I should be at home. I really don’t know what makes me leave my room. These days I am pushed along by forces not in my control. One day slips into another. Every night is a silent dark space that swallows me whole. I squat inside her belly until she spits me out at dawn, covered in phlegm and bile.

Something happened a year ago. Arpita and I were living in Bombay then. We were locked in the missionary position when, suddenly, she pushed me off. She said, ‘Manik, I feel hemmed in. Every day it is the same damn thing. We’ve been together for five whole years and every night it’s the same old shit. No new positions. No nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. I feel my youth slipping away from me, Manik.’ She sat on the floor and glared at her toes. I smoked a cigarette. I felt deeply humiliated.

Then I did something terrible.

It’s not very clear to me what exactly happened. I did what I did in a fit of rage. I remember a kitchen knife, I remember being seized by an uncontrollable urge and doing what had to be done. I recall a pair of dangling headphones playing tinny music.

Defence Colony isn’t a completely new place for me. I lived here many years ago, when I was a techie with a dotcom. It was my first job.

In Bombay, I thought to myself: it’s all over now, let me return to where I started my adult life. From twenty to thirty has been one long journey. I suppose you could say my life never really took off. Many strange things happened in those ten years. I try not to remember them but very often memories force themselves on my consciousness; they are like stubborn relatives who invite themselves over even when you’ve made it clear that they are unwelcome.

I have a room on the first floor, directly above the garage. The house faces a school. In the mornings I can hear the bell go off every forty minutes, signalling the end of one period and the start of another. Mid-morning, at around eleven, a drum starts its heavy pounding, most probably a PT class. From my window I can see only a small part of the playground. The ground is dusty and shorn of grass. During the break the girls play a game where they run around holding each other’s hands, forming a chain. When the girls stray into the corner of the field visible from my window, I back away or hide behind the curtain. I wouldn’t want them to see me.