The last thing she says to him, she knows she will never see him ever again, ‘You will always be very special to me; remember that, always.’

What she does not say is what she has known from the first day of their intensely brief friendship: something is finally setting itself right.

What can you explain when you do not want to understand it yourself, she thinks as she clicks the seat belt in place. The aircraft is ready to fly her away from Hyderabad, she leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. Waiting for take-off.

This has been happening from the time she was nineteen, every time she has sat in a plane. Or walked on a road. She is in her early thirties now, she has travelled the world and the seven seas. She waits as the plane taxies on the runway.

She waits for the aircraft’s sophisticated engine to pick up speed, and sound; deeper, deeper the sound, deeper, until at the very centre the sound of its silence. Even as she has walked on the pavements of cities all over the world, she has known this sound of silence: she has looked up at the sky and there it has been, a plane flying in the limbo of deepest silence.

Not like the comfortable silence she had been shaken from by her guardian’s son when she was studying for the last year of her college in Poona.

‘Hey, get up, you are fast asleep over your books.’

‘Oh God, what time is it?’

‘Almost three o’ clock. You want a drink?’

‘A drink? You must be crazy, I have a paper to give tomorrow morning, I mean this morning, in a few hours.’

‘Oh come on, have a small one with me; I will drop you at your examination centre tomorrow morning.’

‘Thank you kind sir, but that your mother’s driver does anyway.’

‘One, just one small one.’

‘Where did you celebrate your birthday?’

‘A party with my friends at a farmhouse, we had a few drinks. Come on, have a nightcap with me.’

‘Seems to me you have had more than a few. And don’t open that bottle here, your mother may well walk in and yell at us both.’

‘She is asleep in the main house, we could see her coming from this east wing if she does, come on have a drink!’

‘No. Get lost, will you? I need to complete revising this last chapter.’

‘Okay, give me a kiss and I will get loshsth.’

‘You are so drunk you are sloshing your words. Go away.’

‘One khish.’

‘Oh go to bed, please, you have no idea what you are saying.’

‘Bed, with you.’

‘What?! Fuck off you fat pig. Drunk, fat pig!’

Her uterus mocks her. Why did you get in his way? Why did you not run?

Why did you not run, run, run, you knew by then how to run, didn’t you?

Why did you let yourself get overpowered? Not a scream, not one shout for help?