Goodbye

Saying goodbye means that by uttering the word ‘goodbye’, you have completed taking leave of the person. But before the end, before death comes to snatch you away by your hair or hand, you – the person about to die – have neither the time nor the privilege to engage in farewell rituals. So, to turn this abrupt departure into something a little more circuitous, we—the living—celebrate death with the same magnificence accorded only to events described in epics.

What scares us most in life is facing a situation that feels utterly out of control. We try to look for some hidden order, some secret meaning behind this chaos. And when we cannot find the pattern we expect, we devise our own conspiracy theory. We, therefore, are simultaneously both investigators and conspirators.

In other words, it is our primordial instinct to bring everything beyond our presumption within the scope of our hypothesis.

But the question is: why?

“Did you say something?” Ela, who was unpacking her bag and putting the folded clothes in the wardrobe, suddenly asked.

“Nope!” I frowned. How could she have known what I was thinking, let alone that I was thinking at all? How did she guess?

That was Ela for you. There was no chance in hell that you could let your attention wander if that woman was around. She would instantly catch the faintest whiff of your absent-mindedness and pounce on it. I replied hurriedly, “Freshen up. I will go down and wait at the reception.”

“I can freshen up right here in front of you,” smirked Ela.

I paid no attention to her and walked out.

The reception area here in this hotel, loftily named ‘Paradise’, consisted of two cheap plastic chairs in front of the counter. Sitting on one of them was a boy of thirteen or fourteen, manning the fort. That same boy, minutes ago, had run out to photocopy Ela’s voter ID card, and later would double up as room service. Right now, he was eyeing me with suspicion. I opened the book Chechallisher Danga – the 1946 Riots – by Sandip Bandopadhyay and started reading the chapter ‘Pratyakkha Sangram’ – ‘Direct Action’. That would definitely pique the brat’s curiosity.

After my Dadaji’s passing, we found a long-forgotten pamphlet tucked away in one of his drawers. It featured an old photograph of Jinnah, clutching a sword firmly in his hand. Something was scrawled underneath the image, but it was too old, too faded to be legible. However, if we refer to Shila Sen’s book, Muslim Politics in Bengal, we might conclude that the litany printed in said pamphlet could have been something like this: Do not lose hope. Go on, brandish your sword. The day of your destruction is nigh, you infidel.

The knowledge that my forebears had once identified themselves with such a battle cry was not exactly agreeable to me.

Could it be that the zeitgeist of the time – the unrest and consternation of that particular moment in history – had swallowed him up so utterly that he had lost his nature-given powers to judge straight and intelligibly?

‘The spirit of the time’ – let us all be mindful of this phrase. ‘The spirit of the time’ – a phrase which is almost like alcohol, for it is a phrase that creates a space of compulsive collectiveness where the individual’s self-expression remains unvoiced. ‘The spirit of the time’ – and we tend to forgive the actions of those who are addicted to this concept as something that they do not choose with their full faculties. We treat them exactly the way we pay half a mind to the doddering drunk, shuffling homeward and pontificating about his sorrows into the lonely night.

And that precisely is why we hope eternally that, once the zeitgeist fades into oblivion, we will find both forgiveness and our way back home.

But could Dadaji find someone to shelter him, to offer him security, however temporary? And why did he not eventually tear up Jinnah’s photograph into tiny, little pieces?

While discussing the dearly departed, we tend to separate their actions from their mortal bodies, as if, while they were alive, their bodies were mere vehicles to channel and carry forward their living deeds. And now that those vehicles of flesh are destroyed, these actions flutter around us. Like the souls. Like the wind.

While reading Chechhallisher Danga, my thoughts kept drifting back to that specific day: August 16th.

From across the huge gulf of time, I see… Dawn was just breaking. There were high winds that day, a wind white in colour, a wind like ghosts.

Back in the day, our village did not have electricity. So, the azaan never rang out through loudspeakers, something we are all used to today. That day, Dadaji had woken up to the four consecutive strikes of his old-fashioned alarm clock. The early morning prayer was just a few minutes away, and he still had his teeth to brush, his sehri to eat. Till that day, he hadn’t broken a single roza.

As Dadaji brushed his teeth with a datun, he noticed that curlicues of fog were slowly filling up the right side of the courtyard. His eyes began to smart as his mind brimmed with distrust.

