Moments ago, Dayeema had let out a shriek which alerted us. She was crestfallen, having let the tail of the ugly black cloud slip from her fingers. The ugly black cloud that had abducted Dina had climbed in bursts of three—mimicking a child, somewhat imbalanced, hurriedly climbing upstairs while skipping one-legged, as though abundantly cheerful and equally naughty—she recounted. It had wiggled through the power cables high above, disengaged its body and escaped into higher atmospheric territory, then out of our vision.

Gathering around, we don’t speak. Dayeema doesn’t say anything more. Dina is gone forever.

Your sisters and you just wait for Dayeema’s orders. You’ll not let any more of your sisters be stolen like this.

Her nod could be the thunderbolt. You are shoving the photograph into everyone’s face, when the woman-with-the-thunderbolt-nod nods. In your culture, the nod has many variations, and equally, those many meanings. This head is tilted in alternating up and down arcs along the sagittal plane, like a child’s spinning top, whirring, deciding which way to fall.

The next one is not a tilt of head that signals irritation. Instead she measures you, feet to hair, and decides. What? That’s not clear, because the nod meant a no, she tells you, by way of explicit confirmation, when you look confused. She has never seen this girl of twelve in the photograph, now seventeen, in a parrot-printed summer frock, ears reddened from the piercing she’d just had, a mischievous smile because she’d been stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s orchard.

Every nod is an omen setting you deeper and deeper into domains of unknowing. The cloud clan is stronger than ever. Sisters of thunder-men are everywhere. They are the lightning-women; they can take forms that suit their fancy. They’re the shapes of rustic women, shapes of aromatic nameless wildflowers, and shapes of buoyant neem trees that nod to winds for eons. This thought makes you suspect these women who nod. Do they know something about Dina, and are yet, conniving?

‘Kyon?’ the milkmaid steps out of her home at your call, shoves you aside and tosses vegetable peels out on the street to make use of her time stepping out. As you balk, she queries again, ‘Why you ask?’

‘She’s a sister. Stolen by the thunder-men.’

‘Ah-ha!’ She laughs.

‘Then, why look for her on the ground, amidst our fields and homes? Ha?’

‘Thunder-men are crafty. I only explain because you act like you know nothing. Well, if you didn’t know yet, I suspect she’s been deposited with their many sisters, the lightning-women, for safe-keeping, until they have the podium ready, the horoscopes matched, and an auspicious night with storms and fireworks ready for the wedding.’

‘Is it?’ She laughs one more time. A strange laugh of disbelief, mocking the story of a child-woman like myself, perhaps too unhinged to be true in her estimate.

This is not a time to cry, not with face abegging, eyes to heavens. The cloud clan has forcibly married Dayeema’s daughters for centuries now. If you saw an interface, it might be one of Dayeema’s daughters peering from there, someone who could be your mother, except she was never released, and you—the baby of a cloud and a woman, liberated instead to grow into a woman who they might fancy when the time is ripe. They let you go. They let you fall miles to soil, ensconced in one of many raindrops that regularly descend on earth, to be reunited with Dayeema, and nurtured through adolescence.

You often hear the rumblings of your thunder father, imagine your mother crying when it rains, and bereft of love above and below, watch the shelves of cottony clouds play on a blue field when autumn arrives. You think of the place you were born in, in the upturned vessel of the sky.

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki: As a child you often roared emphatically, little knowing it was actually a curse.

You remember what mother told you once. Cotton flowers are trapped clouds. Only cotton farmers can expertly hook thunder-clouds, cleave them into tiny bits and stuff the pods in their fields with those bits. Packed like that for long periods, the thunder-men are drained of all their powers to regroup again. So cotton farmers are the only ones that can end the tyranny of the cloud clan.

You had listened in awe.

Today, you shout again:

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.

Your cries float away to the distant hills and back.

You shy away when you spot gaping onlookers, peasants and labourers from the nearby fields, baffled at your dishevelled clothes but royal manner of speaking, as though someone possessed or of unsound mind. You run off to where your mother once hid to escape being taken away by the thunder-kingdoms Vikings. It’s a ruined mansion that was once struck and destroyed by lightning. Mother said she had spent days together, hidden there, among the braided mountain-ivy. The mansion smells of moss, the bricks showing up like a monster’s jutting teeth, the pillars like they’ll give away any minute, and rather be a concrete pile washed away by the rains. You walk through the undergrowth that has taken over the mansion to discover the twines around. They are handy to make a swing, tied to one of the hooks in the walls. You think it could be made into a rope ladder for you to meet your mother and older sisters held captive up there.

