In dreams, it abandons the dim translucency of an image cradled between two eyes to be projected feebly onto the world and surfaces to the point of clarity. I can see the green leaves burning through afternoons filled with cement dust, flowers scaling the branches of trees like fresh wounds, and you—standing beneath it, holding up a twig for inspection, unaware of the cigarette you had dropped, which I would stamp out with the sole of my slippers later, once you had walked ahead. In the sweet scent of emissions from rows of air conditioners and the bitter trail of smoke you left, I inhaled those hours with an unawareness I would never feel again, a state of lightheadedness, my legs balanced on my toes with ease, muscles freed of all effort.

These were afternoons when heat lay claim to the body and lines of sweat ran repeatedly down my back. Dampness made marks on clothes, coastlines of refuse sat heavily on cotton and polyester. You could taste the salt in the air. When I walked with you, I forgot these sensations of discomfort. The saline streams birthed in the mouth of my armpits, between my legs. The shadowed strip beneath my breasts where sweat gathered and pooled for hours, the damp cotton pinching my skin, scaffolded by the understring of my bra with metal hooks that left small pink bites. The spot at the bottom of my abdomen, where the stitching of the jeans sat in rough friction, leaving glowing strokes of irritation. 

These were the hours of my discovery that a string could be tied around my waist, I could be pulled up and moved around, that the body could be unfixed from soul, and gestures, movements, nerves, tissues, voice, all of it could be given, handed over to an entity beyond oneself. I remember the words you used to say though I can’t be certain if these are indeed your words or something placed by my mind so that the dream retains its vitality and you are more than an empty cast; you are a convincing replica of a person, such that if my arm reached out for you it would pierce the particles of dust dancing rabidly in the shafts of light around you to feel something solid. So much time has passed that doubt lines every thought of you, and it will grow until it eclipses all our memories. When you appear, the light in the frame turns harsh, its clarity is like a blade and I wince at the impact. No matter the number of times this has happened before, nothing prepares me for the shock. I am certain if I could leave my body, as I did those afternoons, and see myself on the bed, I would witness a grimace on my face, marks of restlessness, flailing limbs and muffled sounds of agony. These are but conjectures, I remain inconsolably fixed to my body, unbearably inside, looking outward at an empty plane, every possible frame of the world that arrives before my eyes is depleted of all detail by your absence.

One of those afternoons you had claimed I had a “photographer’s eye”. You declared it based on a morsel of evidence. A bird had hopped ahead of us, and I had waited for its flight, the camera on my phone ready to catch the moment of its departure from the hot, dirty ground. You hadn’t noticed my hands move to pull the phone out of my pocket, you barely looked at me those afternoons, and only when you had to, when you were speaking to an invisible audience but needed to turn back every few minutes to look into my eyes, to confirm that you were audible, you were present, and you were commanding all of my attention. You never sought any approval, you were confident of your words. It doesn’t surprise me that I can only access a reflection of your voice, and when I wake up, this is how I recognise the falsity of that image, the weakened sound of your voice running like the watered milk that once would linger as a displeasing aftertaste on my tongue hours after breakfast, or the way my mother still dilutes hand soap and ketchup, the ugliness of the thinned liquid rising as water separates from pulp. I remember very little of what was said between us—I have phrases, and sometimes I try making a collage of your words, jumbled and arranged with no meaning. Sometimes I hear someone else say something and think you would have liked that sentence.

