On The Ashtamudi

It’s a Saturday, the first week of April. The first April of the new century, the new millennium. And she, Zainab, has prickly heat on her back. The hard coir-stuffed mattress she’s been sleeping on and sweating into hasn’t helped. It takes in the heat of the air, her body’s heat and the heat of the ghosts of previous residents of this hostel who’d also sweated and panted through fifty years’ worth of Aprils, and now bursts through her skin in red, itchy boils. Her brown back is dotted with them.

“Looks painful,” Tara, her classmate she shares this room with, had said the evening before. “Use this.” She had handed Zainab a bottle of Nycil as she rushed out the door to catch her train to Ernakulam.

Now, after her morning bath and towelling dry, Zainab has powdered herself with Nycil. There’s some relief. She can see, as she twists and turns before the mirror and counts the boils, the reflection of the small owl that roosts in the mango tree outside their window. It fluffs up, opens one eye and stares at her: a feathered cyclops.

Zainab turns away from the mirror and starts putting on clothes. She should probably close the window and do this, but that would make the room even warmer. Besides, theirs is one of the last rooms of their hostel block, at the farthest end of the compound, a place where even the watchmen don’t bother coming during their evening rounds. Burglars and senior boys on semester-end pranks have been deterred by tales of cobras who’ve bitten intruders, monitor lizards that made friends with some of the residents generations ago, and mongoose matriarchs that consider this corner of the world their queendoms. And, of course, ghosts. Since these buildings have tiled roofs and rafters there’s an abundance of tales of suicides by hanging, featuring lovelorn engineering students. Tara had scoffed at these stories when they’d first moved in — she found it hard to believe any woman would kill themselves over love in an engineering college. Who would end their lives over these men? Seriously, who?

Zainab watches the owl as she brushes her hair. Her mother used to tell her how her Hameed mama used to sing to owls when he was a child. “Your uncle loved animals and birds and insects. He could talk to them and seduce them to come sit on his lap or his open palms.” Apparently, he had convinced most birds and animals to do this — except the owls. The owls didn’t come to him but they responded to his song.

Mohideenkutty, her uncle would sing.

Hmmmuuu-uh? The owl would reply.

Nee elle panni? (Confusion rose in Zainab’s mind — why ask an owl if it’s a pig? But the song had no logic and her mother evaded Zainab’s questions.)

The owl would reply: hmmmmuu. In the affirmative. I am a pig.

Her mother would fall back on the sofa once she’d finished singing this song and laugh until the tears rolled down her cheeks. Zainab sings now: Mohideenkutty.

The owl doesn’t respond.

She’s just one of ten girls staying back in the hostel for the Easter holidays so there’s no canteen service. The hostel warden has taken the bus home to Alappuzha that morning so there are just two clerks in the office, fanning themselves with old copies of Vanitha. They greet Zainab in Malayalam (when she first came to Kollam she found their accents hard to follow and had to ask them to repeat themselves and they humoured her because a Thrissurkaari like her was, to them, a visitor from another planet. No one from the rest of Kerala speaks like you people from Thrissur, they would say. And they’d giggle when she spoke. We love hearing you speak — speak some more. Tara would put a stop to it, snapping that Zainab was not a performing animal). They ask her if she’s eaten anything.

“No,” she replies.

“You girls should really eat better,” Sumangala, the older woman, tuts.

“I bet Zainab doesn’t even have a loaf of bread in her room. Do you, Zainab?” Reshma asks her.

Tara detests these women. Too nosy, she always says. They seem to know the full inventory of possessions of each hostel resident.

“I bet she doesn’t have a packet of biscuits either,” Sumangala adds.

“I will go to Chinnakada in a while,” Zainab says. “I will meet my friend there and maybe we will go eat a dosa or something.”

“Write in the gate pass register, don’t forget,” Reshma says.

At the end of each month, Tara once told Zainab, these women sit and tally who has gone where and when, and spin every kind of story based on what’s written in that damn register. They say they track us for our safety and yet they don’t do anything about the flashers who stand just outside the hostel gates and open their lungis exposing themselves. Safety, Tara had sneered. What safety?