This is not your village, or you could have asked for help with the search. Only you and your sisters must do it alone, without aid.

Dina could be dead. As you roam around, the thought swirls more often, now that several hours have passed.

You think of Dina with increasing dread. She is your twin; she is more than a sister. She is the one you saw in bed next to you every morning as you woke up. The only time you didn’t see Dina, was when she’d escaped five months ago, revealing her plans to you beforehand. She said she was tired of the way Dayeema kept all the girls hidden—in mango boughs, sometimes in mud huts meant for the cattle, sometimes in a trunk meant to keep heirloom saris.

Dayeema warned you not to venture out, even for water, because she feared the thunder-men would spy on you. She believed you were safe from their hunting, safe from the abductions, if you stayed hidden.

You had feigned sleep that morning, until Dayeema noticed that Dina was missing. You wished that Dina escaped the curse that has haunted women of Dayeema’s clan for ages. For yourself, unlike Dina, you hoped you’d be taken away by a prince instead. That morning too, you and your sisters had embarked on a search like this one.

An unenthusiastic head bobble can be a polite way of declining something without saying no. But you noticed they were more like a pattern. It seemed the nods were a contorted way to mock your plight.

Following Dina’s disappearance five months ago, you had all gathered at Dayeema’s private chambers. There, while everyone was praying, the brass idol of Kumari Devi had briefly nodded in a direction that indicated where Dina might be. She was brought back because Dina couldn’t be allowed to do what normal girls her age normally do. Dina couldn’t be permitted to live like a commoner. She could not be allowed to elope and marry a simple, hardworking cotton farmer who lived with his parents in the far corner of the village.

That young man was no prince. Unlike you, Dina had never desired one. One morning almost a year ago, a boyish-faced man was on his way to the market, when he had discovered you sisters hiding among the haystacks where Dayeema had ordered you to be. He had openly been enamoured with Dina—and did not shy away from revealing his feelings. In turn, Dina was immediately brought to liveliness by that young man. After that chance encounter, Dina met him secretly, to which end she enlisted your help. Once they were together, even though you remained away to allow them private comfort, you could hear Dina giggle and laugh, as though she was her happiest self ever. How badly she wanted to escape her doomed future!

When you were alone, just the two of you, Dina told you she was waiting for the right time.

Waiting for far too long, Dina had decided to twist open the knob of her captivity that morning five months ago, and waking you up and telling you, she had the courage to escape out and be where her moods took her. Alas, by evening, owing to the intervention of the brass idol of Kumari Devi, it turned out to be a misstep, one that ended in futility.

The sun can be seen crawling to its perch. It must be nearly noon. This second time you’re searching for Dina, it is turning out to be much worse. Dina hasn’t shared her intentions with you. Besides, Dayeema vouches that she witnessed the abduction—of Dina being carried away by that ugly cloud. However much she tried, she lamented many times, she could only grab its tail, and had to let that slip through her fingers too, because clouds are unimaginably powerful.

Even though you feel, deep down, that Dayeema has erred, and that Dina is safe, you dare not mistrust the old, fragile woman who brought you up.

You wipe your tears as you walk the mud-lanes that crisscross the village, thought-dried and aimless. Your hope eroding fast.

You’re at the outer periphery of the village where the lane meets the concrete road. You watch a small caravan leave the village. The bullock-cart is laden with humongous bales of cotton. The young man who commands it wears a turban so huge it partially conceals his face. The family, that trails the bullock-cart on foot, carry possessions bundled under their arms or on their heads.

You wonder if you really saw the turbaned-man nod, or if it was something your mind conjured up.

At noon, you are on the fire dragon’s back, because it’ll give you a free ride. Besides, fire dragons and the branch-sons of cloud men, are arch-enemies. You know this fire-dragon has an eye on you. If you manage to escape the thunder-men, this fire dragon will surely take you away. You accepted its offer of help because now is not a time to think of personal dislikes.

Riding against the train tracks, you keep peeping into the shanties by the tracks to look for Dina. Perhaps the sisters of thunder-men are keeping Dina there, hiding her under the enormous tarpaulins.

But there is no success.

Tired and parched, you lick your own sweat streaming down your face.

By late afternoon, you reject the fire dragon’s plea to continue assisting. Your sisters and you now regroup and climb onto specks of dust to travel through the air on the shoulders of a tropical storm and go barge into the hotel that’s near the railway station.

