So was this solitary line the only thing she would ever write? Was this one line all the blood that would ever flow from the wounds?

She continued walking. When her bag was full of paper, she went to the riverbank. Perhaps the sun was setting then. She emptied her bag into the water. She tried to tell herself that she loved this water, that this star was her favourite, that this wandering death was the outcome of her ambition. This disease, this defencelessness – that this was actually what enabled her to live, to survive.

And she tried to tell herself that not writing could achieve more than writing could. The wounded pride of the solitary line she had written touched her. For on one side of this line lay one eternity, while on the other side lay eternal time. In the process of writing the line, she had introduced a deathlike silence into it. The line had died despite all its possibilities. The possibility of creating something from out of creation. The possibility of life emerging from life.

‘Weep,’ the river had told her. And the moment you did, you thought of him. You thought of how long it had been since you last saw him. A long time. The way things happen after a break-up. ‘Maybe we’ll meet again after we die,’ you had said.

Believing that she had found her final or second line, she postponed her tears and began to run. And realised this was how it was, this was the poet’s life. The poet’s manuscript was made up of all these suppressed tears. The failure of tears. The poet did not weep for herself, nor for others. The poet wept only for poetry.

What use was writing? None at all. The world had seen so much of it, but no one had found it to be of any practical use. Or, no one bothered to make use of it. They’d simply read the words, then forgotten them.

She too had asked herself when writing each new word, ‘What have you just written? The words have vanished behind the tree.’ Besieged with doubt, she stopped writing.

Then night fell. And the worms in her head began to wriggle. Trying to crawl out through her eyes and ears and nose and mouth. The look in her eyes changed. There was a toxic vapour in her breath; she heard obscene words muttered, uttered some herself. And writhed on the floor. Eventually, she quietened down, twisting her scarf as she watched the whirling fan. Like a hangman, she practised making a noose.

Then someone pushed her back to writing. Trembling, she wrote. Writing, she slept. This is release, she thought.

10

This newspaper at the start of the day. Every page that touched her sleep-hazed skin bore pictures of burnt bodies. She felt miserable, distracted. Grief flowed easily through her slack limbs.

All these children had burnt to death at a school in Tamil Nadu. They had held one another as they burned. As though that had helped, somehow, to mitigate the agony. As though they were telling us that if we ever got the chance to burn to death as a collective, we too should hold one another.