He stood on the veranda of his house-of-one-room and looked out at the garden and the cowshed and the low hills, which flickered like an illusion in the pre-cyclone heat. The hills were too red, the peaks too perfect, the sea beyond too big, and in the garden the tomatoes too round, the brinjals too purple, and the litchi—litchi in this climate? Well, they were simply unbelievable. And the too-clean cowshed with the too-fat cow and her leggy calf, a pretty bell swinging from her neck, looked straight out of an English picture book—and next to the shed the branches of the mango trees bowed with too many mangoes too early in the season. It was only April. It would all be gone when he woke the next morning, or when he returned from a walk or a visit to the toilet, and in its place not the sea as they predicted so direly, but a city street pocked with rickshaws and rubbish dumps and shoe shops. Inside the house, his books would be stacked in columns, a white lace doily placed on his chair, and not a speck of dust anywhere. A stranger would step forward, someone he hadn’t seen in years—someone he had no wish to see. Nothing had happened. Yet he was deeply anxious.

Something had happened. He’d received an email that morning from his daughter, Kavita, who was thinking of visiting him soon (she wrote). Of coming all the way from her house in landlocked St. Louis, Missouri—her house with three stories and thirteen rooms, and a front door with glass panes on either side to enable a yokel such as him to gawk at what was inside: stately drapes and plush carpets and chairs, including one throne-like chair with a tall, curved back and clawed feet. He knew this from the emails and photos she sent him, which he devoured on the computer she got for him. 

He hadn’t known what a computer could do until she gave him one, doggedly working at it from thousands of miles away, hassling government officials and holding them to rash election promises, moving heaven and earth to get a high-speed cable laid to the village for his use and his use alone, rendering his tiny veranda thick with avid villagers until he chased them away. He’d resented the computer beyond measure at first, its hulking bulk threatening him like a strongman from the middle of the room. It had hampered even his thoughts at first, muddled him simply by being there, but he couldn’t do without it now. Now he wrote hundreds of emails and letters to editors, kept up with the news in all the corners of the world, and on top of this, he made pen pals. He had more than fifty pen pals around the globe, all far enough away that there was no chance they’d ever visit him. He read books. He read the Gita. He gardened. He was busy, busy, busy.

Why did she want to come now? He hadn’t seen her since she left for America nine years ago, after her mother died, had not even heard from her until a few years ago. 

She’d changed after her mother’s death. She’d go to work morosely, come back and cook something morosely, and take the food to her room, her back stiff with umbrage, all the while working secretly on her applications. She blamed him for her mother’s unhappiness. One evening she’d come up behind him as he scratched at the sad little patch of land in front of the house in Bombay where they lived, and announced that she’d been offered admission at an American university and would leave in two months. She kept standing after he grunted his acknowledgment. “You don’t want me here anyway,” she said. “You just want to live your own way, in this dump. You don’t want anyone around. You never have.” Naturally he had come back to the village, to the sea, as soon as his house was ready—he’d had it built while he was still in Bombay. The day he got here, he dropped his bag on the bare earth and joined it, and lay there for a long time. He burrowed into the earth and became one with it. For months he lay around and did nothing, as if doing something would make a ripple that would travel all the way to America and remind her of him. Slowly he built himself a new life. A plump, briny, beautiful new life.

But how long would she stay? And would the husband come? She had a child now too.

She’d invited him to her wedding, had tracked him down here several years after she left, though she could well have done it sooner if she really wanted to. She’d telephoned the old man in the village, who bade him come speak to her on the payphone in his shop. He’d shaken his head at the phone, though she couldn’t see him, and explained why he couldn’t come for the wedding, why it would be like going to the moon: he had neither passport nor visa nor money for tickets. Difficulties she should have known, but of course she’d invited him only for form’s sake, just as she wanted to come now for form’s sake, or out of guilt. “I can’t believe you went back to that ghost village battered by storms and sea,” she’d said. “In a few years it will be gone, your stuff washed away.” He’d listed all the reasons he couldn’t come, except what should’ve been obvious: that he’d never leave this place again. Except that, after the call, full of silences and fits and starts, he’d heaved a sigh of relief that her low-pitched, raspy voice, which he’d always found difficult to understand and which had become even more difficult to understand due to her new accent, was out of his ear—and she out of his mind. He had no reason to feel bad. She had an enormous house, a son, a husband.

