It dawned on him that he had not seen even a rainbow, having spent all his life looking only down at the earth like a pig. He had almost seen one when he had taken his family on a company excursion. When the dam’s shutters were opened, the water spray in the morning sun had made a small rainbow, but he and his friends were off searching for an arrack shop. And by the time the excursion party reached Shanghumugham, he was so drunk that he had missed seeing the sea.

‘Papa, lick my hand,’ his son told him that night. ‘It’s salty from the sea.’

His house was only thirty kilometres away from the sea, but he had never felt the need to go and look at it.

As an endless sea surging in the darkness took shape inside him, he scrambled up. It did not matter if the sea was three thousand kilometres away. He would get there, walk all the way there. He set out at a brisk pace towards the west he had created for himself, and as he walked, he learnt to play a secret game with his mind. Focus on what it is that you are thinking about right now, and when you are certain that focusing on what you are thinking is your current thought, focus on it with a secretive smile and wait for further thoughts to develop. He walked, at a fair clip, through the long corridor created by two mirrors facing each other.

Noticing a luminescence in the distance, he walked towards it, and realized it was a swarm of fireflies flying close to the ground. Some rested on a plant and shone like the lost crown of a king in some story. He picked a leaf off the plant, squeezed it between his fingers and smelled it, and recognized it as a thumba plant. The fireflies took flight with the arrival of the human. He ran after them and caught one with great difficulty and held it inside his fist. His hand glittered as though he had a diamond ring on his finger.

And then a scary thought passed through his mind calmly. What if, in other places, the sun had risen several times? What if this place would never again see the light of day? What if eons had gone by since his wife and children had stopped crying for him?

lord of the hunt

To him, it felt as though a majestic lion had sauntered into the cool, clean room, and taking the computer screen to be the trunk of an ungu tree, rubbed its face against it. But which of the two men was the lion? One was middle-aged, dressed in a saffron mundu and a khaki shirt, and sported a pointy moustache. The other, clean-shaven and dressed in a pair of trousers, was quite young. The moustached man had a plastic bag printed with the name of a textile shop in Kumali in his hand. Droplets of blood fell on the clean, white floor tiles like the bright-red seeds of a manjaadi tree.