Each summer is cruel, but that year I had felt the first tinges of what it could mean to lead a free life. As I began to leave home every morning on my own, without neighbourhood girls accompanying me in shared routes to the school or market; as I boarded the metro which held no familiar faces; as I walked into the crowded complex of tall buildings, switching radio stations to avoid advertisements; as I entered the office where there were so many people like me, I could be no one; when I sat within four neat plastic walls, erected with the barest of support, just large enough for me to fold my legs on the chair but cramped such that I had to place my dupatta on the corner of the table, above the CPU; in all of these I found a strange feeling of not knowing or being known, of being at a distance, seen every day by the world but remaining unnoticed. The work was tiring and the commute long; the only sounds I heard in the day were voices through my screen, the pressure of fingers on keyboards gliding across cubicles, and the parallel hum of computers and air conditioners. Yet I was never tired and felt giddy when I could leave the building and plug in my earphones. My days circled like this for a few weeks, my feet marched with many others out of the metro gates, down the steps, and then back again. My face stayed impassive, but sometimes my eyes met another pair, and I stared back instead of immediately looking away. I had never thought it was possible to stop and consider the lives of strangers, but in the hours of the commute, the metro coaches packed with bodies pressed close, I found myself doing this often. I wondered if someone standing near me was imagining my life, and what my face, stark and clean scrubbed every morning with a face wash I had to convince my mother we needed in place of soap – was telling them. I looked at treetops and buildings through the big windows of the train, as it ran on elevated rails held up by giant concrete pillars cutting through the heart of the city. My own house was near pillar number 42, I remember having mentioned this to you. In the evenings the train passed tall buildings with such nearness you could look through the windows of the upper floors which lay exposed in electric lights. You could see items through the glass: an apartment had a large TV screen, and they did laundry every Friday, taking care to hang coloured and white clothes separately. I was confident they had help of some kind; in my house we washed clothes quickly, impatiently, or forgot about them entirely, the heap of fabric getting heavier as it lay submerged in buckets. Often colours would bleed and leave traces on other clothes. I had found out a few years ago that even black pyjamas could be stained with the colour of a red kurta if left soaking for too long. Since I began working, I had to be careful, though I often tried to pass this chore to my brother, who would wash his school uniform separately. Appearances mattered to my brother. I, like my parents, didn’t ever notice what was draped on my body. This changed a little when I met you and I think you realised this.

It wasn’t long before I started stepping outside the cool walls of my office and the grey building which held it, into the crowded courtyard of electronic shops, printing machines, and locksmiths over which the roofs of concrete structures dominated the sky but provided no shade from the sun. The complex was dirty, the froth of fresh spit and chewed paan, torn plastic bags and food wrappers lay everywhere. There were many tea stalls, cigarette shops, and vendors for fried snacks, and here it felt everything was moving, spinning like atoms, no one stood still or stayed for long. As the cool efficiency of my office began to lose its glimmer, I turned to the disarray of the courtyard singed by the sun which reminded me of the street where my home had stood since my birth: open, loud, crowded. So when I think about it, you and I were an aberration—a quiet moment that shouldn’t have happened.

*

These days I have trouble sleeping. I have understood that it is possible to be a machine, an assembly of moving parts. I get up every morning and head to the kitchen, I fill up the bottles and buckets, and splash my face. I put some water on the boil, I slice ginger and lemon which will go into the tea my father likes to drink. I like the heaviness of the teabox, it hasn’t run light for some time now. There is no meaning to any day, all days are alike and I don’t object to this. So you would understand why I feel sick to the stomach when my mother mentions him, just as I was sweeping the kitchen. I was crouched on the floor with the bucket, trying to wring the dirt out of the washcloth, and her words startled me such that I squeezed the rag too hard, the muddy water spraying over my face, the phenyl and dirt setting my eyes on fire.

He is all that you are not, though there are other details. His profession, his earnings, his caste, and age, height and weight. My mother has found out that someone in his family has a degenerative disease but she disregards this, she feels confident holding up his pictures. In my cubicle, for a brief moment, I am seized by the need to search his name on the browser but I catch myself and type your name instead. Once a part of me would have railed against this, I never used the work machine for any personal purpose, even though I knew people in some cubicles played movies and shopped for things. It felt like an improper thing to do. But I shed this reservation as easily as I had shed so many others for you. All I had of you outside of my dreams existed on this screen, on a search engine, nestled among thumbnail sized pictures of people who shared a name with you. I am desperate, grappling for anything that could bring me to you. I find nothing much of use, except one picture from your youth, your face bright and markless. Your social media accounts are closed, and in desperation one day I created my own and sent you a request, but the dagger of refusal sliced deeper in my gut when there was no update and I had to stop myself from checking each day, I had to stifle that need, swallow it into a corner of my body. I wonder if someday I would suffer an accident and they would have to cut me open, they would find buried desires instead of flesh and blood.

