“If you had so much problem with me carrying someone else’s child, why hadn’t you told me before? Can you put a hand on your heart and confess that the band-aid did not warn you of another pregnancy?”

“No.”

“What?”

“I believed when you said you had donated blood.”

He crushed the beedi under his rubber slipper and sat next to me. I immediately grabbed his sweaty yellow vest in my fists for I couldn’t hold myself anymore. Against his beating heart I was in pieces. He did nothing to calm me down the way I often did to Kimi. He heard me cry. He felt me cry.

“Manu,” I complained, “Why are you so distant? Am I not yours?”

“The way you are not mine.”

“Do you even have a man’s heart? Does it never melt?”

He didn’t justify.

I licked my lips and inched closer to his shoulder. He didn’t jerk as I rested my head on his swollen muscles covering the well-formed bones.

“Do you know what I had been dreaming about, Manu?”

“Must have been something terrible. By now you should have known that sleeping with your feet up on my box…”

“I dreamt of the baby. Can’t you see what it means?”

“Memories, Sapna.”

“No, the universe is speaking to us. It’s time that we have one of our own. I know it doesn’t quite sound right but aren’t those rules made for the mainland and not for us? Stick your ears out and listen to the universe, Manu!”

“As if you understand the language well!”

“Why? Are you alone entitled to the lexicon?”

“Stop being a child, Sapna!”

“What stops you from having a child with me? Do you want to get married to me first? I don’t think it is difficult. You put a mangalsutra around my neck and that’s it. Or is it something else? Do you have anything wrong in you? You know what I mean.”

“Do you like me, Sapna?”

“No.”

“That settles it then.”

“Why does bearing a child have to do anything with being in love?”

“Had you still been in the bylanes of Kamathipura, you would have shuddered at the thought of a child.”

“Manu!”

“No, think about it. Sapna, do you think everything is a child’s play?”

“Why the dream, then?”

“You asked the universe for the experience and it let you have one.”

“Only to be taken away.”

“Because it wasn’t yours to keep.”

“But when shall the tables turn?”

“I don’t know. I can only look back in time and join the dots for you.”

“Manu, do I have to fall in love with you?”

“I am not in love with you.”

“What stops you, then?”

“I cannot, Sapna.”

“A doctor…”

“No.”

“Are you scared, Manu? You shouldn’t be. Kimi had guessed correctly about you. She doesn’t find anything about you manly. It’s okay. She often tells me the medicines can cure you.”

“Sapna, nothing is wrong with me.”

“What is it?”

“You do not really need to know.”

“You are hiding, Manu.”

“I know.”

“Since when have you begun to bother about the society?”

“You don’t understand, Sapna.”

“Then, explain to me. Is a child of our own too much to ask for?”

Breaths lashed out of his flaring nostrils. “You do not have any bit of patience in you.”

“Tell me, Manu.”

“What do you think I did this evening before coming home?”

“Counted the fishes, maybe. Washed them.”

“And?”

“Sold them to the sellers on the mainland.”

“And?”

“And what? You came home.”

“This evening on the other side of the island, I found something silver shimmer in the setting orange sun. I rode closer. The waves were lashing again and again on a tuft of silver hair. A woman – very old – was lying on her tummy on the wet sand. Her skin like the sand was loose. Her arms and feet and the rest of her frame were burned down to her bones. Her gold bordered red saree was sticking to her skin like a shroud. I jumped out of my boat and turned her over. Her breaths could still be counted on the fingers. I wasted no time and held her wobbly head on my lap. I passed water from my bottle down her throat. She gulped. In her struggles to keep her translucent eyes open she asked if it was good time to die. I replied I wasn’t a record keeper. She was too weak to react. I passed down some more water. Her breaths were tied to the sun. With its each tilt westward, her breaths fluttered one by one. I waited till there wasn’t any left in her lungs. The sun had just touched the horizon. Her body was still warm. I pushed a pill to the end of her throat and covered her mouth. Those eyes blinked again.

“I’m sorry but I had a question to ask.”

She slipped my hand off her trembling mouth. “Do you have the usual question?”

“No. Do you wish to be born again and return to the realm as the one caught between life and death?”

“No.”

Her eyes were glassy again. I had my answer. I carried her in my arms to the boat and rowed under the darkening sky to the mangrove thickets where the water was low. I laid her in the mud. I washed myself in the sea and came home to you.”

