Those days, I’d try to write but no ideas came to me. Our town offered little opportunity for getting a job. It was possible, of course, to be a teacher or a journalist, or perhaps a doctor or lawyer. None of these appealed to me, however. I tried, instead, to write. It was the only thing I wanted to do, but my mind was empty like the sky that stretched away in front of me. There were times when a bunch of broken up sentences or blurred faces, the rags of days long past, would move across my brain like a caravan. But it wasn’t as if I could hold on to these images and make something of them. They’d fly far into the sky, like birds.

On some days an unclear longing took hold of me; maybe this was an inspiration to write? As if voice were stirring inside a mute. I tried hard to catch the sound, straining each sense, but it was gone before I could grasp it. I just couldn’t hear it. I sat with pen and paper everyday, but the battle was lost even before I’d begun. Receding, dimly visible, something like the line of a shore appeared briefly before my mind; it was merely a shadow, though, that I strove in vain to capture. However, I was convinced that, if I kept at it long enough, I would succeed. And so, I floated around in emptiness. It was a strange experience, this encounter with nothingness.

But I didn’t lose heart. I had put up a swing under a tin shade on the roof; I’d sit on it for hours, thinking. Days passed by. Sometimes I’d write a few lines and cross them out again. The swing creaked on its rusty chain. I pushed the ground with my foot and the swing moved forward; then I’d stop it again with my foot. It was all I did those days. The sky was white in summer, blue in winter and ragged strands appeared on it during the rains, making it look like a shawl made of coarse, hand-woven cloth. Large chunks of time sailed by as if nothing. It seemed as though days were passing not singly but in groups. Sometimes it felt as though a whole season had gone by like a single day. I had nothing to show for the passage of so much time, not even one story, nothing. It was a really bad situation.

There were several things in my range of vision, a line of dust-laden, bluish eucalyptus trees, standing straight and tall. They’d bend to one side in the wind, making the line go crooked. There was one tamarind, also dust-laden, and two silk-cotton trees close together, with thick branches turning to the sky and huge trunks firmly embedded in the ground; evidence to the power inherent in nature. I gazed with envy at the fat silk-cotton buds, their sensuousness seeming to be nothing short of a miracle to me. No flowering happened within me though, not a single bloom in all of those days. Then it was time for the slow mystery of the silk-cotton buds blossoming into flowers.

Behind the trees, the road led straight to the railway station, which wasn’t far from my house. There were no right or left turns, the way was quite straight. It was a busy road, what with people coming to our town or going away, constantly in movement. Many more people came than left, those days; it was the year of the Ardh Kumbh Fair. A sea of people washed by, bound for the new township at the edge of the water, along the river. It was a town composed mostly of tents, lights and makeshift lanes, with tall electricity poles seeming to hold the darkness on their heads like a black tarpaulin cover. Time was in motion too and, of course, it wouldn’t stop for anything. I was the only one who was quite still.

A loud roar sounded from the heart of the earth, rising and becoming louder, before fading into the distance. The glass panes on the windows in my house rattled, then it was completely silent after the train had gone. It was strange how loud the silence seemed. And then, there was the ting of the bell announcing the train’s departure. This went on the whole day. What with trains coming and going all the time, I felt as if I were getting left behind, sitting there on my swing.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed that Radha had come and sat down at the other end of the roof, with a bag of peas she was shelling into a bowl. She knew she mustn’t disturb me, for I was ‘working’. But she didn’t want to be alone in the kitchen. Sitting on the roof, even at a distance from me, she had the consolation of being with me. This was all she wanted, just this assurance. Things were hard for Radha then. She could get to sleep at night only if the lights were on, that was how she kept her fear at bay.

Radha too, had been left behind. She’d come as a pilgrim to our town six years ago, to the Kumbh Fair. She got lost in the crowd, like thousands of other such women. The years flew past. Her husband didn’t come looking for her, though it was also possible he did, but just couldn’t find her. She thought it unlikely that he wouldn’t have tried to search for her, but there were times when she wasn’t so sure. Those were the days on which she had little hope left of being ‘found’. Her upbringing being such, she couldn’t say her husband’s name out loud, and with her father-in-law long dead, the only person she could talk about was her mother-in-law and, of course, she knew the name of the village she came from. It wasn’t as if she was clever, or even literate, she was just a farmer’s daughter-in-law. It was six years since she’d got lost, and disappointment had settled on her heart like a stone. She’d had to make her peace with the way things were, start a new life.

Her daughter Rashmi Kiran, then five was now eleven, a fatherless child, growing like a wild bush. She’d grown, but seemed still to be stuck in the moment when they got lost at the fair, groping around in the mist. She never had much to say. She’d fold her hands together when she saw me in the morning and say “Namaste”, with a shy smile playing on her face. Radha and Rashmi Kiran lived at my place, in the room at the back of the house. It was the milk of human kindness in me, I told myself, that I let them stay there, but I’d really done this only for myself. I felt virtuous, giving shelter to someone like this. Besides, Radha did all the housework. My selfishness lay curled under my generosity like a snake.