He leaned on the door frame and thought of her email again—I’m coming to India soon to visit my in-laws. Thinking of coming to see you—and recalled why he’d thought she’d visited before without bothering to see him: she’d described her in-laws’ house in a lengthy past email. She wrote long, boring emails, had been just as boring as a young woman, though she spoke little then, to him anyway. “They live in Mysore,” she’d gushed, “in a two-story bungalow on a huge lot, at least an acre. There’s a terrace and a garden behind and one in front with a little pond and fish and lilies, and in the house everything is lovely, dark wood furniture and 100 percent cotton sheets, and a sitting room with glass cabinets and cane chairs and a cooler.” If you asked him, all the words after “Mysore” were unnecessary, but it was what she cared most about, furniture and frippery and fancy floors—and to show that he had none. 

She’d have to stay with him, in his house with one room and the bathroom without walls or door. There was nowhere in the village—within miles of it—that she could stay. The ghost village, which was a real village with real pigs rooting in real gutters and mud paths studded with heaps of real cow dung—the pungent dung smell always in one’s clothes along with salt and dirt and smells of fish—and, for a bonus, tidy pyramids of human dung in the fields, their makers having squatted together amicably at dawn. The dung of the cow at least had its uses: the villagers used dung cakes for fuel and plastered their floors with dung slurry to keep out insects. He’d considered building himself one of the round, low-roofed huts they lived in, invincible in storms, but was afraid his citified body couldn’t bend double to get in and out, and so he’d settled for concrete, unyielding, vulnerable. 

He took a deep breath and leaned on the wall, exhausted with thinking. Outside, gray clouds now bulged ominously on the horizon, and the wind was loud. It was going to be only a little cyclone, which was why they’d named it gulab, for a flower. He’d read about it on the computer—the van with the loudspeaker that broadcasted warnings up and down the coast didn’t bother coming here. The rain was to start only tomorrow, but even a flower-like cyclone would turn the paths to rivers of mud, bend the trees, whistle past windows. He felt the usual fear masquerading as excitement stirring within him, the head-splitting tension of standing ground when he wanted to flee. Let her come then! And struggle to keep the mud out of her shoes—let her scrub the salty sweat from her skin. She hated the heat, especially. An image appeared to him, with clarity, of Kavita laboring up the slope to the house in Bombay, swaying from plumpness and a sedentary life—she was a bookworm if ever there was one—mopping her face, lips turned down in her characteristic expression of unhappiness.

Perhaps she wouldn’t come after all, he thought, brightening. After all she’d said she was thinking about it, had not mentioned a date. But he couldn’t assume anything; he had to prepare. For form’s sake. Out of guilt. He would have to go to the village today because of the storm tomorrow. He’d walk to the village for his walk instead of away from it and speak to the old man about a bed—she’d expect a proper bed. He had only one bed, a rope cot, the kind the villagers who used beds used, and even this he’d added only when his bad knee made it hard for him to rise from the floor. She’d expect a mattress and sheets and pillows and pillowcases. Would she bring her boy?

A bed was only the beginning, though. His house was in no shape for guests, let alone a small boy—in no shape for him, she would say. Of course she hadn’t thought about the practicalities. That was the problem with children. With her. She thought she could appear after nine years and demand attention regardless of the manner in which she’d departed. She took for granted all sorts of things: the availability of proper beds and bathrooms, and pans that weren’t encrusted with ancient, burned food, and a fridge, and fresh milk and eatables you didn’t need to sniff and poke and examine from all angles before consuming. He’d learned to do this—hold a morsel to the light and look at it from all angles—after an incident involving an enticing slice of coconut flesh of uncertain age. The fungus had been invisible against the white flesh; by the time his tongue detected the musty taste, it was too late, and his stomach had suffered agonies for days. “You could be like everyone else and keep your house clean and have a fridge and a hotplate and everything,” she’d say, with a sniff. “A normal house. Even here. But no, you just want to be different. You always have.”