“Cannot be true,” I confessed under my breath.

He did not reason.

In the most natural consequence of emotions, I was supposed to allow distance and aversion set roots in me. Why could I not tear myself apart and put an end to clinging to him? Amidst the battling questions, I sniffed – harder and harder till my nose hurt. The crudeness of the burnt out beedi and his pungent and my stale breaths rushed in. I couldn’t smell an apparition. I wasn’t Manu, I reminded myself. We had never discussed the concoction of the smell of the spirits.

“She hasn’t come with me,” he had read my mind.

“How do you know?”

“She had told me her wish.”

“Is it always the case?”

“No. Many of them want to come back.”

“Don’t they tag along with you?”

“To ward them, I do what you do.”

“What do I do?”

“There”, he raised his finger, “You go to the caves.”

“Oh,” I shuddered.

“You should have done the same today. You could have climbed up the stairs.”

“I hadn’t been feeling well, Manu.”

“And so, you had fallen asleep?”

“I hadn’t intended to.”

“Had the seagulls been here, you wouldn’t have been able to.”

The argument was reasonable enough.

“Do you still not understand, Sapna?”

“Manu…”

“While I send him off, fold your hands to Shiva, cleanse yourself and come back.”

“They have locked the caves by now.”

“I am not sending you now.”

“I was coming to that, Manu. I shall visit them the first thing in the morning.”

“What do we do with him, then? He shall be lying next to us through the night and eating from our plates.”

“But aren’t you sending him off?”

“You too must be gone. He has come with you.”

“I don’t understand, Manu.”

He did not immediately answer. Instead, he turned to his side and flung open the lid of his box. The unornamented box of mango wood was his only possession apart from his fishing boat and fishing net. In the square compartments inside, he stored pills – segregated by shape and colour. He carried some to the sea in a small pouch tied to his waist and after his revelation, it was clear to me why he did so. He never locked the latch. But had my sleeping with my feet on it gone down well with him?

I had been peering over his shoulder to investigate what he had been fiddling with. But my efforts were cut short with him turning his attention from the inheritance of unexposed history to my creased forehead. He held up a diamond shaped red pill. My glances bounced from the blunt vertices to his round eyes.

“You don’t need water for this.”

“Not today, Manu.”

“Can’t you bear to part ways with the departed?”

His crescent smile was a clenched punch on my beating heart.

“Have it. It’s for our own good.”

“Manu, I….”

My trembling hands were not in synchronisation with my protesting mouth. There was something in his eyes – both fearful and dictatorial at the same time. I took it from his grip and slid it down my dry tongue. But no sooner had the pill begun to plummet down my gullet, the colours infront of me were mixing in psychedelia along my untamed heart. I shut my eyes.

“The Quagmire”

When I dared to open them again, there was no sign of Manu. St. Maria too was gone. I was standing in my blue saree and magenta blouse in an inch deep still water. The unending mangroves looked on. The stars unblinkingly stared. Something pricked at my heart like the subtle change in someone or something so dear that cannot meet the eyes yet.

I held back the wail. The island was kin to me and like kin I was assured, after a game of puzzles it would tire itself. On my end, I walked – rippling across the stinking waters – inching closer and closer to what I assumed was the shore.

I wasn’t disappointed. Soon, ground – drenched but not flimsy – slipped between my toes. I continued up the slant. Mettled in roots popping from the mangroves, the earth had no trace of the pavement laid.

Though I wasn’t an expert at reading the stars very well, I, nevertheless looked up. Did the stars blink differently or was the sky not the one I was used to staring at? I did not give up walking along the dark roads – under the uncertain sky and on the unfamiliar slit for the stretch between the barks and the grasses.

The swarm of noisy mosquitoes followed me like a halo from the waters. When one is entangled amidst everything uncanny, one walks as if in a trance. I was no different.

I did not have a reliable instinct to compass me. What matched my steps next was a hum – soft – underneath them. Some ancient sense of response shook its head and began unfurling its petals in my veins but my lack of sensibility pushed them back in the sepals.

The hum was a hymn. The syllables only began to be clearer as I shifted farther and farther from the sea. The verses must have been bound by a tune as old as time for the leaves and the sleeping birds between them dropped their eyes in meditation.