Zainab goes to the little phone kiosk by the side of the office and once inside, lifts the receiver and dials the code on her BSNL voucher. You have three hundred and ninety-nine rupees in your account, the automated female voice informs her. She dials the number. She waits. Soft murmurs from the office reach her in the kiosk. Sumangala and Reshma are talking. Probably about the friend Zainab has said she’s going to meet.

She’s one of the designated good girls in the hostel. This is something she’d actually heard the warden say one day when she was walking towards the little wicket gate that the girls use to get onto the main college campus.

There she is, the warden had said loudly. Zainab — one of the most responsible students here. Always pays her fees on time and never breaks curfew. Her roommate, however…

Zainab didn’t hear what the warden said about Tara but she could guess. Tara, loud and argumentative, demanding to know why the canteen food varied wildly in quality from day to day and why the utility charges were being increased without enough warning. Tara, who always paid the hostel fees a week after the due date. Tara, whose father died in the Island Express crash in the Ashtamudi Lake when she was just seven years old and whose mother was a ferocious lawyer in the High Court in Ernakulam, was no favourite of the hostel warden or the college principal. If their professors at the architecture department didn’t have an unwritten rule against students joining the college union, Tara would have been a flag bearer in the committee, enthusiastically participating in strikes and breaking water pipes to the hostels at the end of semesters to delay the exams. When they’d gone on their South India study tour in January, Tara had been the only girl to share her train berth with one of their male classmates, Sajan. On their return to the college, the warden pulled Zainab aside and asked her if she wanted another room or a roommate. It could be arranged, the warden had said as she squeezed Zainab’s arm. You needn’t live with immoral women.

But Zainab had shrugged off the help and the syrupy advice on how to preserve her virtue. Maybe it helped to have Tara as a foil so that she could do things like this, make local calls and say she was going to meet a friend in town without anyone asking for too many details. She was too sensible, too stolid, to excite speculation.

Someone finally picks up the phone and a voice says hello at the other end of the line. In the background, she can hear voices speaking in English. One of them is his.

They first saw each other one afternoon the previous November. She was sitting next to her classmate Dechen on the steps of the small storage shed on the north side of the college football field. He was in midfield in a yellow jersey with the number 10 on it. A playmaker.

He made a play: threaded a ball between two defenders to the central striker. The striker rolled the ball back to him and he played it to the winger who’d appeared to the left of the net. A deft touch from the right foot of the winger and the ball was firmly in the goal. They wheeled away to celebrate on the sidelines where she sat with Dechen. Around them, the college students cheered and hollered. Dechen whistled.

He looked at Dechen and smiled and turned to Zainab and his mouth parted into a wide grin that reached his eyes and into her. She couldn’t stop herself from smiling back. He waved at Dechen and her.

“Who is he?” she asked as he trotted back to his place on the field.

“Deepak,” Dechen replied. “He’s in the Civil Engineering department. Fifth semester.” “He’s the captain?”

“Yeah — he’s rather good. He was captain of his school team back in Thimphu.” For the rest of the game, she watched him, wiry and strong, making clever passes and setting up goals that were hardly ever converted. The match ended in a tie but their college team progressed to the next round and he came by to speak to Dechen.

As Dechen spoke to him in Dzongkha he looked over her shoulder to where Zainab stood leaning against the blue storage shed door. He interrupted Dechen’s flow to extend his hand to her and said, “I am Deepak Pradhan. And you are?”

Zainab, she replied and her hand was clasped in his and she could feel the warmth of his palm on hers. Dechen continued to speak and he held her hand till she pulled it away. When he finally said he had to go and attend an evening lecture, Dechen said oh that’s too bad and he said he hoped to see her around. And to Zainab he said I hope to see you around, too. It took her a month to go to Dechen and ask her about Deepak. A month in which she sat on Thursday afternoons in the architecture section of the college library and instead of going through the volumes of Frank Lloyd Wright monographs and admiring the long, clean lines and cantilevered wooden beams of Taliesin West as she usually did to reassure herself this was her calling, she sketched Deepak in his yellow jersey running with a football at his feet.