Well, yes, he was sorry, but he had no fridge, and his kitchen was a stone slab, a kerosene stove, and a single battered pan. And his pillow was mangled, his blanket tangled, and the floor unfinished, spattered with whitewash, and still littered with debris from the building of it: he’d told the men to scram the instant they finished. And the walls were devoid of decoration except for a few hooks he’d hammered in haphazardly, from which his clothes hung: a spare lungi and a vest, and a pair of trousers and shirt unworn for months. For his ablutions, he simply stepped over to the tiled rectangle at one end, no door or walls: he’d thriftily omitted them. What was the need anyway? There was no one to see him on the toilet or washing the garden from his body when he troubled to do it.

He felt faint with anxiety though none showed on his face, dark and leathery from the sun—and yes, very likely there was dirt in the creases and grease in his still-full hair. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Truly he tried to bathe every day as prescribed in the Bhagavad Gita, which lauded the practice of cleanliness—bathing and washing hands and dipping the body in sacred rivers and anointing it with sandalwood and so on and so forth and on and on forever—but it often slipped his mind. And when it was hot—and it was always hot—he liked to walk around wearing only his loose underwear, his privates jiggling joyously, and sometimes he’d even walk outside that way. He liked to feel the breeze against his skin there. The woman who cared for the cows was used to it and didn’t even glance at him, but Kavita would be disgusted, vindicated.

How you live is in your blood and cannot be changed. What you gather about you, what you festoon your body with, what you seek, what you spurn. Though you can imitate alien ways for a time, as he had in Bombay, where he’d go to his job as a process engineer dressed up like a peacock, catch sight of himself in a window and not know who it was. He—he!—had owned shirts with collars—collars!—one for every day of the week, and five pairs of socks, and a pair of brown shoes and one of black, which he polished every Sunday evening. Back from work he’d throw off his chains and slip with relief into a once-white lungi and sleeveless vest with plenty of holes for aeration. They were all he wore now—logically speaking, they were all anyone needed, if that—all but three of his wall hooks bare. When he left the village—every few months he went to see his friend Raju in Vizag—it was always on a whim, no time to change even if he wanted to. He’d be walking in one direction, then simply turn and walk to the bus stop by the highway. Three hours later he’d step into Raju’s house, hands free. Raju knew better than to ask about luggage—he just handed him a neem stick for his teeth, which he did not use.

He started off now towards the village, twenty minutes away, and tried to enjoy the breeze, which was rough but not too rough and blew wherever it pleased, as a breeze should. There had been no rain for days, as was normal before a cyclone, and the path was dry. He walked slowly, kicking up the red dust, leaning into the wind. It was hot, as it could be only in April in these parts—only in April before a storm. It was paradise, heat, storms, dust, and all, and only he knew it. Paradise had a way of revealing itself only to those who knew how to spot it: the heat always gave way to cool, the dust was only rock ground to powder over millennia.

Soon the first humped tortoise-shell of a dwelling came into sight, the thatched roof almost touching the ground, the low door agreeably ajar. Though he’d grown up here, it was only when he became an engineer that he wondered about the strength of the huts and learned the secret hidden beneath their sorcerer’s hat roofs: that the roundness of the structures allowed them to make a pact with the wind by letting it pass unhindered through the many openings in their walls. As stated by the writer of an article he’d found about the “engineering marvels that can withstand the rage of Andhra cyclones,” the solution here was to give in, not to resist or remake.

Fewer and fewer huts were occupied every year, however. More and more had fallen into disrepair—the roofs in particular had to be updated every six months. More and more of the villagers, most of them fishermen, had left. It was hard to believe, but the village had once been ten times as big, a fishing paradise, before the tides rose and the sea, aided by frequent storms, ate into the coast and destroyed harbors, leaving half-houses and naked sand in its wake. And as the fishing deteriorated, people began migrating. Some moved only a little way away, to the next town or the one over; others went to Orissa or West Bengal or all the way to Gujarat to become crew, packed nine to a small boat on alien seas. There were only a hundred odd villagers left at last census—the bravest or the most foolish, the ones content with whatever they could eke out from the ocean.