I was always withdrawn but for months now I have been completely quiet and people at home have taken notice. Until a few years ago, it concerned my mother that I did not have any friends. She didn’t want too many, for then I wouldn’t study, but having none marked me as an outcast, which I was. How could I tell her that I was the poorest in my form, that everyone knew this? Instead she would argue with me and then retreat. Soon I began offering private tuitions to children in the neighbourhood and explained I couldn’t assert authority over those I befriended. This settled things between us, I was dismissed as being “my father’s daughter”. It was true that my father is reserved. Though there was a greater truth that we were always in need of money in our house, and if there was a word used to describe me, it was responsible. Not obedient, which my brother was, but responsibility is valued more in the elder child.

At home, I am asked pointedly to clean my room, and a thin undercurrent of resentment runs through this. It is bait, I don’t rise to it. I proceed with the cleaning. It alarms me how much hair I am losing, they form clumps on the floor, thick, entangled forms clotted with dust bunnies. I always believed that you liked my hair, black and large and when tied it took the shape of a dark ball balanced precariously at the nape of my neck. I knew when I moved my head, the ball moved with it. When we would conclude our walk, I could feel the heat of your gaze in the part hidden by my hair, the place where the cold elastic met my skin, what I imagined an antumbra meant. When I told you about this word, you laughed and said I read the strangest things. I mentioned that it was part of a textbook my client was studying. Teacher-ji, you began calling me by this awful name, a name that would stick. 

I am taken aback by how dusty my room is and I realise as I pick up a fallen Gulmohar under the corner of my bed, a bougainvillea pressed at a bottom of a bottle of cold cream, three stubs of cigarettes, and countless scraps of flyers and papers that I had let the filth settle. When I had begun collecting parts of our afternoons I was careful to scatter these across the room, in a manner that appeared careless so no one could draw any relation between a calling card for a body relaxant and a withered leaf, or know that these were your possessions first.

“English Language Specialist,” you announced, holding up my office id-card for inspection. Did you notice the gentle tug on my neck when you pulled at the lanyard?

“Yes.”

“A teacher.”

“An expert,” I replied swiftly. “Teachers can be generalists.”

You tried to appear as if you were nodding disinterestedly, though I could see you were disturbed at the force of my reply.

It always bothered you how I knew these things. How confident I was stringing ideas into retorts that arrived in a flash. You seemed to forget I spent eight hours a day tutoring adults from distant places in this language. That even though a statue of the god Hanuman holding his chest open was the only landmark to my house, and we saw it every time we stepped onto the terrace or boarded the metro, my parents still expected us to fold our hands as many times in a day and we did, we obliged each time, they had eventually admitted me to the catholic school in the neighborhood. They somehow knew that English was to be our survival. They had no grand ambitions for me, if I could teach we would be comfortable. We were told: study, practice, watch movies, listen to music but learn this language—and so English channels played on our cable TV, we watched the same movies over and over again. Once my brother teased me for not having a boyfriend while I stood in the kitchen reading out the names of spices printed in English on the boxes as Ma cooked: cumin, coriander, red chillies, kitchen king, turmeric. My mother found “turmeric” the strangest—“haldi,” she repeated, “haldi.” I nodded, yes, on the tongue, turmeric was haldi, just as a boyfriend was aashiq.

You once asked if I could read out the instructions on a manual for installing an inverter battery. It was a performance, and I shone, taking pride in your astonishment, mistaking it perhaps for admiration, mistaking it next for reverence, as my tongue navigated words like “tubular,” “heat-resistant,” “hassle-free” with not just ease but the confidence of familiarity. I told you that I was a star student in recitation and extempore, winning medals for my school. Your face hosted disinterest.

I had wanted to tell you about the shape of my life, which had been decided long before I existed. For that I would have to tell you of my father’s heartbreak after his brother left for South Korea to study mechanical engineering. About Ma’s cousin who became an air-hostess and travelled the world, and had lent us money for my school fees many times. How my parents were protecting us from the shame that had followed them all their lives—a poor, uneducated couple in an otherwise enterprising family.