When she wasn’t drawing him in the library, she was writing a long letter to him explaining that she would like to meet him. And why she would like to meet him. Why she felt a thrill move through her bones at the thought of meeting him, just him, and to look at him again and have him look at her like he did that evening at the football match.

The night Zainab went to speak to Dechen she found her chopping chillies and potatoes along with another Bhutanese student, Tshering. They were making kewa datshi on the hotplate Dechen was allowed to keep in her room (they need, the hostel warden explained to the other girls who were not allowed this exception to the rules, to eat their own food as they won’t be happy always eating our matta rice and sambar). Dechen and Tshering invited Zainab to join them and she watched them add slices of Amul cheese into the pot and the stew turned a creamy yellow. They offered her a bowl with slices of Modern milk bread and she listened to them talk about their compatriots. Who was doing well in their courses. Who had coupled up and whether it would last. Who would, from the group of around thirty-five in this college in the southern reaches of Kerala, return to Bhutan to the cushiest government job. Zainab thought back to the first time she and Dechen had ever spoken, probably the first day of the first year at college. Dechen had sat alone on a bench in front of the class and Zainab had gone and sat next to her. It would be some time before she’d be honest enough to admit to herself that she’d done so because Dechen stood out in that class, her light skin, high cheekbones and hazel eyes so different from the rest of the students. And because she’d been the first to break the ice with Dechen, they’d become friends. Not as close as she was with Tara, but close enough that she could confess things to her. Also, during their South India tour, they had gone to Planet M on Brigade Road in Bangalore and Zainab had bought a cassette of Tracy Chapman’s greatest hits that Dechen regularly borrowed from her. The two of them had sung along to Fast Car on the train back to Kollam and would do so in the hostel as well for many days and weeks afterwards.

So now Zainab, on the strength of their closeness, their bond, and their love for Chapman, felt comfortable enough to ask: “What about Deepak?”

Dechen said, “What about him?”

“How is he doing? I didn’t see him or the team play after that match.”

“I think they lost the next one and are out of the tournament,” Tshering said. “Tshering follows up on them,” said Dechen. “I can’t stand football.”

Zainab looked down at her empty bowl and let a few seconds pass before asking, “So is he married?” Some of the Bhutanese students were older and some, she knew, did have wives and husbands and children back home.

“Deepak? No,” Dechen said. “Why do you ask?”

It was Tshering, who she barely knew, who guessed: “Do you like him Zainab?” She wasn’t sure how to answer and shifted in the wooden chair and straightened the edge of her kurta and decided it was best to be honest. “Yes, I think so.”

Tshering let out a squeal and said oh you should tell him and he is a nice guy and you should go out with him for a movie or something.

“Or maybe she shouldn’t,” Dechen said. The ice in her voice stabbed the air. “Why would you say something like that?” Tshering was furious, her perfectly oval face reddening. “Why shouldn’t she tell him?”

“People we care about shouldn’t get hurt.” Dechen looked at Zainab. “You’re both very different. Forget it.”

Zainab asked, “What’s wrong with being different?”

Dechen shook her head. “I am surprised you’re asking that question. There’s nothing in it.”

Tshering said, “There doesn’t have to be anything in it. It can be just a nice way to pass the time.”

“Feelings aren’t a timepass.”

“Well, let people who actually feel be a judge of that,” Tshering said, rolling her eyes. The little gathering broke up after that — there would only be nastiness in the conversation after this and Dechen had yawned and said she wanted to sleep. They washed the plates together at the sinks near the bathrooms at the back of the block and returned to their rooms. That night, waiting for sleep to come, Zainab decided to send the letter to Deepak’s hostel the next morning.

He wrote back and asked her to call him and when she did, he asked her if she would like to go to Zest Bakery at the Karicode junction. They met and drank grape juice in thick glass tumblers and he paid. She said she could pay for hers. He smiled and asked her if a boy had never bought her something. She said no, she wasn’t the type of girl boys would buy things for. Let me change that, he said.