I trudged. The soil and the gravel paced. They, instead of abandoning my company, led me on like a companion enroute the same way. By then the shroud of thin fog had started to descend and cloak me. Did it carry the essence of the forest – the enchantress – on its condensing screen? My nose was not of any help here.

Rustling on the fallen leaves and under the wilderness blooming on the canopying vines, I stepped one foot at a time in the direction of the chant. The sea could be heard. Its waves were not lashing mercilessly on the harbour rocks and the mud. A bat flapped its wings somewhere in the distance. A feeble hoot of an owl floated to my ears. The mosquitoes, surely, had lost track of me. The fog by drawing in closer had shielded me. Was I afraid? No. Did the darkness threaten me? No. Wrapped in the fog along a route my eyes couldn’t see, I believed I had surpassed the melange of human senses.

The flattened terrain abutting the climb truncated the encapsulated trek. I did not stop to catch my breath. How time had unfolded from the shore to where I was standing, I was unaware. My body bore no relation to the time or the distance either. Something had been pulling the strings strung to my hands and feet and I was in the middle of forgetting what it had been like to be a person of flesh and blood.

I submitted my agency to the tune – now mellifluous, if not distinct. From the melting screen before my eyes, the glare of the earthen lamps softened the line between what was true and what wasn’t. The painted lamps in symmetrical rows and the circles of rose, marigold and mogra petals strewn around them and the granite elephant quivered my judgement. A few girls in crisp white veils were hunching over a bowl of rice and sandalwood paste on the ground. Discussions were rife among them. Freed from the cocooning mist, I was struck with the indecision of stealing up to them for a few seconds. The serpentine strings of mogra on their braided hair were slithering up and down their little backs. Perhaps, they were finalising the pattern of the mandala.

I skirted past them. My straying was not enough to tumble their stacking ideas – one atop the other. They were not the only spectacle, however. What captured my animation next was the ornately pillared and sculptured entrance to the cave temple and the mandapa infront. The marvellous art on stone transfixed my imagination beyond the reaches they had scaled based on what my eyes had always witnessed.

I rushed almost to where on the open courtyard, the seated Nandi was being slathered with sandalwood mixed in clarified butter. The ivory veiled woman, reclining and wreathing bael leaves and crown flowers by the tail, looked up and laughed. Our eyes did not meet. I turned my neck to the short steps that I had just fleeted and except for the butter yellow flames, not a footfall was within purview.

I craned my neck a little more. Strings of lamps and fragrant white flowers were dangling from the pruned roof of the cave, the top of the pillars and around the Dwarpalas. My feet could hardly keep up with my swinging glances and almost threw themselves up at the hint of dizziness.

The woman laughed on. Her berry-like face, thin brows and carmine lips and the dense black curls fastened in a braid was no less than a carving in motion. I licked my lips. Had my welling bewilderment raised the curtain on my secret? I could hardly smell anything from the spiralling blossoms swaying in the breeze. I had declared them fragrant for I still remembered how flowers of that geometry and kind smelled like.

Her tinkling laughter sent simmering embers under my feet. I couldn’t spare a minute more in discomfort. I fled up the small flight of stairs in front and raced past the mythical screens I was familiar with, to the gigantic three-faced Shiva in the centre. I paid no heed to the other men and women in white behind me going about their chore of picking flowers, arranging diyas on the salvers and pouring butter on the frolicking tongue of the haven fire.  I was glad that in the sanctum – the garbhagriha – the ringing small and large shackled bells drowned most of her maddening laughter. Shiva had heard, perhaps. Guarded by two well decorated Dwarpalas, the three garlanded faces stared wherever they were carved to. The fly ashes and burning guggal drifted in the musty air. Some teased my eyes. And yet I gaped shamelessly at the side faced Bhairava and Vamadeva and the lotus face in the middle – Tatpurusha through the film of tears. I forgot as well to veil my hair like them and lower my head in prayer. My singularly pointed eyes and His all seeing aligned and I gave up blinking. My eyes must have reddened – vein by vein – for to cool them, pails of tears emptied.

A string was pulled again and shutting my eyes was Hobson’s choice. I kept them closed even when I sensed the stones drifting apart underneath and I, free-falling down the abyss.

The senses of time, speed, distance, sight, sound and smell were tossed and suspended, meanwhile. Only when I could feel a tension and a stronger pull under my toes, I started to convince myself I was being dropped in another time zone.