He was born here. He’d grown up here in the bustle of an extended family, cousins and uncles and granduncles, all of them in the fishing business, not going out to sea but middlemen and merchants. Presciently, his mother had decided that he should study to escape the imminent demise of the fishing trade, and so he’d left, first to college, then to work in Bombay, a blot of a city, but by the sea at least. 

He’d dragged city-born Ramya and Kavita here once a year. They’d stay with his uncle in his house, now empty, locked up, though there was nothing to loot and no one to loot it. They’d trek up the hills when they came, he and Kavita. He remembered the time they climbed the biggest hill. She was only six but had woken up without a fuss at dawn so they could beat the heat, as quiet and determined then as when she grew older. He remembered her white blouse and beige pinafore and skinny legs twinkling by him, her fingers, slender as cluster beans, resting lightly in his. He’d make a cracking sound in his throat and pretend to snap her fingers in two; it never failed to delight her. But it was during these visits that Ramya got the chance to spread her poison among the villagers, lies about how he slacked off, failed at his job, neglected them. 

His guard down, his wife’s figure appeared before his eyes, the pleats of her starched sari flaring angrily, her hair scraped into a lemon-sized ball, scrubbing invisible spots from blemish-free chairs. Always cleaning, plumping cushions, covering the furniture with something and the something with something else: coasters on cloth on table, TV remote in sleeve, a doily on everything. Always keeping Kavita close, the girl’s sleep-puckered little face peering from among the folds of her sari. Ramya hated their house. It was poorly built, she said, a dump. She could never have her family visit. He was just a villager with villagers’ ways. There he went—tracking through the house with muddy feet only to rile her.

But here was what might be called the main street of the village with the three pukka buildings, corrugated-roofed and empty, on one side, and on the other, shops selling sundry goods: eggs, lentils, fish, fish, fish. Wooden boxes on legs, the keepers crouched behind the counters, heads touching roofs, knees the sides. When the water came, they might just draw their necks into their box-shells and scuttle away. Storms didn’t scare them. They liked storms, the ones who stayed—it stood to reason. Besides, this was only a little storm. Besides, storms were good for the ocean: the high waves cleaned the sea, the high winds made fish make more fish. 

Twenty paces down, and here was the old man’s shed—the same old man Kavita called about the computer. He was a boat builder, or rather a boat repairer, or rather had once been a boat repairer with so much work he’d turn some away. Now he did everything: fixed doors, leveled floors, repaired roofs, maintained the only phone in the village, which nestled behind a curtain at one end of his shed. The price for a mournful conversation with distant family? A rupee a minute.

The door was open. The old man—he thought of him as the old man even though he was only a little older—looked up.

“I need a bed,” he said without preamble, and wondered why he was always so brusque with the villagers. Cities changed you. They put concrete in more than your walls.

“Wood’s scarce and very costly,” said the old man immediately and just as brusquely, though his reasons were clearer. Persistent adversity made it hard for a polite word to cross his lips, and besides he didn’t like him. None of the villagers liked him. “Not even tamarind wood is available. There was flooding in Yerramanchi and they’re cutting down trees in Nelavanka and planting cashew because lumber is too costly, and what’s left they’re turning into paper and—”

“I don’t care about the cost,” he interrupted, incensed. Who was the old man to suggest he didn’t have the money, even if it might turn out to be true? He went on, recklessly. “Just find the wood. I might need a second bed too.”

“It won’t be cheap.”

“I said I don’t care,” he said sharply. Inside him hope flared. Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to afford the bed. Perhaps he could truthfully tell her that a visit was impossible. He imagined the enigmatic, sorrowful manner in which he would communicate this. “I can’t tell you why, but don’t come now. Any other time would have been fine. Please don’t ask why.” She’d have to put it off. And, if he was lucky, his words would drive the wedge between them deeper, and she might never again ask to come.