They went out with the rest of the Bhutanese students to movies and trips to the park by the Ashtamudi. They ate pizza in Bishop Jerome Nagar shopping centre and at Supreme Bakery in Chinnakada he bought her cashew pastries and they sat at one of two tables in the bakery’s tiny dining area and spoke about their childhoods.

She learned the names of his four siblings and he learned her sister’s name and the colour of her parents’ home in Thrissur and the fact that she no longer prayed despite being a devout child growing up. He asked her if she kept fasts for Ramadan in the hostel and she said she’d tried the previous year but she couldn’t manage it beyond a week.

He spoke Nepali at home. It was his mother tongue. And so Zainab got a crash course in Bhutanese-Nepalese politics and tensions, something that she’d never imagined existed because she had no reason to be interested in such things before she met Deepak. She now knew that the Nepalese minority in Bhutan were not considered wholly Bhutanese. She was invested in the narrative of the minority, of their pain.

Deepak said his parents were not refugees. “My family has lived there for many generations and we are citizens. But we have some distant relatives who live near Phuentsholing in the camps. They don’t have the same rights as us.”

“Do they treat you differently?” she asked him. No, he said. My friends don’t care about these things.

Zainab thought Dechen was wrong when she said she and Deepak would have nothing in common. This was something they had in common: the knowledge of being different from the rest. Knowing that they stood apart even when in a group. A detail from their private selves that marked them in the world outside and which was a part of their beings as much as their brown skin.

For Zainab, it was burned into her, this element that made her different, when she watched that mosque being brought down on a grainy news broadcast in Muscat a few weeks after she’d turned 12. It was called forth a week later, this elemental difference, when one of the school admin staff rushed in during maths class and asked the Muslim children to stand up. She was one of four who stood up in her class of forty in that school for Indian expats. Her hands clutched the top of her desk while they were counted. She could feel the glossy polish of the wood and the initials carved by students on its underside over the years. The four of them sat down once the count was done. The hum of the air conditioner had filled the quiet and then the teacher, Mr. D’souza, had cleared his throat and gone back to explaining algebra.

So there, she told the version of Dechen that appeared in her mind, I find in his existence and the way he moves through the world echoes of the way I do.

In the April heat, she walks to Karicode junction by taking a shortcut through the college lawns. The mango trees are laden with fruit and the security guards are walking around with baskets and long sticks with green nets at their ends. One of them, Prakash, says hello and asks where she’s going at this time of day.

“To Chinnakada,” she replies. “For lunch.”

“Take an umbrella with you. It’s going to be a scorching afternoon,” he says. He dips his hand into the basket he’s carrying and brings out two of the fruit oozing sap from the top. “Here, for you.” She takes the fruit and puts them in the outer pocket of her bag.

She doesn’t go to the bus stop directly and instead enters the mostly empty internet cafe. The young man who runs it points to one of the booths at the back. She avoids pressing too hard on the sticky keyboard when logging on. Tara had shown her what the men browse — some of them deliberately forget to log off and so the women who take their turn at the machines are confronted with an avalanche of badly photoshopped porn. “Honestly,” Tara had hissed when they had sat at a booth together and pictures of topless women popped up, “have these people not seen real breasts?” The women had big opaque black circles drawn over their natural nipples. “It’s like a five-year-old’s idea of breasts,” Zainab had said and they had both burst out laughing and some of the men in the booths nearby had clicked their tongues in annoyance and walked out.

She opens her email and sees a message from her father. The first half of it is stiff and formal, explaining that he’s put some money in her SBI account and that he will be investing five thousand rupees in her name in a mutual fund that a friend of his, Mr. Farooq Habib, has assured him outperforms the market regularly. He drops the formal tone further down and tells her that his parents are expecting her call this weekend and not to disappoint them because she is their favourite grandchild. Yes, they love her even more than they love her younger brother who is not doing as well in chemistry as he should be if he wants to get into a good engineering college like she has done. Her mother will travel to Kerala in May and if Zainab wants something from Muscat she should send a list soon so they can buy and keep things ready. He hopes it’s not getting too hot and that she has friends she can be with during the Easter holidays. It would have been better if she had gone to her grandparents’ home in Kodungallur but he understands that she has assignments to finish.

