Impossible to start from where we left off, impossible to join what was meant to be truncated. A story, a house, the noise of fake rain. Of dogs, chained and locked inside dingy rooms, surrounded by rags that used to be saris, the banality and damp smell of nine yards of pain. Of nerves and wires, lungs expanding, strained flute music, stained expectorate. She now measures her time by the number of street floods, and not by the endless seasons. Pathways for water, the old pipes clog up, as do ponds, marshes, bladders and drains. Two hundred units, forty-eight seasons, eight years.
Which is to say that the brick lane, now concrete, is trampled over at least fifteen times a day, then feels suffocated as soon as it rains. Once the sky is perforated a million times over, the millipedes crawl out of countless holes, and move forward caressing with their feet soil and gravel, to jostle outside her door. Rubber bodies entwined. Then come the diaphragm-less frogs and, close behind, a line of harmless snakes, moulting eyelids to give up on dreaming. Swallow your liquid hunger, your skeletal pride and ask yourself what years are if not durations to shed.
Meanwhile, during the afternoons, as she lays under the ceiling and over the floor, everything constricts. Windows close, doors become slits, rain drops become lines, light refuses to enter the cracks. She can feel her body turning stiff. She bends her ribs to become wrought iron and welcomes rust which grows like moss, only not as gently. If she can turn into the house, in time, she will transform into a vessel for a tree. Refusing to grow flowers or even expel seeds, the moss on her mind begins to spread in its own ways. How else to become substrate, cushion for underneath creatures, velcro for caseworms, how else to expand by breaking off rather than by joining.
Meanwhile, the rain writes, writes her in. If her sleep becomes too heavy with the wingbeat of dead sparrows, a jamun tree will shoot up and take over the saptaparni so when she wakes up, she will wake up to a scattering of bulbous purple. The house that grew into a tree, no, a jungle of grass and periwinkle, ashoka and neem, groans when it thunders, and is so sorrowless that a chunk of its head breaks off to reveal a gaping mouth than grins. Do you have dreams where your teeth fall off, the house asks her, and she says, oh yes, ever so often.
And so we return to the old stories all over again, built over the same barbed plot of land, littered with potholes larges enough to fit corpses. Fragmenting against the world that wants to fuse everything into a giant distribution board hidden behind a machine-generated image of a butterfly resting on a sunset stalk of wheat, the eight-year-old dog will bark and tell she is already as old as we will be when we are forty-eight. Water will evaporate. Boil broken rice into a gruel for the poor jawless creatures and adorn your lies like the wind adorns the branches with raindrops. Watch hands arrange purple petals upside down over eyes to cause a wrinkle in the tarp sheet of time.
Tear out the corners, return the saliva from the postage stamps, blot out the address, and then set the dogs free. Moisture will dampen concrete, ground floor will be garden, then grassland. The dust in the sky will be sporous. Sandpaper in hand, they will round off the edges like numbers and let moss grow between toes. Only then can she think of the day to come where time is spent counting rings. You will say, the light was softer then. The light will always be softer when you look back. Into trees, not time. Look up, in the meanwhile, keep looking up.
Sohini Basak’s first book We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (2018) won the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize. Other honours include a Malcolm Bradbury Grant for Poetry, a Toto Funds the Arts award, a Sangam House fellowship and a Speculative Literature Foundation grant. She is currently the poetry editor at Words Without Borders.