To the old man, he continued. “I don’t have time to chat. I’m very busy. Please make as fine a bed as you can.” Hastily he added, “That is, don’t make it yet, tell me first what it will cost, but make sure to include posts for a mosquito net. And a nice headboard, and a footboard. And a . . . a . . .”—from the pit of his memory a picture emerged of the splendid bed that was the highlight of Kavita’s room in Bombay, carrying him away—“. . . and tall pillars at each corner, carved with . . . with flowers! And paint the flowers, in bright colors, yellow and blue and green, like the toys you make. And polish the wood until it shines. And no hard edges or splinters—a child will sleep on it.” As he spoke, the bed materialized by the old man, bathed in a golden light, a sanctuary fit for a goddess, complete with crimson canopy and curtains, and he himself next to it, smiling benevolently while Kavita and her little boy, who looked exactly like him, embraced him and thanked him profusely, tears of joy in their eyes. If he was going to have a bed made, it would be the best. If he was going to care for her, he would care like no one else.

The old man had been listening, motionless. “What do you need a new bed for?” he said, eyes narrow. 

He knew now that he hadn’t imagined it: in addition to the usual brusqueness, there was suspicion in the man’s eyes. He recalled that they hadn’t spoken to each other at this length since the computer. 

They hadn’t liked him in the village even before Ramya spread her stories about him. They thought him crazy. When he was a boy, they thought him crazy for swimming all day, making solitary tracks up and down the coast, hiding in the sugarcane fields or the hills instead of going to school or working with his father, whom they didn’t like because he ate into their profit. Later they thought him crazy because of what Ramya told them. Now they thought him crazy for coming back. They weren’t used to people coming back instead of leaving, or doing good for no reason. By extension, everything he did was crazy, too. His giving away bushels of bananas and vats of fresh milk? Crazy. His efforts to get a public toilet built for their use? Crazy. His walking around barefoot, cultivating soles as thick as leather like theirs? Crazy. They wrote off his asceticism and philanthropy—yes, that’s what it was!—as penance for past misdeeds. They wouldn’t stop asking about Kavita. “How is Bujji? Why doesn’t she come to see you?”

What had Kavita said about him to the old man? He’d forged a bond with her when she was little over, of all things, the delicate toys he made in his spare time, a local art. All sorts of toys from the soft light ivory wood of the ankuru tree that grew—used to grow—in the hills: dolls, cooking vessels, a coal stove, a mortar and pestle, even a tiny well complete with pail, all of them lacquered in brilliant reds and blues and yellows. Unlike the village children who liked toys that buzzed and hummed and did things, Kavita was drawn first to the toys and then to the old man because he could make them. He’d squat on the floor and play with her, the childless old man, crossing barriers of age and caste and occupation, which the child, being a child, couldn’t care less about. Over the years, she’d built a huge collection of the toys, brought them home from the village, given them pride of place in the TV cabinet. He’d looked for them when he was emptying the Bombay house, but they were nowhere to be found.

“Just tell me how much,” he said.

The old man turned back to his work. “Come back in a few days, I’ll tell you.”

It had started drizzling while he’d been talking. Surprised and delighted, he paused and lifted his face to the rain, dug his feet into the earth, and squeezed the glorious mud between his toes as immoderately as if she were there to see and be disgusted. Then he went on, his steps soft, his head cocked to take in the sounds. Wind sounds and sea sounds and tree sounds, none of cleaning and scrubbing and dusting. Far to his right, the sea would have advanced inland several feet. The sea that was big enough to swallow him whole if he were to give himself up to it.

Inexorably, the matter reclaimed his attention. “I can get a bed,” he thought, “but what about walls for the bathroom?” And who knew what else: spoons and mops and towels. He didn’t own a towel. He owned two lungis. One he wore, the other he dried himself with, a mathematically sound solution to the towel problem. Further, the thin cloth absorbed water instantly.

After Ramya had died, he’d sometimes crack open the door to Kavita’s room at night and watch her sleep, one arm dangling, tips of slender fingers almost touching the floor. And when she wasn’t home, he’d stare as long as he wanted at everything, his throat catching at the splendor: the silky purplish-pink thing on the four-poster bed, the plethora of pillows, the fragile lamps with fringed shades, the enormous wall painting of a ship rocking on an angry sea—the sea so realistic he could smell the salt. She’d asked a friend to create the scene. (“So she likes the sea too,” he’d thought, when he first saw it.) Enticing scents filled the room and leaked out from under the door. Though he touched nothing, he could imagine how the textures, the scents, pampered the skin, the senses, let you believe that discomfort and long suffering and pain were not mandatory. How had she done it? How did people do this: exert control over themselves and their world, fix it so they were better than the original design? Nothing in her room would spoil. Nothing would crumble, smell, ooze, erode, distress, get in the way. Everything would always be perfect. Perhaps there was value in that.