Zainab considers replying to him right away and she starts a draft but she cannot find the words so easily. She logs out of her email account, walks out of the booth, pays at the counter, and then walks to the bus stop. She lets two red KSRTC buses pass by without climbing on board. The back of the buses where the passengers have to enter are crowded with male bodies. She knows what those bodies can do and will do: fingers, hands, and genitals all creep towards passing female flesh to push and pinch and she will shove and scratch and shout. This is a drama she doesn’t want today or any other day of her life and she waits for a relatively empty blue private bus. Once on board, she buys her five rupee ticket to Chinnakada and sits in front by herself and the hot wind blows on her face.

She had assignments to finish and that’s what she’d told her parents when they’d called her the previous Sunday and asked her why she was staying back in college during the long Easter break. What she didn’t tell them was that these assignments, to plan and sketch out interior views of an optician’s store, could have been done at her grandparents’ house. What she didn’t tell them was that the day before the call she had gone with Deepak to the only theatre in town that showed English movies and they had watched The Beach together. And at some point when Leo and Tilda were making unwise moves, Deepak had leaned over and touched her cheek with his hand. He’d turned her face to his and their mouths had met and she’d experienced her first kiss at the age of 19. It had been short and not unpleasant and not the wetness and stickiness and questionable smell and taste she’d been expecting. She hadn’t felt anything right then besides a heat radiating from her just kissed mouth to her cheeks and ears. She’d licked her lips and tasted salt on them and she guessed that was him: a salty trace on her mouth.

Later that night, on her bed in her room, she’d responded to Tara’s questions about her trip to the theatre with the briefest of answers. Once the light in the room was out, she’d thought of that kiss. She felt its aftershocks then: a sudden need to have Deepak above her on the bed, his mouth on hers, his hand on her breast and between her thighs. Him kissing her wrists and her hip. She touched herself wherever she wanted him to touch her and when in a few moments something had released within her and she’d felt a warm calm settle on her, she’d fallen asleep.

The next morning she’d looked in the mirror and seen her glowing face and thought, so that’s why it’s so good for the skin. Tara’s jokes about having Sajan as the best possible skin tonic, shared with their female classmates who knew what the two of them had been up to on that train berth during the South India tour, made sense now. For a week she glowed, radiant, a lit bulb. No one else seemed to notice, not Tara, not Dechen. But then no one quite looked at her much anyway so this wasn’t surprising.

When she gets down at Chinnakada, Zainab still has two hours to while away. The sun hides behind a large grey cloud and she decides to visit the bookstore near the YMCA. She unfurls her umbrella and starts walking.

The bookshop, when she enters it, is mercifully cool and she greets the owner who sees her sweat-beaded face and the dampness on her back and asks her if she has a death wish. She laughs and says she didn’t think it worth paying twenty rupees to take an auto for a two-minute ride. Mr. Mohan, the bookshop owner, shakes his head.

She browses the cramped shelves of the small store and finds a Penguin Classics edition of Greyfriars Bobby. She gets a Wodehouse of which she has fond memories from school, The Old Reliable. When she pays for the books at the counter Mr. Mohan asks her how she’s finding hostel life.

“This week has been peaceful,” she says.

“It used to be the old railway quarters some thirty years ago. For staff who worked on the Quilon-Madras metre gauge.”

“One of the seniors did tell me about that,” Zainab says as she watches him wrapping the books in brown paper. “He said it was only men who used to stay there. When the number of female students increased the college didn’t want to spend money building new accommodation so they just bought these buildings.”

“Those courtyards in the middle must be a blessing in the summer,” Mr. Mohan says. “Keeps you cool when the rest of us are sweltering.”

“Honestly it gets so hot that even those don’t help.”

