‘I’ll come with you. What if a snake bites in inappropriate places . . .’

‘No need,’ Neethu said, pushing the wing mirror inwards with a sly smile. ‘You can sit right there.’

She was back within a minute. The road stretched in front of them, haunted and deserted. Tired after a relentless day, Neethu tried to curl up in the limited space of the passenger seat. Her shampoo-smelling hair had become frizzy in the dry wind, her body sticky with sweat. She looked at her feet in the dim light of the vehicle and saw that they were covered in dust and had become the dirtiest they had ever been. She tried to close her eyes and fall asleep, but sat up again when she could not. Bineesh dabbed at her face with a wet towel, offered to give her a good wipe down.

‘It’s boring once you leave Kerala,’ Neethu said, looking at the unchanging scenery. ‘It’s just flat and endless . . .’

‘But it gets interesting in one aspect,’ Bineesh said. ‘Women become different when they leave Kerala. Once past Walayar and into Tamil Nadu, you people are unstoppable, and once in Bangalore, there’s no saying what you’ll get up to.’

‘Not me,’ Neethu said. ‘My behaviour changes once I am in Kerala.’

‘Well, that’s my only hope now.’

Bineesh swerved away from an old monkey sitting sleepless in the middle of the road.

‘Eda, Kapish!’ Neethu called out, and, forgetting the circumstances completely, laughed loudly. Until that moment, she had forgotten the nickname Bineesh had been given in school—Kapish, the name of the monkey with a magic tail that could be extended or shrunk as he wished, from a children’s cartoon series. Despite having grown up, the old nickname brought out the monkey god Hanuman in Bineesh’s features.

Angrily, he tugged the back of his jeans down and showed her his behind. ‘Look, here’s my tail.’

‘Our classmate Smitha was convinced that you really had a tail.’

‘Where is she now? I’ll go and show her my actual tail.’

For the next several minutes, Bineesh sat quietly stewing in his anger. The silence brought sleepiness to his eyes.

‘Damn, I am seeing double,’ he muttered.

An old man rode a bicycle weighed down with something to be sold in the morning market. Watching his shadow, Neethu began to cry again.

‘I could have been more loving towards Papa,’ she said, not really addressing Bineesh.

At the checkpost, an officer examined their paperwork and put his head reverentially inside the van. It was the first time he was dealing with a vehicle crossing the border with a dead body inside.

‘Was it an accidental death?’ he asked in a respectful tone. ‘Drive carefully. There was an accident just half an hour before.’ Ceremoniously, he shone his torch inside the vehicle.

Farther ahead, Bineesh pulled up at the side of the road. Having woken up before the sun, some houses stretched their backs. The smell of idli wafted out of the kitchens of those who had to catch the early-morning trains to their jobs.