It was a widow. An old, emaciated widow had woken up way too early to light her wooden oven with the sole purpose of filling up Dadaji’s yard with smoke.

That morning, he, Dadaji, had failed to recognise the widow.

Or the very whiteness of her widowhood at all.

Why? He breathed out the question as if a whistle escaped his lips, addressing her.

Just then, a face peeped through the thick curtain of smoke, a face that belonged to no one; the thin and vulpine face of suspicion.

And that indeed startled Dadaji.

On August 2nd, 1946, Jinnah was asked what the blueprints of direct action looked like to him. “I am not going to discuss ethics,” he answered. However, neither did Dadaji read all this in the newspapers, nor had he ever developed a habit of reading those things. In those days, the village mosques were busy organising prayer meetings for the success of the Direct Action, and it was quite possible that these prayer events were Dadaji’s source of information.

Now, the smoke was all but gone, and Dadaji was ready. There he was, heading towards the Brigade Ground.

Dadaji moved forward, one step at a time. Walking by him was his suspicion, just like a fox.

And an entire race was marching towards its complete annihilation—one step at a time.

The whole group from our village who travelled all this way to hear Suhrawardy’s speech had alighted from the train at the Sealdah station. From there, they would make a further pilgrimage to the Brigade Ground.

On the morning of August 16th, white sunlight shrouded the streets of Kolkata like an unmarked sheet of A4 paper. Men, a thousand dots of men, slid along its four edges. That morning, suspicion, flaky and powdery like dry skin, was breathing intimately on their moving bodies.

For the past few days, news of stray conflicts had been circulating around our neighbouring villages. One night, by the river, lay a corpse with its face thrust in the riparian sludge. Water coursed in and out of the open slit on its throat. Dawn saw a white egret resting majestically on the lifeless head. Some of the villagers still hoped that the high tide had brought the unknown dead from another unfortunate village and deposited the body on their side of the river as the water ebbed.

Someone upturned the body. It was Yasmin, who had joined the All-India Muslim League just about a month ago. Now, inside the yawning gash of his slit throat, nested mud and dirt and bits of grass.

The group that Dadaji was walking with halted just outside Bowbazar. Two people were killed at Manicktala while men with javelins patrolled Bowbazar. More news you could hear blowing in the wind — only if you paid attention.

After finishing the cherished sehri, as Dadaji tried to pour some water from a jug into his mouth, he stopped. What was it that arrested his moving hand? Was it the memory of the river water, or the corpse rolling gently in that water? Or was it the sudden flight of the white egret into the soft dawn’s dusky light? True, the exact reason was unknown, but it was clear that the early morning azaan cut across the middle of the invisible line that began from the mouth of the jug and ended on his lips.

Thus, at that exact moment, when he finished his sehri and the azaan sounded, his attempt to drink water had failed.

Now, hours after that abortive attempt, his dusty throat prickled with thirst, tongue felt like a lump of glue. But such minor issues should never be allowed to interrupt the pilgrimage. The group continued its endless walk.

“Hey, you, aren’t you Basir Ali? Basir Ali from Magura?”

“Yes!” Dadaji was alarmed as soon as the reply escaped his lips. Who was it that knew him intimately enough to ask this question? He looked around once furtively and resumed walking.

“You know Ramzan? Kader’s father? The house to the north of yours belonged to him, remember?”

“Who’s that? Who’s asking all these questions?”

“It’s me. Here I am.”

“Who are you?”

Dadaji could not see who was speaking to him.

“Remember? They were digging that new pond for Khaled Miyan, and Maniruddin caught a catfish, remember? How he ran with the fish hidden under his lungi! But, after all, Allah is the master of all our fates. It was not him, but his wife, Aktari, who got stung while cleaning the fish. What was it she said? The fishbone travelled up from the tip of her finger to her heart! And then what a pandemonium broke out! Don’t you remember anything?”

My Dadaji was about to swallow spit to wet his throat, but remembered at the crucial moment that if the glob slid past his tongue, his roza would automatically break. The group had already moved ahead. He quickened his pace to catch up, to hide himself in the crowd.

And his suspicion still walked with him.

But some forms of suspicion should be nourished, kept alive. Hearing footsteps on the stairs, I looked up from my book. The boy at the reception was still side-eyeing me distrustfully.

Ela came down to the reception, all freshened up. “Let’s go,” she commanded.

