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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Ashu later realized that the angry smile of Mana’s uncle came from a place of deep-seated hurt. Every story, every poem that he had read carried an image of that pain.