Across the street, there was an old, yellow building with arches. There were dark patches on the yellow, left by moss from the last rains. It was a school, the Maharishi Dayanand Shiksha Sadan. The building had been demolished on one side, leaving a high mound of bricks and rubble. Something new was supposed to come up there. But nothing had happened so far, with snakes and scorpions having the run of the place. A board with ‘Maharishi Dayanand Shiksha Sadan’ on it, hung outside, rusty and faded. It looked like a scruffy animal and creaked tiredly in the wind. But a school still did function in these premises. Most of the children from the neighborhood studied there. I’d had Rashmi Kiran registered there too. From my swing I’d hear them reciting their poems and tables and then school would be over, with the bell going loudly at the end. I’d see the children in their red sweaters tumbling out of the old building. They’d push open the rickety gate swinging on its hinges and swarm past the board, looking like birbahutis, those velvety red insects that emerged from the ground in the rains.

I turned around to look at Radha, and she read this as permission to come up to me. I watched her as she approached. What did or didn’t this woman have that her husband hadn’t bothered to come fetch her? I studied her face, broad-boned and flat, which somehow made her figure look squat, dark complexion, black hair. It was hard to tell her age, she could have been thirty-five or thirty-six. She wore a green cotton sari with a border; nobody could have called her unattractive. Her eyes looked anxious, with remnants of kajal in them from yesterday, faint, like a memory. She wanted me to write another letter to her husband. I’d already written so many, letters that never got a reply. Each time it was the same; she called him “Rashmi Kiran’s Papa”, as if the child were the only link between them. I don’t know what came over her some days. She’d come to me and say, “My heart burns so, today. There’s someone missing me.” How on earth did hearts burn? I know mine never did, not for anyone.

She being illiterate, I was the one who wrote all the letters. She dictated what she wanted me to say and I wrote it down. At first the words came hesitantly, at random, as though she were picking up scattered things from here and there. She gained momentum slowly and her words acquired an easy flow. All kind of things, from the humdrum to the complex, rolled easily off her tongue in long, wordy sentences. It was like a steady stream of words. Where did she get so many words from, this illiterate woman? Just a handful of ‘poetic’ words went round and round in my own head, words like ‘frost’, ‘anguish’, ‘memory’ and ‘petal’… They bobbed about, weightless and vapid, inside my head and then vanished.

She said Rashmi Kiran told her that the children bullied her at school. They made fun of her for speaking so little and chased her, shouting, “Dumbo! Dumbo!” The girl ran nervously, her steps bumbling and awkward. She was dark, said her mother, and there was nothing wrong with that surely. God had made her like that, hadn’t he? But who could explain that to the children, they’d see her and cry out in a chorus:

“Matchstick!
Drumstick!
Here comes the black witch!”

She’d try to laugh it off but grew quieter still, beneath the laugh. There were days when she’d lock herself in, into the toilet at the end of school, and stay there till they all went away. She’d be in trouble if the chowkidar locked up for the night and went away, the teacher told Radha. She did try to scold the children, she said, but children were wicked, weren’t they? She smiled a little at this. Rashmi Kiran couldn’t cope with her studies either. While taking dictation, she’d go on writing the same word again and again. It was the same during poem recitation; she’d simply repeat the last two words of each stanza. Dear God, why did she behave like this at school? After all, it was the same girl who recited the whole poem without a mistake at home. None of this stunted her body though, just look at her, shooting up like a palm tree. Finding a match for her was going to be tough.

Radha would go on speaking and I’d keep writing. My silent pen suddenly turned gregarious. She remembered all kinds of things, last night’s dream for instance. There was a mountain in her dream, right in front of her eyes, tall, blocking out the light. She saw the same mountain again and again, and in the dream she tried to see what lay beyond it but to no avail. Of course, it had gone when she woke up but she could sense its presence still, in her bones, and it made her restless. The children pinched Rashmi Kiran too, she said. And the silly girl said nothing even then; it was the mother who saw the blue marks on her arm. Why did they pinch her, Radha seemed to demand an explanation from me. Was it to find out whether she was, in fact, real? Did her silence make them doubt her very existence? Radha carried on talking and I could feel a blind anger building up inside me, circling like a tornado. I thought about Rashmi Kiran’s “Namaste” and her shy smile. It pained me to remember that smile.

I went to her school, early the next day, and met the principal. I told her about Rashmi Kiran’s past. She was dealing with a lost child, I said, a fatherless child. Didn’t that explain why she was so quiet and couldn’t work at the same level as the other children? Surely that didn’t give them the right to torment her while the school authorities looked on, saying nothing? Was that why she thought I’d put her in this school? Suddenly I had many questions to ask her. The principal looked at me calmly from behind her thick glasses. “Don’t be so angry!” she finally said, and pointed to the sign – “Please keep silence” – that hung on the door. She went on after a pause, “You mustn’t lose heart. I’ve seen so many children, and I’ve been observing Rashmi Kiran too. She’s no different from the others; it’s just that she’s all bottled up. Believe me, she’s going to be quite normal one day. Please be patient and let her make her own friends. It’s the only thing that’ll help her, so kindly keep out of it.”