Her hair was damp. The lines of water that zigzagged from the sides of her ears into her t-shirt were not sweat. This water smelled alluringly of soap.

“Where do you want to have lunch?” asked Ela.

“You decide.”

Ela finger-combed her damp hair. “My initial plan was to eat Bengali food, since I have come to Kolkata after so many years. But that would be so typical, wouldn’t it? Let’s experiment instead,” she announced, and almost took me by my neck and dragged me onto the street.

There had been a short spell of rain without any of us in the hotel noticing it at all. The streets had turned into sticky channels of slush; an old lady had slipped and fallen, creating a frenzied chaos and a flurry of helpful activities around her.

Ela walked a few steps ahead of me. I watched her and marvelled at how gracefully she moved, entirely unaffected by the sludge and mud of Kolkata staining her feet, the back of her clothes. Thin arrows of slush sprayed upwards from the pressure of her slippers, appearing like fractious dialogues of a script that a playwright hadn’t bothered giving any meaning to. As if they existed simply because they were supposed to. And their absence wouldn’t have really mattered.

“Why are you carrying around that book like a stage prop?” Ela demanded. “Could have left it in the room, couldn’t you? Don’t you dare start reading it at lunch.”

“You’re right.” I changed the subject. “Why have you come back to Kolkata, Ela? You haven’t given me a clear answer yet.”

“Can’t I come back? I was born here, spent my college life here; what does it matter if I don’t live here anymore? Is there a specific moment when love for your birthplace must end?”

“Oh, I get it. Nostalgia, right?”

“Nostalgia.” Ela turned back. “N for Nostalgia. Understand, you moron?”

“Sure do. Meaning you’re still letting me stew. Still a mystery.”

“Something like that.” Ela stopped abruptly, “Can we try dosa for lunch?”

The light shower from before resumed as soon as we stepped into the restaurant. It continued throughout our meal.

Ela mused, “If I can somehow finish that job today itself, I’ll have two whole days to myself. By the way, you’re also coming with me.”

“I have taken leave from my office already. But where exactly are we going?”

She didn’t answer; instead, she turned her full attention to the potato filling of the large roll of masala dosa that sat in front of her.

“Ela, did you hear me at all?”

“Hold on, I’m wondering.”

“About what?”

She peeked into my book. “About why you’ve suddenly decided to write a story on the 1946 riots.”

“What story? There’s no story; I’m reading it just because. Yes, there are some images in my head, but they are not coagulating into a story just yet.”

“Keep at it. You’ll make it happen.”

“I can feel it already!”

Ela became restless as soon as the rain stopped. “Let’s get moving. The visiting hours will start soon, and we can’t be late.”

“For the hundredth time, Ela, where are we going?”

“To see my in-laws.”

Apparently, Kolkata taxi drivers were still quite mindful of women; Ela managed to summon a taxi at the very first try. She probably realised I had detected a shade of suppressed tension on her face. Once we were in the taxi, she softened slightly and shared parts of the day’s itinerary.

For some time now, her former father-in-law had been suffering from various ailments typical of old age. About two weeks prior, he had a massive stroke, resulting in a completely paralysed right side. And now, we were making a trip to the hospital where he was admitted.

Ela climbed out of the taxi, remained standing for the fraction of a second, as if desperately trying to gather her scattered wits about her, and then stepped inside the hospital entrance all by herself, leaving me behind.

She didn’t turn back even once. I watched her go.

There she was, moving beyond the gate, beyond the emergency unit … I could still see her, far inside the building. And then she was gone, lost among the anxious crowd of the hospital.

Her ‘walking away’ and my Dadaji’s pilgrimage to the Brigade Ground— these journeys were not mutually divergent; at one point in history, the line that their motions etched out may have even intersected.

Ela was moving back in time to her former relationships, former loves, to those she’d lost. Within this journey was concealed a sense of coming back.

Dadaji, on the other hand, made every step forward to evade his previous one. And thus, when his scepticism appeared to him as a thin-faced fox, constantly reciting the names of the villages and the homes now gone, he felt only too disconcerted. The act of ‘walking away’ for Dadaji was primarily a process of un-connecting his self from his memories, a hope that this process would lead him to an external space. And there he would stay. Here, memory was like a pregnant womb – escaping from this womb was the only way for the living to acquire their own identity.

Yes, on August 16th, 1946, the fluid of miscarried memories stained Dadaji’s skin.

