I call Prashant from her Nokia. Prashant, man, where are you? This is an emergency. Hurry.

Dude, says Prashant’s distorted voice, I’m stuck in a traffic jam near Ansal Plaza.

In the shop everything is white: the tablecloths, the cups and saucers, the porcelain plates. She opens her eyes. The eyeballs are back. She is clutching the purple hanky. She smiles a weak smile and says she loves me. I realize for the first time that I am in love with her. Where am I, she says, and what happened?

Where am I, she says, and what happened? She is lying on the couch. I am sitting on the floor, by her feet.

You had another seizure.

You know my weak spots and you hit me there. You are cruel. So what if I slept with that man? Even if I did—and I did not—what about all the love I have given you?

I say I am going to call her doctor. I can picture the neurologist: small, bald, owl-like eyes, a messiah from another planet.

Do you like doing this to me?

I find myself getting angry. I can’t think straight. I find myself shouting at her: You can’t stop me from asking questions. I want answers. I want a simple life.

That night we sleep separately. At 3 I get up and go to the bedroom. She is half-asleep, trying to sleep.

I think about tomorrow. She will be nervous, irritable, hypersensitive. She will have memory lapses, her brain will fizz and pop. She will remember things I said five years ago.

Without realizing it I have begun pacing the room. My feet leave marks on the dusty floor. These marks mingle with other marks from the past—the wet bathroom slippers from Sunday morning, the big, flying cockroach I crushed yesterday afternoon.

I turn my head and look at her. I love her when she is asleep. The only other time I love her this much is just after she’s had a seizure and she’s lying there, her body inert, the eyeballs missing. At that moment all I want to do is dive into the white spaces underneath her eyelids and hit rock bottom.

I walk out on to our first floor balcony and spend half an hour drumming my fingers on the rickety wooden railing. When I stop, I notice that the night smells of leather and that the plants need watering.

Okhla Basti

Angad, twenty-six years old, of medium build and receding hairline, a middle-level techie in a sinking dot com, walked down the narrow path that dipped steeply, spread out into a modest valley, before rising up again into a second mound.

Children ran up and down the slopes like mountain goats. A stream of water came trickling down to meet the giant puddle at the bottom of the second mound, the one Angad had just begun to ascend.