I had made no mistake. The unending, insulated black, contrary to its attributes, was invaded by the pungency of Manu’s beedi. I knew the pill had dissolved its life in my blood.

His stinging comment darted at me before I had the chance to ease my eyes to the fading black. “Had you been as far as Kamathipura?”

He was no more beside me on the mattress. My body ached to reply. It wasn’t the first time he had brought up Kamathipura. How did he know of Kamathipura, I had no clue but I seemed to know the place as if from another life. I could distinctly imagine the clinking glass bangles and the glint of the freshly washed polyester sarees. If I tried a bit more, I could see infront of my eyes women in dark red lipsticks waiting on the steps of the wrought iron stairs. I could unbolt one of their rooms and walk into the seeping walls and the slept in bedsheets. Many seasons back I had retaliated and confronted Manu. “What do I have to do with Kamathipura?”

“I believe you have lived there all your life.”

“How?”

“Well, I don’t know but I had found you dressed up like them lying on the beach.”

“Why would I be lying on the beach?”

“You know better. From there I had rowed you to St. Maria.”

“If I belonged there, why don’t I remember anything of the life you say I might have had?”

“Why don’t you take a pill, Sapna and look for the answers?”

I hadn’t answered anything then and I didn’t reply to the reference now. Instead, I left the mattress and sat on the deck by him.

“Manu.”

“Hmmm,” he blew rings of crude smoke.

“Was I alive when you had found me?”

He smirked the identical smirk.

“C’mon, tell me, Manu!”

“Are you sure I am not a ghost?”

My head on the hillock of my knees turned to his unruly beard and the overgrown hornet’s nest of hair. He smoked his beedi in peace – without a care in the world. Fishes – at least a finger long – covered in a dense paste of ginger, garlic, turmeric, chilli, salt and tomato were basking in the algal-saline smell of the sea, on his right. I fixed my eyes on the unshapely aluminium bowl. “But Manu, I….”

“I know you had bought rice and lentils on your way back. The dhansak was so good that you couldn’t think of anything but the two of the ingredients.”

“I…”

“I know you didn’t know that you had brought the dead home. You need nose for that. We already have enough rice and lentils stocked for the month. I would have let you know if we needed repurchasing. You could have waited for me, Sapna.”

“I haven’t paid yet, Manu.”

“I will leave some cash with you in the morning.”

I arched my back. The stars and I exchanged glances. Had the constellations changed positions? Had they twinkled more iridescently? They were still a mystery to me.

When had I slipped out of my train of thoughts and spoken abruptly was as intriguing as the stars studded on the shawl of the night sky. “I don’t think I want to have fish, Manu.”

“You love the way I curry bangda, don’t you? Besides, it will be good for your tastebuds bitter from fever.”

I was too fatigued to look back in disbelief. “Had you smelled my fever, Manu?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“I thought it was due to my untimely napping – especially with my feet up on your box.”

“That was the second thing my nose had caught this evening.”

Briefly, we paused. Different things demanded our attention – the faraway lights of the petroleum vessels and the pipelines for him, and I couldn’t resist the thickening magnetism of the stars.

He flung his beedi at the mud and broke the ice again. “I won’t be there for the next three days. I am joining other fishermen to the deeper part of the sea to catch more fishes.”

“But the studios?”

“My assistant will be there at the shop. Besides, tomorrow is Monday. I have asked him to get you all that you need to make the trinket jewelleries. There are enough fishes till I return. You can stay at St. Maria and work on the pieces.”

“The other days?”

“You have fever, Sapna.”

“When will it recede?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it true, then?”

“What?”

“That what everyone is talking about. It starts with cough and fever and people die like fleas. Half of the world will be wiped off, they say. Big cities like ours are planning to shut down. Didn’t you hear anything at the sea?”

“No.”

“Is this fever not that fever?”

“It isn’t possible for me to tell, Sapna. What I can suggest…”

I angrily snapped, “Why is for everything I ask on earth, popping your pill is the only resort?”

“The Swale”

I slept deep through the night. My mind had spent up all the reserves of strength to conjure another dream. Manu might have left my side in the early hours. I looked around for his fishing net and pair of rubber boots. He had taken them with him. On the floor by the mattress and his box was the now lidded bowl of tangy bangda curry – overcooked to last me days. In the waking moments of the day, I had nothing against the fishes and the pills. It was Manu, perhaps, I was cross at.

