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.

Memory works somewhat like that for you. A few days strike out marvelously, rainbow-hued, or grey, sensorial, almost all of them from travels, ever since you were a little girl.

She had always felt somewhat burdened by her name. Her name to her carried the expectations of her parents and family, which restricted her already timid movements.

You look at the sands and pick some in your hands. They glisten, somewhat dry, mostly wet and you wonder how your heart and self-esteem was like the sand, weightless, shattered to a million tiny pieces, easily blown away by the gentlest wind.

She was too young to understand the full implicature of the term, but she knew the place where she stayed wasn’t home either.

You look at your ferns in the window. They sway in the delicious March breeze. The sounds in your head swell, then soften, they sway with the fern fronds.

They all look the same with different colours. Like my friends. All different. All same.

It was her world, her link to outer space, just as the word was hers and hers alone.

Sue gave her the sheer joy of seeing her own innermost being articulated in tiny atoms in someone else