She bids him goodbye and walks, this time to Bishop Jerome Nagar. What an odd name for a shopping centre, she’d told her mother when they first came to Kollam for her college admission. Almost a year ago she’d gone with her classmates to make a case study of the design and someone from the bishop’s office had taken them to the top of the central tower where a room with stained glass windows gave a bird’s eye view of Kollam town. She’d stood there with Tara and Dechen and the others and taken in the cool breeze that had sprung up after a night of heavy rain and brought the smell of the sea to them. The bishop’s assistant had asked her where home was.

Thrissur, she had said and the man, dressed in white robes, a priest himself, had pointed to the ceiling. The stained glass, he said, was made in Irinjalakuda. Did you know they have experts in stained glass there?

No, she hadn’t known that.

The sun emerges from behind the cloud and is reflecting off the glass when she reaches the mall and she feels the need to drink something cold so she heads to Chef King where she orders a lemon soda and downs it in one long gulp. She orders a chicken sandwich and takes her time eating it. She still has an hour to go before she meets him.

Deepak is lying down on the grass by the play area when she reaches the park. She calls out to him and he sits up. She joins him on the grass. He smells of eucalyptus. It’s just the two of them here and if he reaches out to kiss her she would have let him. But he doesn’t. Instead, he touches her arm and says that he’s sorry they couldn’t have lunch together. One of his friends wanted help with coursework. She finds that now that he’s touching her and it’s something she’s intensely desired this past week, the prickly heat and the sun make her not want it as much.

“Let’s get a paddleboat and get out on the water?” Deepak asks her. “It will be cooler there.” He puts on his green baseball cap and she fishes out a white bucket hat from her bag and settles it on her head. He laughs and asks her if she wants to be an umpire at a cricket game he’s playing tomorrow. She sticks out her tongue at him. He leans forward and she knows he’s going to kiss her but he remembers where they are — a park in a town that doesn’t like these sorts of displays in public — and pulls back. She feels a bit of relief he hasn’t followed through.

She’s confused as to why her feelings are turning in an opposing direction right now. But she gets up with him and takes his proffered hand and they walk to the jetty where they pay for an hour and get life jackets and step into one of the white tubs. Don’t go too far, the man who rents out the boats tells them. He gives them each a whistle.

They can’t go too far in the paddleboat anyway — for that you’d need one of the motorised boats and that’s out of their budget today. Instead, they paddle and talk and keep as close to the bank as possible.

She opens her bag and takes out the mangoes and she asks if he’d like one. He takes one from her and rubs the fruit on his grey t-shirt. She watches him bite and peel the skin off and the yellow flesh emerges and he tears off a chunk. He hands it over to her and says, “It’s sweet. Have a bite.”

She regards the fruit and his bite marks. She thinks of what she’s wanted this past week since their kiss. His skin on hers, his flesh on her flesh, wetness, warmth, breaths mingling. She wonders, not for the first time if he’s wanted her the same way.

She holds the fruit at length so the juice and pulp don’t stain her clothes. He’s holding her arm by the elbow — his brown fingers on her brown arm. A respectful hold on her hand, sweet and supportive. And she knows then he’s not wanted her the same way she’s been wanting him.

She feels the world dim just then. Like the sun’s luminosity had gone down by several watts. She chews the mango pulp and looks at him and their eyes meet and he laughs. Did anyone tell him as a child that he was too dark to be worthy of consideration like one of her father’s sisters had told her when she was six years old. Why is your face so pinched and why don’t you have your mother’s fair skin, her aunt had asked her. Her six-year-old mind couldn’t understand the question but the laughter of the other women in that kitchen had hinted at something wrong with her, the way she’d been made. This aunt still called her the dark fruit of the family and warned her mother that girls shouldn’t be allowed so much freedom. It would ruin them. She remembers the first boy she’d fallen in love with, back in eleventh standard in school in Muscat. Siddharth had been in the same year as her and she’d seen him hanging around on the edge of the cool crowd, clearly wanting to be part of them and knowing he didn’t have quite the same claim to popularity they did. He was smart, but not a class topper. He was good at sports but not in any of the teams. His hair flopped in the right style on his forehead, but he wasn’t the most good-looking among that group. She’d liked that about him and she’d told this to Tarannum who sat next to her in class and knew Siddharth well. Tarannum had looked at her much like Dechen had looked at her and said, don’t tell him.

