Red Earth and Pouring Rain

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THE DAY before Abhay shot the white-faced monkey, he awoke to find himself bathed in sweat, a headache already cutting its way into his skull in a razor-thin line across the middle of his forehead. He lay staring at the slowly-revolving ceiling fan that picked up dust with each revolution through the hot air, adding another layer to the black stains along the edges of its blades. Much later, he rose from the bed and stumbled to the door, rubbing his face with the flat of his palms. As he looked out at the sunlit court-yard with the slightly-dazed eyes of those who go away laughingly on journeys and return only to find themselves coming home from exile, his mother swayed across the red bricks, carrying a load of freshly-washed clothes on one hip, and vanished into the stairway leading up to the roof. In a room diagonally across the court-yard from where Abhay stood, his father’s ancient typewriter beat out its eternal thik-thik, creating yet another urgent missive to a national newspaper about the state of democracy in India. A single crow cawed incessantly. Abhay forced himself out into the white, blinding square of heat, feeling the sun sear across the back of his neck, and hurried across it to the damp darkness of the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and stood under the rusted shower head, twisting at knobs, waiting expectantly. A deep, subterranean gurgle shook the pipes, the shower head spat out a few tepid drops, and then there was silence.

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