Ela was uncharacteristically silent once she came back from visiting the ailing man. I offered her hot tea in a clay cup; she first took a very long drag of her cigarette before accepting.

The entire evening, we roamed around Dharamtala. Ela had a glass of fruit juice from the roadside juice stall, picked up a 750 ml bottle of rum, and ended up confiding in me that the coarse and sandy poison of jealousy was abrading the insides of her very skull!

It was already 10.30 pm when I escorted Ela back to her hotel. As for myself, I could just about catch the last train home.

If you search Direct Action Day on any search engine, a grainy, black-and-white photo of a crowd comes up. I squinted at the photo. In it, a group of men stared ahead, evidently listening to someone or something, their faces hazy, out of focus. I zoomed in, trying to see those faces more clearly, but the image quality was so bad that all I got was a screen full of pixels.

Dadaji’s whereabouts during those three days could not be traced; for three days, he had simply vanished. My Abba, who was about five or six at the time, could not remember much, only the quick, whispered conversations about Dadaji being lost forever.

How did Dadaji spend those three days in a city devastated by deaths? Where did he spend them? Did he have to witness any killing?

That night I dreamt of a fox licking all the ink marks zigzagging the sheet of white paper; was it trying to erase them?

Ela’s call came the next day, as I was getting ready for work. “Come over,” she said imperiously.

I arrived at the hotel to find Ela chatting away with the young boy at the reception. Her face was so free of tension that I was unsure for a moment. Was this the woman from last evening, or someone else?

Ela introduced me to the boy. “That’s Bharat, Bharat Shah. But maybe we can call him Bhaarot – India? Tell me, Bhaarot, you wouldn’t get angry if we did, right?”

The boy looked at me and grinned.

Then we—all three of us—got out of the hotel. Another employee had stepped in for Bharat and was handling the reception desk.

Just like yesterday, today too, I had no idea where we were going.

Our taxi stopped at Mominpur, a neighbourhood in South Kolkata. Bharat had decided to celebrate this unexpected day off by putting on a pair of cheap, plastic sunglasses. Ela walked around, clicking pictures of everything possible along the road with her DSLR.

Beside Mominpur Police Station is a hand-pulled rickshaw stand. From there, take a sharp turn to the right, and you’ll find Priyanka Studio. Ela walked past the studio, took yet another right turn, and stood in front of a narrow alley.

So far, we blindly followed her. Ela pointed at a new three-storey building and said, “That’s the house number 18B there.”

“Is that so?” I turned to Bharat, slightly astonished. He, too, looked a little dumbfounded.

Ela began delivering a lecture in her special professor-like voice, “Here once lived the late and lamented Panna Chatterjee, but obviously not in this particular house. At that time, a one-storey building stood in its place, shared by four brothers and their families. On the evening of the 16th August, that house was attacked, and three of the brothers were brutally killed. Only the fourth, Hiranath, was found the next morning in the bathroom—alive but still unconscious.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Ela?”

Without showing any interest in me or my words, she turned to Bharat. “Mr Bhaarot, do you understand at all what I’m trying to say here? Listen. Strain your ears, you’ll be able to hear it too – the angry, hateful drone of 30 or 40 men, the echo of their collective footsteps along this very road, moving towards us. Look at that man, he just walked by us with a sword in his hand. Can you see him?”

Bharat, who was staring stupidly at Ela all this while, did not quite know how to react to this theatrical outburst. Then he saw my face and grinned. Seeing him, Ela too smiled.

“You see…” Ela let the sentence hang and lit a cigarette once we left the mouth of the alley and resumed when we stepped onto the main road, “It’s a blessing to have in one’s life a corrupt police officer for an ex-husband. A lot of otherwise impossible situations become so damned easy.”

“I can see.”

Ela didn’t elaborate.

That day—the day of 16th August—some young men from Khidirpur had gone to the Ballygunge Lake for a dip. On their way home, they heard about a stray skirmish in Bhowanipur and found that the area had remained on edge ever since.

The skirmish happened like this – around late morning, some locals had a bit of an altercation with a grocer about the opening of his shop during a day-long cease-work, which led to a fist fight, and ended up in the grocer being stabbed.

The entire afternoon, a heavy, tense silence hung over the area until the time of the Maghrib azaan—and then a cry of Naara-e-Takbeer rose into the air.

‘Pathakbari’, the house belonging to the Pathaks, a Hindu family, was smoothly bombed.

