‘He said that? He really shouldn’t have done this to you.’

Fear filled her face. Slipping her feet into the sandals I had bought her to replace the pair she had lost in the hostel room, she got into the autorickshaw. I supported her as she stumbled and pushed her inside.

‘Now I’ll tell you a story.’

I held my lips close to her ear so that my voice would not drown in the noise of the bus. It had turned north past two districts and past Madurai, past coconut groves and cultivated land, and now travelled through a scrubby landscape. Two weeks had passed, and the shock of the incident had almost left her. I was considering at which unknown place we should get off the bus.

‘Once upon a time, there was a very beautiful blind girl,’ I continued. ‘A man was deeply in love with her.

‘“Will you marry me?” he asked her, for the hundredth time.

‘“Not now,” she said, for the hundredth time. “I’ll marry only when I am able to see.”

‘One day the man told her: “Someone has promised to donate their eyes to you.”

‘This made her very happy. And before long, the operation was done, and she was able to open her eyes and see the world for the first time.

‘“Let’s get married now,” he said.

‘“How can I who can see marry you who are blind?” she asked him. “You must find someone suitable for yourself.” And then, in a gruffer voice, she said: “We won’t see each other again.”

‘Deeply hurt, he watched her walk away from him mercilessly. “My dearest,” he called out in a frayed voice. “Please take good care of my eyes.”’

Vidya gripped my hand. Tears flowed out of her eyes used only to cry.

‘Vasuvannan, where are we going?’ she asked me.

‘That’s not my name,’ I said. ‘I am a storyteller.’

‘What’s this on your fingers?’ She raised my fingers to her nose. ‘Oh, the ink from your pen,’ she answered her own question. ‘Seems it’s all over your hand.’

I pulled my hand away, and surreptitiously wiped the redness of guilt off my fingers.

alone

Ahaha! How sad to think there is, in this world,

Nothing more wretched than human existence

—Kumaranasan, Karuna

‘Aren’t you getting off?’

Desperately hanging on to the ticket rack with his left hand, the conductor, who looked neither young nor old, asked him. ‘The place you bought the ticket for is far behind us.’

‘Yes! Stop the bus!’ he said, waking up suddenly and looking anxiously into the night. Whether the conductor rang the bell or not or the driver stopped the bus or not, he found himself in the darkness outside as the bus sped away towards its destination.

Later, he would re-examine those unclear moments several times in his mind. Were there other passengers in the bus? And were they, except, perhaps, for a handful, asleep, swinging like damaged pendulums? Did a couple of them wake up at the sound of the conductor’s voice and look at him with interest? Perhaps a child had laughed. He thought the conductor had grabbed his shoulder and shaken him awake. The leftover pain in his shoulder must be from the conductor’s fingers. Or did he bang it against something when he scrambled up? He tried to imagine that the conductor had, with the help of some passengers, pushed him out of the bus. In the end, he decided that, in the anxiety of having missed his stop, he had got out by himself.