Digital intimacy made no sense to her, it made her lonelier, suffusing her body with strange yearnings that knew no home.

I rushed to your picture frame first, but it yielded nothing. No, not nothing. A certain distaste, that felt like tar in my mouth, heavy, unrelenting, dark, putrid, unpleasant.

She likes things to have meaning. She is used to a clock in every room at her house and the absence of it here is almost a wilful suspension of time.

She routinely boarded a bus and when the bus conductor asked her the name of her stop, she gaped at him, fighting with her memory. But all she could recall was a lane full of shady trees, the angry gulmohar, the vibrant palash, the tall coconuts and all the varieties of ixora that dotted the many gardens there.

Today I chopped it into tiny pieces along with a large tomato, a capsicum, four large green chilies because I need spice back in my life, and a large onion. I threw a generous knob of butter in the frying pan and tempered it with whole cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and a pinch of dried fenugreek leaves.

Bambi hugs the soft animal of her body, her skin dreaming of love...

This flash fiction of a so-called godwoman unmasks the underlying hypocrisy, selfishness and the greed for power and control.

She always finds his voice like warm water. Never boiling, no. It has a nice warmth to it without ever being tepid. She closes her eyes and breathes in his voice even though it mostly sounds like distant babble to her right now. It smells like sunshine on the grass.

He wants food. She is the giver of food. Sometimes, especially now, she feels that she has ceased to be the wife and is merely the caregiver, the provider. She picks up her bag and decides she will walk home, delaying her arrival as far as possible.

She touches them with loving fingers. They are happy memories. She puts them inside a packet, flattens them with her hand and locks the drawer. Mridula squares her shoulders. She will never see them again.

The babble she hears all around her bounces off her ears in strangeness. People speak hurriedly here, in a different rhythm and she doesn’t know why she always imagines speeding trains that blur right in front of her eyes. Their tongues roll a lot and sometimes in front of a mirror she sticks out her tongue and flips it back to feel how the mouths of the people here must be when they speak.

Your body and mind are exhausted from the week that sits heavy on your chest like the old mortar in your kitchen your grandmother left you. Sometimes you wonder if she shifted her own weight in that lifeless object, something for you to carry.

And you feel something unclench within and in that curated hotel room with warm yellow lights, loneliness runs free.

These two micro-fictions explore two shades of desire and the agentic self that explores both simply, earnestly.

Each time he scoops more of you. Each time you remember less.

She stares at the screen, shaking his words as though they have pockets and will surely release something secret if she keeps at it long enough.

Is this why people have children? To seek what they have lost.

February arrived with an extra day making you melancholy.

You have always felt you have an ordinary face, brown, with round, brown eyes that turn a shade lighter in the sun, and sparkle when at sea, even teeth behind full lips that break into a smile, giving your face a momentary beauty.

The two of them, with their own longings, stared out into the void. She felt some of the ink leech out of her, dripping out, thick and metallic, and dissipate into the darkness beyond.