Why not, Zainab had asked.

He might not respond the way you want him to, Tarannum had said.

Not too long afterwards they were all at the Annual Day program at the school. It was December. Dusk. The sun had set early and the lights were on. Zainab was volunteering backstage and she saw Siddharth on the other side of the stage looking at Falguni, who was also in their year and who was about to perform a kathak dance.

Zainab saw the way Siddharth looked at Falguni in her blue costume, her glowing skin, her smooth hair and her slim length. She caught sight of her own reflection in a mirror just then and knew why Tarannum had told her what she had.

Why do these things come to her mind now? She pushes them away, locks them away in the part of her mind she hopes will be closed off to her forever. But it won’t be. She has to learn to live with it. Someone like Tara wouldn’t learn to live with it. She would beat it down, obliterate it.

Zainab looks at Deepak now, the smile on his face, his gaze on her and nothing else, and takes another bite of the mango. Juice spills on her face. He asks softly, “It’s good, no?” She nods, as the mango gives off the summer heat in her mouth.

They reach a tangle of mangroves leaning over the water. It’s shady and cool here so he stops the boat and holds on to a branch.

She looks out at the lake. It stretches out before them, silvery blue. Time isn’t moving forward or back and she’s grateful for the pause.

Zainab doesn’t know if Deepak has considered what they have between them now – the nature of it.

What they have is finite. He will graduate in another year. She will go away for her internship in June. They won’t see each other for six months. She knows that they will get tired of mailing each other and stop. She knows she will feel that loss more intensely than he ever will. She already knows that he’s not into her as much as she is into him. This was always lopsided: Zainab heavy with feeling below, while Deepak, lighter, floated above.

She knows that in five years he will walk out on a snowy morning in Thimphu and meet, for the first time, at the electricity board where he’s working as an engineer on a hydroelectric project, the woman who will become his wife. Zainab would be able to draw her: petite and pretty, hair falling straight down the sides of her face. She knows the children they will have. Two boys and a girl.

Zainab knows he will remember her every now and then and maybe one day he will send her an email and ask after her and her life. She will think about replying, think about making a joke and saying that no, I haven’t had much of a heart since it was broken over you. But she won’t reply. She will ignore the email and it will get buried under other emails and it will disappear in some archive on some server in another corner of the world.

They will probably remember this afternoon and the other afternoons like this that they have spent together. He will remember that kiss and think of her every time he catches The Beach on TV. He will probably remember this fruit they are sharing.

And even beyond all that, beyond the flush of love that she’s feeling for him and the attention they have paid to each other, there’s one thing she’s sure he won’t forget. The story of this lake.

He will remember what she’d told him on a previous visit, of the train crash in the lake that killed Tara’s father. And the stories of other drownings, retellings of tales her mother has told her. There are dead who have been swallowed by this lake over the centuries. It’s crowded with ghosts and the memories of these ghosts, stretching back over centuries to the time when Phoenicians and Romans and Arabs made their way to these shores.

In that future, when the stories she’s told of this lake will come to him in his dreams on his bed in Thimphu, Zainab will walk into a coffee shop in a city she doesn’t know yet and see a man sitting at a table and think that it’s him. But the man will turn and the face won’t be his. And she won’t be sad that it’s not him. She won’t regret that she could have had another life in a mountain valley. She won’t miss children she will never have.

Deepak asks her what’s on her mind.

She doesn’t tell him she’s mapped their end in her mind, that she knows this love and wanting between them is already a ghost. She doesn’t answer and he doesn’t press her for a response.

They are, together, too gentle and too quiet. Tara’s father and the other ghosts here will not be disturbed by them or her visions of their future selves. The dead wouldn’t care, the business of living is not for them to fret over.

She throws the mango stone that’s been sucked clean into the waters of the Ashtamudi. They watch it bob up and down as it floats away.

They keep watching till they can no longer see it.