Including Pathakbari and another house belonging to one Shishir Sarkar, there were only a handful of Hindu households in this area. The sound of the blast had prompted them to nervously switch off all the lights. That particular part—the Hindu part of the neighbourhood—was eerily silent; the houses were wrapped with thick rugs of fear, and under the rugs huddled the living, breathing, stuck to each other’s frightened skins.

Did the stray dogs come to their doors to ululate mournfully?

Did our Shishir-babu place an ear to the door to listen to the dogs’ yowling?

From the terrace of the house, a procession could be seen, a procession with burning mashaals circling the area.

A procession that howled Allahu-Akbar again and again and again.

The women and children hid in a room with its door locked from the outside, the key to the lock was in Shishir Babu’s pocket. Shishir Babu, with a gun in his hand, now made a furtive trip to the terrace.

The column chanting Naara-e-Takbeer, with mashaals glowing in their raptorial hands, inexorably surged forward. The trees and the sky retreated into a deep abyss of silence. Shishir Babu aimed his gun.

One…two…three…fire!

Then came the darkness.

Then came a clanging sound—the collapsible gate was being wrecked. The noise clambered up the walls and stuck to the corners. It was later said that Tapati, Shishir Babu’s widowed elder sister, had once cried out in barely suppressed hysteria, “Why is nobody coming for us from the roof? Why is nobody coming for us yet?”

Moments before the hand came down on him and took possession of his – their – entire beings, Shishir Babu waited, waited with the gun in his hand. Alone…

The eldest of Shishir Babu’s two grandsons had settled in Bangalore. It was the youngest, Subhash, with whom we had come to talk.

It appeared that Ela had already made an appointment with Subhash, and typically, by now, without telling me anything about it. She admitted that she had to spin a little tale. Apparently, we were on an assignment to write an article on Direct Action Day for The Hindu, and I was her co-writer.

“What about Bharat?” I asked.

“He is only accompanying us. You know, just a hanger-on.”

“And what happens if Subhash Babu asks for our ID cards?”

“Listen.” Ela flashed a conspiratorial smile, “As I said, everyone needs to have at least one corrupt police officer in their life.”

Inevitably, we were now sitting in front of Subhash Babu.

Subhash appeared to be the same age as me, about 35 or 36. The house looked like no renovation had been done in a long time, even though the room we were sitting in had an AC blasting cool air.

Subhash’s wife brought us tea, biscuits and plates piled with sweets.

Bharat was already lovingly eyeing the sweets. With Ela’s silent consent, he got busy chomping down on them.

Ela rapidly took photos of the room and the couple. “Tell us something about that day,” she prompted.

Subhash gave his wife a quick glance. “I don’t remember much, actually. Better you ask questions, and I answer.”

“Perfect,” Ela stopped clicking pictures and asked, “May I smoke in here?”

Subhash’s wife switched off the AC and opened the windows.

Ela began her questioning, perfectly imitating the demeanour of an experienced journalist, “To begin with, I think we should share our concept with you. That way, you’ll be able to talk more freely, and in turn, it will help us. You see, we’re looking to write this feature from a different angle. Our idea is to collect the stories about the Direct Action Day that have passed down for generations in the victims’ families – stories that have never been archived in history books.”

“Right.” Subhash looked grave.

Ela took a sip of her tea. “Now, tell me what your parents told you about that day.”

“My father was very young then, and my mother was from Burdwan, far from Kolkata. There was no riot there, as far as I know.”

“Tell us about your father then.”

“So, there was…” Subhash stopped. Evidently, he was combing his memory for all those forgotten stories from his childhood—stories his father used to tell him when other children were still listening to fairy tales.

Ela told Subhash to stand facing the window. Just beyond it lay the congested streets of Khidirpur; ear-splitting noise from never-ending traffic floated over into the room. I wondered whether Ela’s camera could truly freeze these ever-changing moments for eternity.

“You were telling us about your father.”

“Yes.” Subhash came back from the window and sat on the chair. “My father remembered almost nothing. As I said, he was very young at the time. And yet, any mention of the events would terrify him; he lost his own father in the attack after all…that’s all, really… but they did not lay their hands on the women. They took all the money, though. After it happened, my grandmother left the house with my father to go and live with her own family. She stayed with them for a long time – almost a year. She could finally come back to this house after 1947, after Independence.”