But we never spoke of such things. In fact, now when I think of it, it seems as if we barely spoke at all. It was a thrill to find someone as silent as me. For you perhaps the excitement was the discovery that I spoke English fluently, effortlessly. Perhaps you didn’t expect that from the girl standing in the shade of a teetering, dirty staircase in Nehru Place, in shoddy jeans and an unremarkable cotton kurta, hair pulled back in a feeble orange band plucked from that morning’s newspaper, eating gol guppas alone.

*

I have now met him twice, it is likely we will be married. It agitates me that he’s unobjectionable. He appears calm and clean. He asks me things, it feels strange and not all too good. I give him the barest details of what I do, but more, he wants to know more, each day, each client, something good, something bad. I want to tell him that there is nothing bad or good now, all my life was leading up to finding a job, which I hold, I have no further desires. We are comfortable, we take small liberties every month. Ma was keen to go see a mall, but I prefer shopping where we did, a rickshaw ride away, and there’s all kinds of restaurants there now, so we don’t need to take the metro to a mall. I tell her this differently, I say that the weekly commute tires me, and I miss our walking together through the shops. This is done to make her smile and she does. I urge her to go to a mall with her friends, knowing that she wouldn’t. See—you can live a whole life like a manual, I want to say, like an inverter that is only needed when the power supply fails. When my brother will start working, we will be truly free—we may even visit other towns and cities, though Ma has frequent illnesses, and Pa has taken the word retirement very seriously, he has disconnected from the task of living. So I respond to these questions by saying something like, “all is well” and he is either satisfied or prudent enough to not probe further.

I am asked whether we are happy as a family, I want to say, yes, we are, we fight not as much as we did, and that is because Pa has decided to spend more time by himself, lost in his thoughts in a corner of the balcony. Pa holds up a newspaper that covers his head but never turns the pages, it has been many days since I last saw his face, which has been replaced with the flapping of newsprint. Perhaps he feels the loss of being the provider, he looks at me with a strange gaze that appears a little scared. His face is sinking deeper into bones, his eyes bulge from their sockets. It’s unnerving to see this transformation in my Pa, and sometimes I am glad he hides behind the paper so I don’t have to think about it every day.

I meet my suitor for a third time at a KFC. The dark arrives earlier now, and from where we are seated—a wooden table lining glass walls—I can see the facades of the white buildings that make Connaught Place transform in the flare of passing vehicles and street lamps. These buildings had always struck me as beautiful, and sitting here it isn’t difficult to imagine that I am someone else, someone in a movie, following the trail of neon lines made by cars and bikes that zipped past, reflecting fleetingly on the glass. You and I never shared such scenic sights, our terrain was unkempt and many would have found it revolting—garbage, starved dogs, the stench of cheap oil, brittle roads and piss-stained walls filled with peeling posters in morbid shades of pink, yellow, green, and fallen gulmohars trampled beneath hurried feet. But this mess, it was where that we started walking together, you said the barest hello, my eyes beheld pools of crimson, I said hello in turn, and maybe you liked the sound of my voice. I can’t remember now whether you gestured for me to walk, or if you asked me to join you, but we were walking and first, you were to show me the grand Gulmohar tree hidden behind concrete, known only to discerning eyes like yours. Looking at the traffic in Connaught Place, so different from the ground we had shared, I close my eyes. I think of the tree swaying, its branches casting shadows on my face, and I can feel the light move on my skin, stroking my cheeks and nose.

He doesn’t seem to find my silences or short responses a problem, he keeps wanting to meet. A new cycle has taken hold, I meet him, he asks about home; I go home and they ask about him. I am happy to participate as long as I am not asked to speak about myself. A part of me is still standing in the shade of that tree in the summer, feeling your breath on my skin.