The rain was now more than a drizzle. The wind was starting to moan. Glad to be back indoors, he sat down soaking wet at the table in the middle of his room. Mud caked his shins up to his knees. The cheap wood of the table, also made by the old man, had settled into a deep concave with time. Dust coated everything, interrupted by intersecting rings made by the bottles and glasses he placed wherever he liked because Ramya had hated it. Why couldn’t he let go? He’d lived with her thirty years, had been free for nine. Maybe he’d let go in another twenty years. Twenty more years of hate. 

The wind tore in through an open window and made him shiver. The mud dried and made his skin itch. His old bones hurt; suddenly he felt desolate. The little white square ricocheted invitingly across the computer screen. Jabbing the keyboard with two gnarled forefingers at great speed, he brought the machine to life and scrolled through fifty-seven new emails. There were daily news digests from Abu Dhabi Journal, the Times, Washington Post. The news was dull: war, disease, climate crises. There were emails from Colorado Winter Warriors, Democratic National Committee, Himalayan Rescue Group, dozens of charities. He’d signed up for emails from them. He’d signed up to Walk for Hunger in Boston, donate to the Arctic Fund, run for World Peace. He got more than a hundred emails every day, more than two hundred on a good day.

He reached the last read email. Kavita’s email, bleak and gray. 

He shut his inbox, opened a document, and began typing rapidly: “World today is in a chaos all of its own making. Here and now the Bhagavad Gita, quintessence of the Upanishads, is the only solution. But like the proverbial elephant examined by blind men who pronounce as to what the elephant is and how it looks, some see in the Gita ‘Management skills’ while others see salvation and transportation to a heaven and yet others see ‘the Big Bang’ in it.”

He sat back, regarded the paragraph, and thought it cogent and urgent. He was especially pleased with the elephant analogy. Then, a brainwave: he’d write a book about the Gita! He couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him before. Weak with relief at having found a solution, he typed a reply: “I’m sorry, I’m too busy for anyone to visit right now. I have a very important project going on.” He wouldn’t mention the book to her, though; she’d only mock it. “What’s the point of reading the Gita,” she’d say sourly, “when you can’t take care of your family?”

He didn’t send the email. Instead he picked up his brick of a cell phone and, muscle memory guiding his fingers, typed his friend Raju’s number. Raju was the only person he ever phoned, the only reason he owned a phone. Some primitive—shameful—fear of lying dead for weeks, body rotting, had made him get one. He hadn’t given the number to Kavita, had enjoined Raju to keep it a secret, citing cost. “She’ll call for silly things,” he said. “To ask what I ate. You can give it to her when I’m dead.”

His friend answered on the second ring. “Everything okay?” Like everyone, Raju, too, lay in wait for him to be in trouble. 

They’d gone to college together, although Raju had immediately deserted the country for England, where he’d spent twenty years, golfing and curling and squirreling away money. He thought he’d whipped his life into obedience, but the land had pulled him back, and he’d returned, tail between legs, hair white, body bent like a comma over a shiny walking stick that his devoted daughter had given him.

“Kavita is coming,” he said. As he spoke, a thought: couldn’t he claim to have never seen her email? Couldn’t he say the computer was broken?

“Kavita’s coming? Really? That’s wonderful! When?” said Raju.

“I don’t know.”

“My God, I haven’t seen her in—”

“Why do you think she’s coming?”

“Why do I think she’s coming?”

“Yes.”

“To see you, why else?”

“It can’t be that simple.”

“What do you mean, it can’t be simple?”

“She didn’t want to see me the last time she was here.” 

“Well, didn’t she buy you the computer and start emailing only recently? Now that she’s more in touch, she wants to come. It’s a good thing. I didn’t want to say it, but it’s not good for you to be so aloof. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

“I don’t have room for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“My room is too small.”

“Oh, I see now what you’re worried about! I can assure you—she won’t mind. She’ll manage. I know her. She’s a good girl. She doesn’t talk much but she’s very tender-hearted. I’ll never forget how she came and stayed with us and took care of Pramila when she had her hip operation and I hurt my back at the same time. She’s worried about you. She . . .” On and on Raju went, singing Kavita’s praises. 

