Hyderabad: August 6, 2006

…and on this, a most beautiful Sunday morning, the first of my last four Sundays here in this place, I walk barefoot on the grass, thinking of the night recently gone by, spent awake with her and her, giggling, crying, pulling secrets out of each other’s loosening fists. Stirring alive our lives in goblets of vodka, holding on to a thinning, fraying corner of the night, lest it pass. But it does. The sun rises, and here I am.

I think of them, of all those times I have hugged them, wishing them to be the happiest anyone has ever been. I think of how I have never been able to be the first to say “I’ll miss you”. I think of the evening of a friend’s engagement, sitting in a circle on a carpet on the floor, magically swiping out Bappi Lahiri numbers from behind each other’s ears. Of a heavy, wooden dining table with a spread dished out at my request, of a cook who worries occasionally about how I will survive by myself when I can’t put a meal together on my own. I actually can, when I have to, I want to tell him, but I let it go. There is comfort in this concern.

I think of a room in an apartment far, far away from my home, where the heavy drapes on the window cut out the most of the light. We could hear the rain, though, lying under this window. He liked the rain, he had said. I did too. I think of him, the boy who lied, as did I, so he could be there. The boy I may never again hold the same way.

Ma, and her ceaseless preoccupation with the dishes and the laundry. There was one moment, when she relaxed her guard, and noticed a fawn coloured horse running across the empty field behind our house. I think of that moment, which had held us both in thrall. And Balloo, vexed that I could not come to the garden to plant the parijat on my dead cat’s grave. But understanding, in the end. Understanding everything.

I think of an afternoon weeks ago, when I lay in this grass that I walk on right now, looking for animal shapes in the clouds and listening to Greenday sing “it’s something unpredictable, but in the end is right…I hope you had the time of your life.” And on this, a most beautiful Sunday morning, I think that all of them - this home, this time, these people, this age, this life – will be dearly missed.

In hindsight

Bah. What drama. It was all pretty much out there in the end, wasn't it?