*

I don’t comfort myself with notions of your interest in any of this. Winter has passed, it is April and the Gulmohar trees are about to flower, it is impossible to not think of you. We are printing my wedding cards, so it is all now final. Clothes have been bought, jewellery has been exchanged, many gifts sent back and forth. Pa is alive again—his savings have been put to use, and in my lack of interest he has found the space to take charge, managing everyone—tailors, electricians, caterers, tent agency, photographer, relatives. Ma and he sit in our small living room till late, and they haven’t yet quarreled. Small misunderstandings have arisen between all parties and deftly swept aside. Through all of this I have been amenable and acquiescing, but these are not words my prospective mother-in-law would use. She calls me respectful, quiet. I suppose you could split the difference. You once called me “truant”. I had laughed, and stopped myself from asking if you knew what it meant—were you trying to say “tyrant”? You did that to words often, you’d once said “proudy,” and I had to hold myself back from correcting you. I thought I had prevented injury by withholding words. I thought I was considerate. I did not know the razor a laugh holds or the sharpness of silence.

My brother has decided my wedding is the event all his school friends should be invited to. And then Ma turns to ask me: “What about your friend… the one at work? What happened to her?”

At my home you were a woman. Ma insisted she would pack extra lunch for office friends, food which was eaten by you, sitting on makeshift benches of concrete slabs. She knew what you preferred, how you liked the preparation of gajar halwa. But she would never know you—in my responses to her you were always cast as a woman. I seem to have forgotten what I had once said to you—perhaps asking you if you had eaten delicacies like halwa before, but I remember how your face had changed form in an instant, I had never seen something that could be in equal parts anger and contempt. You were growing tired of my tricks, my grand show of speaking in English, the strange facts up my sleeve, or was it I who was growing emboldened, inflated? Is this what it came to: you, princely village boy and me, the poor city girl?

When I think of you I wonder: what happened to you? Not where you are or who you are with, just what has happened to you; who are you becoming? I will never know. I like to think that there is somewhere a chance, hidden in the vastness of the future, the long life I am certain I have been given for my share of miseries have only begun to arrive, and in the decades that wait to greet me, for you to appear again. I don’t expect for this to be a result of intent—yours or mine. Nothing that we shared was intentional. Even your vanishing which was really your departure, or your silence which was your escape, felt like something done out of madness more than reason. When I waited for an hour under the staircase the first day you were gone, then again the next day, and then I walked and ran across the courtyard into the lanes, across all the paths we had charted, into the corners we had embraced, as I looked and could see how my desperation and fear aroused a blithe look of pity in the eyes of the tea stall owner, how that look spread from his face to every face in the crowd, I felt the heaviness of shame press down on every part of my body. I would never know on which floor you worked in that building which you entered as we parted each afternoon, every other shop sold electronics. I looked for you for a week, and then again after a month, but I knew that you were gone. You weren’t ill or indisposed though my mind hatched these ideas first. I wasn’t wrong, the world has spun another cycle around the sun, the trees have yellowed and will now be scarlet, you aren’t missing, you have left.

A part of me knows how ordinary all this is. That part brings little comfort as I lay down on my bed, doing anything to avoid falling asleep and walking into your world. Till Ma and Pa are awake, I follow their voices. In a few days, mere weeks before my wedding, as I will struggle to sleep at night, my father will hang himself in our living room. Ma will first recoil in shock in the morning, then cry of the fear, the shame, the stain that can’t be washed. I would barely feel anything through this. My brother’s eyes will dig into mine each hour as relations would descend, our house will be filled with voices, the wedding procurements locked into a room. It seems the months I spent closing myself to the power of your memories have prepared me to reject grief, to accept the unbelievable. No one can find any reason for him to have done this, but I understand a little of how hollow life can be.

All these thoughts race through me and remain unsaid, but something told me that you would have heard them. Just as you unpeeled my skin, you made a claim with the confidence of someone who is taking a wild risk, someone who has placed a bet on a feeling. That day when I stood under the staircase and our eyes met, and I felt a slight shiver and looked away, only to be drawn back to you in the beat of a few seconds, to find that you were still looking at me. How you approached me, your limbs moving with the grace of endowed beauty, walking up, walking closer, holding my eyes in yours, and directing them with something forming on your lips towards a tree with red blooms, the colour rising with exhaust fumes, evaporating in the sky.