‘Perhaps the same place where you lost it?’ And that was the point when she heard it. Rajjo was sure she heard the coin hit the bottom. She heard the clink. It was time for change. She could feel the post monsoon air, dry, cool and dense. The winds spilling from the Himalayas were going to reach here soon. The leaves were beginning to dry out in her village. It was time to destroy what flourished to start a new beginning. It was time for autumn to set in her life. She was ready, for her beloved to be whole and hearty, she was going to find his breath, even if it was hidden in the heart of a mountain or the bottom of a deep black sea.

9

9

RAJJO sat in her courtyard looking at the clear blue sky. It was familiar. She was back in the village again where everything was as dusty and old as she’d left it. Only a new bunch of children, different faces but familiar smiles. They ran down the railway tracks or played in the river with the buffaloes. They chased the tractors filled with hay. They stood with a wide cloth under a mango tree, shaking the branches, waiting for the fruit to fall in the cloth. They squealed in delight as the branches ruffled and made a noise. Rajjo smiled as she passed them by. She could see her siblings in them. She could smell the mangoes they ate soaked in buckets of water in the courtyard.

The farmers toiled hard in the fields. As she walked the length and breath of her village she stared at familiar faces staring back at her. The tired woman was the little girl who walked with them to the school every morning – Lalli. Now she had a broken tooth, dark baked skin and five children. She worked with her brood in the fields along with her husband. She had married her next-door neighbour. It all came rushing back to Rajjo.

After eating the dust in the familiar streets, smelling the ripened fields, tasting the mangoes, revisiting the stories each familiar face wove in her head she was ready to go home to her mother.

On her way back she whispered a release for the pale red kite stuck on the old tree, trapped and straining to break free.

Saroj prepared a simple meal and waited for her daughter. The house had few new amenities that Saroj allowed, like a geyser and a television set. A generator that was grudgingly allowed to sit there. She had refused a car altogether, and a lady to help her out was also shot down by Saroj. Thankfully, her distant cousin’s help had come to stay with Saroj, as she had no place to stay after the cousin passed away.

Saroj firmly kept her world seperate from the empire. She made her own rules and boundaries and no one was allowed to cross them.