Mondays were usually idle. I had the luxury of sleeping as much as I wanted and avoid travelling on the overcrowded trains. But the day wasn’t to pan out idyllic. I had earrings and pendants to make for Manu’s shop by the stairs to the caves. On other Mondays, I divided my hours between rest and peering at the sea. Before I was to set for the day, I thought of Kimi. I unzipped my bag and the deluge of her emotions inundated me. I picked my phone out.

My phone – I had finally learnt to call it that. When Phiroze uncle had gifted her a new phone, she had passed on her previous one to me. “On this you can know of the world around you,” she had explained. She had been so happy at Phiroze uncle’s gift that she hadn’t been annoyed at buying me a SIM card. Unlike her usual self, she hadn’t asked too many questions on why neither Manu nor I owned papers documenting our identities.

There were two missed calls from an unsaved number. However, no messages from her blinked on the screen. She must finally be sleeping after the mourning, I presumed.

Listlessly, I got up and strolled to the back. The fluttering tarpaulin in the breeze teased Manu’s kerosene stove and my bag of rice and lentils. His previous night’s lungi and vest drying on the string outside too were fluttering. I stole to the dusty mirror above the stove. To the right was the plastic holder stuck to the tarpaulin. I grabbed my brush by the bitten bristles and squeezed a little toothpaste on them. The mirror reflected only my forehead. From the dust settled, I couldn’t infer from the image if my eyes were red or rosy bumps had erupted around the bindi. I cleaned my teeth and rinsed the foam with the fresh water he had spared for me in a jerry can by the stove at the stem of the ramshackle sink.

I wiped my face with the end of my saree and fled to the phone. Impatience was ticking in me. Kimi still hadn’t written and I was desperate to hear from her. Manu’s jewelleries could wait. The money he had promised me, had been slid under the brushes like old routine. It hadn’t escaped my eyes but I had no urgency in placing them in the wallet.  St. Maria was no more my heaven of tranquillity.

Curling my fingers around the phone, I spent no minute in sparing another thought. I sped on the mud, under the mangrove foliage, on the rocks and up the pavement (peeping from the gap in the fence). I sat on one of the seats for the toy train ticket vendors and slowed my breaths. With the tourists not flocking in, the road was mostly empty – empty enough for the pot-bellied cow across the street to munch uninterruptedly the intruding leaves of the mangrove without being shooed.

My phone rang. It was the same number. This time I received the call. “Hello.”

“Hello,” a fine voiced woman chirped, “Am I speaking to Miss Sapna?”

“Yes.”

“You had donated blood yesterday at Mr. Phiroze Mistry’s memorial. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“I am Anusha Kamble from Red Cross Society, Mumbai. The donation drive was in collaboration with Jehangir Mistry State of Art Multi Speciality Cancer Hospital. You had mentioned your address as Gharapuri, hadn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where exactly, you had not described. Anyway, we have mailed your reports to Gharapuri Post Office. I think it will take another day. In case you are in Mumbai today, you may collect the same from our office,” she paused and then continued, “Are you married, Miss Sapna?”

“Yes?”

“You answering the question is important. We had been trying to get in touch with you. Please understand we do not usually send back reports to blood donors. Kindly cooperate, Miss Sapna.”

“I am unmarried.”

“Are you sexually active?”

“No.”

“Have you recently been tattooed or injected?”

“No.”

“Miss Sapna, our diagnostic tests have reported of you being HIV positive. I do not mean to scare you. Medical intervention at the right time can help you. Do you mind if I ask you about your family history?”

“I don’t remember,” I immediately corrected myself, “I mean, may we talk in person, please?”

“Sure. I was coming to that. We are a stone’s throw from The Asiatic Society’s Library at Fort. We shall be awaiting you, then. Good day, Miss Sapna.”

She hung the call.

My face lost the colour. I knew as much was enough for me to know what HIV was. My body had already been burning with fever and now the dread joined the music. Had they informed Kimi before dialling me? Was she purposefully ignoring me, then? The baby? Was she fine? Had they found nothing in my blood then? Did they realise they had trusted the wrong person with the baby? And Manu? I don’t think he knew nothing. Why had he kept everything in wraps, then? Why hadn’t he broken my heart with the truth at my pestering of wanting to birth a child?

