Outside, in the tamarind tree, sits Sanwala. This room affords a full view of the tree. It’s a room made of glass where I am this moment, and now Suparna is too. Anyone on the tamarind tree can now see there are two women in this room. Suparna and I. In this glass room.

Suparna reminds me that I’m very tired. It’s this tiredness that brings me back to this room. All I have to keep in mind is that I’m rather tired. Suparna is quiet and is looking at me. My heart begins to throb loudly. Suparna at once turns her glance away; there’s nothing she doesn’t know. We’ll begin whenever you wish to, she breaks her silence. I don’t know what it is that Suparna wishes. You could, if you like, slowly take off your clothes, I’ll give you a massage. The moment Suparna utters these words, I begin to feel extremely tired all over again. I only have to remember, somehow, that I am tired. Looking at me, she utters yet another word. This word reminds me of nothing. Only the sound of it casts a spell of warmth over my limbs. Can I ask her what it is that should come to my mind on hearing this word?

– Why don’t you lie down, I’ll be back in a minute.

I go and lie down. In the tenderness of Suparna’s utterance, leaning on my own tiredness. Suparna is removing a mirror from the glass wall. I know I’ve never seen anything like this before – a human form removing a mirror from a glass wall. Across the mirror only those images will flash that you’re able to remember. If you don’t remember anything, all you will see are these glass walls and a misty milk-light hanging from the ceiling. Having taken the mirror from the wall, Suparna has placed it close next to me on the floor.

Suparna’s glance takes in that I’m lying on the floor just like that. She is not in a hurry. She doesn’t have to go anywhere. What comfort inhabits this sentence! She does not have to go anywhere. I don’t know why it is so comforting to think that the one who is with me at the moment does not have to go anywhere. The mirror lying next to me has no images from my memory. I remember nothing that will flash across this mirror. Only the glass walls around me. And the bulb-shaped milky cloud-like light hanging from the ceiling. There is light here, I tell myself.

When I turn my neck, I see that there is a tamarind tree outside. In the dense cluster of branches Sanwala sits surrounded by the dangling pods. The pods are his matted locks. Suparna is sliding out of her costume. I’ve never seen anything like this before but I know why she is doing this. She knows that my body is not unaffected. Clothes exist, I’m grateful. The illusion of hiding remains intact, I’m grateful. Sure enough, Suparna is now shedding her skin with the beauty of a glass snake. In the light from a milky cloud a glass snake is rising from within its own body. And now her limbs fill up with human colors. If Suparna had been of dusky complexion, I would have been able to see her well enough in a glass room. And yet I’m able to see the twenty-two year old Suparna sliding out of her clothes like a child so that I shed my shackles too. Should I look at you, Suparna, keep looking at you, or gaze into the mirror instead?

Without looking at the tamarind tree and looking only at Suparna I can feel Sanwala’s eyes burning on Suparna. In a little while, surely, he will look at me too. But not the way he looks at Suparna. He will look at the lack of sap in my limbs. What has vanished he will witness in the presence of that which is there. A sap that is filled with tenderness. In the glass room, he is going to witness a subtle event about to unfold in a human body. Sanwala won’t keep looking at me. Won’t be able to. Images that were once so enchanting fall to the ground the moment they are bereft of form.

Sanwala won’t be able to stop looking at Suparna. At sap, light and at tenderness. Sitting in the darkness and flavor of the tree he will long for Suparna. She is sitting on her haunches. Inebriated by what her body bids me, I loosen the hundreds of strings fastened around me. My hair has been done into countless tiny braids. My tired fingers begin to undo these braids. Loosening so minutely, I get deeply involved. Like an angel of undoing, I too slowly slide out of my intricate costume. My shoulders no longer droop to provide cover for me. I’m at peace. Tired, but at peace. Face down I stretch myself before Suparna. Her hair caresses me as if I were asleep under the fragrance of a wave. With nimble fingers she begins to massage me from head to toe. She makes tiny and gentle whirlpools all over me. In order to feel them at all I have to stay wide awake in the sleep within sleep. But there is no effort involved in this. No initiation either. To stay awake in the inner circle of sleep is as easy as staying asleep in the outer circle without Suparna’s touch.

Suparna, I ask, it isn’t as if our room is bang in the middle of a public square?

Precisely so, says Suparna.

I hear my mother’s voice explaining to the woman next door that her daughter is very tired and rather unwell. That she is lying like this so that she could get a proper massage. I hear the voice of the woman next door, okay, agreed that it is like this. But that woman who is giving her the massage, why is she without clothes? I strain my ears to listen to my mother. But I don’t hear her voice. Then all at once surrounded by several voices, I hear my mother’s sobs — I don’t know, I know nothing.

Her sobs, Suparna, do you think I have the strength?

Suparna says, now you should lie down on your back. She begins to make tiny whirlpools around my navel. Surrounded by the same voices in the mirror now is Suparna’s voice. She is asking my mother’s neighbor to keep quiet. My mother’s sobs once again rise to a high pitch, and then fall silent.

Suparna has now handed over the mirror to me. On my neck, the same whirling downpour of Suparna’s voice, her breathing, and her touch. In the mirror my mother’s sobs are now beginning to reach me. Next time before she begins, I have to present myself to her in such a way that she doesn’t burst into sobs.

On my eyelids, Suparna’s caress. Her lips. My whole body is flooded with tears. My eyes don’t allow them. Ripping through the entire poetry of this dream all I want to do is touch Suparna’s eyes.