You and your sisters sift through each room, there’s not a trace or hint of someone held wrongly.

The storm is still picking up speed when you cross the pavement, and run across to the railway station premises. Pilgrims to Kumbh, caught in the storm, and freshly invested in briny grains upon their skin, hurry for cover.

A woman with hip-length wavy hair, pushes a stack of cardboard boxes on a cart towards the stall by the roadside, causing a commotion.

‘Dina!’

Hearing you, one of your sisters runs and grabs a woman pilgrim by the arm. She turns to look, but it’s not Dina.

You look at the faces of the people standing around stunned by the suddenness. Most are pilgrims. They stop and empathise, gauging the immediacy of the situation of a near-relation gone missing. Some, overwhelmed with concern, offer to help, but you politely refuse.

Your sisters and you resume the search for Dina. Minutes tick away.

‘We lost her. The lightning-sisters may have boarded a train with Dina.’ The sister, with the long bony arms, says.

‘We can’t give up now!’ The chant from the rest is spontaneous.

Dusk, raw like wound, settles in where the storm has just passed through. You, daughters of Dayeema and daughters-of-daughters, similitude of drops, tokens of your thunder fathers, are still around, looking for Dina.

Everyone whom you ask, they only nod. And the ‘no’ sticks to you—the no-in-the-N-O-D sticks to you even more, the more unlikely you’ll ever find Dina.

You pause; something holds your attention. The bullock-cart you saw earlier, still laden with cotton bales, has been abandoned under the prayer flags hanging from a pole near the railway station. The bullocks are nowhere to be seen, nor the women, nor the young man in a turban. As you try to see more clearly in the descending semi-darkness, try to see deep inside, conflicting thoughts arise in your mind. Cotton? Farmer?

A couple walk by, very close to you. The man is oddly familiar but has his face painted with colours as is common for pilgrims, making him unrecognizable. The woman has a veil drawn over her face. She playfully brushes your shoulder. As you turn, surprised and mildly irritated, she lifts her veil ever so slightly, then nods very slowly as she crosses.

You don’t grab her for affirmation. You know dead-sure who this woman is, and what her nod means.

The couple are headed to catch the train leaving for Kumbh soon. You shield the sight of their passage onto the platform from your sisters, who are still swarming the steadily-thinning mass of pilgrims, checking every face.

Locking the truth of Dina’s daring escape deep in your heart, you discharge a long sigh of relief.

When you return to Dayeema and report an unsuccessful search, you must make sure to steal the brass idol in Dayeema’s chambers before it has occasion to sway its head one way or other to indicate Dina’s bearings. You must bury it deep in the backyard.

Two years have passed since the last blogpost. Much has happened: authors must grieve the twin deaths of Alice Munro (May 2024), the poetic genius in short format, a writer of nostalgia for lives we never lived, and Paul Auster (April 2024), the textual illusionist, meandering through subjectivity and identity. If writers are distant friends, if books are their letters, must we not be sad at loss of such genuine correspondence?

Little must be written here, much elided over. Perhaps there will be time to return to Munro’s provocations, her controversial life and storytelling. Here, we have Auster: Auster who penned the private eye/I, the subjective singularity that engulfs his characters, his plots, his cities, his readers, him; Auster who was a kaleidoscope within his own stories of so many different personas: the Rothesque ghostwriter shadowing other artists, the archivist copiously chronicling his own cities through his own characters, the detective of imagined crimes, the seer and seen, the author and authored. To read Auster is to see New York differently, like it is to read Joyce and see Dublin differently. The mechanism, however, is different. Joyce presents a measured profligacy; Auster presents redundant minimality. Auster sees the world as if from a pinhole camera and then redoubles the blurry edges over, and over, and over, until the contours of a story emerge.

My relationship with Auster has been tenuous. I had always held him at a distance — his evocative premises, fixation on language and misinterpretation, error and frailty at odds with the scale of life I concerned myself with. Except, Auster beckoned me to look at the oddities even in this scale, in its repetitions, its frictions and its slippages. In the previous post, I had mentioned that I would implicate Auster when discussing our engagement with speculation. It is odd, remembering someone one day and finding them departed the next.

It is also odd to open an opinion piece on speculative fiction with literary fiction authors. Colour me biassed. I would love to speak of similarities in the mathematical worlds of Abott and Lem, of cultural distinctions that we routinely draw in these genres, of time and its evolution through time. But there are times when one must view the earth from the moon, when one must assay a country from another, when genres appear suddenly warped from another. That is the idea.