Now he wished he hadn’t called: he should have known the man would be on her side. For all he knew Kavita talked to him frequently. God, that man was pampered! His children called daily, and his wife plied him with food as he sat on his veranda in a spotless white shirt, hair oiled, smelling strongly of Pears soap, leading his neat, clean, pusillanimous life, which he smugly thought was the only way to live. Suddenly it was clear: he and Raju had nothing in common except that they’d both returned.

“I’ve made arrangements,” he said carefully. Even if Raju wasn’t in touch with Kavita, Raju’s daughter was. Who knew where their uncontained words would lead them? “I’ve seen the carpenter about a bed.”

“Very good,” said Raju, “You’ll both enjoy it, just see.” He fired a parting shot. “Treat her well! They need bottled water—the water here makes them sick. Keep it ready. And be careful—did you hear the latest news? They’re saying the cyclone will hit land earlier and be worse than they expected.”

“The cyclone?”

“Yes—be careful!”

It was seven o’clock, a time of the day he loved, when there was little light, yet he could see clearly and watch the garden bed down on his way to the stall, where he’d stand stroking the cow’s forehead, setting her skin a-shiver with pleasure. He opened his door to step out and saw what Raju meant. The sky was black. The garden looked up at the sky, expectant, pliant, waiting for the rain to lash it. The stems and branches, leaves and flowers, would droop, surrender, succumb, then rise up new the next morning. 

He looked back at the room, and froze. The happiness was blatant. Wouldn’t it bare itself to her in all its obscene glory? The happiness was in the way that things lay in a seeming mess but followed a pattern that suited one and only one man. It was in the way the capless water bottle stood on the floor at a distance from the bed that equaled the length of one and only one arm, a pile of books the same, the top book open at a well-thumbed page that entranced only one mind. It was in the way the blanket coiled in a shape only one man made when he woke, head aching from never-plumped pillow with a depression the size of one and only one head. Look closer at the pillow, and you’ll see the snow-white hairs shed by the head. Sniff it, and you might pass out. It didn’t end there. The food on the counter: a blueprint of one man’s tastes—milk, milk, milk, a blob of smelly white butter, a few bedraggled ears of maize, pickle, pickle, pickle. Not one thing aligned with another.

He couldn’t let it be seen. It revealed too much. In fact, the thought of it being seen had already spoiled it. The thought of her cleaning his desk, plumping his pillow. He didn’t want it anymore.

She would fly to Vizag and climb into a hired car, step out with her son. They would regard him. She’d be even plumper, face lined, hair short. They wouldn’t embrace—they never embraced. Perhaps they would touch fingers, but it was unlikely. 

The last time he’d seen her, he was squashed in the mob at Bombay airport, all craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the departing travelers, who looked only ahead. They’d been silent on the ride to the airport, the walk to the gate. She’d plunged into the crowd with her huge suitcase, short and square and tough, and somehow bulldozed her way through until, after only a minute, her long braid was swinging by the guard. He stood for only a few minutes, his nose buried in someone’s oily hair, then turned and walked off.

He sat down at his desk again now and typed a new reply. “Come whenever you like. I’m making arrangements.”

He stacked his books in neat piles, folded his blanket, fluffed his pillow, hung up his clothes. He found the cow woman’s broom, and swept the floor, and the cobwebs on the wall and ceiling. He poured the milk into the earth outside and pushed the cot to one wall and the desk to the other. He shut the door carefully and walked to the bus stop by the highway, feet slap-slapping in the mud. The buses were still running; they had to get to the depot, where they’d likely call a halt and take stock of the weather. He meant to buy a ticket to only as far as Vizag, but when he boarded the bus—the few passengers buzzing with tension due to the now fast-moving storm—he asked for a ticket to Nellore, twelve hours south. Too harried to ask questions, the conductor sold him a ticket, which he tucked away in a fold of his lungi. He’d figure out what to do when he got off, wherever that was. When she stepped out of the car, hair tucked behind ears, clutching her bottled water, she would find nothing. Only order. ■

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