“She never considered selling this house? I mean, it must have been very difficult for her to keep living in the same house where her husband was killed in front of her very eyes.”

“Indeed.”

“Maybe she knew some of the people who attacked your…may I be direct with you…your family that day, maybe she even ran into them from time to time when she went out. Wasn’t it almost unbearable to keep going on every day with this possibility?”

Subhash stared at us. Kept on staring. He didn’t answer or react.

A society is defined by the very words it decides to silence, to hide – this profundity wasn’t uttered by Ela. After I returned home that day from Subhash’s, it came to me while I was looking at the picture of Jinnah with the sword. But how would we know what words are left out and what are included?

Dadaji could not be tracked for three days after he left home to attend Suhrawardy’s speech. He may have found shelter at the house of a mutual friend. It could have been in Khidirpur, Mominpur, or perhaps in Ekbalpur. Maybe there were booms of tear gas shells exploding nearby or far away. Rumours circulated that a slum at Garcha was burnt to the ground. They had torched the shoe market in College Street; the massive orange blaze dancing on the horizon was visible from miles away. Entally too was burning. Maybe all this news and rumours had made Dadaji flinch.

I could see my father now. Abba, then a five-year-old boy, stood gazing down the dirt track that looped away from his house. This road was bringing his father home.

Dadaji rushed forward and picked up his child. And then, holding the son, kissing his cheeks, he almost slunk into his house.

The next day, by the time I reached Paradise hotel after a gruelling day at the office, Ela had got a sizeable amount of work done. Bharat lay unconscious on the floor of her hotel room. The white roll of paper that still smouldered between his index and middle fingers most certainly did not have tobacco.

Ela drawled, “Come, sit here next to me. Tell me about your story. Have you completed it?”

“I’m a little scared, see. Haven’t started writing it yet. But what are you doing? You let him smoke hash in his workplace? Do you have any idea what the fallout would be if word got out? Nothing would happen to you, of course, but he would lose his job then and there.”

“His name, such a sweet name he has.” Ela was tottering, I could see; I fed her some food. Now she could sleep it off.

“Have you eaten anything? Shall I order snacks?” Ela slurred and fell back onto the bed. She stayed like that for a long time, without moving or turning around even once. Then she sat bolt upright and asked, “So, why exactly are you not writing the story?”

After she washed her face and regained a little normalcy, she listened to my account of unearthing the picture of Jinnah and pointed out, “Does it matter that much? Maybe he kept the picture in the drawer and simply forgot about it? It happens; nobody remembers everything.”

But I could not really agree with her. “My family made a conscious choice. A choice to attempt to forget the truth. Otherwise, why am I discovering it now, after so many years?”

“Truth?” Ela almost howled with laughter, “Truth…truth…truth…is almost like the vagina of the family’s youngest daughter. Everybody knows it exists, but nobody wants to face it directly.”

Ela had already prepared a couple of extra joints. We started with alcohol the moment the hash was finished. I was already worn out from the office, and with all the smoking and drinking on top of it, I could barely keep my eyes open. Ela finally asked the very thing that had probably been eating both our insides for the past few days, “What do you want from me?”

Was there any way to squarely answer questions like this? I had turned away, but she cupped my chin and pulled my face towards her. I wasn’t going to discuss ethics.

Ela had climbed down from the bed, and now she was standing naked in front of me. She glanced down at her body and calmly revealed, “I’m menstruating. But I’m not going to discuss ethics.”

With that being said, that night she climbed on my supine body. I remember the bed moving and shaking with every thrust. I could not even look at Ela, but knew the blood flowing out of her was drenching me, my skin, my body.

When I woke up the next morning, the room was empty. No Ela. No Bharat. Ela’s rucksack was also gone.

I rushed to the wardrobe and opened it. Empty.

My head went blank.

I still don’t know how long I was there. I just sat there on the blood-soaked sheets for maybe an hour. Or it could be two.

Ela had already paid for her stay before leaving. By the time I finally managed to stand up, walk out of the room and leave the hotel, it was almost two in the afternoon.

Ela’s flight was scheduled to take off at 2.15. Right now, she could be busy checking in. I would get an engaged tone if I called her number, or she would have already switched off her mobile phone.

Should I send her a WhatsApp message saying goodbye?

I debated these questions while wandering aimlessly.

Did not even realise when I had walked into the hovel of a tea stall by the roadside.