In the cupboards, she finds Sunil’s favourite cereal bowl, his favourite mug to drink tea, his favourite ketchup chips. In the fridge, she finds the jar of pickled onions he ate like olives. No one else likes them, and they’re about to go off, but she doesn’t have the strength to throw them out. All day, every day, she stumbles over these pieces of Sunil, and they disarm her, cause her memories of him to detonate inside her, and they are everywhere, these little bombs.

If only she knew how to stop the onslaught. The changing weather inside her. The hurricanes. The drag. The head talk. But how? She couldn’t possibly ever have that power. These forces are bigger than her. And as their tall, tall shadows grow, she gets smaller and smaller beneath them.

“Kavita?”

She tries to swallow but can’t. “I’m fine,” she says.

Another pause.

“Have you heard from Chi?” he asks.

“No, not yet.”

“Well, she wrote to me the other day.”

“She wrote you?”

“Yes. She was concerned about you.”

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of her for weeks. She’s been ignoring me. Why would she write you instead?”

“I think you may have frightened her off.”

“But I haven’t even spoken to her. How could I have frightened her off?”

“Did you write her an e-mail recently?”

“A couple of days ago. How did you know?”

“She told me about it. She said you didn’t sound like yourself.”

It was strange to receive this external report, almost as if she were sitting through a performance evaluation at work. If she wasn’t like herself, then who was she? Kavita didn’t know anymore. Who was she in the wake of Sunil’s death? It was too early, her grief still too fresh, for her to be able to claim resurrection like a Rose of Jericho, or transformation like an insect that emerges from its cocoon, winged, and more beautiful than before its seclusion. What she’s becoming remains vague to her, a matter of process too close for her to see clearly, as though she is standing with her nose pressed up against a self-portrait, but she can’t see her full likeness yet. “She told you that?”

“Mm hm.”

The betrayal bites. “Did she tell you what I wrote?”

“No. Only that she was worried about you, and she thought I should know. I think she was hoping I would approach you and you would tell me yourself.”