“I told them,” a woman was saying to a companion, “this is no way to run a shop; if you don’t exchange a purchase, say so, but don’t sell damaged goods.”

He quietly put down the bottle of Fanta on the floor. There wasn’t much of a view; there was the wall, which ran towards the street you couldn’t see, and another five-storeyed building with little, pretty balconies. Below him was the porch to the left, and the driveway, which seemed quite close. A young woman, clearly not a maidservant, was hanging towels from the railing in one of the balconies opposite.

Did it happen here? He looked at the woman attach clips to another towel. Apparently those who always threaten to, don’t. Anjali had been living with her parents for a month after leaving her husband. She’d left him before, but this time she’d said her intentions were clear and final. There was a rumour that her parents had not been altogether sympathetic, and had been somewhat obtuse; but it’s easy to be lucid with hindsight. He was still hungry, and he looked back into the hall to see if he could spot the man with the sandesh. But he had temporarily disappeared. As he moved about exploratorily, he caught his wife’s eye and nodded at her as if to say, Yes, I’m coming, and, Yes, it’s been a waste of time.

Cautiously, he tried to trace, from memory, the route that he’d seen Sarbadhikari take about ten minutes ago. He found himself in a bedroom where the double bed had been covered neatly with a pink bedcover; he coughed loudly. He opened a door to what might be the bathroom and, once inside, closed it behind him again. As he urinated into the commode, he studied a box, printed with flowers, of Odomos room freshener kept above it; then he shivered involuntarily, and shrugged his shoulders. He had a vaguely unsatisfying feeling, as if the last half hour had lacked definition.

Once inside the car, he said to his wife, “I don’t know about you, but I’m quite ravenous.”

Prelude to an Autobiography: A Fragment

Prelude to an Autobiography: A Fragment