The questions fired across my body and in reaction, it shivered. My body must have been trembling like the not so unusual malaria afflicted. The people going by chose to keep to themselves. They weren’t to be cursed. For the woman Manu lived with, they had nothing to be generously amicable. I wanted to call Kimi and then Manu but my mouth was dry of words. Should I have confronted or confided?

The questions rattled and battered my bones. I could hear them knocking at my every jolt. There was nothing much of help either. I was no different from the onlookers. The body slayed and was being slayed.

Respite drew in with the senses deserting me once again. Numb, I wobbled to the fence behind the cow not shy to look away and yelled at a fishing boat proceeding to untie the knot around the young trunk of the lonely mangrove on the mud. My brain-body had filled in for me and taken note. “Where to?”

“Bhaucha dhakka, tai.”

“Wait for me.”

I cascaded down the other side of the fence at an inhuman hurry. He kept sitting with the oars. I made room for myself among the fishing nets and boat was set asail.

Together we traced the waves. Occasionally he flew the net in the sea and pulled out whatever little fishes that could be trapped at this time of the day. Neither of us talked. Kimi-Manu-Baby occupied a larger hemisphere of my mind.

We did not talk when we alighted his boat and walked up the bare barnacled-stairs to the market of the port. He, with his cane baskets of fishes, was close behind. Kimi-Manu-Baby whipped me up the ascend. I was aware I had to enquire about the payment but Kimi-Manu-Baby tied my tongue. On reaching the island, I promised, I would clear the debt of the ration and the fisherman. I missed uttering the same in words when without bidding goodbyes, we parted ways.

I continued across the stinking avenues over the sea with Kimi-Manu-Baby in close pursuit.

As long as I waited under a spreading banyan tree at the crossroads for the bus, Kimi-Manu-Baby narrated me tales of how ruthless the virus was. The bus chugging smoke arrived braving the sea of traffic and I escaped buying a ticket to the Gateway. Kimi-Manu-Baby sat next to me.

Most of us squeezed ourselves out at the Gateway from the crammed crowd. Kimi-Manu-Baby advised it was high time to take a taxi or another bus to a few streets around the corner.

This time, I did otherwise. Ignoring their pleas, I marched in my muddy sandals and saree to the sea, the tetrapods and the promenade at Marine Drive.

The scaly smell of the sea surprisingly cheered me. Sizeable crowd was whiling away its time on the seats. Kimi-Manu-Baby admonished me for being laid back. Turning a deaf ear was easier. Kimi-Manu-Baby wrestled and bickered but this part of the sea was leaching out the discomfort the thickets of mangroves had failed at.

I did not have to stride as far as Nariman Point. In the little space vacated by two couples in each other’s arms, I slid. Kimi-Manu-Baby trampled in agitated fury. They could not stand straight on their feet and the gravity tricked them into plummeting to their deaths in the sea. I breathed in the air of their passing.

Love, especially affection, is communicable. They were whispering verses of love or at least, I imagined them to in their partner’s ears. Unbeknownst to me, a smile crept in. The air between them was rosier – vibrating with the need to find the one true love.

I couldn’t help but think of Manu. Had he been thinking of my fever? My tongue bittered. I craved him. Impulsively, I dialled his number. It sometimes rang and sometimes didn’t. I wrapped my head around the futility of the attempt, instead. I turned on the camera and started a video. The reel would not be free of the love oozing in. Surely it would capture the merrier sea and the curve of the Queen’s Necklace and his Sapna’s shaky hands and unchecked breaths. Three days later I would show him how now I was cured of the sea but not of the pangs of being loved and admired. All the talks of the world could be put to bay. Manu and I would then relive the afternoon at Marine Drive while relishing his bangda curry and thick slices of onion and not bore each other with requited and unrequited love. Till then, like the sea and its innumerable stories, I would await his return. If the fever still remained, I wouldn’t fuzz about gulping his pill. His indifferent shoulder would cradle me as I would cruise from one dream to another to unearth the chronology of the viruses that entered me. Maybe I would fix the glitch back in the time. He would then have to interject, “And then” through my chronicle by the flickering lamp.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Oindrila Ghosal 2026

Image Source: Nazik Mandziuk from Unsplash.com