In his famed New York Trilogy,¹ Auster speaks of truth, detection and detectives. Unlike conventional detectives, a Sam Spade, a Sherlock Holmes, a Miss Marple, characters whose shadow pervades the plot, whose larger-than-life identity provides solid ground on which you are willing to bet the truth, characters who linearise time: from not knowing to knowing, each chapter an increment, a nugget of wisdom, Auster’s detectives are diffuse, anonymous (and thus autonomous). There is a sense, in his works, that time is playing tricks on you, that the past will face you at the next intersection as your future, as your alter ego whose life is on a different trajectory.

Strewn throughout his works, therefore, are indicators of an identity that do not cohere. A detective watches a mark even as he feels watched, a wretched cog in an absurd game of waiting, not acting. A horde of identities seem to erupt from the page: the detective, sometimes Daniel Quinn, sometimes Paul Auster (the character? the author? the pseudonym?) seem to speak simultaneously. A man involves himself with the life of Hector Mann, actor in silent movies, whose life on camera he brilliantly recalls in remarkable detail. Always, there is the idea that one life has been trapped by another, caught in a web, where in all directions what radiates is yet another strand of a life that one seems to be distantly living. Therefore of being under perusal from this distance, an inability to walk in your own skin as your own person.

In such a complex field, the ‘I’, argues Auster, is a sinkhole. It is at once the authoritative Investigator, the intimate Subject and the roving Private Eye, and the attractor for all such identities which entangles with yours. Through desire, through imitation, through surveillance and consumption, through comparison, the ‘I’ repeatedly contracts the other, measures up against it and then sinks it. I call this idea the ghost: a way of living that takes you on a collision course with somebody else’s life. As Brockmeier says: “It would take so little. Why didn’t it happen?”²

To live as a ghost is to live on the knife-edge of absolute subjection and absolute freedom, a curious phantasmic life indeed. It is a virtual unity of contradictions, a life where saying: how can I be other than what I eventually will be? is to simultaneously declare yourself free from the clutches of your own future. Every action is lent significance in the future; each passing desire, each obligatory act — are we not always susceptible to being looked back at in ten years, with a future us saying: this is not so; it was never meant to be so. Read Carloff (Time Heist), who writes about the present being continuously botched up by knowledge that things will reset. Or McCaffrey (Central Time), for whom the present is inundated with constraints. The horror of time is thrown open to us precisely when we let ourselves be determined by the future; should we not instead declare that the future will be what it will be, and thus declare ourselves free? An empty freedom indeed! But the ghost reminds us that all freedom is, in the final analysis, empty, a declaration sans creation.

Auster navigates through this subjection-freedom. There is always the terminus of what one must become; the end has always been in sight. What constitutes the story is the progression towards the end, the becoming of a pure subject, the possession of the body of the other, the ticking into pure freedom.

What does it matter to us? Here, let us return to Bachelard again who writes: “… the joy of reading is the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.”³ No reader, says Bachelard, reads without trying to become the writer. To the extent that a modest reader is kept in place is by the sheer genius of the writer himself. The good writer maintains a ghostly reader, there to be possessed but resisting possession. She is the hero of every horror genre who keeps the ghost at bay, who resists every attempt on her body, on her soul. The reader, in his turn, must attempt a seizure, a subjection-freedom, a possession; that is the fulfilment of his desire.

In this curious setting, Bachelard hints at an equally curious idea. Who here is creative if not the reader? The writer, through the text, is present as if objectively. It is the reader who must move the text and be moved by it in turn. It is his gaze, his experience of the text, that is Bachelard’s central concern. The writer is relegated to the margins, the significant other. This is an inverted horror movie, one where we enter the lives of the ghosts and see them haunting the real world. The selection by the reader is the artistic act, insofar as art is the experience of expression of desire.

Through Auster then, we find what it is to be a hungry artist, continuously trying to meld with the world. In the pieces that we shall publish this year, especially the entries from our Faux Tales contest, this is what we have continuously tried to do. Which story among these would I have written; who is the author we would have anyway become if we were to become the Author?

There is, of course, a silly way of reading this entire idea as hubris. Are we therefore saying that we could have written the story in spite of the author? Are we not therefore saying that the author is a mere accident, a chancy being who got there first, planted their flags on terrain that was otherwise our manifest destiny? This is not what I mean by the ghost. The ghost does not exist without man, the reader without the writer, the editor / magazine without our authors. In the absence of the author, there is no future that we can emptily gesture towards. It is only when our authors write these stories that they bring into the world the conditions of our freedom; it is only by pointing at them, their expression, their words, that we say: there, that is exactly what I would have wanted to say anyway. There is no predestination because there is no future yet — the future will be in its own time — there is only a freedom from the future that we seek.