This room is bang in the middle of a public square. In the mirror I see the woman who is my mother’s neighbor.

Suparna’s lips are being drenched with my tears. She lets them.

In the mirror, another woman now. With a dirty veil of muslin over her, she suddenly stops at the threshold of my childhood home. On second reading, I’ve removed the sentences that were once here.

In the mirror they have placed my father before the woman in a dirty muslin veil. I said, placed. Had someone wanted, they could also say they made my father lie down in her presence. But my father can no longer use the enchanting words he had coined. A big cart loaded with ice screeches to a halt at the entrance. The cart man says, Where do I offload this ice, is this the house?

Is this the house? I whisper into the mirror. The woman in the muslin veil tells the other women who have now thronged the courtyard that he was young as kadi. What on earth are these words they’re using for my father? I have no idea what kadi means. She says, not a single gray hair, think of that. A shadow passes quickly over my childhood home. Drenching me, another word sails past me. Sāyāyé-abré-gurézā.

I’m in the middle of circling waves. There is Suparna, and very deep waters. Over me a boat freeing itself of the whirlpool has drifted away. I try to swim my way in the whirlpool. I don’t want to surface because I have to hide myself from view. Water trickles into my lungs and my mind dips into calmness. I don’t wish to surface and begin to hear my mother’s voice. Now my brother’s too. They are turning my name into screams.

This is the first ever time my name has been turned into screams. This is the first ever time I hear my own name in this play and it does not sound strange to me. My name is like someone close to me who wishes to get drowned along with me. Somehow it has to be extricated from my mother’s and brother’s loud pitch. But it’s they who have made the first move. I have been dragged out of the river. There’s one I who is being pulled by the fisherwomen into a boat. There’s another I who, standing on the riverbank without any clothes on, is explaining to my mother why it is important to remain in this state.

My mother and my brother look now at me, now at my body in the boat. They burst into loud wailing. My mother is trying to explain something to the people gathered on the riverbank. No one betrays any sign of having got it. She tries yet another time. She says the one in the boat is not her daughter, the one who has got drowned, and whom the fisherwomen have placed in the boat. Her daughter, she says, is standing right here, on the riverbank. Tired and sick, she has removed her clothes… Then mother’s words are missing. The ones that are missing I know by heart; they have always been the same — How many times do I have to tell her not to wear her father’s clothes. Is this the way to stay in mourning that you keep chasing men who are like your father? Suparna is nowhere in sight. I stand on the riverbank flanked by my mother and brother and try to feel Suparna’s touch like a breeze on my skin. Suparna, I say softly, and despite wanting to, I can’t make my eyes well up with tears.

Whatever has happened has taken place on account of the woman next door — my mother’s voice. It’s her questions in which my child has been drowned. The woman next door is saying, but that’s what your daughter was like.

My mother and my brother are together in an underground room. What I have on is heavy winter clothing. I tell them I’m not on my way somewhere. It strikes me how easily they trust my word. In the same breath I plead with someone that they should put it off no longer, that they should push me off the roof now. From somewhere, the smell of my father’s last medicines wafts up to me. Over the parapet, on the terrace, a bouquet of rays comes into play. This is the precise spot where I have to begin my descent. My mother should not weep. My limbs grow heavy with her wailing. Why doesn’t she know this is not the way? She has no idea how to read the signs of light. She can’t read, this mother of mine. She knows nothing.

At a street corner stands a home for lepers. I tell my brother that it is here that he could leave some money. He is walking by my side with a tenth of his salary stashed in his pocket. Even in this state, I walk with a matter of fact face, as if I’m well acquainted with the home for lepers. For a moment it crosses my mind that the use of funds here is not quite above board. But having pointed the place out to my brother, I can’t express any doubt now. My brother listens very attentively to me and stops for a moment to figure out the location. Even then he says, when you’re no longer here, will I still be able to recognize this place?

The stairs to the third floor of my granny’s house. Every step is scarred by cracks that seem very unpleasant to me. A peepal tree has already taken root in a crevice. In the mirror I hear my mother’s voice — when you were about to be born, I had seen a cobra on this very step. If a woman with child happens to see a snake it goes blind. It had slithered away into this very hole. This peepal wasn’t there then. The moment it vanished into the hole your grandpa poured boiling oil into the chink. Boiling oil, grandpa? It’s me over whom you’ve poured the oil; could it have been you, grandfather?

On every step the sound of its writhing hood. Right over this sound, on each step, and covering the crevices, there stands a chef. A whole line of chefs is poised on the entire staircase, who stand stiffly in dazzling white uniforms. A cauldron of boiling oil in front of each one of them. An aroma of seafood invades the steps. The fragrance of fenugreek is absent, but still lingers somewhere. That’s all I can make out. Even so I want to hold on to the entire aromatic scheme present here. The red crests of the caps worn by the chefs jut into the rainbows arching overhead. In the three-storey house of my grandma, on every step of the uppermost staircase, there is only one scene repeated on seventeen steps — a chef standing in white uniform —the crest touching the arch of the rainbow overhead. Seventeen boiling cauldrons. Seventeen rainbows that could fall any moment into the oil. Deep inside every step, the sound of a writhing hood. Placing a hand on my belly, I try to diminish my hurt. This turns out to be Suparna’s hand.

In the mirror my mother and my brother are seen walking. I keep wiping the mist off the surface of the mirror.

Suparna rises from the floor, gathering her hair.

Taking the mirror from my hand, she hangs it back on the glass wall.

(Translated from the original Hindi by the author.)