I felt a little better. I came home and told Radha about the hope the principal had held out, feeling as though I were giving her a present.

The season was changing. The silk-cotton flowers had turned into pods that burst, scattering cotton wool about like a snowstorm. The soft, white balls that had remained tightly packed within the pods now fluffed out in the open air and flew around, dancing madly. There was a flash of green on the dusty, dry branches of the chilbil too. I sensed the whirring of wings in the trees. The red-cheeked bulbul was pouring out its song from on top of the electricity pole.

I sat on my swing, reading through what I’d written yesterday but found myself unable to concentrate. My eyes skimmed off the letters and settled on the glass window of the front room. There was a bird trapped in there. I must have left the window open and it flew in unawares. It was a tiny sparrow, flying in panic against the windowpane, no doubt mistaking the clear glass for open air. I could see her agitatedly flapping about, unable to get out after repeated attempts. She’d get injured like this, I thought. I went inside and opened the window and the circling bird immediately flew out, lightly brushing her wing on my ear. She was soon lost in the expanse of sky and I enjoyed seeing her free flight.

“Why did you give Rashmi Kiran this name?” I asked Radha. “After all, both the words, Rashmi and Kiran, mean the same, don’t they, a ray of sunlight? Then why the same name twice?”

She looked at me quietly for a bit. Then her eyes lit up slowly and I could see the trace of a smile in them, a hint of motherly pride, something I’d never seen before.

“Haven’t you noticed that Rashmi has so much shine to her?” she asked.

It was the last thing I’d expected to hear and I grew embarrassed.

I went out for a walk that evening, taking Rashmi Kiran with me. I thought I’d have a talk with her. What was the wilderness this girl lived in? I remembered what the principal had said, about her being bottled up. There was a dilapidated bus on the road, just outside the school. It had been standing there for a long time and had perhaps been used by the school at some stage, though it bore the name “Tathagat Tours and Travels” in faded letters. I’d never thought about why it was there at all, if it didn’t belong to the school.

I’d often passed it and noticed that the seats and windowpanes, as also most of the other parts of the bus, were missing, no doubt stolen for some purpose. Ours’ was a poor town and nothing remained standing on the road for long, be it electric bulbs or the bricks from municipal tree guards, even trees were stealthily cut at night for fuel. In fact, someone had also carried off the peepul sapling at the edge of the road, no doubt to pray to it at home. Anything that was on the road belonged to no one in particular, which meant it belonged to everyone. It was all part of community living, sharing one’s own and others’ things.

It wasn’t surprising that the bus had been emptied out. What was unexpected was the fact that the steering wheel was still there. If it hadn’t been for the steering wheel, the bus was a skeleton, without wheels, going nowhere. Wild grass had sprung up inside it and peeped out from the windows without panes. It was the same grass as the one on the side of the road. There were rumors that the bus was the night time meeting place for all kinds of anti-social elements, robbers, gamblers, alcoholics, drug peddlers and so on. It was in bad shape, this bus, and the day wasn’t far when it would collapse completely and sink to the ground. That very morning Radha had told me Rashmi Kiran carried on about wanting to get into the bus; she’d stop in front of it and refuse to go further, to school. Maybe she’d seen the other kids going in. It seemed to me to be a ray of hope; at least there was something she wanted to do. But her mother wouldn’t let her. She didn’t approve of the goings-on inside the bus.

A mad fancy took hold of me as I passed the bus. I looked round stealthily, like a thief. What if someone saw me? They’d wonder what I was up to. They’d probably think this middle-aged woman had quite lost it. I looked at Rashmi Kiran; she seemed to have to have guessed my intention, for her eyes were shining. Suddenly we’d turned conspirators. Well, there was no one on the road right then. I threw caution to the wind and stepped into the bus, with Rashmi Kiran following behind me. I got a whiff of wild grass and wet earth. There were no seats in the bus, so we stood there in the tall grass, as though in a jungle. It was pleasant in there. There were bits of broken glass on the floor and scraps of paper in the grass. The setting sun cast a reddish hue on the pieces of glass.

I moved forward excitedly, from the back door to the front, and then to the driver’s cabin. I put a hand on the steering wheel and was taken aback to find it firmly in place. I tried with both hands to turn it and surprisingly, it did turn. I found myself spinning it around really fast, from the right to the left. Rashmi Kiran chuckled loudly and I found that astonishing too. My amazement grew as I felt the bus slowly rising off the ground, becoming airborne. My heart leapt as we looked down, silent child and silent woman. We gazed at the street below and saw the school, our house, the entire neighborhood, in fact. I felt this was the first time I was looking at it so clearly.

(Translated from Hindi by the Author)