Consider, in this vein, Vajra Chandrasekera’s comments (The Limner Wrings His Hands) on the author-machine. Begin reading where it allegedly ends: “This story was generated by the machinic state, the prison within the prison like the text within the text, the state of the machine, the machine ulcerated, the machine cold but learning… To fight gods, especially gods that you made, you must become monstrous.” End where he begins: “This story is a monster; that is to say, this story is written by a monster. That is, that is to say, a monster is a mantra, a maniac, a (de)monstration, a (demon)stration, a(n auto)maton, a matos, an emanation of the manas.” In between, you might find him saying that the author-artist does authorship-artistry only when throws open his own subjection to the universe, only when he absolves his own subjection. Art here is not unlike faith: the artist does not make a spectacle of the prison; he short-circuits the transition between the reading of the prison and the finding oneself within it. This is the artistic function.

This is also a lesson in temporal intimacy, a coming together at every moment of our anticipation for tomorrow. Call it what you will: a textual tryst, a speculative romance, a political solidarity; these are but labels of a gnawing metaphysics of time. And it requires other intimacies, some cultural, some genetic, some interactional. The question then is who or what emerges from these intimacies, and whether such emergence may be truly called South Asian. What are the peculiarities of South Asian speculative fiction, and is there some truth to South Asian experiences that can serve as a criterion for categorizing stories?

In time, I will write about this.

Notes

1. Auster, P. (1990). The New York trilogy. Penguin. ︎
2. Brockmeier, K. (2021). Pieces of elsewhere: The horizontal and the vertical in character and fiction. Sewanee Review, 130(4), 735–765. ︎
3. Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1958) ︎

“Must you pluck all the flowers?”

“Hey prabhu! Must you always startle me so?”

“Have you completely given up on sleep? Even the sun is yet to rise.”

“It’s the thieving neighbours. I must get them all before anyone is up.”

“The gods don’t need so many every day. I’m sure they’re tired of the same old flowers.”

“You and your tirade against my gods! For once, just stop wandering and go get some rest.”

You see, for the last twenty years or so, I have hardly slept a good wink—let alone rest—around the crack of dawn. As far back as I can stretch my unreliable memory, I cannot remember a day of our shared matrimonial life when the stubborn woman has not woken up at these ungodly hours. Even before the next-door rooster has cleared his throat, the entire house rings with a pandemonium of noises big and small—the ear-splitting creak of the rusty bathroom door, the rhythmic swoosh of the broom in the courtyard, the urgent jingle of her bangles attune with the dull thuds of her footsteps. Who can sleep around such a circus, not to mention the routine lowing of the neighbour’s cattle all night?

A lone owl’s hoot pierces through the thick, wintry silence of the dawn. The cool dew soothes my callouses as I struggle to put one foot in front of the other. They say wintertime makes old wounds come alive, reminding the body of the many shocks it has survived through the years. It has been a long walk though getting used to the distance is entirely another thing. I try blowing away some glistening cobwebs from the tagar tree—how beautifully it has grown! In full bloom, the small tree has morphed into a constellation of its own, its milky white flowers sparkling like tiny stars in the dark. I still remember the blazing summer afternoon when I had received my first salary; it was not much but so was the work of shuffling files in a government office all day. Proud as punch, lugging a gunny sack stacked with saplings of several flowering plants, I had walked home from the village bus stop. My mother and little sister, waiting by the verandah and probably expecting a freshly caught mirikali or a big ripe jackfruit, were unable to mask their disappointment.

In the soft blur of twilight, the peeled paint on the front wall resembles a furrowed bark of an old tree. I should have seen to its repair in time, when the place was yet to become a warehouse of unsightly cracks and clutter. I was fortunate to be left as the sole caretaker of this house since my younger siblings chose to prosper and grow old in the only big town in the district. They rarely visited the village. My mother, who refused to move, handed over the upkeep of the house to my wife after we got married. Reduced to a functional ruin now, the four close-packed rooms—the smallest doubles up as the kitchen and utility space—and a sizable backyard served us well over the years. With the little money I had saved up after a decade of employment, a small sitting room adjacent to the verandah and a pucca bathroom were added later.

My eyes rest on the big blob of seepage on the bedroom ceiling, giving it the appearance of a poorly drawn map by a child. Even the window curtains—the only remaining pair that match—have doubled in weight from gathering months of dust, the beige altered to a moldy brown. The steel almirah that once safekept the few valuables we owned, is now a dedicated shrine for junk of all kinds. Over the past few years, it has been piled with plastic boxes, paper cups, disposable spoons, wooden combs with missing teeth, utensils that have lost both their shape and purpose, and what have you. What started as a memorabilia collection in her younger days has ballooned into a ridiculous compulsion. I want to pull my hair and scream into the void, but I fear her sharp tongue.

“Tell me, what is so fancy about these plastic food trays? When will this habit stop?”

“Baah! Don’t you start now.” Almost hissing, she continues, “How do you keep wearing that same soiled shirt every day then?”

“How can you even bring me into this? As if I have an option.”

On the few occasions I secretly convinced Dhulia to dump it all by the banks of the Brahmani, her detective senses would sniff me out, and the entire matter ended up in a heated argument. One time she even went so far as threatening to jump into the river herself. Just like her gods, all that bric-a-brac too is sacrosanct; naturally, Dhulia is not allowed anywhere near them. His odd jobs, like weeding the vegetable patch and unclogging drains, are strictly restricted to the outer periphery of the house. My mother, who lived for less than a decade with us before she succumbed to a massive heat stroke, had taught her well. Despite their continuous bickering that would often drive me to the panchayat office for some quiet, they bonded well over pettiness and pakhala.

She sprinkles the remaining puja water on straggly clumps of yellow and pink tuberoses that have sprouted around the rim of the well. A few stubborn ones have broken through the cracks in the concrete, attracting small butterflies and dragonflies. In a fruitless attempt to draw her attention, I circle the drying well and pretend to gauge the level of the water. Following her—more out of habit than purpose—I hobble all the way to the verandah and try stretching my bad leg slowly against the broken stairs. The winter sun washes over me, rekindling the memory of a warm compress on my useless limb. As she approaches the sitting mat, her pet parrot Rupa throws a sudden tantrum, flapping its wings in a demonic frenzy. I won’t lie, it is the most nagging bird I’ve seen in my time though it is not hard to guess who it mimics. I tried to free it more than once but every time the rascal would fly its way back after teetering on the guava tree for a bit.

Every morning after she is done with her chores, a large part of which includes the daily puja, she would sit on the verandah floor with the newspaper spread under her nose. Ignoring the pressing concerns of the world, she would turn the pages in a haste and stop at the Daily Horoscope section. Quite a self-proclaimed expert of the zodiac, she has always stood firm on her hypothesis that people born under the Kanya rashi suffered the most trials and tribulations. Neither material prosperity nor good karma smiled upon her lot, as if the goddess Laxmi herself had some personal beef with them. She would often lament this astrological inheritance from her mother, grumbling over the generational wealth passed down to her.

Reaching for her customary mid-morning tea, which is saccharine to the point where ants circle the teacup in minutes, she clicks her tongue in dismay.

“Bad news?” I swat a fly circling above her head.

“If only you had been this attentive always! It’s a pity how men become so desperate in old age.”

She casts a sideways glance and continues running her index finger along the prediction. “My planets have not been in sync for some time. The full moon too is approaching in a day.”

“Hmm… Did your planets never warn you about me?”

I smirk; it always infuriates her.

A gust of cool wind carries a shower of tagar flowers across the verandah. While some land on her lap, caught in between the creases of her crumpled cotton saree, few rest on the bold newspaper headlines as if on a mission to block out the world’s ugliness. Disinterested in the floral intervention, she smooths away a few wisps of white hair from her eyes. With a singular focus, she surveys the crisp blue sky which does not carry a single trace of cloud. A pale, almost full moon waits patiently for its last sliver to complete yet another full circle. How I envy the moon, its ability to resurrect itself from the pit of darkness every month.

Years ago, her pantheon of the sun, moon and planets failed to foretell the fate of a dying man. They did little to caution her about a ravenous lump, the size of a lemon, gnashing through my left femur. I shudder recalling those days of wait and despair when, lying awake for hours, I could hear the inevitable shrinkage of my body, witness its gradual emaciation to the form of a skeletal child. During such sleepless nights, drenched in sweat and delirium, I’ve seen her throw up in the backyard. My poor brinjal plants! I know, it was a lot to stomach, the stench of my festering bedsores. The very thought still makes my insides churn, that brown, fishy discharge of pus melded with betadine.

It has been seven long winters to that fateful night. I remember there was a full moon that night as well. A thirsty blood moon, you see.